Down there at the end, at the last turn of the plot, all the lost and absconded fathers waiting. Rosie’s own. And Boney. Pierce’s, who had been found again after years and years, apparently, and not on bad terms with his son now, she thought; and still. Kraft never mentioned his father in his memoir: lost too. She felt a clear pattern knitting itself together in the world around her, the world of lives within which she lived: a pattern like an idea for a painting, The Lost Fathers, a pattern that had lain all around her for a long time but which she hadn’t noticed till now. A plague of dead estranged absent ignorant refusing fathers.
Was that because of the curse the world labored under? Or was that the spell itself? If it was, how was she supposed to fix it, find everyone’s father for them?
She awoke then, as from a little sleep, returned to where she stood before Boney’s suits, marveling at what she had just thought, which evanesced as soon as she rethought it, bearing away with it its dream-darkness.
Come on, which of these. It didn’t matter at all, she should just reach in and take one, but the fact that it didn’t matter at all kept her from choosing. A summer seersucker? Something dark and respectful of death’s dominion? Once when she was young, an avid reader of all kinds of fictions, she had determined to her own satisfaction that ghosts are not alive for themselves, but are only creations of the persons who see them: and that was because of the clothes they wear. Where did they get them, the tattered wedding gowns, the top hats, rotted cerements, suits of armor? Were you supposed to believe the clothes were ghosts too?
She shuddered hugely in the heat, plunged her arm in among the empty male forms, which wavered, upset, at her intrusion, and abstracted one. Brown. Fine.
“Fine,” Sam said gaily, enjoying this. “Now what else.”
“Socks, shirt, undies.”
“Okay. Can I pick out the socks?”
“Okay.” Good Lord, as ready to play the game of death and burial as she was any other. But the choosing wasn’t much fun, for though Boney had many pairs of socks, all rolled into neat rolls, every single pair was black.
The Danish Brethren share a plain white wooden church building on a knoll high up in Blackbury Jambs with another small denomination, neither of them having members enough to support a church of its own. Since the Danish Brethren (among other theological and liturgical oddities) holds its weekly divine service not on Sunday but on Saturday evening, the arrangement could be worked out.
Despite all Rosie’s efforts to meet Boney’s wishes and make little of the event, the church was going to be full. Boney had lived here and in Cascadia since the previous century, Allan Butterman reminded her; a lot of people knew him. She had filled the altar with flowers, refusing the funeral parlor’s offer of wreaths and sprays of gladiolus (“sadiolus” she called them, and Sam laughed) and cutting instead her own armfuls of phlox and day lilies and sweet william at Arcady, stuffing the funeral director’s vases with them not very professionally, scattering leaves and petals underfoot where they were crushed into the waxed wood and purplish rug.
Pierce inhaled the violent perfume. He had walked up from his building on Maple Street, arriving too early, entering the austere space with a sense at once of pleasure and transgression (a sin, in his childhood, to attend services in the churches of schismatics); he had taken a rear pew. Boney in his box of wood lay in the aisle.
Rosie at the front of the church turned and saw him (he wouldn’t have guessed from where he sat that the woman in the dark suit and hat was she). She slipped from her pew and came down the side aisle to him.
“Pierce.” She sat to whisper to him. “Listen, I know this is a little funny. But can I ask you a favor.” There was no response he could make to that, and he waited for her to continue. “See the guy in the front row on the right? The sort of stooped one? That’s Boney’s cousin.”
“Ah.”
“He was supposed to be a whatsit, who carries the. The coffin. Casket. Pallbearer. Only now he just told me he can’t. His back or something. So I wondered if you.”
A small wave of resistant horror came over Pierce, and passed. He hadn’t been asked to help carry his uncle Sam, and couldn’t remember now why he hadn’t. “Um,” he said. “There’s nobody else to do it, family, friends? I mean I’d be happy to, but. I hardly knew him.”
