"If you were, I salute you for it," Louis said.
"You don't mean that, though," Rachel said with the utter surety of one who has been over a point and over it and over it. He let it go. He thought she might eventually get rid of this awful, rancid memory that had haunted her for so long--most of it, anyway--but never this part. Never completely. Louis Creed was no psychiatrist, but he knew that there are rusty, half-buried things in the terrain of any life and that human beings seem compelled to go back to these things and pull at them, even though they cut. Tonight Rachel had pulled almost all of it out, like some grotesque and stinking rotten tooth, its crown black, its nerves infected, its roots fetid. It was out. Let that last noxious cell remain; if God was good it would remain dormant except in her deepest dreams. That she had been able to remove as much as she had was well nigh incredible--it did not just speak of her courage; it clarioned it. Louis was in awe of her. He felt like cheering.
He sat up now and turned on the light. "Yes," he said, "I salute you for it. And if I needed another reason to . . . to really dislike your mother and father, I've got it now. You never should have been left alone with her, Rachel. Never."
Like a child--the child of eight she had been when this dirty, incredible thing had happened--she reprimanded him, "Lou, it was Passover season--"
"I don't care if it was judgment trump," Louis said with a sudden low and hoarse savagery that caused her to pull back a little. He was remembering the student nurses, those two candy-stripers whose evil luck it had been to be in attendance on the morning Pascow had been brought in dying. One of them, a tough little lady named Carla Shavers, had returned the next day and had worked out so well that even Charlton was impressed. The other they had never seen again. Louis was not surprised and did not blame her.
Where was the nurse? There should have been an R.N. in attendance . . . they went out, they actually went out and left an eight-year-old kid in charge of her dying sister, who was probably clinically insane by then. Why? Because it was Passover season. And because elegant Dory Goldman couldn't stand the stink that particular morning and had to get away from it for just a little while. So Rachel got the duty. Right, friends and neighbors? Rachel got the duty. Eight years old. pigtails, middy blouse. Rachel got the duty. Rachel could stay and put up with the stink. What did they send her to Camp Sunset in Vermont for six weeks every year, if not to put up with the stink of her dying, insane sister? Ten new shirt-and-jumper combinations for Gage and six new dresses for Ellie and I'll pay your way through medical school if you'll stay away from my daughter . . . but where was the overflowing checkbook when your daughter was dying of spinal meningitis and your other daughter was alone with her, you bastard? Where was the R-fucking-N?
Louis sat up, got out of bed.
"Where are you going?" Rachel asked, alarmed.
"To get you a Valium."
"You know I don't--"
"Tonight you do," he said.
*
She took the pill and then told him the rest. Her voice remained calm throughout. The tranquilizer was doing its job.
The next-door neighbor had retrieved eight-year-old Rachel from behind a tree where she was crouching and screaming "Zelda's dead!" over and over. Rachel's nose had been bleeding. She had blood all over her. The same neighbor had called the ambulance and then her parents; after getting Rachel's nosebleed stopped and calming her with a cup of hot tea and two aspirins, she was able to get the location of her parents out of her--they were visiting Mr. and Mrs. Cabron across town; Peter Cabron was an accountant in her father's business.
By that evening, great changes had taken place in the Goldman household. Zelda was gone. Her room had been cleaned and fumigated. All of the furniture was gone. The room was a bare box. Later--much later--it had become Dory Goldman's sewing room.
The first of the nightmares had come to Rachel that night, and when Rachel woke up at two o'clock in the morning, screaming for her mother, she had been horrified to discover that she could barely get out of bed. Her back was in agony. She had strained it moving Zelda. In her spurt of adrenaline-powered strength, she had, after all, lifted Zelda with enough force to pull her own blouse apart.
That she had strained herself trying to keep Zelda from choking was simple, obvious, elementary-my-dear Watson. To everyone, that was, except Rachel herself. Rachel had been sure that this was Zelda's revenge from beyond the grave. Zelda knew that Rachel was glad she was dead; Zelda knew that when Rachel burst from the house telling all and sundry Zelda's dead, Zelda's dead at the top of her voice, she had been laughing, not screaming; Zelda knew she had been murdered and so had given Rachel spinal meningitis, and soon Rachel's back would start to twist and change and she too would have to lie in bed, slowly but surely turning into a monster, her hands hooking into claws.
After a while she would begin screaming with the pain, as Zelda had done, and then she would start wetting the bed, and finally she would choke to death on her own tongue. It was Zelda's revenge.
