Ariel

Two

Early on the morning of Caleb’s funeral, Roberta slipped out of the house and went for a walk by herself. She had no conscious destination in mind but wandered around as she had often done on her walks with Caleb, heading up one street and down the next. She was not surprised, though, to find herself at the Battery. Her feet had often led there in the past, and she realized now that she had been on her way to the Battery from the moment she left the house, realized in fact that she was looking for the little old black woman with whom she’d talked of ghosts on the last day of Caleb’s life.

She didn’t find the old woman. There were two men and a woman fishing, a handful of people sitting with newspapers, and one bum stretched full length on a bench, his overcoat serving him as a blanket, his shoes tucked under his head for a pillow. Over to her left, in the shade of an equestrian statue, two young mothers were engaged in conversation. One moved her carriage gently back and forth as she talked. The other had a child in a stroller. Roberta took in the scene at a glance and at once averted her eyes. She was careful not to look in their direction again.

She stayed in the park long enough to smoke a cigarette.

Then with an effort she got to her feet and began walking slowly back to the house.

The funeral service was held that afternoon at the Whittecombe Mortuary, a rambling one-story building of white stucco located on Edgeworth Road a mile north of the city line. The split-level house where the Jardells had lived for over ten years was within walking distance of the funeral parlor. Roberta had attended a number of funerals at Whittecombe’s over the years, and when her mother had died seven years previously Whittecombe’s had been the logical choice. Now, although it was no longer particularly convenient, it was the first place David had thought of.

At the time she had not objected. If there had to be a funeral it hardly mattered to her where it was held. Now, sitting in the first row, with David on her left and Ariel on her right, Roberta regretted the choice. Ever since they’d moved downtown she’d disliked even driving through their old neighborhood, and now, returning to it for this particular occasion, she felt as though Caleb’s death was some bizarre punishment for their having moved in the first place.

Roberta sat stiffly, her spine perpendicular, her hands in her lap. People drifted up to offer words of sympathy. She would look at each person in turn but her eyes refused to focus on the faces in front of her, even as her ears were unable to make sense of the words they took in. So sorry for your troubles crib death is such a mystery even in this day and age have our sympathy want to say how much certainly do hope tragedy good die young such a shame—

Once she turned, thinking she’d spotted the old black woman out of the corner of her eye. But she’d only seen one of Horace Whittecombe’s bloodless little assistants scurrying around.

She managed now and then to nod to the people who offered their sympathy, managed to return a bit of pressure to the hands that pressed her hand. From time to time she would force herself to look beyond the faces to the tiny bronze casket. Miniaturization, she realized, transformed an ordinary casket into something curiously obscene.

At least it was closed. But it had been open earlier and she had looked inside it. Before the others had begun to arrive, when there were just she and David and Ariel, Horace Whittecombe himself had slithered across the room to ask if they would care to view the remains.

What a word—

David had not wanted her to go for that final look. As if it would be too much for her. As if she were not strong enough to bear it.

As if she could bear not to look.

And so they had all viewed the body, all three of them. David had held her and supported her while she stared down at Caleb’s waxen face. She thought of other corpses she had viewed. Her father, who’d died in a car crash when Roberta was not much more than Ariel’s age; the steering wheel had crushed his chest but the accident had left his face unmarked. Her mother, gaunt and ravaged by disease before death took her. David’s father. Aunts, uncles, grandparents. A handful of others.

For all the pride morticians took in their cosmetic skills, she had never seen a corpse that had looked remotely alive. At best the dead looked dead; more often, they looked as though they had never been alive in the first place. They might have been window dummies.

But Caleb looked like a doll, like a child’s doll. A wax head, a little body of stuffed rags swaddled now in a blue blanket.

She had stared dry-eyed at him for as long as she could bear. Then she had turned and ordered the casket closed.

