Ten North Frederick (4 page)

Monica could execute the Peg Slattery nod, in slightly different form. When Monica and the other Slattery daughters did the Peg Slattery nod they added a gentle smile, a continuation, in maturity, of the smiles they had been commanded to give throughout childhood. Because of the added smile, the Slattery girls' nod differed from their mother's. Monica, Marie, Michelle—each was pretty in her own way, and a pretty girl's smile, even when given through an error of recognition, is welcome the world over. Even another woman has trouble resisting a pretty girl's smile when it has asked nothing in return. People who really knew better, who had had experience of life, had been known to remark that the Slattery girls made you feel that your troubles would soon be over. Others, slightly less cynical, had said that it was easy to see that the Slattery girls had never known a moment's unhappiness. Then there were others who, until Margaret took the veil, declared that the four Slattery girls were the best vote-getters Mike Slattery had. It was a not quite accurate judgment, since Mike Slattery did not get votes in the sense of persuading voters. The individual voter as such was not a concern of Mike's; he seldom made speeches, and he had abandoned door-to-door nonsense after his second term as assemblyman. He delivered a county, not a voter; the voter was the responsibility of the captain or the ward leader. But it would be accurate to declare that the four Slattery sisters had not
cost
him any votes.

Monica finished her inspection of the women's hats; women were not likely to wear anything interesting to a funeral anyway. The clergyman talked on, pronouncing his words in the same manner as some of her old schoolmates at Manhattanville; the New York ones. It was not a Boston accent, but it was not Brooklyn either. It was just the way certain of the New York girls spoke. Some of their brothers went to Fordham and some went to Yale, and they had the same accent. Just like this clergyman.

And now he had stopped talking and the professional pallbearers were sneaking up the side aisles. Johnny Loftus, the taxi driver; Matt McGowan, who was some kind of a railroad policeman; George Longmiller, who had some job at the courthouse; Frank McNaughton, a distant cousin of Monica's husband James and a helper for the Railway Express; Jack Duff, who ran a candy store on the East Side; and Ed Cresswell, a salesman in one of the men's clothing stores. She had never noticed before that Johnny Loftus and Frank McNaughton were almost exactly the same height. She had always thought of Frank as taller than Johnny. There was six dollars apiece in it for the pallbearers, she happened to know, and could not remember how she happened to know. Probably Jim had told her. Yes, Jim had told her. They had to be strong and sober, clean-looking, about the same size, and have jobs that they could get away from for a few hours on funeral days. It seemed strange to see Matt McGowan in a Protestant church; he usually took up the collection at the seven o'clock Mass in SS. Peter & Paul's, and seeing him here was like being in Paris, France, and seeing someone from home. She wondered—but of course Monsignor Creedon approved. Johnny was a Catholic, Matt was a Catholic, Frank was a Catholic, and Jack Duff was a Catholic. They wouldn't have taken work of this kind without Monsignor Creedon's approval.

Now the honorary pallbearers were coming out of their pews. Her father. Mr. McHenry. Henry Laubach. A very tall man from out of town that she had never seen before. Mr. Hooker, the newspaper editor. Mr. Jenkins from the bank. The Governor. J. Frank Kirkpatrick, the lawyer from Philadelphia. An admiral. Dr. English. Whitney Hofman. The Mayor. Judge Williams. Mr. Johnson, the new Superintendent of Schools. A man with two canes who was new to her. Paul Donaldson, from Scranton. Sixteen altogether.

“Sixteen honorary pallbearers,” said her mother.

“I noticed that,” said Monica.

“The out-of-town people went to Yale with Joe Chapin,” said Peg Slattery.

“I never even knew he went to Yale,” said Monica. “You could fill a book with what I didn't know about him.”

“Hmm?”

“Nothing,” said Monica.

The church was slowly emptying and Monica and her mother moved into the crowded aisle.

“Very beautiful service, Mrs. Slattery, didn't you think?” The speaker was Theodore Pflug, assistant cashier of the bank, stopping to hold up the departing worshippers and make way for Peg Slattery and Monica.

“Thank you. Very beautiful. Very beautiful indeed,” said Peg Slattery.

“You notice the man with the two canes? That was David L. Harrison, a partner in J. P. Morgan and Company,” said Pflug.

“Yes, I know,” said Peg Slattery. “He went to Yale with Mr. Chapin.”

“Good morning, Mrs. McNaughton.”

