The chapters selected for this anthology come late in the book. Elizabeth has just died and family members arrive that evening to visit. These two chapters explore the tensions in the family and the internal conflicts experienced by Elizabeth’s husband, Doctor Thomas Rowan. Readers may find it helpful to refer to the cast of characters below for an orientation to the selected chapters.
Characters Appearing or Mentioned in Chapters 22 and 23
Elizabeth Kirby Rowan, dies in her bed after a long battle with cancer
Dr. Thomas Rowan, her husband
Jeanie Rowan, their daughter, 12
Ellen Rowan, their daughter, 8
Michael Rowan, their son, 7
Mary, the Rowans’ housekeeper and cook
Margaret Kirby Delaney, Elizabeth’s sister
John Delaney, Margaret’s husband and the undertaker for the funeral
Mrs. Rowan, Dr. Thomas Rowan’s mother
Pauline Rowan Welles, Dr. Thomas Rowan’s sister
David Welles, Pauline’s husband, lawyer who drew up Elizabeth’s will
Norah Martin, Elizabeth’s old friend and godmother to Michael
The Trouble of One House (Chapters 22 and 23)
by Brendan Gill
22.
It was after six when Mrs. Rowan and the Welleses reached the house. The sun still burned in the western sky, not seeming to drop but to swell and redden as the horizon, hazy with dust, humpbacked with hills, inched up to meet it. The showers that the weather bureau had predicted that morning were being predicted again in the evening paper (the newsboy on his bicycle tossed the paper, tightly furled, onto the Rowans’ front porch, and the paper opened and flattened itself as it slid across the painted floor). “RAIN DUE TONIGHT,” said the damp headlines, smeared by the boy’s thumb. “CITY SWELTERS IN NEW HIGH.” As long as that cataract of heat poured down over the city it would be the only news worth reading. “Is it hot enough for you?” people asked each other on quitting work, standing dazed on street corners downtown, too tired to move, or riding home on the bumpy yellow and black open trolleys, their trousers and skirts sticking to the slatted varnished wooden seats, the conductor collecting his fares with a wet handkerchief tucked inside the collar of his uniform. “How do you like this for a taste of summer,” they asked him, “for a little free sample of what’s to come?” “Well, now, we never had a June like this,” he answered, swinging along from seat to seat on the narrow board that hung above the road. “The fact is, the climate’s changing. Even the winters, you know—we don’t have the winters we used to have.”
“That’s right, you’re right. He’s right, I remember … ”
“They say it’s the spots on the sun that does it.”
“I don’t know about spots, all I know is I can’t breathe. I—just—can’t—breathe.”
The sky overhead was without a cloud, and if, after all, it should fail to rain, the coming of darkness (so late today, today the latest darkness of the year) would only lower the temperature by a few degrees, for the valley in which the city lay would hold the heat all night, brimming like water in a glass between the hills and above the languid tidal river. Mary welcomed them at the kitchen door. She had laced her shoes, put on a clean apron, and with her fingers combed her rough hair back of her ears. She was looking her best, as she looked her best on Christmas and Easter morning.
You’ll be hungry and hot and dirty after your trip,” she told them. “I’ll get you a bite of supper while you wash up.” “It doesn’t matter, Mary,” Pauline said. “We’re not hungry.”
“What does she say?” Mrs. Rowan asked. She never troubled to read a servant’s lips. She counted on Pauline to act as her interpreter. “Tell me what she says.”
David Welles said, “Mary wants to get us something to eat.”
“We don’t want anything.”
“So I’ve already told her, Mother,” Pauline said.