Now she glanced down at her hands. They lay in her lap like pieces of wax fruit on a plate. She could almost see them aging before her eyes, the skin drying and shrinking on the bone, the knuckles swelling with arthritis. Her own mother had first shown her age in her hands, and Roberta took after her mother, looked like her, shared her tastes and inclinations. Her mother’s hands had grown old long before the rest of her. The woman had retained a youthful face long after she’d had an old woman’s hands, and then in a rush the rest of her had caught up with her hands. She’d had lung cancer and it reached metastasis before they found it, and then the decline had been abrupt and dramatic.

Roberta looked at her own hands and thought of her mother and her mother’s death and wanted a cigarette. Her mouth was dry and her hands and feet were chilled and she wanted a cigarette badly, wanted a drink of water, wanted to use the toilet. But nothing was worth the trouble, nothing was all that urgent, and she remained in her seat, staring dully ahead.

So many people offering their sympathy! True, she had lived in Charleston all her life, but she’d been an only child and David had no family here, and most of the friends of her youth had drifted away. While she and David had been socially active earlier in their marriage, they had become less so even while they still lived in the suburbs, and what social life remained had shrunk considerably since the move to the city. They had neither made new friends nor kept the old ones, and yet people kept coming, murmuring unintelligible words, patting her wax-fruit hands.

“Sorry for your trouble, Mrs. Jardell. I’m Curt Rowan, a business friend of your husband’s.”

She nodded, let her hand touch his.

“Mrs. Jardell? I’m Ariel’s teacher, Claire Tashman. I’m so sorry.”

“Roberta, what a terrible thing. I’m so deeply sorry, dear.”

“I’m sorry for your trouble, Mrs. Jardell. I’m Erskine Wold, I’m Ariel’s friend.”

What an odd-looking little boy, she thought, certain she’d never seen him before. Trust Ariel to choose an odd child for a friend. Birds of a feather—

“Oh, Roberta, you poor darling!” An ancient friend of her mother’s, her face as wrinkled as a monkey’s, her name impossible to recall. Roberta had not seen her since her mother’s funeral. An embrace, a powdered cheek to be kissed, and then the woman moved off and a man took her place.

She sensed his presence before she raised her eyes and saw him. She had had fleeting thoughts of him during the past two days but had refused to allow herself to entertain these thoughts.

Now her eyes took him in and she kept a tight hold on herself, not letting herself react visibly to the sight of him. Of course he had come — why shouldn’t he? He’d been her friend for years, hers and David’s, and he lived just a few blocks from Whittecombe’s. It was a fine fall day, cloudless and cool. Perhaps he’d walked over, cutting a dashing figure in his pinstripe navy suit, striding athletically through the quiet suburban streets, his arms swinging at his sides.

Jeff Channing.

Did he know whom they were burying this lovely afternoon? Did he know who it was in the little brassbound casket?

She wanted to tell him. She wanted to tell them all. She wanted to lift the lid of the obscene little coffin and cry out at the top of her lungs, telling Jeff Channing to take a first and last look at his son.

But all she did was nod, and pretend to have heard whatever he might have said, and murmur something unintelligible in evident response. He hesitated only a moment before moving on to express his sympathy to David. He had not moved to take her hand, nor did she offer it.

She looked down at her hand, lying so still in her lap. Soon, she thought. Soon it would begin to show its age.

Ariel wished they would start it already. All of these people were driving her crazy. She didn’t know who most of them were and she didn’t really want to know, but instead of just leaving her alone they had to give their names.

Not the man who’d just passed, though. He hadn’t called her by name nor had he supplied his own, and the funny thing was that she was pretty sure she recognized him. She’d seen him before, though not recently.

Maybe it was just that he had the kind of blank good looks you saw in magazine ads and on television. He could have been the master of ceremonies on the Dating Game. Maybe he was working up a new game show. The Funeral Game — pick the right coffin and win an all-expense paid trip for two to Forest Lawn Cemetery.

At least he hadn’t bugged her. So many of them seemed to feel a need to drop some special message on her. One grayhaired woman with huge nostrils had asked her if she would miss her baby brother. That was about the most disgusting number anyone had done so far, but a lot of people had told her that she would have to be very brave and help her mother, and she felt like asking the next moron who came up with that line just what good her bravery would do Roberta.

