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when he was gone, she would say: ‘He’s a nice young fellow, I dare say, but he can’t manage himself.’ ‘They’re all pretty well, I guess,’ he said, when he had dealt with the spilled coffee. ‘Although my mother’s not so good.’ Huey’s mother was never very well. She had a goitre in her throat and an abscess on her leg that needed to be dressed twice a week at the doctor’s surgery. This was another thing Mrs Christie had against Huey: bad health was a moral failing. The coffee was nearly all drunk up now, and in the silence that followed she could hear the creak of his shoes as he rocked back and forth on his feet. She wondered if her mother had finished with Huey yet, but Mrs Christie had her trump card still to play. She waited until Huey had set down his coffee cup in such a way as to send another little rivulet of liquid over the saucer’s edge and onto the kitchen table and said in what was meant to be a conversational tone: ‘Of course, Ruthie got her letter just the other day.’ ‘Why, that’s great,’ Huey said, with the same air of pious absorption he brought to a baseball game on the radio or a cinema newsreel. ‘I’m certainly pleased to hear that.’ She stood there by the kitchen table as the cat looked up enquiringly from its refuge, her mother canny and belligerent, Huey pained and conciliatory, and wished that all this could stop. ‘That’s right,’ Mrs Christie said proudly. ‘Some girls, they just got standard letters. But Ruthie, she had the principal write to her personally. Now I call that well-mannered.’ ‘Oh mother,’ she protested, ‘there’s no reason tomake such a thing about Mrs O’Riordan writing to me. It’s only because there was a doubt about me going.’ ‘Nonsense,’ Mrs Christie said triumphantly. ‘She wrote because you scored so high in the test and she wanted to tell you so. Isn’t that right, don’t you think, Huey?’ ‘Yes, I’m sure that’s so,’ Huey said anxiously, knowing that some game was being played with him but not yet able to see what it was.
    Having watched Huey spill his tea, satisfied herself that his mother was still ill and wrought upon him the triumph of the letter, the fight went out of Mrs Christie. She had carried her point, established her moral superiority: the young people could make of this what they chose. ‘Ruthie,’ she said, deciding to leave abstract questions of etiquette for practical necessity, ‘if you are going out in this heat, I absolutely insist that you wear a hat. Think what Mrs O’Riordan would say if you turned up on the first day looking like a field hand.’ Mrs Christie had been raised in rural Illinois: ‘field hand’ was about the worst insult she could think of. And so she went back to her bedroom and fetched the straw bonnet she had bought for her holiday the previous year and wove a piece of ribbon around it, which the
Ladies’ Home Journal
had said was a sure-fire remedy against dullness. When she came back to the kitchen her mother was gone and there was only Huey twirling his boater in his hand and staring seriously at the picture of Herbert Hoover, gleaned from the
Sun-Tribune
, that had been stuck to the larder door. ‘Your mother’s in the parlour,’ he said. In the early days he had called her ‘your ma’. This had got back to Mrs Christie and been appropriately ridiculed. ‘She said not to say goodbye. Maybe we ought togo.’ ‘Yes, maybe we should,’ she said. She was annoyed about the spilled coffee and the letter. The ribbon had come adrift from the back of her hat and she wound it carefully up again, round and round her finger, and then pushed the knot into a little crevice in the brim, all the while following him down the staircase and out onto the sidewalk.
    It was still not much more than 8am, but already the street was showing signs of life. The Italian family who owned the drug store were out taking down the shutters, and there were old men with elaborately