“You’ll have to eat something sooner or later,” Welles said. He turned to Mrs. Rowan. “And you, too,” he said. “It’s more important than ever now that you keep up your strength.” Welles was stocky and middle-aged, with pepper-and-salt hair and eyes. Middle age became him; he looked as if he had never been anything else. He looked, too, like a man who had spent most of his life sitting down. The shape of his body implied a chair under and behind it, cushion to cushion, and his fingers seemed curved over wooden arm rests. As a lawyer, he was in the habit of weighing at length, with a pleasure all the greater for being hidden, the alternatives to every phrase, every course of action that crossed his mind. “What if you don’t eat?” he asked now—a man whom nothing and no one could hurry, who might have been sitting slouched in the dusty yellow courtroom at home, with the horseflies droning under the vaulted ceiling and the judge asleep on his high pine bench. “You’ll only make yourself sick,” he said. “You’ll only make things more difficult for Thomas.”
“I’m fixing supper for the others, anyhow,” Mary said. “The Doctor and the children and Mr. and Mrs. Delaney and the Lord knows who. There’s plenty for all. Sick as she was, she always insisted on a full pantry. In case of callers, you know. Two or three extra places at supper were nothing to her.”
Pauline said, “David, I couldn’t. Not now. Not here.”
Mrs. Rowan glanced from Pauline to David. She had never sided with any woman against any man. “Whatever you think best, David,” she said. “All I want is to be with Thomas.”
“The Doctor’s upstairs,” Mary said. “He only came down for a minute while they took her away. He’s in his room now with Mrs. Delaney.” She dropped her voice, making certain that Mrs. Rowan could not hear. “Getting an earful from her ladyship, I have no doubt.”
“The children should be helping you with supper,” Mrs. Rowan said. “It would keep their minds occupied.”
“Young Michael’s gone with Miss Martin to spend the night,” Mary said. “Mrs. Delaney thought that best, so I understand, and Jeanie and Ellen are up in their room, as quiet as mice. I’d rather have them up there than down here under my feet, the poor little lambs.” Mary’s eyes filled with tears; sad words always set her off. “God love them,” she said, “the poor little motherless lambs.”
“Now, Mary,” Pauline said. “The less of that kind of thing, the better.”
“What did she say?” Mrs. Rowan asked. “Tell me what she said.”
Mary said, ‘The poor little motherless lambs’ is all I said.”
Mrs. Rowan stared at Mary through her gold-rimmed glasses until Mary’s eyes fell. There was no standing up to the old battle-axe, Mary thought—God help them that looked for an easy time of snatching the Doctor away from that old hard hungry one that had had him first!
“All right, now, Pauline, Mother,” Welles said. “Let’s get along out of Mary’s way.”
“Thank you, sir,” Mary said. That was striking a blow for her; that was being the perfect gentleman. It was the quiet ones that got their way in the end. “I’ll have supper on the table in two shakes.”
They passed in procession, Mrs. Rowan, Pauline, and David, through the butler’s pantry and dining room, where silver and crystal hovered winking in the shadows and the big table mirrored their passing like black brook water, and on into the darkened living room. A single lamp burned at a wing chair beside the fireplace, and the high-backed chair and that yellow light falling across the hearth gave an effect of autumn in the room, as if, on raising the shades and putting one’s head to the cold pane, one would be certain to hear the wind crying in gusts through the double row of elms that lined the avenue.
John Delaney was seated in the chair, reading the evening paper. As they entered the room, he stood up and slowly folded the paper round and round in his pale, freshly washed hands. He had been working steadily for hours; this was his first real rest since morning. Moreover, he had slept badly the night before, on the narrow, lumpy cot in the study, and towards dawn had stood slumped in slippers and shorts at the one small open window, smoking and waiting until at last it seemed late enough, light enough, to go into the kitchen and make breakfast for Margaret and himself. “But I don’t want any breakfast,” Margaret had said to him, when he brought in the tray and set it down on the wide bed beside her. “It’s much too hot to think of eating.” She had been flushed with sleep, her eyes heavy-lidded, her white hands crossed on her breasts. She had said she would eat breakfast only if he insisted on it, and he had insisted on it, and she had eaten it to the last crumb.
