Dear Doctor Lily (25 page)

It was Lily's first funeral since she came to the United States. She had no idea that she would see the body of her mother-in-law. When she went with Paul through the reception-room into the larger room, with the same reverent music coming out of the walls, she stopped and said, ‘The coffin's open.'

‘It usually is, in a place like this. Dad wanted it, and so did she.'

Muriel wore pale blue, the dress that was new this year and had been to two weddings and a few summer cocktail parties, and the dinner of the Norfolk County Bar Association.

‘Come, darling. Come up to her.'

Lily had never seen anyone dead. After she made herself look at Muriel, she felt she still had not.

The line of people filing soberly past held back. Paul took
Lily's hand, and she peered over the edge of the coffin, like looking into the frozen-meat compartment at the supermarket. They had set Muriel's hair with tighter waves than she liked, and made up her face more elaborately than she had ever done. Her small domestic hands were crossed on her bosom, which they must have padded out, because didn't people go flat when they stopped breathing?

Did everyone who passed by to pay their respects have a look to see if the blue dress was moving, like the Sleeping Beauty at Madame Tussaud's? Muriel's eyes were closed, but she was wearing her glasses.

Thank God she had left the girls with Nora and James.

With Muriel exposed to view in this cheating fashion – was it fair to let people see you dead rather than just remember you alive? – it seemed rude to turn away. Lily went to Paul and his father and stood close to them. The Judge was very carefully dressed in his dark pin-stripe with a silver tie, every strand of grey hair in place, pinkly shaven, very gentlemanly. Paul's mouth was set in the way that told Lily that he was not as relaxed as he looked, and he was worried about Terry, but he was talking to people and helping them to find seats, in charge of himself and the occasion. He was the kind of man who was reassuring to have around at weddings and funerals.

After Lily sat down with him, she looked round her, because she could not sit up front there and stare at what was left of poor Muriel, and she saw Terry shuffle in like a small jeopardized alien, from another world.

Because he slid into a metal folding-chair at the back, Terry did not see that Gramma's casket was open until the service was over and his father beckoned him across the room to come up front.

Like this?
Terry gestured at his jeans and dirty T-shirt and shrunk denim vest. His father nodded.

Terry put out his hand to his grandfather, who bent to kiss
him. He kissed his father. They had always kissed each other, and it was easier to go on than to make a big thing about stopping.

He never knew if he was supposed to kiss Lily or not, and she never knew what he wanted. She said, ‘I'm so sorry. I know you must feel very sad about your grandmother.'

For some reason, Lily seemed to Terry like a kindred spirit in this unreal gathering. She looked like Cape Cod, brown from the sun, with the top of her hair lighter than the rest, fidgeting on her feet, as if she were ready to run out with him and go sailing, or roll in the dunes, or collapse into the surf. So when she leaned forward uncertainly, he kissed her on the golden fuzz at the bottom of her cheek.

Then he saw his mother watching him. Not mad. Coolly, as if he were an amusing child.

Then he saw his grandmother.

To cover his shock, he scoffed to himself about how conventional all this was, and how typical. Didn't his family have the guts not to let themselves be manipulated by a funeral parlour called Stanhope & Towle?

Two women turned away from the casket, and murmured to the Judge, ‘She looks beautiful.'

‘She looks dead,' Terry wanted to say. He edged closer, sideways, without it being obvious.

After the first shock of seeing his grandmother there at her own funeral, she did actually look sort of beautiful. Her fond, active face was smoothed out. The skin looked good enough to touch, if you wanted to touch a dead body. A sudden attack, his father had said, and Terry had imagined terror and pain; but this was only peace, masking the horror of death. All of this nonsense: the service, the minister who told them things about Gramma they already knew, the formally dressed people, the piped music, the quilted satin inside the open casket, maybe there was some point to it, because it was all so calm and normal in the face of the enemy of howling blackness.

‘You okay?' His father put an arm around his shoulders.

‘Sure.'

‘Come back to the house with Grandpa and me.'

Terry looked at his mother.

‘Go ahead.' She nodded. ‘Give me a call later, and I'll come and collect you.'

