The Learners: A Novel (No Series)

by Kidd, Chip

  But I suspected this funeral, in Guilford, was going to be something else entirely. I had no idea.

  After a short struggle with myself over whether or not to go, I then gave in: I just had to. It was my last chance to…to what? See her? No. Too late. But—and I know how this sounds—it would be…Oh God…the last thing we’d ever do together.

  On Saturday morning I stepped with no little uncertainty from the bus onto the sidewalk adjoining the Guilford green, a large expanse of lawn and trees which could have been a life-size version of a New England town for a Lionel train set. A wilting August day, already 85 in the shade, and my navy wool suit clung to me like moss. I took a deep lungful of the wet velvet air, as the cicadas in the massive corridors of elms swelled it thick with their modulated, invisible electricity.

  And then I noticed the cars. Lincolns, Cadillacs, Studebakers, a Packard, a Mercury, a smart little MGA, a Corvette convertible. All lining the green and dotted with white mums, like ivory buttons on blazer sleeves. A sick feeling bloomed in me. This is real. This is really happening. These cars are here and they have flowers taped onto them because Himillsy is dead. I gulped another heavy breath, caught my balance.

  Formally dressed couples struggled out of identical Ford woody station wagons, slowly, from either the weight of the occasion or the heat or both. Sunglasses and ebony wing tips, black linen shifts, pillbox hats with veils, elbow gloves, obsidian patent leather purses the size and shape of bricks suspended from spaghetti straps. I joined their wordless caravan, trying to convince myself I belonged among them. Absurd. The cozy Grover’s Corners perfection of the buildings surrounding the park—Dowden’s Drugstore, Murphy’s Hardware, Noah’s Diner—made me want to stop and throw rocks at them. It wasn’t right for the world to go about its business.

  Christ Episcopal Church, a granite monolith, stood out in defiance against the pristine clapboard rectitude of its neighbors. Twin doors the color of fresh blood flanked its stony facade, a block carved with the date 1838. Inside, it was marginally cooler, with four ceiling fans going like jet propellers as the sunlight ricocheted off the custard stucco walls and Pachelbel’s endless Canon oozed in and out of the organ pipes mounted to the left of the lectern. The place was jammed but few had taken their seats. Instead, a long line snaked all the way back to the vestibule in the front, leading up the left side aisle to the altar.

  To the casket.

  I got in back of a middle-aged woman in black hose with heels to match and scanned the crowd. So, who were all these people, the people in Himillsy’s life? Well, unlike the world of Spear, Rakoff & Ware, this really was the cast of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Except today the gray had faded to black. But otherwise here they were: the manor-born friends and neighbors Gregory Peck was coming home to, all those hours on the train. I didn’t belong here—the only person I knew was, for Chrissakes, the deceased.

  So I dredged up what I did know—things about Himillsy that they couldn’t have: Did they know about Baby Laveen, the realistic baby doll she secretly carried around with her to help her cope with the death of her infant brother De Vigny? Did they know she wanted to open a combination barbershop and restaurant called Snippets, just so she could watch the customers try to pick the stray bits of hair out of their teeth? That she wanted to create a TV show called People Are Awful, in which ordinary contestants would earn cash and prizes by doing things like kicking the crutches out from underneath toddlers with polio? Or that she had plans to make a movie short of a man being mercilessly pelted with two stiletto-heeled pumps and call it These Shoes Are Killing Me? The strange fruits of her imagination, confided during the dark hours of our school days—they gave me entree, entitlement that this entire throng, with its perfect teeth and padlocked jaws, did not have.

  And then, as the line inched further, I realized…

  No. It couldn’t be. My imagination playing cruel tricks in the suffocating heat. The casket was…open.

  No. Unthinkable.

  And I could just make out—there she lay, hands crossed over her chest. Oh. Oh. I snapped my head away, clamped my eyes shut.

  How could they? Ghouls. Ghouls do this.

  I can’t. I will bolt from the line, right now. Excuse myself, back out of the church, onto the street, and run, run and not stop until none of this existed.

  Himillsy: Not so fast, Happy. Old chum. You’re not going anywhere. You will wait patiently in line. You remember lines don’t you, from school? Registration, frat parties, lunch, graduation. This is just another one. And you will wait in it, like you always have.

