by John O'Hara
And now he had stopped talking and the professional pallbearers were sneaking up the side aisles. Johnny Loftus, the taxi driver; Matt McGowan, who was some kind of a railroad policeman; George Longmiller, who had some job at the courthouse; Frank McNaughton, a distant cousin of Monica’s husband James and a helper for the Railway Express; Jack Duff, who ran a candy store on the East Side; and Ed Cresswell, a salesman in one of the men’s clothing stores. She had never noticed before that Johnny Loftus and Frank McNaughton were almost exactly the same height. She had always thought of Frank as taller than Johnny. There was six dollars apiece in it for the pallbearers, she happened to know, and could not remember how she happened to know. Probably Jim had told her. Yes, Jim had told her. They had to be strong and sober, clean-looking, about the same size, and have jobs that they could get away from for a few hours on funeral days. It seemed strange to see Matt McGowan in a Protestant church; he usually took up the collection at the seven o’clock Mass in SS. Peter & Paul’s, and seeing him here was like being in Paris, France, and seeing someone from home. She wondered—but of course Monsignor Creedon approved. Johnny was a Catholic, Matt was a Catholic, Frank was a Catholic, and Jack Duff was a Catholic. They wouldn’t have taken work of this kind without Monsignor Creedon’s approval.
Now the honorary pallbearers were coming out of their pews. Her father. Mr. McHenry. Henry Laubach. A very tall man from out of town that she had never seen before. Mr. Hooker, the newspaper editor. Mr. Jenkins from the bank. The Governor. J. Frank Kirkpatrick, the lawyer from Philadelphia. An admiral. Dr. English. Whitney Hofman. The Mayor. Judge Williams. Mr. Johnson, the new Superintendent of Schools. A man with two canes who was new to her. Paul Donaldson, from Scranton. Sixteen altogether.
“Sixteen honorary pallbearers,” said her mother.
“I noticed that,” said Monica.
“The out-of-town people went to Yale with Joe Chapin,” said Peg Slattery.
“I never even knew he went to Yale,” said Monica. “You could fill a book with what I didn’t know about him.”
“Hmm?”
“Nothing,” said Monica.
The church was slowly emptying and Monica and her mother moved into the crowded aisle.
“Very beautiful service, Mrs. Slattery, didn’t you think?” The speaker was Theodore Pflug, assistant cashier of the bank, stopping to hold up the departing worshippers and make way for Peg Slattery and Monica.
“Thank you. Very beautiful. Very beautiful indeed,” said Peg Slattery.
“You notice the man with the two canes? That was David L. Harrison, a partner in J. P. Morgan and Company,” said Pflug.
“Yes, I know,” said Peg Slattery. “He went to Yale with Mr. Chapin.”
“Good morning, Mrs. McNaughton.”
“Good morning, Mr. Pflug.”
“Can I give you ladies a lift or do you have your car?”
“Very kind of you, I’m sure, but we have some shopping to do,” said Peg Slattery.
“Yes, I guess I’ll go back to the bank. We’re closed in honor of Mr. Chapin, but I imagine I can find one or two things to do. One or two, putting it mildly.”
“Well, nice to have seen you,” said Peg Slattery.
“A pleasure, I’m sure. Good-bye, Mrs. Slattery, Mrs. McNaughton. Good day.”
“Good-bye,” said Monica.
She paused with her mother at the foot of the stone steps. “You got that, didn’t you?” said Peg.
“What?”
“I’m supposed to tell Dad Ted Pflug didn’t take the day off, even though he was entitled to it. All right, I’ll tell him. Now what do you want to do? Shall we go take a look at some hats? I’ll treat you to a hat if it isn’t too expensive.”
“How high can I go?”
“Thirty-five. I’m feeling flush.”
“If I like one for twenty-five can I have the difference?” said Monica.
“All right, and I can see where this is going to cost me a hundred and five. I can’t buy for the one without buying for the others, is my motto.”
“Oh, I thought this was a special for me,” said Monica.
“No, I couldn’t do that, but I’ll take you to lunch at the hotel. Dad and the others are having lunch at Edith Chapin’s. I was invited but I got out of it. Me sit around and watch Edith queening it over the Governor and the others? It’s a wonder she didn’t ride in the Governor’s car.”
