The Funnies (4 page)

My eyes adjusted. The room we had entered was much like a small collegiate lecture hall, with seats—bleachers, really, padded with red upholstery—arranged in concentric semicircles around a curtained proscenium. Canned organ music trickled out over the crowd. I looked around quickly to make sure I had actually come to the right place, and saw Bitty holding hands with a stout man I'd never seen before. Mike, I figured. She noticed me and managed a brave smile through the sheen of tears and sweat that had control of her face, and I smiled back. The froggish Mike smiled at me, a frog's smile, wide and anthropomorphic. I nodded at Mike. Mike nodded back. Finally, fed up, I looked away.

Here came my mother, apparently out of Rose's hands, cruising through the milling mourners with her walker like an arctic icebreaker. My heart pitched, and I went to her.

“Mom?” I held out my arms. “It's me, Tim.”

Her eyes widened and she veered off to the left, knocking her walker into the leg of the gristly man I hadn't recognized earlier. “Out of the way!” she barked. He turned to me and, with a look that indicated a long and complex acquaintance, raised his eyebrows, as if to say: What are you gonna do with ‘em?

I caught up with my mother and took her arm. It was thin and muscled, like a distance runner's. “Mom!”

She turned on me. “Where's my son!” she said. Her eyes were clear and blue as marbles. She had turned sixty-eight this year and looked, with her brilliant white head of curly hair, about a dozen years older. For a moment I saw Rose in her and recoiled in surprise.

“It's Tim,” I said. “It's your son Tim.”

She stared at me and her gaze softened. “Oh, Timmy,” she said, and let me hold her a moment. She had never called me that in her life. That had been my father's name, invented for the convenience of the strip: Lindy, Bobby, Timmy, Bitty.

“Let me get you settled, Mom.”

“Well, all right,” she said. I led her to the front bleacher and moved her walker into the aisle, close enough so that she could reach it. In a second Rose strode in, her rabid eyes darting.

“Oh, Jesus Christ, Mom,” she said, a little too loudly for the small room.

“This man was helping me sit down.” She said this smugly, as if Rose had been found wanting in her duties. Rose pouted.

Andrew walked in and, smiling tactfully, put his arm on Rose's back. “Hello, Tim.”

“Andrew,” I said, shaking his hand. I wanted him to like me, and so tried to return the smile. It was a strain. Why all these smiles, more than I'd ever been given, at such a grim occasion? I had returned so many today, I didn't know if I could take another.

“You all sit,” my mother said. “Take a load off those dogs.”

“You bet,” Andrew said, and plopped down next to her. Rose took her seat with a sigh. The rest of the front row, I noticed, was filled with townspeople. The room had the unlikely air of a puppet show or company picnic, the lame static electricity that preceded any third-rate entertainment. It occurred to me that this was probably how Riverbank felt about my father in general: not the local attraction they wished they had, but all they had nonetheless.

I climbed up the carpeted aisle and found an empty place right under an air conditioning vent. The muted gurgle of voices surrounded me, and I closed my eyes and considered that I felt the same way as Riverbank. He wasn't the father I wished I had, but all I had nonetheless. At least that's what I pretended, when during college I asserted my independence from the Family Funnies and its author both: what could have been easier than opposing something so wholesome and unironic as the strip, someone so wrapped up in his invented innocence as my father? What could have come more naturally than a thankless and inconvenient career as an installation artist, to the spurned middle child of a well-heeled alcoholic cartoonist?

So why, then, having done these things, did I feel like such a shit? My siblings had taken on the responsibilities of marriage and independence, risen above their petty resentments to become real people. Even Pierce, stuck as he was in the quagmire of his own head, was the true rebel of the family, torturing our father with his presence right up to the bitter end. Only I had proved myself weak and shallow, just like Dad.

Things grew quieter as more people found their seats, and when I opened my eyes I found myself seated next to the plump woman who had wept at the church. She had a round, pretty face and thick-framed glasses too conservative to be hip and too ugly to come off as dignified. They were the glasses of a woman twice her age. I got nervous.

“You're Tim,” she informed me, sticking out a doughy hand.

