His friends looked at one another.
“Hey, man,” Dave called, grabbing his arm as if they’d seen each other three days and not three years earlier.
“Oh my God,” said Emily, running over and embracing him. “Tal, you freak. Oh my God. I can’t believe it’s you. The famous Tal Morgenthal. When did you get in?”
But before he could answer—before he could say hello to Dave or Beth or Sadie, who could barely bring herself to look at him—the door opened again, and a cadre of low voices interrupted them. “I guess we should get in there,” said Dave. Sadie nodded. She had, the girls saw, gone almost green. “I don’t want to talk to anyone until after,” she said, almost, they thought, hysterically. “I just don’t.”
Quickly, the pews began to fill. They had thought they would only need a few rows of the space, but it seemed now that they might fill it. Lil had been loved. There was Abe Housman and Maya Decker and Meredith Weiss and a whole band of Oberlin people. Curtis Lang arrived, with Amy, who looked like she’d been dragged along, and Marco LaRoue and his sister Paola, the men slapping Dave on the shoulder and kissing Emily’s cheek. “You look nice,” Curtis told her, sliding into the pew behind her. “Thanks,” she said tightly, worried that she was going to be stuck in conversation forever. But then the husbands arrived, all at once, as if they’d planned it: Josh, then Will, coattails flying, and Ed. Behind them trailed Dave’s parents and Beth’s parents, with her little brother, Jason, followed by a knot of older persons, with dark hair and wild brows, whom they vaguely recognized from Lil’s wedding as Roths. Lil’s boss from the poetry association—a short, barrel-chested man, with enormous eyebrows—strode in, dressed like an English gentleman about to embark on a hearty walk on the moors, with his minions: the pretty young women who staffed his office and had been Lil’s coworkers for years. The group had met them all, over the years, at Christmas parties and such.
“Who’s that?” Emily whispered to Sadie, cocking her head toward a short, pear-shaped woman with spiky blonde hair and enormous earrings of oxidized metal. “Oh,” Sadie said. “Heidi Kass. She was Lil’s advisor at Columbia.” Professor Kass was followed by a troupe that could only be academics: A tall, white-haired man in a sweater vest and Wallabees. Two elderly women in shapeless dirndls, their thin hair pulled back in wispy buns. A young, angry-looking fellow—“Joyce scholar,” said Sadie impishly, “I’m sure of it”—accompanied by a short, bald man in red, round plastic spectacles and matching suede Hush Puppies, and a bone-thin creature, grayish hair falling past her waist, clad in a puff-sleeved blouse—a pirate shirt, Lil would have called it—and a tight velvet vest. “And who’s Stevie Nicks over there?” Emily asked. “Andrea Simmons Smith,” Sadie told her, raising her dark brows. “She’s a poet. Kind of famous. Her last book was a series of poems based on Dorothy Wordsworth’s letters. Sort of wonderful, but sort of cringy.”
In the middle of the central aisle, then, appeared an old man in a baggy suit, with pale, thinning hair, who Emily abruptly realized was Sadie’s father. She hadn’t seen him in years, but she remembered him as tall, hale, athletic. Without Rose on his arm, he looked lost. “Dad,” Sadie called, in a voice that made Emily want to cry—would her brisk, efficient parents ever be this frail?—but the Roths came up behind him and he turned and embraced them. Sadie, overcome, turned away.
In the back row, Rob Green-Gold—he’d kept the married name, even after his divorce, so as to avoid confusing his many followers—seated himself and his latest wife, a Johnson heiress who had parted with half her income under his tutelage, next to a group of tousle-headed young men: the Slikowskers of yore. And there was that cheerful Texan Lil dated in college—what was his name?—flanked by their professors, whom they hadn’t seen since graduation, all those years ago: George Wadsworth, tall and thin and severe; Joan Silver, clad, just as they remembered her, in a jumpsuit; Martin Donahue, white-haired and rabbity.
A new wave of mourners rushed in, scanning the pews for blocks of seats. Beth recognized the band guys from Lil and Tuck’s wedding, and a tiny elderly person, escorted by an attractive young man in a dark suit. “Who’s that?” Sadie asked Emily. “I think that’s Althea Gibbon.” Sadie blinked. “She started the poetry foundation?” Emily nodded. “She loved Lil.” She was followed by a clump of underdressed young people. “Poets,” Sadie suggested. Emily nodded. “Interns.”
The mourners kept coming. Lil’s friends from Columbia. Dave’s neighbors Katherine and Matt. Lil’s childhood friend Daniel, who was now a reconstructionist rabbi in Philadelphia, and his pleasant-faced wife. A tall, bald man, accompanied by a stout woman, her face set in a frown. “Emily, oh my God,” Josh said. “It’s your friend Bob Goldstein.” “Dr. Bob,” she cried. “Wow. And Nurse Hopkins. And isn’t that Paj Mukherjee?” Josh nodded and waved at the doctors, until Emily tugged his arm down. “We’ll talk to them later,” she whispered, then flashed him a smile to counteract her wifely tones.
The clock moved past eleven, but the stream of people kept flowing. Lil and Tuck’s neighbors in Williamsburg: the British waiter from the L café, the owner of the yoga studio, nearly unrecognizable in a brown wool dress (none of them had ever seen her in anything but knit pants and tank tops), the redheaded woman who ran Ugly Luggage, the slender bartender at Oznot’s, and, as Rose stage-whispered, “Girls, let’s get this started,” and the rabbi strode across the front of the sanctuary, Clara and her anarchist publisher, waving at the group and sitting down a few rows behind them.
Sobered by the sight of the cleric, in his neat suit and shiny shoes, the group settled down, until a blonde apparition emerged at the base of the aisle, paused dramatically, hands sculpturally aloft, and surveyed the crowd: Caitlin Green-Gold—now Caitlin Shamsie—in a smart black shift, vividly pregnant. Ismael’s small, noble face peeped over her shoulder, suspended in some sort of sling or cloth backpack, which looped around her shoulders. “Oh, no,” Sadie moaned.
Rose leaned over—she and Mr. Peregrine were behind them, with the Roths—and tapped her daughter’s shoulder. “What in the devil is that?” she asked.
“I don’t know, mom,” Sadie intoned.
“You don’t bring a child to a funeral,” said Rose, in a clipped tone. “What is that girl thinking?”
Sadie shrugged.
“I hope she’s going to take him out if he starts crying.”
“I’m sure she will,” said Ed, patting Rose’s hand.
Rose made a noise, something between a grunt and a snort, and settled back in her seat. Caitlin was still standing, ostensibly looking for a seat. Many eyes had turned to her, including those of the rabbi. “This is just like her,” Emily whispered.
“I know,” said Sadie, instantly regretting it. But soon Caitlin had seated herself next to George Wadsworth—Sadie remembering how she’d spoken so disparagingly of him all those years back—forcing everyone in the row to slide down, and making a big show of untying Ismael from his red baby sack.
“Sadie, I think we should get started,” said Rose, leaning over Sadie’s shoulder.