No one could talk Rachel out of this belief--not her mother, her father, or Dr. Murray, who diagnosed a mild backsprain and then told Rachel brusquely (cruelly, some--Louis, for instance--would have said) to stop behaving so badly. She ought to remember that her sister had just died, Dr. Murray told her; her parents were prostate with grief and this was not the time for Rachel to make a childish play for attention. Only the slowly abating pain had been able to convince her that she was neither the victim of Zelda's supernatural vengeance nor God's just punishment of the wicked. For months (or so she told Louis; it had actually been years, eight of them) afterward she would awaken from nightmares in which her sister died over and over again, and in the dark Rachel's hands would fly to her back to make sure it was all right. In the frightful aftermath of these dreams she often thought that the closet door would bang open and Zelda would lurch out, blue and twisted, her eyes rolled up to shiny whites, her black tongue puffing out through her lips, her hands hooked into claws to murder the murderer cowering in her bed with her hands jammed into the small of her back . . .
She had not attended Zelda's funeral or any funeral since.
"If you'd told me this before," Louis said, "it would have explained a hell of a lot."
"Lou, I couldn't," she said simply. She sounded very sleepy now. "Since then I've been . . . I guess a little phobic on the subject."
Just a little phobic, Louis thought. Yeah, right.
"I can't . . . seem to help it. In my mind I know you're right, that death is perfectly natural--good, even--but what my mind knows and what happens . . . inside me . . ."
"Yeah," he said.
"That day I blew up at you," she said, "I knew that Ellie was just crying over the idea . . . a way of getting used to it . . . but I couldn't help it. I'm sorry, Louis."
"No apology needed," he said, stroking her hair. "But what the hell, I accept it anyway, if it'll make you feel better."
She smiled. "It does, you know. And I feel better. I feel as if I just sicked up something that's poisoned part of me for years."
"Maybe you have."
Rachel's eyes slipped closed and then opened again . . . slowly. "And don't blame it all on my father, Louis. Please. That was a terrible time for them. The bills--Zelda's bills--were sky-high. My dad had missed his chance to expand into the suburbs, and the sales in the downtown store were off. On top of that, my mother was half-crazy herself.
"Well, it all worked out. It was as if Zelda's death was the signal for good times to come around again. There had been a recession, but then the money loosened up and Daddy got his loan, and since then he's never looked back. But that's why they've always been possessive of me, I think. It's not just because I'm the only one left--"
"It's guilt," Louis said.
"Yes, I suppose. And you won't be mad at me if I'm sick when they bury Norma?"
"No, honey, I won't be mad." He paused and then took her hand. "May I take Ellie?"
Her hand tightened in his. "Oh L
ouis, I don't know," she said. "She's so young--"
"She's known where babies come from for a year or more," he reminded her again.
She was quiet for a long time, looking up at the ceiling and biting her lips. "If you think it's best," she said finally. "If you think it won't . . . won't hurt her."
"Come over here, Rachel," he said, and that night they slept back-to-stomach in Louis's bed, and when she woke up trembling in the middle of the night, the Valium worn off, he soothed her with his hands and whispered in her ear that everything was okay, and she slept again.
33
"For man--and woman--is like the flowers in the valley, which bloom today and are tomorrow cast into the oven: the time of man is but a season; it cometh, and so it passeth away. Let us pray."
Ellie, resplendent in a navy blue dress bought especially for the occasion, dropped her head so abruptly that Louis, sitting next to her in the pew, heard her neck creak. Ellie had been in few churches, and of course it was her first funeral; the combination had awed her to unaccustomed silence.
For Louis, it had been a rare occasion with his daughter. Mostly blinded by his love for her, as he was by his love for Gage, he rarely observed her in a detached way; but today he thought he was seeing what was almost a textbook case of the child nearing the end of life's first great developmental stage; an organism of almost pure curiosity, storing up information madly in almost endless circuits. Ellie had been quiet even when Jud, looking strange but elegant in his black suit and lace-up shoes (Louis believed it was the first time he had ever seen him in anything but loafers or green rubber boots), had bent over, kissed her, and said: "Glad you could come, honey. And I bet Norma is too."
Ellie had gazed at him, wide-eyed.
Now the Methodist minister, Reverend Laughlin, was pronouncing the benediction, asking God to lift up His countenance upon them and give them peace.
"Will the pallbearers come forward?" he asked.
Louis started to rise, and Ellie halted him, tugging his arm frantically. She looked scared. "Daddy!" she stage-whispered. "Where are you going?"
"I'm one of the pallbearers, honey," Louis said, sitting down beside her again for a moment and putting an arm around her shoulders. "That means I'm going to help carry Norma out. There are four of us that are going to do it--me and two of Jud's nephews and Norma's brother."
" 'Where will I find you?"
Louis glanced down front. The other three pallbearers had assembled there, along with Jud. The rest of the congregation was filing out, some of them weeping.
"If you just go out on the steps, I'll meet you there," he said. "All right, Ellie?"
"Yes," she said. "Just don't forget me."
"No, I won't."
He got up again, and she tugged his hand again.
"Daddy?"
"What, babe?"
"Don't drop her," Ellie whispered.
