As Bright as Heaven(7)

Maggie looks up at me and rolls her eyes. I put a finger to my lips.

Fred takes us down a hallway that leads from the kitchen to the rest of the left side of the house—formerly the cook’s and maids’ quarters from the days of the banker and his family. The first door on the left opens to a viewing parlor. It’s carpeted and wallpapered in hushed shades of wine and evergreen. Cushioned chairs line the walls, but I can easily picture them in rows facing the front window, where a treatment of lace and heavy brocade softens the light that spills on an open space just the right size for a coffin.

“I meet with the families in here,” Fred says. “And if folks can’t have the funeral or viewing in their home, they have it here. You older girls might be able to help with flowers and chairs and such on those days,” he says to Evie and Maggie. “But the little one will need to stay in the other part of the house when there are people in here.”

Fred looks to Willa with grandfatherly concern when he says this. I assure him she will cause him no trouble. Willa tosses me a look that tells me she’s not “the little one.” Again I put a finger to my lips.

The next door on the same side of the hallway opens to a room of caskets of different sizes and woods. The sight of them—the first visible evidence of what is done inside this house—makes me shudder a bit.

“Families do the choosing in there,” Fred says, stopping just at the doorway.

“Are those for sleeping?” Willa asks.

“They aren’t beds, Willa,” Maggie answers, though the question was directed to Fred.

“Now, you don’t want to go climbing in those, little one. You could get hurt,” Fred replies solemnly. “Those are caskets and the lids are very heavy.”

“I’ll explain it to her later,” Thomas says.

Fred nods and we move on. Just before the mudroom and the side entrance is the third door in the hallway, this one on the right side. It’s closed nearly all the way, but not quite. Through the crack, I can see a body lies on a table of some kind. I can see the stocking-covered ball of a woman’s heel and the piped edge of a skirt. A peculiar odor is seeping out from the opening between door and frame.

“Now, this room is off-limits except to your papa and me. And Mrs. Brewster. This is the embalming room, and there are chemicals and such that aren’t safe for you girls to be around.” Fred says this in what I’m sure he imagines is a tone of paternal caution, but I can tell he is serious. I am frustrated by that seriousness, for this is the room that interests me most. It’s not like the others.

I know only in part what Thomas will be doing inside it. We talked about the embalming room in the days before we came here. Thomas told me he’d visited his uncle a few times when he was younger, long before we married, and that he’d been rather fascinated by Fred’s work with the dead, as perhaps only a boy could be. He hadn’t had to explain in detail what he meant. I’d noticed this about my nephews as I watched them grow up. The carcass of a possum or raccoon in the road, for example, was a magnet for their attention as it decayed or was picked apart by birds. Their sisters and my girls, by comparison, would walk past with their eyes scrunched shut, noses covered. But I’d gathered from watching the nephews—not just with animals killed in the road but with a deer in someone’s side yard being butchered, or a hooked fish on a line gasping for one last breath—that most boys aren’t afraid to look at what death does.

I hadn’t had time to ponder if my sweet Henry would have been a boy like this, heartily curious about what happens to the body when life ends. But I’d thought about it then, when I asked Thomas how he would feel about working on cadavers that had been grotesquely mangled in some way. He’d answered that he’d learn to bear it because it was a small price to pay to give us the kind of life that would now be ours. I’d wondered then if Henry would have wanted to poke at the dead raccoons and possums and peek at the little organs laid bare by tractor tires. Would he have tried to scare his sisters with them, as his boy cousins liked to do? Would he have kept coming back to the carcass as it swelled and then withered into an unrecognizable lump in the road? It surprised me to realize in that moment that I didn’t mind if Henry would have been a boy like most boys. Or that he would have been Thomas’s assistant when he grew up and then heir to the funeral home just like his father had been. Someone must be able to gaze on the breadth of what makes us mortal, yes? Someone has to.

Thomas had taken my silence at his answer as worry that the girls and I might somehow be exposed to those terrible cases that he would learn to bear. “You and the girls won’t ever have to know what I’ve seen or had to do. I won’t bring any part of the work into the rest of the house. I promise you that, Polly.”

“All right,” I’d said absently, still ruminating on thoughts of Henry and the man he might have been.

“Good,” Thomas had said. “I don’t want you or the girls to be afraid of anything in the house where we will be living. Especially the girls. I’ll find a way to make sure they feel comfortable with what I’ll be doing.”

And then our conversation was interrupted by a knock at the door and another farewell that needed to be received and given.

Fred is about to say something else about the embalming room when the door suddenly opens all the way, startling us. An older woman emerges from the room, holding a basket of shears and combs and curling rods. Her expression at seeing us is as surprised as ours surely are. Behind her is the dead woman on the table, now fully visible in a midnight blue gown, as if dressed for a formal engagement. The deceased’s face, the half that we can see, looks serene but slack. Her brown-gray hair has been brushed and styled and the locks gathered with hairpins. Her hands are folded across her bosom, one hand over the other. Her left hand is raised a bit like she wants to alert Mrs. Brewster to a forgotten detail. The wrist looks stiff and unyielding.