By the Time You Read This

5

DESMOND’S FUNERAL HOME IS centrally located at the corner of Sumner and Earl streets, which pretty much means anyone coming in or out of town has to drive past it, turning it into a daily memento mori for the citizens of Algonquin Bay. It’s not a pretty building, little more than a cement-block rhomboid, painted a cream colour to soften the severity of its outlines and lighten the darkness of its implications. Whenever Cardinal’s father had driven by, he would always wave and yell, “You haven’t got me yet, Mr. Desmond! You haven’t got me yet!”

But of course Mr. Desmond had got Stan Cardinal in the end, just as he had got Cardinal’s mother before him and would get every other resident of Algonquin Bay. The Catholics, anyway. There was another funeral home a few blocks east that got the Protestants, and still another, newer establishment that seemed to be doing a brisk business with recently deceased Jews, Muslims and “others.”

Mr. Desmond was not in fact one man but a many-personned entity whose sad but necessary tasks were vigorously carried out by numerous Desmond sons, daughters and in-laws.

As Cardinal stepped through the funeral home entrance with Kelly, thick clouds of emotion gathered in his chest. His knees began to tremble. David Desmond, a neat young man married to precision, shook hands with them. He wore a trim grey suit with just the right rectangle of perfectly starched handkerchief showing above the breast pocket. His shoes were gleaming black brogues more suited to an older man.

“You have forty-three minutes before people start arriving,” he said. “Would you like to go in now?”

Cardinal nodded.

“All right. You’re in the Rose Room just over that way, the second pair of oak doors on the right, just past the highboy with the head-and-shoulders clock.” The directions were delivered as if they were embarking on a journey of some miles instead of thirty feet of pastel carpet. In any case Mr. Desmond Jr. escorted them and slid open the doors.

“Please go right in,” he said. “I’ll be right here if you need anything.”

Cardinal had been in this room before and knew what to expect: walls a soothing dusty pink, matching couches and armchairs, tasteful end tables dominated by gauzy lamps that bathed everything in diffuse, benevolent light. But when he stepped through the doorway, he stopped, emitting one syllable—actually a sigh, a sudden expulsion of breath not intended as speech.

“What is it?” Kelly said from behind him. “Is something wrong?”

“I asked for a closed casket,” Cardinal managed to say. “I wasn’t expecting to see her again.”

“Uh, no. Me either.”

The two of them stood just inside the doorway. The room stretched into a rose-coloured tunnel, at the other end of which Catherine, impossibly beautiful, lay waiting.

Finally Kelly said, “Do you want me to ask them to close it?”

Cardinal didn’t answer. He crossed the room with slow, tentative steps, as if the floor might give way at any moment.

Years previously, when Cardinal’s mother had been laid out in this same room, the figure in the coffin had scarcely resembled her. The disease that had consumed her had left no vestige of the chirpy, strong-willed woman who had loved him all his life. And his father too, minus his glasses and his combative manner, might have been a complete stranger.

But Catherine was Catherine: the wide brow, the full mouth with its tiny parentheses, the brown hair curling gracefully to her shoulders. How the Desmonds had repaired the damage inflicted by the fall, Cardinal didn’t want to know. The left cheekbone had been completely smashed, but now here was his wife, face whole, cheekbones intact. The sight yanked him into yet another dimension of pain. Pain was not a big-enough word for this country of agony, this Yukon of grief.

A bend in time, and he was huddled on one of the pink couches, exhausted and sighing. Kelly was beside him, clutching a soggy ball of Kleenex.

Someone was speaking to him. Cardinal rose unsteadily and shook hands with Mr. and Mrs. Walcott, neighbours on Madonna Road. They were retired schoolteachers who spent most of their time bickering. Today they had apparently agreed to a ceasefire and presented a united front that was formal and subdued.

“Very sorry for your loss,” Mr. Walcott said.

Mrs. Walcott took a nimble step forward. “Such a tragedy,” she said. “At such a lovely time of year, too.”

“Yes,” Cardinal said. “Autumn was always Catherine’s favourite season.”

“Did you get the casserole all right?”

Cardinal looked at Kelly, who nodded.

“Yes, thank you. It’s very kind of you.”

“You just have to reheat it. Twenty minutes at two-fifty ought to do it.”

Others were arriving. One at a time they went to stand by the coffin, some kneeling and crossing themselves. There were teachers from Northern University and the community college where Catherine had taught. Former students. There was white-haired Mr. Fisk, for decades the proprietor of Fisk’s Camera Shop until it was put out of business, like half of Main Street, by the deadly munificence of Wal-Mart.

“That’s a great picture of Catherine, with the cameras,” Mr. Fisk said. “She used to come into the store looking just like that. Always she’d be wearing that anorak or the fishing vest. Remember that fishing vest?” Nervousness was manifesting itself in Mr. Fisk as jauntiness, as if they were discussing an eccentric friend who had moved away.

“Nice turnout,” he added, looking around with approval. Catherine’s students, middle-aged some of them, others young and teary-eyed, murmured kind words at Cardinal. No matter how conventional, they pierced Cardinal in a way that surprised him. Who would have thought mere words could be so powerful?

His colleagues showed up: McLeod in a suit that had been cut for a smaller man, Collingwood and Arsenault looking like an out-of-work comedy duo. Larry Burke made the sign of the cross in front of the coffin and stood before it with head bowed for some time. He didn’t know Cardinal all that well—he was new to the detective squad—but he came over and said how sorry he was.

Delorme showed up in a dark blue dress. Cardinal couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her in a dress.

