A Wounded Name (Fiction - Young Adult)

by Hutchison, Dot

  “The service?” I finish gently. The word funeral is ash in my mouth, as it must also be in his, and he looks grateful for a different name, a different term.

  He nods, swallowing hard. “And … and after.”

  For the burial. For the reception. For the tide of people that must be faced in the name of propriety and the good of the school. My place is with Father or with Laertes, behind the Danemarks but not part of them. “I’ll stay with you. I promise.”

  He gropes for my hand and squeezes it too tightly, but I let him. I can accept the small pains if they will help him bear this greater one. “My uncle has already applied to the Board of Governors to be the new headmaster,” he mumbles.

  “It’s not really something that can wait. The school year will come quickly.”

  “Father’s not even buried, and already someone wants to take his place.”

  “Dane, your family has run this school since its founding,” says a voice from beyond the shadows. The tall shape ducks under the bottom of the stairs and sits on the edge of another bench. “Your father was proud of that legacy; your uncle wants to keep that pride intact.” Horatio gives me a nod of greeting, his hands clasped between his knees and his eyes on Dane.

  Now we need only Laertes for our quartet to be complete, but my brother is minded too much of our father today. He will not be seen lurking in shadows. He will stay near Father, even when his friend needs him, because that is where he is supposed to be. Sometimes I wonder if that sort of certainty brings with it its own kind of comfort. Then I wonder if it should. Like so many things, I never find an answer.

  Gertrude comes to retrieve her son and his dismal company. She watches our silence for a moment, an almost smile a subtle curve on her painted lips. She is too young to be a widow, I think suddenly, too lovely to be left alone. “Dane,” she says softly, “it is time for us to go.”

  He slowly stands, allows Horatio and me to adjust his clothing, but he can’t look at his mother, can’t share this grief even with her. He jerks his head in what might be a nod, to acknowledge her presence or her words I’m not sure, and walks past her.

  Her smile deepens when I step out of the shadows and she can see me more clearly. “You look lovely, Ophelia.” Her fingers brush gently against one of the violets, too light a touch to dislodge it. “Hamlet always loved seeing you with flowers in your hair, like you’d stepped right out of a fairy tale.”

  I cringe inwardly, grateful that neither Laertes nor Father followed her to the alcove.

  “Thank you for doing this, for him. And …” Her voice trembles, the strength crumbling to reveal the grief beneath. Then she clears her throat, and the moment has passed. “And for Dane. This is especially hard for him.” She links my arm through hers. “I’m glad he has his friends to help him through this.” We join the others in the entryway.

  Father’s eyes show his concern when he sees the flowers in my hair, but no surprise; Laertes must have told him already. Whatever he might say, though, is unknowingly cut off by Gertrude, who again brushes her fingertips across the silky petals.

  “It does me good to see this,” she murmurs. “Hamlet would have liked to see this.”

  Dane’s jaw clenches, as it does whenever he hears his father put into past or conditional tenses. Strange, how words can be so precise and yet have so many shades of meaning. Words, words, words, it’s a wonder that they mean anything at all, when so often they don’t.

  But that is the last said of the violets in my hair. Even in the midst of his worry, Father won’t go against Gertrude in this. At his shoulder, Laertes shakes his head. He is more and more like our father, losing those pieces of him that made him like our mother, like me. Soon enough I shall lose my brother entirely, and I don’t want to be alone in our mother’s memories.

  Claudius offers his arm to Gertrude for the walk to the church. Dane should fall in behind them, but he hesitates, glances back at me, and shakily extends his hand. Ignoring my father’s startled look, I take it. My fingers ache in his grip, but soon enough the feeling leaves them entirely, so it doesn’t hurt anymore. Father and Laertes walk behind us, Horatio bringing up the rear by himself, always slightly out of place but never taking offense at it.

  Sometimes I think Horatio is the best of us, and I never feel disloyal for it. Sometimes love is naming the faults so they can’t be forgotten.