  For me. You have a promise to keep.

  She was right. As ever. I was powerless to do anything other than her bidding. The queue inched forward. Dread. Sick dread. I kept my attention to the rear of the church, to the doors, to the plaque on the wall honoring the congregation’s World War II dead.

  What on earth compels allegedly civilized people to do this, to desecrate not just bodies, but our memories? I can’t remember her this way, I can’t. Please someone, something, make this go away.

  A dead body. The first I’d ever see. And it has to be you, Mills. This was not how it was supposed to go.

  Endless, terrible minutes, drawing forward until I couldn’t avoid it anymore. The time had come. I was too close, there were people watching, I had to do the right thing, what was expected, I had to turn and look, look at—

  And a burst of something like relief popped in my heart because, it…wasn’t her.

  Surprise! Nobody home! GOTCHA!!

  It was what she’d left behind. So obvious. Mind you—the utter inhumanity of it, the ghastliness of the display was still appalling, but at least it wasn’t her. Yes, her pixie features, the elegant fingers tapered pencil-thin, her aura of elfin beauty—they lingered like the glow of a candlewick after you blow the flame out. But Himillsy—my Himillsy—was long gone. This…remnant, it was not the person I knew. She would have agreed.

  And can you believe this dress? I wouldn’t be caughtdeadin this thing!

  Didn’t they know her? Didn’t her own family even know anything about her? Mills, you of all people deserved better than this. Is that why you did it? Is that why you checked out, because this was the alternative?

  The cliché is that dead people look like they’re sleeping. They don’t. That’s a lie. Sleeping people vibrate despite themselves, with the ever-present promise of reanimation. Their vulnerability is tender, and fills you with the need to keep them safe. The dead just look exactly that. And they don’t make you want to protect them. They make you want to take them out like the trash. Bury them. Or burn them—anything to return them to the earth, to get them out of your sight—because until you do it’s that much less possible to remember they were ever alive.

  Then, next to me to my right—a familiar voice, fermented by time, eerily sliced the air: “Isn’t she beautiful? She’s so beautiful…”

  I turned, froze. Couldn’t accept what I was seeing: Himillsy, at age fifty, bending over her twenty-five-year-old corpse. “So beautiful…”

  Her mother. She had to be, the resemblance was supernatural. Except that she was Himillsy as Doris Day. In black taffeta. There was a hostess-in-fourthgear quality to her, even in these horrific circumstances—a desperation for proper social procedure and ceremony—so unlike her daughter. “Come, come see her,” she beckoned, her face folded in perfect grief as she reeled in the arm of a reluctant skinny blonde girl in a licorice linen shift. It was then that I looked back at the body. Mills was right: they’d slid her husk into a white, frilly, lacey number she would have described as a giant Victorian sneeze. The idea that that’s what she’d be wearing for the rest of what amounts to eternity—she, who was style itself—was beyond contemplation.

  Paying respect. This, all of this, was the opposite of anything like that. The real Himillsy would spring bolt upright, this very instant—not to bring any measure of assurance to the mourners, but to give them all a heart attack. Oh, if only.


  I staggered away to the rear of the church and climbed the steps to the balcony, lost in repulsion and misery. I wanted to be as far away from it as possible. After another twenty minutes, with a mercy too long in the coming to ever redeem those responsible, the coffin lid was closed.

  “All rise.”

  The rector read the prayer, then we recited the twenty-third Psalm, in unison. Like the docile, idiot lambs we were.

  A hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” and then it was time for what the program listed as “Reflections.” There was only one name: LEVIN DODD. A young man got up and made his way hesitantly to the lectern.

  Hmm. A cousin?

  He was tall, slight. Early twenties, I’d say. My age. Delicate but sturdy, you could tell. He started, uneasily. “My sister, once made me promise,”

  Sister. Levin, her brother, Levin. As in…Laveen? Impossible. Himillsy had told me he’d died. As an infant.

  “—promise, she made me promise that—”

  She’d said that his name was De Vigny, that she was too young to pronounce it correctly, that her father had given her a plastic replica of him as a solace. Baby Laveen. All a lie?

