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By Root 959 0

It was not called a wake – wakes were held on the other side of the Jogues River, and were rowdy and disreputable, with liquor. No: ours was a reception. The funeral had been packed – the factory workmen had come, their wives, their children, and of course the town notables – the bankers, the clergymen, the lawyers, the doctors – but the reception was not for all, although it might as well have been. Reenie said to Mrs. Hillcoate, who’d been hired to help out, that Jesus might have multiplied the loaves and fishes, but Captain Chase was not Jesus and should not be expected to feed the multitudes, although as usual he hadn’t known where to draw the line and she only hoped nobody would be stampeded to death.

Those invited had crammed themselves into the house, deferential, lugubrious, avid with curiosity. Reenie had counted the spoons both before and after, and said we should have used the second-best ones and that some folks would make off with anything that wasn’t nailed down just to have a souvenir, and considering the way they ate, she might as well have laid out shovels instead of spoons anyway.

Despite this, there was some food left over – half a ham, a small heap of cookies, various ravaged cakes – and Laura and I had been sneaking into the pantry on the sly. Reenie knew we were doing it, but she didn’t have the energy right then to stop us – to say, “You’ll spoil your supper” or “Stop nibbling in my pantry or you’ll turn into mice” or “Eat one more smidgen and you’ll burst” – or to utter any of the other warnings or predictions in which I’d always taken a secret comfort.

This one time we’d been allowed to stuff ourselves unchecked. I’d eaten too many cookies, too many slivers of ham; I’d eaten a whole slice of fruitcake. We were still in our black dresses, which were too hot. Reenie had braided our hair tightly and pulled it back, with one stiff black grosgrain ribbon at the top of each braid and one at the bottom: four severe black butterflies for each of us.

Outside, the sunlight made me squint. I resented the intense greenness of the leaves, the intense yellowness and redness of the flowers: their assurance, the flickering display they were making, as if they had the right. I thought of beheading them, of laying waste. I felt desolate, and also grouchy and bloated. Sugar buzzed in my head.

Laura wanted us to climb up on the sphinxes beside the conservatory, but I said no. Then she wanted to go and sit beside the stone nymph and watch the goldfish. I couldn’t see much harm in that. Laura skipped ahead of me on the lawn. She was annoyingly light-hearted, as if she didn’t have a care in the world; she’d been that way all through Mother’s funeral. She seemed puzzled by the grief of those around her. What rankled even more was that people seemed to feel sorrier for her because of this than they did for me.

“Poor lamb,” they said. “She’s too young, she doesn’t realize.”

“Mother is with God,” Laura said. True, this was the official version, the import of all the prayers that had been offered up; but Laura had a way of believing such things, not in the double way everyone else believed them, but with a tranquil single-mindedness that made me want to shake her.

We sat on the ledge around the lily pond; each lily pad shone in the sun like wet green rubber. I’d had to boost Laura up. She leaned against the stone nymph, swinging her legs, dabbling her fingers in the water, humming to herself.

“You shouldn’t sing,” I told her. “Mother’s dead.”

“No she’s not,” Laura said complacently. “She’s not really dead. She’s in Heaven with the little baby.”

I pushed her off the ledge. Not into the pond though – I did have some sense. I pushed her onto the grass. It wasn’t a long drop and the ground was soft; she couldn’t have been hurt much. She sprawled on her back, then rolled over and looked up at me wide-eyed, as if she couldn’t believe what I’d just done. Her mouth opened into a perfect rosebud O, like a child blowing out birthday candles in a picture book. Then she began to cry.

(I have to admit I was gratified by this.