by Stephen King
At the head of the aisle, just inside the door giving onto the foyer-lounge, was a book on a stand. Chained to the stand was a ballpoint pen. It was here that the funeral director positioned Louis, so he could "greet his friends and relatives."
The friends and relatives were supposed to sign the book with their names and addresses. Louis had never had the slightest idea what the purpose of this mad custom might be, and he did not ask now. He supposed that when the funeral was over, he and Rachel would get to keep the book. That seemed the maddest thing of all. Somewhere he had a high school yearbook and a college yearbook and a med school yearbook; there was also a wedding book, with MY WEDDING DAY stamped on the imitation leather in imitation gold leaf, beginning with a photo of Rachel trying on her bridal veil before the mirror that morning with her mother's help and ending with a photo of two pairs of shoes outside a closed hotel door. There was also a baby book for Ellie--they had tired of adding to it rather quickly though; that one--with its spaces for MY FIRST HAIRCUT (add a lock of baby's hair) and WHOOPS! (add a picture of baby falling on her ass)--had been just too relentlessly cute.
Now, added to all the others, this one. What do we call it? Louis wondered as he stood numbly beside the stand waiting for the party to begin. MY DEATHBOOK? FUNERAL AUTOGRAPHS? THE DAY WE PLANTED GAGE? Or maybe something more dignified, like A DEATH IN THE FAMILY?
He turned the book back to its cover, which, like the cover to the MY WEDDING DAY book, was imitation leather.
The cover was blank.
Almost predictably, Missy Dandridge had been the first to arrive that morning, good-hearted Missy who had sat with Ellie and Gage on dozens of occasions. Louis found himself remembering that it had been Missy who had taken the kids on the evening of the day Victor Pascow had died. She had taken the kids, and Rachel had made love to him, first in the tub, then in bed.
Missy had been crying, crying hard, and at the sight of Louis's calm, still face, she burst into fresh tears and reached for him--seemed to grope for him. Louis embraced her, realizing that this was the way it worked or the way it was supposed to work, anyway--some kind of human charge that went back and forth, loosening up the hard earth of loss, venting it, breaking up the rocky path of shock with the heat of sorrow.
I'm so sorry, Missy was saying, brushing her dark blond hair back from her pallid face. Such a dear sweet little boy. I loved him so much, Louis, I'm so sorry, it's an awful road, I hope they put that truck driver in jail forever, he was going much too fast, he was so sweet, so dear, so bright, why would God take Gage, I don't know, we can't understand, can we, but I'm sorry, sorry, so sorry.
Louis comforted her, held her and comforted her. He felt her tears on his collar, the press of her breasts against him. She wanted to know where Rachel was, and Louis told her that Rachel was resting. Missy promised to go see her and that she would sit with Ellie anytime, for as long as they needed her. Louis thanked her.
She had started away, still sniffing, her eyes redder than ever above her black handkerchief. She was moving toward the coffin when Louis called her back. The funeral director, whose name Louis could not even remember, had told him to have them sign the book, and damned if he wasn't going to have them do it.
Mystery guest, sign in please, he thought and came very close to going off into cackles of bright, hysterical laughter.
It was Missy's woeful, heartbroken eyes that drove the laughter away.
"Missy, would you sign the book?" he asked her, and because something else seemed to be needed, he added, "For Rachel."
"Of course," she said. "Poor Louis and poor Rachel." And suddenly Louis knew what she was going to say next, and for some reason he dreaded it; yet it was coming, unavoidable, like a black bullet of a large caliber from a killer's gun, and he knew that he would be struck over and over by this bullet in the next interminable ninety minutes, and then again in the afternoon, while the wounds of the morning were still trickling blood:
"Thank God he didn't suffer, Louis. At least it was quick."
