During the first week in April, his aunt stopped eating, bringing her eldest son, Noah’s cousin James, across the pond from his banking job in London to, as James put it, “get out in front of the curve re: Mom’s funeral.” It wasn’t like James to move into the house and stay by his mother’s side until the end. This was both unnecessary, since he was the executor of the will and already knew exactly what he was getting, and “not terribly social,” since he had a number of old friends to catch up with. So he camped out at the family “farm” in the wooded hills an hour northeast of the city and threw a number of parties.
The farm was a large stone house, built in the late 1800s, which had been recently renovated by a Japanese architect friend of James’s with offices in London and New York. It had every green feature on the market, from toilets to energy supply, and was tucked into fifteen hundred acres of untouched woodlands. When trying to figure out a best-case number for the size of the family fortune, and what a first cousin’s piece of the inheritance might be, Noah would factor in the price of this land as if it were rezoned for residential development. The number was astronomical.
But Noah knew that the rich didn’t get rich by giving it away. These were “his people” and deep in his heart he anticipated the worst. Fuck them all was his presumptive state of mind.
Three days after James arrived, his mother died. Noah was hopeful that he could pay his final respects with some kind of grace that would put to rest the whole incident around Jeanne and the cancelled visits. He called James and volunteered as a pallbearer.
The church was less than half full and the speeches were short. His aunt had been old and not well liked and this moved things along quickly. Not surprisingly, she had retained her worst qualities as she aged, which had dampened the enthusiasm of most who knew her, outside of the extended family.
His dead aunt wasn’t heavy—in fact, at the end she was a mere wisp of anger and ingratitude—but the coffin was another story as Noah hoisted his corner onto his shoulder. Since his aunt had done some volunteer nursing service overseas during the Korean War, it was decided to shoulder the coffin military style. It was one of those Cadillac models with solid brass handles and details and was made, he suspected, out of oak. Even though the funeral director had given a quick lesson on how to hoist and hold it, the base of Noah’s corner dug into his shoulder. He wasn’t about to shift his grip now that they were on their way. As the coffin moved out of the church down the centre aisle, Noah spotted Jeanne. She had a seat on the aisle in a back pew. She wore dark glasses and a tight black dress made of a shiny material that buttoned up the front, with a wide black belt that sucked in her waist and pushed out her tits like two proud cannonballs. This was almost the exact black version of her nurse’s white uniform. Noah smiled at her but couldn’t make out a reaction behind her large sunglasses. The whole setting, the church, the organ playing “Amazing Grace,” Jeanne in black, the coffin on his shoulder, the inevitability and finality of death, all gave Noah confidence that he had put his aunt and the confusion with Jeanne to rest and that Jeanne accepted it and him. As he passed her, the edge of the coffin now digging into the base of his neck causing what he felt was the sweet pain of redemption, he thought he heard her whisper “motherfucker.” He wasn’t sure it was “motherfucker,” especially in a church, especially during a funeral and to a pallbearer, coffin in hand. But it sure as Christ sounded like “motherfucker,” and he prayed she wouldn’t go to the event back at the house. Just in case, he complained of nausea at the cemetery and excused himself from the gathering afterward.