Because it was pretty obvious that Roberta didn’t give the northern half of a southbound rat whether she was brave or terrified or anything else. The only thing she could do that would make Roberta feel better would be to change places with Caleb. If it was Ariel in the little brass box instead of poor old Caleb then Roberta would jump up and down and turn handsprings.

Not that she’d fit. She was twelve, just two months short of thirteen, and although she was not particularly tall for her age she was still far too large to squeeze into Caleb’s coffin. She had a sudden mental picture of herself jammed into it, legs doubled up and all scrunched together to fit, and old Roberta jumping maniacally up and down on the lid in an effort to close it.

The image struck her as hysterical and she had to fight the impulse to giggle. That, she knew, would just about tear it. Roberta hated her as it was, hated her for being adopted, hated her for being alive, and hated her for being there, and all it would take was one tiny little giggle and Roberta would just about strangle her. Besides, even if Roberta didn’t notice, even if nobody happened to notice, the last thing she wanted was to sit around breaking herself up at Caleb’s funeral.

What she really wanted to do was cry. But she couldn’t do that either. She had cried all of yesterday and most of the day before, and she would almost certainly do some more crying, probably that night. But she had to be alone to cry. She just wouldn’t cry in front of anybody.

The parade finally ended when a pair of ushers moved in and began steering people toward their seats. The people who worked in funeral parlors, Ariel decided, had to be about the grimmest people in the world. There was old Mr. Whittecombe, who owned the place, and who looked as though he had died years ago and had been very skillfully embalmed; they’d done such a perfect job on him that he could still walk and talk, but if you watched closely and listened carefully it became obvious that he was actually dead. Then there were his two sons, younger versions of their father, and there were three or four other young men who hovered around, and they all wore the same black suits and had the same oily voices and narrow-shouldered bodies and they were all spooky. Which only figured, because you had to be pretty spooky to decide to do things like this for a living.

And you had to be able to glide around like an efficient zombie, which wasn’t likely to be a million laughs. And, speaking of laughs, you could absolutely never laugh. But that probably wasn’t a problem for these men because they didn’t look as though anything had ever struck them as funny.

The minister mounted the steps and took his position at the lectern a few steps to the right of Caleb’s casket. Ariel had met him earlier that day but didn’t remember his name. He wasn’t their minister because they didn’t have one — they didn’t attend church — but David had evidently dredged him up somewhere. Maybe old Whittecombe found you a minister if you weren’t able to come up with one of your own. Maybe it was all part of a package deal.

The minister started talking but she decided not to listen to him. It was easy enough to tune out things you didn’t want to hear. She’d had plenty of practice over the years not listening to Roberta, and had reached a point where she could ignore just about anybody. And it didn’t seem likely that the minister would say anything sensational. What could he talk about, anyway? What a great life Caleb had had and all the good things he’d done in it? She figured he would just come up with the standard crap about how God’s ways are mysterious, and that wasn’t anything she wanted to hear.

She wasn’t sure about God. Some days she believed in Him and other days she didn’t. Today she didn’t, but not because Caleb had died. That could just as easily make her believe there had to be a God, because nothing that rotten could happen just by accident. A little baby goes to sleep at night and doesn’t wake up in the morning — well, that convinced you either that there was a God or that there wasn’t, depending which way your ears were pointed that particular day.

She looked at the minister, a tall man with very prominent eyebrows and dark blond hair that had gone gray at the temples. He had the same kind of unreal good looks as the man who could have been planning to emcee the Funeral Game. Her eyes moved from the minister to the coffin, and then she closed her eyes and tried to think of something else to think about.

She had never been to a funeral before. She’d been about five when her grandmother died and they’d left her at home with a baby sitter. Her regular sitter couldn’t come that day, probably because the funeral took place during school hours, and the sitter who showed up was a plump bubbly woman with a hearty laugh who told great stories and kept her occupied nonstop from her parents’ departure to their return several hours later. The woman had been a far more grandmotherly type than the woman they buried that day, whom Ariel now recalled as having always been ill, lying in bed first in a sick-smelling bedroom and later in an equally unwholesome hospital room.

