In the Shadow of Blackbirds(28)
We followed the sound of voices and organ music through a doorway and found ourselves in a room about thirty feet long, wallpapered in a pale yellow. More buckets of smoking coal bathed the masked mourners in that noxious blue haze and made my eyes smart. If we hadn’t been wearing the gauze, none of us would have been able to breathe.
At the far end of the room, a bronze electric chandelier illuminated a closed, flag-draped casket shrouded in smoke, on display in front of amber curtains. My knees went weak, but I forced myself to stay upright, even though the luminous blue clouds billowing around the coffin made it look like the undertakers had placed Stephen in the middle of a giant laboratory experiment. A photograph of Stephen in his army uniform—the same portrait he had mailed to me—sat propped on a white pillar.
Aunt Eva squeezed my arm to give me strength and led me farther inside the sulfuric room.
Two dozen or so masked mourners milled about in the smoke or sat in the spindle-back chairs facing the coffin. A handful of girls my age, perhaps slightly older, dabbed their eyes with handkerchiefs, and I wondered, with a sting of jealousy, if any of them had ever been Stephen’s sweetheart. We had never discussed an interest in other people in our letters.
I tore my eyes away from the girls and met Mr. Darning’s gaze across the room. He was busy conversing with a few professional-looking men, so he merely gave me a polite nod of recognition. I was tempted to walk over to him just so I could hear that comforting voice of his.
Stephen’s cousin Gracie wandered by Aunt Eva and me, looking lost. Her stringy wig slid down the left side of her head, revealing a bald patch above her ear. Her flu mask—poorly tied—hung off her chin like a deflated balloon.
Aunt Eva touched the girl’s broad shoulder. “Gracie, how are you?”
Gracie turned our way with pale brown eyes that didn’t seem to focus on us. “I don’t know. Stephen’s mother couldn’t come. Nothing’s going well at all.”
“I’m so sorry.” Aunt Eva embraced the girl in a firm hug. “You’ve been through so much lately, what with Stephen … your mother … your own fight with the flu.” She helped Gracie pull her wig back into place to hide the ravages of the illness.
I tried not to stare. “Where’s Stephen’s mother?”
“She’s away for a while.” Gracie lowered her head. “She hasn’t been the same since Stephen …” She swallowed, and a peculiar emotion rose off her like a vapor—I could taste it over the sulfur, the same way I had tasted Aunt Eva’s metallic rage in the hospital. A sour, rotten flavor, like curdled milk.
Julius, wearing a mask for the first time that I’d seen, came our way. At his side strolled the bespectacled young man with the solid build who had driven him home the morning I learned of Stephen’s death.
“Go sit down, Gracie—you don’t look well.” Julius turned our way. “Thank you for coming, Eva. Mary Shelley, I was sorry to hear about your lightning accident. Are you better?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Aunt Eva touched his arm. “How are you doing, Julius?”
“Not well. Um … There was something …” He rubbed his swollen eyes. “Uh … What was I just going to say? Oh—have you met my other cousin? This is Gracie’s twin, Grant.”
I gave Grant a polite nod. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you, too,” said Grant. “I’ve seen your picture enough times, even though I can barely recognize you in that mask. Girls look ludicrous in that gauze.”
I opened my mouth to retort that he probably looked better with the gauze than without, but I pressed my lips shut out of respect for Stephen.
Aunt Eva kept hold of Julius’s arm. “Gracie told us your mother’s not well.”
“No, she’s not,” he said. “She’s in a terrible condition. Everyone in this miserable family is either dying or cracking to pieces. It’s getting hard to take.” He slipped his arm away from my aunt’s and pulled a handkerchief from his coat pocket. Plump tears leaked from his eyes—a sight I hadn’t expected. He seemed too masculine to cry, even at a funeral for his own brother, but I tasted the genuine bitterness of his grief.
Everyone’s emotions seemed to come alive upon my tongue.
“So strange,” I whispered, to which Julius lifted his red eyes.
“What’s strange?” he asked.
“Just the way I’m feeling.”
I looked toward Stephen’s coffin again and had the urge to walk over and touch the surface. Aunt Eva guided Gracie to a chair. Julius wiped his eyes and mumbled something about spirits, but I excused myself and made my way toward the front of the room. Stephen’s dark eyes in the photograph watched me through the incandescent blue fog.
Two boys near his age stood by the casket for about a minute before I could approach, and I heard them saying something about “rotten luck” and “the damned Krauts.” They patted the lid like they were giving a reassuring touch to Stephen’s shoulder and departed with bowed heads.
I stepped toward the casket, my lungs wheezing and my legs rubbery. It was just the two of us up there: Stephen and me. I laid my nonbandaged hand on the flag covering the wood and tried to envision the way he’d looked when he watched me from his staircase—the interest in his brown eyes, the dimpled grin blooming across his face, the Verne novel lying open in his lap. The funeral room closed around us, becoming as intimate as the Emberses’ peacock-green sitting room, where we had dared to inch closer to one another.