"That night people began to call. Paying their respects is the old-fashioned phrase for it. Beesty and Caroline and I hung around in the drawing-room and chatted with the visitors in subdued voices. 'So good of you to come… Yes, a very great shock… It's extremely kind of you to say so…' Lots of that sort of thing. Top people from my father's business, the Alpha Corporation, doing the polite. Lesser people from the Alpha Corporation, seeing that everybody who came signed a book; a secretary specially detailed to keep track of telegrams and cables, and another to keep a list of the flowers.
"Oh, the flowers! Or, as just about everybody insisted on calling them, the 'floral tributes.' Being November, the florists were pretty well down to chrysanthemums, and there were forests of them. But of course the really rich had to express their regret with roses because they were particularly expensive at the time. The rich are always up against it, you see; they have to send the best, however much they may hate the costly flower of the moment, or somebody is sure to say they've been cheap. Denyse had heard somewhere of a coffin being covered with a blanket of roses, and she wanted one as her own special offering. It was Caroline who persuaded her to hold herself down to a decent bunch of white flowers. Or really, persuaded isn't the word; Caroline told me she was finally driven to saying, 'Are you trying to make us look like the Medici?' and that did it, because Denyse had never heard any good spoken of the Medici.
"This grisly business went on all day Wednesday. I was on duty in the morning, and received and made myself pleasant to the Mayor, the Chief of Police, the Fire Chief, a man from the Hydro-Electric Power Commission, and quite a crowd of dignitaries of one sort and another. There was a representative of the Bar Association, which called to mind the almost forgotten fact that my father's professional training had been as a lawyer; I knew this man quite well because he was a frequent associate of my own, but the others were people I knew only by name or from their pictures in the newspapers. There were bank presidents, naturally.
"Denyse, of course, did none of the receiving. It wouldn't have suited the role for which she had cast herself. Officially, she was too desolated to be on view, and only special people were taken to an upstairs room where she held state. I don't quarrel with that. Funerals are among the few ceremonial occasions left to us, and we assume our roles almost without thinking. I was the Only Son, who was bearing up splendidly, but who was also known not to be, and to have no expectation of ever being, the man his father was. Beesty was That Decent Fellow Bastable, who was doing everything he could under difficult circumstances. Caroline was the Only Daughter, stricken with grief, but of course not so catastrophically stricken as Denyse, who was the Widow and assumed to be prostrate under her affliction. Well – all right. That's the pattern, and we break patterns at our peril. After all, they become patterns because they conform to realities. I have been in favour of ceremonial and patterns all my life, and I have no desire to break the funeral pattern. But there was too much real feeling behind the pattern for me to be anything other than wretchedly overwrought, and the edicts Denyse issued from her chamber of affliction were the worst things I had to bear.
"Her edict that at all costs I was to be kept sober, for instance. Beesty was very good about that. Not hatefully tactful, you know, but he said plainly that I had to do a great many things that needed a level head and I'd better not drink much. He knew that for me not drinking much meant drinking what would be a good deal for him, but he gave me credit for some common sense. And Caroline was the same. 'Denyse is determined that you're going to get your paws in the sauce and disgrace us all. So for God's sake spite her and don't,' was the way she put it. Even Netty, after her first frightful outburst, behaved very well and didn't try to watch over me for my own good, though she lurked a good deal. Consequently, though I drank pretty steadily, I kept within my own appointed bounds. But I hated Denyse for her edict.
"Nor was that her only edict. On Wednesday, before lunch, she called Beesty to her and told him to get me to look over my father's will that afternoon, and see her after I had done so. This was unwarrantable interference. I knew I was my father's principal executor, and I knew, being a lawyer, what had to be done. But it isn't considered quite the thing to get down to business with the will before the funeral is over. There's nothing against it, particularly if there is suspicion of anything that might prove troublesome in the will, but in my father's case that was out of the question. I didn't know what was in the will, but I was certain it was all in perfect order. I thought Denyse was rushing things in an unseemly way.
"I suppose if you are to do anything for me, Doctor, I must be as frank as possible. I didn't want to look at the will until it became absolutely necessary. There have been difficulties about wills in our family. My father had a shock when he read his own father's will, and he had spoken to me about it more than once. And relations between my father and myself had been strained since his marriage to Denyse. I thought there might be a nasty surprise for me in the will. So I put my foot down and said nothing could be done until Thursday afternoon.
"I don't know why I went to my father's house so early on Thursday, except that I woke with an itching feeling that there was a great deal to be settled, and I would find out what it was when I was on the spot. And I wanted to take farewell of my father. You understand? During the last forty-eight hours it had been impossible to be alone in the room with his body, and I thought if I were early I could certainly manage it. So I went to the drawing-room as softly as possible, not to attract attention, and found the doors shut. It was half past seven, so there was nothing unusual about that.
"But from inside there were sounds of a man's voice and a woman's voice, apparently quarrelling, and I heard scuffling and thudding. I opened the door, and there was Denyse at the coffin, holding up my father's body by the shoulders, while a strange man appeared to be punching and slapping its face. You know what people say in books – 'I was thunderstruck… my senses reeled.' "
"Yes. It is a perfectly accurate description of the sensation. It is caused by a temporary failure of circulation to the head. Go on."
"I shouted something. Denyse dropped the body, and the man jumped backward as if he thought I might kill him. I knew him then. He was a friend of Denyse's, a dentist; I had met him once or twice and thought him a fool."
"The body had no face. It was entirely covered in some shiny pinkish material, so thickly that it was egglike in its featurelessness. It was this covering they were trying to remove.
"I didn't have to ask for an explanation. They were unnerved and altogether too anxious to talk. It was a story of unexampled idiocy.
"This dentist, like so many of Denyse's friends, was a dabbler in the arts. He had a tight, ill-developed little talent as a sculptor, and he had done a few heads of Chairmen of the Faculty of Dentistry at the University, and that sort of thing. Denyse had been visited by one of her dreadful inspirations, that this fellow should take a death-mask of my father, which could later be used as the basis for a bust or perhaps kept for itself. But he had never done a corpse before, and it is quite a different business from doing a living man. So, instead of using plaster, which is the proper thing if you know how to work it, he had the lunatic idea of trying some plastic mess used in his profession for taking moulds, because he thought he could get a greater amount of detail, and quicker. But the plastic wasn't for this sort of work, and he couldn't get it off!