Though this was her first funeral, Ariel had known what to expect. You saw enough of them on television. But she had not known what the experience would feel like. And she had had no idea that she would have to go stand next to the coffin and look at Caleb lying there.

Not that she had been forced to look. In fact they hadn’t seemed to want her to look, but it didn’t matter what they wanted. If you were supposed to go and look, then that was what she was going to do.

So she had stood there, just able to gaze over the side of the coffin, and it was the strangest feeling. It was like standing at the side of his crib and looking through the bars at him while he slept. Except that he wouldn’t wake up. He wouldn’t coo and make his giggle sounds, and he wouldn’t raise his feet for her to play with them and make him laugh, and he wouldn’t go ga-ga looking at his fish mobile. He wouldn’t do any of those things, not ever again, but here she was looking down at him, and it was, well, weird.

Speaking of weird, she was surprised that Erskine had come. She had only met him when school started and she really didn’t know him at all. They were in two classes together, arithmetic and social studies, and they would nod at each other when they passed in the halls, but that was the extent of it. Nobody else had come from her new school except for her homeroom teacher, Miss Tashman, and no one at all had come from her old school, and that was about what she had expected. She didn’t really have any friends.

Maybe Erskine just happened to be a nut about funerals. It almost figured that he would be. He was certainly creepy enough. He was short, five or six inches shorter than she was, and he was plump. Not plump all over but just in the stomach and chest. His arms and legs were quite thin, and he had very small hands and feet. His eyes were blue and looked larger than life because he wore glasses like the bottoms of Coke bottles that magnified his eyes so they looked enormous, making Erskine look something like a Martian in the process.

His complexion, she thought, was even paler than her own, so pale it looked unhealthy. And he was almost as well-coordinated as a spastic, unable to walk through the halls without dropping at least half of what he was carrying. Sometimes he bumped into people. Sometimes he caromed off walls. Sometimes he tripped over his own feet. And his voice was high in pitch, and he tried to conceal this by talking down at the very bottom of his throat, which made him sound either like a girl trying to imitate a boy or a sparrow trying to imitate a bullfrog.

Weird.

So maybe he never misses a funeral, she thought. Which would figure. Or maybe he likes me, which would also figure, because I’m almost as unusual looking as he is. Erskine Wold and Ariel Jardell, and how’s that for a corner on the weirdness market, ladies and gentlemen?

Still, it was nice of him to come.

Jeffrey Channing sat alone in the last row, where he paid no more attention than Ariel to the words the minister was saying. The room was little more than half full, and Jeff was the only person seated in any of the last five rows on either side of the center aisle. This physical gap between himself and the others intensified a feeling of detachment that had been strong to begin with.

He was thinking about crib death.

He’d spent most of the morning reading about it, first in the main public library downtown, then at the medical school library at Calhoun and Barre, where articles in pediatric journals referred to it as SIDS, the acronym representing Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Which, it seemed to him, just accented how little was known about crib death.

Perfectly healthy babies went to sleep and didn’t wake up, and no one seemed to know why. There were theories, he had learned, but they came and went with the seasons. One article he’d read suggested that SIDS might be some form of anaphylactic shock, an extreme allergic reaction of the sort that gave some individuals fatal reactions to a bee sting or a shot of penicillin. Another writer argued that the syndrome was far more common in bottle-fed babies, and reasoned that it was caused by a constitutional inability to digest the larger protein molecules in cow’s milk. Yet another authority explained the phenomenon in terms of the failure of the body’s autoimmune system. Jeff knew that the autoimmune system was a factor in some patients’ rejection of transplanted organs, but that was about all he did know about it, and he couldn’t understand how it might relate to the death of Caleb Oliver Jardell.

Lord, what a handle for an infant. Caleb Oliver Jardell sounded like some grizzled captain of industry, some board chairman cloaked in respectability but with the soul of a pirate. Would the kid have grown into the name? Or would they have wound up calling him Butch or Sonny or Callie or something of the sort?

