Peter Straub - Lost Boy Lost Girl

Mark snatched the card from his father’s hand without a word.

When Jimbo looked around for a card of his own, Tim passed one to him. Both boys were deep in contemplation of the Pacific sunset when a brisk, rotund little woman bustled into the room. Joyce Brophy was the daughter of the last, now-deceased, of the Trott Brothers.

‘Well, here we are, Mr Underhill, isn’t that right? It’s a pleasure to see you, sir, and to welcome you back to our humble establishment, despite the sadness of the circumstances. I think we can all say that what we’re doing is the best we can, wouldn’t you agree, Mr Underhill?’

‘Um,’ Philip said.

She turned a brisk, meaningless smile upon Tim. ‘And a heartfelt welcome to you, sir. Are you a member of the family circle?’

‘He’s my brother,’ Philip said. ‘From New York.’

‘New York, New York? Well, that’s wonderful.’ Tim feared that she would take his hand, but she merely patted his arm. ‘The hubby and I had a lovely weekend in New York City, oh, it was nine – ten years ago now. We saw Les Mis , and the next day we saw Cats . You New Yorkers never run out of things to do and places to go, do you? Must be like living in an anthill, ants ants ants, all running running running.’

Having disposed of Tim, she transferred her hand to Philip’s arm. ‘Feeling a little bit shy, are we? You’d be surprised how many of our people feel that exact same way, but the minute you go up and commune with your late missus, you’ll understand there’s no need at all for that sort of thing.’

She placed her free hand on his elbow and piloted him down the aisle between the rows of empty chairs. Loyally, Tim came along behind.

‘Now, see, Mr Underhill? Your little bride looks every bit as peaceful and beautiful as you could ever want to remember her.’

Philip stared down at the effigy in the coffin. So did Tim. Nancy appeared to have been dead since birth.

In a strangled voice, Philip said, ‘Thank you for all you’ve done.’

‘And if you will take the advice of someone who is pretty much an expert in this sort of thing,’ Joyce Brophy whispered close to Philip’s ear, ‘you make sure that handsome boy of yours comes up here and communes with his mama, because believe you me, if he misses this chance he’ll never have another and he’ll regret it all the rest of his life.’

‘Excellent advice,’ said Philip.

With a neighborly pat of his wrist, she bustled out of the room.

‘Mark, this is your last chance to see your mother,’ Philip said, speaking in the general direction of his left shoulder.

Mark mumbled something that sounded unpleasant.

‘It’s the reason we’re here, son.’ He turned all the way around and kept his voice low and reasonable. ‘Jimbo, you can come up or not, as you wish, but Mark has to say good-bye to his mother.’

Both boys stood up, looking anywhere but at the coffin, then moved awkwardly into the center aisle. Tim drifted away to the side of the room. Halfway to the coffin, Mark looked directly at his mother, instantly glanced away, swallowed, and looked back. Jimbo whispered something to him and settled himself into an aisle chair. When Mark stood before the coffin, frozen-faced, Philip nodded at him with what seemed a schoolmaster’s approval of a cooperative student. For a moment only, father and son remained together at the head of the room; then Philip lightly settled a hand on Mark’s shoulder, removed it, and without another glance turned away and joined Tim at the side of the room. In wordless agreement, the two men returned to their earlier station next to the dark, polished table and the stacks of memorial cards. A few other people had entered the room.

Slowly, Jimbo rose to his feet and walked up the aisle to stand beside his friend.

‘You have to feel sorry for the poor kid,’ Philip said softly. ‘Terrible shock.’

‘You had a terrible shock yourself,’ Tim said. At Philip’s questioning glance, he added, ‘When you found the body. Found Nancy like that.’

‘The first time I saw Nancy’s body, she was all wrapped up, and they were taking her out of the house.’

‘Well, who …’ A dreadful recognition stopped his throat.

‘Mark found her that afternoon – came home from God knows where, went into the bathroom, and there she was. He called me, and I told him to dial 911 and then go outside. By the time I got home, they were taking her to the ambulance.’

‘Oh, no,’ Tim breathed out. He looked down the aisle at the boy, locked into unreadable emotions before his mother’s casket.

Inside his brother’s house on the following afternoon, after the sad little funeral, a good number of the neighbors, many more than Tim had anticipated, were sitting on the furniture or standing around with soft drinks in their hands. (Most of them held soft drinks, anyhow. Since his arrival at the gathering, Jimbo’s father, Jackie Monaghan, whose ruddy, good-humored face was the template for his son’s, had acquired a dull shine in his eyes and a band of red across his cheekbones. These were probably less the product of grief than of the contents of the flask outlined in his hip pocket. Tim had witnessed two of the other attendees quietly stepping out of the room with good old Jackie.)

Jimbo’s mother, Margo Monaghan, had startled Tim by revealing that she had read one of his books. Even more startling was her extraordinary natural beauty. Without a trace of makeup Margo Monaghan looked like two or three famous actresses but did not really resemble any of them. She looked the way the actresses would look if you rang their bell and caught them unprepared at three o’clock on an ordinary afternoon. Amazingly, the other men in the room paid no attention to her. If anything, they acted as though she were obscurely disfigured and they felt sorry for her.

Part of the reason Tim had expected no more than three or four people to gather at his brother’s house was Philip’s personality; the remainder concerned the tiny number of mourners at the grave site in Sunnyside Cemetery. The pitiless sunlight had fallen on the husband, son, and brother-in-law of the deceased; on the Rent-a-minister; on Jimbo, Jackie, and Margo; on Florence, Shirley, and Mack, Nancy’s gas company friends; on Laura and Ted Shillington, the Underhills’ next-door neighbors to the right, and Linda and Hank Taft, the next-door neighbors to the left. The Rent-a-minister had awaited the arrival of additional mourners until the delay became almost embarrassing. A grim nod from Philip had finally set him in motion, and his harmless observations on motherhood, unexpected death, and the hope of salvation lasted approximately eight endless minutes and were followed by a brief prayer and the mechanical descent of the casket into the grave. Philip, Mark, and Tim picked up clayey brown clods from beside the open grave and dropped them onto the lid of the coffin; after a second, Jimbo Monaghan did the same, giving inspiration to the other mourners, who followed suit.

Back on Superior Street, Laura Shillington and Linda Taft stopped off to pick up the tuna casseroles, Jell-O and marshmallow salad, ambrosia, and coffee cake they had prepared. Florence, Shirley, and Mack partook of the banquet and the Kool-Aid and left soon after. Their departure had an insignificant effect on the assemblage, which by that time had grown to something like thirty. Tim wondered if so many people had ever before been in Philip’s house at the same time. Whatever his experience as a host, Philip now moved easily through the various groups, talking softly to his neighbors and the other guests. The Rochenkos, a pair of young elementary school teachers incongruous in matching polo shirts and khaki trousers, showed up, and so did a sour-looking old man in a plaid shirt who introduced himself to Tim as ‘Omar Hillyard, the neighborhood pest’ and seldom moved out of the corner from which he eyed the action.