  “—that if I was to ever, ever speak at her…” he popped an intake of breath, the sound of a bicycle tire giving out, “at her, fu…” He couldn’t, not that word.

  “That I’d. That she. She wanted me to say…this.”

  He swallowed air, bracing himself. He was going to do this for her. No matter what. His eyes went sky-ward as he tried to clear his throat.

  “Himillsy…loved Life,”

  It was tortuous. For everyone.

  “but,”

  He was horrible to look at.

  “she also,”

  A mouse in a trap.

  “she also had a subscription,”

  Gnawing on its tail, clean through to escape. Bright pain.

  “…to Time magazine, too.” He crumpled, in mortification, to the confusion of just about everybody. Except me.

  And presto: The tears were released from my head. Yes, finally, that was Himillsy. Now that was her. For that split second, when he said it—that ridiculous, sophomoric nonsense—she was alive in the air. And just as quickly, like a small wisp of smoke, eaten by it.

  Good-bye, Hims.

  Levin dabbed at his head with a handkerchief, collected himself with borrowed effort, and returned to his seat. The pipe organ kicked in, swelled—the strains of “How Great Thou Art .” Everyone stood, opened to page 418, began to sing halfheartedly; the choir carrying it, covering for everyone.

  THEN SINGS MY SOUL,

  Hims, how could you do this to me? To all of these people? Look at them.

  MY SAVIOR GOD, TO THEE,

  You selfish, narcissistic, indulgent, self-obsessed, unforgivable bitch.

  HOW GREAT THOU ART, HOW GREAT THOU ART!

  It’s my fault. I was too late. I should have gotten to you sooner, I could have saved you. I know it. I could have solved your problems. But I was a coward.

  Himillsy. My little gumdrop in the mud. Smothered.

  I closed the hymnal, managed to set it down on the pew. Then, untethered and all too connected, I shook. Uncontrollably. Helpless. As a piece of me—one of the best parts there ever would be—was ripped out, stolen, burned.

  And buried.

  They filed slow out of the church, the organ chords heavy as the air. The reception was in the adjoining parish room, but he cut through the crowd, slipped out the side door. I followed him. There, around to the rear of the building. Alone, leaning against the garbage bin, head hung, smoking. Unseen, I hesitated to approach. Was that really him?

  It was wrong to trespass on this private moment. I had to. “P-pardon me.” I tried to think of something unobtrusive to say. “Uh, do you have a light?”

  His face was the color of marshmallow. “Sh. Sure.” He offered his lighter just as I realized that I did not have a cigarette, seeing as I do not smoke. Pathetic. We stood like that for what seemed like minutes—his arm extended, brandishing the Zippo reluctantly, like he was showing a traffic cop his driver’s license. Not looking at me, thoughts elsewhere. I felt like an utter, complete fool. Then he suddenly awoke to the situation.

  “Oh. I am sorry, here.” He handed me one of his Lucky Strikes, lit it.

  I took it gratefully and introduced myself. He didn’t seem to recognize my name. “We, Himillsy and I, were friends,” I offered meekly, “at State, years ago. When she was a junior.”

  Levin’s face flushed with dark recollection. He stared at the ground. “Millsy didn’t talk much about school. Sore subject.” There was something strangely familiar about him—he looked like someone I knew, but I just couldn’t place it. Not like Himillsy, that wasn’t it. Someone else.

  “I, we, we just recently reconnected. We had lunch, were going to be in touch again. Look,” I whispered,

  “Lord knows this isn’t the time, but I’d really like to talk to you. Himillsy talked about you…all the time, and well.” His head bolted up. “Well, I just really liked her a lot, I.” And his eyes started to fill. “I mean, that sounds so dumb. ‘Like’ is such a dumb word,” not just with tears but with something else. “I’m sorry. I wish I could explain it,” with anger. “I wish I—”

  “Did you see that dress?!” he spat. He was furious. At me? “Himillsy…” No, not at me. “She…” It was as if he suddenly knew that I was on his side. That we were against them, all of them. Whoever they were.

  And then he was on me. Arms thrown around my neck, his head hard into my chest, practically beating my heart for me. Uncontrollable sobs.