Hardly mattered. Caleb had been born and had died without Jeff’s ever having seen him. Nor would Jeff see him now. The casket was closed, and soon enough it would be in the ground.

Funny how he hadn’t even wanted to see the kid while he was alive. The affair with Roberta had ended, broken off abruptly at her insistence before he’d had any idea that she was pregnant. He’d been surprised by her decision, and more than a little hurt. At first he tried calling her, but her reaction made it very clear that she wanted him to keep his distance.

To hell with her, he’d decided, and he had put her out of his mind without further ado. First he’d taken his wife for a week’s vacation in Bermuda, attempting to reinvigorate their marriage while dealing with his guilt over the affair. The trip was a limited success, but on his return he found himself still smarting from Roberta’s rejection. He had promptly plunged into a series of brief affairs, using deliberately casual sex to cheapen whatever he and Roberta had had between them.

Then he’d found out that she was pregnant.

He had dealt with this reality by denying it. His first reaction to the discovery was the immediate assumption that she was carrying his child. David, after all, had never been capable of fathering a child. It was true that he did produce living spermatazoa, but Roberta had said that his sperm count was so low as to make his sterility a medical presumption. After several years of trying and extensive series of tests, they had adopted Ariel.

Now, more than a decade later, she was pregnant. She and David barely slept together. Jeff, on the other hand, was fiercely fertile, and they had made love frequently during the several months their affair had lasted.

They’d taken precautions, of course. This was something of a novelty for both of them; Roberta had had no need to employ birth control when she slept with her husband, and Jeff’s wife Elaine had had tubal ligation after the birth of her second daughter. So they’d used condoms, which had given their lovemaking a high school lovers’ lane element, and evidently one of the condoms had been unequal to its task.

Roberta had become pregnant with his child. And, on realizing as much, she had decided to terminate not the pregnancy but the relationship, returning to David and presumably convincing him that his sperm had improved with age. Which he no doubt was pleased not to question.

Then the denial mechanism had taken over. How did he know it was his child she was carrying? David might not have many sperm, but all it took was one. And a sperm count wasn’t necessarily fixed. It could increase or decrease over the years. And pregnancy after the adoption of a child was such a common phenomenon as to be almost a cliché. When it happened, you didn’t run to the window looking for a bright star in the East.

She was part of the past, he had decided. And the baby was probably her husband’s, and if not that didn’t make it Jeffs anyway, because who knew how many other clowns she’d been screwing over the months? He at least had used condoms. For all he knew she’d balled the entire Citadel football team, including the coach and the waterboys, and hadn’t even made them use Saran Wrap.

So the hell with her, and the hell with the kid, and good riddance to both of them.

When the child was born his denial faded. He recognized that Caleb’s sex was a factor. His own children were both girls, and although he loved them none the less for their gender, he would have liked a son as well. But Elaine had had a hard time with the second pregnancy and was determined to stop at two, and her tubal ligation was a fait accompli by the time Jeff learned about it. He’d been hurt by the way she’d made the decision all on her own, but it was her body, and these days women were making a lot of noise about their right to do as they wished with their own bodies, and maybe two children was enough. Maybe he was better suited to father daughters anyway, maybe he’d have been awkward with a son.

Then all at once he had a son, had him but didn’t have him. And of course Caleb was his son — how had he managed to make himself believe otherwise?

Was there a resemblance? His daughters both favored Elaine, although the younger one had her father’s eyes. Whom did Caleb resemble? Himself or Roberta?

Not David, he knew. Not a chance of that.

Ever since Caleb’s birth, Jeff had kept his distance from Roberta and the baby without putting them out of his mind. He entertained a variety of fantasies in which he eventually got together with his son. In one of them, David and Elaine both perished in some convenient fashion; Jeff liked the idea of their being copassengers on some airliner that might fly into the side of a handy mountain.

Then, after a suitable period of mourning, he and Roberta would court and eventually marry. She would be a mother to Debbie and Greta, and he would be to Caleb what he already was biologically, and Caleb would never know the real circumstances of his conception, and—

Other fantasies were somewhat more likely to be realized at some future date. He thought he might manage to get a look at Caleb sooner or later, if only to see for himself whether a resemblance existed. When Caleb was older, he might manage to meet the boy. Someday, when the boy was old enough to handle it, maybe they could have a few beers together and the truth could come out.