He was sorry that Mrs. Rowan and the Welleses had come on him reading the paper. He was aware that to them he must have looked so—what word, he wondered, would they use afterwards to describe him?—so callous, so unfeeling? Yet he had only picked up the paper to see if it carried a report of Elizabeth’s death. Apparently, it had gone to press too soon to carry it; the morning paper would be the first to publish the news. Finding no mention of Elizabeth in the paper, John Delaney had turned to the sports section, and now as he got up he made a note of the paragraph he had been reading when they interrupted him. That game would keep, he thought, moving on tiptoe across the room to greet them and thinking as he moved that the count had been two and two on the batter, with a man out and a man on second; yesterday’s game would keep forever. He shook hands, making his stiff little formal bow to each of them and softly speaking their names: “Mrs. Rowan. Pauline. David.” He knew what they were thinking, he could have spoken the words aloud—”No one like a undertaker for shaking hands. No one like an undertaker for keeping his voice down, for walking on tiptoe.” He said, “I’m glad to see you. The Doctor will be glad to see you.”
“Everything in order, John?” Welles asked.
“Everything in order, David,” he said. He was grateful to David for asking that question. He had his work, as David had the law, and he liked to be allowed to speak of it. He wasn’t a thief, after all; he had committed no crime, he had done nothing to be ashamed of. “We’ll be bringing her back in a little while,” he said. “We’ve had to step things up a bit because of its being Thursday. Margaret and the Doctor didn’t want the funeral put off till Monday, and I agreed those long wakes can be a terrible strain. And then the heat, this time of the year.” He broke off, seeing that they had misunderstood, or were about to misunderstand. “Oh, not that,” he said, “there’s no difficulty about that. It’s the crowds filling the house on a hot night, and the lack of sleep, and all; it makes it hard. It makes it very hard. I remember at poor old Mrs. Begley’s—” But he must stick to the business at hand. He wasn’t encouraged to talk shop. He could only talk shop with other undertakers. It was as if he were an executioner, as if in each case part of the blame for the death was somehow to be laid at his door. “The casket is to go in the music room,” he said. “Mahogany and bronze, very handsome, the best we had. That will leave this room and the dining room and hall free to accommodate callers, of which we’re expecting a great many. Short as the time is, it’s bound to be a very big wake.”
Pauline said, “Surely there’ll be nobody coming tonight?”
“Not officially,” John said. “Members of the family and perhaps a few old friends. But tomorrow there’ll be a terrible rush. I’ve already spoken to the police about putting an extra officer or two on the street, to help with the traffic and parking. And I’ve told them that I wouldn’t be surprised if, the day after, the day of the funeral, there’d be a hundred cars in the procession from house to church and from church to cemetery.” He could not help taking pride in that extraordinary total, and he repeated, “A hundred cars, I told them. I’m renting limousines from twenty miles around and making use of every car I can lay claim to myself, even Margaret’s.”
Mrs. Rowan said, “Is Elizabeth here?”
“No, Mother, John was just explaining—”
She turned from Pauline. “Let him explain it to me, then, and not mumble his words. My son’s wife, after all; where is she?”
As loudly as he had ever said anything, John said, “She’ll be coming back here in a little while.”
“What a dreadful way to put it,” Mrs. Rowan said. “You make her sound—it’s most disagreeable.” She fixed him with her faded eyes. “The dead are dead,” she said. “I disapprove of everything you—you people do to make it seem as if they weren’t. I don’t believe in prettying them up. I don’t believe in all this fussing and prinking. I hope you haven’t gone and prettied up Elizabeth.”
“Now, Mother,” Pauline said, “for heaven’s sake—”
“Don’t ‘Now, Mother’ me,” Mrs. Rowan said. “I don’t want to be prettied up. I want to look like what I am when I’m dead, if I ever do die. I want to look like a dead old woman, not like a flapper. I’ve never worn rouge in my life, and I don’t intend to wear it in my coffin. Where are you putting Elizabeth’s coffin?”
“The casket,” John said, “is to go in the music room. We’ll bank it with flowers and candles, all very lovely. We’re saving this room for callers.”
“There’ll be no refreshments, of course?” Mrs. Rowan asked.