Yes, it was quick, all right, he thought about saying to her--ah, how that would shatter her face all over again, and he felt a vicious urge to do it, to simply spray the words into her face. It was quick, no doubt about that, that's why the coffin's closed, nothing could have been done about Gage even if Rachel and I approved of dressing up dead relatives in their best like department store mannequins and rouging and powdering and painting their faces. It was quick, Missy-my-dear, one minute he was there on the road and the next minute he was lying in it, but way down by the Ringers' house. It hit him and killed him and then it dragged him and you better believe it was quick. A hundred yards or more all told, the length of a football field. I ran after him, Missy, I was screaming his name over and over again, almost as if I expected he would still be alive, me, a doctor. I ran ten yards and there was his baseball cap and I ran twenty yards and there was one of his Star Wars sneakers, I ran forty yards and by then the truck had run off the road and the box had jackknifed in that field beyond the Ringers' barn. People were coming out of their houses and I went on screaming his name, Missy, and at the fifty-yard line there was his jumper, it was turned inside-out, and on the seventy-yard line there was the other sneaker, and then there was Gage.
Abruptly the world went dove gray. Everything passed out of his view. Dimly he could feel the corner of the stand which held the book digging into his palm, but that was all.
"Louis?" Missy's voice. Distant. The mystery sound of pigeons in his ears.
"Louis?" Closer now. Alarmed.
The world swam back into focus.
"You all right?"
He smiled. "Fine," he said. "I'm okay, Missy."
She signed for herself and her husband--Mr. and Mrs. David Dandridge--in round Palmer-method script; to this she added their address--Rural Box 67, Old Bucksport Road--and then raised her eyes to Louis's and quickly dropped them, as if her very address on the road where Gage had died constituted a crime.
"Be well, Louis," she whispered.
David Dandridge shook his hand and muttered something inarticulate, his prominent, arrowhead-shaped adam's apple bobbing up and down. Then he followed his wife hurriedly down the aisle for the ritual examination of a coffin which had been made in Storyville, Ohio, a place where Gage had never been and where he was not known.
*
Following the Dandridges they all came, moving in a shuffling line, and Louis received them, their handshakes, their hugs, their tears. His collar and the upper sleeve of his dark gray suit coat soon became quite damp. The smell of the flowers began to reach even the back of the room and to permeate the place with the smell of funeral. It was a smell he remembered from his childhood--that sweet, thick, mortuary smell of flowers. Louis was told how merciful it was that Gage hadn't suffered thirty-two times by his own inner count. He was told that God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform twenty-five times. Bringing up the rear was he's with the angels now, a total of twelve times.
It began to get to him. Instead of losing what marginal sense these little aphorisms had (the way your own name will lose its sense and identity if you repeat it over and over again), they seemed to punch deeper each time, angling in toward the vitals. By the time his mother-in-law and father-in-law put in their inevitable appearance, he had begun to feel like a hard-tagged fighter.
His first thought was that Rachel had been right--and how. Irwin Goldman had indeed aged. He was--what? Fifty-eight, fifty-nine? Today he looked a graven and composed seventy. He looked almost absurdly like Israel's Prime Minister Menachem Begin with his bald head and Coke-bottle glasses. Rachel had told Louis Goldman had aged when she came back from her Thanksgiving trip, but Louis had not expected this. Of course, he thought, maybe it hadn't been this bad at Thanksgiving. The old man hadn't lost one of his two grandchildren at Thanksgiving.
Dory walked beside him, her face all but invisible under two--possibly three--layers of heavy black netting. Her hair was fashionably blue, the col
or favored by elderly ladies of an upper-class American persuasion. She held her husband's arm. All Louis could really see behind the veil was the glitter of her tears.
Suddenly he decided it was time to let bygones be bygones. He could not hold the old grudge any longer. Suddenly it was too heavy. Perhaps it was the cumulative weight of all those platitudes.
"Irwin. Dory," he murmured. "Thank you for coming."
He made a gesture with his arms, as if to shake hands with Rachel's father and hug her mother simultaneously, or perhaps even to hug them both. Either way he felt his own tears start for the first time, and for an instant he had the crazy idea that they could mend all their fences, that Gage would do that much for them in his dying, as if this were some romantic ladies' novel he had stepped into where the wages of death were reconciliation, where it could cause something more constructive than this endless, stupid, grinding ache which just went on and on and on.
