ELEVEN

By the time we reached downtown the dance of bad memory was like tocsins in the brain. “I know you hate these,” Kris Ann said finally.

I shrugged. “It’s just that Protestant funerals are such dismal affairs. There’s no catharsis, just one more dutiful rite of forebearance. No one will cry—not even Henry—and then we’ll all go home.”

But then that was all I’d done when they’d buried my father.

The Episcopal church was a large gothic structure, its stone walls blackened by time and weather and a thickening overcast. Inside it was dark and vast, with a high vaulted ceiling. Along both walls intricate stained-glass windows portrayed the life of Jesus in bright, jagged sections. A blood-red carpet declined between pews overflowing with mourners to a marble altar with an ornate silver cross. Toward the right front, my partners grouped in white shirts and gray suits, trying hard to look what they were. We joined them.

Muffled sounds came from the rear of the church. Five relatives and Cade bore Lydia’s casket, covered by a white pall and resting on a low metal platform with wheels. A blonde acolyte with the processional cross and two clergy with prayer books preceded it. At the rear, Henry Cantwell stood with his sister.

We all rose. The pallbearers began rolling the casket noiselessly toward the altar. A grim-faced Cade held one handle. I couldn’t find Jason. The clergy read in hollow voices:

“‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live …

I saw Rayfield standing by the rear door. The voices moved nearer:

“‘I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God …’”

Henry’s eyes fixed emptily on the acolyte’s cross. He passed Etta Parsons, face rigid as if fighting tears, then Dalton Mooring, head averted, his blonde wife next to him looking wretchedly hungover. The clergy continued:

“‘We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away …’”

—“Deserter,” my mother had shrieked until they pulled her from the coffin and dragged her upstairs.

My father lay in the front hall. “A fine-looking man, Kieron Shaw,” they kept saying, and him dead and waxy and looking like someone else. Brian babbled the Rosary by the head of the coffin—

The foot of Lydia’s casket was placed toward the altar. One of the clergy read over her: “‘For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were. O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength, before I go hence, and be no more seen. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost …’”

—“In nomine Patri, et Filii et Spiritu Sancti …” The old priest chanted over my father amidst the smell of incense. Three candles had lined each side of the closed black coffin. My mother wore black, the priest black vestments. Brian, nine years old, watched him—

I watched the clergyman now as he read: “‘Jesus said, let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you.’”

He looked shrunken in his vestments, his gaze through wire-rimmed glasses touched with uncertainty. I sensed his isolation: a middle-aged man repeating an inherited ritual in a reedy voice and doubting his own efficacy.

—Brian wore the priest’s collar I could never quite believe. “Good God, man,” he said, “you send Mother money instead of visiting, can’t bear to see the old neighborhood or anyone in it, and live outside the Church, beholden to a man you despise. For all your beautiful Kris Ann and fine house you’ve at last no sense of who you are.”

“Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest,” I jibed.

“Don’t spar with me, Adam. You can make a sadness of your own life, but our mother deserves better.”

“I’m here now.”

“For our uncle’s funeral. That’s quite a gesture.”

“Dammit, Bri, since I was twelve all I got from her was ‘don’t be like your father, don’t look up to what he did’ and all the time knowing she hated him for being killed. Hell, she’d say I looked like him and it was like a curse. So I did as she wanted, and if that’s taken me other places, so be it.”

Brian raised a finger to his lips, glancing toward the stairwell. Upstairs my mother had said the Rosary and slept alone, as she had for the twenty years since my father was shot and killed and buried in a spring drizzle like the one that spattered the windows, reminding me of the smell of wet earth. Instead, drinking wine with Brian in the living room, I smelled the same trapped mustiness. A small lamp lit the familiar things of my mother: a Belleek china cup, lace on the couch, the tortured Jesus, the cameo of my father, wolf-faced, with cold blue eyes. I sat in his chair. Brian faced me, a brown-haired replica of the pale sleeping woman. “I know you paid the price for Da’s dying,” he said.

I shrugged. “At least it didn’t make me a celibate.”

He nodded in wry acknowledgment. “No doubt I found comfort in the Church, if only the sense that someone was looking after me. Who’s to say that’s a bad thing?”

“Well, what I remember is our dried-out priest mouthing all that cold business of God’s will, and me knowing all the time that we were losers in an arbitrary and very nasty lottery. I’ve not become so weak-minded as to cherish that.”

Brian flushed. “It’s worse than weak-minded to hate your past and neglect your mother,” he came back. “You’ve been at war with God twenty years now, and it’s left you empty. You’re a cynical man, Adam, there’s no purpose to your life—”

And no purpose in rehashing it, I thought now. It was just that I hated funerals.

I found myself staring at Lydia’s casket, ashamed to wonder, yet wondering if my stricken friend in the first pew was a sad, bewildered cuckold with a wife he’d never understood, and shouldn’t now. Perhaps better to let it be, and hope that Cade was right, that no one else would come to harm and Henry would go free.

“Unto God’s gracious mercy and protection we commit you,” read the clergyman. A little late, I answered silently. “Amen,” he finished.

We rose again. The pallbearers shuffled to the casket and inched it back up the aisle. Henry trailed, eyes bleak with cold comfort. They rolled the casket to the door of the church and were gone.

Kris Ann took my hand. Mourners edged from their pews looking up or down like strangers in an elevator. We moved in the halting file of reticent bodies, out the door.

Rayfield stood watching in the stone archway. I passed him without speaking. In the street below it was raining and almost dusk. There were newsmen on the other side. Nora Culhane was next to her cameraman, shooting footage for the evening news. Then I saw Etta Parsons.

She stood with her back to me, staring from the top of the steps toward the sidewalk. Joanne Mooring waited there alone. Then a dark green Cadillac glided from the street to stop in front of her. As he pushed open the door Dalton Mooring’s face appeared. His wife got inside. Etta Parsons watched the car drive silently away.

I left Kris Ann and walked behind her. “Mooring?” I said softly.

The single stare she gave me was hard as sculpture. Then she turned and walked away, into the rain.