Эд Макбейн - Strangers When We Meet

“Mother—”

“Margaret, I’m not a whore.”

“Mother—”

“Please understand that, Margaret. I’m not a whore. It’s important to me that you under—”

“Please, please,” Margaret said.

She looked across at her mother, and there were tears forming in Mrs. Wagner’s eyes, and for a moment she wanted to reach across the table and take her mother’s delicate hands, the wedding ring and engagement ring large on the third finger, take her mother’s hand in her own and say, “It’s all right. Please don’t cry, please.”

The moment hung suspended.

And then Margaret said, “I don’t want to hear it, Mother.”

“I hope your life is never threatened, Margaret. I hope your blood supply is never cut off.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” Margaret said, more firmly this time.

“Whatever happened to you is your business, but I can tell it meant nothing.” Mrs. Wagner studied her daughter, and her eyes were clear now. “Do you know what I wish?”

“What?”

“I wish you fall in love some day. I wish to God you really fall in love.”

“The way you did, Mother?” Margaret asked, vast sarcasm in her voice.

“Yes,” Mrs. Wagner said slowly, her eyes bright and hard, “the way I did.”

On Tuesday morning, in the town of Vega Alta, Larry saw the funeral.

The town was hot and dry and dusty. The shops lined the main street, and Larry stood on the sidewalk waiting for Hebbery, who had stepped into one of the shops to buy some “cigarillos” after showing Larry the site. There was a hush to the town, the silence of bare feet on dust-covered roads. There were few shoppers, and there was a feeling of almost complete inactivity, a laziness sponsored by the sun, washing the road and the sidewalk and the colorless, faded pastels of the shop fronts in a monotonous warm bath of sun yellow. The silence seemed suddenly to mushroom in upon itself. There had been silence before, but it deepened now as if before a sudden summer cloudburst so that Larry looked unconsciously skyward, expecting rain.

At the far end of the street, he saw the procession. It took him a moment to realize what it was, and then another moment to realize it had caused the deepening of silence.

The procession started with the little girls in white. He counted an even dozen of them, walking in pairs, each holding a bunch of flowers, walking in slow cadence, the dust rising around them on the painfully silent street. Six pairs of girls in white dresses, young girls with tan faces and brown faces, each clutching a bunch of blood-red flowers at her waist. And behind the little girls, the pallbearers marched with stiff solemnity, carrying the huge black coffin on their shoulders, the weight evenly distributed so that it appeared the coffin was not heavy at all, seemed as if they walked effortlessly beneath this huge black box which hovered magically on the air over their shoulders.

Behind the pallbearers, behind the coffin, the townspeople marched in mourning. They spread across the width of the small street, marching shoulder to shoulder with the slow, uneven beat of stragglers, their faces serious with the serious business of death.

The shoppers were lining the curbs now. Men removed their hats as the coffin passed. Storekeepers came out onto the sidewalk and closed the doors of their shops behind them. Up and down the street as the coffin passed, the wood louvered doors eased quietly shut, and the hats were lifted silently from heads, and the straggling mourners raised giant clouds of dust that sifted up silently on the bright, golden, sunlit air.

He felt like an outsider. He felt like a scientist watching bugs perform under a microscope, and he didn’t want to feel that way, didn’t want these people to think he was scientifically and coldly watching death go by, didn’t want them to think he was the proud, aloof Americano who watched dispassionately while they put a friend and neighbor to rest. He was suddenly involved in the funeral, very involved in it, suddenly feeling the pure white innocence of the flower girls, the burden the pallbearers carried, the sadness that showed on the faces of the mourners who walked in sloppy disorganization, the awkwardness of their hands hanging at their sides, knowing they did not know what to do with their hands.

And he felt suddenly on the thin edge of realizing something very important about life. Here in this dusty town, in this town gone awkwardly silent in the presence of death, here where he did not know why they were closing the doors of the shops, or who the man in the coffin was, here he felt something start in the pit of his stomach and burn there with ferocious intensity and then work its way into his blood stream like a narcotic, rushing for his brain. He tried to channel it, tried to organize it into something he could grasp, something that would have meaning. He knew there was profundity in what was happening, something very deep and very meaningful, something about values and goals, about the incompleteness and startling brevity of life, something about clinging, living, building, something about the finality of death, but he could not think, he could only feel, and his inability to make this feeling coherent, to lay it out like a floor plan, to put it into meaningful symbols and ciphers he could manipulate frustrated him so that he stood silent and thoughtful, wracked with agonizingly elusive thought as the coffin passed and the shop doors closed and the dust rose on the street washed with sunlight.

“They close the doors because a friend is passing,” Hebbery said at his elbow. “They won’t do business while a dead friend goes by. It’s respect.”

He nodded, but he was not listening to Hebbery, did not know how long Hebbery had been standing by his side. The procession had passed, and behind it was the cloud of dust. He could no longer see the little girls in white. There were only the backs of the mourners now, spread across the street like a solid wall of sorrow. He had the feeling that once they were gone, if he allowed them to go, he would never be able to understand what he’d almost grasped, what was still within reach of his grasp, if only he could organize it, hold it.

A bell was tolling somewhere in the distance. The procession was turning a corner at the end of the street, and Hebbery said, “They’re heading for the church. It’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it?”

He nodded. He wanted to say, Yes, yes, it’s a beautiful thing, but that isn’t it, help me, Hebbery, this is the whole meaning of life here if you’ll only help me put it into words.

The last of the mourners turned the corner, following the coffin. The dust settled, the shop doors opened again. The men replaced their hats. Slowly the street came back to lethargic life.

In the distance he could hear the steady, unrelenting toll of the church bell.

The plane left Isla Verde, the island’s international airport, two days later at dusk. They sat side by side, and they could see condensed moisture rising from the island’s greenery as evening set in with its cool sea winds.

Eve took his hand when the wheels left the ground, and she did not let go of it until the tension inside her relaxed an hour later, and then she fell asleep.

He walked with Chris rapidly.

He had shaved and put on his favorite woolen sports shirt. He wore it open at the throat, a sports jacket thrown over it, even though it was much too cold for such light attire. When he saw her, he smiled and then quickly pulled the smile from his face. He saw the recognition in her eyes, and he studied her face and then the ash-blonde hair and then the dangling earrings. Her eyes avoided his. Again she seemed embarrassed in his presence, and he wondered what caused the embarrassment.