I felt a hand on my shoulder. “This way, sir,” said a gelid, androgynous voice, but I was blinded by the sudden dimness and could see nothing but my brother’s egg-white neck, bobbing and glowing before me like swamp gas. I followed down a hallway paneled with thick knotty boards, and turned where a man in a black suit and gleaming wristwatch was gesturing through a door.
My eyes adjusted. The room we had entered was much like a small collegiate lecture hall, with seats — bleachers, really, padded with red upholstery — arranged in concentric semicircles around a curtained proscenium. Canned organ music trickled out over the crowd. I looked around quickly to make sure I had actually come to the right place, and saw Bitty holding hands with a stout man I’d never seen before. Mike, I figured. She noticed me and managed a brave smile through the sheen of tears and sweat that had control of her face, and I smiled back. The froggish Mike smiled at me, a frog’s smile, wide and anthropomorphic. I nodded at Mike. Mike nodded back. Finally, fed up, I looked away.
Here came my mother, apparently out of Rose’s hands, cruising through the milling mourners with her walker like an arctic icebreaker. My heart pitched, and I went to her.
“Mom?” I held out my arms. “It’s me, Tim.”
Her eyes widened and she veered off to the left, knocking her walker into the leg of the gristly man I hadn’t recognized earlier. “Out of the way!” she barked. He turned to me and, with a look that indicated a long and complex acquaintance, raised his eyebrows, as if to say: What are you gonna do with ‘em?
I caught up with my mother and took her arm. It was thin and muscled, like a distance runner’s. “Mom!”
She turned on me. “Where’s my son!” she said. Her eyes were clear and blue as marbles. She had turned sixty-eight this year and looked, with her brilliant white head of curly hair, about a dozen years older. For a moment I saw Rose in her and recoiled in surprise.
“It’s Tim,” I said. “It’s your son Tim.”
She stared at me and her gaze softened. “Oh, Timmy,” she said, and let me hold her a moment. She had never called me that in her life. That had been my father’s name, invented for the convenience of the strip: Lindy, Bobby, Timmy, Bitty.
“Let me get you settled, Mom.”
“Well, all right,” she said. I led her to the front bleacher and moved her walker into the aisle, close enough so that she could reach it. In a second Rose strode in, her rabid eyes darting.
“Oh, Jesus Christ, Mom,” she said, a little too loudly for the small room.
“This man was helping me sit down.” She said this smugly, as if Rose had been found wanting in her duties. Rose pouted.
Andrew walked in and, smiling tactfully, put his arm on Rose’s back. “Hello, Tim.”
“Andrew,” I said, shaking his hand. I wanted him to like me, and so tried to return the smile. It was a strain. Why all these smiles, more than I’d ever been given, at such a grim occasion? I had returned so many today, I didn’t know if I could take another.
“You all sit,” my mother said. “Take a load off those dogs.”
“You bet,” Andrew said, and plopped down next to her. Rose took her seat with a sigh. The rest of the front row, I noticed, was filled with townspeople. The room had the unlikely air of a puppet show or company picnic, the lame static electricity that preceded any third-rate entertainment. It occurred to me that this was probably how Riverbank felt about my father in generaclass="underline" not the local attraction they wished they had, but all they had nonetheless.
I climbed up the carpeted aisle and found an empty place right under an air conditioning vent. The muted gurgle of voices surrounded me, and I closed my eyes and considered that I felt the same way as Riverbank. He wasn’t the father I wished I had, but all I had nonetheless. At least that’s what I pretended, when during college I asserted my independence from the Family Funnies and its author both: what could have been easier than opposing something so wholesome and unironic as the strip, someone so wrapped up in his invented innocence as my father? What could have come more naturally than a thankless and inconvenient career as an installation artist, to the spurned middle child of a well-heeled alcoholic cartoonist?
So why, then, having done these things, did I feel like such a shit? My siblings had taken on the responsibilities of marriage and independence, risen above their petty resentments to become real people. Even Pierce, stuck as he was in the quagmire of his own head, was the true rebel of the family, torturing our father with his presence right up to the bitter end. Only I had proved myself weak and shallow, just like Dad.
Things grew quieter as more people found their seats, and when I opened my eyes I found myself seated next to the plump woman who had wept at the church. She had a round, pretty face and thick-framed glasses too conservative to be hip and too ugly to come off as dignified. They were the glasses of a woman twice her age. I got nervous.
“You’re Tim,” she informed me, sticking out a doughy hand.
I took it. “Yes.”
“I’m Susan Caletti. I was your dad’s editor.”
“Really?” I said. “I thought what’s-his-name was his editor, Burn. The syndicate guy.”
“Dead,” she said flatly, then turned red. “Sorry. His brother took over the syndicate and didn’t want to deal with any actual cartoonists. He farmed them out to his underlings. I got your dad. Like, a year and a half ago.”
“Ah.”
“He was an interesting man.”
“Thank you for not saying he was great.”
She reddened again. “Oh. Well.” She coughed. “Well, hey, I’ll just leave you to your thoughts, okay? But we’ll have to talk later.” I couldn’t for the life of me think of anything we would need to say to one another later, but I bit the bullet and composed another polite smile.
By this time, everyone who was coming seemed already to be in, and the dolled-up greaser who had been standing outside the door quietly closed it. There were no windows in the room; the only light emanated from recessed bulbs in rows on the ceiling. As if on cue, these lights dimmed, and simultaneously the curtains hummed open on mechanized runners, revealing my father’s casket, alone on stage like a brooding soliloquist. It was resting on some sort of conveyor, and beyond it, two little doors were visible, outlined by a red glow. It took several seconds for everyone to process all this, and as they did a stunned hush fell over the room. We were going to watch him tumble into the fire?
Apparently we were. Beside me, my father’s editor gasped. Fresh sobs broke out in the crowd.
And then, with appalling suddenness, the doors clanged open and the conveyor kicked into action, emitting a ghastly throb that drowned out the organ music. I felt a breath of hot air gust past me. Somebody screamed. The conveyor was slow, but the casket had little distance to cover, and in seconds was sliding under gravity’s pull down a little incline toward the inferno. The back end tipped up, like the prow of a sinking ship, and like that, it was gone.
Wait! I wanted to yell, but it was too late. The room was in the grip of an appalling silence. It dawned on me that I never got a chance to look at the old man. The doors swung shut.