“Good morning, Mr. Pflug.”

“Can I give you ladies a lift or do you have your car?”

“Very kind of you, I'm sure, but we have some shopping to do,” said Peg Slattery.

“Yes, I guess I'll go back to the bank. We're closed in honor of Mr. Chapin, but I
imagine
I can find one or
two
things to do. One or
two
, putting it mildly.”

“Well, nice to have seen you,” said Peg Slattery.

“A pleasure, I'm sure. Good-bye, Mrs. Slattery, Mrs. McNaughton. Good day.”

“Good-bye,” said Monica.

She paused with her mother at the foot of the stone steps. “You got that, didn't you?” said Peg.

“What?”

“I'm supposed to tell Dad Ted Pflug didn't take the day off, even though he was entitled to it. All right, I'll tell him. Now what do you want to do? Shall we go take a look at some hats? I'll treat you to a hat if it isn't too expensive.”

“How high can I go?”

“Thirty-five. I'm feeling flush.”

“If I like one for twenty-five can I have the difference?” said Monica.

“All right, and I can see where this is going to cost me a hundred and five. I can't buy for the one without buying for the others, is my motto.”

“Oh, I thought this was a special for me,” said Monica.

“No, I couldn't do that, but I'll take you to lunch at the hotel. Dad and the others are having lunch at Edith Chapin's. I was invited but I got out of it. Me sit around and watch Edith queening it over the Governor and the others? It's a wonder she didn't ride in the Governor's car.”

“I think I'll call Ann up tomorrow.”

“Don't you do it. Stay out of it.”

“Stay out of what?” said Monica.

“Well, not exactly stay out of it,” said Peg Slattery. “But don't start getting mixed up with those people. You never see Ann any more, and when you used to I always knew nothing would ever come of it. Joe's dead now and we don't have to pretend we're friends of the Chapin family, because we're not.”

“All right,” said Monica. “I wish I'd worn my tan. I want to get a hat to go with it and this dress is so completely different.”

“You can always exchange it. We buy enough hats from Sadie, I never had any trouble exchanging one. Just as long as you don't wear it to a party, or publicly, then she doesn't mind.”

“I could buy two fifteen-dollar hats.”

“You wouldn't wear anything she has for fifteen. Buy a twenty-five now and exchange it later, is my advice,” said Peg Slattery.

“I'd almost rather have a pair of shoes.”

“No, you buy your own shoes. Let Jim pay for your shoes. They're a necessity. Hats are a luxury.”

“All right,” said Monica.

The day had turned cold and clear after the previous day's threat of snow and there was in the near-noonday traffic, augmented by the big black cars of the funeral and the politicians and the important, a festive air. The shiny limousines and the many strange chauffeurs and the low-number license plates and the stars and flags of the military motors were enough to make a man have some respect for Joe Chapin. The town was accustomed to big funerals; they were no novelty. But these big cars carried big men, who had made an effort to attend Joe Chapin's funeral. Big, busy men from all over the state and Washington and New York were in Gibbsville because Joe Chapin had passed on. You could not get a room at the hotel; there was a private car in the Reading Railway shed; members of the Gibbsville Club and the Lantenengo Country Club had been asked not to use the club restaurants at lunch that day, in order to accommodate the many visiting notables. The scene outside Trinity Church, upon conclusion of the ceremonies, was described in a special fifteen-minute program broadcast over the local station WGIB by Ted Wallace. Ted was a comparative newcomer to town, an expert in finding a connection between a popular song title and Kaufman's Kredit Jewelry, and with an unquestioned flair for making a high school basketball game seem exciting. He was assisted in identifying the celebrities by his good friend Al Jellinek, of the
Standard
, who had a list of the prominent. But Al was unable to keep his good friend Ted from identifying the deceased as Joseph B. Chaplin. The WGIB switchboard received eighty-four telephone calls, topping the previous Wallace record of fifty-five calls on the occasion of his crediting Frank Sinatra with a Vic Damone disk. It was the only time Ted had been placed in charge of a WGIB Special Events Program; indeed, it was the first time WGIB had broadcast a Special Events Program under that name. Ted was somewhat comforted by the fact that the station also received sixteen letters complaining against putting on a funeral instead of the customary Luncheon Siesta.

