Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

The organ started playing softly, and Dr. Prescott entered through a side door and took a seat behind the pulpit. Below the pulpit lay the casket, pearly gray, decorated with a spray of white flowers. The sight of it made Ian feel cold. Something like a cold blade entered his chest and he looked away.

Now the others were filing down the aisle — his father solemn and sheepish, his mother wearing an expression that seemed less grief-stricken than disappointed. “I’m not angry; just disappointed,” she used to tell Ian when he misbehaved. (What would she say now, if she knew what he had done?) Behind came Claudia and Macy with Abbie, who was evidently considered old enough now for funerals. She had on her first high heels and wobbled slightly as she followed the others into a pew. This wasn’t the front pew but the one just behind. Maybe the front pew was reserved for Lucy’s blood relations, if any showed up.

But none did. The organ music dwindled away, Dr. Prescott rose and announced a prayer, and still no one arrived to fill that empty pew.

The prayer was for the living. “We know Thy daughter Lucy is safely by Thy side,” Dr. Prescott intoned, “but we ask Thee to console those left behind. Comfort them, we pray, and ease their pain. Let Thy mercy pour like a healing balm upon their hearts.” Like a healing balm. Ian pictured something white and semiliquid — the bottle of lotion his mother kept by the kitchen sink, say — pleasantly scented with almonds. Could the balm soothe not just grief but guilt? Not just guilt but racking anguish over something impulsively done that could not be undone?

Ordinarily indifferent to prayers (or to anything else even vaguely religious), Ian listened to this one yearningly. He leaned forward in his seat as if he could ride the words all the way to heaven. He kept his eyes tightly shut. He thought, Please. Please. Please .

In the pews around him he heard a rustling and a creaking, and he opened his eyes and found the congregation rising. Struggling to his feet, he peered at the hymnbook Cicely held in front of him. “… with me,” he joined in belatedly, “fast falls the eventide …” His voice was a creak. He fell silent and listened to the others — to Cicely’s clear soprano, Mrs. Jordan’s plain, true alto, Dr. Prescott’s rich bass. “The darkness deepens,” they sang, “Lord, with me abide!” The voices ceased to be separate. They plaited themselves into a multistranded chord, and now it seemed the congregation was a single person — someone of great kindness and compassion, someone gentle and wise and forgiving. “In life, in death, O Lord,” they finished, “abide with me.” And then came the long, sighed “Amen.” They sat down. Ian sat too. His knees were trembling. He felt that everything had been drained away from him, all the grief and self-blame. He was limp and pure and pliant as an infant. He was, in fact, born again.

Through the burial in Pleasant Memory Cemetery and the car trip home, through the flurry of reclaiming the children, setting up the coffeepot, and greeting the guests who stopped by afterward, Ian wandered in a dreamlike state of mind. He traveled around the living room with a plate of butterscotch brownies, failing to notice it was empty till his brother-in-law pointed it out. “Earth to Ian,” Macy said, guffawing, and then Mrs. Jordan relieved Ian of the plate. Cicely came up from behind and slipped a hand into his. “Are you all right?” she asked him.

“Yes, fine,” he said.

Her fingertips were soft little nubbins because she bit her nails. Her breath gave off the metallic scent of Coca-Cola. Mrs. Jordan’s craggy face had a hinged and plated look, like an armadillo hide. Everything seemed very distinct, but also far away.

“It’s been too much,” Mrs. Jordan told Cicely. “Just too much to take in all at once. First Danny, and now Lucy!” She turned to draw one of the foreigners into the conversation; he was hovering hopefully nearby. “Why, I remember the day they announced their engagement!” she said. “Remember, Jim?”

“Jack,” the foreigner said.

“Jack, I was there when he brought her home. I’d come over to borrow the pinking shears and in they walked. Well, I knew right away what was what. Pretty little thing like that, who wouldn’t want to marry her?”

“Woe betide you,” Jack told Ian.

“Um …”

“O lud lud! Please to accept my lamentations.”

This must be the foreigner who was so devoted to Roget’s Thesaurus . Bee was always quoting choice remarks. Mrs. Jordan gave him a speculative stare. “I suppose in your culture, Lucy wouldn’t have lasted even this long,” she said. “Don’t they throw themselves on their husband’s pyre or something?”

“Pyre?”

“And now I reckon Doug and Bee will have to take on those poor children,” she told Ian.

Ian said, “Well, actually—”

“Just look at that little one. Did you ever see anything so precious?”

Ian followed her gaze. In the doorway to the hall, Daphne stood rocking unsteadily. Her dazzling white shoes — hard-soled and ankle-high — no doubt helped to keep her upright; but still, standing alone at ten months was quite an accomplishment, Ian suspected. Was this the first time she’d tried it? He thought of all the fuss that would have been made ordinarily — the applause and the calls for a camera. But Daphne went unnoticed, a frail, wispy waif in an oversized dress, looking anxiously from face to face.

Then she spotted Ian. Her eyes widened. She grinned. She dropped to the floor and scuttled toward him, expertly weaving between the grownups’ legs and pausing every now and then to wrench herself free from the hem of her dress. She arrived at his feet, took hold of his trousers and hauled herself to a standing position. When she beamed up at him, she had to tip her head so far back she nearly fell over.

Ian bent and lifted her into his arms. She nestled against his shoulder. “Oh, the darling,” Mrs. Jordan said. “Why, she’s crazy about you! Isn’t she, Ian? Isn’t she? Ian?”

He couldn’t explain why the radiance left over from church fell away so suddenly. The air in the room seemed dull and brownish. Mrs. Jordan’s voice sounded hollow. This child was far too heavy.

Back in school, he kept trying to recapture that feeling he’d had at the funeral. He hummed “Abide with Me” under his breath. He closed his eyes in hopes of summoning up the congregation’s single, melting voice, the soft light from the pebbled windows, the sense of mercy and forgiveness. But nothing came. The bland brick atmosphere of Sumner College prevailed. Biology 101 progressed from nematodes to frogs, and King John repudiated the Magna Carta, and Ian’s roommate dragged him to see Devil-Women from Outer Space .

At night, Danny stood at the blackboard in front of Ian’s English class. “This is a dream,” he announced. “The word ‘dream’ comes from the Latin word dorimus , meaning ‘game of chance.’ ” Ian awoke convinced that there had been some message in this, but the harder he worked to decipher it, the farther away it drifted.

He phoned home Saturday afternoon and learned that Mrs. Jordan, of all people, had cleverly uncovered the name of Lucy’s ex-husband. “What she did,” Bee told Ian, “was sit Agatha down beside her and run through a lot of everyday, wife-ish remarks. She said, ‘Don’t forget the garbage,’ and, ‘Suppertime!’ and, ‘You’re late.’ Her theory was, the name would sort of swim into Agatha’s memory. She thought Thomas was too young to try it on. But all at once Thomas pipes up, ‘You’re late with the check again, Tom!’ he said. Just out of nowhere!”

“Well, that would make sense,” Ian said. “So Thomas must be Tom Junior.”