This isn't just another funeral. It's got an odd ambivalence to it – some people are greeting each other with smiles and hugs, others are giving somber pats on the back, still others are sitting by themselves in the pews, staring at the backs of the people in front of them. I hear a peal of laughter echo through the church, which shocks me and the people around me, but it's like a glass of cool water first thing in the morning and I want to hear more.
I'm still waiting to find a seat. There's a crowd of people who haven't been seated yet, myself among them, and we're moving slowly. It's early yet, so there's no rush, but I'd like to claim a spot at the end of a pew and be one of those quiet ones before I have to stand up and speak. I need a few more minutes to collect myself, to convince myself that I can do this and maintain some shred of dignity – not for myself, but for Catherine.
Her name in my thoughts makes my hands tingle and burn, even after all this time. I gave up on her more than ten years ago, but not one day has gone by that I haven't thought of her and what we could have had, if her life hadn't been so cursed with grief and loss. She never stopped mourning John Hollister, but that wasn't all of it – she was haunted by something other than his death, as tragic and senseless as it was. There was something else.
I used to wonder if it was worry for her daughter. But several years ago I met Paxton Hollister and I don't think Catherine would eat herself up with anxiety over Paxton's future. She's a bright girl, went to Barnard, I think it was, graduated early. Not a surprise given her mother's intelligence. And she has that spark, that essential light that most children seem to have, the one that gets buried under experience and disillusionment the older they grow. By the time they're teenagers, the light is so dim you almost can't tell it was ever there at all. It may have been so with Paxton as well during her adolescence, but when I met her she was twenty-seven, and as graceful and brilliant as a sunbeam. Somehow she found joy in her life, even after her father died. And I know it had to have been Catherine's doing.
I've found a place I like now – as much as I can like anything, having to be here at all. It won't take me long to hobble my old bones up to the podium and deliver the elegy. And when I do, I will keep her face in my mind, the way she looked the day I met her at the Shelter board meeting. Fierce, sharp-eyed, glowing with determination. I don't remember what she wore, or how she smelled. I just remember the look in her eyes, and I remember thinking that I would never know a moment's peace until Catherine Hollister was mine. She got the money she asked for that day – the Board couldn't say no to her. We knew she gave as much of her own money as she asked of us, and her generosity and passion shamed us all.
"Jack," says a voice, accompanied by a gentle pressure on my arm. Lettie Gardener reeks of violets and whiskey, as she always does, and it's all I can do not to slap the old spiteful thing with all the force left in my good arm. "It's good to see you," she says, simpering. Of course she's here. She wouldn't miss this chance to show up Catherine, not when there's finally no competition for the spotlight. I wonder what it will be. She might just blow her nose in the middle of my elegy, or she might go for the big show and burst into those awful howling sobs she likes to affect at public gatherings. Weddings, funerals, Sunday mass, it's all the same to her, as long as someone's looking at her, even with disgust.
I am so sad, and so tired. Catherine used to laugh at Lettie's behavior, but with such compassion that it made me ashamed of my own hostility to the woman. The fact that Lettie is still alive, and in obviously robust health, when Catherine died in pain that morphine couldn't touch at the end, bewilders and infuriates me. God makes no sense to me, nor does karma, nor any other system people like to use to explain things like this, things that should not be in a world that has any justice at all.
I wish it was me dead instead of her.
No comments:
Post a Comment