The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [53]
“No, I’m not a relative,” Kathryn said. “There’s going to be a memorial service for her son, and I wanted her to be informed.”
“Her son died?”
“Yes.”
“What was his name?”
“Jack. Jack Lyons.”
“OK.”
“He was killed in a plane crash,” Kathryn added.
“Really? You mean that Vision crash?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, my God, wasn’t that awful? What kind of a man would commit suicide and take all those innocent people with him?”
Kathryn was silent.
“Well, this is the first I’ve heard of Mrs. Rice’s son being on the plane,” the woman said. “You want me to try to tell her? I can’t promise you she’ll understand. . . .”
“Yes,” said Kathryn coolly. “I think you should try to tell her.” “Maybe I’d better talk to my supervisor first. Well, listen, thanks for telling us, and I hope you didn’t have any relatives yourself on that flight.”
“I did, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry.”
“My husband was the pilot,” Kathryn said.
In the days that followed her meeting with the priest, Father Paul and Kathryn spoke often, and twice the priest drove to Julia’s house to visit. At the first meeting at the rectory, Robert had stressed the need for security, and Father Paul had seemed not to think this was beyond his ken, although in this, as it happened, he was overconfident. Repeatedly, Kathryn herself could get little farther than the word honor, though Father Paul did not demand much beyond that, and for that she was grateful. When she thought about Father Paul now, it was with a shudder of relief, for if it had not been for his firm hand, the memorial service would have been a fiasco beyond all proportions.
As it was, she and Julia and Mattie had had to go to the church an hour ahead of time to insure that they would have clear passage through the streets, which later would become so clogged that nothing — not even an ambulance — could get through. Mattie wore a long gray silk skirt with a cropped black jacket, and shook violently when Father Paul said that her father had now made a safe landing. Julia and Kathryn had worn suits and had held hands. Or rather, Julia had held Kathryn’s hand, and Kathryn had held Mattie’s, and this passing on of strength, this willing of strength from one to the other to the other had helped Kathryn, and she thought Mattie and Julia as well, survive the service. But afterward, when Kathryn stood up from the pew and turned to face the back of the church and saw the rows upon rows of pilots in dark suits, pilots from many airlines, most of whom had never met Jack, and then the rows of students from her classes, some of whom had already graduated and had come back for this event, she faltered, and then stumbled, and it was Mattie, in a sudden reversal of roles, who held her up, supported her. Mattie and Kathryn and Julia had then walked the length of that long aisle, and Kathryn thought now that it had been, possibly, the longest walk of her life. For as she walked, she had the distinct sense that when she reached the door of the church and slipped inside the black car that was waiting for her outside, her life with Jack truly would have ended.
The next day, in the newspapers, there was a photograph of Kathryn emerging from Saint Joseph’s, and she was surprised not only by the repetition of her image on the front page of several papers in the stand outside Ingerbretson’s, but also by the image itself: Grief transformed a face, she saw, carved hollows and etched lines and loosened muscles, so that the face was almost unrecognizable. In the picture, clutching her daughter’s arm for support, Kathryn looked dazed and stricken and years older than she was.
She winced now to think of that picture, and of others,