Gone for good.
Max watched Elizabeth and Rachel turn the corner. He left before the last bell rang. Briefcase into the backseat, empties into the dumpster. Drive home. Good, it’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik. Milk, Cheerios, orange juice, cigarettes.
I Sing Because I’m Happy, I Sing Because I’m Free
Sometimes God makes a mistake. Just carelessness. He doesn’t check the calendar. If He had checked, He might have seen that Elizabeth was overbooked for loss. Elizabeth didn’t believe in a real God, but she had a God character in her head, part Mr. Klein, part Santa. In grade school, when Mimi Tedeschi’s little brother died, Mimi had leaned forward from two seats back to whisper that God took him to be one of His angels. Elizabeth almost stood up in the middle of spelling to scream. Who could believe such ugly, cruel nonsense? That God would steal babies from their families because He was lonely, snuff the life out of them because He needed company?
And even if there was a huge Winnie-the-Pooh nursery for all of God’s dead baby angels, where did that leave Mrs. Hill?
Elizabeth lay in her bed every day after school, missing Huddie so badly her body gave out after a few hours. Rachel called, but Elizabeth was too tired to talk. Her mother hovered in the doorway, wishing Elizabeth unconscious until the pain passed.
“Would you like to talk about whatever it is?”
“No.” Elizabeth rolled over.
“Are you quite sure?”
Elizabeth pulled the covers up. The only good thing about a broken heart at a young age is that you don’t yet feel the compulsion to behave well, to consider your effect on others. Margaret brought a plate of square chocolate-dipped cookies and a cup of tea, which is what she would have liked someone to bring her, and Elizabeth wept for the Huddie-colored chocolate and ate all the cookies without gratitude, without appreciation, without any awareness that every day her mother left her office to come home, take her daughter’s emotional pulse, and put a little plateful of appealing cookies on her nightstand. For the rest of her life, when people were in trouble and she cared at all, Elizabeth gave them a box of French cookies, plain on one side, a thick chocolate slab on the other.
The lady who phoned didn’t know who exactly Elizabeth was, and the beginning of the call was a tangle of misunderstanding and misfiring expectations. Elizabeth didn’t know anyone with such a silky, low-pitched, and definitely black voice, and Reverend Shales had not told the A.M.E. Zion Church clerk, who had not told Mrs. Hazlipp, that Elizabeth Taube was a white girl. In the end, Mrs. Hazlipp made it clear that Mrs. Hill’s funeral was on Friday at one, at Doolittle’s Funeral Home, on Little Church Road off Middle Neck, and that Dr. Vivian Hill had indicated that Elizabeth was, of course, “welcome to mourn the passing of Sister Hill.” She was not so welcome that Dr. Hill had called directly, but Mrs. Hazlipp offered that it was a very difficult time for Vivian Hill, what with losing her mother and what with her very busy medical practice in Los Angeles. Elizabeth nodded, unseen, and agreed to everything, not sure that she was allowed to say how much she had loved Mrs. Hill.
Three church Stewardesses went right to Mrs. Hill’s house. They went about their business, tidying up, remarking, wrestling the smell of death out the door, humming melody and harmony for their favorite hymns. No one knew what Mrs. Hill’s favorites were. When Mr. Hill died, all her sociability went with him. No Missionary Society, no Board, not even the Four Seasons Tea or the community potluck could get her back to church. The Stewardesses were not cleaning for Mrs. Hill, they were certainly not cleaning for hincty Vivian Hill, graduated first in her class from North Shore High School, went to medical school in California, left an ailing mother, hardly visited, couldn’t be bothered with the church when she did. They were cleaning for the Stewardesses, for their sense of what was right, for their own peace of mind. No one would say they had not done right by Sister Hill, least of all Miss Vivian in that white Mercedes.
Elizabeth went to the funeral as properly dressed as she could stand, expecting warmth and light and a huge, swaying choir of sweet black voices, Mrs. Hill’s community, her people, throwing their arms around Mrs. Hill to take her in and carry her home, laying her head on a soft dark breast.
The funeral parlor was not large. Dusty olive-green velvet drapes hung down behind two tottering plant stands crowned by massive pink and yellow gladioli. The front rows were empty except for a single woman wearing sunglasses, a chic black silk suit, and black patent leather heels. She was the only woman without a hat, with close-cropped natural hair, and when a large church lady in a grey dress and matching jacket and an ivory grey-feathered turban sat down next to her and put one gloved hand on her dark, ringless hand, Elizabeth could see that Dr. Hill was an outsider too. There were no other white people, and Elizabeth headed toward the back, away from the casket, away from the light bouncing off Reverend Shales as he began to rumble informally beneath the organ wheezing through “God Will Take Care of You.”
Someone put a pamphlet in Elizabeth’s hand, and she looked hard at the tiny xeroxed picture of a middle-aged Mrs. Hill frowning back, even then cocking her head a little. The lady in the grey dress got up, smoothed her white gloves, and stood foursquare in the room. She sang “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” and Elizabeth closed her eyes and tried to feel and smell Huddie in this warm, scented room of brown flesh that was all not him. The voice was sweet and full of feeling, but it was not feeling for Mrs. Hill. It was the singer’s love for her Lord, her powerful, in-the-very-core-of-her-being belief in her personal relationship with her Savior, and it was her devotion to Reverend Samuel C. Shales. Mrs. Hill was only an opportunity to celebrate, and the celebration of this whole world that was not Elizabeth’s and not open to her, the slap-obvious truth that this place was not her home, any more than her mother’s house was, that her only home had been Mrs. Hill’s footstool and Huddie’s narrow bed, made Elizabeth crumple up and cry until one of the ladies beside her, kind and curious, passed her a lace hankie that Elizabeth tried to use without actually soiling it or blowing her nose on it.
Reverend Shales said all life was precious, said something soft-voiced and tender about those who lived in the shelter of the Lords something, and then he swung into it.
“Death reminds us that life is given by God, by God Almighty alone, and life is taken away by God. Live righteously and prepare for Judgment Day. As it has come to Sister Hill, it will come to each and every one of us. Live righteously and be judged righteous, for those that are judged righteous shall sit with the Lord in his heavenly mansions, I say they shall sit at the right hand of God in his glorious, heavenly home, and they, the righteous among us, shall feast at the heavenly banquet.”
The women around her began to shift and nod, and Elizabeth could see Mrs. Hill nodding to herself, rooting around in the pork rind bag until she found the really crispy, curlicued ones.