Matthew’s father was clearer in this room than Timothy; his death seemed more recent, more easily mourned. He had gone unwillingly, after all — taken unawares, in his sleep, probably looking forward to tomorrow’s wheelings and dealings. But how could you mourn a suicide? Complications arose every time Matthew tried. On top of the oil burner was a sheaf of photographs he had been puzzling over the night before: Timothy in his mother’s yard, last summer when Matthew was trying out his new camera. He had not yet learned how to use it. The focus was blurred, and in every print Timothy’s laughing face had extra outlines around it, as if he had been moving, lunging toward the lens, as if laughter were some new form of attack. However Matthew tried to imagine him sober-faced, he couldn’t. He pulled up images in his mind, one by one: Timothy laughing with that girl he had brought to dinner once, his arm around her shoulders; Timothy laughing with his mother, with Melissa, with his father at his college graduation. Then a new picture slid in, clicking up from the back of his head: Timothy quarreling with Elizabeth. Only what was it about? Had she broken a date? Refused one? Shown up late for something? All he remembered was that it had happened on the sunporch, over the noise of a TV western. “If you persist,” Timothy said, “in seeing life as some kind of gimmicky guided tour where everyone signs up for a surprise destination—” and Elizabeth said, “What? Seeing what?” “Life,” said Timothy, and Elizabeth said, “Oh, life,” and smiled as fondly and happily as if he had mentioned her favorite acquaintance. Timothy stopped speaking, and his face took on a puzzled look. Wispy lines crossed his forehead. And Matthew, listening from across the room, had thought: It isn’t Timothy she loves, then. He hadn’t bothered wondering how he reached that conclusion. He sat before the television watching Marshall Dillon, holding his happiness close to his chest and forgetting, for once, all the qualities in Timothy that were hard to take (his carelessness with people, his sharp quick tongue, his succession of waifish girls hastily dressed and combing their hair when Matthew came visiting unannounced). He forgot them again now, and with them the picture of Timothy triumphantly cocking his pistol and laughing in his family’s face. All he saw was that puckered, defeated forehead. He adjusted his glasses and cleared his throat. He felt burdened by new sorrows that he regretted having invited.
. . .
That night he dreamed that Elizabeth had gone away. She was long gone, she had been gone for years, she left behind her a dark blue, funnel-shaped hollow that caused his chest to ache. Then his mother died. She lay on a table with her head slightly propped and he stood beside her reading a newspaper. All the headlines contained numerals. “783 SUNK; 19 SURVIVORS; 45 BURIED IN MINE DISASTER,” he read, but he understood that this was her will leaving everything to Elizabeth. It made sense; on the table his mother had changed into a frail, lavender-dressed old lady, the kind who would make eccentric wills in favor of pets and paid companions. He began searching for Elizabeth, combing through long grasses with his fingers and coming up with nothing. She never appeared. Her absence caused an echoing sound, like wind in the tops of very tall pines. “What shall I do about the money?” he asked the old lady on the table. “If you fail to find the beneficiary it must be buried with me,” she said. “You’ll never get it.” He let the money float into the coffin. He was crying, but it wasn’t because of what she had said; it was the wastefulness, the uselessness, the lost look of all that fragile green paper waiting forever for Elizabeth to come home.
At the funeral the immediate family filled one pew — Mrs. Emerson, her three daughters, two of her sons, and her sister Dorothy, who was barely on speaking terms but always showed up for disasters. In the pew behind sat Mrs. Emerson’s two cousins, Mr. Emerson’s strange brother, and Elizabeth. Matthew felt uncomfortable so close to the front. He had entered with his eyes lowered, guiding his mother by the elbow, and because it was his first time here since his father died he was uncertain of anything that lay behind his own pew. He disliked sitting in places that he had not taken measure of first. Once he turned partway around, but his sister Mary jabbed him in the side. She was staring straight ahead, with her plump, pretty face set in stern lines. Little pockets of irritation shadowed the corners of her mouth.
Irritation was the mood of this whole funeral, for some reason. All down Matthew’s pew, exasperated jerks traveled like ripples. Margaret tore triangles off the pages of her hymn-book, until Melissa slammed it shut. Aunt Dorothy tapped Peter for cracking his knuckles. Matthew shoved his glasses higher for the dozenth time and received another jab in the side. His mother, listening to the generalities of the service, twisted restlessly in her seat, as if she wanted to jump up and make additions or revisions. Even Father Lewis seemed annoyed about something. He was deprived of most of the phrases he liked to use — fruitful lives and tasks well done, happy deaths and God’s design — and when he had finished the few vague sentences left to him he briskly aligned two sheets of paper on his pulpit, heaved a sharp sigh, and frowned at someone’s cough. Before him lay the pearly gray casket, hovering, weighing down the silence, waiting for something more that never came.
By the time they returned from the cemetery it was nearly one o’clock. Three limousines left them at the door. People alighted in straggling lines, and unbuttoned their gloves and removed their hats and commented and argued and agreed all the way up the walk. “He never liked that hymn, he would have poked fun at us for singing it,” Melissa said. Mrs. Emerson’s two cousins climbed into their car, murmuring soft sounds that might not even have been words. It looked as if only the immediate family and Aunt Dorothy were staying to dinner. “You’ll stay, Uncle Henry,” Mary told Mr. Emerson’s strange brother, but Uncle Henry (who was strange because he never talked, not ever, but merely bobbed his Adam’s apple when confronted with direct questions) waved one red, bony hand and went off stiff-legged to his pickup truck. “We’d better tell Alvareen,” Mary said. “Eight for dinner, if she hasn’t yet fed Billy.”
“But how about Elizabeth?” Mrs. Emerson said.
“Elizabeth, oh. Does she eat with us?”
“I’ll get something later,” Elizabeth said. She was zigzagging across the front lawn, gathering the debris left by last night’s rainstorm. In church, in her beige linen dress, she had looked like anyone else, but there was nothing ordinary about her now when her arms were full of branches and rivulets of barky water were running down the wrinkles in her skirt.