“I haven’t spoken to the Doctor about that,” John said. “I’ve been too busy seeing about the casket and the plot and all.” He turned to David. “I’ve arranged for an exceptionally nice plot, on high ground—”
“But no refreshments?” Mrs. Rowan said.
“I suppose the Doctor will want to see that cigars are passed, as usual,” John said. “I don’t know about anything else—sandwiches, coffee, things of that sort?”
“But no liquor,” Mrs. Rowan said. “Coffee and tea, yes, but no alcohol in any form.”
“You talk as if this were thirty years ago,” Pauline said. “Nobody drinks at wakes any more.”
“Don’t they, my dear? Haven’t I seen them with my own eyes? Or do you suppose I’m too old to notice such things?” She swung back to John Delaney. “Not that any of my son’s friends would abuse alcohol,” she said. “Or even Elizabeth’s friends, though they may be a trifle more worldly, a trifle more advanced, than Thomas’s friends.”
“Now, Mother,” Pauline said again.
“Didn’t I ask you not to ‘Now, Mother’ me?” Mrs. Rowan said. “Someone must be in charge here from now on. Someone must take control. Would you rather it was I or you?”
“I take charge?” Pauline said. She sat down in the wing chair by the fireplace, spreading her hands fanwise, palms down, before her. She saw that there were still traces of dirt from the garden under her nails. “I don’t want to take charge of anything,” she said. “I won’t say another word.”
“Where is Margaret?” Mrs. Rowan asked. She felt in a mood of triumph, she wanted to take on all comers while that mood lasted, for it would not last long. It never did, any more: it came and went without warning, like a fever that, while it lasted, made her stronger than she had been in years, and left her weaker afterward than she had ever been.
“She’s upstairs with the Doctor,” John said. “There was the matter of the dress, which Margaret knew about, and now there’s the matter of what jewelry Elizabeth is to wear. But that must be settled, too,” he said. He had caught sight of Margaret in the arched doorway. She stood there behind them, silently taking them in. “Speak,” he began, and at once broke off, smiling to diminish the words, condemning himself for having said the one wrong thing. “I was saying—”
“Everything is settled,” Margaret said, and touched the corners of her eyes and mouth with her handkerchief. She exchanged blank glances with Mrs. Rowan and Pauline. “It’s good of you to come so quickly, David,” she said.
“We came as soon as we got word.”
“Oh, I remember. Polly was in such a hurry to tell you that I had no chance to say goodbye.”
“Where is Thomas?” Mrs. Rowan asked. “I want to see Thomas.”
“He’s up in their room.” “I’m going up to him.”
“He said he wanted to be left alone. He wanted to be sure that no one interrupted him.”
“Interrupted? How could he be interrupted, by his own mother?”
“He came across something of Elizabeth’s in her jewel box. He was looking for a ring and found a note, or a bundle of notes—instructions of some kind, I suppose.” Margaret shivered. “Most unpleasant. He’s up there now, reading them.”
“He doesn’t know we’re here.”
“I’m sure I don’t know whether he does or not. I do know he said he wasn’t to be disturbed by anyone, for anything.”
Mary opened the dining-room door. “If you’ll please to be seated,” she said, “I’ll put supper on the table.”
David said, “Thank you, Mary, we’ll be right in.”
“You’ll have to excuse me,” Pauline began, then, seeing that no one had heard her (not even David; not even John), she gave up asking to be excused and sat looking down at her outspread hands.
“I’ll go up and fetch Thomas for supper,” Mrs. Rowan said. “He’ll be needing something to keep his strength up, as we all do.”
Margaret said, “He won’t come.”
“We’ll see whether he comes or not.”
“Perhaps, for his mother’s sake,” John said.
Mary called up the dark stairwell, “Ellen! Jeanie!”
“Never mind calling them, Mary,” Mrs. Rowan said. “I’ll fetch them along with the Doctor.” She set off up the stairs, lifting her long black silk dress in her swollen hands to keep from tripping on it and showing her black shoes and black cotton stockings.
“He won’t come,” Margaret said. She paid no attention to Mary standing in the doorway. “He’s too busy reading whatever it is she left him. Did you ever hear of anything like that—of leaving something to be read afterwards like that? How could she?”
