Virgin With Butterflies by Tom Powers Page A

go on to wherever the prince and his sweet and Bill and Coo were going to.
    But Aunt Mary was with me, and Aunt Mary is somebody I just love because somehow she makes me feel safe and comfortable. And when I say I wish I knew about a lot of things that I don’t know, she says they are not as important as being “pure in heart.” Even though I didn’t know exactly what Aunt Mary meant, it made me feel good.
    Aunt Mary was always saying things like, “No, I don’t believe I’d wear that suit to dinner in the Panama Hotel because it will maybe be a big party and maybe it’s a good time to wear the ivory satin dinner dress.” And I knew she thought they’d all be in their formals for dinner, and they were, so I was glad I wore my formals because I sure wouldn’t have if Aunt Mary hadn’t given me the courage to dress up quite so much.
    And Aunt Mary was always somewhere else, or just starting to go somewhere or do something else if the prince wanted to sit down and talk. She nearly always had some shopping to do, mostly for me, when it was time to start out for a drive in the two-horse carriage that we had all planned to take together. So he and I went alone, and he bought white flowers for me and the whole sweet began to treat me with respect.
    The prince talked quite a lot to me now about his pop and his brother, and I talked quite a lot about mine—that’s how you get to be friends. He told me something about why he was flying around the world like this; it was to sell a lot of stuff that had been laying around in their cellar, under his papa’s house. He had sold a lot ofthis stuff in America and was going to sell the biggest one of all to a kind of king in a place that he called the Soodan. Then he was going home to take the money to his brother and to settle something between them. A blood brotherhood was the best he could say it, and he showed me a little scar on his wrist. He said the little lotus button was a sign of it, too.
    I laughed and said, “Well, I guess I’m pretty near a sister to the two of you,” and he said “Why?” and I said, “Because when I was getting you out of Butch’s place—draggin’ you with my hands around you, under the arms—I scratched my wrist on that little lotus button, just where your wrist is cut. “And it bled a little, too, so I guess I kind of belong to this blood brotherhood, along with you and him.” I showed him the place on my wrist.
    Well, you would have thought I had told him that my grandpop was the king of India. He kissed the place to make it well, and he looked at me till I had to look somewhere else.
    â€œNow you understand,” he said. “What my brother do, I must do.”
    â€œWhy?” I says. “I don’t see that.”
    â€œThe bond,” he says, “the oath. You must not be bound as we are bound, you must be free. As I am not free. But the English will never understand these things.”
    â€œListen,” I says, “you don’t have to do anything you don’t think is right. If you’ve made a bargain with your brother, you can get out of it the same way you got in. If you made an oath or a prayer about it you just go to the same place with your brother and unmake it,” I says. “Will you promise?” I says.
    â€œI will never make another promise,” he says. “I made one with my brother and that one will break my father’s heart.”
    He didn’t ever ask me not to, but somehow I felt like maybe he would rather I didn’t tell anybody about things he said when we talked like this, and as Aunt Mary was all I had, I didn’t, not a word.
    I asked him about Rio, and he said we was going to stop there for a minute to pick up a friend. This was on our way back from wherever we’d been, as we drove slow in the sunset with the ocean on the other side from where it was on the way out. What