“She needs to settle down,” my grandmother would say. “She’s such a scatterbrain.”

“You never did like her,” my mother would put in. “You only like the boys.”

“Sister’ll be all right,” Daddy decreed. “She’ll marry a nice boy someday and have some babies. She’s still wet behind the ears.”

“She won some race,” Momma put in. “People talk all the time about the columns she used to write.”

“Well, don’t encourage that. Look what happened to Sissy Arnold. They let her work for that Hodding Carter down in Greenville and now she’s in New York married to that drunken man who wrote all that bad stuff about Clarkesville and all that nasty stuff about Aunt Frances’s house. After he was her guest. He said she had the family portraits held together with masking tape. He said her silver was black as coal.”

“She’s eighty-three years old,” Momma agreed. “Imagine having all that nasty stuff written about you in Newsweek magazine. When he was her guest.”

“He and Sissy were down there last summer handing out birth control things to the Negroes. She let them stay. Frances let them stay after he wrote all that nasty stuff about her.”

“She must be senile,” Mother said. “I don’t think she can think very well.”

“She is not senile. She has some trouble hearing. I don’t know where you got your information, Ariane, but my sister Frances is not senile. People in our family do not lose their minds. There has not been a single case.”

“Where are the little boys, do you think?” Momma would quickly ask. “I believe we should go on to Dunleith, Dudley. I think the movers will need us to be there when they arrive.”

Chapter

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