  CHAPTER 3

  We’re the last to enter the grey stone church, the polished wooden pews packed with current and former students, with administrators from other schools. There are senators there and business executives and diplomats and all manner of successful men who have come from the halls of Elsinore Academy, many with their perfect trophy wives on their arms. That is what this school teaches us to be. For the male students, success is measured by money and power. For the female students, success is measured by the success of our husbands and how our accomplishments may serve to aid them. The boys progress and advance, and the girls cling to a time that was never ours.

  All turn to watch us as we pace down the long center aisle to the front pews on the right side. There is nothing so tacky as a sign to mark those spaces apart; it is proper, so it is left empty.

  Dane still has my right hand in a crushing grip so I end up between him and Gertrude, much to Father’s dismay. His fingers tighten spasmodically on mine, so hard one of the knuckles pops with an unnaturally loud sound in the quiet church. I don’t have to look at him to know what he sees, because I see it too.

  The casket.

  It’s an elegant construction of polished mahogany and silver upon the altar, the inside lined with ice blue, the color of the sky, of death. It is one of Elsinore Academy’s colors, but I cannot see it without remembering my mother’s lips, the skin around her eyes. The lid stands open, and before we sit I can see just a glimpse of the figure within, the waxy skin smooth and serene, the expression shaped into the stern smile he wore so often. Over his crisp, midnight-blue suit and ice-blue tie, the undertakers have dressed him in his open navy professorial robes and mortarboard, the ceremonial attire of the Headmaster. His hands are folded gently over his chest, a pale stripe on his left hand where his wedding ring sat for nineteen years.

  The plain gold band sits now on Dane’s finger, the metal cold and bruising against my skin.

  The priest begins the service with a prayer. There will be no friends to give eulogy, for Hamlet was so well respected and admired, how could one ever choose who to speak? Gertrude wishes to offend no one, and so she has placed the service squarely within the priest’s hands, her trust in him absolute to commend her husband’s soul to God.

  I like the death the priest speaks of, a quiet place of rest and ease and warmth, so unlike the cold ground that lies waiting to receive the body. He speaks not of pain but of light, the healing of the soul sundered from Heaven so it could walk its time on Earth. He speaks of death as coming home. There is no judgment in his words, no fear of sin or Purgatory. I wonder if this is how he spoke at my mother’s service.

  One of the graduates, a rare one who made a name for herself outside of a husband by becoming one of the leading sopranos of opera, leads us in a hymn, but almost no one sings along. Her song shakes the dust motes in the light that streams from the plain glass windows, beautiful and strong and perfectly human. Within the church, I can’t hear the feral wails of the bean sidhe.

  I wish I could. Even with the wildness they bring to my eyes, even with the pain it causes my father and brother, their songs are more suited to death than this voice that stirs life.

  My fingers are white within Dane’s. Tears track steady paths down his cheeks, silent and dignified, glistening scars that may never fade. I have tissues tucked in the hidden pocket of my wrap but no way to reach them, and little enough will to try. I cannot find anything unnatural in a son grieving for a beloved father, whatever propriety may say of public shows of emotion. A full chorus of sniffles and soft weeping ripples behind me. The women sob softly into tissues
or lacy handkerchiefs, but even the men have recourse to them, their jaws set against the grief even as their moist eyes betray their intentions.

  Then it’s time. It’s been time so often today, but it’s time again, this time to close the lid and forever place Hamlet in darkness. The priest places a hand on the sectioned lid, then glances at the line of ravens in the front pew and asks if we’d like to pay our respects. The violet waits patiently in my palm, its fan-shaped petals a little wilted but the colors still true.

  Claudius goes up first, his face impassive as he studies his elder brother. His face shows nothing, but then, it so rarely does. Claudius is not one to let others know his thoughts or plans if he can avoid it. He doesn’t touch the body, doesn’t even rest his hand on the edge of the casket but, instead, clasps his hands at the small of his back in a vaguely military stance that keeps his spine stiff and straight.

  Dignity.

  Propriety.

