I cut the engine and waited for the Gremlin's shudders to subside. A silver hearse was parked out back, and a man in a gray pinstriped suit leaned against it smoking a cigarette. He looked at his watch, took a long drag from his cigarette, and with a smokeless exhale flicked the ashes to the ground, rolling the filter into a handkerchief. Straightening his fat-knotted tie, he walked in the back entrance under a green awning with the words RICHARD P. CRAWLEY AND SON, FUNERALS OF QUIET DIGNITY.
Despite my occupation, I had never been inside a funeral home. When my father was dying, we were living in Chicago, and I was sent away to Greencastle, Indiana, my mother's hometown, to stay with my aunt's family. Uncle Keith, my mother's brother-in-law, arrived the day my father went into the hospital, packed me a duffel bag of summer and fall clothes, and brought me down from the city on a rush-hour train. The one memory that sticks in my mind from that summer was that the neighbors had an above-ground pool and I panicked when they tried to teach me to swim. I stayed a month with my cousins, who were in high school then and didn't have much time for me, a five-year-old then. When I returned to Chicago, my father had died, and three weeks later I was shuttled back on the train, in a daze, this time to Columbia, Missouri, and to a new life in the college town where my parents had first met.
Why my mother had sent me away that summer was not an easy subject to talk about, so mostly we didn't. But it came up early one morning, my first year of high school, on what would have been my father's forty-fifth birthday. It was as though she suddenly felt compelled to say something, and I suppose she took a gamble that I'd now be mature enough to understand. She sat on the edge of my bed and, pressing out the wrinkles in the cover, explained that the doctors had told her he could live another three weeks or three months with this kind of cancer.
"I wasn't going to let you watch that," she said. "I wanted you to remember him the way he was: strong and tall and clear-eyed."
I told her I understood, which wasn't entirely true.
I had been to church funerals—for my uncle and my grandmother in Wichita, for the dean of the journalism school, for Mary Ellen of Mary Ellen's Beauty Shop, who did my mother's hair, and for a boy in my class who once put mashed potatoes in my milk and whose rope swing broke over rocks along the Gasconade.
In the sporadic car rides to Greencastle and Wichita to visit my family and up to Wisconsin where I went to camp one summer, I came to understand that the town is directly ahead when you see the graveyard and that the oldest, most beautiful house is always the funeral home.
It surprised me, then, since she had seemed like a woman of particular taste, that Alicia would have chosen this place to honor her husband—this house of mismatched parts at the edge of an outdated strip mall.
The funeral director, who had been smoking behind the building, greeted me at the front entrance. He had crust under his eyes, age spots along the sides of his face, a sore like dried preserves on his upper lip.
"Gunther or Whiting?" he asked, squinting from the brightness of the open door.
"Whiting," I said.
"Come with me." He took my elbow, leading me down a dark hallway. "Whiting is in the West Annex."
We stopped under a gold-veined mirror. He handed me a pen and pointed to an open guest book surrounded by peach gladioli.
"Please sign your name before entering the receiving room. The service will begin in fifteen minutes," he said, retreating.
For some reason, I hesitated about writing my own name, worried it might be traced back to me, so instead I signed my father's, "Charlie Hatch," near the bottom of the page.
When I opened the door and stepped inside the receiving room, I realized that the Dunkin' Donuts and the aluminum siding and the funeral director with the sore on his lip had all been there for good reason—to give this sanctuary at the end of the dark hallway the advantage of surprise.
Everywhere I looked there were white roses: white roses on the altar, a white rose on every chair, sprays of white roses in crystal vases, fans of white roses tied with purple ribbons on each of the velvet-draped tables.
I stood behind two middle-aged women who appeared to know each other. The one in front of me pulled some tissues from her purse and slipped them into her jacket, then turned around, handing me a program from the table beside her. Her friend, so large she obscured my view of the left side of the room, was speaking in a whisper to someone I couldn't see. I opened the program, glanced over it, and as another mourner came up behind me to take his place in line, I lifted my head—and there was Alicia.
She wore a navy crepe dress and a black cloche pulled low over her forehead, half of her face in shadow. Her lips were slightly parted, the flesh around her eyes soft with crying. She looked off toward the altar, in the center of which sat a mahogany cremation box.
The sight of her under the hat with her faraway expression in that bright, quiet room, which she had so artfully transformed, moved me to do the most curious thing: I kissed her hand.
I've never been a courtly person, have always found courtliness to be contrived, but I actually took her hand and pressed my lips to her fingers.
I have no idea what got into me, but there I was, at the funeral of a man I had never met, holding the hand of his wife, a woman I hardly knew, looking at her as if the world should step aside and leave us alone.
And she went straight along, as if kissing her hand were the most natural gesture for me to have made. She tilted her head and held my eyes for a moment. "I'm so glad you came." She sounded genuinely relieved.
"Of course," I said.
Standing next to her, the top of its head level with her elbow and baring its teeth, was the largest dog I had ever seen.
He had a rough, brindle coat, a long body, and a deep chest. His narrow face had wiry hairs that came together like extra fangs, and his small, high-set ears were drawn back against his neck.