Anything was possible. Especially when you kept it a fantasy.

Not now, though. Not with Caleb dead.

Why had it happened?

One of the articles he’d read that morning discussed the psychological effect of crib death on the victims’ parents. Almost invariably, the mothers of those babies — and to a lesser extent the fathers as well — blamed themselves for what happened. Because there was no identifiable cause of death, because a seemingly healthy infant had died suddenly for no good reason, the parents assumed responsibility. Some viewed the baby’s death as punishment, just or unjust, for their own sins. Others had a less abstract view of guilt; they felt they must have neglected the baby, that they had cared for it inadequately, that there should have been something they could have done to prevent the tragedy. If only she had checked him during the night, a mother might berate herself. If only she had given him an extra blanket, or no blanket at all, or wakened him for his feeding, or let him sleep through it, or—

And what could he have done? Forced himself into the picture during Roberta’s pregnancy? Broken up her marriage and his own? Even if he’d made an effort, there was no reason to think she’d have accepted him. He’d been acceptable as a lover, but evidently she’d decided she preferred being married to David Jardell.

And suppose she’d come to him and told him of her pregnancy? Suppose she’d wanted to leave David and marry him? What would he have done then, if it were not fantasy anymore but a case of hard-edged reality?

Would he have divorced Elaine? Would he have been willing to give up custody of Debbie and Greta for the sake of a child as yet unborn? For that matter, would he have been that thrilled at the idea of marrying Roberta? She was an exciting bedmate and a stimulating companion, but how well would that kind of stimulation wear? She was sometimes brittle, she was acerbic, she was moody, she smoked too much — how quick would he have been to choose her over the comforting presence of Elaine?

And what about Ariel? He craned his neck, trying for a glimpse of her over the intervening rows. There was something odd about her, something faintly spooky, some intangible aura the kid gave off. That was the trouble with adoption, you never knew what you were getting, and if he had married Roberta, Ariel would almost certainly have been part of the package.

Pointless speculation. Caleb had been conceived and born and was now dead. Jeff had not seen him. And never would.

The damned finality of it—

It wasn’t fair.

Just as the minister was hitting his stride, a joke popped into Erskine’s mind. He couldn’t remember where he’d read it. Mad Magazine, probably. It was their kind of humor.

Question: How do you make a dead baby float?

Answer: Take one dead baby, two scoops of vanilla ice cream, a little chocolate syrup, some club soda—

He felt a whoop of laughter gathering itself within him and headed it off by launching a coughing fit. A woman seated just across the aisle turned to give him a dirty look, which didn’t astonish him. Adults generally gave you dirty looks.

One dead baby, two scoops of vanilla—

Classic.

He just wondered how soon it would be cool to try the joke on Ariel.

The minister was talking about the will of God. God’s will, he said, had three properties. It was good, it was acceptable, and it was perfect.

The three words kept echoing in David’s mind. Good, acceptable, perfect.

It was difficult to identify those properties in certain types of tragedy, like the death of an innocent infant. God’s ways were a mystery to us, the man went on, but our inability to grasp his plan for us did not mean the plan did not exist.

Good, acceptable, and perfect.

How, David wondered, could it be good for a baby like Caleb to die? Well, he could see an argument. As long as the human race had existed, infant mortality had been high. Only in recent years, with the advances in medical science and the development of immunization and antibiotics, had this pattern begun to change.

And wasn’t high infant mortality nature’s way of culling the weaker individuals? When you planted a vegetable garden, you always sowed more seed in the rows than you could allow to grow to maturity. The little seedlings would come up shoulder to shoulder, but in order to give them room to grow you had to thin them ruthlessly, leaving only the best and strongest plants.

Why shouldn’t Nature thin the crop of human seedlings?