“I think I’ll call Ann up tomorrow.”
“Don’t you do it. Stay out of it.”
“Stay out of what?” said Monica.
“Well, not exactly stay out of it,” said Peg Slattery. “But don’t start getting mixed up with those people. You never see Ann any more, and when you used to I always knew nothing would ever come of it. Joe’s dead now and we don’t have to pretend we’re friends of the Chapin family, because we’re not.”
“All right,” said Monica. “I wish I’d worn my tan. I want to get a hat to go with it and this dress is so completely different.”
“You can always exchange it. We buy enough hats from Sadie, I never had any trouble exchanging one. Just as long as you don’t wear it to a party, or publicly, then she doesn’t mind.”
“I could buy two fifteen-dollar hats.”
“You wouldn’t wear anything she has for fifteen. Buy a twenty-five now and exchange it later, is my advice,” said Peg Slattery.
“I’d almost rather have a pair of shoes.”
“No, you buy your own shoes. Let Jim pay for your shoes. They’re a necessity. Hats are a luxury.”
“All right,” said Monica.
The day had turned cold and clear after the previous day’s threat of snow and there was in the near-noonday traffic, augmented by the big black cars of the funeral and the politicians and the important, a festive air. The shiny limousines and the many strange chauffeurs and the low-number license plates and the stars and flags of the military motors were enough to make a man have some respect for Joe Chapin. The town was accustomed to big funerals; they were no novelty. But these big cars carried big men, who had made an effort to attend Joe Chapin’s funeral. Big, busy men from all over the state and Washington and New York were in Gibbsville because Joe Chapin had passed on. You could not get a room at the hotel; there was a private car in the Reading Railway shed; members of the Gibbsville Club and the Lantenengo Country Club had been asked not to use the club restaurants at lunch that day, in order to accommodate the many visiting notables. The scene outside Trinity Church, upon conclusion of the ceremonies, was described in a special fifteen-minute program broadcast over the local station WGIB by Ted Wallace. Ted was a comparative newcomer to town, an expert in finding a connection between a popular song title and Kaufman’s Kredit Jewelry, and with an unquestioned flair for making a high school basketball game seem exciting. He was assisted in identifying the celebrities by his good friend Al Jellinek, of the Standard, who had a list of the prominent. But Al was unable to keep his good friend Ted from identifying the deceased as Joseph B. Chaplin. The WGIB switchboard received eighty-four telephone calls, topping the previous Wallace record of fifty-five calls on the occasion of his crediting Frank Sinatra with a Vic Damone disk. It was the only time Ted had been placed in charge of a WGIB Special Events Program; indeed, it was the first time WGIB had broadcast a Special Events Program under that name. Ted was somewhat comforted by the fact that the station also received sixteen letters complaining against putting on a funeral instead of the customary Luncheon Siesta.
After a fairly serious tie-up lasting twenty minutes, traffic thinned down to noonday normal. The horns of protest during the twenty-minute jam were not able to drown out the tolling bells of Trinity. Those noble bells had been tolling while those motorcars were still buried in the Mesabi Range, and they would continue to toll long after the last of those cars was junk. But the battle of the decibels made Gibbsvil
le, at least for part of an hour, sound like a city. And Joe Chapin, the cause of it all, was made to seem like an extremely important man.
His wife, the new widow Edith Stokes Chapin, likewise was made to feel an extremely important woman. All that day and into the night, until her retirement shortly after ten o’clock, she was the beneficiary of the small kindnesses that the big people know how to give. The graceful stepping aside as she took her place at the grave, the little glances in her direction by the clergy, the firm restraint of any emotional display at the inevitable mentions of Death in the burial service.
