Bleeding Hearts(107)

“I’ve changed my mind,” she said, going to the closet door as she put on her earrings. “I am going to take you with me to church.”

“Great,” Christopher said. “Turn your back. When you see me naked in daylight, you get embarrassed.”

Lida turned her back. She got less and less embarrassed every time she saw Christopher that way. But there was no need to tell him that.

“Can I wear jeans and a decent sweater?” he asked her. “That suit Howard Kashinian loaned me fits funny.”

“You can wear your jeans,” Lida said. “Lots of people do now.”

“Great,” Christopher said again.

Lida’s navy blue shoes were on the second level of the shoe rack. She got them down and put them on.

It was bad enough that she was going to take Christopher to church, she thought. What was worse was that she was feeling irritated with church.

She was also feeling irritated with herself.

All those shoes on shoe racks.

All those dresses on padded hangers.

All those “accessories” in the built-in drawers, color-coordinated or dyed to match.

What had she been doing with her life?





2


James Hazzard never woke up to an alarm clock if he could help it. Since he ran his own business and passed himself off as a god to his clients, he could usually help it. Some of his colleagues had expanded their practices by opening quasi-churches of their own. The women started Temples of Diana and the men flirted with satanism. James’s position was that it was a mistake to get involved in anything he couldn’t carry through with a straight face. That was why he hadn’t immersed himself in the recovery movement. He had tried, once, by going to one of his father’s seminars—although not one that his father himself was running. Midway through, the participants had been required to write letters to their inner children, and it had just been too much. James had nearly died laughing.

He wished that he could die laughing now, or maybe that he could just die. It was eleven-fifteen on Sunday morning and he was cold. Worse than that, he was with Caroline and Caroline was on one of her patented rampages. He wondered who she had learned her rampages from. Paul had been self-controlled to the point of petrification. Jacqueline had had the emotional life of a sea slug. Maybe their own mother had been histrionic. James couldn’t remember their own mother.

“She went searching through his things on purpose,” Caroline said. “She was trying to take control of the rest of us. It’s a kind of abuse, James.”

“Everything is a kind of abuse.” This was true. James was sure of it. Having a mother who wanted French toast for breakfast every morning was a kind of abuse.

“You don’t take me seriously, James,” Caroline said. “That’s a kind of abuse too. You refuse to mirror back to me my own reality.”

To James Hazzard’s mind, his sister Caroline’s reality resembled an Escher print. He didn’t have time to consider it at the moment, however, because the funeral director was making his way back to them across the enormous reception room. The man was wearing a suitably hangdog expression and holding his hands at his sides the way boys did when they were walking in line at the kind of private school that didn’t have a military tradition but wished it did. His name was Arthur Pommerant and James didn’t like him much.

“I have very good news,” Arthur Pommerant said. “I have discussed the matter with our preparations department, and there will not have to be a closed casket after all.”

“Oh,” James said.

“Why would we want an open casket?” Caroline demanded. “Why would we want to look at a dead body?”

Arthur Pommerant looked confused. “It’s for the wake,” he explained. “The deceased is usually on view at the wake. It puts quite a damper on things when the deceased isn’t on view at the wake.”

“I think it’s barbaric,” Caroline said.

“For God’s sake,” James told her. “This isn’t an arena for getting your needs met. This is something we all have to get through for the sake of the public and the papers and whatever fans Dad had left. Will you just let it go?”

“I see what you’re trying to do,” Caroline said. “You’re trying to make me look hysterical and unreasonable. Then you can make yourself look like a paragon of objective rationality and get anything you want.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” James exploded.

Arthur Pommerant was looking from one to the other of them. He was not embarrassed. James thought he must have seen family fights a million times before. Maybe everybody squabbled at funerals. Maybe that was one of the ways families got through them.