Amanda and Jeannie exchanged a look, which Red caught. He turned abruptly to Denny, who was lounging on the couch cycling through TV channels. “This is easy to fix,” Red told him, holding up the dashiki on its wire hanger. “Right? Am I right?”
Denny said “Huh?” and flicked his eyes over. “Oh, sure, I can fix that,” he said. “If I can find the same color thread.”
The girls groaned, but Denny stood up and took the dashiki from Red and left the room. “Thanks,” Red called after him. Then he turned back to his daughters and said, “I’ve got some corduroys I could wear with it, kind of a light gray. Gray goes good with blue, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, Dad,” Amanda said.
“At our wedding I wore bell-bottoms,” he said. “Your grandma Dalton had a conniption.”
There’d been no photos of their wedding, because Abby had claimed that a photographer would ruin the mood. So Amanda and Jeannie perked up, and Jeannie asked, “What did Mom wear?”
“This long sort of flowy, I forget what they call it,” Red said. “A Kaplan?”
“A caftan?”
“That’s it.” His eyes filled with tears. “She looked nice,” he said.
“Yes, I bet she did.”
“I know I can’t ask, ‘Why me?’ ” he said. The tears were running down his face now, but he didn’t seem to realize it. “We had forty-eight good years together. That’s way more than a lot of folks get. And I know I should be glad she went first, because she never could have managed without me. She couldn’t even fix a leaky spigot!”
“Right, Dad,” Jeannie said, and she and Amanda were crying too now.
“But sometimes I just have to ask anyhow. You know?”
“Yes, Dad. We know.”
Carla wasn’t happy about letting Susan miss school for the funeral. Everybody heard Denny arguing with her on the phone. “She was my mother’s favorite grandchild,” he said. “You’re telling me the kid can’t skip one measly math test for her sake?” In the end it was agreed that she could come but not stay over, in order to be back in school on Tuesday morning. So immediately after breakfast on the morning of the funeral Denny drove down to the train station to meet her. The child he returned with was a much more solemn, more dignified version of the Susan who’d gone to the beach with them. She wore a charcoal knit dress with a demure white collar, and black tights and black suede pumps. Some sort of training bra appeared to be crumpled around her chest. Stem’s three boys eyed her shyly at first and wouldn’t speak, but she herded them into the sunroom and in a few minutes chattery voices began drifting toward the kitchen, where the grown-ups were still sitting around the breakfast table.
Red wore floppy gray corduroys and his dashiki, which was even more startling off its hanger. The sleeves ballooned extravagantly over elasticized cuffs, giving him a buccaneer air, and the slit at the neck was deep enough to expose a whisk broom of gray chest hair. But Nora said, “Oh, didn’t Denny do a nice job of mending!” and Red looked satisfied, not appearing to notice that she hadn’t said a word about the overall effect.
When the doorbell rang and Heidi started barking, they all gathered themselves together. That would be Ree Bascomb’s maid, who had agreed to babysit the three boys. Once she’d been given her instructions, they all filed out the back door—Stem and Nora, Red, Denny and Susan—and climbed into Abby’s car. Denny drove. Red sat next to him. During the ten-minute trip to the church Red said nothing at all, just gazed out the side window. In the rear, Nora made small talk with Susan. How was school this year? How was her mother? Susan answered politely but briefly, as if she felt it would be disrespectful not to keep her mind on the funeral. Denny drummed his fingers on the steering wheel every time they stopped for a light.
In Hampden, the rest of the world was enjoying an ordinary Monday morning. Two heavyset women stood talking to each other, one of them trailing a wheeled cart full of laundry. A man pushed a bundled-up baby in a stroller. The weather had started out cool but was rapidly growing warmer, and some people wore sweaters but a girl emerging from a liquor store was in short shorts and rubber flip-flops.