A civilian airplane, a blue Aeronca, was doing 8’s around pylons during the burial service, and the gentlemen pallbearers to a man tried to stare the craft out of the air, but not one of them was heard to murmur displeasure at the ignorance of the pilot. The noisy little engine introduced a sporty sound to the unsporty occasion and the pallbearer who was an admiral frowned over at his two-striper aide, who nodded in comprehension. The aide knew that there was nothing that could be done about it, and the aide understood perfectly that the admiral felt he had to make some token sign of disapproval as senior officer present. Actually any action in the direction of the Aeronca and its pilot might not have been desirable, since the airplane held the attention, almost throughout the ceremony, of Joe Chapin Junior. There was nothing on Joe Chapin Junior’s face to indicate displeasure or disapproval of the blue aircraft. He stood beside his heavily veiled mother, close to her in body, but his cold blue eyes followed the plane’s exercises with a calm curiosity, and the set of his mouth told nothing. Joe Chapin Junior was alive and present, but it would have been easy for anyone else present to imagine that Joe Junior was only standing alone on a hillside, on a clear, cold spring day. And yet a stranger would have known that Joe Junior very much belonged at graveside. His attire, of course, proclaimed the mourner: his black knitted necktie in a starched collar; his black topcoat, blue serge suit, black shoes and black homburg were all of superior workmanship and material and did not show professional wear. No article of his attire had been bought for the occasion; all came from a complete wardrobe, items to be worn on other, dissimilar occasions but available for occasions like this one. Then there was the point of resemblance between the principal figure at the ceremony, the widow, her daughter, and her son: the Stokes mouth. The lips themselves were prominent, but not thick. The illusion of thickness was caused by the stretching of the lips, through the years, over the large front teeth. It was a remarkable resemblance, especially in the day of the orthodontist. The mouth and the now unseen teeth behind it were the same for the woman born in 1886 and the young man born in 1915. The mother’s mouth was so unpretty as to be described as masculine, but with the mother present the young man’s mouth seemed voluptuously feminine. The mouth was the sole point of resemblance, but it was so prominent as to be unmistakable and immediately apparent. The son had a thin nose and eyes buried deep and a large forehead, not bulging, but a continuing part of the face rather than a beginning part of the head. He was half a head taller than his mother, but his bones apparently were no larger than hers, which made him, for a man, slender to the degree of slightness.
The daughter looked more like the mother. If it had been possible to re-create a younger and prettier version of the mother, and place her at graveside, she would have been the daughter. The daughter’s looks were a refinement of the mother’s, a refinement and a softening, so that the mouth, in the daughter, became inviting, the eyes were lively, the teeth were for whitening the smile. The daughter was smaller than the mother and, beside her, dainty. It was a commonplace comment in Gibbsville: “How can Ann look so much like her mother and still be pretty?” Ann was remarkable, too, for something else: she was the only person at the funeral who was weeping.
There was a ton and more flowers and wire and foil at the graveside. Beside it stood two workmen, leaning on spades—gravediggers. They kept their caps on during the service and stared like innocently rude children at the members of the funeral party. To show any respect was not expected of them, and they showed none. Their only connection with the funeral party was their recognition of Mike Slattery and they nodded to him but they were not offended when he did not return their nod. They had not even done the work of digging the Chapin grave; they were only waiting for the removal of the floral tributes so that they could begin digging to prepare another grave in another plot. To that extent the Chapin funeral was in their way, holding them up, but gravediggers are well paid and there were a lot of grand people to stare at. In a little while the grand people would be going away and they could start work, spading out the correct number of cubic feet of earth to make a hole for the person who would be laid away the next day. Their stony, weather-beaten faces gave back in dignity the same austerity that they saw in the faces of the Chapin mourners.
