Following the Dandridges they all came, moving in a shuffling line, and Louis received them, their handshakes, their hugs, their tears. His collar and the upper sleeve of his dark gray suit coat soon became quite damp. The smell of the flowers began to reach even the back of the room and to permeate the place with the smell of funeral. It was a smell he remembered from his childhood—that
sweet, thick, mortuary smell of flowers. Louis was told how merciful it was that Gage hadn’t suffered thirty-two times by his own inner count. He was told that God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform twenty-five times. Bringing up the rear was he’s with the angels now, a total of twelve times.
It began to get to him. Instead of losing what marginal sense these little aphorisms had (the way your own name will lose its sense and identity if you repeat it over and over again), they seemed to punch deeper each time, angling in toward the vitals. By the time his mother-in-law and father-in-law put in their inevitable appearance, he had begun to feel like a hard-tagged fighter.
His first thought was that Rachel had been right—and how. Irwin Goldman had indeed aged. He was—what? Fifty-eight, fifty-nine?
Today he looked a graven and composed seventy. He looked almost absurdly like Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin with his bald head and Coke-bottle glasses. Rachel had told Louis Goldman had aged when she came back from her Thanksgiving trip, but Louis had not expected this. Of course, he thought, maybe it hadn’t been this bad at Thanksgiving. The old man hadn’t lost one of his two grandchildren at Thanksgiving.
Dory walked beside him, her face all but invisible under two—
possibly three—layers of heavy black netting. Her hair was fashionably blue, the color favored by elderly ladies of an upper-class
American persuasion. She held her husband’s ann. All Louis could really see behind the veil was the glitter of her tears.
Suddenly he decided it was time to let bygones be bygones. He could not hold the old grudge any longer. Suddenly it was too heavy. Perhaps it was the cumulative weight of all those platitudes.
“Irwin. Dory,” he murmured. “Thank you for coming.”
He made a gesture with his arms, as if to shake hands with Rachel’s father and hug her mother simultaneously, or perhaps even to hug them both. Either way he felt his own tears start for the first time, and for an instant he had the crazy idea that they could mend all their fences, that Gage would do that much for them in his dying, as if this were some romantic ladies’ novel he had stepped into where the wages of death were reconciliation, where it could cause something more constructive than this endless, stupid, grinding ache which just went on and on and on.
Dory started toward him, making a gesture, beginning, perhaps, to hold out her own arms. She said something—”Oh, Louis. . .“ and something else that was garbled—and then Goldman pulled his wife back. For a moment the three of them stood in a tableau that no one noticed except themselves (unless perhaps the funeral director, standing unobtrusively in the far corner of the East Room, saw—Louis supposed that Uncle Carl would have seen), Louis with his arms partly outstretched, Irwin and Dory Goldman standing as stiff and straight as a couple on a wedding cake.
Louis saw that there were no tears in his father-in-law’s eyes; they were bright and clear with hate (does he think I killed Gage to spite him? Louis wondered). Those eyes seemed to measure Louis, to find him the same small and pointless man who had kidnapped his daughter and brought her to this sorrow. . . and then to dismiss him. His eyes shifted to Louis’s left—to Gage’s coffin, in fact—
and only then did they soften.
Still Louis made a final effort. “Irwin,” he said. “Dory. Please. We have to get together on this.”
“Louis,” Dory said again—kindly, Louis thought—and then they were past him, Irwin Goldman perhaps pulling his wife along, not looking to the left or the right, certainly not looking at Louis Creed. They approached the coffin, and Goldman fumbled a small black skullcap out of his suit coat pocket.
You didn’t sign the book, Louis thought, and then a silent belch of such malignantly acidic content rose through his digestive works that his face clenched in pain.
The morning viewing ended at last. Louis called home. Jud answered and asked him how it had gone. All right, Louis said. He asked Jud if he could talk to Steve.
“If she can dress herself, I’m going to let her come this afternoon,”
Steve said. “Okay by you?”
“Yes,” Louis said.
“How are you, Lou? No bullshit and straight on—how are you?”
“All right,” Louis said briefly. “Coping.” I had all of them sign the book. All of them except Dory and Irwin, and they wouldn’t.
“All right,” Steve said. “Look, shall we meet you for lunch?”
Lunch. Meeting for lunch. This seemed such an alien idea that Louis thought of the science fiction novels he had read as a teenager—novels by Robert A. Heinlein, Murray Leinster, Gordon R. Dickson. The natives here on Planet Quark have an odd custom when one of their children dies, Lieutenant Abelson: they “meet for lunch.” I know how grotesque and barbaric that sounds, but remember, this planet has not been terra formed yet.
“Sure,” Louis said. “What’s a good restaurant for half time between funeral viewings, Steve?”
“Take it easy, Lou,” Steve said, but he didn’t seem entirely displeased. In this state of crazy calm, Louis felt better able to see into people than ever before in his life. Perhaps it was an illusion, but right now he suspected Steve was thinking that even a sudden spate of sarcasm, squirted out like an abrupt mouthful of bile, was preferable to his earlier state of disconnection.
“Don’t worry,” he said to Steve now. “What about Benjamin’s?”
“Sure,” Steve said. “Benjamin’s would be fine.”
He had made the call from the office of the funeral director. Now, as Louis passed the East Room on his way out, he saw that the room was almost empty, but Irwin and Dory Goldman sat down in the front row, heads bowed. They looked to Louis as if they might sit there forever.
Benjamin’s was the right choice. Bangor was an early-lunch town, and around one o’clock it was nearly deserted. Jud had come along with Steve and Rachel, and the four of them ate fried chicken. At one point Rachel went to the ladies’ room and remained in there so long that Steve became nervous. He was on the verge of asking a waitress to check on her when she came back to the table, her eyes red.
Louis picked at his chicken and drank a lot of Schlitz beer. Jud matched him bottle for bottle, not talking much.
Their four meals went back almost uneaten, and with his preternatural insight, Louis saw the waitress, a fat girl with a pretty face, debating with herself about whether or not to ask them if their meals had been all right, finally taking another look at Rachel’s red-rimmed eyes and deciding it would be the wrong question.
Over coffee Rachel said something so suddenly and so baldly that it rather shocked them all—particularly Louis, who at last was becoming sleepy with the beer. “I’m going to give his clothes to the Salvation Army.”
“Are you?” Steve said after a moment.
“Yes,” Rachel said. “There’s a lot of wear in them yet. All his jumpers . . . his corduroy pants . . . his shirts. Someone will be glad to get them. They’re all very serviceable. Except for the ones he was wearing, of course. They’re. . . ruined.”
The last word became a miserable choke. She tried to drink coffee, but that was no good. A moment later she was sobbing into her hands.
There was a queer moment then. There were crossing lines of tension then. They all seemed to focus on Louis. He felt this with the same preternatural insight he’d had all this day, and of them all, this was the clearest and surest. Even the waitress felt those converging lines of awareness. He saw her pause at a table near the back where she was laying placemats and silver. For a moment Louis was puzzled, and then he understood: they were waiting for him to comfort his wife.
He couldn’t do it. He wanted to do it. He understood it was his responsibility to do it. All the same, he couldn’t. It was the cat that got in his way. Suddenly and with no rime or reason. The cat. The fucking cat. Church with his ripped mice and the birds he had grounded forever. When he found them, Louis had cleaned up the messes promptly, with no complaint or comment, certainly without protest. He had, after all, bought them. But had he bought this?