Jud had come with him on Sunday, the day after Gage had died, to pick out a coffin. They had gone downstairs, and instead of
immediately turning right into the coffin showroom, Louis, dazed, had continued straight on down the hallway toward a plain white swinging door, the sort you see communicating between restaurant dining rooms and the kitchen. Both Jud and the funeral director had said quickly and simultaneously, “Not that way,” and Louis had followed them away from that swinging door obediently. He knew what was behind that door though. His uncle had been an undertaker.
The East Room was furnished with neat rows of folding chairs
—the expensive ones with plushy seats and backs. At the front, in an area that seemed a combination nave and bower, was Cage’s coffin. Louis had picked the American Casket Company’s rosewood model—Eternal Rest, it was called. It was lined with plushy pink silk. The mortician agreed that it was really a beautiful coffin and apologized that he did not have one with a blue lining.
Louis responded that he and Rachel had never made such distinctions. The mortician had nodded. The mortician asked Louis if he had thought about how he would defray the expenses of Cage’s funeral. If not, he said, he could take Louis into his office and quickly go over three of their more popular plans— In Louis’s mind, an announcer suddenly spoke up cheerfully: I got my kid’s coffin free, for Raleigh coupons!
Feeling like a creature in a dream, he said, “I’m going to pay for everything with my MasterCard.”
“Fine,” the mortician said.
The coffin was no more than four feet long—a dwarf coffin.
Nonetheless its price was slightly over six hundred dollars. Louis supposed it rested on trestles, but the flowers made it difficult to see, and he hadn’t wanted to go too close. The smell of all those flowers made him want to gag.
At the head of the aisle, just inside the door giving onto the foyer-lounge, was a book on a stand. Chained to the stand was a ballpoint pen. It was here that the funeral director positioned Louis, so he could “greet his friends and relatives.”
The friends and relatives were supposed to sign the book with their names and addresses. Louis had never had the slightest idea what the purpose of this mad custom might be, and he did not ask now.
He supposed that when the funeral was over, he and Rachel would get to keep the book. That seemed the maddest thing of all.
Somewhere he had a high school yearbook and a college yearbook and a med school yearbook; there was also a wedding book, with MY WEDDING DAY stamped on the imitation leather in imitation gold leaf, beginning with a photo of Rachel trying on her bridal veil before the mirror that morning with her mother’s help and ending with a photo of two pairs of shoes outside a closed hotel door. There was also a baby book for Ellie— they had tired of adding to it rather quickly though; that one— with its spaces for MY FIRST HAIRCUT (add a lock of baby’s hair) and WHOOPS!
(add a picture of baby falling on her ass) —had been just too relentlessly cute.
Now, added to all the others, this one. What do we call it?
Louis wondered as he stood numbly beside the stand waiting for the party to begin. MY DEATHBOOK? FUNERAL
AUTOGRAPHS? THE
DAY WE PLANTED GAGE? Or maybe something more dignified, like
A DEATH IN THE FAMILY?
He turned the book back to its cover, which, like the cover to the MY WEDDING DAY book, was imitation leather.
The cover was blank.
Almost predictably, Missy Dandridge had been the first to arrive that morning, good-hearted Missy who had sat with Ellie and Gage on dozens of occasions. Louis found himself remembering that it had been Missy who had taken the kids on the evening of the day Victor Pascow had died. She had taken the kids, and Rachel had made love to him, first in the tub, then in bed.
Missy had been crying, crying hard, and at the sight of Louis’s calm, still face, she burst into fresh tears and reached for him—
seemed to grope for him. Louis embraced her, realizing that this was the way it worked or the way it was supposed to work, anyway—some kind of human charge that went back and forth, loosening up the hard earth of loss, venting it, breaking up the rocky path of shock with the heat of sorrow.
I’m so sorry, Missy was saying, brushing her dark blond hair back from her pallid face. Such a dear sweet little boy. I loved him so much, Louis, I’m so sorry, it’s an awful road, I hope they put that truck driver in jail forever, he was going much too fast, he was so sweet, so dear, so bright, why would Cod take Gage, I don’t know, we can’t understand, can we, but I’m sorry, sorry, so sorry.
Louis comforted her, held her and comforted her. He felt her tears on his collar, the press of her breasts against him. She wanted to know where Rachel was, and Louis told her that Rachel was resting. Missy promised to go see her and that she would sit with Ellie anytime, for as long as they needed her. Louis thanked her.
She had started away, still sniffing, her eyes redder than ever above her black handkerchief. She was moving toward the coffin when Louis called her back. The funeral director, whose name Louis could not even remember, had told him to have them sign the book, and damned if he wasn’t going to have them do it.
Mystery guest, sign in please, he thought and came very close to going off into cackles of bright, hysterical laughter.
It was Missy’s woeful, heartbroken eyes that drove the laughter away.
“Missy, would you sign the book?” he asked her, and because something else seemed to be needed, he added, “For Rachel.”
“Of course,” she said. “Poor Louis and poor Rachel.” And suddenly Louis knew what she was going to say next, and for some reason he dreaded it; yet it was coming, unavoidable, like a black bullet of a large caliber from a killer’s gun, and he knew that he would be struck over and over by this bullet in the next interminable ninety minutes, and then again in the afternoon, while the wounds of the morning were still trickling blood:
“Thank God he didn’t suffer, Louis. At least it was quick.”
Yes, it was quick, all right, he thought about saying to her—ah, how that would shatter her face all over again, and he felt a vicious urge to do it, to simply spray the words into her face. It was quick, no doubt about that, that’s why the coffin’s closed, nothing could have been done about Gage even if Rachel and I approved of dressing up dead relatives in their best like department store mannequins and rouging and powdering and painting their faces. It was quick, Missy-my-dear, one minute he was there on the road and the next minute he was lying in it, but way down by the Ringers’ house. It hit him and killed him and then it dragged him and you better believe it was quick. A hundred yards or more all told, the length of a football field. I ran after him, Missy, I was screaming his name over and over again, almost as if I expected he would still be alive, me, a doctor. I ran ten yards and there was his baseball cap and I ran twenty yards and there was one of his Star Wars sneakers, I ran forty yards and by then the truck had run off the road and the box had jackknifed in that field beyond the Ringers’ barn. People were coming out of their houses and I went on screaming his name, Missy, and at the fifty-yard line there was
his jumper, it was turned inside-out, and on the seventy-yard line there was the other sneaker, and then there was Gage.
Abruptly the world went dove gray. Everything passed out of his view. Dimly he could feel the corner of the stand which held the book digging into his palm, but that was all.
“Louis?” Missy’s voice. Distant. The mystery sound of pigeons in his ears.
“Louis?” Closer now. Alarmed.
The world swam back into focus.
“You all right?”
He smiled. “Fine,” he said. “I’m okay, Missy.”
She signed for herself and her husband—Mr. and Mrs. David Dandridge—in round Palmer-method script; to this she added their address—Rural Box 67, Old Bucksport Road—and then raised her eyes to Louis’s and quickly dropped them, as if her very address on the road where Gage had died constituted a crime.
“Be well, Louis,” she whispered.
David Dandridge shook his hand and muttered something inarticulate, his prominent, arrowhead-shaped adam’s apple bobbing up and down. Then he followed his wife hurriedly down the aisle for the ritual examination of a coffin which had been made in Storyville, Ohio, a place where Gage had never been and where he was not known.