Nobody's Angel

24

ONCE PAST THE COAT HOOKS, THE PLAN OF THE FUNERAL home is clear. This place can handle the lapsed of all religions. There is a corridor on the left with perhaps three rooms leading off perpendicularly. In every one of these rooms is someone dead. Over the door of each room is the last name of the goner: Symanski, Westcroft, Fitzpatrick. Just at the point of division between this set of rooms and the large room to the right, where services are held, is a small stand holding a kind of guest register; it has an attached light. A discreet brown cord trickles over to the wall outlet. The owner stands behind the guest book and flags the dalliers by the coatrack; he is dressed somberly, but not grimly. His is the air of riding out a good franchise. Here and there are his assistants, that odd breed of Recent Graduates in smart suits and razor-cut hair who have decided to spend the rest of their working lives driving hearses and standing in attendance at funerals with their hands just so.

Patrick, the blood rising in his head, circled past the casket with the other mourners; he took one look at the barbaric effigy constructed from his deceased sister and decided: I have no attitude toward this. He was still far from knowing what had happened to him.

They sat in the front row: Patrick, his mother, Dale, his grandfather and little Andrew. Little Andrew had wanted to touch the body. He got a good snatching for that. The grandfather gaped around and smiled at his contemporaries, all of whom, Patrick felt sure, were thinking: Odd for a person so young to go when it’s usually one of us. Patrick wondered if these old people didn’t feel a little edge, thinking time was not so reliable a force against the living that it could be utterly counted on. There was always mishap, the unexpected; and in this case, the perils of one’s own hand. Few had the nerve for that and, all in all, went uncounted, as they were easily dismissed as mental cases. The old people gazed around: this was just social. Of course, there was death. The middle-aged worked on the theater of doom, many of them with dramaturgical mugs that wouldn’t pass muster at the local playhouse. The very young craned around like the very old; and all were surrounded by the funeral house staff, including the altogether depressing Recent Graduates. Patrick was getting angry. Mary was gone and this bit of drill seemed superfluous. Moreover, the audience included a substantial group of townies eager to see the family on its knees, which Patrick could have stood for, except that there was no family anymore. The mother was divorced and gone, Patrick was in disgrace, his father long dead, his sister was ridiculed before she died; and his grandfather despised everyone. Patrick was growing more incensed by the second.

The Ford dealer bowed his way down the aisle, holding a narrow-brimmed and piquant fedora, obsequious before a couple of hundred prospects. His wife stared into infinity, her cylindrical hat indicating a level stance in the face of mortality. A tiny wino brakeman slipped in because he’d seen the gathering. The preacher materialized in the wings, counted the house and withdrew to await the swelling crowd. Deke Patwell was on hand to report the loss. A lip reader from the stationery store sat front and center with her own missal. The song “Chapel in the Moonlight” came dimly from invisible speakers. There were five Indians with hard Cheyenne features, two of whom were young enough to be suspects as Mary’s paramour. Andrew had a cast-metal articulated earth-mover, which he rolled quietly back and forth between his feet. His mother moved her shoe to block its progress and Andrew looked up at her with no expression whatsoever.

Scattered around the audience were people never before seen in town, friends of Mary’s from all over the Rockies. They were uniform in age but staying well away from each other.

The minister began to move under the arcade of flowers past the casket toward the Recent Graduates pushing the lectern at him from the opposite direction. “Chapel in the Moonlight” diminished and disappeared. Patrick’s mother drew back the silk string from her missal and raised the face of one who, as the mother of a suicide, had nowhere to hang her next glance. Dale seemed to be saying, This is how it is.

The minister gazed for a long time at his own little volume; and when the moment came at which its pages could best be heard, he turned it open, gazed, then abruptly closed it again: he would speak from the heart. That was a good one, and everybody looked at him, even the Recent Graduates, sharpening expressions in anticipation of something daring.

“Young Mary Fitzpatrick,” he crooned, “was a free and delightful spirit …” He paused. Perhaps he never should have paused, or paused so long, because the fury Patrick had feared arose in him and he spoke.

“Shut up,” said Patrick in a clear voice. “We knew her.” The quiet was like undertow.

The minister’s head fell with patience. Patrick arose. His mother’s face turned in horror. Nearly half of the audience got up and started to the rear. The editor-in-chief gazed back at Patrick, then led the group out. Aaron Clark, the prosecutor, stayed close alongside the editor. Dale, after a moment’s reflection, left with them. Patrick’s grandfather pulled Andrew onto his knee. The Indians milled and went, leaving one frightened young man in a Levi jacket and carrying a broad-brimmed uncreased straw. That’s our man, thought Patrick, but I won’t talk to him. It’s all disgrace. Patrick walked up to the minister and demanded to know where he had gotten the business about the free and delightful spirit. “You never met her. That was an unhappy girl and she isn’t going anywhere. She’s just dead.” What remained of the audience stirred at this ghastly speech.

Patrick turned to go and spotted the Indian. He changed his mind about talking to him. They looked at each other hard and Patrick asked him to wait outside. Patrick watched him turn slowly and go into the blind light at the door, affixing the straw hat as he did so, causing a sudden deep shadow to reveal his face as he stared back in the glare, his expression very much that of something cornered and awaiting necessity, grave and shy at once.

“Have you had enough?” He saw his mother. He was blank. “Have you had enough, I said! I said—”

“I heard what you said.” She was right into his face. He gazed off at the casket and thought about that Indian in the sidewalk glare, the angular, expressionless face lit by the dark under his straw hat. “You said nothing.”

Between the pews Patrick’s grandfather led Andrew to the rear. The old man looked upon Patrick with a sadness he’d never allowed to be seen before. Patrick couldn’t understand the expression at all, not at this time.

“Take it easy, Pat,” he said. “I’ll bring little Andrew here. It’s just best for you to go on out of here. Andrew wants an arrowhead. So I’ll try to find him one. And then they’re going to bury her, see. And what I’m saying is it’s just best if you go on out of here, Pat.”

“Did you happen to notice the newspaper editor?” His mother inquired. She walked off, leaving no time for a reply, though in an instant of stunned, relieving giddiness, which shot through his grief like a tiny spark, he almost told her that he read only the sports page. Then he thought of his grandfather and walked toward the light. He knew and felt the people’s close watch on him. He had always understood that to observe the burying of other people’s dead was one of the few things that made their lives palatable.

But best of all the agony of those who remained. Aha! There had not been a good death like this one in Patrick’s family for some time. His father’s death in the desert of the Great Basin had seemed remote. There had been a dry spell. But Patrick knew, too, that he had not learned; his grandfather had walked out and given them nothing. There was nothing in the old cowboy’s face, his straight-backed walk toward the door, to give them anything. And Patrick had raved. He had raved for nothing. So this was a good one. This was one of the best ones they had ever seen.