The church turned out to be a small, unassuming white cube topped with more of a cupola than a steeple, squeezed between a ma-and-pa grocery store and a house already decorated to the nines for Halloween. They might have missed it altogether if not for the signboard in front. HAMPDEN FELLOWSHIP was spelled out across the top of the frame, with WELCOME HOME PRIVATE SPRINKLE in movable type below. There wasn’t even a parking lot, or not one that Denny could locate. They had to park on the street. As they were piling out of the car, Jeannie and Hugh drew up behind them with their two children and Hugh’s mother. Then Amanda and her Hugh walked up with Elise, who was wearing patent-leather heels and a shiny, froufrou dress so short she could have been a cocktail waitress. A patch of pancake makeup nearly hid her black eye. All it took was the sight of each other for Jeannie and Amanda to dissolve in torrents of tears, and they stood on the sidewalk hugging while Mrs. Angell clucked sympathetically and clasped her purse to her bosom. She wore a pretty flowered hat that looked very churchlike. In fact all of them were dressed in their best today except for Red, whose dashiki hem flared below his Orioles jacket.
Eventually, they climbed the two front steps and entered a low-ceilinged white room lined with dark pews. It had the deep chill of a place that had sat through an autumn night without heat, although a furnace could be heard now rumbling somewhere below. A wooden lectern faced them, with a plain dark cross on the wall behind it, and off to one side a woman with dyed red hair was playing “Sheep May Safely Graze” on an upright piano. (Reverend Alban had already explained that his choir members were working folk and would not be able to sing on a weekday.) The pianist didn’t look in their direction but continued plinking away while they threaded up the aisle and settled in the second row. Possibly they could have chosen the first row, but there was unspoken agreement that that would have felt too show-offy.
A tall vase of white hydrangeas stood in front of the lectern. Where had those come from? The Whitshanks hadn’t ordered flowers, and they had specified in the Sun that they didn’t want any sent—just donations to the House of Ruth, if people were so inclined. Abby had been odd about flowers. She liked them growing outside, unpicked. Jeannie whispered, “Maybe they’re from someone’s yard,” which would have been preferable, at least, to flowers from a florist, but Amanda, sitting next to her, whispered, “Isn’t it too late in the year?” They could have spoken in normal tones, but they were all a little self-conscious. None of them felt entirely certain about funeral etiquette—whom to greet, where to look, who should be handed discreet envelopes of cash at the end of the service. Twice just this morning, Amanda had phoned Ree Bascomb for advice.
The children sat at the far end, with Susan in the middle because she was from away and therefore the most interesting. Red was on the aisle, at Amanda’s insistence. She had pointed out that friends might like to stop by his pew and say a few words to him. Since this was exactly what Red feared, he sat hunch-shouldered with his head lowered, like a bird in the rain, and stared fixedly at his knees.
Reverend Alban entered from a side door near the piano. Eddie, he’d asked them to call him. He was a very blond, disconcertingly young man in a black suit, his skin so fair that you could see the blood coursing beneath it. First he bent over Red and pressed Red’s right hand between both of his own, and then he asked Amanda if she had the list of people who would be speaking. At the time of his visit to the house they hadn’t yet decided on the speakers, but now Amanda handed him a sheet of paper and he ran his eyes down it and nodded. “Excellent,” he said. “And how do you pronounce this one? E-lyce?”
“E-leece,” Amanda said firmly, and Jeannie stiffened next to her. It didn’t seem a good sign that he had had to ask. He slipped the paper inside his jacket and went to sit on a straight-backed chair beside the lectern.
Guests had begun trickling into the pews behind them. The Wh
itshanks heard footsteps and murmurs, but they went on facing forward.
Reverend Alban—Eddie—had admitted during his visit to the house that he hadn’t known Abby personally. “I’ve only pastored at Hampden three years,” he’d said. “I’m sorry we didn’t have a chance to get acquainted. I’m sure she was a very nice lady.”
The word “lady” had made them all go steely-faced and wary. This man had no idea of Abby! He was picturing some old biddy in orthopedic shoes. “She was not but seventy-two,” Jeannie told him with her chin out.
But he himself was so young, that must have sounded old to him. “Yes,” he’d said, “it always feels too soon. But the Lord in his wisdom … Tell me, Mr. Whitshank, do you have any wishes of your own for the service?”
“Me? Oh, no,” Red had said. “No, I’m not … I don’t … we haven’t thrown a lot of funerals in this family.”
