Debbie put her head out the door and called in a low but intense voice, “Tina! Dean!” and went back into the room. Tina was there at once. Lillian said, “What is that noise?” And then Dean appeared, and all three of them approached the bed. Lillian lifted her head, then let it fall back, and her last word was “Darling.”
It didn’t matter whom she was thinking of or talking to, but always afterward, Debbie said that her mother had looked at her father, said “Darling,” and passed away.
—
DEBBIE HAD CALLED maybe seven people, Tina had called four or five, and their father hadn’t called anyone, because after their mother died he seemed to collapse. So Debbie was amazed when she finished dressing herself, and then Carlie and Kevvie, to come out to the living room and discover that it was packed to the doors, that there were people chatting in the hall who stopped talking when they saw her and gave her sympathetic looks, that the front door was wide open and there were cars parked all the way down the driveway and out onto the road, and more people, everyone dressed in somber, formal outfits, walking up to the house. They should have had it at the funeral home or at a church of some sort after all — with no one to consult, she had assumed that maybe thirty friends plus Uncle Henry, Uncle Frank, Aunt Andy, and Janet would show up. When she’d called Uncle Joe, he had started crying as soon as she said, “My mom…” but he didn’t dare come — Lois had some sort of stomach virus, and he had been exposed. Aunt Claire couldn’t come, either, because she had just started at Younkers; she and Debbie had agreed they would do a memorial at the farm, maybe at Thanksgiving or Christmas, and then Claire had burst out crying, too, and said, “Oh, sweetie, your mom was my idol. When I was little, I would get her mixed up in my mind with Maureen O’Hara, except that I thought your mom was more glamorous!” The first thing Debbie did when she saw all the people was to go out to the pool area and check that the gate was chained, and the next thing she did was go into her father’s office and lock the liquor cabinet. The coffin, closed because her father couldn’t stand for it to be open, was in the living room, right out of a nineteenth-century novel, but that hadn’t been her intention — her intention had been to keep her mother for as long as she possibly could, not to let her leave home until the very last minute.
Her father was a mess. He kept running his hand back through his hair and standing it on end, and he could not tolerate the feeling of his tie, so he had pulled that off and draped it around his neck. He was wearing a black suit that looked like it had crumpled itself to conform to his state of mind. Debbie watched him. A man would come up to him, shake his hand, mutter something sympathetic, then put his arm around her father’s shoulders and walk him a little away from the crowd. There would be earnest words, more head shaking, a pat on the back; then that man would walk him back into the group, and another man would do the same. Her father looked pale and distraught, as though he found all of this attention disconcerting, but Debbie didn’t know how to put a stop to it or draw him away.
The weather continued calm and clear. As one o’clock approached, Debbie went through the crowd, handing out the programs that Linda had made at the copy center. Mr. Littlejohn, who was going to play the piano, had to walk half a mile to the house. Debbie thanked him effusively, and saw that he understood — he and she were the only two people in control of this mob. Dean, Linda, and Tina set out the rented chairs — not enough — and every bench, kitchen chair, and stool they could find. At one o’clock, Mr. Littlejohn commenced Pachelbel’s “Canon in D.” Everyone stopped talking, came into the living room, and sat down where they could. Debbie took her father into custody — she got him to sit beside her, and she tightly held his hand. Aunt Andy was on his other side, and Uncle Frank was leaning against the wall nearby. Janet had come without Emily or Jared, and she was in the back of the room, keeping to herself. Debbie knew from their talk late last night that Janet was barely holding herself together, but she couldn’t think about that. Aunt Andy quietly took her father’s other hand. When they were all silent, Mr. Littlejohn played the Introit from Mozart’s Requiem, arranged for piano, and much more somber than the Pachelbel. Faces assumed their proper expressions.
Once the music had stopped, a minister they knew socially — a very liberal and cheerful-looking man — got up and gave the sermon. He did not mention “God,” only “our dear Father,” and he said the blandest possible prayers that everyone knew. Then Uncle Frank stepped up and talked about the farm, and Lillian with her troops of devoted friends, and then, all of a sudden, she was spirited away by some stranger, and it turned out to be Arthur, and when he met Arthur and saw them together, he knew he had seen true love. Then Janet came forward and talked for a few moments about Tim, and then Tina came forward and talked about watching her mother her whole life and saying to herself, Oh, that’s how you do it; and now she had seen her mother die, and she had said once again, Oh, that’s how you do it; and she thought of her mother going ahead of her into that unknown kingdom, and somehow felt safer. Then it was Dean’s turn, and he started to talk about being allowed to do whatever he wanted when he was a child, and how that was the best — but he couldn’t go on, and after a few moments, Linda had to come up and take him back to his chair.
Debbie crumpled her paper in her hand and stared at her strangely moving feet in their black pumps as she stepped to the front of the room. As she passed the coffin, she allowed her fingers to run along the dark-reddish edge. Mahogany? It looked like it; her mother herself had picked it out. When she saw all the faces looking up at her, she crumpled the paper even tighter, then looked at the back wall of the living room and out the windows, at the shine of the pool in the warm air. When she opened her mouth, she said, “I am a know-it-all, and have always been a know-it-all, and all these years I spent telling my mother what to do, and either she did what I told her, or she very kindly went her own way and did it differently and better than I would have done. But even as much of a know-it-all as I have always been”—everyone was smiling—“I always knew that my mother, Lillian Manning, knew all there was to know about being a loving mother and a loving wife and a loving friend. I hate how much we miss her already, and how much we will miss her tomorrow and forever.” And then she, like Dean, started to cry, and so she went and sat down, and she could hardly see where she was going through the tears.
Her father got up. Debbie took out her Kleenex and wiped her eyes, of course smearing her mascara. Aunt Andy reached across his empty seat and stroked her arm. Debbie glanced at Uncle Frank, who had gone back to leaning against the wall, and was staring at her father with a kind of hungry curiosity. Yes, they all thought it: How will he survive this?
But her father had pulled himself together, and now he was his usual self. He clasped his hands and said, “I want to tell a little story. Long, long ago, I was driving from Rapid City, South Dakota, to D.C., and when I got to a small town in Iowa, I walked into a bar. Now I say that I walked into a bar, but actually, as I remember, Iowa was dry then, so really, I walked into a drugstore with a soda fountain. And behind the counter there was a very pretty girl. In those days, I, like many of us at the end of the war, considered myself a Big Bad Wolf. Now, thanks to Farley Mowat, we know that the Big Bad Wolf is a wolf who has perhaps lost his female parent, been driven out of the pack at an early age, and may have seen his mate shot by hunters and his single cub die of starvation, but back then, a wolf was a wolf, and if you were a wolf, you had very bad intentions. I chatted up the pretty girl, and I walked her to her car, of course telling her that it was others who had bad intentions, not me. I went to the nearest larger town, and I put myself up for the night.