“All dead,” Rosie said. She looked up then, and Pierce saw her go pale a little, a thing he didn’t often actually see people do; he turned. Val was coming uncertainly up the center aisle. She turned in at Pierce’s pew with something like relief
Not all dead, Rosie thought. “Listen,” she said. “Val.” Val wore a darkly dramatic swathe of a dress, not black when you looked closely but iridescent and many-colored like a grackle’s plumage. And she wore dark glasses. A movie star incognito. “Do you want to help carry him?”
Val answered nothing. It took Rosie a moment to see that she had not understood and that behind the dark glasses was trying to make sense of Rosie’s weird challenge.
“Be a pallbearer, I mean,” Rosie said. “You know.”
“Christ no,” Val said.
“Sure, okay,” Rosie said, and touched her shoulder. “Come on, Pierce.” She took his hand, and Pierce slipped from his pew; she led him up the side aisle to sit by her, not releasing his hand but gripping it with a pressure strangely intense.
The service was as spare as the church; the minister too, a woman in a dark suit not unlike Rosie’s, scrubbed cheeks and gray ash-blond hair, whose eyes and mouth were good-natured; when she rose at the service’s beginning to say that the deceased had requested no eulogy or sermon and that his wishes would be respected here, she did it as gravely and eloquently as though it had been a eulogy. Then she opened her book.
Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither; the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.
What touched Pierce always in Christian burials, what never failed to bring surprising tears to his eyes, was when they talked of the soul coming home, to be hurt never more. Because they couldn’t say it without reminding you of all that souls do suffer. Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord. Nothing can touch him further.
It was very brief, and then Rosie nudged him, and a funeral-home functionary showed him his place and his handholds, and with Allan Butterman and four others Pierce didn’t know, elders of the community, he carried Boney’s box (was it light or heavy? Hard to say) down the aisle and out the door, onto the gurney of the hearse. Then he realized that he could not now turn toward home, but would have to go on to the cemetery, wherever it was, and help to get Boney into his closet in the earth, from which there is no exit.
“Ride with me,” Val at his elbow said. “I’ll tell you a story.”
Allan had persuaded Rosie to have the reception catered, at the Foundation’s expense; Mrs. Pisky, still mighty in the power of her caretaking, knew what to do, and made the arrangements as though she had been thinking about them for years; so there were long tables on the lawn laid with white cloths showing the fold-marks, like linens in Florentine paintings of dead saints, and coolers beneath them full of refreshments, and young people in white shirts behind them to serve, and even a kid to help park cars. All that early morning young people had come and gone and passed Rosie in the hall or on the lawn on their errands, asking her questions in lowered voices (though they sometimes laughed among themselves as they raised their tables and laid their cloths); and now it was done and the guests were gravely entering onto the lawns too large ever to seem crowded, and were waited on discreetly. Rosie thought: the Elysian Fields. As though they had all gone over together in their nice clothes to a stiller, calmer version of their earthly life.
She had swallowed a quick drink to fortify herself, maybe too quick, she felt she floated somewhere above the scene, able to observe keenly, but not certain she could participate. There was Allan, and the men from New York, and the weedy distant cousin. Spofford, in boots and a black
suit from which his brown wrists protruded, where had he found or been keeping it; he looked more like a marshal than a mourner. As she watched, Pierce Moffett broke off his conversation with him, and moved across the lawn, to speak, apparently, to the minister, who awaited him, a nice-sized drink in her own hand.
“I wanted to ask you,” Pierce said to her when they had introduced themselves. (Her name was Rhea Rasmussen, but she was no immediate relative of Boney’s; they had tried hard to find the connection but had been unable to.) “When we were at the cemetery?”
“Yes.”
“As we carried the, toward the, the. You asked us to stop for a moment, and you read …”
“Yes.”
“And then we went on, a few steps, and then we stopped again.”
“Yes.”
Pierce had raised his eyes at this second pause (the old man was after all pretty heavy, he and his box) to see Val’s Beetle, outside the gates, Val in it, her dark glasses on; she had chosen not to participate. And had not come to this reception. “Then again, three or four times more.”
