The flu finally arrived—a fairly serious outbreak struck the campus less than a week after the spring semester had begun, and he had his hands full—he found himself working ten and sometimes twelve hours a day and going home utterly whipped but not really unhappy.
The warm spell broke on January 29 with a roar. There was a blizzard followed by a week of numbing subzero weather. Louis was checking the mending broken arm of a young man who was hoping desperately—and fruitlessly, in Louis’s opinion—that he would be able to play baseball that spring when one of the candy-stripers poked her head in and told him his wife was on the telephone.
Louis went into his office to take the call. Rachel was crying, and he was instantly alarmed. Ellie, he thought. She’s fallen off her sled and broken her arm. Or fractured her skull. He thought with alarm of the crazed fraternity boys and their toboggan.
“It isn’t one of the kids, is it?” he asked. “Rachel?”
“No, no,” she said, crying harder. “Not one of the kids. It’s Norma, Lou. Norma Crandall. She died this morning. Around eight o’clock, right after breakfast, Jud said. He came over to see if you were here and I told him you’d left half an hour ago. He oh Lou, he just seemed so lost and so dazed. . so old.
thank God Ellie was gone and Gage is too young to understand . .
.”
Louis’s brow furrowed, and in spite of this terrible news he found it was Rachel his mind was going out to, seeking, trying to find.
Because here it was again. Nothing you could quite put your finger on, because it was so much an overall attitudinal fix. That death was a secret, a terror, and it was to be kept from the children, above all to be kept from the children, the way that Victorian
ladies and gentlemen had believed the nasty, grotty truth about sexual relations must be kept from the children.
“Jesus,” he said. “Was it her heart?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She was no longer crying, but her voice was choked and hoarse. “Could you come, Louis? You’re his friend, and I think he needs you.”
You’re his friend.
Well I am, Louis thought with a small touch of surprise. I never expected to have an eighty-year-old man for a buddy, but I guess I do. And then it occurred to him that they had better be friends, considering what was between them. And considering that, he supposed that Jud had known they were friends long before Louis had. Jud had stood by him on that one, and in spite of what had happened since, in spite of the mice, in spite of the birds, Louis felt that Jud’s decision had probably been the right one . . . or, if not the right one, at least the compassionate one. He would do what he could for Jud now, and if it meant being best man at the death of his wife, he would be that.
“On my way,” he said and hung up.
32
It had not been a heart attack. It had been a cerebral accident, sudden and probably painless. When Louis called Steve Master-ton that afternoon and told him what was going on, Steve said that he wouldn’t mind going out just that way.
“Sometimes God dillies and dailies,” Steve said, “and sometimes He just points at you and tells you to hang up your jock.”
Rachel did not want to talk about it at all and would not allow Louis to talk to her of it.
Ellie was not so much upset as she was surprised and interested—it was what Louis thought a thoroughly healthy six year-old reaction should be. She wanted to know if Mrs. Crandall had died with her eyes shut or open. Louis said he didn’t know.
Jud took hold as well as could have been expected, considering the fact that the lady had been sharing bed and board with him for almost sixty years. Louis found the old man—and on this day he looked very much like an old man of eighty-three—sitting alone at the kitchen table, smoking a Chesterfield, drinking a bottle of beer, and staring blankly into the living room.
He looked up when Louis came in and said, “Well, she’s gone, Louis.” He said this in such a clear and matter-of-fact way that Louis thought it must not have really cleared through all the circuits yet—hadn’t hit him yet where he lived. Then Jud’s mouth began to work and he covered his eyes with one arm. Louis went to him and put an arm around him. Jud gave in and wept. It had cleared the circuits, all right. Jud understood perfectly. His wife had died.
“That’s good,” Louis said. “That’s good, Jud, she would want you to cry a little, I think. Probably be pissed off if you didn’t.” He had started to cry a little himself. Jud hugged him tightly, and Louis hugged him back.
Jud cried for ten minutes or so, and then the storm passed. Louis listened to the things Jud said then with great care—he listened as a doctor as well as a friend. He listened for any circularity in Jud’s conversation; he listened to see if Jud’s grasp of when was clear (no need to check him on where; that would prove nothing because for Jud Crandall the where had always been Ludlow, Maine); he listened most of all for any use of Norma’s name in the present
tense. He found little or no sign that Jud was losing his grip. Louis was aware that it was not uncommon for two old married people to go almost hand-in-hand, a month, a week, even a day apart. The shock, he supposed, or maybe even some deep inner urge to catch up with the one gone (that was a thought he would not have had before Church; he found that many of his thoughts concerning the spiritual and the supernatural had undergone a quiet but nonetheless deep sea-change). His conclusion was that Jud was grieving hard but that he was still compos mentis. He sensed in Jud none of that transparent frailty that had seemed to surround Norma on New Year’s Eve, when the four of them had sat in the Creed living room, drinking eggnog.
Jud brought him a beer from the fridge, his face still red and blotchy from crying.
“A bit early in the day,” he said, “but the sun’s over the yardarm somewhere in the world and under the circumstances . .
“Say no more,” Louis told him and opened the beer. He looked at Jud. “Shall we drink to her?”
“I guess we better,” Jud said. “You should have seen her when she was sixteen, Louis, coming back from church with her jacket unbuttoned.. . . your eyes would have popped. She could have made the devil swear off drinking. Thank Christ she never asked me to do it.”
Louis nodded and raised his beer a little. “To Norma,” he said. Jud clinked his bottle against Louis’s. He was crying again but he was also smiling. He nodded. “May she have peace, and let there be no frigging arthritis wherever she is.”
“Amen,” Louis said, and they drank.
It was the only time Louis saw Jud progress beyond a mild tipsiness, and even so he did not become incapacitated. He reminisced; a constant stream of warm memories and anecdotes,
colorful and clear and sometimes arresting, flowed from him. Yet between the stories of the past, Jud dealt with the present in a way Louis could only admire; if it had been Rachel who had simply dropped dead after her grapefruit and morning cereal, he wondered if he could have done half so well.
Jud called the Brookings-Smith Mortuary in Bangor and made as many of the arrangements as he could by telephone; he made an appointment to come in the following day and make the rest. Yes, he would have her embalmed; he wanted her in a dress, which he would provide; yes, he would pick out underwear; no, he did not want the mortuary to supply the special shoes which laced up the back. Would they have someone wash her hair? he asked. She washed it last on Monday night, and so it had been dirty when she died. He listened, and Louis, whose uncle had been in what those in the business called “the quiet trade,” knew the undertaker was telling Jud that a final wash and set was part of the service rendered. Jud nodded and thanked the man he was talking to, then listened again. Yes, he said, he would have her cosmeticized, but it was to be a lightly applied layer. “She’s dead and people know it,”
he said, lighting a Chesterfield. “No need to tart her up.” The coffin would be closed during the funeral, he told the director with calm authority, but open during the visiting hours the day before.