A Cup of Tea - Amy Ephron [29]
Mr. Fell was in his study cataloguing butterflies. He was placing a particularly large blue monarch under glass when the doorbell rang. He ignored it and continued with his work but then it rang again.
“Why isn’t anyone getting the door?” he muttered under his breath. And then got up to answer the door himself.
There were two young soldiers on the doorstep. They looked grave and somber. One of them was holding a telegram in his hand. Mr. Fell knew instantly why they had come but he was silent and let them speak. “We are looking for Mrs. Philip Alsop,” said the younger of the two.
“Could I suggest that you go away so that none of us will know of this?” said Mr. Fell. “No, I guess I could not suggest that.” Not that it would have done any good as Rosemary’s car pulled up at the curb as he added, sadly, “Yes, I imagined that you were.”
Rosemary had been to lunch at “21” with Jane where the disproportionate number of women in the room and the fact that it was a meatless day emphasized the presence of the war. They had taken a walk down Fifth Avenue, Rosemary’s driver following in the car a discreet distance behind, so he would be waiting at the curb as soon as they were ready to go home. After a few forays into stores, they piled safely into the backseat of the car with their packages and drove downtown. They pulled up in front of the house as the two soldiers were still standing on the doorstep. Rosemary turned absolutely white and gripped Jane’s arm.
The soldiers knew no details, only that Philip had been reported dead. They had found his dog tag on a battlefield but, as yet, had been unable to identify a body. Rosemary’s face hardened into a porcelain mask. If there was no physical evidence, there was no way they could know for sure. Maybe he’d…there were so many possibilities. She fastened onto the phrase, “…unable to identify the body.”
When someone dies, time seems to take on a dimension of its own. Minutes expand to sometimes seem like hours and silence is filled with memories of what has been. It was not a traditional mourning period, however, as Rosemary refused to acknowledge it.
Jane went with her to Carlysle’s funeral home on Madison Avenue. The floors were thickly carpeted and they noticed everybody seemed to speak in whispers. A white-faced fellow led them into Oliver Carlysle’s office and left them alone. The furniture was leather. Carlysle’s desk top was bare except for a conservative floral arrangement, white chrysanthemums and baby’s breath, which somehow made its own statement. Rosemary and Jane, each clad in appropriately dark clothes and Rosemary wearing a black hat with a wide brim. She kept her head bowed so that it was difficult to see her eyes. She seemed nervous.
“I don’t know how you have a funeral without a body,” she said to Jane. “I guess we, could just bury the telegram.”
Jane was stunned and didn’t know if she was supposed to laugh. But before she could respond, Oliver Carlysle, the proprietor of the funeral home, entered. He looked as one would have expected him to look, so pale as to appear pasty with slightly pudgy, well-manicured hands. He mistakenly extended his hand to Jane, who realized that she didn’t want to take it. “Mrs. Alsop—” he said.
Rosemary stood. “I am Mrs. Alsop.”
“Would you forgive me?” Carlysle said immediately. “I would like to express our condolences,” he said using a peculiar third-person liberty that made Jane wonder whether he imagined he was speaking on behalf of the entire spirit world.
Rosemary cut him off. “Yes, of course,” she said.
He took a large book out of his desk drawer and placed it on the desk top. “There are a great many decisions to make at a time like this,” he said. “We have a great many resting grounds and caskets to choose from…”
He turned the book towards her and in it were various pictures, drawn in gray and brown charcoal, of coffins, mahogany, pine, some elaborately carved, and headstones made of marble, granite, and simple stone. There