"I'm sorry," I said.
"Won't bring her back anyways, will it?" he said as he toddled off to take his seat.
Just before the service was to begin, a nice-looking man appeared with two sweet little girls in tow. They took their places in the front row across the aisle from the rest of us. The older of the two girls was about nine, I'd say, the other only four. They were in their very best dresses, pink for the elder girl, blue for the young one, with lacy collars and big skirts. They wore white tights and black patent Mary Janes, their blond hair was pulled back with matching barrettes, and they were two of the prettiest little girls I had ever seen. The younger one was the spitting image of Anna, the older looked more like her father.
We were about ten minutes into the service when the clear bell-like tones of the little girl filled a momentary pause in the proceedings. "Where's Mummy gone?" she said. The sound seemed to rise to the very top of the cathedral, echoing from every corner of the church. We all started, and some of us gasped. The man leaned down and murmured something to her. I think he said something about heaven. "When is she coming back?" the little girl demanded in a plaintive tone. The older child put her arms around the shoulders of the little one, and gave her a hug. The man, Anna's husband, looked terrible. Cybil burst into tears, and it was all I could do, not to do the same.
I sat through the rest of the service in a little puddle of misery, going back over that evening for the thousandth time, and wondering if I'd been responsible in any way for the little girl's pain. How many drinks had I consumed? I had a glass and a half at the bar before we went to the museum. The wine was lovely, but you would never call the glasses large, and I hadn't had time to finish the second one. I'd taken three glasses of champagne at the Cottingham, but I'd not got more than a sip or two out of any of them. Indeed I felt I'd spent the whole evening looking for my stray champagne glass. I'd barely sipped the first glass when we'd been asked to set them down to go upstairs. I'd been served another afterward, but only had a couple of sips before leaving it in the bathroom. I got a third, but then I'd had to set it down to go into the shop to buy Karoly's book. When I came out there were several half-drunk glasses where I'd left mine, so I'd just given up on champagne. That meant that by the time I returned to the bar, I couldn't have had much more than two drinks in me, two and a half at most. There was the B52, or course, which had been a bad idea. They didn't name those things after military aircraft for nothing. But still, I'd only had a couple of sips, certainly not enough not only to pass out, but not to remember a thing. I'd started drinking at five, and recalled seeing the clock over the bar at midnight, awhile before it all went black. That meant I'd had seven hours for the stuff to work its way out of my system. Maybe, I thought, I had a peculiar virus or a brain tumor. Or maybe, more likely, I'd just had a helluva lot more to drink than I recalled.
There was no interment ceremony, although Cybil told us that her mother had chosen a plot for Anna's ashes in the cemetery that led down into the ravine where Anna had died. After the service we all went back to Anna's mother's apartment. It was in a yellow apartment building very similar to Alfred Nabb's and only a block or two away from the bridge. Mrs. Belmont served tea and those sandwiches we used to get at children's birthday parties, pinwheels of peanut butter and banana, cucumber and cream cheese, and impossibly constructed squares of pink and brown bread that look like a chessboard. Cybil, who was quite obviously dealing with this by stuffing her face, ate most of them. There were cakes, tiny petits fours, with pink icing, and for those who needed something a little stronger, in this case Alfred Nabb, there was some truly awful sherry.
"Didn't know she was a neighbor of mine," he said, looking at the picture of Anna, taken in happier times, that rested prominently on a table beside the small urn of Anna's ashes. "Been living in that building for over twenty years, and saw everybody who'd walked across the bridge. Never remember seeing her. That lady," he added, indicating Doris. "Her mother. Seen her many times, but not that poor girl."
"I didn't know she was a neighbor, either," I said. "I live just across the bridge in Cabbagetown, and she was a classmate of mine at college, and I didn't know she lived just a few blocks away from me. She didn't get out much."
I looked at the many photos Doris had on display. The most poignant of them all was Anna with her family: her husband, smiling, a boy of about three in his lap, the older daughter about six standing beside her mother and smiling at the baby in Anna's arms. Many of the photos dated to our college days. Anna had been the clown of the group, always sneaking into our apartments to short-sheet our beds, or to dream up some prank we all had to participate in. In the photos, she was the one holding up her fingers behind someone else's head, or mugging outrageously. That she should come to such a sad end, after years of anguish, seemed impossible. I'd thought of going after her that night in the bar, to get her address from Cybil, to just sit with her to see what was bothering her, but instead, I'd just hung around the bar drinking myself into a coma.
"This is so sad," Morgan said, looking about the apartment. "I can't even imagine what it would be like being afraid to go out. Did she just sit here, day after day, staring out the window?"
"I think she had visitors. Cybil certainly came over. And Diana told me that even though she lost custody of her children, they came over to see her once a week."
"I hope she at least went out on the balcony or something," Morgan murmured. "Being stuck in this little apartment would have the opposite effect on me. I'd be clawing at the walls trying to get out."
The apartment was tidy, but, as Morgan had pointed out, rather small. There was a bedroom that obviously belonged to Doris, one bathroom, and a second, much smaller room with a single bed that doubled as a couch, a small chest of drawers, and, the dominant feature of the room, a rather large desk. "Anna's room," Cybil said, joining me. "Tiny isn't it? I guess she really did close herself in. She had virtually nothing, you know. The cupboard's small, but it was big enough for her stuff. She had lots of books, that's about all. She read everything. Frank and I cleaned out the room yesterday. I didn't think Doris could manage it, and I thought I'd need a guy to do the heavy lifting. Frank volunteered, which was nice of him. He came to visit Anna a few times while she was shut in, or whatever we want to call what she was doing. I didn't really need his help, as it turned out, but it was nice to have his company. We got everything into three small cartons. We took pretty well everything to a women's shelter. Frank said he'd take her books to a library, if Doris didn't want them, which she didn't.
"It was her shoes that really got to me," Cybil went on. "She had three pairs. When you looked at them on the floor of the closet they looked perfectly normal, but when we put them in the box, on the bottom they looked like new. The apartment has broadloom as you can see, and the soles never got worn. The tops had some spots on them, of course, what you'd expect—spaghetti sauce or something, on one of them. But the soles… It hit me then. She really never went out."
"We can't imagine that, can we?" I said. "You hear about people like that, but you can't understand it."
"No, you can't. Could I ask a favor, though, while you're here? Would you mind having a look at the desk? Doris was going to give it away, but I think it's rather nice, and I thought she should save it for one of the little girls. I had the idea it might even be worth something. What do you think? Is it an antique or anything?"
I took a closer look, opening the drawers, and pulling it out from the wall to look at the back. "It's not terribly old," I said. "Maybe fifty or sixty years. But it is a lovely desk, solid wood. They don't often make them like this any more. Notice it has a pocket shelf over the bank of drawers on either side. It's a nice feature. If you need a bigger work surface, you just pull out the shelf and work away, and then slide it back in when you're done," I said, demonstrating. A small piece of paper came out with the shelf. I glanced at it before handing it to Cybil, to see that it contained only two words: Calvaria Club.