Pauline said, “She had the right to do anything she liked. Anything.”
“But to write things!” Margaret said. “That’s almost as bad as speaking them. It’s so dreadfully alive. I don’t see how she could have done it.”
“What is a will but a sort of letter?” David asked, hearing with reverence his measured lawyer’s voice. He would bring the probabilities to bear on the matter, as he liked to do. “As a matter of fact, Elizabeth had a certain amount of property to dispose of. She asked me to draw up a will for her, and I did. Probably what you saw is her will.”
“It’s not her will,” Margaret said. “I saw how it began.”
“Now, Margaret,” John said. “It’s none of our business, you know, how it began.”
“That’s easy enough for you to say,” Margaret said. “It isn’t your sister who’s dead, is it? As far as you’re concerned, this is the same as any other funeral, only better. This is a chance to show everybody how skillful you are, how well you can run things. Oh, this will be a great feather in your cap, won’t it, a funeral like this? It’ll,bring you in all kinds of business, such a grand affair! The Mayor will be here, and maybe the Bishop, and you can already hear them singing your praises, can’t you?” Her eyes shone. The tears in them were real tears. “It began ‘Dearest,’ ” she said. “That was the first word. I never heard of a will beginning ‘Dearest,’ did you?”
“Margaret!” John said, and took her arm. “We don’t want to know.”
“We’d better all sit down and have supper,” David said. He held out his hand to Pauline and waited until she put her hand in his. “You, too, my dear. All of us together.”
Pauline got up and she and David followed the Delaneys into the dining room. As they stood around the table, Ellen and Jeanie came down the stairs, followed by Mrs. Rowan. She looked very small and old behind the children. Her face was pale; even her eyes looked pale back of her gold rimmed glasses. The children took their places in silence while Margaret and Mrs. Rowan moved towards Elizabeth’s chair at the foot of the table. Mrs. Rowan reached the chair first and, sitting down in it, gestured to Pauline to sit at her left, David at her right. Then, in a voice they could scarcely hear, she said, “He’ll be down in a moment. He says we’re not to wait for him.”
“What did I tell you?” Margaret asked. “He wouldn’t see her.”
“He says he’s so glad we’re here,” Mrs. Rowan said, and patted Pauline’s hand. “You and David and I. He says it makes all the difference.”
“He wouldn’t see her,” Margaret said, and then, in the same breath, “I see we’re having potato salad. Potato salad is one of Mary’s specialties. It might be described, in fact, as Mary’s only specialty.”
Standing behind the pantry door, listening to the voices at table, Mary thought, I’ll have her heart for that. Someday I’ll have her heart for that.
23.
He sat alone in the darkened bedroom. He could hear them talking in the dining room downstairs—first his mother’s voice, then Margaret’s voice (through the bare, polished floor, he heard her demanding, “What did I tell you? He wouldn’t see her”), then a low murmur that might be John’s or David’s voice coming between the women, trying to make safe a conversation that was likely to end even now, even today, in a reckless child’s quarrel, in childish anger (though the real children kept silent; he listened and could not hear their voices). From behind the closed door of the bedroom, he had told his mother that he would be down to join them in a moment, and in a moment, or maybe in a thousand moments, he would have to go down and take his place at table. He would do whatever he was asked to do, say whatever he was expected to say, provided everything was got through as quickly as possible. He would give in to all of them, surrender whatever was left to be surrendered, if only they would do their work and leave him alone. He had already given in to John on the arrangements: the casket, the plot, the bearers, the music. The organist was to play anything he liked, or anything the Monsignor liked. Elizabeth had had a hundred favorite songs—it was a family joke that every old song she heard was, for as long as it was being played, for as long as she hummed it, her favorite song—but she had had no favorite hymns. “Yes, yes, whatever you think,” he had said to John, “but get it over with. Get it over with fast.”
“I will, Tom. And, Tom —”
Seeing the fat face working with dismay, the fat hands clumsy at his sides, he had given in to John even in that, knowing what was to come. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry for your trouble, Tom.”
