Lit by Mary Karr Page B

looks freshly scabby. He sits down on the bed’s edge, staring at his brown forearms. Daddy , I whisper, and that greedy call for him snaps the connection to the past. The voltage drops, and he’s gone, reabsorbed into the shriveled form in my mother’s house, tended days by a male nurse we can’t afford, nights by Mother, who resents it.
    In an instant I’m back in the Whitbreads’ library, and Daddy lies uninsured, half paralyzed.
    On the mantle, sits a recent Christmas snapshot with all the siblings before the fireplace, glossy-haired and tidy. They actually match like the gorgeous silverware. Not resemblance but precise replication. I think, Tiger One, Tiger Two …(I’ll come to believe that the WASP genetic code imperially squashes the other parent’s contributing DNA in offspring. My own son, blond and blue-eyed, will bear so little of me that ladies in the park will think I’ve been hired to push his stroller.)
    Just as we’re saying good night, Mr. Whitbread inquires whether, as a Texan, my father’s in oil, and I tell him he was, adding—wittily, I think—up to his elbows twelve hours a day. Which fact they take with a preoccupied air. I could speculate on what they thought, but they’re unreadable as granite.
    That night, lying in Warren’s narrow bed, where I’ve sneaked from his sister’s flowery boudoir to make love, I ask him, How’d I do?
    He cups my face. I love you, he says. Leafy shadows move over us. (How young we were.)
    Do you think they heard us just now?
    Don’t be silly, he says. I doubt they’d care.
    Their room is in another wing, which includes—among other mysteries—Mr. Whitbread’s own dressing room, padlocked from the outside. Not even the maid is allowed to clean in there.
    Warren is lying on his back, and his face mesmerizes me—the patrician nose, Germanic jaw.
    Do they like me? I say.
    You want everybody to like you, he says.
    You don’t? I say.
    Only you, he says. And Tiger.
    Not Sammy?
    Sammy’s common , Warren says, referring to something his mother said about a cousin’s wife.
    I’m common, I say.
    I always fancied an affair with a scullery maid, he says. I’m propped on an elbow studying him. He fails to open his eyes, as he says, Aren’t you even a little sleepy?
    I’m pouting, I say. Can’t you hear me pouting with your eyes shut?
    He reaches up a hand to pinch my pouting mouth with two fingers. Okay, duck lips, he says, rolling over. My father thinks you’re smart and funny—both uncommon virtues. My mother thinks if you keep jogging, you’ll damage your female organs and fail to reproduce.
    Do they think I’m cute?
    He’s half blind. She wants to dress you in hot pink or lime green.
    Tell me they like me and I’ll sneak back to your sister’s room.
    As much as they like anybody, he says. Don’t worry about it, sweetie.
    The next morning I’m wide-eyed before dawn, half waiting for some Inquisitor to roust me from the ruffled covers of the type Little Bo Peep probably slept in. I bathe with French-milled soap and brush my short hair.
    In the library, I find a copy of Matthew Arnold’s poems autographed to some illegible forebear. I’m perusing when a voice from the stair causes Tiger Three to rise shakily on his ancient hips and trot out.Mr. Whitbread says, I fail to see why you couldn’t greet them when they arrived, for God’s sake.
    Once the front door has opened and shut, Tiger slinks back in and slumps at my feet. After a while I smell coffee and bacon, and a while later, I see a wizened, disheveled old woman balding under her black hairnet. Slippers slide her up the hall across from me to the wet bar. (I’d later find out she’s the cook.) She opens the fridge and draws out a carton of eggnog, pouring herself a small punch cup full. How sweet, I think, they keep eggnog in the summer. Then she unscrews the top of a bottle of dark rum and upends it with both hands. She takes two long draws, then shuffles off.

7
The Constant