  Gertrude joins him there, and one of Claudius’ hands floats away to rest on her back. His fingers curve over the small of her back, his palm against the swell of her hip. It’s an intimate stance. I’ve had much occasion over the past three days to study how people touch each other in support: a grip on the shoulder, the forearm, a hand placed gently against one of the shoulder blades, all things as though they could help the grief stand on its own. It’s too close for brother and sister, as they have been for nearly two decades, and yet there his hand rests, and she doesn’t step away.

  Her blue eyes glisten, and tears tremble on her lashes but do not fall. She touches her husband’s cheek, leans down to press a soft kiss against his cold lips. Her hand shakes.

  Dane stands abruptly, yanking me gracelessly to my feet beside him. He stalks up the steps to the altar, jerky as a badly controlled marionette. We pass his mother and uncle on their way back to the pew, and Gertrude’s hand brushes across my cheek in passing. The shiver crawls under my skin. Was it the same hand? From dead flesh to living flesh, could her hand tell the difference?

  There’s something profoundly unnatural in seeing the Headmaster lie so still within the ice-blue satin, a lace-edged pillow under his neck to prop his head. There was always a sharply contained energy within him, a strength even in stillness that said he was just waiting for his next movement. Now that is gone and he is only still, never to move again. More of my knuckles pop within Dane’s grip; his own joints creak and protest in his other hand where it squeezes the edge of the casket in a desperate search for strength. He stares at his father, at the mirror he’ll see when he’s older, and a low, growling keen builds deep in his chest, nearly inaudible.

  I uncurl the fingers of my left hand to reveal the cream-throated violet. Hamlet’s fingers are cold, the texture of the skin strange with the preservations, but I tuck the short stem against the pale stripe left by his wedding band to make a purple spill against his hand.

  Ever since the hospital, ever since the cold place, since that first homecoming and his quiet welcome back, I went to his study every night before I went to bed. No matter what he was doing, who he was talking with, he set it aside just long enough to kiss my cheek and receive a kiss in return against his bearded cheek. I lean down now to kiss the neatly trimmed whiskers, my lips tingling, and whisper as I have so many times before “Good night, sir; sleep well.”

  And every night, he would say back “Good night, child; sleep well.” Now I’ll never hear that again.

  “Sleep,” Dane echoes beside me, his voice little more than breath. “As if he just sleeps through death.” He cups his hand over his father’s, fingers curved over the flower to protect it, and says nothing more.

  I flinch at the sound of the casket closing, both sections coming together with the rest of the wood to drown Hamlet in darkness. On the surface, where the two sections meet, the school crest is carved into the polished wood. His entire life was about the school; so his death will be too.

  The pallbearers step forward: two senators, a governor, two Fortune 500 CEOs, and Horatio. I wonder if Horatio’s presence is for Hamlet or for Dane, for the one who gave him the scholarship to change his life or the one who decided the scholarship didn’t matter. Horatio rests his hand against the wood over Hamlet’s chest, and tears course down his cheeks without any attempt to hide them. When the governor nods, he lifts his portion with the rest of them, the wood digging into his shoulder.

  We filter out behind them, and somehow this is worse, this trek to the graveyard in the wake of a closed box that holds what used to be a man. Dane does not let go of my hand, even when my father tries to draw me away, but Dane finally sees the mottled colors of my fingers and eases his grip. His other hand smoothes over mine, easing the painful return of sensation.

  As soon as we step out into the mocking sunlight of clear skies, the keening sweeps over me again, and I sway against Dane. Laertes makes a sound, but I shade my eyes as though it is only the departure from the dim interior of the church that unsteadies me. Father lightly touches my shoulder, avoiding the violets, but says nothing.

  It is a small gathering against the square-edged hole in the ground. The rest have gone on to the Headmaster’s House, to wait for us at the reception and give this small pretense of privacy, as if there was anything private about a funeral and burial. In a maneuver so smooth they must have practiced it, the pallbearers pass strands of thick webbing beneath the casket and shift their grip to these, slowly easing the casket down into the grave. A blanket of plastic grass covers the mound of earth that waits to bury him. Just beyond the fence, surrounded by the faerie women he cannot see, Jack Barrows waits with a spade to replace the soil. He never steps foot in the church, and he’s uncomfortable in the consecrated ground, but he tends the graves because that is the debt the living owe the dead. He gives me a small nod when I see him, a bare smile on his wrinkled, dirt-smeared face when he sees the violets in my hair.

