Aunt Kate chuckled. “For a vacancy in our second family home!” she said.
“Yes, indeed!” Aunt Eveline said happily. “Our second family home! But we have to move in one at a time! Everyone has to wait his turn. After all, Kate, Ben’s only been gone six months, and even in our climate, that’s just not long enough!”
It might as well have been a conversation in Chinese for all someone outside this house would understand. But I knew they were talking about our tomb in Saint Louis #2 Cemetery.
“You mean Uncle Ben hasn’t departed yet,” I said. “Departed. Get it?”
“Addie!” Aunt Eveline cried. “That is not an amusing pun.”
“Well, it’s the same thing you were just saying. There’s only room for one body in the tomb, and if Uncle Ben hasn’t turned to dust yet and sifted through the grating to the ground, there’s no room for Aunt Kate.”
“That will be quite enough, young lady!” Aunt Eveline swished her lavender skirt away from me.
I didn’t really want to make her mad, so I tried again. “You’re absolutely right about the second home part, Aunt Eveline. Those tombs in Saint Louis #2 look just like little houses. Sister Elizabeth Anne told us they had to build them above ground in the old days because New Orleans was so marshy we’d have floated away underneath. Can’t you just see all those people we’ve buried floating away, right on out to the Gulf of Mexico where my mother—”
“Adelaide! Not another word!” Aunt Eveline’s voice shook and squeaked.
Aunt Kate’s white, pincushion head bobbed in a jolly way as she sipped her coffee and said, “What a crowd of people will come out of our tomb on the Last Day!”
“If only darling Pasie were with us!” Aunt Eveline said. She didn’t mean with us on the mohair sofa, she meant with us in the crowd at Saint Louis #2.
“Just the same, you’re always putting flowers on the tomb for my mother,” I said. “It would make a lot more sense to throw them into the Gulf.”
“Just like Harold’s father!” piped up Sandra Lee, coming through the door, yellow curls bouncing. I slipped Jane Whitmore out of sight into a magazine and casually put the scissors on the table. “Harold’s father is going to sprinkle his ashes in the Mississippi River because he’s a river pilot.”
“Pagan!” Aunt Eveline glared at me as though I’d suggested it.
“I am sick to death of hearing about Harold,” I snarled. Harold is in love with Sandra Lee and vice versa.
“I am speaking of Harold’s father. I wonder what ever became of Tom’s father?” Sandra Lee knows perfectly well that he just up and left home when Tom was a baby.
“It’s not my business, I’m sure,” I said. I am not in love with Tom or vice versa. “And I just meant sprinkling flowers, Aunt Eveline, into the Gulf, where my—”
“Adelaide, I do not wish to pursue the subject! An absolutely heathen thought! And please wear your hair so that it does not impair your vision.” I glared at Sandra Lee and anchored my straight black hair at the sides with the bobby pins that had slipped. I can’t help it if my bangs, which are in the process of growing out, do not look their best at the moment.
Sandra Lee smiled her dimples at me and tossed her golden curls. I tried to turn the other cheek, but I had run out of cheeks. “Harold must need glasses !” I had to whisper so Aunt Eveline wouldn’t hear. “I’ve never seen a meaner-looking girl than you!”
Sandra Lee’s lips curled at the corners and she looked at me with my mother’s portrait eyes. “Heathen!” she mouthed so that only I could see.
Aunt Eveline helped Aunt Kate upstairs, and Sandra Lee skipped to the radio, singing off-key:
Who’s that little chatterbox?
The one with pretty auburn locks?
Who can it be?
It’s Little Orphan Annie!
“Why is it,” I asked, “that although you have a perfectly good radio right next door at your own house, you never miss listening to Little Orphan Annie here at my house?”
Cute little she,
It’s Little Orphan An-nie!
Sandra Lee croaked the theme song, not even looking in my direction, and plopped down in what she considers her chair.
“My, my!” she said. “A paper doll! What would Tom say?” Jane Whitmore had fallen out of the magazine and was lying with her portrait dress on the floor. Sandra Lee snatched them up before I could.
“I don’t care what Tom would say! Give it back! It’s not a play doll! It’s practice! I’m going to be—”
“I know. An artist. Just like your mother, Aunt Pasie.” Sandra Lee was putting the portrait dress on Jane Whitmore. “Is this supposed to be Aunt Pasie? You’ve got her curves right, anyhow. Quite a girl. So I hear.”
“What are you talking about? What did you hear?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“Did Aunt Toosie tell you something about my mother?”
“My mother wouldn’t say anything about her own sister! Hush! It’s starting.” Sandra Lee threw Jane Whitmore at me and unpinned her Little Orphan Annie Secret Society decoding badge.
Sandra Lee is a member of the Secret Society, and she got her badge by mailing two Ovaltine tops and ten cents to Little Orphan Annie. She got a book, too, with secret codes and Seven Golden Rules, which she obeys like the Ten Commandments, especially the Sixth, about drinking Ovaltine three times a day. Even if it weren’t for the Sixth, Aunt Toosie would make Sandra Lee drink Ovaltine because she says Sandra Lee needs building up. It seems to me that if anyone needs “building up,” it is a person built like a pencil, namely me, but Aunt Eveline says, “Golden Rules notwithstanding, Ovaltine is far too stimulating for young people.”
At the end of the program, I watched Sandra Lee write down the numbers Little Orphan Annie broadcast. She spun the wheel on her badge and wrote letters next to the numbers. She saw me watching and hugged her paper to her chest. “I’m so sorry, Adelaide,” she said, “but Outsiders aren’t allowed to know the Secret Message.”
I tried not to care, but I did. “Sandra Lee,” I said humbly, “could I please have two of your extra Ovaltine tops to send off?”
“You’re supposed to save your own,” she said piously. “I have to be fair to Little Orphan Annie.”
A wave of pure hate washed over me. “Why don’t you just go home, then, to your old Ovaltine and your cute little organdy cottage and get out of my house!”
“I was leaving anyway,” she snapped back. “And Three Twenty’s not your house, it’s Aunt Eveline’s and Aunt Kate’s, and they’re as much my aunts as yours!”
“You can have this whole place for all I care!” I shouted. “It’s practically haunted. You can take every last thing in it! All except the portrait.”
“I don’t even want the portrait!” Sandra Lee shouted back. “I wouldn’t want a mother like that!”
“How’s a body to cook with all that carrying on?” Nini cried, coming out of the kitchen. Nini, who has been our cook for twenty years, is the only sane person at Three Twenty Audubon Street.
“Oh, Nini,” I wailed. Sandra Lee had made a quick exit, and I was fighting a losing battle with tears. “What was wrong with my mother?”
“Not one thing, honey,” Nini said. “Not one thing wrong with your mother!”
“But