Dory started toward him, making a gesture, beginning, perhaps, to hold out her own arms. She said something--"Oh, Louis . . ." and something else that was garbled--and then Goldman pulled his wife back. For a moment the three of them stood in a tableau that no one noticed except themselves (unless perhaps the funeral director, standing unobtrusively in the far corner of the East Room, saw--Louis supposed that Uncle Carl would have seen), Louis with his arms partly outstretched, Irwin and Dory Goldman standing as stiff and straight as a couple on a wedding cake.
Louis saw that there were no tears in his father-in-law's eyes; they were bright and clear with hate (does he think I killed Gage to spite him? Louis wondered). Those eyes seemed to measure Louis, to find him the same small and pointless man who had kidnapped his daughter and brought her to this sorrow . . . and then to dismiss him. His eyes drifted to Louis's left--to Gage's coffin, in fact--and only then did they soften.
Still Louis made a final effort. "Irwin," he said. "Dory. Please. We have to get together on this."
"Louis," Dory said again--kindly, Louis thought--and then they were past him, Irwin Goldman perhaps pulling his wife along, not looking to the left or the right, certainly not looking at Louis Creed. They approached the coffin, and Goldman fumbled a small black skullcap out of his suit coat pocket.
You didn't sign the book, Louis thought, and then a silent belch of such malignantly acidic content rose through his digestive works that his face clenched in pain.
*
The morning viewing ended at last. Louis called home. Jud answered and asked him how it had gone. All right, Louis said. He asked Jud if he could talk to Steve.
"If she can dress herself, I'm going to let her come this afternoon," Steve said. "Okay by you?"
"Yes," Louis said.
"How are you, Lou? No bullshit and straight on--how are you?"
"All right," Louis said briefly. "Coping." I had all of them sign the book. All of them except Dory and Irwin, and they wouldn't.
"All right," Steve said. "Look, shall we meet you for lunch?"
Lunch. Meeting for lunch. This seemed such an alien idea that Louis thought of the science fiction novels he had read as a teenager--novels by Robert A. Heinlein, Murray Leinster, Gordon R. Dickson. The natives here on Planet Quark have an odd custom when one of their children dies, Lieutenant Abelson: they "meet for lunch." I know how grotesque and barbaric that sounds, but remember, this planet has not been terraformed yet.
"Sure," Louis said. "What's a good restaurant for half time between funeral viewings, Steve?"
"Take it easy, Lou," Steve said, but he didn't seem entirely displeased. In this state of crazy calm, Louis felt better able to see into people than ever before in his life. Perhaps it was an illusion, but right now he suspected Steve was thinking that even a sudden spate of sarcasm, squirted out like an abrupt mouthful of bile, was preferable to his earlier state of disconnection.
"Don't worry," he said to Steve now. "What about Benjamin's?"
"Sure," Steve said. "Benjamin's would be fine."
He had made the call from the office of the funeral director. Now, as Louis passed the East Room on his way out, he saw that the room was almost empty, but Irwin and Dory Goldman sat down in the front row, heads bowed. They looked to Louis as if they might sit there forever.
*
Benjamin's was the right choice. Bangor was an early-lunch town, and around one o'clock it was nearly deserted. Jud had come along with Steve and Rachel, and the four of them ate fried chicken. At one point Rachel went to the ladies' room and remained in there so long that Steve became nervous. He was on the verge of asking a waitress to check on her when she came back to the table, her eyes red.
Louis picked at his chicken and drank a lot of Schlitz beer. Jud matched him bottle for bottle, not talking much.
Their four meals went back almost uneaten, and with his preternatural insight, Louis saw the waitress, a fat girl with a pretty face, debating with herself about whether or not to ask them if their meals had been all right, finally taking another look at Rachel's red-rimmed eyes and deciding it would be the wrong question. Over coffee Rachel said something so suddenly and so baldly that it rather shocked them all--particularly Louis, who at last was becoming sleepy with the beer. "I'm going to give his clothes to the Salvation Army."
"Are you?" Steve said after a moment.
"Yes," Rachel said. "There's a lot of wear in them yet. All his jumpers . . . his corduroy pants . . . his shirts. Someone will be glad to get them. They're all very serviceable. Except for the ones he was wearing, of course. They're . . . ruined."