“I understand. Then might I suggest—”
“It’s true my parents passed away, but I mean, that was so sudden. Their car stalled on the railroad tracks. I guess I was in shock; I really don’t remember too much about the funeral.”
“That must have been—”
“Now that I look back on it, I don’t feel like I really took it in. I feel like it sort of slipped by me. And it all seems so long ago, although truth to tell it was only back in the sixties. Modern times! We’d sent men into space by then. Why, my folks lived long enough to see aluminum-frame window screens, and clip-on fake mullions and flush doors and fiberglass bathtubs.”
“Just fancy that,” Reverend Alban had said.
So what with one thing and another, his visit hadn’t settled much. None of the family knew what to expect when he rose to stand at the lectern, finally, and the piano fell silent.
“Let us pray,” he told the congregation. He held up both arms and everyone rose; pews creaked all through the room. He closed his eyes, but the Whitshanks kept theirs open—all but Nora. “Heavenly Father,” he intoned in a hollow-sounding voice, “we ask you this morning to comfort us in our bereavement. We ask you to …”
“That Atta woman’s here,” Jeannie whispered to her husband.
“Who?”
“The orphan who came to lunch last month, remember?”
Apparently, in the process of rising for the prayer, Jeannie had contrived to cast a backward glance at the congregation. Now she glanced again and said, “Oh! And there’s the driver of the car. She’s got somebody with her; could be her husband.”
“Poor gal,” Hugh said.
The driver of the car that killed Abby had paid a visit to the house the day after the accident, all upset, and apologized a dozen times even though it was common knowledge that it hadn’t been her fault. She kept saying that she would see that sweet dog till her dying day.
“There are a lot of people here,” Jeannie whispered, but then a look from Amanda hushed her.
Abby had not specified a Bible reading, but Reverend Alban provided one anyhow—a long passage from Proverbs about a virtuous woman. It was okay. At least, the family found nothing offensive in it. Then they were asked to sing a hymn called “Here I Am, Lord” that none of them was familiar with. Evidently Reverend Alban had felt the need of more musical selections than Abby had suggested. But that was okay too. Jeannie said later that it made her envision Abby arriving in heaven all brisk and bustly and social-worky: “Here I am, Lord; what needs doing?”
Abby had specified a poem. An Emily Dickinson poem, “If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking,” which Amanda read aloud at the lectern, after first welcoming everybody and thanking them for coming. She was the only one of Red and Abby’s children who had wanted to speak. Denny claimed he wasn’t good at such things; Jeannie had worried she would break down; Stem had simply said no without giving any reason.
However, Merrick had volunteered. Merrick! That was unexpected. She had flown in from Florida as soon as she heard the news and come directly to the house, prepared to roll up her sleeves and take over. Amanda had managed to fend her off, but no one could deny her when she begged to say a few words at the service. “I knew Abby longer than anyone did,” she had said. “Longer even than Red!” And that was how she began her speech, standing not behind the lectern but beside it, as if to give the congregation the full benefit of her stark black dress with the asymmetrical hemline. “I knew Abby Dalton since she was twelve years old,” she said. “Since she was a scrappy little Hampden girl whose father owned one of those hardware stores where you walk in off the street and say, ‘Oh, my God! I’m so sorry! I seem to be in somebody’s basement!’ Shovels and rakes and wheelbarrows crowded up close together, coils of rope and lengths of chain hanging down from this really low ceiling you could practically bump your head on, and a tabby cat sound asleep on a sack of grass seed. But you know what? Abby turned out to be the livest wire in our whole school. She wasn’t held back by her origins! She was a firecracker, and I’m proud to say she was my closest, dearest friend.” Then her chin began to quiver, and she pressed her fingertips to her lips and shook her head and hurried back to her seat, which happened to be next to her mother-in-law. All the other Whitshanks looked at each other with their eyes wide—even Red.
