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By Root 6749 0

—if she hadn’t much use for this, she hardly knew how little until she found herself in the orbit of this enchanting person. Her stepmother had taken her in charge and set her free. In the older woman, older than a mother and yet something of a sister, she found the blithest gayest fellow rebel and comrade. The world of books and music and art and ideas opened before her. And if later her stepmother was to take alarm at Kate’s political activities—a spiritual rebellion was one thing, the soaring of the spirit beyond the narrow horizons of the parochial and into the lofty regions of Literature and Life; nor was there anything wrong with the girlish socialism of Sarah Lawrence; but political conspiracy here and now in New Orleans with the local dirty necks of the bookshops and a certain oracular type of social worker my aunt knew only too well—that was something else. But even so, now that it was in the past, it was not really so bad. In fact, as time went on, it might even take on the flavor of one’s Studententage. How well I remember, her stepmother told her, the days when we Wagnerians used to hiss old Brahms—O for the rapturous rebellious days of youth. But now it is she, my aunt herself, who falls prey to Kate’s dialectic of hatreds. It was inevitable that Kate should catch up with and “see into” her stepmother, just as she caught up with her father, and that she should, in the same swing of the dialectic, rediscover her father as the authentic Louisiana businessman and, if not go to Mass with him, build him a TV room. It was inevitable that she should give up the Philharmonic upstairs and take up the Gillette Cavalcade in the basement. It is, as I say, all the same to me which parent she presently likes or dislikes. But I am uneasy over the meagerness of her resources. Where will her dialectic carry her now? After Uncle Jules what? Not back to her stepmother, I fear, but into some kind of dead-end where she must become aware of the dialectic. “Hate her then,” I feel like telling her, “and love Jules. But leave it at that. Don’t try another swing.”

I say: “Then you’re not going to the Lejiers.”

She puts her cigarette on a potsherd and goes back to her rubbing.

“And you’re not going to the ball?” I ask.

“No.”

“Don’t you want to see Walter as krewe captain?”

Kate swings around and her eyes go to discs. “Don’t you dare patronize Walter.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Do you think I didn’t see the two of you upstaging him at lunch? What a lovely pair you are.”

“I thought you and I were the pair.”

“You and I are not a pair of any sort.”

I consider this.

“Good day,” says Kate irritably.

5

We talk, my aunt and I, in our old way of talking, during pauses in the music. She is playing Chopin. She does not play very well; her fingernails click against the keys. But she is playing one of our favorite pieces, the E flat Étude. In recent years I have become suspicious of music. When she comes to a phrase which once united us in a special bond and to which once I opened myself as meltingly as a young girl, I harden myself.

She asks not about Kate but about my mother. My aunt does not really like my mother; yet, considering the circumstances, that my father was a doctor and my mother was his nurse and married him, she likes her as well as she can. She has never said a word against her and in fact goes out of her way to be nice to her. She even says that my father was “shot with luck” to get such a fine girl, by which she means that my father did, in a sense, leave it to luck. All she really holds against my mother, and not really against her but against my father, is my father’s lack of imagination in marrying her. Sometimes I have the feeling myself that who my mother was and who I am depended on the chance selection of a supervisor of nurses in Biloxi. When my father returned from medical school and his surgical residency in Boston to practice with my grandfather in Feliciana Parish, he applied for a nurse. The next day he waited (and I too waited) to see who would come. The door opened and in walked the woman who, as it turned out, would, if she were not one-legged or downright ugly, be his wife and my mother. My mother is a Catholic, what is called in my aunt