And, with the original complement of infant diseases no longer as effective, why shouldn’t a phenomenon like crib death emerge, carrying off the weak and infirm quickly and painlessly while they slept. Surely it was a gentler thinning mechanism than whooping cough or diphtheria.

But why Caleb?

Well, perhaps there was an answer to that, too. Caleb was a child who should never have been born in the first place. They had been doing fine without him, he and Roberta and Ariel. Certainly there were imperfections in their life. His job, in the traffic department at Ashley-Cooper Home Products, had evolved into a comfortable rut; fortunately his ambition had eroded even as the possibilities for job advancement shrank. His salary was adequate, his position secure, his work pleasant and undemanding. It wasn’t the brilliant career he’d envisioned at twenty-one, but one’s attitudes changed as one’s life defined itself, and he was happy enough doing what he did.

Roberta’s life, too, had had its discontents. His inability to impregnate her had been hard for her to handle, but after a frustrating couple of years they’d adopted Ariel, and that had strengthened them as a family while giving Roberta the fulfillment of motherhood. And Ariel was an endlessly interesting child, and it was exciting for David to watch the gradual evolution of her unique personality.

Caleb had disturbed the balance. Ariel, an adopted child of unknown parentage, was equally the daughter of David and Roberta.

Caleb, on the other hand, was Roberta’s son.

The fact had never been discussed. He had known for some time that she was having an affair, had known it without consciously acknowledging that he knew it. But when she announced the miracle of her pregnancy he had immediately gone along with the fiction that it was indeed miraculous, that his sparse and sluggish sperm had managed an amazing increase in number and mobility, one of them actually charging through to the goal line, planting the flag on Iwo Jima.

He’d never really believed this for a moment. Nor did he think Roberta actually thought he was fooled.

When Caleb was born, David thought he might come to love the boy. He loved Ariel, wholly and without reservation, although he had not fathered her. Why shouldn’t he love Caleb, whom he had not fathered either, but who at least was the child of his wife? His first sight of the baby, through the thick glass window at the hospital, was quite lacking in emotion. But that didn’t necessarily mean anything. From what he’d heard, relatively few fathers were overcome with a rush of love at the first sight of their offspring.

Instead of love, what he grew to feel was resentment. Roberta was crazy about the kid, and there was no getting away from the fact that she favored him over Ariel. At first he told himself it was simple favoritism for the needier newborn, a natural maternal prejudice perhaps essential for survival. But he came to see that it was rather more than that. Roberta’s attitude toward Ariel underwent a definite change. She resented the girl as David resented Caleb.

Of course they never talked about any of this. The new house lent itself to their spending time apart. His study was the immensely comfortable masculine room he’d always yearned for, and it quickly became his habit to retire there after dinner with a book and a bottle. Sometimes Ariel would come in and sit on his lap. Sometimes he would spend hours by himself until it was time to go up to bed.

The brandy helped take the sharp edges off his feelings. He would drink slowly but steadily from the time dinner ended, and by the time he left the little room on the ground floor he was generally pretty tight. He held it well, though, and he clung to this fact whenever he found himself wondering whether he was drinking an unhealthy amount. He never showed the effects of the brandy, never threw up or staggered or passed out, and if he experienced a fairly rocky morning once in a while it rarely amounted to more than a cup of black coffee and a couple of aspirins could cure.

Once or twice he’d had memory lapses. More than once or twice, if you counted the short ones. He’d wake up in the morning with no clear recollection of leaving his study. But obviously he’d been all right. He’d made it up the stairs and he’d wake up in his own bed with his clothing hung neatly in the closet. If he’d done anything bizarre during those vacant periods he surely would have heard about it from Roberta. And if he happened to have lost the memory of a few minutes or a half hour or whatever, what earthly difference did it make? A person’s head was cluttered enough with facts and memories; one hardly needed total recall of every time one climbed a flight of stairs.

In any event, the brandy helped. It smoothed things out. Throughout, he’d been confident things would work out. Roberta would get over whatever she was going through with Ariel. He himself would work things out as far as his feelings for Caleb were concerned. And everything would be fine.

Good, acceptable and perfect.

