The Secret History (71 page)

I didn’t know what to say. She was drifting down the stairs a step at a time, and now that her head was free of the balustrade,
she had an unimpeded view of the patio doors—rain-splashed glass, oblivious smokers beyond—if she chose to look that way. We were all transfixed with suspense. Sometimes mothers didn’t know what pot was when they saw it, but Mrs. Corcoran looked like she would know, all right.

She snapped the clutch bag shut and looked around with a sweeping, raptor-like gaze—the only thing about her, surely, that could remind me of my father, and it did.

“Well?” she said. “Would
somebody
tell him to hurry up?”

Camilla jumped up. “I’ll get him, Mrs. Corcoran,” she said, but once she was around the corner she scooted over to the terrace door.

“Thank you, dear,” said Mrs. Corcoran. She had found what she wanted—her sunglasses—and she put them on. “I don’t know what it is with you young people,” she said. “I don’t mean you
in particular
, but this is a very difficult time and we’re all under a great deal of stress and we must try to make things go as smoothly as they possibly can.”

Cloke looked up, bloodshot and uncomprehending, at Camilla’s soft rap on the glass. Then he looked past her into the living room, and all of a sudden his face changed.
Shit
, I saw him say, noiselessly, and a cloud of smoke escaped from his mouth.

Charles saw, too, and almost choked. Cloke snatched the joint from Bram and pinched it out with thumb and forefinger.

Mrs. Corcoran, in big black sunglasses, remained thankfully unaware of this drama unfolding behind her back. “The church is a bit of a drive, you know,” she said as Camilla circled behind her and went to fetch Francis. “Mack and I will go ahead in the station wagon, and you people can follow either us or the boys. I think you’ll have to go in three cars, though maybe you can squeeze into two—
Don’t run in Grandmother’s house
,” she snapped at Brandon and his cousin Neale, who’d darted past her on the stairs and clattered into the living room. They wore little blue suits with snap-on bow ties, and their Sunday shoes made a terrific racket on the floor.

Brandon, panting, dodged behind the sofa. “He hit me, Grandma.”

“He called me a booty wipe.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

“
Boys
,” she thundered. “You ought to be
ashamed
of yourselves.”

She paused dramatically, to observe their silent, stricken faces. “Your Uncle Bunny is dead and do you know what that means? It means that he is
gone forever
. You will never see him again
as long as you live
.” She glared at them. “Today is a very special day,” she said. “It is a day for remembering him. You ought to be sitting quietly somewhere thinking about all the nice things he used to do for you instead of running around and scuffing up this pretty new floor that Grandmother just had re-finished.”

There was a silence. Neale kicked sullenly at Brandon. “One time Uncle Bunny called me a bastard,” he said.

I wasn’t sure if she really didn’t hear him or if she chose not to; the fixed expression on her face made me think maybe the latter, but then the terrace doors slid open and Cloke came in with Charles and Bram and Rooney.

“Oh. So there you are,” said Mrs. Corcoran suspiciously. “What are you doing out there in the rain?”

“Fresh air,” said Cloke. He looked really stoned. The tip of a Visine bottle stuck out from the handkerchief pocket of his suit.

They all looked really stoned. Poor Charles was bug-eyed and sweating. This was probably more than he’d bargained for: bright lights, too high, having to deal with a hostile adult.

She looked at them. I wondered if she knew. For a moment I thought she’d say something, but instead she reached out and grabbed hold of Brandon’s arm. “Well, you should all get a move on,” she said curtly, leaning down to run a hand through his mussed hair. “It’s getting late and I’ve been led to expect that there might be a little problem with
seating.
”

The church had been built in seventeen-something, according to the National Register of Historic Places. It was an age-blacked, dungeonlike building with its own rickety little graveyard in the back, set on a rolling country lane. When we arrived, damp and uncomfortable from Francis’s sodden car seats, cars lined the road on both sides, as if for a rural dance or bingo night, sloping gently into the grassy ditch. A gray drizzle was falling. We parked near the country club, which was down a bit, and hiked the quarter-mile silently, in the mud.

The sanctuary was dim, and stepping inside I was blinded by a dazzle of candles. When my eyes cleared I saw iron lanterns, clammy stone floors, flowers everywhere. Startled, I noticed that
one of the arrangements, quite near the altar, was wired in the shape of the number 27.

“I thought he was twenty-four,” I whispered to Camilla.

“No,” she said, “that’s his old football number.”

