“What’s a dispensary?”

“Over there—that door.”

“I guess you must have.”

“Getting old. How is Faye?”

“Well, I’m worried about her. She was real sick a while ago. Had cramps and went a little out of her head.”

“She’s had a stomach disorder before,” Dr. Wilde said. “You can’t live like that and eat at all hours and be very well. I can’t anyway. We just call it stomach trouble. Comes from eating too much and staying up all night. Now—the pills. Do you remember what color?”

“There were three kinds, yellow, red, and green.”

“Oh, yes. Yes, I remember.”

While he poured pills into a round cardboard box she stood in the door.

“What a lot of medicines!”

Dr. Wilde said, “Yes—and the older I get, the fewer I use. I got some of those when I started to practice. Never used them. That’s a beginner’s stock. I was going to experiment—alchemy.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Here you are. Tell Faye to get some sleep and eat some vegetables. I’ve been up all night. Let yourself out, will you?” He went wavering back into the surgery.

Kate glanced after him and then her eyes flicked over the lines of bottles and containers. She closed the dispensary door and looked around the outer office. One book in the case was out of line. She pushed it back until it was shoulder to shoulder with its brothers.

She picked up her big handbag from the leather sofa and left.

In her own room Kate took five small bottles and a strip of scribbled paper from her handbag. She put the whole works in the toe of a stocking, pushed the wad into a rubber overshoe, and stood it with its fellow in the back of her closet.

3

During the following months a gradual change came over Faye’s house. The girls were sloppy and touchy. If they had been told to clean themselves and their rooms a deep resentment would have set in and the house would have reeked of ill temper. But it didn’t work that way.

Kate said at table one evening that she had just happened to look in Ethel’s room and it was so neat and pretty she couldn’t help buying her a present. When Ethel unwrapped the package right at the table it was a big bottle of Hoyt’s German, enough to keep her smelling sweet for a long time. Ethel was pleased, and she hoped Kate hadn’t seen the dirty clothes under the bed. After supper she not only got the clothes out but brushed the floors and swept the cobwebs out of the corners.

Then Grace looked so pretty one afternoon that Kate couldn’t help giving her the rhinestone butterfly pin she was wearing. And Grace had to rush up and put on a clean shirtwaist to set it off.

Alex in the kitchen, who, if he had believed what was usually said of him would have considered himself a murderer, found that he had a magic hand with biscuits. He discovered that cooking was something you couldn’t learn. You had to feel it.

Cotton Eye learned that nobody hated him. His tub-thumping piano playing changed imperceptibly.

He told Kate, “It’s funny what you remember when you think back.”

“Like what?” she asked.

“Well, like this,” and he played for her.

“That’s lovely,” she said. “What is it?”

“Well, I don’t know. I think it’s Chopin. If I could just see the music!”

He told her how he had lost his sight, and he had never told anyone else. It was a bad story. That Saturday night he took the chain off the piano strings and played something he had been remembering and practicing in the morning, something called “Moonlight,” a piece by Beethoven, Cotton Eye thought.

Ethel said it sounded like moonlight and did he know the words.

“It don’t have words,” said Cotton Eye.

Oscar Trip, up from Gonzales for Saturday night, said, “Well, it ought to have. It’s pretty.”

One night there were presents for everyone because Faye’s was the best house, the cleanest, and nicest in the whole county—and who was responsible for that? Why, the girls—who else? And did they ever taste seasoning like in that stew?

Alex retired into the kitchen and shyly wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist. He bet he could make a plum pudding would knock their eyes out.

Georgia was getting up at ten every morning and taking piano lessons from Cotton Eye and her nails were clean.

Coming back from eleven o’clock mass on a Sunday morning, Grace said to Trixie, “And I was about ready to get married and give up whoring. Can you imagine?”

“It’s sure nice,” said Trixie. “Jenny’s girls came over for Faye’s birthday cake and they couldn’t believe their eyes. They don’t talk about nothing else but how it is at Faye’s. Jenny’s sore.”

“Did you see the score on the blackboard this morning?”

“Sure I did—eighty-seven tricks in one week. Let Jenny or the Nigger match that when there ain’t no holidays!”

“No holidays, hell. Have you forgot it’s Lent? They ain’t turning a trick at Jenny’s.”

After her illness and her evil dreams Faye was quiet and depressed. Kate knew she was being watched, but there was no help for that. And she had made sure the rolled paper was still in the box and all the girls had seen it or heard about it.

One afternoon Faye looked up from her solitaire game as Kate knocked and entered the room.

“How do you feel, Mother?”