Unfortunately, an even more depressing reunion waited a few steps down the street. G. V. Ness and Sons, Funeral Directors. For all the years I’d lived in North Sable, this was only my second visit (“Good-bye, Daddy”) to that cold colonial building. But such places always seem familiar, having that perfectly vacant, neutral atmosphere common to all funeral homes, the same in my hometown as in the suburb outside New York (“Good riddance, Hubby”) where I’m now secluded.
I strolled into the proper room unnoticed, another anonymous mourner who was a bit shy about approaching the casket. Although I drew a couple of small-town stares, the elderly, elegant author from New York did not stand out as much as she thought she would. But with or without distinction, it remained my intention to introduce myself to the widow as a childhood friend of her deceased husband.
This intention, however, was shot all to hell by two oxlike men who rose from their seats on either side of the grieving lady and lumbered my way. For some reason I panicked.
“You must be Dad’s Cousin Winnie from Boston. The family’s heard so much about you over the years,” they said.
I smiled widely and gulped deeply, which must have looked like a nod of affirmation to them. In any case, they led me over to “Mom” and introduced me under my inadvertent pseudonym to the red-eyed, half-delirious old woman. (Why, I wonder, did I allow this goof to go on?) “Nice to finally meet you, and thank you for the lovely card you sent,” she said, sniffing loudly and working on her eyes with a grotesquely soiled handkerchief. “I’m Elsie.”
Elsie Chester, I thought immediately, though I wasn’t entirely sure that this was the same person who was rumored to have sold kisses and other things to the boys at North Sable Elementary. So he had married her, whaddaya know? Possibly they had to get married, I speculated cattily. At least one of her sons looked old enough to have been the consequence of teenage impatience. Oh, well. So much for Preston’s vow to wed no one less than the Queen of Nightmares.
But even greater disappointments awaited my notice. After chatting emptily with the widow for a few more moments, I excused myself to pay my respects at the coffinside of the deceased. Until then I’d deliberately averted my gaze from that flower-crazed area at the front of the room, where a shiny, pearl-gray casket held its occupant in much the same position as the “Traveling Tomb” racer he’d once constructed. This part of the mortuary ritual never fails to put me in mind of those corpse-viewing sessions to which children in the nineteenth century were subjected in order to acquaint them with their own mortality. At my age this was unnecessary, so allow me to skip quickly over this scene with a few tragic and inevitable words. …
Bald and blemished, that was unconsciously expected. Totally unfamiliar, that wasn’t. The mosquito-faced child I once knew had had his features smushed and spread by the years—bloated, not with death but with having overfed himself at the turgid banquet of life, lethargically pushing away from the table just prior to explosion. A portrait of lazy indulgence. Defunct. Used up. The eternal adult. (But perhaps in death, I consoled myself, a truer self was even now ripping off the false face of the thing before me. This must be so, for the idea of an afterworld populated with a preponderance of old, withered souls is too hideous to contemplate.)
After paying homage to the remains of a memory, I slipped out of that room with a stealth my Preston would have been proud of. I’d left behind an envelope with a modest contribution to the widow’s fund. I had half a mind to send a batch of gaping black orchids to the funeral home with a note signed by Laetitia Simpson, Preston’s dwarfish girlfriend. But this was something that the other Alice would have done—the one who wrote those strange books.
As for me, I got into my car and drove out of town to a nice big Holiday Inn near the interstate, where I found a nice suite—spoils of a successful literary career—and a bar. And as it turned out, this overnight layover must take us down another side road (or back road, if you like) of my narrative. Please stand by.
A late-afternoon crowd had settled into the hotel’s barroom, relieving me of the necessity of drinking in total solitude, which at the time I was quite prepared to do. After a couple of Scotches on the rocks, I noticed a young man looking my way from the other side of that greenish room. At least he appeared young, extremely so, from a distance. But as I walked over to sit at his table, with a boldness I’ve never attributed to alcohol, he seemed to gain a few years with every step I took. He was now only relatively young—from an old dowager’s point of view, that is. His name was Hank De Vere, and he worked for a distributor of gardening tools and other such products, in Maine. But let’s not pretend to care about the details. Later we had dinner together, after which I invited him to my suite.
It was the next morning, by the way, that inaugurated that yearlong succession of experiences which I’m methodically trying to sort out with a few select examples. Half step forward coming up: pawn to king three.
I awoke in the darkness peculiar to hotel bedrooms, abnormally heavy curtains masking the morning light. Immediately it became apparent that I was alone. My new acquaintance seemed to have a more developed sense of tact and timing than I had given him credit for. At least I thought so at first. But then I looked through the open doorway into the other room, where I could see a convex mirror in an artificial wood frame on the wall.
The bulging eye of the mirror reflected almost the entire next room in convexed perspective, and I noticed someone moving around in there. In the mirror, that is. A tiny, misshapen figure seemed to be gyring about, leaping almost, in a way that should have been audible to me. But it wasn’t.
I called out a name I barely remembered from the night before. There came no answer from the next room, but the movement in the mirror stopped, and the tiny figure (whatever it was) disappeared. Very cautiously I got up from the bed, robed myself, and peeked around the corner of the doorway like a curious child on Christmas morning. A strange combination of relief and confusion arose in me when I saw that there was no one else in the suite.
I approached the mirror, perhaps to search its surface for the little something that might have caused the illusion. My memory is vague on this point, since at the time I was a bit hung over. But I can recall with spectacular vividness what I finally saw after gazing into the mirror for a few moments. Suddenly the sphered glass before me became clouded with a mysterious fog, from the depths of which appeared the waxy face of a corpse. It was the visage of that old cadaver I’d seen at the funeral home, now with eyes open and staring reproachfully into mine. …
Of course I really saw nothing of the kind. I did not even imagine it, except just now. But somehow this imaginary manifestation seems more fitting and conclusive than what I actually found in the mirror, which was only my old and haggard face … a corpselike countenance if ever there was one.