The minister mounted the steps and took his position at the lectern a few steps to the right of Caleb’s casket. Ariel had met him earlier that day but didn’t remember his name. He wasn’t their minister because they didn’t have one — they didn’t attend church — but David had evidently dredged him up somewhere. Maybe old Whittecombe found you a minister if you weren’t able to come up with one of your own. Maybe it was all part of a package deal.
The minister started talking but she decided not to listen to him. It was easy enough to tune out things you didn’t want to hear. She’d had plenty of practice over the years not listening to Roberta, and had reached a point where she could ignore just about anybody. And it didn’t seem likely that the minister would say anything sensational. What could he talk about, anyway? What a great life Caleb had had and all the good things he’d done in it? She figured he would just come up with the standard crap about how God’s ways are mysterious, and that wasn’t anything she wanted to hear.
She wasn’t sure about God. Some days she believed in Him and other days she didn’t. Today she didn’t, but not because Caleb had died. That could just as easily make her believe there had to be a God, because nothing that rotten could happen just by accident. A little baby goes to sleep at night and doesn’t wake up in the morning — well, that convinced you either that there was a God or that there wasn’t, depending which way your ears were pointed that particular day.
She looked at the minister, a tall man with very prominent eyebrows and dark blond hair that had gone gray at the temples. He had the same kind of unreal good looks as the man who could have been planning to emcee the Funeral Game. Her eyes moved from the minister to the coffin, and then she closed her eyes and tried to think of something else to think about.
She had never been to a funeral before. She’d been about five when her grandmother died and they’d left her at home with a baby sitter. Her regular sitter couldn’t come that day, probably because the funeral took place during school hours, and the sitter who showed up was a plump bubbly woman with a hearty laugh who told great stories and kept her occupied nonstop from her parents’ departure to their return several hours later. The woman had been a far more grandmotherly type than the woman they buried that day, whom Ariel now recalled as having always been ill, lying in bed first in a sick-smelling bedroom and later in an equally unwholesome hospital room.
Though this was her first funeral, Ariel had known what to expect. You saw enough of them on television. But she had not known what the experience would feel like. And she had had no idea that she would have to go stand next to the coffin and look at Caleb lying there.
Not that she had been forced to look. In fact they hadn’t seemed to want her to look, but it didn’t matter what they wanted. If you were supposed to go and look, then that was what she was going to do.
So she had stood there, just able to gaze over the side of the coffin, and it was the strangest feeling. It was like standing at the side of his crib and looking through the bars at him while he slept. Except that he wouldn’t wake up. He wouldn’t coo and make his giggle sounds, and he wouldn’t raise his feet for her to play with them and make him laugh, and he wouldn’t go ga-ga looking at his fish mobile. He wouldn’t do any of those things, not ever again, but here she was looking down at him, and it was, well, weird.
Speaking of weird, she was surprised that Erskine had come. She had only met him when school started and she really didn’t know him at all. They were in two classes together, arithmetic and social studies, and they would nod at each other when they passed in the halls, but that was the extent of it. Nobody else had come from her new school except for her homeroom teacher, Miss Tashman, and no one at all had come from her old school, and that was about what she had expected. She didn’t really have any friends.
Maybe Erskine just happened to be a nut about funerals. It almost figured that he would be. He was certainly creepy enough. He was short, five or six inches shorter than she was, and he was plump. Not plump all over but just in the stomach and chest. His arms and legs were quite thin, and he had very small hands and feet. His eyes were blue and looked larger than life because he wore glasses like the bottoms of Coke bottles that magnified his eyes so they looked enormous, making Erskine look something like a Martian in the process.
His complexion, she thought, was even paler than her own, so pale it looked unhealthy. And he was almost as well-coordinated as a spastic, unable to walk through the halls without dropping at least half of what he was carrying. Sometimes he bumped into people. Sometimes he caromed off walls. Sometimes he tripped over his own feet. And his voice was high in pitch, and he tried to conceal this by talking down at the very bottom of his throat, which made him sound either like a girl trying to imitate a boy or a sparrow trying to imitate a bullfrog.
Weird.
So maybe he never misses a funeral, she thought. Which would figure. Or maybe he likes me, which would also figure, because I’m almost as unusual looking as he is. Erskine Wold and Ariel Jardell, and how’s that for a corner on the weirdness market, ladies and gentlemen?
Still, it was nice of him to come.
Jeffrey Channing sat alone in the last row, where he paid no more attention than Ariel to the words the minister was saying. The room was little more than half full, and Jeff was the only person seated in any of the last five rows on either side of the center aisle. This physical gap between himself and the others intensified a feeling of detachment that had been strong to begin with.
He was thinking about crib death.
He’d spent most of the morning reading about it, first in the main public library downtown, then at the medical school library at Calhoun and Barre, where articles in pediatric journals referred to it as SIDS, the acronym representing Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Which, it seemed to him, just accented how little was known about crib death.
Perfectly healthy babies went to sleep and didn’t wake up, and no one seemed to know why. There were theories, he had learned, but they came and went with the seasons. One article he’d read suggested that SIDS might be some form of anaphylactic shock, an extreme allergic reaction of the sort that gave some individuals fatal reactions to a bee sting or a shot of penicillin. Another writer argued that the syndrome was far more common in bottle-fed babies, and reasoned that it was caused by a constitutional inability to digest the larger protein molecules in cow’s milk. Yet another authority explained the phenomenon in terms of the failure of the body’s autoimmune system. Jeff knew that the autoimmune system was a factor in some patients’ rejection of transplanted organs, but that was about all he did know about it, and he couldn’t understand how it might relate to the death of Caleb Oliver Jardell.
Lord, what a handle for an infant. Caleb Oliver Jardell sounded like some grizzled captain of industry, some board chairman cloaked in respectability but with the soul of a pirate. Would the kid have grown into the name? Or would they have wound up calling him Butch or Sonny or Callie or something of the sort?
Hardly mattered. Caleb had been born and had died without Jeff’s ever having seen him. Nor would Jeff see him now. The casket was closed, and soon enough it would be in the ground.
Funny how he hadn’t even wanted to see the kid while he was alive. The affair with Roberta had ended, broken off abruptly at her insistence before he’d had any idea that she was pregnant. He’d been surprised by her decision, and more than a little hurt. At first he tried calling her, but her reaction made it very clear that she wanted him to keep his distance.