Proud Flesh by William Humphrey

amounted almost to preference. When it came to boys, Ma was apt to equate being in the wrong with being the underdog.
    On one thing, though, in opposition to their brothers, the Renshaw girls were united, or had been until all were married and gone from home. This was precisely the question of their getting married, and accounted for their being so widely scattered now, compared to the boys. The Renshaw boys had positively Sicilian notions about a brother’s duty to his sisters’ reputations, and were all the more vigilant after the death of their father. Local boys had been rather unforward in coming to court any of the girls, and as the girls said in complaining to Ma, you could hardly blame the fellows. A fellow does not want to be made to feel obligated to propose after taking a girl out a time or two, nor to be bullied by a gang of her brothers, maybe marched to the altar with a shotgun at his back, on bringing her home past midnight once. After calling and being watched, slit-eyed, by two or three, sometimes all five of the Renshaw boys, most suitors failed to call again. For unfortunately, though they were all what is called nice-looking girls, none of the sisters was quite handsome enough to inspire any local boy to run that gauntlet a second time. The girls charged that their brothers’ concern for their reputations was incidental to the fun they got from scaring hell out of the various bouquet and bon-bon laden youths bold enough to come sniffing around their warren. There was ugly talk once, never fully substantiated, as the only witness was the alleged victim, of a premature kiss, a midnight ride, a beating. It began to look as if the girls might all be left to wither on the vine. All had ended by marrying beyond the adjacent counties, beyond the range of their brothers’ notoriety, and in each case Ma’s connivance had been needed in arranging clandestine meetings enough to bring the suitor to the desired point. In the case of one, namely Gladys, the young man had been backward, and him Ma brought round by disclosing to the boys that he was seeing their sister.
    The first of the girls to arrive now was Hazel.
    Admiring liberality and despising thrift as they did, the Renshaws found the sight of their sister Hazel—leaner, shabbier, more packrat-looking each time—always an embarrassment. Despite her upbringing in that prodigal family, Hazel was a miser, a true miser, and proud of it. Not just proud of her wealth, the size of which she alone (and least of all her husband, Troy) knew, nor just of her acumen in amassing it, but proud like a fanatic, a member of a cult, despising all those who do not know the truth. She relished the contradiction between the way she lived and looked and the way she might have lived and looked if she had wanted to. Hazel knew that people despised her for her stinginess. She relished that, too. She enjoyed being despised. It added to her sense of superiority.
    Hazel loved money. Loved crisp crinkly new green bills, thick silver dollars with their milled and serrated edges that fell together with a ripe and solid clunk; her love of property took a mannish turn. Like her father before her (like her mother, too; for her mother too had the Southern country man’s attitude in this) property meant to Hazel real property: houses, land. She had begun buying years ago: ramshackle rental bungalows, dilapidated duplexes in run-down neighborhoods, Negro shanties. She sold a few, traded a few, always turning a profit, and bought more. Meanwhile she grew leaner, shabbier, more secretive and apart, mistrustful, sly. She declined invitations so as not to have to return them. She scrimped her family, serving them stale and sometimes moldy bread bought in large lots from the back doors of bakeries; for meat served them the cheap inner organs, the lights of animals: the lungs, hearts, heads—after a while ceased serving them meat altogether. At thirteen, to teach them