*
Louis joined the others, and Jud introduced him to the nephews, who were really second or third cousins . . . descendants of Jud's father's brother. They were big fellows in their twenties with a strong facial resemblance. Norma's brother was somewhere in his late fifties, Louis guessed, and while the strain of a death in the family was on his face, he seemed to be bearing up well.
"Pleased to meet you all," Louis said. He felt a trifle uncomfortable--an outsider in the family circle.
They nodded at him.
"Ellie okay?" Jud asked and nodded to her. She was lingering in the vestibule, watching.
Sure--she just wants to make sure I don't go up in a puff of smoke, Louis thought and almost smiled. But then that thought called up another one: Oz the Gweat and Tewwible. And the smile died.
"Yes, I think so," Louis said and raised a hand to her. She raised hers in return and went outside then in a swirl of navy blue dress. For a moment Louis was uneasily struck by how adult she looked. It was the sort of illusion, no matter how fleeting, that could give a man pause.
"You guys ready?" one of the nephews asked.
Louis nodded; so did Norma's younger brother.
"Take it easy with her," Jud said. His voice had roughened. Then he turned away and walked slowly up the aisle with his head down.
Louis moved to the back left corner of the steel-gray American Eternal coffin Jud had chosen for his wife. He laid hold of his runner and the four of them slowly carried Norma's coffin out into the bright still cold February first. Someone--the church custodian, he supposed--had laid down a good bed of cinders over the slippery path of tamped snow. At the curb a Cadillac hearse idled white exhaust into the winter air. The funeral director and his husky son stood beside it, watching them, ready to lend a hand if anyone (her brother, perhaps) should slip or flag.
Jud stood beside him and watched as they slid the coffin inside.
"Goodbye, Norma," he said and lit a cigarette. "I'll see you in a while, old girl."
Louis slipped an arm around Jud's shoulders, and Norma's brother stood close by on his other side, crowding the mortician and his son into the background. The burly nephews (or second cousins, or whatever they were) had already done a fade, the simple job of lifting and carrying done. They had grown distant from this part of the family; they had known the woman's face from photographs and a few duty visits perhaps--long afternoons spent in the parlor eating Norma's cookies and drinking Jud's beer, perhaps not really minding the old stories of times they had not lived through and people they had not known, but aware of things they could have been doing all the same (a car that could have been washed and Turtle-waxed, a league bowling practice, maybe just sitting around the TV and watching a boxing match with some friends), and glad to be away when the duty was done.
Jud's part of the family was in the past now, as far as they were concerned; it was like an eroded planetoid drifting away from the main mass, dwindling, little more than a speck. The past. Pictures in an album. Old stories told in rooms that perhaps seemed too hot to them--they were not old; there was no arthritis in their joints; their blood had not thinned. The past was runners to be gripped and hefted and later let go. After all, if the human body was an envelope to hold the human soul--God's letters to the universe--as most churches taught, then the American Eternal coffin was an envelope to hold the human body, and to these husky young cousins or nephews or whatever they were, the past was just a dead letter to be filed away.
God save the past, Louis thought and shivered for no good reason other than that the day would come when he would be every bit unfamiliar to his own blood--his own grandchildren if Ellie or Gage produced kids and he lived to see them. The focus shifted. Family lines degenerated. Young faces looking out of old photographs.
God save the past, he thought again and tightened his grip around the old man's shoulders.
The ushers put the flowers into the back of the hearse. The electric rear window rose and thumped home in its socket. Louis went back to where his daughter was, and they walked to the station wagon together, Louis holding Ellie's arm so she wouldn't slip in her good shoes with the leather soles. Car engines were starting up.
"Why are they putting on their lights, Daddy?" Ellie asked with mild wonder. "Why are they putting on their lights in the middle of the day?"
"They do it," Louis began and heard the thickness in his own voice, "to honor the dead, Ellie." He pulled out the knob that turned on the wagon's headlights. "Come on."
*
They were going home at last, the graveside ceremony over--actually it was held at the small Mount Hope Chapel; no grave would be dug for Norma until spring--when Ellie suddenly burst into tears.
Louis glanced at her, surprised but not particularly alarmed. "Ellie, what is it?"
"No more cookies," Ellie sobbed. "She made the best oatmeal cookies I ever ate. But she won't make them anymore because she's dead. Daddy, why do people have to be dead?"
"I don't really know," Louis said. "To make room for all the new people, I guess. Little people like you and your brother Gage."
/> "I'm never going to get married or do sex and have babies!" Ellie declared, crying harder than ever. "Then maybe it'll never happen to me! It's awful! It's m-m-mean!"
"But it's an end to suffering," Louis said quietly. "And as a doctor I see a lot of suffering. One of the reasons I wanted the job at the university was because I got sick of looking at it day in and day out. Young people quite often have pain . . . bad pain, even . . . but that's not quite the same as suffering."