The church was packed. I looked for Henry but didn’t see him; saw someone I thought was Julian but realized it wasn’t when he turned around. For a moment we stood there in a knot, confused. There were metal folding chairs along the back wall to accommodate the crowd, but then someone spotted a half-empty pew and we headed for that: Francis and Sophie, the twins, and me. Charles, who stuck close to Camilla, was plainly freaking out. The doomy horrorhouse atmosphere of the church was not helping at all and he stared at his surroundings with frank terror, while Camilla took his arm and tried to nudge him down the row. Marion had disappeared to sit with some people who’d driven down from Hampden, and Cloke and Bram and Rooney had simply disappeared, somewhere between car and church.

It was a long service. The minister, who took his ecumenical and—some felt—slightly impersonal remarks from Saint Paul’s sermon on Love from First Corinthians, talked for about half an hour. (“Didn’t you feel that was a
very
inappropriate text?” said Julian, who had a pagan’s gloomy view of death coupled with a horror of the non-specific.) Next was Hugh Corcoran (“He was the best little brother a guy could have”); then Bunny’s old football coach, a dynamic Jaycee type who talked at length of Bunny’s team spirit, telling a rousing anecdote about how Bunny had once saved the day against a particularly tough team from “lower” Connecticut. (“That means black,” whispered Francis.) He wound up his story by pausing and staring at the lectern for a count of ten; then he looked up frankly. “I don’t know,” he said, “a whole lot about Heaven. My business is teaching boys to play a game and play it hard. Today we’re here to honor a boy who’s been taken out of the game early. But that’s not to say that while he was out on the field,
he didn’t give us all he had
. That’s not to say he wasn’t a winner.” A long, suspenseful pause. “Bunny Corcoran,” he said gruffly, “was a winner.”

A long, solitary wail went up from somebody towards the middle of the congregation.

Except in the movies
(Knute Rockne, All-American)
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen such a bravura performance. When he sat down, half the place was in tears—the coach included. No one paid
much attention to the final speaker, Henry himself, who went to the podium and read, inaudibly and without comment, a short poem by A. E. Housman.

The poem was called “With Rue My Heart Is Laden.” I don’t know why he chose that particular one. We knew that the Corcorans had asked him to read something and I expected that they had trusted him to choose something appropriate. It would have been so easy for him to choose something else, though, something you would think he would pick, for Christ’s sake, from
Lycidas
or the
Upanishads
or anything, really—certainly not that poem, which Bunny had known by heart. He’d been very fond of the corny old poems he’d learned in grade school: “The Charge of the Light Brigade,”

“In Flanders Fields,” a lot of strange old sentimental stuff whose authors and titles I never even knew. The rest of us, who were snobs about such things, had thought this a shameful taste, akin to his taste for King Dons and Hostess Twinkies. Quite often I had heard Bunny say this Housman aloud—seriously when drunk, more mockingly when sober—so that the lines for me were set and hardened in the cadence of his voice; perhaps that is why hearing it then, in Henry’s academic monotone (he was a terrible reader) there with the guttering candles and the draft shivering in the flowers and people crying all around, enkindled in me such a brief and yet so excruciating pain, like one of those weirdly scientific Japanese tortures calibrated to extract the greatest possible misery in the smallest space of time.

It was a very short poem.

During the closing prayer (overly long) I felt myself swaying, so much so that the sides of my new shoes dug in the tender spot beneath my anklebones. The air was close; people were crying; there was an insistent buzz which came in close to my ear and then receded. For a moment I was afraid I would black out.
Then I realized the buzz actually came from a large wasp flying in erratic darts and circles over our heads. Francis, by flailing at it uselessly with the memorial service bulletin, had succeeded in enraging it; it dove towards the weeping Sophie’s head but, finding her unresponsive, turned in midair and lit on the back of the pew to collect its wits. Stealthily Camilla leaned to one side and began to slip off her shoe, but before she could, Charles had killed it with a resounding thwack from
The Book of Common Prayer
.

The pastor, at a key point in his prayer, started. He opened his eyes and his glance fell on Charles, still wielding the guilty prayerbook. “
That they may not languish in unavailing grief,
” he said in a slightly amplified voice, “nor sorrow as those who have no hope, but through their tears look always up to Thee.…”

Quickly I bowed my head. The wasp still clung with one black feeler to the edge of the pew. I stared down at it and thought of Bunny, poor old Bunny, expert killer of flying pests, stalking houseflies with a rolled-up copy of the Hampden
Examiner
.