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died, and as they say, some of her went with him. More of her kept leaving; eventually Aunt Clara stopped going out to places where she’d meet people, even church, and had her hair done at an undisclosed location. She was sensitive about being hard-of-hearing.
    The recluse on the hill, she lived, in the Southern phrase, on the inherited capital of family responsibilities, which had dwindled to reading the obituaries and keeping up a strong correspondence with cousins in Philadelphia, Washington, Jersey City, with her sister in Atlanta, and her brother who, after the Great War, sold his Packard, married a French-Canadian girl from Winnipeg, took a job with the railroad at the Manitoba end of nowhere, and never set foot in Opelika again.
    She had been educated to be a teacher, like her mother before her, like all her female relations. It was a “holding pattern” profession. “Ariel was your mother’s favorite.” Aunt Clara was disappointed by my response to Tales from Shakespeare. Our personalities, insofar as they existed under the detention-center conditions of good behavior, were colors for her to squeeze out, assets or liabilities that somehow reflected on her. “Why, you’re the darkest one in the family.”
     
    Aunt Clara’s activities, dictated by the privacy of her setting, were unchangeable, a routine that absorbed everyone into the perpetual shade of the house. She seemed to know by magic where a light had been left on, as far as the bathroom on the third floor. The telephone never rang, but it was a feminine way
of life, one designed for waiting—waiting for the mail, for the uncomfortable man from the Farmers’ National Bank, for the husband to come in from house calls, the father to return from travels around the state, shaking the outside world from his coat.
    There was a limit to my enthusiasm for exploration among crocheted covers and bizarre vesper chairs, though Aunt Clara’s things became interesting as they moved up from the first floor. They evolved to higher levels in forgotten rooms until they attained pack-rat nirvana in the attic. Tinted pictures of bayou picnics, of bearded faces that looked past me; men’s hats; thick phonograph records, radios, phonographs; chests I could not unlock; microscopes from Uncle Eugene’s studies at Meharry; camphor ice, oxide of zinc ointment, and quinine pomade for the relief of gathered breasts, nasal catarrh, and pleurisy, medicines that dated back to the scandal of Theodore Roosevelt breaking bread with Booker T. Washington. I couldn’t trace the scents of fir and formaldehyde to their sources.
    Aunt Clara preferred that I not ransack the memories of her mother and Uncle Eugene. I was welcome to sit with the grownups, to help her wrap dust jackets that she decorated herself around His Eye Is on the Sparrow by Ethel Waters, The Makers of Venice and The Makers of Florence by Mrs. Oliphant. She read for the same reason that she tolerated Nida Lee’s prayers: both induced sleep.
    Aunt Clara’s favorite book for the last eight years had been the autobiography of Marian Anderson. It was a great inspiration to her because it read like one long thank-you note to the churches of Philadelphia, as if her career had been the desk tidy she’d always wanted. The great singer traveled with an iron to press her own dresses. Aunt Clara did not, however, approve of Miss Anderson revealing how much she paid for her gowns.
    Like the swan that strove only to keep its feathers brilliant,
Aunt Clara enjoyed the company of family when she knew in advance what the talk was going to be about and to make certain that she didn’t miss anything she did the talking. Aunt Clara remembered the 1939 World’s Fair in New York; the exact time of night a cousin died of gangrene up in Chicago; the name of the German professor the FBI arrested after it was discovered that he was transmitting right from the Spelman campus; the Northern Lights pattern of her sister’s silver at