The custodian had rearranged the folding wooden chairs in the Town Hall so that they formed a semicircle around a long wooden table upon which were arranged three baskets of white lilies. The funeral was over at nine-thirty that Monday morning, and it was close to eleven when the hall began filling for the scheduled memorial service at eleven-thirty. The adults took seats on the wooden chairs; the young people wandered toward the back of the hall, and ranged themselves against the wall there. There were a great many young people. Jamie had expected there would be, but their presence unsettled him nonetheless and caused him to wonder whether what he planned to say would appeal to them. He had not written out a formal speech, had thought he would just say what was in his heart, basing an impromptu eulogy on what Melanie, dry-eyed, had said in the invaded sanctity of her home yesterday morning, and what he himself, outraged, had said in the fly-buzzing stillness of the rectory yesterday afternoon.
A tall, blond, bearded boy stood leaning against the wall at the rear of the room, his arms folded across his chest, his pale blue eyes watching Jamie as he sat behind the long table. He seemed to be taking Jamie’s measure, silently anticipating what would be said about Scarlett. The boy looked familiar. Was he Scarlett’s boyfriend? Someone Jamie had seen her with in town? But Larry Kreuger had said she didn’t have a boyfriend. Or had he simply said Scotty Klein wasn’t her boyfriend? Jamie couldn’t remember. Yesterday’s events seemed to have occurred in an airless, soundless vacuum that now defied true recall. The bearded, blue-eyed boy was still watching him. Their eyes met for an instant, held until Jamie turned his gaze away. More people were coming through the open oaken doors. Outside on Route 16, Jamie could see one of the town cops waving his arms at drivers wanting to park their cars. There would not be enough chairs for everyone. He wished suddenly that he had not agreed to speak today. He hadn’t known the girl, damn it!
But that was the point.
He waited while the hall filled. Connie, who with some of the other women had made coffee and sandwiches for after the service, came up front to sit beside red-eyed Larry Kreuger and his wife. The minister went to them, whispered some comforting words as he held Melanie’s hand briefly between both his own, and then came around the long table to take the chair beside Jamie’s. A hush fell over the room. The minister nodded to Jamie. Jamie got to his feet and looked out over the room. From the back of the hall, the boy with the beard and the pale blue eyes looked back at him.
“I didn’t know Scarlett too well,” he began. The truth, he thought. Start with the truth, and stay with it. “I wish I had. Her parents think I knew her well, shared with her a philosophy, or a view, or at least a common understanding of life that somehow transcended the difference in our ages. I wish that were true, too, but it simply isn’t. Scarlett was one of my daughter’s friends, but not a very close one at that, just a casual acquaintance really, someone who dropped by the house every now and then, another face in this town where there were, and are, so many teenage faces. I see some of them at the back of the room today, lining the wall, adults now, or almost adults, the way Scarlett was an adult or almost one. But not a person I knew, not really.
“I came late to this town. We didn’t move here, my family and I, until December of 1967. That was less than three years ago, a very short time in the history of a town that can recall Hessian soldiers in the streets. So I was denied the privilege so many of you others enjoyed. I didn’t know Scarlett in kindergarten, I didn’t know any of these kids when they were still very young, I didn’t see them performing in elementary school pageants, I didn’t watch them at Little League practice, I didn’t have to call parents in the middle of the night to say little Sally, who I see standing there at the back of the room, tall and beautiful, little Sally, or Annie, or Nancy, or indeed Scarlett if I’d known her then, had decided she didn’t really want to sleep over and was crying to be taken home. I missed all that, I came to these kids late. My own daughter was almost sixteen when we moved here. I caught all these kids who were her friends just as they were moving into their teens, just as they were on the verge of — forgive me, I must say this — leaving. Leaving us. Before they got here.”
He paused.
He looked out over the faces.
Connie sitting beside the Kreugers in the first row; behind them Reynolds and Betty McGruder whose boy had been killed in Vietnam; just behind them Frank and M. J. Lipscombe whose daughter had joined a commune out in Arizona only last week; and there was George Yancy, the postmaster, a widower whose only son Ralph had been in an automobile accident this past June, three months after he’d got home from Vietnam. And all the other townspeople, watching him, waiting for what he had to say next, the vast expanse of faces stretching toward the back wall where the young people stood, and there — the pale-eyed, bearded boy, his arms still folded across his chest, his eyes demanding to know why Scarlett Kreuger had killed herself in the woods early yesterday morning.
“We all know Scarlett shot herself,” Jamie said, and saw Junie Landers in the third row open her mouth in surprise, and looked directly into her face and said, “Yes, that’s the truth, we can’t deny it.” He looked to where the Kreugers were sitting, Larry’s hand between Melanie’s hands, and he said, “Nor do I think Larry and Melanie would want us to deny it. It’s a shocking horror they’re going to have to live with for a long, long time, and we can only help them live with it by recognizing it ourselves, and not pretending it didn’t happen. Because if we say to ourselves that this was just something with Scarlett, you know, a problem unique to Scarlett, something she couldn’t work out and had to deal with in the only way that seemed possible to her — by going out onto a deserted logging road in the middle of a lonely wood, alone with herself, alone with whatever final thoughts consumed her, and shooting herself, killing herself — well, if we can think this was Scarlett’s problem alone, and allow ourselves to believe that Scarlett was only an accidental casualty and not a victim of something that has been happening for a very long time now, why then we will have done her the final disservice, we will have committed the final obscenity.”
The pale-eyed, bearded boy was watching him. His arms were still folded across his chest. He leaned against the back wall, his head slightly tilted, light streaming through the long windows to burnish the beard and mustache. Long hair and skeptical eyes. Faint look of derision. A look he had seen often enough on the face of — well, his own daughter. Well, all right, I’m saying all the wrong things, he thought, they shouldn’t have asked me to make this speech, anyway, I’m not a public speaker, I don’t now how to do such things. The Kreugers shouldn’t have asked me to talk about Scarlett as though she were my... own daughter. He looked again at the pale, blue-eyed bearded boy at the back of the room. My own daughter, he thought. Arms folded, cold dead eyes, watching, challenging.
“There was a little thing I used to do whenever Scarlett came to the house,” Jamie said. “Not recently. My daughter and Scarlett haven’t seen too much of each other in recent months. I mean when Scarlett was younger, sixteen, seventeen. Whenever she came to the house, I used to say ‘Oh, lookee heah, it’s Missy Scah-lutt home fum Atlanta!’ and she’d look at me and blink — I don’t know what she was thinking, her parents tell me now she used to get a kick out of it, but maybe she was thinking, Well, here’s this baffling little joke again from Lissie’s dumb father, I just don’t know. But the point, the thing I’m trying to say is, is... that was it, that was the extent of our communication. ‘Hello, Mr. Croft’ and ‘Oh, lookee heah, it’s Missy Scah-lutt home fum Atlanta!’ That was it, do you see? That was all of it. And I wish now just once I’d have said, ‘Hey, Scarlett, what’s new in your life, what’s important to you, what would you like to talk about?’ Just once. And I wish that just once Scarlett would have asked me why I had a worried look on my face, or why I, why I... you see, I think we could have talked. I think we could have prevented what happened. It’s too late now, I guess.”