American Appetites (19 page)

OF GLYNNIS'S FAMILY
so few remained extant, to use the expression Glynnis was in the habit of using, that notifying them of her death, and of the funeral, involved only a few telephone calls and a second telegram sent to the Tokyo Hilton, where, Ian had been given to understand, Glynnis's older sister, Kate, and her husband, Richard, were staying. Richard Kirkpatrick was an official with the World Bank, and the trip to Japan was primarily for business purposes, though, as it turned out, he and Katherine had already left for Kyoto; by the time they returned to Tokyo, discovered the first telegram, and made arrangements to fly home, Glynnis was already dead. If it arrived at all, the second telegram arrived after their departure.

Katherine, whom Ian had not known well, and with whom Glynnis had not been close, was greatly upset by Glynnis's death, came close to breaking down when she viewed the body, and, with her husband, had a good many questions to ask, both of Ian and of the hospital authorities, about what had happened to her. An accident involving a plate-glass window, emergency neurosurgery, the patient's regaining consciousness only to lapse into a coma and die within nineteen days—Katherine said repeatedly that she did not believe it, simply could not believe it: could not accept it. In private Richard Kirkpatrick asked Ian if his sister-in-law had been drinking, and Ian hesitated so long before replying that he said, curtly, “Never mind—I can find out from the medical report.”

In all, only six members of Glynnis's family made the trip to Hazelton: the Kirkpatricks, a woman cousin of Glynnis's whom Ian had never met before, and a sad trio of elderly aunts. Ian invited them to stay with him and Bianca—he would happily sleep on a couch in his study—but they preferred accommodations in a Holiday Inn near the Thruway. At such a time he couldn't possibly want houseguests, Katherine said.

She knows, thought Ian.

IAN AND BIANCA
McCullough and the Kirkpatrick contingent were driven to the First Unitarian Church on South Main, and then to Hazelton Memorial Park, in two hired cars: “stretch limos” as they were known in the trade, elegantly black of course, and smartly gleaming of course, with darkly tinted windows, to match the hearse. Ian had spoken of driving his own car but Bianca had objected strenuously. “You know Mommy would want things done in style,” she said. Once in the limousine Ian had been grateful enough for it: for being spared the effort, in this instance a public effort, of driving his own car; grateful for the tinted windows, which spared his eyes from the achingly bright spring sunshine, and for the space that allowed him room to stretch his long, rather stiff legs. The limousine was surely empowered by gasoline yet made virtually no sound; it passed by familiar sights as if effortlessly, like a car in a dream. Bianca said, striking the cushioned seat beside her with a fist, “This is the life!”

Their driver wore a uniform and a visored black cap with a military look; had it been royalty he bore along Hazelton's streets he could not have been more deferential. He introduced himself to the McCulloughs: “Poins is my name.” Ian smiled in surprise but could not, for the life of him, figure out why.

THE FIRST UNITARIAN
Church of Hazelton-on-Hudson, one of the village's officially designated historic buildings, was plain, even spartan, both outside and in; wood-frame and foursquare and painted a shade of white so subdued as to resemble pearly gray. The windows were tall and narrow and emitted light that too seemed subdued. All was sobriety, a sort of cerebral calm: the pews were oak and comfortingly hard, the minister's pulpit no more despotic than a lecturer's podium. Ian, who had never stepped inside the church before and had, until the other day, never exchanged with Reverend Ebenbach, or, as he wished to be called, Hank Ebenbach, more than a dozen casual words, felt both relief and disappointment: if the church did not embarrass, neither did it excite. Ian thought it sad and perplexing that, drawn to Christianity as she was, in resistance to the genial humanism-atheism of her community, Glynnis should have chosen this church; should have chosen Hank Ebenbach, who might have been a colleague of Ian's at the Institute, rather diffident, scholarly in manner, earnest and self-effacing, over other possibilities. Did a Unitarian minister, Ian wondered, conceive of himself as a man of God, or was such a notion simply too extravagant and histrionic to be taken seriously? Ebenbach seemed to say, Trust me; I will never lie to you.