“Yes. Seven times in all, actually.” She smiled, and her smile lightened her austere features, lit her eyes.
“Well what was … Oh. Seven times.”
“There’s an esoteric reason, one we don’t really anymore …”
“The planets,” said Pierce.
“Yes.” She laughed a little. “You actually know? Usually it takes a lot of explaining. I sometimes hope no one will ask.”
“Sort of, yes. For the leaving of earthly concerns and heaviness behind.”
The soul, at death, sheds the body, but not the incorporeal or less corporeal spirit wrapping; that is only discarded as the soul ascends through the spheres that have governance over it. As the soul rises, it gives back the garment or integument that belongs to each sphere before it can go through to the next. That was neo-Platonic lore, Pierce thought, or Gnostic myth; Hermetic. How had it come to these northern Protestants?
“So we were pausing for each.”
“They do the same thing in the Orthodox Jewish burial service.” She shook the ice in her glass and drank. “I think we probably got it from them.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Did you notice our weekly service is on Saturday? We were very ecumenical. It’s an interesting story. Maybe you’d like to hear it someday.”
“I would,” Pierce said. “Very much.” Damn if each time they paused Boney had not in fact seemed to grow lighter. He looked into his glass, and laughed a little, imagining Boney’s soul ascending through the spheres (the same spheres Beau Brachman had drawn in the dirt of his driveway), up up to the outside, wriggling out of all the heavy overcoats of earthly hurt and astral destiny. Unless of course some unforesworn attachment held him back.
Una Knox. The name, when Val had said it to him, had tickled somewhere deep, in the wrong or unlikely part of his memory, but he couldn’t reach it.
As she stood at the lawn’s edge waiting for the courage to go mingle, Rosie felt a hand on her elbow.
“Oh hi, Mike.”
“Rosie.” He held her arm and studied her for a long moment, looking into her face with a clear frank neutrality that was probably supposed to be open and receptive but which maybe he knew was also unsettling. Then he said: “It’s hard for you.”
“Yep,” she said.
“I guess you were there.”
“Yep.” She supposed she could say that Boney had died in her arms, hers and Val’s and Mrs. Pisky’s. She remembered the long hall, the lighted bathroom. Heat lightning or something, a rocket going off, had lit the windows momentarily just then.
“You had got to be pretty close,” Mike said.
“Well. Close. I don’t know.” She looked at Mike, who was now gazing smiling over the funeral crowd, hands loosely clasped behind his back. The beetle-browed truculent look he had worn the last months was all gone, had been gone for a while she realized, replaced by this face, sweet, wide-eyed, even gay, and somehow predatory. He appeared a stranger to her.
“You’ve got a lot on your mind just now,” he said. “I don’t want to interfere in your. In your grieving. And there’ve got to be a lot of business matters left over.”
There were; lots. If you live denying you’re going to die, you tend to avoid finishing things. She said nothing, only clasped her own hands before her.
“This isn’t easy to bring up,” he said. “But I want to ask you a favor.”
“Sure.” Sure, ask: when Rosie was a kid her best friend Sylvia had explained to her that you could perfectly correctly say Sure when somebody said Can I ask you a favor, and still be able to refuse to do what was asked. Sylvia had later betrayed Rosie atrociously; she still remembered.
“Things are really changing in The Woods,” Mike said. “Really changing. Our whole mission could change. There are major new things coming in.” He shook his head in what appeared to be awe, and to Rosie it seemed his eyes were moist. “All I wanted to say,” he said, “is that this would really be a terrible time for anything to happen to our funding.”
She said nothing to this either. She hadn’t heard that big changes were sweeping through The Woods. She wondered why Mike felt responsible for the funding that the Rasmussen Foundation supplied to The Woods, which was really a small part of their income, used for research projects she understood, Rosie hadn’t ever looked closely at the paperwork.
“Well gee,” she said. “I can’t tell you anything, Michael.”