I took it. “Yes.”

“I'm Susan Caletti. I was your dad's editor.”

“Really?” I said. “I thought what's-his-name was his editor, Burn. The syndicate guy.”

“Dead,” she said flatly, then turned red. “Sorry. His brother took over the syndicate and didn't want to deal with any actual cartoonists. He farmed them out to his underlings. I got your dad. Like, a year and a half ago.”

“Ah.”

“He was an interesting man.”

“Thank you for not saying he was great.”

She reddened again. “Oh. Well.” She coughed. “Well, hey, I'll just leave you to your thoughts, okay? But we'll have to talk later.” I couldn't for the life of me think of anything we would need to say to one another later, but I bit the bullet and composed another polite smile.

By this time, everyone who was coming seemed already to be in, and the dolled-up greaser who had been standing outside the door quietly closed it. There were no windows in the room; the only light emanated from recessed bulbs in rows on the ceiling. As if on cue, these lights dimmed, and simultaneously the curtains hummed open on mechanized runners, revealing my father's casket, alone on stage like a brooding soliloquist. It was resting on some sort of conveyor, and beyond it, two little doors were visible, outlined by a red glow. It took several seconds for everyone to process all this, and as they did a stunned hush fell over the room. We were going to watch him tumble into the fire?

Apparently we were. Beside me, my father's editor gasped. Fresh sobs broke out in the crowd.

And then, with appalling suddenness, the doors clanged open and the conveyor kicked into action, emitting a ghastly throb that drowned out the organ music. I felt a breath of hot air gust past me. Somebody screamed. The conveyor was slow, but the casket had little distance to cover, and in seconds was sliding under gravity's pull down a little incline toward the inferno. The back end tipped up, like the prow of a sinking ship, and like that, it was gone.

Wait!
I wanted to yell, but it was too late. The room was in the grip of an appalling silence. It dawned on me that I never got a chance to look at the old man. The doors swung shut.

Nothing happened for a moment, then the curtains drew themselves closed. For a moment the music swelled to an ear-splitting level, then was quickly corrected. I saw my brother Bobby sitting with his family, his hands on his knees, his eyes implacably aglow, the way the Vikings must have looked when they pushed their dead out to sea. Down in front, the gristly man stood up to leave, and throughout the room other people started to do the same.

* * *

Back in the lobby I picked up a pamphlet from a discreet oaken stand and read through it out in the sun. There were several lurid photos, a lot of gibberish about Final Journeys and Eternal Peace, and at the end, a short paragraph devoted, I supposed, to the inevitable macabre tech-heads. It described the “Assumption System,” its “state-of-the-art Interactive Theater of Rest,” the team of compassionate mortuary and clerical experts who had striven for maximum numinous effect while retaining simplicity and grace. I thought there was little about what I had seen that could be described as simple or graceful. At the bottom of the last page, just above the address and phone, I noticed an italicized message:
Come in for a free demonstration
.

They actually fired up the incinerator for any yokel who strolled in? I pictured Bobby sitting alone in the bleachers, his face slack and calculating, watching the curtains part and the iron doors yawn open into the flames.

* * *

Later, at the house, while everyone was enjoying wake food, I went into my father's bedroom, shut the door behind me and called Amanda. She answered on the first ring.

“Yeah?”

“Hey,” I said.

“How are you?”

“So-so.” I told her about the crematorium, leaving out the part about my self-censuring revelations. She cooed her amazement and sympathy. “I have some unfortunate news,” I said.

“Okay.”

“The car croaked. Bobby thinks it threw a rod. There's a mechanic in Washington Crossing looking it over.”

“My brother's Porsche threw a rod once.”

“No kidding.”

“Well, whatever,” she said. “How are the sibs?”

“Fine.” It was a very easy conversation, like all of ours were. One of us said something and the other said something. It was comforting; we could have done it all day.

“Is there any way you can get home tonight?” she said finally.

“It doesn't look that way.”

“I wish you would. Can you get a ride or something?”

“I should be with my family,” I said. I felt the guilty titillation of the lie in the back of my throat. “For a day or two, anyway.”

