Who can separate practicality from hope from lingering superstition? We wanted another child. We wanted to fill those clothes.
And so, without even looking, we packed them away, three boxes full. We could throw them out later, if we had to.
That afternoon we called the movers, who were going to take our boxes to Edward’s parents’ house in England. They were supposed to come in five days, but we hadn’t settled on an actual time. The owner of the business, an English guy in his thirties, had been over to the house two weeks before to give us an estimate. A lifetime ago. We’d talked about babies. His son had been born in Bordeaux, too, with kidney problems. The hospital was good, he’d said. Now Edward left a message with the receptionist at the moving company explaining what had happened.
“It doesn’t need to be mentioned again,” said Edward. “I just wanted him to know ahead of time so he won’t ask.”
The owner called back later that day, all business, to say that he’d be over the next morning to take our stuff.
“I thought Monday,” said Edward.
No, said the mover, this was it, their one trip for the month.
“You do understand what we’ve gone through,” said Edward cautiously.
Yes, he did.
It was Thursday. I checked the voicemail, sure that he’d said Monday. He had.
Edward called back.
Well, said the mover, then that was a mistake, but that’s how it is.
It seemed too much to bear. How could we be expected to buy packing tape when our child had died? To pack in eighteen hours what we’d thought we’d had three days to do? To stay up all night sealing up cartons, for someone else’s mistake? I was furious, insane at the injustice of having to deal with anything even mildly difficult in the face of the hardest thing in the world. “When,” I asked Edward, as we drove to buy more tape, “did we become characters in a Raymond Carver story?”
We spent the day packing and cursing the mover. It was invigorating to have such a villain. I didn’t care about his carelessness, only his cowardice: if he’d abjectly apologized I would have forgiven him. “I’m going to tell him,” I told Edward.
“Good.”
“I’m going to say, I just hope no one is ever this cruel to your wife, or your child.”
“I think you should.”
“I’ll say, How would you feel — ”
But he sent over a single hired hand to do the work, and I was spared the pleasure.
At night when I’m tired I still write him angry letters in my head before I fall asleep.
17
We didn’t want to go back to Bordeaux after Pudding died, but we had to: the autopsy took three days, and only then could we pick up Pudding’s body, to accompany it to the crematorium. On the way to the morgue we had to stop at a pharmacy so poor Edward could negotiate a tube of hemorrhoid cream for me. (Sometimes, when I think back on those days I forget that I wasn’t just a woman who had lost a child, I had given birth to one, too, and was recovering.) This was the last of Bordeaux. We hated the place. It was ruined for us worse than the rest of France was. Edward had mentioned to his parents that we’d like to spend the summer in North Norfolk, near the sea, and within forty-eight hours they had found a cottage for rent in a small town called Holt. It wasn’t free for three weeks, but it felt like a miracle: we had somewhere to go.
The morgue was just by the hospital. It felt — well, dead, but dead in an early-morning dentist’s-office way, clean and deserted. The waiting room was large and sparsely furnished, with a coffee vending machine by the plate glass windows at the front and a windowless double door into the back. We rang a bell; a woman came to see what we wanted; we gave the name in its mangled aitchless French version: R-Vay.
You may see the child again, she said.
We’d been warned by the funeral director that we’d be asked this. No thank you, we told her.
Well then, she said. Please wait.
We sat. It was very sunny out, but the room was so big that the light from all those windows at the front stalled out at the coffee machine. It was in no danger of getting anywhere near us. I remember craning my head to look at the outside. At first there was nothing, and then the most funereal person I have ever seen in my life walked by, a Gallic Boris Karloff. He wore a white dress shirt. His shoulders had a sorrowful hunch. His dark overhanging eyebrows looked carved from granite, like tombstones, monuments to worry. Of course he had something to do with the morgue: he couldn’t have gone into anything but a funerary profession. Maybe this was the family face, and the family business, and who could say whether it was evolution or destiny or an acceptance that one’s face is one’s fortune, or misfortune.
“That’s the screws,” said Edward.
“What?”
“That’s the sound of them screwing the lid down,” and then I could hear the dim sound of a turning power tool. That was good. It meant we didn’t have to wait much longer.
Of course Boris Karloff turned out to be the hearse driver. I couldn’t understand a single word of his French, he mumbled so apologetically. The hearse was a plainish station wagon. He gave directions to the cemetery. Edward seemed to understand him.
We followed the car, a threadbare funeral procession. At every rotary the cemetery was marked, but we checked the map anyhow. What could be worse than to lose sight of our boy now?
In the middle of the cemetery, Boris Karloff pulled up in front of a building that housed both the crematorium and a few chapels for funerals. He shook our hands and directed us inside. The building had the timeless feel of an institutional edifice constructed in good taste, with no heart. It might have been erected in 1952 or 1977 or 2005. The funeral director greeted us. We said our name, we said we were the R-Vays, and he indicated with his hand the direction to walk.
At every turn of the hallway was a sign with the international line drawing of a martini glass, the kind that indicates airport cocktail lounges, underscored with an arrow, though if you followed them you got only as far as a vending machine for bottled water. There was another funeral going on that day, for a grown-up, and we walked against the current of mourners who seemed to be taking it all very well.
The director brought us into our chapel.
I am sorry, he said, for the size of the room, but it is all we have.
The size of the room was vast, appropriate for the service of someone very famous, or very friendly, or very old, someone who could attract mourner after mourner. Surely they should have put the other funeral here, I thought, but maybe they weighed the possibilities and decided: to put fifty people in a room meant for two hundred is sadder than putting two people there.
This way, said the funeral director, and he brought us to the front, where the casket had been set on a cabinet. We had seen the casket only in a catalog at the funeral home by the hospital. The director said, I will leave you for a moment.
“It’s too big,” I said when he’d gone.
“I know,” said Edward, looking at the room yawning out behind us. It upset him. “If I were my father, I’d complain — ”
But I’d meant the casket. A brass plate had been fixed to the top: Pudding Harvey, 2006. I wondered how caskets came. I mean how they were sized. We’d chosen the cheapest casket, the cheapest urn. Now we touched the wood very tentatively. What age was this meant for? For a child, surely, not a baby, and it made me sad that he, who had so little to his name, was lying inside such a big, empty, dark space. I didn’t like to think of where he was in there, at the top, at the bottom, but I wondered. It should have fit him.