Dying in the Post-War World

9

That night I stopped in at the funeral home on East Erie. Peg wasn’t up to it — felt funny about it, since she’d never met the Keenans; so I went alone. A cop was posted to keep curiosity seekers out, but few made the attempt — the war might have been over, but the memory of personal sorrows was fresh.

The little girl lay dressed in white satin with pink flowers at her breast; you couldn’t see the nicks on her face — she was even smiling, faintly. She looked sweetly asleep. She was arranged so that you couldn’t tell the arms were still missing.

Norma Keenan had been told, of course, what exactly had happened to her little girl. My compassionate lie had only lessened her sorrow for that first night. Unbelievably, it had gotten worse: the coroner had announced, this afternoon, that there had been “attempted rape.”

The parents wore severe black and, while family and friends stood chatting sotto voce, were seated to one side. Neither was crying. It wasn’t that they were bearing up well: it was shock.

“Thanks for coming, Nate,” Bob said, rising, and squeezed my hand. “Will you come to the Mass tomorrow?”

“Sure,” I said. It had been a long time since I’d been to Mass; my mother had been Catholic, but she died when I was young.

At St. Gertrude’s the next morning, it turned out not to be a Requiem Mass, but the Mass of the Angels, as sung by the one hundred tender voices of the children’s choir. “A song of welcome,” the priest said, “admitting another to sing before the throne of God.”

JoAnn had belonged to this choir; last Christmas, she’d played an angel in the Scared Heart school pageant.

Now she was an armless corpse in a casket at the altar rail; even the beauty of the children’s voices and faces, even the long, tapering white candles that cast a flickery golden glow on the little white coffin, couldn’t erase that from my mind. When the priest reminded those in attendance that “there is no room for vengeance in our hearts,” I bit my tongue. Speak for yourself, padre.

People wept openly, men and women alike, many hugging their own children. Some thirteen hundred had turned out for the Mass; a detail of policemen protected the Keenans as they exited the church. The crowd, however, was well behaved.

And only a handful of us were at the cemetery. The afternoon was overcast, unseasonably chilly, and the wind coursed through All Saints’ like a guilty conscience. After a last blessing of holy water from the priest, the little white casket was lowered into a tiny grave protected by a solitary maple. Flowers banking the grave fluttered and danced in the breeze.

I didn’t allow myself to cry, not at first. I told myself Keenan was an acquaintance, not a friend; I reminded myself that I had never met the little girl — not before I fished her head out of a goddamn sewer, anyway. I held back the tears, and was a man.

It wasn’t till I got home that night, and saw my pregnant wife, that it hit me; knocked the slats right out from under me.

Then I found myself sitting on the couch, crying like a baby, and this time she was comforting me.

It didn’t last long, but when it stopped, I came to a strange and disturbing realization: everything I’d been through in this life, from close calls as a cop to fighting Japs in the Pacific, hadn’t prepared me for fear like this. For the terror of being a parent. Of knowing something on the planet was so precious to you the very thought of losing it invited madness.

“You’re going to help your friend,” Peg said. “You’re going to get whoever did this.”

“I’m going to try, baby,” I said, rubbing the wetness away with the knuckles of one hand. “Hell, the combined rewards are up to thirty-six grand.”