That was the classic statement of the wake, those were the sacred words that John had been bound by his professional pride to be the first to speak, and Rowan had answered them, as he had known he was required to do, “Thank you, John.”
He had listened, too, while Margaret explained, in that high cold voice of hers, about the dress with the blue sequins (she had taken the dress from the closet and held it over one arm, admiring it, swinging it jauntily back and forth to make the sequins shimmer), and about the jade brooch that was to be pinned to the throat of the dress, and about the ring that was to go to Norah Martin. Rowan held the ring in his hand. He would give it to Norah the moment he saw her. He would get that job over with and never think about it again. As he turned the ring over and over in his palm, it occurred to him that it was one of a dozen rings that Elizabeth owned and that he must have seen her wearing it a hundred times; but he could not remember it. He might never have seen it before.
And when Mary called him to the telephone, whispering, her eyes big with respect, that the editor of the morning paper was on the wire, he had tried to put the reporter at ease (“No, no, not the editor, the obituary editor,” the young man had been explaining as he picked up the telephone), he had brushed aside the stammered apologies to say that he understood perfectly and would try to set down whatever facts would help the young man in preparing an obituary—Mrs. Rowan’s maiden name, yes, and the date and place of her birth, yes, and her father’s and mother’s names. Beloved wife of, beloved mother of, sister of, president of the Guild of—at most, it would make a handful of sentences, a short paragraph of small type, and it would tell nothing about Elizabeth. For how could the newspaper publish the important things that had no dates? The only important things? That there had been no one she had not been willing to love, nothing of herself that she had not been willing to risk giving? No, it would print instead the hour of the funeral and the name of the cemetery and perhaps, if no one of importance were to die meanwhile, in New York or Washington or London, the picture of Elizabeth that he had insisted on having taken last spring.
She had said, “Please, Tom, I can’t. I won’t.”
“Darling, you must.”
“Don’t say must. You’re the one that never says must.”
“This time I do.”
“But I look so ugly now. I hate the way I look.”
“You look as you always do. You look beautiful.”
“You’re not to make fun of me. We both know I was never that.”
“I think you were never anything else.”
“I wish—no, I don’t.”
“What were you going to wish?”
“Something selfish, something foolish. That you’d said that a year ago.”
“You know I never manage to say anything I think until too late.”
“That’s why I decided not to make a wish. We wouldn’t think of making wishes, would we, if it weren’t already too late?” Then, smiling: “I don’t suppose that’s as profound a discovery as it sounds?”
“No, you’re just trying to get out of having your picture taken. And it won’t work. Not this time.”
“Not any time, with you. You have such a way of sticking to the point.”
“There has to be someone in a family that sticks to the point.”
“Does there? Then I’m glad it’s you.”
“Well, but about that picture—”
“You see? What did I tell you?”
“I’ll have the photographer come out next week. It will all be over in ten minutes.”
“If he takes my picture, it will never be over.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that.”
“I only half know what I mean, myself.”
“He can come, then?”
“Yes, he can come. Oh, yes, let everyone come and look at me. Let them look and look.”
They were busy eating downstairs. He could hear the cheerful chinking sound of silver on china, dropped note by note into the singsong murmur of their voices, and already, he felt sure, keeping the thought at a distance, studying it without surprise, the three women downstairs must be looking forward to the wake; already the pleasure of that prospect might have been enough to keep them from quarreling. For they would be alike, those three, so different in every thing else, in their enjoyment of the wake. Elizabeth and he had talked of this long ago, he in anger, she in laughter at his anger. They had agreed that to a woman a wake was above all a test of her worthiness as a hostess; the challenge it offered was not merely death but hospitality. Like a holiday dinner or family reunion, a wake was required to be a success, for to fail as a hostess was to fail as a woman—was worse than failing as a wife or daughter. And with those three, he thought, hearing their voices under him, the wake was certain to be a grand affair. They would see to that, they would see to it that the wake was talked about afterward as one of those events of the day by which other events were recalled and dated, so that even twenty or thirty years hence people would be saying, “Yes, yes, we met at the Rowans’, we met that night at Elizabeth Rowan’s wake….”
