The Secret History - Donna Tartt [203]
It was a muddy, black day in the churchyard. The rain had stopped but the sky was dark and the wind was blowing hard. Someone was ringing the church bell and not doing a very good job of it; it clanged unevenly to and fro like a bell at a seance.
People straggled to their cars, dresses billowing, holding hats to head. A few paces in front of me Camilla struggled on tiptoe to pull down her umbrella, which dragged her along in little skipping steps—Mary Poppins in her black funeral dress. I stepped up to help her, but before I got there the umbrella blew inside out. For a moment it had a horrible life of its own, squawking and flapping its spines like a pterodactyl; with a sudden sharp cry she let it go and immediately it sailed ten feet in the air, somersaulting once or twice before it caught in the high branches of an ash tree.
“Damn,” she said, looking up at it and then down at her finger, from which a thin seam of blood sprang. “Damn, damn, damn.”
“Are you okay?”
She stuck the injured finger in her mouth. “It’s not that,” she said peevishly, glancing up at the branches. “This is my favorite umbrella.”
I fished around in my pocket, gave her my handkerchief. She shook it out and held it to her finger (flutter of white, blown hair, darkening sky) and as I watched time stopped and I was transfixed by a bright knife of memory: the sky was the same thundery gray as it had been then, new leaves, her hair had blown across her mouth just so …
(flutter of white)
(… at the ravine. She’d climbed down with Henry and was back at the top before him, the rest of us waiting at the edge, cold wind, jitters, springing to hoist her up; dead? is he …? She took a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped her muddy hands, not looking at any of us, really, her hair blowing back light against the sky and her face a blank for just about any emotion one might care to project …)
Behind us someone said, very loudly, “Dad?”
I jumped, startled and guilty. It was Hugh. He was walking briskly, half-running, and in a moment had caught up with his father. “Dad?” he said again, placing a hand on his father’s slumping shoulder. There was no response. He shook him gently. Up ahead, the pallbearers (Henry indistinct, somewhere among them) were sliding the casket into the open doors of the hearse.
“Dad,” said Hugh. He was tremendously agitated. “Dad. You gotta listen to me for a sec.”
The doors slammed. Slowly, slowly, Mr. Corcoran turned. He was carrying the baby they called Champ but today its presence seemed to offer him little comfort. The expression on his big slack face was haunted and lost. He stared at his son as if he had never seen him before.
“Dad” said Hugh. “Guess who I just saw. Guess who came. Mr. Vanderfeller,” he said urgently, pressing his father’s arm.
The syllables of this illustrious name—one which the Cocorans invoked with very nearly as much respect as that of God Almighty—had when uttered aloud a miraculous effect of healing on Mr. Corcoran. “Vanderfeller’s here?” he said, looking around. “Where?”
This august personage, who loomed large in the collective unconscious of the Corcorans, was the head of a charitable foundation—endowed by his even more august grandpapa—which happened to own a controlling interest in the stock of Mr. Corcoran’s bank. This entailed board meetings, and occasional social functions, and the Corcorans had an endless store of “delightful” anecdotes about Paul Vanderfeller, of how European he was, what a celebrated “wit,” and though the witticisms they found frequent occasion to repeat seemed poor things to me (the guards up at the security booth at Hampden were cleverer) they made the Corcorans rock with urbane and apparently