2

THERE WAS A REQUIEM MASS FOR EMILY BYRNE, aged sixteen, of this city, three days later. Virginia wore a black, Spanish-style veil, and sometime afterward she realized that this was the first time she had worn a veil since she and Edward were married, in this very church; where she had not too long ago begun to picture Susan and then Emily being married to young men as fine and handsome as Edward had been twenty years ago.

There was not much to Edward today. He looked pallid and slight. His hand was in hers, but it was brittle and weightless and inanimate, like a dried leaf. She stole a look at him, although she could rest her eyes on whatever she chose without discovery from behind the veil. He was not the man he used to be, or at least the man she had pictured him being when she was, twenty years ago, still almost a girl.

He had gone to see Emily at the funeral home, and that was, she knew, no small thing. She had looked at peace, he said. He had given her both their blessings. Virginia had not wanted to go. She had known how it would be; that she would merely be seeing what she already felt inside. She had lived in Emily and Emily had quite truly lived in her, and then, at birth, had been parted from her. Now she had been torn from her body again. Virginia could feel it. Really, palpably. There was a sensation in her gut, in her womb, of something moved, displaced, and pressing against the rest of her, an absence that was a presence. There was no need to go down to the mortician’s to see what it was.

Virginia had always believed God had given her two daughters, Martha and Mary, Susan and Emily, one steady and practical, the other headstrong and rather too curious. And one tended the kitchen and the hearth, and the other sat at Love’s feet, listening. And who knew, thus enchanted and charmed, what she might pick up and do, where she might go?

Now she had one daughter and a husband, and it was her lot from this day forward, for better or worse, to tend them and care for them no matter how diminished she felt. She could see, still gazing at him, Edward’s diminishment, and she supposed her own was visible to anyone who cared to look.

The mass went on without incident. Virginia could scarcely say she was even there, although she went through all the motions and heard the beads of a rosary clattering in the pew behind, Granny Byrne’s, with Susan alongside her. She heard the Dies Irae, clearly in Latin; and she remembered this the following year because by a coincidence or vast pretense the protests that occurred in Chicago just then took the same name, the days of rage. These were in reaction to the prosecutions brought in the aftermath of the events at the convention the previous summer.

Virginia, too, knew something of rage. It had been the most natural intuition for her last October to drive by the boy’s mother’s apartment on several different afternoons and see that Edward’s car was parked nearby. She had spent forty years being nobody’s fool and she comprehended precisely what was taking place. She had planned on saying something, and was in fact going to do so the very night the police called about Emily. But then what Edward had done was no longer the very worst thing that had ever befallen her.

Virginia’s grief was very deep, but it was also broad, and lent her life a capaciousness, a sympathy for the larger world and its troubles, that it had perhaps before lacked. She took it in and made herself at home with it, and while it claimed her life entirely for a while, it gave it back more or less whole, if not intact; altered not entirely for the worse. She could imagine how losing Emily, and the other matter too, might also be the worst things ever to happen to Edward.

But Virginia and Edward both kept their silence, not about Emily, but about the other thing for as long as they had left together. It is so hard to be alone and yet so hard to be with others, to speak the truth without doing injury, without unraveling the net of memory—of the sweet and delectable past, but also of slights and secrets set aside, of bonds we wish had never been made—upon which all our affections rest.