Pet Sematary(95)

Abruptly the world went dove gray. Everything passed out of his view. Dimly he could feel the corner of the stand which held the book digging into his palm, but that was all.

"Louis?" Missy's voice. Distant. The mystery sound of pigeons in his ears.

"Louis?" Closer now. Alarmed.

The world swam back into focus.

"You all right?"

He smiled. "Fine," he said. "I'm okay, Missy."

She signed for herself and her husband-Mr. and Mrs. David Dandridge-in round Palmer-method script; to this she added their address-Rural Box 67, Old Bucksport Road-and then raised her eyes to Louis's and quickly dropped them, as if her very address on the road where Gage had died constituted a crime.

"Be well, Louis," she whispered.

David Dandridge shook his hand and muttered something inarticulate, his prominent, arrowhead-shaped adam's apple bobbing up and down. Then he followed his wife hurriedly down the aisle for the ritual examination of a coffin which had been made in Storyville, Ohio, a place where Gage had never been and where he was not known.

Following the Dandridges they all came, moving in a shuffling line, and Louis received them, their handshakes, their hugs, their tears. His collar and the upper sleeve of his dark gray suit coat soon became quite damp. The smell of the flowers began to reach even the back of the room and to permeate the place with the smell of funeral. It was a smell he remembered from his childhood-that sweet, thick, mortuary smell of flowers. Louis was told how merciful it was that Gage hadn't suffered thirty-two times by his own inner count. He was told that God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform twenty-five times. Bringing up the rear was he's with the angels now, a total of twelve times.

It began to get to him. Instead of losing what marginal sense these little aphorisms had (the way your own name will lose its sense and identity if you repeat it over and over again), they seemed to punch deeper each time, angling in toward the vitals. By the time his mother-in-law and father-in-law put in their inevitable appearance, he had begun to feel like a hard-tagged fighter.

His first thought was that Rachel had been right-and how. Irwin Goldman had indeed aged. He was-what? Fifty-eight, fifty-nine? Today he looked a graven and composed seventy. He looked almost absurdly like Israel's Prime Minister Menachem Begin with his bald head and Coke-bottle glasses. Rachel had told Louis Goldman had aged when she came back from her Thanksgiving trip, but Louis had not expected this. Of course, he thought, maybe it hadn't been this bad at Thanksgiving. The old man hadn't lost one of his two grandchildren at Thanksgiving.

Dory walked beside him, her face all but invisible under two-possibly three-layers of heavy black netting. Her hair was fashionably blue, the color favored by elderly ladies of an upper-class American persuasion. She held her husband's ann. All Louis could really see behind the veil was the glitter of her tears.

Suddenly he decided it was time to let bygones be bygones. He could not hold the old grudge any longer. Suddenly it was too heavy. Perhaps it was the cumulative weight of all those platitudes.

"Irwin. Dory," he murmured. "Thank you for coming."

He made a gesture with his arms, as if to shake hands with Rachel's father and hug her mother simultaneously, or perhaps even to hug them both. Either way he felt his own tears start for the first time, and for an instant he had the crazy idea that they could mend all their fences, that Gage would do that much for them in his dying, as if this were some romantic ladies' novel he had stepped into where the wages of death were reconciliation, where it could cause something more constructive than this endless, stupid, grinding ache which just went on and on and on.

Dory started toward him, making a gesture, beginning, perhaps, to hold out her own arms. She said something-"Oh, Louis... " and something else that was garbled-and then Goldman pulled his wife back. For a moment the three of them stood in a tableau that no one noticed except themselves (unless perhaps the funeral director, standing unobtrusively in the far corner of the East Room, saw-Louis supposed that Uncle Carl would have seen), Louis with his arms partly outstretched, Irwin and Dory Goldman standing as stiff and straight as a couple on a wedding cake.

Louis saw that there were no tears in his father-in-law's eyes; they were bright and clear with hate (does he think I killed Gage to spite him? Louis wondered).

Those eyes seemed to measure Louis, to find him the same small and pointless man who had kidnapped his daughter and brought her to this sorrow... and then to dismiss him. His eyes shifted to Louis's left-to Gage's coffin, in fact-and only then did they soften.

Still Louis made a final effort. "Irwin," he said. "Dory. Please. We have to get together on this."

"Louis," Dory said again-kindly, Louis thought-and then they were past him, Irwin Goldman perhaps pulling his wife along, not looking to the left or the right, certainly not looking at Louis Creed. They approached the coffin, and Goldman fumbled a small black skullcap out of his suit coat pocket.

You didn't sign the book, Louis thought, and then a silent belch of such malignantly acidic content rose through his digestive works that his face clenched in pain.

The morning viewing ended at last. Louis called home. Jud answered and asked him how it had gone. All right, Louis said. He asked Jud if he could talk to Steve.

"If she can dress herself, I'm going to let her come this afternoon," Steve said. "Okay by you?"