"Gavin!" Alicia scolded, pointing a finger at the growling wolfhound, who immediately sank to the floor.
She took my hand again. "He gets jealous," she whispered apologetically.
A cello was playing as Alicia introduced me to Joe Whiting, a tall bald man with a thin mustache, and Margaret, Arthur's sister, a rigid-looking woman with wire-rimmed glasses.
"This is the newspaper reporter Gordon Hatch," Alicia said. "He'll be writing the feature article for the St. Louis paper."
Joe Whiting nodded approvingly, making a strange sound in the back of his throat.
I said how sorry I was, how I had heard such wonderful things about his brother.
The sister, Margaret, shook my hand with surprising strength.
"A feature article? That's interesting." She folded her large-knuckled fingers in front of her, the expression on her face vaguely ironic. "I had no idea Arthur was feature material."
I looked down at my program, folding it in half. "Our feature stories tend to be community-oriented," I said.
She lifted a hand to her chin. A small black purse hung tidily from her elbow. "Community-oriented. Ah, I see."
She had an angular face and a sharp nose, a long sinewy neck, and she was taller than I by several inches. Her shoulder-length black hair was going gray and cut in severe bangs above her eyebrows. Her billowy black dress flared to the knees. Next to Alicia, she towered.
"What section of the paper are you with?" she asked, taking off her glasses.
"I work for Metro," I lied. "I'm on general assignment. I just go where they ask me to go."
"They?" She opened her purse and slid the glasses into a leather case.
"Assignment editors," I said.
"Oh." She smiled, but not in a friendly way, more to say, Perhaps this can all be explained at a more appropriate time.
I took a seat across the room next to the middle-aged women from the receiving line.
"He looks well," said the big one.
"Yes, he seems to be holding up," the other agreed.
"He's a remarkable specimen, even under duress."<
br />
I realized that they were talking about the dog.
"Do you think this means Arthur's wife will take over the society newsletter?" the large one asked.
"I can't imagine," said the other, lifting a Kleenex to cover her mouth. "She's a better-than-average groomer, but she has scant knowledge of the breed."
The service was sparsely attended. No more than twenty-five people had come. One of the bank managers at Portage Savings eulogized Arthur as a model of fairness and good citizenship and said that his performance during the bank robbery showed "a natural impulse for courage."
The minister, Reverend C. W. Johnson, gave a reading from Lamentations and said a few words about Arthur, speaking of him in such general terms that I assumed the two had never met. A cellist played "Fairest Lord Jesus," and a breeder from Mississippi Valley Irish Wolfhounds recalled the day nine years before when Arthur drove out to see a litter of puppies and walked away with majority ownership of his farm.
"He told me, flat out, he'd never even owned a breeding farm before," Clyde Hermann said, tugging at his shirt as though his tie were too tight. "But you know Arthur. He'd done all his research and he knew exactly what he wanted. I gave him my two best sires, and the rest is AKC history."
Margaret Whiting made a brief, somewhat chilling speech that seemed to end before it was meant to, as if her emotions would not allow her to say more. "As children Arthur and I were inseparable. I was born three years before him, but, like twins, we were connected at the core." Her voice trembled as she spoke. "To be happy in this world is to be understood," she said. "I understood my brother and my brother understood me." She looked down at her hands, clasped in front of her, then returned to her seat.
Alicia was sitting in the front row, several rows ahead of me, at an angle that made it difficult to see her face. The collar of her dress was pulled slightly down, exposing the back of her smooth neck, the notch at the top of her spine.
We all sang "O God Our Help in Ages Past." Toward the end of the service, during the moment of silence, I opened my program.
On the inside page was a poem I knew well. My mother had torn it from a book of romantic verse by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and taped it to the dining room wall when we moved into 102 La Grange:
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
...I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
I realized that for all the years that poem had hung on the dining room wall, I had never stopped to read it through, to consider it for what it was: the story of my mother's life.
The service over, Alicia exited through a side door carrying the small box with her husband's ashes. The wolfhound walked beside her, stride for stride, on tiptoe. Joe and Margaret Whiting followed, then the bank manager and the dog breeder and a woman in a tweed suit, then Reverend Johnson, who gestured for us all to rise and join them.
Alicia stood under the green awning with Joe Whiting, who was handing out directions to the Whispering Pines Country Club, where a reception would be held at six o'clock.
"I hope to see you there," she said solemnly.
"Of course I'll come."
And with that, the dinner plans I had made with Thea Pierson earlier in the day must have flown from my mind.
I couldn't leave work until the six-thirty meeting, so it was just after seven before I arrived at Whispering Pines, a modest country club with nine holes of golf, a swimming pool, and a rambling clubhouse, white brick with a green roof.
The reception was held in a dark room behind the ninth tee, where, through the sliding glass doors, we could see the last foursome of the day taking practice swings, polishing their three irons in the evening dusk.
A few guests stood around the buffet, a couple more perched uncomfortably on couches. Joe Whiting, a glass of Coke in his hand, was looking out at the golfers.
"How are you?" I asked.
"Me?" He turned around, pulling his head back, giving me a confused look.