Soon it was over. The immediate family got in their aging Cadillac while the others of the funeral party stood by, then the honorary pallbearers and the few others who had been invited back to the house followed in their own and assigned limousines. The ceremony at the grave took less in time than Peg Slattery’s luncheon treat to her daughter. The honorary pallbearers in their limousines began looking at their watches and studying slips of paper on which their efficient secretaries had written train times. All of the out-of-town men had things to do later in the day, and at distant places. The sad duty to Joe Chapin had been performed; a bourbon, a spot of lunch, a few words with Edith and they would be gone, in many cases never again to see Gibbsville. Time was important to all of these important men, and most of them had learned the lesson that if you kept busy you lived; lived, at least, until you were caught dead. Not one of them liked what had brought him to Gibbsville, and not one of them wanted to stay and be further reminded of what had brought him. A drink of whiskey, a slice of rare roast beef, the clasp of Edith’s hand and a kiss to her wrinkling cheek, and they could hurry back into the live worlds they lived in. There was nothing here for the admiral, whose postwar civilian services had been arranged for. The Governor was not running for re-election. Editor Hooker, the only man who knew the exact degree of importance of each pallbearer, was in such a state of glorious confusion that he gave up and relaxed. David L. Harrison, suspicious of any man he had not known for thirty years, hung on to Arthur McHenry, whom he had known for thirty years, and no valuable new contact was made by any two men as a consequence of their service to the memory of Joe Chapin. The very tall man who had gone to Yale with Joe Chapin had a private fortune much greater than David L. Harrison’s, and any time he wanted to see David L. Harrison he could drop in at The Links, their common club. Henry Laubach transacted a good deal of business with J. Frank Kirkpatrick, but the two men did not like each other. The new Superintendent of Schools, Mr. Johnson, had boned up in his Who’s Who for his information (and they were all in it, except Whitney Hofman and Mr. Jenkins from the bank), but he never became quite certain which was David L. Harrison and which was J. Frank Kirkpatrick. Mr. Jenkins from the bank had eyes only for David L. Harrison, but David L. Harrison made certain that Mr. Jenkins would not come up to him at any future bankers’ convention. He did it by calling Mr. Jenkins “Doctor,” a title and an occupation he was well aware did not fit Mr. Jenkins. Huddled together by the protection of the police, the sixteen men appeared to the public to be a close group, but they were not. Indeed, they did not all know the same Joe Chapin.
Of the sixteen pallbearers only one, Arthur McHenry, had known all of the Joe Chapins, and after him Mike Slattery knew more Joe Chapins than the rest. The Yale Joe Chapin was a friend of David L. Harrison and of the tall man, whose name was Alec Weeks. The legal Joe Chapin was a friend of Kirkpatrick’s and Judge Williams’s. The political Joe Chapin was a friend of Mike Slattery’s and the Governor’s and the Mayor’s. The Old Gibbsville Joe Chapin was a friend of Dr. English’s and Whit Hofman’s and Henry Laubach’s. Editor Hooker, the admiral, Banker Jenkins, Superintendent Johnson—they were not
so much friends of Joe Chapin’s as fellow members of committees. Paul Donaldson from Scranton, who was always referred to as Paul Donaldson from or of Scranton, was the kind of man of consequence who was admitted to the circle of men of consequence that has representatives in most of the states of the Union and several provinces of Canada. He was a rich, rich man who looked right and talked right. He was the only citizen of Scranton who was known to many rich and powerful men; all they knew about Scranton was that Paul Donaldson lived there. In the list of directors of his New York bank his name was down as Paul Donaldson, Scranton, Pa., instead of Paul Donaldson, attorney-at-law, or the name of his firm. He was a member of the bar, but only incidentally a member of the bar; he was president of Paul Donaldson & Company, and he was Paul Donaldson & Company. In one respect he was the most important pallbearer, in that his absence from the pallbearers’ roster would have been, to the knowing, a most conspicuous one. His handshake with Dave Harrison was perfunctory; after all, he had seen Harrison less than a week ago in New York, saw him all the time, and what’s more, he was not a Morgan man. He was personally acquainted with Arthur McHenry, Mike Slattery, Alec Weeks, the Governor, Dr. English, Whit Hofman, and Dave Harrison. Arthur McHenry was a Pennsylvania gentleman, and they all had known Joe Chapin and each other at Yale. Dr. English and Whit Hofman and Henry Laubach were Gibbsville gentlemen, the kind of men Paul Donaldson of Scranton would know in any city in the country. Joe Chapin had been a Yale friend and he was a Gibbsville gentleman, and those were the reasons for Paul Donaldson of Scranton’s being at Joe’s funeral. When he had said, a few days earlier, “I have to go to Joe Chapin’s funeral,” he was speaking a simple truth. As Paul Donaldson of Scranton he had to go to the funerals of men like Joe Chapin of Gibbsville. There were no new Joe Chapins coming up, and nobody knew that better than Paul Donaldson from Scranton. He had no use for first-generation money or first-generation millionaires. He had no use for artists, authors, advertising men, Texans, musicians, or Jews. “Had no use” was his own expression; actually he used or dealt with all of them. But when he had got his use out of them, he dismissed them from his life. He would not have them in his house, he would not go to their funerals, not even jubilantly.
