The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

Tattycorum, Tat for short—included such works as
The Antediluvian Controversy, Other Worlds Than Ours
, and
Mu: Fact or Fiction?
    Tat’s sisters did not encourage this line of inquiry, Adelaide and Libby thinking it un-Christian; Edie, merely foolish. “But if there was such a thing as Atlanta,” said Libby, her innocent brow furrowed, “why isn’t it mentioned in the Bible?”
    “Because it wasn’t built yet,” said Edie rather cruelly. “Atlanta is the capital of Georgia. Sherman burnt it in the Civil War.”
    “Oh, Edith, don’t be hateful—”
    “The Atlanteans,” said Tat, “were the ancestors of the Ancient Egyptians.”
    “Well, there you go. The Ancient Egyptians weren’t Christian,” said Adelaide. “They worshiped cats and dogs and that kind of thing.”
    “They
couldn’t
have been Christian, Adelaide. Christ wasn’t born yet.”
    “Maybe not, but Moses and all them at least followed the Ten Commandments. They weren’t out there worshiping cats and dogs.”
    “Atlanteans,” Tat said haughtily, over the laughter of her sisters, “
Atlanteans
knew many things that modern scientists would be glad to get their hands on today. Daddy knew aboutAtlantis and he was a good Christian man and had more education than all of us here in this room put together.”
    “Daddy,” Edie muttered, “
Daddy
used to get me out of bed in the night saying Kaiser Wilhelm was coming and to hide the silver down the well.”
    “Edith!”
    “Edith, that’s not right. He was sick then. After how good he was to all of us!”
    “I’m not saying Daddy wasn’t a good man, Tatty. I’m just saying I was the one who had to take care of him.”
    “Daddy always knew
me,
” said Adelaide eagerly—who, being the youngest, and, she believed, her father’s favorite, never missed an opportunity to remind her sisters of this. “He remembered me right up until the end. The day he died, he took my hand and he said, ‘Addie, honey, what have they done to me?’ I don’t know why in the world I was the only one he recognized. It was the funniest thing.”
    Harriet enjoyed very much looking at Tat’s books, which included not only the Atlantis volumes but more established works such as Gibbon and Ridpath’s
History
as well as a number of paperbacked romances set in ancient times with colored pictures of gladiators on the covers.
    “Of course, these are not historical works,” explained Tat. “They are just little light novels with historical backdrops. But they are very entertaining books, and educational, too. I used to give them to the children down at the high school to try to get them interested in Roman times. You probably couldn’t do that any more with the kind of books they all write nowadays but these are clean little novels, not the kind of trash they have now.” She ran a bony forefinger—big-knuckled with arthritis—down the row of identical spines. “H.
Montgomery Storm
. I think he used to write novels about the Regency period as well, under a woman’s name, but I can’t remember what it was.”
    Harriet was not at all interested in the gladiator novels. They were only love stories in Roman dress, and she disliked anything which had to do with love or romance. Her favorite of Tat’s books was a large volume called
Pompeii and Herculaneum: The Forgotten Cities
, illustrated with color plates.
    Tat was happy enough to look at this with Harriet, too. They sat on Tat’s velveteen sofa and turned the pages together, past delicate murals from ruined villas, past baker’s stalls preserved perfectly, bread and all, beneath fifteen feet of ash, past the faceless gray plaster casts of dead Romans still twisted in the same eloquent postures of anguish in which they had fallen, two thousand years ago, beneath the rain of cinders on the cobblestones.
    “I don’t see why those poor people didn’t have the sense to leave earlier,” said Tat. “I guess they didn’t know what a volcano was in those days.