Fletcher Flora
Skuldoggery
1
It was, all in all, quite a pleasant funeral. At the cemetery, the sun was shining but it was cool under the elms beside the family mausoleum, and you could smell the red clover that grew wild in the field beyond. Uncle Homer was there, and Aunt Madge, and Junior, and Flo, and Flo’s twins, Hester and Lester. And, of course Grandfather Hunter. As a matter of statistics, it was Grandfather’s funeral. He was, in a manner of speaking, the host.
Everyone was grateful to Grandfather for dying, and was, consequently, in a good humor. Uncle Homer was sober for a change, even though it was already three o’clock in the afternoon, and Aunt Madge and Flo kept scraps of cambric pressed to dry eyes in a decent pretense of sorrow that was proper and convincing even when Flo, at the church, caught a short nap. Junior and Lester, being young men with expensive tastes and meager funds, amused themselves by anticipating the fruits of Grandfather’s will, which would be all the sweeter for coming to them in the natural course of events, the old man having departed, however reluctantly without the slightest nudge. Of all the mourners, though, the most impeccably impressive by far was Hester. Throughout the brief ceremony, her eyes were lifted to a cotton cloud drifting slowly across a pale blue sky, as if Grandfather were riding it bareback into heaven, and her face was so serene and lovely that Uncle Homer, observing it, felt a faint twinge in his leathery heart and was diverted for a few seconds from his dream of a five-to-one martini.
The ceremony completed and Grandfather properly disposed of, the mourners returned to the two black limousines, supplied by the undertaker, that would return them to Grandfather’s house in town. They returned, as they had come, in family units. Uncle Homer and Aunt Madge and Junior rode ahead in the first limousine, Flo and Lester and Hester following in the second. A glass partition separated chauffeur and passengers, and so it was unnecessary to sustain the fiction of excessive grief, or of any grief at all, although it would have been unwise, of course, to demonstrate excessively any contrary emotion. As for Flo, relief was sufficient, she felt, and she expressed it simply by putting away her scrap of dry cambric and settling back with a sigh between her twins.
“Well, children,” she said, “Father is gone at last.”
“So he is,” Lester said, “and if you ask me, I’ll have to say that he took his own sweet time about going.”
“You’re so impatient, darling,” Flo said. “You should try to develop a little more self-discipline. Things generally turn out for the best in the end. As you see, Father has died naturally of a bad liver, and there are no unpleasant consequences.”
“I wonder,” Hester said. “I must admit that I was rather uneasy until the medical examination was completed.”
“Perhaps it was your conscience, Sister,” Lester said. “Did you tamper with the old man’s soup or something?”
“Nothing of the sort. My concern was quite unselfish. I confess, however, that I should hate to be known as the twin sister of a man who was hanged.”
“No fear. Grandfather’s liver has removed that grim possibility. I’ll not deny that the pressure has been considerable. I have several unreasonable creditors.”
“Darling,” said Flo, “I wish you would try to be more careful with money.”
“Yes, darling,” Hester said. “Especially with money that you don’t have.”
“In present circumstances,” Lester said, “that is merely a technicality. As an heir, I’ve suddenly become a good risk, and I’m sure that everyone concerned will be happy to wait until Grandfather’s will is probated. I anticipate, as a matter of fact, that I’ll be able to reestablish my credit sufficiently to survive on it in the meantime.”
“It would be a gas if Grandfather left you only what you deserve, which is clearly nothing whatever.”
“Don’t even breathe such a hideous thought, Sister. Anyhow, it would be unfortunate for you and Mother, if you were lucky enough to miss exclusion on the same grounds as I. It would reduce me, I mean, to the status of an expensive dependent.”
“In a pig’s eye.”
“You mustn’t quarrel like naughty children,” Flo said. “Father assured me that he remembered us all generously in his will, and so there is no need for apprehension.”
“Nevertheless,” said Hester, “I’ll feel better when the exact terms of the will are known. Grandfather was a crafty old devil in many ways, and I don’t mind saying that he never inspired me with complete confidence.”
“I agree that it will relieve matters to have the terms known at once,” Flo said. “That’s why Homer and I, as Father’s only issue and principal heirs, have arranged to have the will read this very afternoon.”
“Mother,” said Hester, “I wish you wouldn’t be so smug about being a principal heir. It’s entirely possible that you won’t be anything of the kind.”
“Yes,” Lester said, “and I wish you wouldn’t refer to yourself as an issue. It sounds like you’d come out of a vending machine or something.”
“Well, what a perfectly disagreeable thing to say. Lester, you should be ashamed for speaking in such manner to your own mother.”
Flo was so offended by being spoken to in such a manner that she sat erect and expressed her disapproval by staring aloofly out the limousine window past Lester’s handsome nose, finishing the ride in silence. As an appropriate tempo to grief, the cars had been moving slowly through the city streets, the first spaced neatly ahead and constantly in sight of the second, and in due time, in that order and so paced, they reached the house of the late Grandfather Hunter. It was a huge house of yellowish stone set well back from the street behind a deep lawn bearing oaks and pines and sycamores. It was approached by a brick drive and surrounded by an ancient iron picket fence. The drive entered the grounds on the east and exited, after completing half of an ellipse, on the west. On both sides of a walk that bisected the half-ellipse from street to house were a pair of cast-iron deer, one grazing through all the seasons on grass green or brown, the other fixed in an attitude of alarmed listening, presumably to the stealthy approach of a beast of prey from the general direction of the garage in the rear.
The place was, in brief, a monstrosity of the first chop and a white elephant of the highest order. No sane person would have wanted to live in it, unless Grandfather Hunter could have been considered in legal possession of his wits, and probably the best thing that could be done with it, now that Grandfather had vacated, would be to sell it to the city for a museum or an orphanage or maybe a reform school. As the only surviving son, who had every moral right to anticipate this real estate, Uncle Homer had already considered carefully its disposition, and had, indeed, laid out a strategy involving the exploitation of several vulnerable officials. He can be excused, then, for waiting in the drive beneath a portico, after Aunt Madge and Junior had gone inside, to welcome his sister and her twins as if it were his prerogative, as well as his duty.
“Well,” he said, “here we are, aren’t we? Flo, I must say that you’ve survived the ordeal of Father’s last rites beautifully. You look as fresh as a mint julep. Did you ever in the world hear such monstrous hyperbole dished up by a member of the clergy? You’d think they’d have more regard for the truth, wouldn’t you?”
“He was a dreadful old bore,” Flo said, referring to the member of the clergy, “but I confess that I am myself inclined to see Father in a more favorable light, now that he is securely in the family mausoleum. After all, he at least had the virtue of being rich.”
“You are right there, Flo. You have expressed the matter exactly, as usual. Hester, my dear, you are positively radiant. I noticed it at the cemetery. As serene and lovely as an angle. Whatever were you thinking about?”