Brian had gone back up another mountain. They had arranged where to meet. Maybe. Maybe not.

Inside his grandmother's house, he knew that he missed her. It wasn't comfortable here now, these three men of different ages sitting behind half-drawn blinds and sharing a bottle of wine and chicken-salad sandwiches with the chicken and celery cut too thick, so that they fell out of the bread.

‘Can't we go sit outside?' Terry whined.

‘It wouldn't be appropriate,' his grandfather answered.

He and Terry's father talked about who had been at the funeral service.

‘She would have been pleased. She would have liked that,' the Judge comforted himself.

They told Terry he could stay here for the night if he liked, but if he did, they might expect him to go with them tomorrow to the cremation, where they would pretend not to know that the incendiarists would switch Gramma to a cheap casket after she rolled through the swishing curtain, and re-sell the expensive one with the carved bronze handles.

‘Let's talk about your future, then,' the Judge said.

‘Not now, Grandpa, don't you want to –'

‘There's nothing I want to do.' The old man looked pretty bleak. ‘You graduate next year. What are your plans?'

Mumble, mumble. Surely the Judge knew as well as everyone else in the family that Terry had been determinedly fending off plans.

‘He's still got a bit of time to apply for college,' his father said, ‘if he wants to.'

‘Wants to? He's got to,' the Judge said with surprising energy for a man who had just said goodbye to his wife for ever. He talked about some universities he had in mind.

‘I don't think –' Terry began.

‘If you think you can't get accepted, you could always go to business school, like your father.'

‘Might be a good idea?' Paul said, as a question. He was always careful not to push Terry. Too careful. Sometimes Terry wanted
him to say, ‘Okay, this is the way it is. This is what you do.' But the poor guy still seemed to feel guilty about the divorce, and marrying again.

‘Do me a favour,' Terry sometimes wanted to say. ‘I'm an independent being. What you do doesn't affect my life.'

‘I thought, maybe, well, um – I might try art school.'

‘You might, that's true, if you think you're good enough to make a career at it.' His father considered this seriously. ‘Magazines, design.'

The Judge made a sort of ‘Pfuh' noise, and went upstairs to his study with a bunch of letters.

‘An advertising agency,' Paul said.

Terry felt very depressed. ‘Or maybe I'll kill myself.'

‘Don't be absurd.'

‘No, honestly.' If you really did plan to kill yourself, would no one take you seriously?

‘Are you on drugs?'

‘No, Dad,' Terry said wearily. If I was, I wouldn't tell you, and grass doesn't count anyway. When they legalize it, everyone will get into something else, until they legalize
that.

‘Do your readers realize,' Terry had written to the
Boston Globe,
on his school's notepaper, ‘that drugs could be legalized out of existence, if Washington was prepared to give up their share of the profits?' The
Globe
had not printed his letter.

‘How about booze? I know that a lot of kids –'

‘Don't, Dad.'

Terry meant, ‘Don't feel you have to go through the litany,' but his father said, with more spirit, ‘Leave you alone, is that it? Sit back and watch you mess up, so you can say, “No one wanted to help me”.'

‘Yeah.' Terry laughed. ‘That's about it, I guess.'

‘I love you,' his father said despondently.

‘I do too. I'm sorry. I mean, I'm sorry about Gramma. I mean, she was your mother, and all.'

Terry thought about his own mother, tricked out in a fancy casket, in her pearl-cluster earrings. He had better give up the odd times when he wished her dead, in case she went and did it.

He and his father sat and looked at each other, with
Gramma's café-au-lait lace cloth between them, like their loneliness.

‘Sure you don't want to spend the night here, Terry?'

‘I guess not. I'd better call Mom.'

He turned on the television while he waited for his mother to fetch him. This house was clean, very tidy, no cooking smells. His father and grandfather were going out to dinner, which his grandmother had never wanted anyone to do, because for those prices, they couldn't get as good as she could serve them.

His father went outside to water her plants that were in pots and tubs on the patio. Unfamiliar in his dark suit, he looked less unhappy out of doors, with the hose in his hands, something to do.