  I fought for words and lost. What is there, ever, to say in such a situation? That she would have wanted us to be strong?

  Oh, please. “Strong” is for drinks. Be my guest—fall to pieces.

  It sure worked forme.

  “Plupp.” Two days later. Sketch was erasing like a madman.

  “Plupp, Plupp.” A Krinkle ad, half-inked, trying to salvage it. And there goes the victorious beaming grin from the face of the potato chip god.

  “Plupp, Plupp, Plupp.” Gone is a good half of the adoring crowd.

  “Plupp, Plupp, Plupp, Plupp.” He tersely muttered it with each stroke, the agitation hot in his mouth.

  But not an it. A he. For Leonard J. Plupp had entered our lives the day before, unbidden and hastily introduced, at our weekly client meeting with Dick. He was a good bit younger than Stankey, maybe thirty, if that. I figured him for some kind of apprentice tagalong, with Uncle Stankey showing him the ropes of the ad biz. I sort of felt sorry for him on sight, as an Oliver Twist’s worth of Stankey-borne secretarial indignities filled my mind, most of them involving the management of his prodigious output of chip spit. Lenny didn’t look too thrilled about the prospect, either—his face was a clenched fist, his eyes two thin strips of licorice whip. His slate gray worsted wool suit, despite its impeccable tailoring, still couldn’t hide the fact that it didn’t, well, suit him. It looked like a costume and not like clothes. And he smelled like a Vicks inhaler.

  We were unveiling a month’s worth of “snack-to-school!” ads for the fall. Sketch had practically killed himself on a series of autumn-themed adventures in comic strip form starring Krinkle Karl, the anthropomorphic potato chip he created in the 1940s and trotted out seasonally when the mood struck. The boards were absolutely stunning, with Karl krinkling his way into all kinds of exquisitely rendered mischief: passing notes to his sweetheart, Tessie Tuber, in class and getting caught; colliding with his best friend, Chauncey Cheesestick, during a football game and creating a new taste sensation (The Cheddertater! Touch-down!); raking all the leaves in Tatertown, only to have them jumped into by his nemesis, Pucky Pretzel, and scattered everywhere. Sketch really went all out on these, as he did every year. The detailing on the leaves alone made your eyes water. Tip’s copy was charm itself.

  Stankey was delighted. “Wowser, Sketch. Hot-CHA!” And then. Then he rotated his lumpy
form to the young man to his right and dispatched what we hadn’t yet understood to be the five single most gut-wrenching words in the English language:

  “What do you think, Lenny?”

  A smoldering pause. “Gee, what do I think?” The air in the room vanished. Sketch’s face said it all: Why, exactly, do we give a thimble’s worth of bat shit what this Lenny whoever-the-hell-he-is thinks?

  Plupp cleared his throat. “What do I think?” He was calm, measured, his deep voice a jarring contrast to his reedy body. “I think Krinkle Kutt sales are stale.”

  Stankey’s face fell. Was that supposed to be funny? Doubtful. One quickly surmised that for Leonard J. Plupp the concept of “funny” was reserved for unwelcome smells.

  “Sprinkles!!” Tip stood in the doorway, arms outstretched, eyes hungry. “Oops. Is this a bad time?”

  “Tip, this is Lenny Plupp.” I watched his face betray a flutter of toxic amusement at the name. His glance bounced against mine for a split second, and: yes, we were going have fun with that one later. Oh, yes.

  Dick stared at the floor, his massive breasts losing their daily, pendulous, war with gravity. “He’s the new head of regional sales.”

  What? This twit? Impossible.

  “I see,” said Tip, beaming, oblivious to the events of the last five minutes. He looked over at the boards, and whistled. “God, I hadn’t seen these finished yet.” Which was a lie. Mr. Showman. He turned back to Plupp. “Aren’t they sensational?”

  “Well,” said Lenny, “yes and no.”

  And Tip was speechless, for the first time that I’d ever seen.

  “As examples of cartooning,” Plupp continued, soberly, “sensational they are. Utterly gorgeous. They always have been.” Stankey stifled a spit. “But here are the facts: Sales of Krinkle products in this territory have been steadily declining for three years now. Which indicates that this cartoon approach is just not working anymore.”