They would be moving from room to room, his mother and sister and Margaret, erect and indefatigable, seeing that everything was as it should be, the supply of chairs adequate, the introductions properly made; and one of them would be always at his side by the open casket while old friends and acquaintances whose names he could not remember and distant cousins whose faces he had never seen slowly filed past him in their best dark clothes, their eyes blank, lacking the sorrow they had tried to feel and failed to feel, and shook his hand and said, “I’m sorry for your trouble.” Then they would wait until he said, as he would have to say, “Thank you,” before they shuffled on to the casket, to glance down at Elizabeth and maybe kneel and say a prayer for the repose of her soul. Then they would wind slowly out of the music room and back into the big rooms full of folding canvas funeral chairs and blue smoke and a mounting racket of talk; and Elizabeth and he would be left there, not forgotten, but put out of mind as having been dealt with, as a duty accomplished that would leave the visitors all the more lighthearted for its having been so unwelcome, and therefore all the more ready for a long, pleasant evening of meeting friends.
For, that one duty aside, a wake was a party like any party; and the important thing about a party was that it should succeed, that everyone should have a good time. Elizabeth had always said that nothing mattered but that. She had always seen to it that her parties were a success. And this would be a fine party, Rowan thought, this would be a party of which they could all be proud. Nothing would be allowed to go wrong with this party. It would be worth all the hard work the women put into it. And John and David would be working, too. They would be kept busy moving from group to group, laughing again and again at the same jokes and handing out cigars, because there would be men smoking everywhere—crouched on the broad stairs, or leaning against the railings of the front porch, snapping unawares the strings of the trellised morning glories, or walking up and down the narrow lawn, with the pulsing reddish glow of their cigars making meaningless little alphabets of light as they gestured and talked. And later the distant cousins and total strangers (a wake was open to all, and there were always strangers) would hear the black Gothic grandfather’s clock that stood at the turn of the stairs gather itself and strike midnight, pouring that party-ending signal down over them in a cascade of chimes, and they would get up pretending astonishment at the lateness of the hour and, lowering their hoarse voices, hurriedly whisper, “Goodbye, goodbye.”
But that would not be the end, for a few relatives and close friends would retire to the kitchen after midnight for a supper of sandwiches and cake. He would have to provide a couple of bottles of whiskey, Rowan supposed, for any of the men that wanted a drink as they sat, in their shirt sleeves now, their faces shining with sweat, and talked of baseball and golf; and there would be coffee and tea for the women, seated around the white porcelain-topped kitchen table, talking of children and the long summer looming ahead. He had had to sit in such gatherings, himself, a long time ago, and had hated them. He had had to listen to what he called afterwards, driving home with Elizabeth, the gibberish, the monkeylike gibble-gabble of all those tired voices running together—”a scorcher,” he would say, imitating the tired tireless droning voices, “a regular Feeney I think from West Rockford either that or a pop fly to second well sir the next man up was an unseasonable June if you ask me July will be a lip to the bunker and no way to chip out of it except by going away for the summer.” And Elizabeth had laughed and said, “Darling, you do take things hard. Of course it’s awful, it’s straight out of the stone age, it’s as barbarous as can be, but it doesn’t matter, it’s not that important. And from now on you needn’t go, ever. I’ll just say you’re out on a call.”
But even that gathering in the kitchen would not be the end, for when the last of the old friends had gone (“We’re so sorry,” they would have said again, and he would have answered, “Thank you, I know you are”), the family would spend the rest of the night spelling each other in that silent silk-walled music room with Elizabeth, breathing an air drowned in the perfume of spray on spray of fat red roses, watching the candles at Elizabeth’s head and feet and trying not to doze off, not to go to sleep, to sleep, to sleep . . . And that first long-drawn-out night and morning would not be the end, would be merely the beginning, if the wake were to last the two days that John had suggested, blinking his troubled eyes, hoping to do his duty by everyone, as the customary, the correct period between death and burial (though of course John had not once spoken the forbidden words “death” and “burial”).