After a fairly serious tie-up lasting twenty minutes, traffic thinned down to noonday normal. The horns of protest during the twenty-minute jam were not able to drown out the tolling bells of Trinity. Those noble bells had been tolling while those motorcars were still buried in the Mesabi Range, and they would continue to toll long after the last of those cars was junk. But the battle of the decibels made Gibbsville, at least for part of an hour, sound like a city. And Joe Chapin, the cause of it all, was made to seem like an extremely important man.

His wife, the new widow Edith Stokes Chapin, likewise was made to feel an extremely important woman. All that day and into the night, until her retirement shortly after ten o'clock, she was the beneficiary of the small kindnesses that the big people know how to give. The graceful stepping aside as she took her place at the grave, the little glances in her direction by the clergy, the firm restraint of any emotional display at the inevitable mentions of Death in the burial service.

A civilian airplane, a blue Aeronca, was doing
8
's around pylons during the burial service, and the gentlemen pallbearers to a man tried to stare the craft out of the air, but not one of them was heard to murmur displeasure at the ignorance of the pilot. The noisy little engine introduced a sporty sound to the unsporty occasion and the pallbearer who was an admiral frowned over at his two-striper aide, who nodded in comprehension. The aide knew that there was nothing that could be done about it, and the aide understood perfectly that the admiral felt he had to make some token sign of disapproval as senior officer present. Actually any action in the direction of the Aeronca and its pilot might not have been desirable, since the airplane held the attention, almost throughout the ceremony, of Joe Chapin Junior. There was nothing on Joe Chapin Junior's face to indicate displeasure or disapproval of the blue aircraft. He stood beside his heavily veiled mother, close to her in body, but his cold blue eyes followed the plane's exercises with a calm curiosity, and the set of his mouth told nothing. Joe Chapin Junior was alive and present, but it would have been easy for anyone else present to imagine that Joe Junior was only standing alone on a hillside, on a clear, cold spring day. And yet a stranger would have known that Joe Junior very much belonged at graveside. His attire, of course, proclaimed the mourner: his black knitted necktie in a starched collar; his black topcoat, blue serge suit, black shoes and black homburg were all of superior workmanship and material and did not show professional wear. No article of his attire had been bought for the occasion; all came from a complete wardrobe, items to be worn on other, dissimilar occasions but available for occasions like this one. Then there was the point of resemblance between the principal figure at the ceremony, the widow, her daughter, and her son: the Stokes mouth. The lips themselves were prominent, but not thick. The illusion of thickness was caused by the stretching of the lips, through the years, over the large front teeth. It was a remarkable resemblance, especially in the day of the orthodontist. The mouth and the now unseen teeth behind it were the same for the woman born in
1886
and the young man born in
1915
. The mother's mouth was so unpretty as to be described as masculine, but with the mother present the young man's mouth seemed voluptuously feminine. The mouth was the sole point of resemblance, but it was so prominent as to be unmistakable and immediately apparent. The son had a thin nose and eyes buried deep and a large forehead, not bulging, but a continuing part of the face rather than a beginning part of the head. He was half a head taller than his mother, but his bones apparently were no larger than hers, which made him, for a man, slender to the degree of slightness.

The daughter looked more like the mother. If it had been possible to re-create a younger and prettier version of the mother, and place her at graveside, she would have been the daughter. The daughter's looks were a refinement of the mother's, a refinement and a softening, so that the mouth, in the daughter, became inviting, the eyes were lively, the teeth were for whitening the smile. The daughter was smaller than the mother and, beside her, dainty. It was a commonplace comment in Gibbsville: “How can Ann look so much like her mother and still be pretty?” Ann was remarkable, too, for something else: she was the only person at the funeral who was weeping.

There was a ton and more flowers and wire and foil at the graveside. Beside it stood two workmen, leaning on spades—gravediggers. They kept their caps on during the service and stared like innocently rude children at the members of the funeral party. To show any respect was not expected of them, and they showed none. Their only connection with the funeral party was their recognition of Mike Slattery and they nodded to him but they were not offended when he did not return their nod. They had not even done the work of digging the Chapin grave; they were only waiting for the removal of the floral tributes so that they could begin digging to prepare another grave in another plot. To that extent the Chapin funeral was in their way, holding them up, but gravediggers are well paid and there were a lot of grand people to stare at. In a little while the grand people would be going away and they could start work, spading out the correct number of cubic feet of earth to make a hole for the person who would be laid away the next day. Their stony, weather-beaten faces gave back in dignity the same austerity that they saw in the faces of the Chapin mourners.