When his mother's car stopped at the end of the front path, Drummond was driving it. ‘Bye, Dad.' Terry hurried out, not wanting his father to see Drum and Fife.

‘Where's your car?' he asked as he got in.

‘I like your mother's better.' Scrounger. ‘You okay, son?'

Terry nodded. He looked out of the window at the familiar streets and houses through which he had travelled since he was very small, with Mom and Dad a unit existing solely for him. Then he took the plug out of his mind to let it empty itself to a comfortable void.

Nora was very sweet with the children. She told them that their grandmother had gone to sleep and woken in a beautiful place where there was bright light and green grass and friendly people waiting on the other side of a sparkling stream to greet her.

‘When my grandmother died,' Rose Mary said, ‘they put her in a hole in the ground.'

‘Yes, well,' Nora said brightly, ‘but she has still gone to the beautiful place.'

‘She was in the hole to stay. I helped throw some dirt on top.'

‘Not dirt, dear, earth. Soil isn't dirty.'

‘How come it's called soil, then?' Cathy looked up, strands of fine hair across her eyes.

‘Bright as a button.' Nora hugged her.

‘I want Gramma.'

Nora did not say, ‘You've got me.' You could rely on her not even to think of things like that. She said, ‘She'll always be near you to look after you. She loved you very, very much.'

‘When I bow off the stage,' James said, ‘will you say kind pretty things about me, Nor?'

‘Oh, shut up, you.' Nora sat outside the house on what passed for a lawn, making daisy chains with the children. ‘You always turn everything back to yourself.'

‘Pardon me for living,' James said. ‘You four girls have fun together. I think I'll call a taxi and go to town and see if I can get me one of those Boston Red Sox jackets to wear at home.' It would be, as they said over here, a conversation piece, the hit of the Duke's Head.

‘I'm making hamburgers for lunch.'

‘Don't wait for me. I may be a while.'

When Art came in Art's Taxi, Jam asked him to drive to the theatre. He went in, on tiptoe from holding his breath. Pyge was in her office, on the phone.

‘Jamspoon! Excuse me,' to whoever was on the phone.

‘We're going out to lunch,' Jam said masterfully.

‘So we are.'

James paid off Art's Taxi and waited until she finished giving someone on the phone a piece of her mind about bit-part salaries, and then they went off in her car.

‘Let's go where we'll be seen.'

She took him to a restaurant on the harbour, where she was greeted by several lunchers, to whom she said, ‘May I present James Spooner,' in a way that made them think he was someone, from the theatre perhaps. She kissed the proprietor and fussed until he took a Reserved sign off a table by the “water, where they could see the yachts going by, and the big power boats with fat men in dark glasses perched up high like emirs by the tall deep-sea fishing rods.

James ordered Bloody Marys, and told the waiter what should
go in them. They came with celery stalks as stirrers. He ate his crisply, to show his teeth were his own.

‘I was afraid I wouldn't see you, Pyge.'

‘You're not going?' She looked genuinely disappointed.

‘Two days. I did come back to the theatre that night, you know, but you'd gone.'

‘I left word for you. I'll kill that Alex. He's not reliable, and he mixes a lousy martini.'

Jam told her how he mixed his own Duke's Special, stirred in a pewter jug with a silver jamspoon. ‘You'll have to come and try one.'

‘And bring my own ice, I suppose.'

He laughed extravagantly, although at the pub, he was sick of American tourists and servicemen doing variations on that joke.

They had a wonderful time. They ate lobster salad, and Pyge kept saying things like, ‘Ohmygahd, this is fun,' and, ‘I'm having such a
great
time,' and laying her jewelled fingers on his arm, and tossing her head about with an eye on people at the other tables, who could not fail to notice her.

The ectoplasm hair was garnished with two micro-pigtails hanging beside either temple. She wore an orange caftan with huge violent beads: her office clothes, since she had not known she was being taken out to lunch.

She found Jam entertaining. He did his low-key imitation of Prince Philip teaching a girls' gym class, and sketched in Same-again Mabel, one of his bar creations: music-hall Yorkshire, puffing out his cheeks and waving an opinionated finger, with a napkin for a headscarf.