“Yeah, okay,” she said. Everything was okay with Amanda, or so she said. It wasn't really, though: a lie for a lie.

“So I guess I should go.”

“Sure.”

“Goodnight,” I said, though it was not yet two in the afternoon. “I love you.”

Afterward, I sat on the bed, smelling the cigar-soaked air. Before me was my father's bureau. His wallet was still sitting there, a handful of change, his wristwatch. I pulled the top drawer open. Briefs. He was the only man in the family who wore them. Pair after pair of black socks. I took a pair out, took my own shoes and socks off, put his socks on. I dug in the back of the drawer for the shoe polish I knew was there. I polished my shoes until the antifreeze marks were gone. Then I put the shoes back on, put away the polish, put on his watch and took the money—about fifty bucks—out of his wallet. I looked at myself in the tiny hand mirror he had stashed in his undershirt drawer, then pocketed that, too. I felt like I was ten years old.

The crowd outside was thick and noisy and filled with people I didn't want to see, let alone receive condolences from. Buffet tables had been set up and covered with paper, and Nancy flitted clumsily from table to table like a bumblebee, unwrapping plates and bowls and straightening up after those who had helped themselves messily. It was a losing battle. I looked at my wrist and realized I was wearing both watches, mine and my father's, so I took mine off and dropped it into my jacket pocket. It was mid-afternoon. I hadn't eaten since nine.

I wasn't three feet past the door when Salvatore Francobolli, the mayor of Riverbank, grabbed my arm in the sweet spot just above the elbow. He was a high-strung, red-faced fireplug of a man with wild tufts of gray hair above his ears, and none on top. “Timmy,” he said. He had always called us by our Family Funnies names, even once we had grown up. “Can't tell you how sorry I am. Riverbank has lost a great man.”

I winced. “Good of you to say so.”

“So, we're going to go ahead with FunnyFest. Early this morning I called an emergency meeting with the town council. We decided that this, of all years, was the year to go all out. Sort of a public coping, if you will. With our grief.” He was still holding tight to my arm. With his free hand, he clutched a half-eaten blob of fried dough.

I flexed my fingers, trying to recover my circulation. “Sounds good,” I said.

“You'll be here, I trust? We'd like to get the whole Mix clan involved.”

“That'd be quite a feat.”

“So you're coming!”

“I don't think so. When is it?”

“Couple weeks.”

I shook my head. “I'll be back in Philadelphia.”

Mayor Francobolli grinned in a conspiratorial way. “Ah, I think you'll reconsider, Timmy, I do. Think about your responsibility to Riverbank.” He released my arm and the blood needled slowly back into it. “People are counting on you.”

“I doubt that,” I said.

He laughed, high and long. Heads turned. “You kill me, Timmy,” he said.

FunnyFest started about ten years ago, once news of my father's fame reached our town. It began as a little marketing diversion dreamt up by somebody at the syndicate: convince the town to have a summer fair, complete with food stands, dunking booths, etc., and have Carl Mix show up and draw pictures for a buck a pop. The syndicate would throw in some cash, and would take a cut, as usual, of the FF product pushed over the course of the day.

But Francobolli, whose only real official function as mayor was cannonballing into the Delaware during the then-already-defunct RiverFest, sunk his hooks into FunnyFest as if to save his life. He advertised all over the state, in newspapers and on telephone poles, on television and the sides of buses. And when the day finally came, it was a blowout: thousands of people, many times the population of Riverbank, filled every parking space from Lambertville to Titusville, bought every ice cream sandwich, drank every drop of iced tea, whisked away every piece of FF merchandise within ten miles of my father's studio. Francobolli was reelected by an unusually wide margin. The festival had been an annual tradition ever since: the fourth weekend in July, every July.

Oddly, FunnyFest seemed to be my father's great joy in life, despite the fact that, as he grew older, he grew to hate more and more people with greater and greater intensity. Generally he spoke to nobody in town except during FunnyFest, when he became glib and effusive, shaking hands and patting shoulders like a politico. This annual appearance ensured, I suppose, that he would continue to be regarded as a charming eccentric in Riverbank, rather than the arrogant bastard people probably suspected he was.