"Thank you for coming," he said. "She's in the garden. I'm going to leave you two alone, if you don't mind. She asked me to." He hesitated with his hand on the gate. "Mrs. Toomer. I would ask you to listen to her the way you would listen to someone who has never said this out loud before. Because she hasn't. Not to anyone. Not in sixty years, except me."
The garden was small and green and wrecked. A camellia had been split down the middle. The fountain had a branch in it. Adelaide Prioleau sat on a wrought-iron bench under the piazza with a tea tray beside her on a little table, and when Toomer came up the brick path she stood, and held out her hand, and then sat down again carefully, and poured.
"I'm going to tell you something," she said, "and then you are going to tell me what you think I should do, because I have not slept since Friday, and Pinckney has an opinion, and I can no longer tell whether I agree with it. Will you take sugar?"
"No ma'am."
"Neither do I. My mother said a lady takes one lump so as not to make a fuss, and I took one lump for fifty years and hated it." She handed Toomer the cup. Her hands were perfectly steady. "I have epilepsy, Mrs. Toomer. I have had it since I was eleven years old."
Toomer put the cup down on her knee.
She had known, a little. Since Friday. Since the white face in the office and the question about whether Tilly remembered. Maybe since Tuesday, since the gray-faced man in the hall outside the visiting room saying my wife felt a little faint. But knowing a thing a little and being told it are not the same, and she sat on the iron bench in the wrecked garden and let it be told.
It had begun in 1932, Adelaide Prioleau said. She was at Ashley Hall, at her desk, in a geography lesson. Her father was a physician on Rutledge Avenue. He knew what it was the moment they told him, and he took her home, and he sat her down in his study and told her two things. The first was that it was a disease of the nerves and not of the soul, and that she was not to let anyone tell her otherwise. And the second was that she was never, ever, to tell a living person.