Alice Bliss - Laura Harrington [94]
Sustenato, Henry would say, pressing that pedal at the piano. Sustaining.
May 9th
Angie sends Alice back upstairs to change her clothes for the “hours” at the funeral parlor. Wearing black jeans and one of her dad’s polo shirts has been deemed inappropriate, disrespectful, and annoying beyond belief.
She is frantically searching her closet for the black skirt and white blouse she wears for chorus concerts. The skirt is on the highest shelf rolled into a ball. She tries to smooth out the wrinkles as she pulls it on, but she still can’t find the white blouse. She tears into her parents’ bedroom and grabs her mom’s cream silk blouse off its hanger and pulls it on over her head. Shoes, shoes, shoes. Back to her room. Her flats from the dance. A scrunchie goes around her wrist; she’ll fix her hair in the car. She doesn’t really understand how her body can be moving so fast when her mind is stuck in slow motion, when her mind is still in bed, still dreaming about last year and last spring and the days and the weeks and the hours before all of this happened.
Running downstairs she can see that the front door has been left open and everyone is already in the car. Uncle Eddie, almost unrecognizable in a suit and tie, is at the wheel; Gram and Ellie are in the backseat. Alice thinks, I can’t do this, I can’t go through the motions, I can’t stand in a room with my father in a casket and talk to everyone; I can’t do this.
She sees her mom lean over Uncle Eddie in the front seat to give the horn a long blast, and on the wave of that sound, she propels herself through the door, slamming it behind her, running down to the street and the car and her family and the final ritualized steps of letting go of her father.
Another funeral director, one of Allison Mahoney’s brothers, meets them at the back door. There is a line of people out the front door, down the sidewalk, and around Middle Street. He ushers them into the room with the coffin and the flowers and the folding chairs and a book to sign on its own stupid, phony stand, and all Alice can see is the coffin. There are so many flowers the smell is taking up all the air in the room. The late-afternoon sun is slanting into sunset outside, while inside the shades are drawn and the lights are on. Alice is ready to bolt, when Uncle Eddie rests his hand on the small of her back. Suddenly she sees the roof and the ladder and remembers her father with his hand on her back telling her to breathe.
The funeral director says that they will have a few moments alone in the room with Matt before they open the doors to the neighbors, to the baseball players and the teachers and the firemen and the wives and the children of the other men in his unit, and all the rest of the world. How did her father know so many people?
Angie walks in first and kneels at the coffin, Ellie beside her. Alice recoils; she turns her back on her mother and her sister and the coffin and all that it contains.
She suddenly wants Henry. Where is Henry? Why isn’t he here?
Gram is at her side.
“I’ll go up with you.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.”
“Gram—”
“These are hard things.”
“I can’t, Gram.”
“You have to think about what you can do for your father now.”
Alice begins to back away from her grandmother.
“You’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t do this.”
“Gram—”
“Never.”
Alice lets Gram take her hand and lead her up to the coffin. They kneel together. Alice is looking down at her clasped hands; Alice is looking at her grandmother’s hands; Alice is looking anywhere but at the figure in the coffin, at the uniform that is not her father, that is something else, someone else, because it is still not possible to believe that her father could be dead and cold and lifeless and gone.
Gram stands and leans over and kisses him. She kisses Matt on the forehead and touches his crossed hands, as though this is normal, as though