In the middle distance toward which they both looked, a big older man in a rumpled suit stood, unattached to any group. Not someone she knew. He held a summer straw hat behind his back, and looked off placidly toward no one.
“I understand. Really. But I think if you were involved in the things that are going on there.” He kicked at a harmless patch of moss that lay before his foot, testing its tenacity. “You used to be interested. In the work up there. My work.”
“Climacterics,” Rosie said. She wasn’t going to ask about it. Mike laughed lightly, dismissively even Rosie thought, as though she had mentioned some ancient enthusiasm of his, motorbikes or stamp-collecting.
Who was that old guy? Not a local person, that was somehow evident. His big pumpkin face was astonishingly lined, his little eyes and features sunken in the expanse. “So what’s the favor?” she said.
“I’d like you to meet somebody. Somebody who’s been working with us at The Woods. I really wanted the old man to meet him, but.”
“But,” Rosie said. “Yeah. So is he a therapist?”
Mike laughed, the new little overflowing-with-unsayable-things laugh. “Um. Yes.”
“What’s his name? Why do you want me to meet him?”
“His name,” Mike said. “Now don’t laugh. His name is Honeybeare.”
“Oh yeah?” She didn’t laugh. She had actually known someone with that name, a swimming instructor, skinny and sour, under whose coaching Rosie had got to be a fair competitor.
“Raymond Honeybeare,” Mike said. “I wanted you to meet him because.” He stopped to choose among the reasons, which evidently clamored or contested within him. “Because he asked.”
“To talk to me?”
“Well the Foundation.”
“That’s not me,” Rosie said.
“I just think,” Mike said, “that you would be very interested. I really think.”
She heard that. That was Mike speaking, the little Mike inside the Mike that usually did the talking, the Mike she almost never heard anymore. “Well,” she said. “Okay. Maybe sometime.”
“Now would be a good time,” he said, and took her elbow again.
“Now?”
“That’s him,” Mike said, indicating the big man holding his hat and gazing at nothing.
“Oh,” Rosie said. She resisted Mike’s arm pushing her gently that way. “Oh Michael no. Uh-uh.”
“Just to say hello.”
“There’s no reason, Mike.” She was quite certain
she didn’t want to meet, speak to, touch that man. She felt his proximity to her, his phony aloofness, with a sudden revulsion.
“Look,” she said firmly, standing her ground. “Not now.”
“When?”
“Make an appointment,” she said. “Mike I’ve got things to see to.”
She turned away, walking quickly and clumsily in her unaccustomed heels, and didn’t look back; sorry for Mike’s embarrassment, sorry she could do no other, and wondering why.
She got no farther than the veranda, where Allan Butterman sat with the people who had come out from New York, Boney’s weedy cousin and the members of the Foundation’s board or their lawyers or agents, who had sat up front in the church with Allan. Allan raised a shrimp on a toothpick to her in salute.
“Rosie.”
“Hi, Allan.” She nodded to the others, aware of their attention to her. Would this day never be over. She hoped she wouldn’t have to address any of them by name; Allan had introduced her to them at the church and before that had supplied her with a list of their names, but no name had attached itself firmly to a face.
“The gentlemen have to be heading back,” he said. “They wondered if they could speak to you.”
“Sure,” Rosie said. Allan had promised her she wouldn’t be grilled about money or made to account for her stewardship, such as it was. Her heart nevertheless beat faster.
She took them into Boney’s office, which Mrs. Pisky had tidied, though the oxygen tank and breathing apparatus still stood against the wall, servants waiting to be dismissed. It was cool. Rosie could still detect Boney’s odor, but the others would not recognize it.
Allan had said they wanted to talk, but he talked most; they only crossed their legs, adjusted their tie-knots, smoothed their beautiful suits, looked with firm but gentle kindness on her. Allan gave a brief history of the Rasmussen Foundation, looking now and then to one of the others for confirmation, and receiving nods; he cast his eyes over Boney’s desk as he spoke, looking maybe for one of the long yellow pencils he was accustomed to manipulate as he talked, conducting his own discourse with it.