The Moviegoer

know they’d be? But perhaps it is just as well. For it is an awkward moment for Kate. The trick is for her to show herself. Here’s what we hit upon: you show up, knowing nothing, come looking for her and fetch her down to dinner.”
    My aunt catches my eye from the dining room and I go in to kiss her and speak to the Oscar Bollings. Things seem calm enough. Uncle Jules is laughing with Aunt Edna about something. Though Aunt Emily is abstracted, temple propped on three fingers, she speaks cheerfully, and I can’t help but wonder if Sam’s story is not exaggerated. Uncle Oscar and Aunt Edna have come down from Feliciana Parish for Carnival and the Spring Pilgrimage, an annual tour of old houses and patios. Aunt Edna is a handsome stoutish woman with snapping black eyes and a near-mustache. Though she is at least sixty five, her hair is still black and loops back over her ears in a way that makes me think of “raven tresses.” Uncle Oscar is all dressed up, but you can tell he is countrified. The fourth of the elder Bolling brothers, he elected to be neither soldier nor lawyer nor doctor but storekeeper—that is, until his recent success in exhibiting Lynwood to tourists at a dollar a head. In certain quirks of expression and waggings of head, he is startlingly like Judge Anse, but there is a flattening of the nosebridge and a softening of the forehead and a giddy light-blue amiability about the eyes. Upon the death of the brothers and the emigration of the girls, Uncle Oscar and Aunt Edna fell heir to the old place. It is not much of a showplace, to be honest (it never occurred to anyone to give it a name until Aunt Edna thought of Lynwood), being a big old rambling pile and having no special virtue save only its deep verandas and its avenue of oaks. But Uncle Oscar and Aunt Edna managed to fix it up wonderfully well and even win a permanent place on the Azalea Trail. Strangely enough, it was not Uncle Oscar, the old settler, who restored the house in the best Natchez style—adding a covered walk to the outkitchen, serving mint juleps where the Bollings had never drunk anything but toddies, and even dressing up poor old Shad in a Seagram’s butler suit and putting him out on the highway with a dinner bell—it was not Uncle Oscar but Aunt Edna, the druggist’s daughter from upstate New York whom Uncle Oscar met and married while she was training at Plattsburg in the first world war.
    When I bend to kiss her, my aunt gives me no sign whatever, beyond her usual gray look and the usual two quick pats on the cheek—no sign, unless it is a certain depth of irony, a gray under gray.
    There comes to me in the ascent a brief annunciatory syllable in the throat stopped in the scrape of a chair as if, having signaled me and repenting of it, it had then to pass itself off as but one of the small day noises of the house. Off the landing is a dark little mezzanine arranged as a room of furniture. It is a place one passes twenty times a day and no more thinks of entering than of entering a picture, nor even of looking at, but having entered, enters with all the oddness of entering a picture, a tableau in depth wherein space is untenanted and wherefrom the view of the house, the hall and dining room below, seems at once privileged and strange. Kate is there in the shadows. She sits beside the porcelain fireplace with its glassed-in cases of medals and tufted Bohemian slippers and gold-encrusted crystal and the ambrotype of Captain Alex Bolling of the 2nd Louisiana Infantry not merely locked in but sealed in forever by glass set into the wall, an immurement which used to provoke in me the liveliest speculation by virtue of its very permanence—to think of the little objects closeted away forever in the same sequestered air of 1938—Kate sits, herself exempt from the needs and necessaries of all passers-by, and holds her arms in her hands and cheerfully makes room for me in the love seat. Not until later do I think why it is she looks so well: she is all dressed up, for the first time since Christmas. It is the scent of her perfume, her nylon-whispering legs, the white dress against her dark skin, a proper dress fluted and flounced and now gathered by her and folded away from me.
    The angle is such that we can see the dining room and its company, except my aunt. There is only her right wrist and hand curving out and under the chair arm to rub the lion’s face with its