Chapter 7 #3
“You girls have to tell me if I start looking seedy,” Red told his daughters.
“I don’t have your mother around anymore to keep me up to par.
” But as the week wore on, and his shirts developed food stains and he never got out of those slippers, he shrugged off any suggestion they made.
“You know, Dad,” Jeannie said, “I believe those pants of yours are ready for the rag bag,” and he said, “What are you talking about? I’ve just now got them properly broken in.
” When Amanda offered to take his suit to the cleaner’s in preparation for the funeral, he told her there was no need; he’d be wearing a dashiki.
“A what?” Amanda asked him. He turned and walked out of the sunroom, leaving his daughters staring at each other in dismay.
A few minutes later he came back carrying a blousy sort of smock in a teal blue so brilliant, so electrically vibrant, that it was painful to the eyes.
“Your mother made this for our wedding,” he said, “and I thought it would be appropriate if I wore it to her funeral.”
“But, Dad,” Amanda said, “your wedding was in the sixties.”
“So?”
“Maybe in the sixties people wore these, although I can’t quite … but that was almost half a century ago! All the seams are fraying, just look. There’s a rip under one arm.”
“So we’ll fix it,” Red said. “It’ll be just as good as new.”
Amanda and Jeannie exchanged a look, which Red caught. He turned abruptly to Denny, who was lounging on the couch cycling through TV channels. “This is easy to fix,” Red told him, holding up the dashiki on its wire hanger. “Right? Am I right?”
Denny said “Huh?” and flicked his eyes over. “Oh, sure, I can fix that,” he said. “If I can find the same color thread.”
The girls groaned, but Denny stood up and took the dashiki from Red and left the room. “Thanks,” Red called after him. Then he turned back to his daughters and said, “I’ve got some corduroys I could wear with it, kind of a light gray. Gray goes good with blue, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, Dad,” Amanda said.
“At our wedding I wore bell-bottoms,” he said. “Your grandma Dalton had a conniption.”
There’d been no photos of their wedding, because Abby had claimed that a photographer would ruin the mood. So Amanda and Jeannie perked up, and Jeannie asked, “What did Mom wear?”
“This long sort of flowy, I forget what they call it,” Red said. “A Kaplan?”
“A caftan?”
“That’s it.” His eyes filled with tears. “She looked nice,” he said.
“Yes, I bet she did.”
“I know I can’t ask, ‘Why me?’ ” he said.
The tears were running down his face now, but he didn’t seem to realize it.
“We had forty-eight good years together. That’s way more than a lot of folks get.
And I know I should be glad she went first, because she never could have managed without me. She couldn’t even fix a leaky spigot!”
“Right, Dad,” Jeannie said, and she and Amanda were crying too now.
“But sometimes I just have to ask anyhow. You know?”
“Yes, Dad. We know.”
Carla wasn’t happy about letting Susan miss school for the funeral.
Everybody heard Denny arguing with her on the phone.
“She was my mother’s favorite grandchild,” he said.
“You’re telling me the kid can’t skip one measly math test for her sake?
” In the end it was agreed that she could come but not stay over, in order to be back in school on Tuesday morning.
So immediately after breakfast on the morning of the funeral Denny drove down to the train station to meet her.
The child he returned with was a much more solemn, more dignified version of the Susan who’d gone to the beach with them.
She wore a charcoal knit dress with a demure white collar, and black tights and black suede pumps.
Some sort of training bra appeared to be crumpled around her chest. Stem’s three boys eyed her shyly at first and wouldn’t speak, but she herded them into the sunroom and in a few minutes chattery voices began drifting toward the kitchen, where the grown-ups were still sitting around the breakfast table.
Red wore floppy gray corduroys and his dashiki, which was even more startling off its hanger.
The sleeves ballooned extravagantly over elasticized cuffs, giving him a buccaneer air, and the slit at the neck was deep enough to expose a whisk broom of gray chest hair.
But Nora said, “Oh, didn’t Denny do a nice job of mending!
