The Snare

6. THE MISSES MULLIGAN

6. THE MISSES MULLIGAN As Julia passed by the flank of the old house, she heard from within the low wispy murmur of old ladies' voices. Oh, the Misses Mulligan. As Edie said, they would die some day. How did it feel if death was all that was left to call happening to you? What did they sit and talk about in a world where not even the milkman was a possibility? Edie had the answer, the first time Julia had mentioned it. "They talk about us," she had said. "I've heard them. You've no idea. They notice everything. Then they talk about it, over and over. It's all written up inside them, everything they've ever known is, and stored like player piano rolls. When they play a subject over it's always the same, word for word, like a tune. They've got almost a whole roll on us, didn't you know?'* Well, let them, Julia Garrett had thought. Let them, let them. The day of this conversation with Edie, she had been sitting on the back steps on a warm Sunday afternoon in winter, thinking of Martin Parham, the boy from up in Mississippi she had planned for so long to marry, sitting with her long hands resting on either side of her blue silk skirt, a broad silver bracelet on one wrist, her feet in lowheeled pumps placed side by side, her head bent and meditative , a characteristic pose. Let them let them let them anything. Right now I could wish them both in the swamp for an afternoon with Martin Parham. Where is he? What did I think I was doing, calling it off for good? When Edie went down the steps past her, she had 66 Elizabeth Spencer 67 started, nervous as a cat. A bitch (not a cat) was what she would have called herself at that moment, with good reason. How did she call it living, if you didn't have a man? There went Edie through the worn, untidy garden, down the old paved walk, past the dried-up lily pool with rust stains in the basin, out to the overgrown prickly camellia tree near the back wall, the one all shaggy with jasmine and honeysuckle vine. "What are you doing?" she almost said, but was too full of fresh desire, which came wellingup in her breast like a spring, to care, really, what Edie was doing. Her senses hammered against the walls of solitude. I have to go somewhere, she thought impatiently, I have to call somebody or drop in on them, Bucky and Marie, for instance. (But they'd moved, way out toward the lake.) Maybe I'll just start screaming. There was bird-screaming instead from way down near the wall, where Edie was bending, pulling limbs aside, lifting. Then Julia realized that for some time a racket had been going on down there, that there was agitation in the bird world and that signals were streaming out all over the place. Once Edie got there to help out, the fool birds had attacked her. Maybe she was even in danger. A mother mockingbird, wild with nothing but instinct and passion, dive-bombedpoor Edie, who had all human kindness on her side. She kept ducking and dodging, leaning and picking up, now reaching and tiptoeing and placing, and then she fled, pursued way past the fish pond by that crazy bird, whose babies she had just saved and returned to their nest. "Good Lord, Edie," said Julia Garrett. "It was these two little baby birds," said Edie, now on the steps, flushed., trying to put her hair straight. "Somehow they fell out of the nest, wriggling around, I guess, and so I put them back. The camellia tree was too thick for her to reach them, but even if she could have reached them, I doubt if she could have done anything. Do birds pick up their young? I must find out tomorrow." Edie and her boyfriend, Paul Fowler, had wanted to 6 8 T H E S N A R E spend all one of their weekends cleaning up the Misses Mulligan's back garden. They had wanted to re-lay the old walks, clip the overgrown grass, sod the soil, pull up the old plants gone to seed, prune and straighten the fine old shrubs, trellis the forsythia, the jasmine...