Next came Ree Bascomb, bless her heart, tiny and sprite-like in her cap of bouncy white curls. She started talking while she was still walking up the aisle. “I was actually at a hardware store once with Abby,” she said. “Not her father’s, of course. I didn’t know her back then. I got to know her when we were young mothers going stir-crazy at home, and sometimes we’d just take off together, hop into one or the other’s car and throw the kids in the backseat and drive somewhere just to be driving. So one day we were at Topps Home and Garden because Abby wanted a kitchen fire extinguisher, and while the man was ringing it up she said, ‘Do you mind hurrying? It’s kind of an emergency.’ Just being silly, you know; she meant it as a joke. Well, he didn’t get it. He said, ‘I have to follow procedures, ma’am,’ and she and I just doubled up laughing. We were crying with laughter! Oh, I don’t think I’ll ever again laugh as hard as I laughed with Abby. I’m going to miss her so much!”
She stepped away from the lectern dry-eyed, smiling at the Whitshanks as she passed them, but hers was the speech that made Jeannie and Amanda grow teary all over again.
“Thank you,” Reverend Alban said. “And now we’ll hear from Elise Baylor, Mrs. Whitshank’s granddaughter.”
Elise had an index card with her. She teetered up to the lectern on her strappy high heels, gazed out at the congregation with a dazzling smile, and cleared her throat. “When me and my cousins were little,” she said, “Grandma would call us on the phone and say, ‘It’s Saturday! Let’s have Camp Grandma!’ And we’d all go over to her house and she would do handicrafts with us—pressed flowers and pot holders and Popsicle-stick picture frames—or she’d read to us from these storybooks about children from other lands. I mean, some of those books were boring but parts were, like, sort of interesting. I’m going to remember my grandma for as long as I live.”
Deb and Susan glared at her—it must have been the “my grandma” that irked them—while Alexander took on the sullen expression of a boy trying not to cry. Elise gave the congregation a triumphant look and clopped back to her seat.
“Thank you, all,” Reverend Alban said. He nodded to the pianist, who pivoted hastily toward the piano and started on a rendition of “Brother James’s Air.” It seemed a peculiarly lighthearted tune for the occasion. Amanda’s Hugh absentmindedly tapped one foot to the beat, till Amanda leaned forward and sent a meaningful frown down the row to him.
At the end of the piece, Reverend Alban rose and approached the lectern again. He placed his fingertips together. “I didn’t know Mrs. Whitshank,” he said, “and therefore I don’t have the memories that the rest of you have. But it has occurred to me, on occasion, that our memories of our loved ones might not be the point. Maybe the point is their memories—all that they take away with them. What if heaven is ju
st a vast consciousness that the dead return to? And their assignment is to report on the experiences they collected during their time on earth. The hardware store their father owned with the cat asleep on the grass seed, and the friend they used to laugh with till the tears streamed down their cheeks, and the Saturdays when their grandchildren sat next to them gluing Popsicle sticks. The spring mornings they woke up to a million birds singing their hearts out, and the summer afternoons with the swim towels hung over the porch rail, and the October air that smelled like wood smoke and apple cider, and the warm yellow windows of home when they came in on a snowy night. ‘That’s what my experience has been,’ they say, and it gets folded in with the others—one more report on what living felt like. What it was like to be alive.”
Then he raised his arms and said, “Page two thirty-nine in your hymnals: ‘Shall We Gather at the River?,’ ” and everybody stood up.
“I don’t understand,” Red said to Amanda, under cover of the music. “Where did he say she went?”
“To a vast consciousness,” Amanda told him.
“Well, that does sound like something your mother might do,” he said. “But I don’t know; I was hoping for someplace more concrete.”
Amanda patted his hand, and then she pointed to the next line in the hymn book.
Ree Bascomb had warned them earlier that people would surely show up at the house right after the service. Whether or not they were invited, she said, there they’d be, expecting food and drink. So at least the family was prepared when the first caller rang the doorbell. Without so much as a pause to catch their breaths, they were back to murmuring thank-yous and accepting hugs and allowing their hands to be clasped. Ree’s maid offered trays of little sandwiches delivered that morning by the caterer. A trio of Middle Eastern men, more formally dressed than Abby’s own sons, watched in shocked silence as Stem’s three boys chased each other around the legs of the grown-ups, and a tiny old woman whom nobody knew asked several people whether there were any of those biscuits that Abby used to make.