The Learners: A Novel (No Series) (10 page)

No. No no no no no. A traffic accident. Jesus. She
did
get the story wrong.

Just not wrong enough.

This was impossible. There was no sign, none. I would have picked it up, I would have, I would have. I replayed our lunch together, over and over. There was melancholy, yes, but that was standard for her. She promised she would see me again. You don’t say you’re going to see someone again soon, you don’t
promise
it, and then do this. It’s not right it’s not right.

Not if I see you first.

The floor. It was slowly rising, taking up my legs, my body, my arms, my head. My useless brain. Take me up. Take it all. My unused ten percent.

I’d never been to a funeral before. Well, once. For Grandma, the only living grandparent I’d ever known—Dad’s mom, widowed for decades—a sweet and generous woman who looked like an older version of Dad in a wig. Died in her sleep at eighty-five. I was fourteen. The service was, naturally, a serious, head-bowed affair; but it wasn’t as if everyone was wailing like banshees. The talk was a veritable orgy of reassurance.
She lived a good, long life. What a wonderful family she left. Gone to her reward. She’s with Iden again, God bless. Do you have a map to the reception?
During the homily, my peripheral vision caught Dad’s eyes discreetly leaking, his hands slowly wrestling each other to a draw. I stared straight ahead at the cross of lilies. Afterward, at the Young Republican’s Club, there was punch and cookies. And stingers.

But I suspected this funeral, in Guilford, was going to be something else entirely. I had no idea.

After a short struggle with myself over whether or not to go, I then gave in: I just had to. It was my last chance to…to what? See her? No. Too late. But—and I know how this sounds—it would be…Oh God…the last thing we’d ever do together.

On Saturday morning I stepped with no little uncertainty from the bus onto the sidewalk adjoining the Guilford green, a large expanse of lawn and trees which could have been a life-size version of a New England town for a Lionel train set. A wilting August day, already 85 in the shade, and my navy wool suit clung to me like moss. I took a deep lungful of the wet velvet air, as the cicadas in the massive corridors of elms swelled it thick with their modulated, invisible electricity.

And then I noticed the cars. Lincolns, Cadillacs, Studebakers, a Packard, a Mercury, a smart little MGA, a Corvette convertible. All lining the green and dotted with white mums, like ivory buttons on blazer sleeves. A sick feeling bloomed in me. This is real. This is really happening. These cars are here and they have flowers taped onto them because Himillsy is dead. I gulped another heavy breath, caught my balance.

Formally dressed couples struggled out of identical Ford woody station wagons, slowly, from either the weight of the occasion or the heat or both. Sunglasses and ebony wing tips, black linen shifts, pillbox hats with veils, elbow gloves, obsidian patent leather purses the size and shape of bricks suspended from spaghetti straps. I joined their wordless caravan, trying to convince myself I belonged among them. Absurd. The cozy Grover’s Corners perfection of the buildings surrounding the park—Dowden’s Drugstore, Murphy’s Hardware, Noah’s Diner—made me want to stop and throw rocks at them. It wasn’t right for the world to go about its business.

Christ Episcopal Church, a granite monolith, stood out in defiance against the pristine clapboard rectitude of its neighbors. Twin doors the color of fresh blood flanked its stony facade, a block carved with the date 1838. Inside, it was marginally cooler, with four ceiling fans going like jet propellers as the sunlight ricocheted off the custard stucco walls and Pachelbel’s endless
Canon
oozed in and out of the organ pipes mounted to the left of the lectern. The place was jammed but few had taken their seats. Instead, a long line snaked all the way back to the vestibule in the front, leading up the left side aisle to the altar.

To the casket.

I got in back of a middle-aged woman in black hose with heels to match and scanned the crowd. So, who were all these people, the people in Himillsy’s life? Well, unlike the world of Spear, Rakoff & Ware, this really
was
the cast of
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
. Except today the gray had faded to black. But otherwise here they were: the manor-born friends and neighbors Gregory Peck was coming home to, all those hours on the train. I didn’t belong here—the only person I knew was, for Chrissakes, the deceased.

So I dredged up what I did know—things about Himillsy that they couldn’t have: Did they know about Baby Laveen, the realistic baby doll she secretly carried around with her to help her cope with the death of her infant brother De Vigny? Did they know she wanted to open a combination barbershop and restaurant called Snippets, just so she could watch the customers try to pick the stray bits of hair out of their teeth? That she wanted to create a TV show called
People Are Awful
, in which ordinary contestants would earn cash and prizes by doing things like kicking the crutches out from underneath toddlers with polio? Or that she had plans to make a movie short of a man being mercilessly pelted with two stiletto-heeled pumps and call it
These Shoes Are Killing Me
? The strange fruits of her imagination, confided during the dark hours of our school days—they gave me entree, entitlement that this entire throng, with its perfect teeth and padlocked jaws, did not have.

And then, as the line inched further, I realized…

No. It couldn’t be. My imagination playing cruel tricks in the suffocating heat. The casket was…open.

