THE REAL THING

1 2 7 R T H E R E A L T H I N G S H E I L A K O H L E R 1. I was brought up in a world of women. My mother was one of two sisters. My father died (or so Mother told me) soon after my birth, leaving her nothing but debts. There were no photographs of him in our tidy flat, though Mother did once tell me he was a distinguished man who had dazzled her with his good mind. But Mother did not like to talk about him or why he had died. If I asked she gave bland, noncommittal answers. An elegant Frenchman who had been some kind of lawyer, a solicitor, she had met him when he was stationed in South Africa, doing something for a French mining company. That was about the most I could glean. ‘‘What’s a solicitor?’’ I asked. ‘‘Someone who deals with wills,’’ she said, and added, drawing herself up, ‘‘His father had been a distinguished judge,’’ which was probably true. My aunt, whom everyone called Kitty, was also a widow, a real one in her case, and her husband, a wealthy timber merchant, had left her a grand fortune, a big house with a garden, and many black servants to tend to it. This was Johannesburg, in the forties. 1 2 8 K O H L E R Y My mother and I lived in a small, sunless, well-polished walkup flat in Hillbrow, with doilies on the arms of the chairs, my mother’s favorite fat books in a small bookcase by her bed, and a smell of camphor in the air. Consequently we spent much of our time with my aunt and her two little girls, Susan and Gillian, who were two and four years younger than I. My aunt was everything my mother was not, everything I admired : small, pretty, plump, a√ectionate, and playful. She had tiny hands and feet, of which she was inordinately proud, and an enormous collection of bright elegant shoes in her vast closets. My mother, perhaps because of her sad circumstances, was not playful. She was tall, thin, and intellectual. She read what I considered dry, di≈cult books, went to church regularly, and led an exemplary life. She wrote daily in her diary, making little lists of her accomplishments : what she ate (as little as possible), how long she had walked (as long as possible), how many pages she had written of a novel she wanted to finish (pages she often tore up). Her only vice was the cigarettes which she called ‘‘fags,’’ which she smoked almost constantly. She would say, ‘‘Light me a fag, will you Pet,’’ while driving the car, and I would be obliged to light one with the car lighter, which made me feel sick. In her heart of hearts, I understood, my mother did not approve of her younger sister’s goings on, though she was obliged to humor her, and to do her bidding. I presume it was my aunt who kept us alive, or anyway paid for my schooling and my clothes. Neither of the two sisters did paying work, though they were endlessly busy embroidering, knitting, and crocheting, and made our dresses and sometimes even their own. Mother was always running around finding the things my aunt had misplaced (her telephone book, the romance novel she was reading, even her little diamond-studded watch), bringing my aunt what she called ‘‘the other half’’ (another glass of whiskey, which she liked to drink), and glancing at us children warningly and saying things like ‘‘Little pitchers have big ears’’ when Aunt Kitty would start to tell the really interesting part of a story. My aunt would say, ‘‘I have to make a wee,’’ and my mother would smile her thin, superior smile, and say, ‘‘Kitty, I’m afraid that’s one thing, I can’t do for you.’’ Aunt Kitty was, to use her own words, ‘‘full of beans.’’ She would T H E R E A L T H I N G 1 2 9 R come back into the house, after a...