‘The first time I saw Nancy’s body, she was all wrapped up, and they were taking her out of the house.’
‘Well, who …’ A dreadful recognition stopped his throat.
‘Mark found her that afternoon – came home from God knows where, went into the bathroom, and there she was. He called me, and I told him to dial 911 and then go outside. By the time I got home, they were taking her to the ambulance.’
‘Oh, no,’ Tim breathed out. He looked down the aisle at the boy, locked into unreadable emotions before his mother’s casket.
Inside his brother’s house on the following afternoon, after the sad little funeral, a good number of the neighbors, many more than Tim had anticipated, were sitting on the furniture or standing around with soft drinks in their hands. (Most of them held soft drinks, anyhow. Since his arrival at the gathering, Jimbo’s father, Jackie Monaghan, whose ruddy, good-humored face was the template for his son’s, had acquired a dull shine in his eyes and a band of red across his cheekbones. These were probably less the product of grief than of the contents of the flask outlined in his hip pocket. Tim had witnessed two of the other attendees quietly stepping out of the room with good old Jackie.)
Jimbo’s mother, Margo Monaghan, had startled Tim by revealing that she had read one of his books. Even more startling was her extraordinary natural beauty. Without a trace of makeup Margo Monaghan looked like two or three famous actresses but did not really resemble any of them. She looked the way the actresses would look if you rang their bell and caught them unprepared at three o’clock on an ordinary afternoon. Amazingly, the other men in the room paid no attention to her. If anything, they acted as though she were obscurely disfigured and they felt sorry for her.
Part of the reason Tim had expected no more than three or four people to gather at his brother’s house was Philip’s personality; the remainder concerned the tiny number of mourners at the grave site in Sunnyside Cemetery. The pitiless sunlight had fallen on the husband, son, and brother-in-law of the deceased; on the Rent-a-minister; on Jimbo, Jackie, and Margo; on Florence, Shirley, and Mack, Nancy’s gas company friends; on Laura and Ted Shillington, the Underhills’ next-door neighbors to the right, and Linda and Hank Taft, the next-door neighbors to the left. The Rent-a-minister had awaited the arrival of additional mourners until the delay became almost embarrassing. A grim nod from Philip had finally set him in motion, and his harmless observations on motherhood, unexpected death, and the hope of salvation lasted approximately eight endless minutes and were followed by a brief prayer and the mechanical descent of the casket into the grave. Philip, Mark, and Tim picked up clayey brown clods from beside the open grave and dropped them onto the lid of the coffin; after a second, Jimbo Monaghan did the same, giving inspiration to the other mourners, who followed suit.
Back on Superior Street, Laura Shillington and Linda Taft stopped off to pick up the tuna casseroles, Jell-O and marshmallow salad, ambrosia, and coffee cake they had prepared. Florence, Shirley, and Mack partook of the banquet and the Kool-Aid and left soon after. Their departure had an insignificant effect on the assemblage, which by that time had grown to something like thirty. Tim wondered if so many people had ever before been in Philip’s house at the same time. Whatever his experience as a host, Philip now moved easily through the various groups, talking softly to his neighbors and the other guests. The Rochenkos, a pair of young elementary school teachers incongruous in matching polo shirts and khaki trousers, showed up, and so did a sour-looking old man in a plaid shirt who introduced himself to Tim as ‘Omar Hillyard, the neighborhood pest’ and seldom moved out of the corner from which he eyed the action.
Four people from John Quincy Adams arrived. After his colleagues turned up, Philip spent most of his time with them. Their little group settled at the far end of the dining room, within easy striking distance of the table.
Tim was introduced to Linda and Hank, Laura and Ted, the Monaghans, and a few other neighbors whose names he did not remember. When Philip attempted to reintroduce him to Omar Hillyard, the old man held up his hands and retreated deeper into his corner. ‘Neighborhood pest,’ Philip whispered. In the dining room, Tim shook the hands of Philip’s coworkers, Fred and Tupper and Chuck (the guidance counselor, the school secretary, and the administrative secretary) and Mr Battley, the principal, a man set apart from the others by the dignity of his office. Philip seemed perfectly comfortable with this group, despite his evident concern for Mr Battley’s ongoing comfort. Like Philip, his superior wore a slightly oversized suit, a white shirt, and a tie with a tie tack. Mr Battley’s rimless eyeglasses were identical to Philip’s. And like Philip, Fred, Tupper, and Chuck, Mr Battley quietly suggested that they owned a higher, nobler calling than the salesmen, factory foremen, clerks, and mechanics around them.
Almost always flanked by Jimbo Monaghan, Mark filtered through the little crowd, now and then stopping to say something or be spoken to. Men settled their hands on his shoulder, women pecked him on the cheek. Not for a moment did he seem at ease or even at home. What you saw when you looked at Mark was a young man who longed desperately to be elsewhere. He concealed it as well as he could, which is to say not very successfully. Tim was not sure how much of what was said to him Mark actually took in. His face had never quite lost the frozen, locked-up expression that had overtaken it in the Tranquillity Parlor. He nodded, now and again offered his handsome smile, but behind these gestures he remained untouched and apart; remained also, Tim thought, under the sway of the amped-up energy, that inflammatory recklessness, which had made him leap up and spin around when he was alone on the sidewalk with his red-haired friend.
This was the quality that most made Tim hope that Philip would find it in himself to aid his son. He was afraid of what Mark might do if left to himself. The boy could not bear what he had seen, and without sensitive adult help, he would break under its fearful weight.
Spotting Mark for once standing by himself near the living room window, Tim pushed his way through the crowd and sidled next to him. ‘I think you should come to New York and stay with me for a week or so. Maybe in August?’
Mark’s pleasure at this suggestion gave him hope.
‘Sure, I’d love that. Did you say anything to Dad?’
‘I will later,’ Tim said, and went back across the room.
While being introduced to Philip’s principal, Tim glanced again at Mark, and saw him shrug away from a wet-eyed elderly couple and cut through the crowd toward Jimbo. Whispering vehemently, Mark nudged Jimbo toward the dining room.
‘I understand you’re a writer of some sort,’ said Mr Battley.
‘That’s right.’
Polite smile. ‘Who do you write for?’
‘Me, I guess.’
‘Ah.’ Mr Battley wrestled with this concept.
‘I write novels. Short stories, too, but novels, mostly.’
Mr Battley found that he had another question after all. ‘Has any of your stuff been published?’
‘All of it’s been published. Eight novels and two short-story collections.’
Now at least a fraction of the principal’s attention had been snagged.
‘Would I know any of your work?’
‘Of course not,’ Tim said. ‘You wouldn’t like it at all.’
Mr Battley’s mouth slid into an uneasy smile, and his eyes cut away toward his underlings. In a second he was gone. On the other side of the space he had occupied, Philip Underhill and Jackie Monaghan stood deep in conversation, their backs to their sons. The boys were a couple of feet closer to them than Tim, but even Tim could hear every word their fathers said.
‘Wasn’t Nancy related to this weird guy who used to live around here? Somebody said something about it once, I don’t remember who.’
‘Should have kept his mouth shut, whoever he was,’ Philip said.
‘A