No. Unthinkable.

And I could just make out—there she lay, hands crossed over her chest. Oh. Oh. I snapped my head away, clamped my eyes shut.

How could they? Ghouls. Ghouls do this.

I can’t. I will bolt from the line, right now. Excuse myself, back out of the church, onto the street, and run, run and not stop until none of this existed.

Himillsy:
Not so fast, Happy. Old chum. You’re not going anywhere. You will wait patiently in line. You remember lines don’t you, from school? Registration, frat parties, lunch, graduation. This is just another one. And you will wait in it, like you always have.

For me. You have a promise to keep.

She was right. As ever. I was powerless to do anything other than her bidding. The queue inched forward. Dread. Sick dread. I kept my attention to the rear of the church, to the doors, to the plaque on the wall honoring the congregation’s World War II dead.

What on earth compels allegedly civilized people to do this, to desecrate not just bodies, but our memories? I can’t remember her this way, I can’t. Please someone, something, make this go away.

A dead body. The first I’d ever see. And it has to be you, Mills. This was not how it was supposed to go.

Endless, terrible minutes, drawing forward until I couldn’t avoid it anymore. The time had come. I was too close, there were people watching, I had to do the right thing, what was expected, I had to turn and look, look at—

And a burst of something like relief popped in my heart because, it…wasn’t her.

Surprise! Nobody home! GOTCHA!!

It was what she’d left behind. So obvious. Mind you—the utter inhumanity of it, the ghastliness of the display was still appalling, but at least it wasn’t
her
. Yes, her pixie features, the elegant fingers tapered pencil-thin, her aura of elfin beauty—they lingered like the glow of a candlewick after you blow the flame out. But Himillsy—
my
Himillsy—was long gone. This…remnant, it was not the person I knew. She would have agreed.

And can you believe this dress? I wouldn’t be caught
dead
in this thing!

Didn’t they know her? Didn’t her own family even know anything about her? Mills, you of all people deserved better than this. Is that why you did it? Is that why you checked out, because this was the alternative?

The cliché is that dead people look like they’re sleeping. They don’t. That’s a lie. Sleeping people vibrate despite themselves, with the ever-present promise of reanimation. Their vulnerability is tender, and fills you with the need to keep them safe. The dead just look exactly that. And they don’t make you want to protect them. They make you want to take them out like the trash. Bury them. Or burn them—anything to return them to the earth, to get them out of your sight—because until you do it’s that much less possible to remember they were ever alive.

Then, next to me to my right—a familiar voice, fermented by time, eerily sliced the air: “Isn’t she beautiful? She’s so beautiful…”

I turned, froze. Couldn’t accept what I was seeing: Himillsy, at age fifty, bending over her twenty-five-year-old corpse. “So
beautiful
…”

Her mother. She had to be, the resemblance was supernatural. Except that she was Himillsy as Doris Day. In black taffeta. There was a hostess-in-fourthgear quality to her, even in these horrific circumstances—a desperation for proper social procedure and ceremony—so unlike her daughter. “Come, come see her,” she beckoned, her face folded in perfect grief as she reeled in the arm of a reluctant skinny blonde girl in a licorice linen shift. It was then that I looked back at the body. Mills was right: they’d slid her husk into a white, frilly, lacey number she would have described as a giant Victorian sneeze. The idea that that’s what she’d be wearing for the rest of what amounts to eternity—she, who was style itself—was beyond contemplation.

Paying respect. This, all of this, was the opposite of anything like that. The real Himillsy would spring bolt upright, this very instant—not to bring any measure of assurance to the mourners, but to give them all a heart attack. Oh, if only.

I staggered away to the rear of the church and climbed the steps to the balcony, lost in repulsion and misery. I wanted to be as far away from it as possible. After another twenty minutes, with a mercy too long in the coming to ever redeem those responsible, the coffin lid was closed.

“All rise.”

The rector read the prayer, then we recited the twenty-third Psalm, in unison. Like the docile, idiot lambs we were.

A hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” and then it was time for what the program listed as “Reflections.” There was only one name: L
EVIN
D
ODD.
A young man got up and made his way hesitantly to the lectern.

Hmm. A cousin?

He was tall, slight. Early twenties, I’d say. My age. Delicate but sturdy, you could tell. He started, uneasily. “My sister, once made me promise,”

Sister. Levin, her brother, Levin. As in…Laveen? Impossible. Himillsy had told me he’d died. As an infant.

“—promise, she made me promise that—”

She’d said that his name was De Vigny, that she was too young to pronounce it correctly, that her father had given her a plastic replica of him as a solace. Baby Laveen. All a lie?

“—that if I was to ever, ever speak at her…” he popped an intake of breath, the sound of a bicycle tire giving out, “at her, fu…” He couldn’t, not that word.

“That I’d. That she. She wanted me to say…this.”

He swallowed air, bracing himself. He was going to do this for her. No matter what. His eyes went sky-ward as he tried to clear his throat.