So it was “good” that Caleb was dead. And it was “acceptable,” in that he was able to accept it. And it was even “perfect,” because now they could go back to being the family they had been, strengthened by what they had been forced to endure, closer than ever for having passed through it.

He took his wife’s hand in his and gave it a comforting squeeze.

In the limousine, seated once again between David and Ariel, Roberta turned around to count the cars lined up behind them. There were ten or a dozen of them, their headlights on, queued up to follow the hearse to the cemetery.

“It’s the weather,” she told David.

He asked her what she meant.

“A nice crisp bright fall afternoon,” she said bitterly. “A little rain would have cut the attendance, but the weather’s so good they want their money’s worth.”

She faced forward, looking out through the windshield at the gleaming silver hearse. Was Jeff in one of the cars behind her? Having come to the funeral, would he ride a little farther to see his son tucked into the ground?

Why not? It was, after all, a beautiful afternoon.

David was saying something, talking with Ariel, but Roberta wasn’t paying any attention. There were things on her mind, things she hadn’t been able to make sense of, things she’d barely permitted herself to think about since Caleb’s death.

The ghost in the bedroom, for one. Obviously the ghost had come for Caleb. But was it really a ghost? Had the apparition truly existed? Contradictions in terms... likely her own subconscious mind had conjured up the woman, creating her out of some inner knowledge that Caleb was going to be taken away. She’d know more one way or the other if someone else had either seen or not seen the woman, but only she had been awake to witness the appearances.

The ghost had not walked on the past two nights. More accurately, Roberta had not seen it. But she couldn’t swear it hadn’t put in an appearance, because she herself had been so sedated she could have slept through a nuclear attack. The morning of Caleb’s death David had put in a quick call to Gintzler, who immediately phoned in a prescription to the drugstore. Roberta, numbed out on Valium, had made it through the days and slept as if comatose through the nights.

No Valium today. They were putting her son in the ground. If there was something to feel, she wanted to feel it.

But if the ghost came back tonight—

Worry about it when it happens, she told herself. They were approaching the cemetery. She was going to have a lot to get through in the next little while. She would just have to take it as it came, and when it was bedtime she could worry about the woman in the shawl.

The ceremony at the graveside was a brief one, with a short formal service. The minister read about ashes to ashes and dust to dust and the resurrection and the life and a lot of familiar phrases. Throughout it Ariel tried to decide whether to close her eyes when they lowered the coffin. She wound up watching the whole thing.

Erskine had come to the cemetery. That surprised her. And the man from the Funeral Game, he had turned up, too, standing off to one side at the rear.

Mrs. Tashman had not come. Evidently just turning up at the funeral was enough for most people, but some liked to sign on for the whole routine.

Her grandmother was buried here somewhere, and other relatives of Roberta’s. Probably Roberta and David would wind up here sometime, buried along with Caleb.

And would the same thing happen to her? She couldn’t be buried with her real parents, not if she didn’t know who they were. Maybe she could be buried at sea. Or they could cremate her and scatter the ashes from an airplane, like that movie star they were talking about on television.

She didn’t like thinking about death. But what else could you think about at a funeral?

The limousine returned them to the funeral parlor. Then they were in their own car and David was driving back to the city. At one point she thought they were going to drive past the house where they used to live, but they didn’t.

It was a little creepy, being in the old neighborhood. She hadn’t wanted to move downtown, but now she liked the new house so much better.

No one spoke while David drove. He parked finally on the street directly behind Roberta’s Datsun. Houses were close together on this block, with no driveways or garages, but the house was large enough so that you could easily park both cars at the curb in front of it.

Ariel opened the back door and got out. She stood on the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb while David emerged from behind the wheel and walked around the back of the car to open the door for Roberta. She seemed reluctant to get out at first. Then she took his hand and let him help her out, and the two of them stood side by side, looking up at the towering red brick house with its ornamental black ironwork.

David put his arm around Roberta and she leaned against him. Ariel felt funny watching them. While they stood there, supporting each other, she scampered up the walk and mounted the steps to the front door.