6
THE FUNERAL SERVICE WENT on for far too long. Zee was aware that many people spoke, though she could not keep her mind on their words. Her eyes scanned the crowd.
Sweet William sat silent and obviously drugged in the first pew.
Zee realized that both Mattei and Michael had been right about her coming here today, if for different reasons. Mattei thought it was unprofessional and strongly advised against it. Michael hadn’t advised her at all; he simply put forward a question: What good could come of it?
She wondered just that as she sat here. The family certainly wouldn’t want to see her. Years later, as they looked back on this day, they might be glad she’d paid her respects. But today it would only serve as a harsh reminder that she hadn’t been able to save Lilly.
There was another reason Zee had come, though she hadn’t admitted it to either Michael or Mattei. She needed to see for herself whether or not Adam showed up. If he did, it would mean one thing. If he stayed away, it would mean something else entirely. By all rights he shouldn’t come anywhere near them today. But if he had been stalking Lilly, as Zee still believed he had, he probably wouldn’t be able to stay away.
Even if she was right, though, there wasn’t much to be done about it. Lilly had jumped off the Tobin Bridge and into the Mystic. It was suicide, not foul play.
It turned out that Adam didn’t come to the funeral. But, to Zee’s surprise, two of the eyewitnesses showed up. Not the woman who had been so competitive for camera time, as Zee might have expected. It was the other woman, the toll taker, who came. And the man in the blue van, the one who’d been so reluctant to talk with the newscaster, was there as well.
WHEN THE ORGAN SIGNALED THE end of the service, the funeral director gave the sign to the pallbearers to lift the coffin, and the congregation filed out behind, family first and then, row by row, the other congregants.
As the family passed, Zee was careful not to catch William’s eye. Whatever he might feel when he saw her, she didn’t want to make it any worse.
As the crowd moved out into the bright sunlight, Zee followed them to her car. She didn’t see the red truck until it was directly in front of her. It was pulled over illegally, half blocking the street. Adam watched the pallbearers and the family. When she looked up, his eyes met hers. He looked at her coldly. Then he put the truck in gear and pulled out, tires screeching, leaving about twenty feet of rubber.
Shakily, Zee let herself into her car. Stuck in the middle of the funeral procession, she moved with it through old town and around Peach’s Point to West Shore Drive and Waterside Cemetery.
She wanted to pull out of the procession, to head directly to the police station and tell them what she’d seen. But she and Mattei had already talked it through. Lilly’s death was a suicide. The police were not likely to open any kind of investigation. And if they did, and the story of Lilly’s affair with Adam came out, it would only hurt the family more than they’d already been hurt.
“Let it go,” Mattei had told her.
When the other cars turned right, into the cemetery, Zee went straight, following the signs on West Shore Drive that aimed her toward Salem. She had waited too long already. She needed to see Finch.
BOTH OF THE OLD MAN’S knees had stiffened to the point that movement had become nearly impossible. Even his arms would not move, and so he stood near the window looking out at Maule’s Well, or at the re-creation of it now on his cousin’s property. After The House of the Seven Gables became well known, his cousin had grown obsessed with re-creating the building as befitted the story. No, not his cousin-his mind was playing tricks on him again. It was not his cousin but someone else entirely. The strands of his memory were breaking. Often now he would struggle to make his way from one room to another only to find when he arrived at his destination that he had no idea why he had come. Names escaped him. Even the simplest of language eluded him now, as if his words, yet unformed, had been stolen by the salt air and blown out to sea.
He looked out over Turner Street at the old house. It had changed so much over the years that it was difficult to picture its reconstruction. At first it had been simple, just a few low-ceilinged rooms. As fortunes grew, the house had been added to, so that eventually there were the full seven gables of his famous book. But Federalist fashion had dictated simplicity, and so gables had been removed, then added back again when his book had made the house so popular. It was amusing, truly, that this woman, whose name he could not even remember, had undertaken to display the house to the public, and more amusing indeed that the public wanted to see it, seemed willing to pay money in fact to see not just the house with its secret room but other things that had never existed in the house before his fictional account, things like Hepzibah’s Cent-Shop and Maule’s Well.
He was not certain how he felt about any of it. He was a shy man by nature and did not appreciate the accolades afforded to him. Still, he loved the house more than any dwelling before or since, and he felt a deep responsibility to watch over the property. It seemed his only job now. His hands could no longer hold the pen. And his words were gone. But he was aware (because his writing had made it so) that the gabled house, however cursed it might be, belonged, always and forever, not to the family who originally built it, or to his cousin, or to the woman whose name he could not remember, but to the characters he had created in his story, to Hepzibah and Clifford and Phoebe.
Somewhere in the distance, he could hear a phone ringing. He was not well today. It was not simply his knees. His head was foggy, more foggy than usual. And his hands had a rigidity he could not soften. He had taken something for it. A visitor, one he had at first thought to be his beloved Hepzibah, had given it to him. He was going to die soon. He could feel it. Slow and steady, death seemed to crawl over him. He could sense the rigor mortis already, in his knees. He was leaning against the wall, looking out across the street at his famous house, and he could not move. He had turned to stone, and all he could do was wait for the medicine or for some force of nature to release him.
Where were the ones he had so loved in life? Where was Sophia? Dead, he thought, though he could not remember her passing. He thought then about Melville, and the tears started to fall. Melville wasn’t dead. Couldn’t be. Then an anger rose up in him, an almost murderous rage.
He stood here now, a statue, a formation of cold granite that trapped just a trace of life inside its chill. The statue could see and feel and want. What he wanted now-wanted desperately, it seemed-was to see the gardens across the street where, in his famous story, the old rooster he had named Chanticleer and his two aging hen wives had been able to come up with only one last diminutive egg, which, rather than ensuring the rooster’s aristocratic line, had been served for breakfast. He had found the words amusing when he’d first written them. But today he mourned Chanticleer and the hens and their loss of lineage. But of course it wasn’t real, had been real only in his imagination and on the page. And there was a wall between them now, a very real wall that his vision could not penetrate. Standing here today, he could not see his beloved gardens, though he could still manage to see the ocean beyond.
He wanted to cry out for Hepzibah, though he knew she wasn’t real, and she seemed to him now two different people, the wizened old woman he had created, the one the actual shop was modeled on, and someone as young and beautiful as he might have once imagined her. And he was filled with love for this last Hepzibah, who was really in his mind more like his character of Phoebe might have been, Phoebe who had come into their lives and changed everything and brought the light back to the old house and love to it as well. He started to cry and was aware that he was crying for what once had been, and for what had passed.