23

EARL BATEMAN HAD NOT INTENDED TO DRIVE TO NEWPORT on Tuesday evening. It was while preparing for a lecture he would be delivering the following Friday that he realized that for illustrative purposes he needed some of the slides he kept in the museum on the grounds of the Bateman Funeral Home. The home of his great-great-grandfather, the narrow Victorian house and the acre it stood on had been separated from the main house and property ten years earlier.

Technically the museum was private and not open to the public. It could only be visited by written request, and Earl personally escorted the few visitors through it. In response to the derisive humor heaped on him by his cousins whenever they discussed “Death Valley”—as they called his little museum—his icy and knowingly humorless retort was that, historically, people of all cultures and breeding attached great importance to the rituals surrounding death.

Over the years, he had gathered an impressive array of materials, all having to do with death: slides and films; recorded funeral dirges; Greek epic poems; paintings and prints, such as the apotheosis picture of Lincoln being received into heaven; scale reproductions of the Taj Mahal and the pyramids; native mausoleums of brass-trimmed hardwood; Indian funeral pyres; present-day caskets; replicas of drums; conch shells, umbrellas, and swords; statues of riderless horses with reversed stirrups; and examples of mourning attire throughout the ages.

“Mourning Attire” was the subject of the lecture he was to deliver to members of a reading group that had just finished discussing an assortment of books on death rituals. For the occasion, he wanted to show them slides of the costumes in the museum.

Visuals always help make for a lively lecture, he decided, as he drove along Route 138, over the Newport Bridge. Until last year, the final slide used when he lectured on attire was an excerpt from the 1952 Amy Vanderbilt’s Etiquette Guide, in which she instructed that patent-leather shoes were never appropriate at a funeral. Accompanying the text he had placed pictures of patent-leather shoes, from children’s Mary Janes to ladies’ pumps and men’s bowed evening slippers, all, he felt, to whimsical effect.

But now he had thought of a new twist for ending the lecture. “I wonder what generations in the future will say of us when they see illustrations of widows in red miniskirts and family mourners in jeans and leather jackets. Will they perhaps read social and cultural custom of deep significance into these costumes, as we ourselves try to read it into the clothing of the past? And if so, wouldn’t you like to have an opportunity to eavesdrop on their discussions?”

He liked that. It would lessen the uneasy reaction he always received when he discussed the fact that the Beerawan community dressed the widow or widower in rags, because of their belief that the soul of the dead person begins wandering immediately after cessation of breath and might reflect hostility to the living, even to those people the deceased had loved. Presumably the rags reflect grief and appropriately deep mourning.

At the museum, that thought had stayed with him as he collected the slides he wanted. He sensed a tension between the dead Nuala and the living Maggie. There was hostility to Maggie. She must be warned.

He knew Nuala’s phone number from memory, and in the dim light of his museum office, he dialed it. He had just started to hang up when he heard Maggie’s breathless greeting. Even so, he replaced the receiver.

She might think the warning odd, and he didn’t want her to think he was crazy.

“I am not crazy,” he said aloud. Then he laughed. “I’m not even odd.”