That first night and morning would be the end this time only because Rowan had refused to put the funeral off until Monday. He had given in to John on everything else and would continue to give in to him and to the rest of them, from now on he would be their puppet, permitting them to pull any strings they pleased, to jerk him this way or that; but on the question of time he had held firm. He would be able to endure speed, but he would not be able to endure delay. And because he had not consented to postpone the funeral the three women would have only a single day and night in which to prove themselves. They would have to face in haste, uncertainly, that challenge to their skill, and he wondered if they had decided to join forces for once, there in the room below him, in order to deal with this unfair advantage that Elizabeth and he had managed to impose on them, she by dying today instead of yesterday or tomorrow, he by not letting her body lie for three days in the musky room, white and still among all those roses.
He dropped the ring—already he thought of it as Norah’s ring—into his pocket, and, resting his elbows on his knees, his chin on his joined palms, stared down at the smooth floor, which gave him back, a glimmering pale ball in its waxed surface, his own motionless image. It was as if he had only to stare down through the blurred image, down through the rough dry floor joists and pine lath and hard plaster ceiling of the dining room to see those heads fixed pinlike around the table, white and grey and black, old, middle-aged, and young, and parting their skulls with his fixed stare gather up their separate thoughts—no, but whose thoughts, he asked himself, what thoughts? He did not care. He turned his head and saw what he knew he had tried to keep from seeing and had been bound to see: Elizabeth’s jewel box, lying open on the low table beside him. It was a large square box of brown leather, scuffed, with a broken hinge. (He would look at the hinge, he would study the broken hinge.) It had been given to Elizabeth before they were married, and the gold had flaked away little by little, year by year, from the name stamped in full across the lid of the box: Elizabeth Kirby. It was a child’s name, the name of a stranger. This box preserving the stranger’s name had never belonged to Elizabeth Rowan, it had only been on loan to her from that vanished child, Elizabeth Kirby. (He would mark the traces of gold in the dinted leather, he would think hard about her, the generous vanished child.)
Margaret had asked him to open the box in order to take from it the jade brooch that John would be requiring, she had said softly, urgently, downstairs. She had filled the word with horror: downstairs, downstairs. She had added that there was Norah’s ring to be looked for, sooner or later, and lifting the top tray (for they could not find the ring: Elizabeth’s jewelry lay in its usual tangle of gold and silver and shining stones, heaped up like so much pirates’ treasure, like booty scooped from the hull of some old barnacled ship half sunk in sand), they had seen in the bottom of the box, crammed tight against its soft suede leather sides, a bundle of papers in Elizabeth’s bold handwriting and at the top of the first sheet the single black word, “Dearest.” At once he had dropped the tray back into place, covering the papers; and there in one corner of the tray was Norah’s ring.
Margaret had said, “I didn’t see anything.”
“What do you mean, you didn’t see anything?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what I mean. I shouldn’t have said that.”
He had said heavily, “No, that’s right, you shouldn’t have said it. Leave me alone now. Go away.”
“I only intended—”
“You’ve been very helpful, but I want to be alone awhile. And not be interrupted; not by any one.”
Once she had closed the door behind her, he had been afraid to turn back to the open jewel box. Even now, he was afraid to lift off the tray and take up the sheets of white paper—a child’s blue-lined school notebook paper—and begin to read them. Yet he had to take them up, because they were there, because there was no escaping them. They had either to be destroyed unread, or read and destroyed. It would be better to destroy them unread; it would also be harder. Slowly, unwillingly, he lifted the tray and set it on the table and looked down at the papers. He would tear them up; he would throw them away. When they were gone, it would be as if they had never existed. Commanding himself to take them, rejecting every excuse for not taking them, he gathered the papers into his hands and held them on bis knees and fixed his eyes on the word at the top of the first sheet. He would be able to read whatever had been written there because he was unable not to read it.