The last word became a miserable choke. She tried to drink coffee, but that was no good. A moment later she was sobbing into her hands.
There was a queer moment then. There were crossing lines of tension then. They all seemed to focus on Louis. He felt this with the same preternatural insight he'd had all this day, and of them all, this was the clearest and surest. Even the waitress felt those converging lines of awareness. He saw her pause at a table near the back where she was laying placemats and silver. For a moment Louis was puzzled, and then he understood: they were waiting for him to comfort his wife.
He couldn't do it. He wanted to do it. He understood it was his responsibility to do it. All the same, he couldn't. It was the cat that got in his way. Suddenly and with no rhyme or reason. The cat. The fucking cat. Church with his ripped mice and the birds he had grounded forever. When he found them, Louis had cleaned up the messes promptly, with no complaint or comment, certainly without protest. He had, after all, bought them. But had he bought this?
He saw his fingers. Louis saw his fingers. He saw his fingers lightly skating over the back of Gage's jacket. Then Gage's jacket had been gone. Then Gage had been gone.
He looked into his coffee cup and let his wife cry beside him, uncomforted.
After a moment--in terms of clock time probably quite short, but both then and in retrospect it seemed long--Steve put an arm around her and hugged her gently. His eyes on Louis's were reproachful and angry. Louis turned from them toward Jud, but Jud was looking down, as if in shame. There was no help there.
37
"I knew something like this would happen," Irwin Goldman said. That was how the trouble started. "I knew it when she married you. 'You'll have all the grief you can stand and more,' I said. And look at this. Look at this . . . this mess."
Louis looked slowly around at his father-in-law, who had appeared before him like some malign jack-in-the-box in a skullcap; and then, instinctively, he looked around at where Rachel had been, by the book on the stand--the afternoon shift was hers by default--but Rachel was gone.
The afternoon viewing had been less crowded, and after half an hour or so, Louis had gone down to the front row of seats and sat there on the aisle, aware of very little (only peripherally aware of the cloying stink of the flowers) except the fact that he was very tired and sleepy. It was only partly the beer, he supposed. His mind was finally ready to shut down. Probably a good thing. Perhaps, after twelve or sixteen hours of
sleep, he would be able to comfort Rachel a little.
After a while his head had sunk until he was looking at his hands, loosely linked between his knees. The hum of voices near the back was soothing. He had been relieved to see that Irwin and Dory weren't here when the four of them returned from lunch, but he should have known their continued absence was too good to be true.
"Where's Rachel?" Louis asked now.
"With her mother. Where she should be." Goldman spoke with the studied triumph of a man who has closed a big deal. There was Scotch on his breath. A lot of it. He stood before Louis like a banty little district attorney before a man in the bar of justice, a man who is patently guilty. He was unsteady on his feet.
"What did you say to her?" Louis said, feeling the beginnings of alarm now. He knew Goldman had said something. It was in the man's face.
"Nothing but the truth. I told her this is what it gets you, marrying against your parents' wishes. I told her--"
"Did you say that?" Louis asked incredulously. "You didn't really say that, did you?"
"That and more," Irwin Goldman said. "I always knew it would come to this--this or something like it. I knew what kind of a man you were the first time I saw you." He leaned forward, exhaling Scotch fumes. "I saw through you, you prancing little fraud of a doctor. You enticed my daughter into a stupid, feckless marriage and then you turned her into a scullery maid and then you let her son be run down in the highway like a . . . a chipmunk."
Most of this went over Louis's head. He was still groping with the idea that this stupid little man could have--
"You said that to her?" he repeated. "You said it?"
"I hope you rot in hell!" Goldman said, and heads turned sharply toward the sound of his voice. Tears began to squeeze out of Irwin Goldman's bloodshot brown eyes. His bald head glowed under the muted fluorescent lights. "You made my wonderful daughter into a scullery maid . . . destroyed her future . . . took her away . . . and let my grandson die a dirty death in a country road."
His voice rose to a hectoring scream.
"Where were you? Sitting on your ass while he was playing in the road? Thinking about your stupid medical articles? What were you doing, you shit? You stinking shit! Killer of children! Ki--"