But there was the terrible casket bearing Glynnis's body, and here was the family of the deceased, and here, filing into the church, filling up the pews, the many friends and acquaintances who had come to mourn: half of Hazelton-on-Hudson, it almost seemed. Surely, Ian thought, they required more than simply not to be lied to. . . . Once, speaking impulsively, Glynnis had told a gathering of friends, I don't believe in God as such and I don't want to believe if it requires the usual anthropomorphic crap, but I want some sense of there being, you know—and here her voice trailed off self-consciously, defensively—a little more than just
us:
just
here
.

She had not, however, attended church regularly or even, in a sense, irregularly; her own family had been nominally Episcopalian and she'd seemed to retain, like Ian, few haunting memories to contend with of a specifically religious nature: no familial sense of obligation or duty. When Bianca had been a small and therefore tractable child, Glynnis had sometimes taken her, but this custom was eventually discontinued; Glynnis had once or twice invited Ian to join them, but never, it seemed to Ian, sincerely—as if churchgoing, so against the grain of Hazelton-on-Hudson and, in a sense, of Glynnis's own nature, were too private a matter to be shared with another adult. In recent years Glynnis had probably not attended Sunday morning services with Reverend Ebenbach more than a dozen times, but, to Ian's considerable relief, this seemed not to have offended the man in the slightest. “Even when I hadn't seen your wife in months I always thought of her as a member of the congregation,” Ebenbach said, “and I'm reasonably sure she thought of herself in those terms too.”

Ian stared at Ebenbach, struck by the notion—of course it was absurd, and instantly dismissed—that this man had been Glynnis's lover. But he said only, quietly, “Yes.”

At eleven-fifteen, though most of the pews were filled and Reverend Ebenbach was waiting to begin, people were still crowding into the church. Ian felt a moment's anxiety, that he had made a mistake; it might have been better to have kept the ceremony private and small. He had not quite considered Glynnis's local popularity and her measure of local fame, nor had it occurred to him that most of his Institute colleagues and their wives would turn out, as if in a solid phalanx of sympathy. That it must have been sympathy for him, and not for Glynnis, whom some of his colleagues scarcely knew, pierced him to the heart.

And there were, too, surely, the merely curious, the morbid minded: those who had an instinct, however infrequently gratified in Hazelton, for local scandal.

Reverend Ebenbach began the service by calling upon them to pray. Ian meant to concentrate on all that took place, to memorize, if possible, the man's elegiac words; but within minutes his thoughts drifted compulsively, his gaze, like Bianca's, drawn to the casket only a few yards away—that fiercely polished object, a work of art, a work of mystification, appearing, in the narrow space at the front of the church, so much larger and heavier than it needed to be. It was for all its beauty somehow rude and barbaric: the very cynosure of interest, beside which Ebenbach's earnest words quickly faded. To think that Glynnis was inside it—contained inside it! Dear sweet Jesus, Ian thought, paralyzed by a wave of terror, can such things be?

The service lasted less than an hour, and there followed then the ride, slow, even langurous, to the cemetery . . . the sense, more pronounced now than earlier, of floating through a dream, being borne, helpless and unresisting, to a horrific end. From the sidewalk people looked after them; children stared; Ian recalled the funeral processions of his childhood, and how they had filled him with dread. The very slowness of the vehicles had seemed unnatural. He could not remember when he had learned about death, its unspeakable finality; he wondered if, in the vanity of his absentmindedness, he had ever learned. His father had died when Ian was twelve but had been so long separated from the family, living in a distant state, the death had seemed belated; nominal; not even, though a suicide, particularly shocking. His mother had died when Ian was seventeen, of lymphatic cancer, so suddenly diagnosed, and so suddenly lethal, it had seemed hardly more real.

Bianca said uneasily, “Aunt Katherine doesn't seem very friendly, does she. I think she blames us for . . . what happened.”

“What? For what?”

“Oh, you know. It's an unconscious sort of thing. Like we didn't protect her or something. Mommy. Like we didn't get the best doctor for her or something. The way people are when they're upset . . . sort of primitive.” She paused. She said, “Aunt Katherine was always jealous of Mommy, you know. At least that was what I gathered from some things Mommy said. I guess a lot of people were jealous of her—women, I mean.”

Ian, who was staring out the window, did not want to think of his sister-in-law, Katherine, still less of her tall stern husband, Richard. He did not want to think of what the vehicle in front of this vehicle held, its rear doors opening as the ambulance doors had opened: receiving its cargo, relinquishing it.