He was maybe six foot four, with a long chin, high cheekbones, and the same large Adam's apple as his brother. He wore glasses now, squarish, thick-rimmed bifocals with a strong prescription, too big for his face. He had a smooth, shiny head, gray hairs around his temples; his pencil mustache was jet black.
"What a beautiful service," I said.
He seemed to have no recollection of meeting me. "Oh, yes. Yes, that's right. A beautiful service. It provided a service for all of us." He smiled broadly, holding his drink with two hands, bowing as he spoke. "For those of us in the service industry, it was a particularly good service. It was quite serviceable." He laughed.
"I see," I said, quickly scanning the room for Alicia or Margaret or anyone to help explain what I hadn't realized about Joe.
"Is Alicia here?" I asked.
"I like Alicia. She has pretty hair, and she gives me treats." He wrinkled his nose. "They're treats for dogs. You can't eat these kinds of treats. They're disgusting to eat."
Joe reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of dog snacks, and I saw for the first time that he was dressed in work clothes: heavy boots and a pair of navy Dickies and a gray shirt with mud streaked on it. Someone must have lent him the blazer he was wearing.
"You're in the service industry?" I offered, indulging him because his outfit and his mustache, so conspicuously dyed, and his labored enthusiasm made me sad.
"I'm in the industrious industry," he said. "I'm very industrious. You can ask anyone."
Joe carried on in this way, and I learned that he worked for Clyde, the breeder who had spoken at the funeral, on a farm up near Winfield. He gave me all the names of Arthur's dogs and the prizes they'd won, speaking in the most cheerful manner, pausing only to push his glasses up his nose or take a two-handed sip of his drink, and I began to wonder if a person like Joe would be capable of feeling sadness.
"Arthur worked in a bank. He has my arrowhead on his desk," he said at one point, speaking of Arthur in both the past and present tense, giving no indication that he understood the loss.
Joe spotted Alicia first. She was huddled in a far corner of the room speaking with the woman in the tweed suit from the morning. The wolfhound lay at her feet with a despondent look.
"Margaret's at the hotel, because she hates Alicia." He nudged me. "She said she was going to the service and that's that. 'That's that,' she said. Excuse me, I need to go to the bathroom."
Before he left, I asked him where Margaret was staying and gave him my phone number in case he ever wanted to call, realizing as I was writing it down that this was probably a mistake.
On the way out I noticed that Alicia and the dog were now engaged in what appeared to be a serious conversation. She was looking down at the floor, scratching the dog's face in long, slow strokes from the tip of his nose to the back of his head. His eyes blinked and closed, a contented smile set on his grizzled face.
I started toward them, then hesitated, suddenly tense, deciding we could catch up later. And after a couple of mini ham sandwiches and some oversweet punch, I briefly complimented Reverend Johnson on the service and left Whispering Pines.
Out on the highway, the road was empty, the slow lane all mine, and I rolled the windows down to take in some of the cool October air.
Somehow, it had been an exhilarating day. I didn't know what it meant to fall in love, couldn't remember how it had felt with Thea, except that at the time it was safer than "falling." I'd always been a cautious person, alert to the dangers of the world. But falling was the sense I had of things now.
I couldn't get Alicia out of my mind—in her hat at the funeral, in her burgundy dress, her small hand reaching out, fast forward across my line of vision. Her voice kept turning over in my head. I though
t of Czechoslovakia, of where I'd go for lunch tomorrow, of who I'd be five years from now, every possibility colored by thoughts of Alicia, as if we had made an arrangement together, as if she were somehow mine to consider and not the bereaved widow of Arthur Whiting. I knew it was crazy, but there she was, playing on me.
Back home, I threw my jacket on the couch and checked the answering machine. The message light read 2.
I listened to the long squeal of the machine rewinding, wondering why Alicia would have left two messages and figured the first one had been cut off. I worried she might be upset that I didn't talk to her at the reception.
"This is your mother," the machine said, and I knew it meant trouble. "Thea just called from a restaurant down the street from you. She's been waiting forty-five minutes and I've told her to leave—"
I cut it off there, skipping ahead to the second message.
The voice was Thea's.
I pressed the rewind button—I couldn't stand to listen—and fell back in my bed.
8
ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, I printed out the seventy-nine advancers, single-spaced, reduced to a small point size, in the order I had written them. I planned to save them as a reminder of my potential.
On my chair sat a piece of pink notepaper, folded in half and stapled, with "Gordon Hatch, Obituary Desk" written in a leaning cursive.
Dear Gordon Hatch,
I was appalled by the way you were treated yesterday. From my observations, you are a hard-working young man who does his part and does it quietly. Nobody deserves to be pilloried like that, least of all someone whose only offense was making a positive change. If you care for an audience or if you need anything, I am at your service.
Regards,
Jessie Tennant
I could see that Jessie Tennant's computer was signed off, her desk cleared; a bottle of Windex stood at the end of a neat row of reference books. Photographs of Sarah Vaughan and Rosa Parks and a postcard print of a toppled yellow rocking chair were pressed next to a calendar under the heavy glass on her desk.
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