Christopher’s medal isn’t balling him, I’ll eat your shorts, Louis,” she said), the wreckage of his college plans and his Olympic hopes, and nine or ten little Catholics running around by the time Gage was forty. By then he would be (according to Rachel, anyway) a cigar-smoking truck driver with a beer belly, Our-Fathering and Hail-Marying his way into precardiac oblivion.
Louis suspected his son’s motives were rather more pure, and although Gage converted (and on the day he actually did the deed, Louis sent an unabashedly nasty postcard to Irwin Goldman; it read, Perhaps you’ll have a Jesuit grandson yet. Your goy son-in-law, Louis), he did not marry the rather nice (and decidedly unslutty) girl he had dated through most of his senior year.
He went on to Johns Hopkins, made the Olympic swimming team, and on one long, dazzling, and incredibly proud afternoon sixteen years after Louis had raced an Orinco truck for his son’s life, he and Rachel-who had now gone almost entirely gray, although she covered it with a rinse-watched their son win a gold medal for the U. S. A. When the NBC cameras moved in for a close-up of him, standing with his dripping, seal-sleek head back, his eyes open and calm and fixed on the flag as the national anthem played, the ribbon around his neck, and the gold lying against the smooth skin of his chest, Louis wept. He and Rachel both wept.
“I guess this caps everything,” he said huskily and turned to embrace his wife.
But she was looking at him with dawning horror, her face seeming to age before his eyes as if whipped by days and months and years of evil time; the sound of the national anthem faded and when Louis looked back at the TV he saw a different boy there, a black boy with a head of tight curls in which gems of water still gleamed.
This caps everything.
His cap.
His cap is…
oh dear God, his cap is full of blood.
Louis woke up in the cold dead light of a rainy seven o’clock, clutching his pillow in his arms. His head thumped monstrously with his heartbeat; the ache swelled and faded, swelled and faded. He burped acid that tasted like old beer, and his stomach heaved miserably. He had been weeping; the pillow was wet with his tears, as if he had somehow stumbled in and then out of one of those hokey country-and-western laments in his sleep. Even in the dream, he thought, some part of him had known the truth and had cried for it.
He got up and stumbled to the bathroom, heart racing threadily in his chest, consciousness itself fragmented by the fierceness of his hangover. He reached the toilet bowl barely in time and threw up a glut of last night’s beer.
He kneeled on the floor, eyes closed, until he felt capable of actually making it to his feet. He groped for the handle and flushed the john. He went to the mirror to see how badly bloodshot his eyes were, but the glass had been covered with a square of sheeting. Then he recalled. Drawing almost randomly on a past she professed to barely remember, Rachel had covered all the mirrors in the house, and she took off her shoes before entering through the door.
No Olympic swimming team, Louis thought dully as he walked back to his bed and sat down on it. The sour taste of beer coated his mouth and throat, and he swore to himself (not for the first time or the last) that he would never touch that poison again. No Olympic swimming team, no 3. 0 in college, no little Catholic girlfriend or conversion, no Camp Agawam, no nothing. His sneakers had been torn off; his jumper turned inside out; his sweet little boy’s body, so tough and sturdy, nearly dismembered. His cap had been full of blood.
Now, sitting on his bed in the grip of this numbing hangover, rainwater spilling its lazy courses down the window beside him, his grief came for him fully, like some gray matron from Ward Nine in purgatory. It came and dissolved him, unmanned him, took away whatever defenses remained, and he put his face in his hands and cried, rocking back and forth on his bed, thinking he would do anything to have a second chance, anything at all.
41
Gage was buried at two o’clock that afternoon. By then the rain had stopped.
Tattered clouds still moved overhead, and most of the mourners arrived carrying black umbrellas provided by the undertaker.
At Rachel’s request, the funeral director, who officiated at the short, nonsectarian graveside service, read the passage from Matthew which begins “Suffer the little children to come unto Me.” Louis, standing on one side of the grave, looked across at his father-in-law. For a moment Goldman looked back at him, and then he dropped his eyes. There was no fight left in him today. The pouches under his eyes now resembled mailbags, and around his black silk skullcap, hair as fine and white as tattered spiderwebs flew randomly in the breeze. With his grayish-black beard scragging his cheeks, he looked more like a wino than ever.
He gave Louis the impression of a man who did not really know where he was.
Louis tried but could still find no pity in his heart for him.
Gage’s small white coffin, its latch presumably repaired, sat on a pair of chromed runners over the grave liner. The verges of the grave had been carpeted with Astroturf so violently green it hurt Louis’s eyes. Several baskets of flowers had been set on top of this artificial and strangely gay surface.
Louis’s eyes looked over the funeral director’s shoulder. Here was a low hill, covered with graves, family plots, one Romanesque monument with the name PHIPPS engraved on it. Just above the sloping roof of PHIPPS, he could see a sliver of yellow. Louis looked at this, pondering it. He continued to look at it even after the funeral director said, “Let us bow our heads for a moment of silent prayer.” It took Louis a few minutes, but he got it. It was a payloader. A payloader parked over the hill where the mourners wouldn’t have to look at it.
And, when the funeral was over, Oz would crush his cigarette on the heel of his tewwible workboot, put it in whatever container he carried around with him (in a cemetery, sextons caught depositing their butts on the ground were almost always summarily fired-it looked bad; too many of the clientele had died of lung cancer), jump in the payloader, fire that sucker up, and cut his son off from the sun forever… or at least until the day of the Resurrection.
Resurrection… ah, there’s a word (that you should put right the fuck out of your mind and you know it).
When the funeral director said “Amen,” Louis took Rachel’s arm and guided her away. Rachel murmured some protest-she wanted to stay a bit longer, please, Louis-but Louis was firm. They approached the cars. He saw the funeral director taking umbrellas with the home’s name discreetly printed on the handles from the mourners who passed and handing them to an assistant. The assistant put them in an umbrella stand which looked surreal, standing there on the dewy turf. He held Rachel’s arm with his right hand and Ellie’s white-gloved hand with his left. Ellie was wearing the same dress she had worn to Norma Crandall’s funeral.
Jud came over as Louis handed his ladies into the car. Jud also looked as if he’d had a hard night.
“You okay, Louis?”
Louis nodded.
Jud bent to look into the car. “How are you, Rachel?” he asked.
“I’m all right, Jud,” she whispered.
Jud touched her shoulder gently and then looked at Ellie. How about you, dear one?”
“I’m fine,” Ellie said and produced a hideous smile of sharklike proportions to show him how fine she was.
“What’s that picture you got there?”
For a moment Louis thought she would hold it, refuse to show him, and then with a painful shyness she passed it to Jud. He held it in his big fingers, fingers that were so splayed and somehow clumsy-looking, fingers that looked fit mostly for grappling with the transmissions of big road machines or making couplings on the B amp; M Line-but they were also the fingers that had pulled a bee stinger from Gage’s neck with all the offhand skill of a magician… or a surgeon.