Fell, mister?—or was pushed?

In the Hazelton Memorial Cemetery, on stiff yet shaky legs, Ian and Bianca walked a short distance, most of it uphill, to the plot Ian had contracted to buy only the other day. The air smelled of green and of damp, of fresh unambiguous earth. There was no marker for Glynnis's grave, but the grave, which is to say the rectangular gash in the earth, had been dug; was there: a category of being to which no helpful name could be assigned. For surely “hole” was inadequate.

The pallbearers bore their heavy burden up the grassy incline, moving carefully: very carefully. Ian felt his shoulder muscles twinge in sympathy. It struck him as a matter of immense significance that the casket, containing, as it did, a human being, one of their party, should be so calmly surrendered to the earth, that no one was going to object, or think it queer.

Without the scrim of the limousine's dark glass the cemetery looked subtly different: the sunshine was rawer; the grass thickly threaded with dandelions; numerous birch trees, their roots cruelly exposed, appeared to be slated for demolition. The faces of Ian's friends too looked raw, and less attractive than he recalled: aging, if not frankly aged; on the edge of being old. The pallbearers panted from their effort; Denis Grinnell wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.

Ian realized something, suddenly . . . an elated stab, as of supreme wisdom. But he could not think what it was.

Something he wanted to tell his friends?

During the brief burial ceremony, so much more valedictory than the ceremony in the church, Ian had to resist the impulse, at times nearly physical, of looking around for Glynnis.

He found himself looking at feet: at the women's high-heeled shoes, at the men's polished shoes; at legs, stockinged, trousered; at his own trouser cuffs, his shoes. His? He noticed that Bianca wore no stockings: was bare-legged, startlingly white-legged, in beat-up old shoes about which her mother would lament, How could you, Bianca?—at such a time?

Glynnis's coffin was being lowered into the grave: a sheerly mechanical process that aroused interest in the onlookers, as such processes usually do. Would it work, or would it break down at the crucial moment? The motorized whirring reminded Ian of the machines of incalculable precision that had kept Glynnis alive for so many days; for he saw now, and wondered at the opacity of his thinking, that of course she had been dead during much of the time he'd sat by her side, a deluded suitor. Had he really thought she would be returned to him and their life would continue as always?—as if nothing had happened?—seizing her shoulders as he had, in a paroxysm of murderous rage, and throwing her backward, helplessly backward, into death: into a sheet of glass. He had not known what he'd done but he had (and this was the paradox) intended it; he had not intended it (and this
was
the paradox) but he'd known what he did. There was something about a knife, a knife that had gone flying, and he'd cut his silly fingers on it, the sort of mad self-hurting thing one spouse does to get a point or two up on the other: You want to hurt me, yes fine hurt me, yes like this, I will help you goddamn you, like
this
. Afterward he'd come home to the devastation and soberly cleaned it up, looked for but did not at first find the knife: someone had carried it out into the kitchen, laid it on a counter. Who? One of the police officers? Ian himself? He could not recall, did not care, washed the dried smears of blood off the knife, returned it to its magnetized rack from Bloomingdale's.

Now the fingers and palm of his right hand were numb, as if with Novocain. You see, Ian told Glynnis, what you have done to me.

Ebenbach was concluding his little talk.
I loved him, I love him now, I gave him up for you
—were such words possible, in terms of Ebenbach?

If not Ebenbach, and Ian was beginning to doubt Ebenbach (for the man, though appealing, looked scarcely more virile than the inadequate husband), then, Ian wondered, who? For surely the man was present, would not have stayed away.
A friend of yours, in fact
. Ian looked covertly about but was distracted by Bianca leaning against him, rather heavily, and Roberta's silent weeping, and the rivulets of tears on Meika's powdered, rather too rouged cheeks; by the way the lower part of Denis's face was stiffening, as if with a muscular spasm—and Denis's tears too, which Ian did not want to see; and there was Vaughn Cassity's fresh haircut, which was too short and unflattering to the man's large, rather regal head. There was, however, Malcolm, handsome Malcolm, the stiff springy dark hair, the thick brows, the “sculpted” mouth—Malcolm Oliver.
I loved him, I love him now, I gave him up for you
. Malcolm
was
plausible: more plausible than Ebenbach.