  Farther away, straddling the line between sacred and unconsecrated ground, fresh flowers deck my mother’s grave. Just as he did when she was alive, Jack brings her flowers every day.

  We are not meant to watch the burial, just this charade of placing a body in a hole we dare to call its home, but when Gertrude touches her son’s shoulder, he shakes his head and remains where he is. She moves the touch to me, one finger resting on the strand of my mother’s pearls. “You’ll stay with him?” she asks quietly, and despite Father’s clearing throat, I lay my free hand over hers.

  “I’ll stay with him.”

  As the others follow the pallbearers up the hill, Horatio hesitates, one hand outstretched. “Dane?”

  “We’ll be along,” he says shortly. “I need to see this.”

  “Do you want me to stay?”

  I can feel the part of him that wants to say yes; that is not the part that wins out. The tension in his arm, in his face, that is what wins, and so he gives our friend the fraction of a smile he can muster and tells him to join the others, because there is just enough of him that can’t stand the potential to break down in front of someone even so close as Horatio.

  Horatio just nods, as if he expected this answer, and walks to the house by himself.

  The decorative gate squeals as Jack lets himself in, his ordinary shovel gripped in one hand. Without a word to either of us, he jerks aside the false grass and starts spading the dark soil into the hole.

  Dane cries out with the first thump of impact against the coffin, and breaks down with the second. Sobs wrack his entire body. He pulls me to him, his hands crushing the flowers in my hair, and buries his face against the crown of violets. I can’t breathe, but neither can he, and without air even an elusive scent can never be found. Silk rubs against my cheek, sticks damply to my palms as I slide my arms around to his back. I’m not even sure he can feel it, but I squeeze back just as hard.

  It doesn’t take long for Jack to fill it in completely and smooth the blade of the shovel over the curved mound. There’s no headstone yet, but he retreats beyond the fence and p
ushes in an enormous wheelbarrow full of blossoms from both gardens and greenhouses. Roses of many shades, violets, star-of-Bethlehem, Narcissi, love-lies-bleeding, hydrangea globes, stalks of freesia like chiming bells, and so many more. He lays them out across the earth until the soil can’t even be seen.

  Dane hiccups through the end of the tears, and I twist in his arms until I can see the ghost of a smile on his face. “Thank you, Mr. Barrows,” he manages, and Jack gives him a deep bow, the kind no one gives each other anymore, and vanishes with his shovel and wheelbarrow back into the woods.

  Now that he’s buried, the song of the bean sidhe softens. They don’t keen or wail, but they mourn. The faerie women sing for the deaths in the great families, for the deaths of great or holy men. They will sing the mourning for Hamlet until they feel they have honored him his due.

  They may sing forever.

  “Does it get better, Ophelia?”

  I glance over to my mother’s grave. Though all the headstones have small bouquets or wreaths, hers is the only one decked in flowers like Hamlet’s. “I don’t know,” I confess. “I suppose I’m still waiting to find out myself.”

  “I can’t go back there. I can’t see all those people, hear them talk about him.”

  “Your mother needs you.”

  He straightens, mops uselessly at his face with one hand. “He would want me to take care of her,” he murmurs.

  I take a few steps away from the grave, arm stretched between us, to see if he’ll follow. He does without complaint or protest, and I lead him back into the silent church. Even the priest has gone up to the house, to give his breed of comfort where he may. Dane walks with me into the single stall bathroom, watches passively as I take his handkerchief and dampen it at the sink.

  His eyes study my face as I gently wipe the evidence of his grief from his skin, the cloth cool against swollen eyes. The uneven color of his cheeks gradually recedes. Except for the pink wash over his dark grey eyes and the lines of red that rim them, he looks as he did before. Not before the death or before the funeral, just before this fresh bout of tears. It will take time, a long time, I think, for him to look as he did before everything.