Russell Banks - The Sweet Hereafter

Actually, I knew that Risa’s increasing confidentiality with me, her evident need to talk to me as frequently as possible, was her way of leading up to a conversation about how to divorce Wendell. I doubt she knew that herself then, but it was surely on the agenda. The death of her son had eliminated the one reason she was married to the boy’s father.

I still hadn’t taken the measure of Dolores Driscoll, however, so when Risa told me that the woman was showing up at all the funerals, sitting way in the back and then disappearing at the end of the service, only to reappear down the road at the next one, I decided to break my rule and take in a funeral myself, then head back to the city for a few days. I had several other cases that I’d left hanging and needed attention.

That morning at the motel, however, the phone in my room rang, and it was Zoe, out of the blue, after three months of silence, and it caught me completely by surprise, or I doubt I’d have handled it as badly as I did.

“Daddy, it’s me!” she’d said. Her voice was full of the usual phony enthusiasm, but it was dead, dead as the kids in their caskets.

“Zoe! Jesus!” I’d been shaving, and I snapped off my electric razor and sat down on the bed. It was like getting a call from a ghost. Every time I think my period of mourning is over, she calls to remind me that I haven’t really started yet.

“Hi! How’re you doing? Where are you? Where’s five one eight? I got this number off your phone machine.”

“Yeah, well, I’m … I’m surprised to hear from you. I’m on a case, upstate, in the Adirondacks.”

She said that was very interesting, and for a minute I gabbled on about the case, the motel, the town of Sam Dent, like we have these conversations, any conversation, all the time. Finally, I was able to stop myself, and I said, “Zoe, why are you calling me?”

“Why am I calling you? You’re my father, for Christ’s sake! I’m not supposed to call you?”

“Oh, Jesus, Zoe. Please, for once, let’s talk straight.”

“Fine. That would be terrific. I called Mom, and all she wanted to know was had I grown my hair back yet and what color was it, so I hung up. What do you want to know?”

“Well, to be perfectly honest, right now I want to know if you’re high.”

“You mean, Daddy, am I stoned ? Do I have a needle dangling from my arm? Am I nodding in a phone booth? Did I score this morning, get whacked, Daddy, and call you for money” ?

Trees, snow, mountains, ice. I could hear sirens, street traffic, a radio or TV newscaster in the background. I imagined some boyfriend behind her, sick and dying, smoking a cigarette, waiting for her to raise some money from her rich father. Who was I talking to? The living or the dead? How should I behave?

“God,” she said. “I don’t fucking believe it.”

“I’m sorry. I just need to know, if that’s possible. So I can know how to talk to you. So I can know how to act.”

“Just act naturally, Daddy,” she snapped.

The operator suddenly came on the line, instructing her to please deposit another two dollars and twenty cents for an additional three minutes.

“Where are you, Zoe? I’ll call back.”

“Shit!” she said. Then she hollered to someone, “What the fuck’s the number of this phone? It’s not here!”

“Zoe, just tell me where you are.”

“It’s this hotel, this … place. Where’s the goddamned number? I can’t find the fucking number.” The operator’s voice cut in again, repeating her instructions.

“Where are you, Zoe? Give me the name of the hotel; I’ll get the number from Information. What’s the address? You’re in New York?”

“Shit! It’s this pay phone. Yeah,” she said, and then the line went dead.

What do you do when this sort of thing happens? I’ll tell you what you do. You sit still and count slowly to ten, or a hundred, or a thousand, however long it takes for your heart to stop pounding, and then you resume doing whatever it was you were doing when the telephone first rang. I had been standing in my socks and underwear at the bathroom sink, shaving. I went back to shaving. I was in the tiny village of Sam Dent, New York, in the middle of generating a terrific negligence suit. I went back to that. I’d planned to return to the city that day anyhow, and Zoe’s phone call hadn’t touched that. She was probably in a ratty, crack-infested single-room-occupancy hotel in back of Times Square, or had just been kicked out of one. And for all I could do about it, she might as well be in L.A. as New York.

I switched my mind onto the business at hand, which I could do something about. Breakfast at the Noonmark. Attending funerals. Dolores Driscoll. The need to sound her out before I got myself locked into this case.

There was only one funeral left, the service for the Catholic kids at St. Hubert’s Church, a small white woodframe structure out by the fairgrounds on the East Branch of the Ausable River, on Route 73, a few miles from town. The funeral was for the Bilodeau and Atwater kids, from Wilmot Flats, and there were five small open caskets up front, surrounded by flowers and miscellaneous plant life. There were maybe a hundred people attending, a sadly shabby crowd in their Sunday best, mostly somber young men with big Adam’s apples and weeping overweight young women with rotten complexions, and bunches of kids and babies in hand-me-downs, with red runny noses and slobbering mouths. The kind of crowd the Pope likes.

I recognized several lawyers, easy to spot in their suits and topcoats, checking out the scene for potential clients, and a couple of journalists with cameras dangling from their necks and notebooks in their hands, waiting for visible signs of grief. Dolores I spotted immediately, thanks to Risa’s description: late middle age, round face, frizzy red hair, a little on the plump side, and wearing a man’s parka and heavy trousers and boots. “You’d think she was a lesbian or something, if you didn’t know about her husband, Abbott, and her sons, who are all quite normal,” Risa had explained. I noted that Risa herself seemed to prefer men’s clothing, but said nothing. What the hell, it was probably just something between women, the way they compete with one another without having to acknowledge it.

I was standing by the door in a pack of late arrivals, still thinking about Zoe, I admit it, when I first saw Dolores. The tiny church was crowded, but she had half a pew at the back to herself, so I slid in next to her. Immediately four or five people followed and sat on my other side, filling the rest of the pew. It wasn’t too hard to see what the difficulty was — these people liked Dolores, she was one of them, and they felt as profoundly sorry for her as for themselves; but they also could not help blaming her and wanting to cast her out. They would have preferred that she simply disappear from town for a while, go and stay with her son in Plattsburgh or at least hide behind the door of her house with her husband up there on Bartlett Hill. They wanted her to stash her pain and guilt where they didn’t have to look at it.

But she wasn’t having any of that. Silently, with her head bowed, Dolores was plunking herself down in the exact center of the town’s grief and rage, compelling them by her presence at these funerals to define her. Was she a victim of this tragedy, or was she the cause of it? She had placed herself on the scales of their judgment, but they did not want to judge her. To them, she was both, of course, victim and cause; just as to herself she was both. Like every parent when something terrible happens to his child, Dolores was innocent, and she was guilty. We knew which, in the eyes of God and our fellowman, we were, despite the fact that most of the time we felt like both; but she did not. Denial was impossible for her, so she wanted us to come forward and do the job for her.