But Caleb looked like a doll, like a child’s doll. A wax head, a little body of stuffed rags swaddled now in a blue blanket.
She had stared dry-eyed at him for as long as she could bear. Then she had turned and ordered the casket closed.
Now she glanced down at her hands. They lay in her lap like pieces of wax fruit on a plate. She could almost see them aging before her eyes, the skin drying and shrinking on the bone, the knuckles swelling with arthritis. Her own mother had first shown her age in her hands, and Roberta took after her mother, looked like her, shared her tastes and inclinations. Her mother’s hands had grown old long before the rest of her. The woman had retained a youthful face long after she’d had an old woman’s hands, and then in a rush the rest of her had caught up with her hands. She’d had lung cancer and it reached metastasis before they found it, and then the decline had been abrupt and dramatic.
Roberta looked at her own hands and thought of her mother and her mother’s death and wanted a cigarette. Her mouth was dry and her hands and feet were chilled and she wanted a cigarette badly, wanted a drink of water, wanted to use the toilet. But nothing was worth the trouble, nothing was all that urgent, and she remained in her seat, staring dully ahead.
So many people offering their sympathy! True, she had lived in Charleston all her life, but she’d been an only child and David had no family here, and most of the friends of her youth had drifted away. While she and David had been socially active earlier in their marriage, they had become less so even while they still lived in the suburbs, and what social life remained had shrunk considerably since the move to the city. They had neither made new friends nor kept the old ones, and yet people kept coming, murmuring unintelligible words, patting her wax-fruit hands.
“Sorry for your trouble, Mrs. Jardell. I’m Curt Rowan, a business friend of your husband’s.”
She nodded, let her hand touch his.
“Mrs. Jardell? I’m Ariel’s teacher, Claire Tashman. I’m so sorry.”
“Roberta, what a terrible thing. I’m so deeply sorry, dear.”
“I’m sorry for your trouble, Mrs. Jardell. I’m Erskine Wold, I’m Ariel’s friend.”
What an odd-looking little boy, she thought, certain she’d never seen him before. Trust Ariel to choose an odd child for a friend. Birds of a feather—
“Oh, Roberta, you poor darling!” An ancient friend of her mother’s, her face as wrinkled as a monkey’s, her name impossible to recall. Roberta had not seen her since her mother’s funeral. An embrace, a powdered cheek to be kissed, and then the woman moved off and a man took her place.
She sensed his presence before she raised her eyes and saw him. She had had fleeting thoughts of him during the past two days but had refused to allow herself to entertain these thoughts.
Now her eyes took him in and she kept a tight hold on herself, not letting herself react visibly to the sight of him. Of course he had come — why shouldn’t he? He’d been her friend for years, hers and David’s, and he lived just a few blocks from Whittecombe’s. It was a fine fall day, cloudless and cool. Perhaps he’d walked over, cutting a dashing figure in his pinstripe navy suit, striding athletically through the quiet suburban streets, his arms swinging at his sides.
Jeff Channing.
Did he know whom they were burying this lovely afternoon? Did he know who it was in the little brassbound casket?
She wanted to tell him. She wanted to tell them all. She wanted to lift the lid of the obscene little coffin and cry out at the top of her lungs, telling Jeff Channing to take a first and last look at his son.
But all she did was nod, and pretend to have heard whatever he might have said, and murmur something unintelligible in evident response. He hesitated only a moment before moving on to express his sympathy to David. He had not moved to take her hand, nor did she offer it.
She looked down at her hand, lying so still in her lap. Soon, she thought. Soon it would begin to show its age.
Ariel wished they would start it already. All of these people were driving her crazy. She didn’t know who most of them were and she didn’t really want to know, but instead of just leaving her alone they had to give their names.
Not the man who’d just passed, though. He hadn’t called her by name nor had he supplied his own, and the funny thing was that she was pretty sure she recognized him. She’d seen him before, though not recently.
Maybe it was just that he had the kind of blank good looks you saw in magazine ads and on television. He could have been the master of ceremonies on the Dating Game. Maybe he was working up a new game show. The Funeral Game — pick the right coffin and win an all-expense paid trip for two to Forest Lawn Cemetery.
At least he hadn’t bugged her. So many of them seemed to feel a need to drop some special message on her. One grayhaired woman with huge nostrils had asked her if she would miss her baby brother. That was about the most disgusting number anyone had done so far, but a lot of people had told her that she would have to be very brave and help her mother, and she felt like asking the next moron who came up with that line just what good her bravery would do Roberta.
Because it was pretty obvious that Roberta didn’t give the northern half of a southbound rat whether she was brave or terrified or anything else. The only thing she could do that would make Roberta feel better would be to change places with Caleb. If it was Ariel in the little brass box instead of poor old Caleb then Roberta would jump up and down and turn handsprings.
Not that she’d fit. She was twelve, just two months short of thirteen, and although she was not particularly tall for her age she was still far too large to squeeze into Caleb’s coffin. She had a sudden mental picture of herself jammed into it, legs doubled up and all scrunched together to fit, and old Roberta jumping maniacally up and down on the lid in an effort to close it.
The image struck her as hysterical and she had to fight the impulse to giggle. That, she knew, would just about tear it. Roberta hated her as it was, hated her for being adopted, hated her for being alive, and hated her for being there, and all it would take was one tiny little giggle and Roberta would just about strangle her. Besides, even if Roberta didn’t notice, even if nobody happened to notice, the last thing she wanted was to sit around breaking herself up at Caleb’s funeral.
What she really wanted to do was cry. But she couldn’t do that either. She had cried all of yesterday and most of the day before, and she would almost certainly do some more crying, probably that night. But she had to be alone to cry. She just wouldn’t cry in front of anybody.
The parade finally ended when a pair of ushers moved in and began steering people toward their seats. The people who worked in funeral parlors, Ariel decided, had to be about the grimmest people in the world. There was old Mr. Whittecombe, who owned the place, and who looked as though he had died years ago and had been very skillfully embalmed; they’d done such a perfect job on him that he could still walk and talk, but if you watched closely and listened carefully it became obvious that he was actually dead. Then there were his two sons, younger versions of their father, and there were three or four other young men who hovered around, and they all wore the same black suits and had the same oily voices and narrow-shouldered bodies and they were all spooky. Which only figured, because you had to be pretty spooky to decide to do things like this for a living.
And you had to be able to glide around like an efficient zombie, which wasn’t likely to be a million laughs. And, speaking of laughs, you could absolutely never laugh. But that probably wasn’t a problem for these men because they didn’t look as though anything had ever struck them as funny.