“Such a sad day,” she said, hugging him. He could feel her trembling slightly, fighting tears of sympathy, and he couldn’t speak. She knelt before the coffin for a few minutes, and then came back to give Cardinal another hug, her eyes wet.

Police Chief R. J. Kendall came, along with Detective Sergeant Chouinard, Ken Szelagy—everyone from CID—and various patrol constables.

Another bend in the afternoon, and now they were at Highlawn crematorium. Cardinal had no memory of the drive out into the hills. It had been Catherine’s request that there be no church service, but in the will she and Cardinal had had drawn up, she had asked that Father Samson Mkembe say a few words.

When Cardinal had been an altar boy, all of the priests had been of Irish descent, or French Canadian. But now the church had to recruit from farther afield, and Father Mkembe had come all the way from Sierra Leone. He stood at the front of the crematory chapel, a tall, bony man with a face of high-gloss ebony.

The chapel was almost full. Cardinal saw Meredith Moore, head of the art department up at the college, and Sally Westlake, a close friend of Catherine’s. And he could make out among the mourners the woolly head of Dr. Bell.

Father Mkembe talked about Catherine’s strength. Indeed, he got most of her good qualities right—no doubt because he had phoned earlier asking Kelly for tips. But he spoke also about how Catherine’s faith had sustained her in adversity—a patent falsehood, as Catherine only went to church for the big occasions and had long ago stopped believing in God.

The furnace doors opened and the flames flared for an instant. The coffin rolled in, the doors closed, and the priest said a final prayer. A doomsday bell was tolling in Cardinal’s heart: You failed her.

The colours of the world outside were unnaturally bright. The sky was the blue of a gas flame, and the carpet of autumn leaves seemed to emit light, not just reflect it—golds and yellows and rusty reds. A shadow passed over Cardinal as the smoke that had been his wife dimmed the sun.

“Mr. Cardinal, I don’t know if you remember me …”

Meredith Moore was shaking Cardinal’s hand in her dry little palm. She was a wisp of a woman, so dehydrated she looked as if she should be dropped in water to expand to her natural size.

“Catherine and I were colleagues …”

“Yes, Mrs. Moore. We’ve met a few times over the years.” In fact, Mrs. Moore had fought a nasty battle with Catherine over control of the art department. She had not been shy about raising Catherine’s psychiatric history as an impediment, and in the end she had prevailed.

“Catherine will be sorely missed,” she said, adding, “The students are so fond of her,” in a tone that implied the complete bankruptcy of student opinion.

Cardinal left her to find Kelly, who was being hugged by Sally Westlake. Sally was an outsized woman with an outsized heart, and one of the few people Cardinal had called personally about Catherine’s death.

“Oh, John,” she said, dabbing her eyes. “I’m going to miss her so much. She was my best friend. My inspiration. That’s not just a cliché: she was always challenging me to think more about my photographs, to shoot more, to spend more time in the darkroom. She was just the best. And she was so proud of you,” she said to Kelly.

“I don’t see why,” Kelly said.

“Because you’re just like her, talented and brave. Pursuing a career in art in New York? Takes guts, my dear.”

“On the other hand, it could be a complete waste of time.”

“Oh, don’t say that!” For a moment Cardinal thought Sally was going to pinch his daughter’s cheek or ruffle her hair.

Dr. Bell came up to give his condolences once more.

“It’s kind of you to come,” Cardinal said. “This is my daughter, Kelly. She’s just up from New York for a few days. Dr. Bell was Catherine’s psychiatrist.”

Kelly gave a rueful smile. “Not one of your success stories, I guess.”

“Kelly …”

“No, no, that’s all right. Perfectly legitimate. Unfortuntely, specializing in depression is a bit like being an oncologist—a low success rate is to be expected. But I didn’t want to disturb you, I just wanted to pay my respects.”

When he was gone, Kelly turned to her father. “You said Mom didn’t seem particularly depressed.”

“I know. But she’s fooled me before.”

“Everyone’s being so kind,” Kelly said when they were back home. Troops of sympathy cards stood in formation across the dining-room table, and in the kitchen, the counter and table were heaped with Tupperware containers of casseroles, risottos, ratatouilles, meat loaves, tarts and tourtières, even a baked ham.

“A nice tradition, this food thing,” Cardinal said. “You start to feel all hollow and you know you must be hungry, but the thought of cooking is just too much. The thought of anything’s too much.”

“Why don’t you go and lie down,” Kelly said, taking off her coat.

“No, I’d only feel worse. I’m going to put something in the microwave.” He picked up a plastic container and stood contemplating it in the middle of the kitchen as if it were a device from the neighbourhood of Arcturus.

“Even more cards,” Kelly said, dropping a handful onto the kitchen table.

“Why don’t you open them?”

Cardinal put the container in the microwave and faced the rows of buttons. Another hiatus. The simplest tasks were beyond him; Catherine was gone. What was the point of food? Of sleep? Of life? You won’t survive, an inner voice told him. You’ve had it.

“Oh, my God,” Kelly said.

“What?”

She was clutching a card in one hand and covering her mouth with the other.

“What is it?” Cardinal said. “Let me see.”

Kelly shook her head and pulled the card away.

“Kelly, let me see that.”

He took hold of her wrist and plucked the card from her hand.

“Just throw it out, Dad. Don’t even look at it. Just throw it away.”

The card was an expensive one, with a still life of a lily on it. Inside, the standard message of condolence had been covered by a small rectangle of paper on which someone had typed: How does it feel, asshole? Just no telling how things will turn out, is there.