” and Red looked satisfied, not appearing to notice that she hadn’t said a word about the overall effect.
When the doorbell rang and Heidi started barking, they all gathered themselves together.
That would be Ree Bascomb’s maid, who had agreed to babysit the three boys.
Once she’d been given her instructions, they all filed out the back door—Stem and Nora, Red, Denny and Susan—and climbed into Abby’s car.
Denny drove. Red sat next to him. During the ten-minute trip to the church Red said nothing at all, just gazed out the side window.
In the rear, Nora made small talk with Susan.
How was school this year? How was her mother?
Susan answered politely but briefly, as if she felt it would be disrespectful not to keep her mind on the funeral.
Denny drummed his fingers on the steering wheel every time they stopped for a light.
In Hampden, the rest of the world was enjoying an ordinary Monday morning.
Two heavyset women stood talking to each other, one of them trailing a wheeled cart full of laundry.
A man pushed a bundled-up baby in a stroller.
The weather had started out cool but was rapidly growing warmer, and some people wore sweaters but a girl emerging from a liquor store was in short shorts and rubber flip-flops.
The church turned out to be a small, unassuming white cube topped with more of a cupola than a steeple, squeezed between a ma-and-pa grocery store and a house already decorated to the nines for Halloween.
They might have missed it altogether if not for the signboard in front.
HAMPDEN FELLOWSHIP was spelled out across the top of the frame, with WELCOME HOME PRIVATE SPRINKLE in movable type below.
There wasn’t even a parking lot, or not one that Denny could locate.
They had to park on the street. As they were piling out of the car, Jeannie and Hugh drew up behind them with their two children and Hugh’s mother.
Then Amanda and her Hugh walked up with Elise, who was wearing patent-leather heels and a shiny, froufrou dress so short she could have been a cocktail waitress.
A patch of pancake makeup nearly hid her black eye.
All it took was the sight of each other for Jeannie and Amanda to dissolve in torrents of tears, and they stood on the sidewalk hugging while Mrs. Angell clucked sympathetically and clasped her purse to her bosom.
She wore a pretty flowered hat that looked very churchlike.
In fact all of them were dressed in their best today except for Red, whose dashiki hem flared below his Orioles jacket.
Eventually, they climbed the two front steps and entered a low-ceilinged white room lined with dark pews.
It had the deep chill of a place that had sat through an autumn night without heat, although a furnace could be heard now rumbling somewhere below.
A wooden lectern faced them, with a plain dark cross on the wall behind it, and off to one side a woman with dyed red hair was playing “Sheep May Safely Graze” on an upright piano.
(Reverend Alban had already explained that his choir members were working folk and would not be able to sing on a weekday.) The pianist didn’t look in their direction but continued plinking away while they threaded up the aisle and settled in the second row.
Possibly they could have chosen the first row, but there was unspoken agreement that that would have felt too show-offy.
A tall vase of white hydrangeas stood in front of the lectern.
Where had those come from? The Whitshanks hadn’t ordered flowers, and they had specified in the Sun that they didn’t want any sent—just donations to the House of Ruth, if people were so inclined.
Abby had been odd about flowers. She liked them growing outside, unpicked.
Jeannie whispered, “Maybe they’re from someone’s yard,” which would have been preferable, at least, to flowers from a florist, but Amanda, sitting next to her, whispered, “Isn’t it too late in the year?
” They could have spoken in normal tones, but they were all a little self-conscious.
None of them felt entirely certain about funeral etiquette—whom to greet, where to look, who should be handed discreet envelopes of cash at the end of the service.
Twice just this morning, Amanda had phoned Ree Bascomb for advice.
The children sat at the far end, with Susan in the middle because she was from away and therefore the most interesting.
Red was on the aisle, at Amanda’s insistence.
She had pointed out that friends might like to stop by his pew and say a few words to him.
Since this was exactly what Red feared, he sat hunch-shouldered with his head lowered, like a bird in the rain, and stared fixedly at his knees.