St. Dale

Racing With the Angels

Terence Palmer had never seen a decal on a coffin before. There it was, though, pasted to the gunmetal lid of his father’s casket: a black number 3 encircled by a halo and buttressed on either side by cartoon angel’s wings.

Odd to see that symbol on the top of a casket. He had seen it often enough on the back windows of cars, though. He was glad to see something at this funeral that made sense to him. That one little symbol told him as much about his father as he had ever known. He smiled at the image, wondering if the funeral home people had known its significance. Would they have thought it some sort of religious emblem (which perhaps it was, in a way)? He saw the Winged Three as a badge of allegiance, a reference to the Trinity, and even a kind of Honk-If-You-Love- Jesus bumper sticker for the trip to the Hereafter.

Throughout the graveside service he stared at it, wondering if his father had requested it and who had put it there, but he knew there was no one he could ask. Everyone here was a stranger-or, more precisely, it was he who was the stranger in the little burying ground above the farm. The rest of the mourners all knew each other, but he knew no one-not even the man they were burying.

“I saw you staring at that decal, son. Tom meant that as a joke.” The rangy older man in the Air Force bomber jacket had come up beside him. He had been one of the pallbearers. Terence finally remembered his name: Vance Howard. But that was all he knew about him.

Now Howard was nodding toward the Winged Three, and smiling. “Well, it was mostly a joke. Although if there’s anybody old Tom would have wanted to be there to open the pearly gates for him, that’s who it would have been.”

Terence hesitated, wondering what to say to such a remark. He was the only blood relative present, so perhaps he should remain solemn despite this man’s invitation to share the joke. How would his father have wanted him to behave, this man who had them put racing decals on his coffin? Truly, Terence felt he was among strangers. Not just people he didn’t know. Strangers.

In Terence’s experience, funerals were sedate occasions that marked the passing of his parents’ friends: the lawyers, bankers, and diplomats who would be buried in leafy memorial gardens outside Washington, or-rarely-back on some family estate in New England or Virginia. These services were usually held in a local Episcopal or Catholic church, sometimes in a synagogue, with all the mourners suitably attired in black, and everything from flowers to eulogy quietly understated, as if the deceased had made reservations with some celestial maitre d’ and could now be whisked into heaven without attracting undue attention. Individuality was not stressed at these upscale funerals, perhaps because belonging had been the whole point of the deceased’s life, and for the mourners as well. Not that anybody did mourn, at least publicly.

Terence could not remember hearing or seeing any displays of emotion at the funerals he had attended before this one. Even here, the reaction of the mostly male attendees was subdued. They all looked over fifty, members of the generation who did not show their feelings lightly, but they were certainly not conformists. The outfits of the mourners around the casket ranged from black dress suits to western attire that he had heretofore thought restricted to working cowboys and country singers. All right, he had expected people at this funeral to be dressed less formally than the people he knew, but even among his mother’s social set, the dress codes were relaxing these days.

He supposed it was the displays of flowers that marked the main departure from the funerals he was accustomed to. Rows of wreaths were lined up on either side of the coffin, each one bearing a satin sash across it, like the chest of a beauty pageant contestant, and the sentiments spelled out in gold press-on letters were in keeping with the artwork on the coffin: Tell Dale and Neil and Alan Hello…Tom’s Victory Lap…Racing With the Angels…

Terence had expected more conventional slogans: “In Memoriam,” perhaps, or simply “Rest in Peace.” He wondered what other peculiar customs might be in store for him at the reception that would surely follow the service. A slender woman in her sixties, silvery blonde, with a Hermes scarf at the neck of her camel-hair coat, had introduced herself as “Mrs. Richard Nash, one of Tom’s neighbors.” When she shook his hand, the rings on her knobby fingers bit into his palm and he winced, finding no consolation in the fact that her weapon of choice was a three-carat diamond.

Terence remembered seeing stone pillars flanking a long driveway just up the road and he thought this must be where she lived. If his mother had come to the funeral with him, Mrs. Nash would have been the person she would talk to. His mother’s radar could spot one of us in half a second. After a lifetime with her, so could he, but he tried to ignore the signals, uncomfortable with the taint of elitism.

After Mrs. Nash offered her condolences, she had made a point of telling him that the neighbors had brought food to the house so that he could receive visitors afterward. The custom was common enough at home, but in these unfamiliar circumstances he found the idea disturbing. He hoped that he wasn’t in for a marathon of soggy reminiscences or a drunken party, and then he scolded himself for that unworthy thought-his mother’s DNA again, swamping his every impulse toward humanity…

Well, he would accept the occasion with grace, whatever it was. Before he left New York Terence had resolved that no matter what happened at this funeral or its aftermath, he would not tell his mother about any of it.

“He asked that a checkered flag be draped over the coffin,” Vance Howard, the elderly pallbearer was saying, “but we couldn’t find one big enough on short notice. I did find a casket advertised on the Internet that had a painting of a stock car on the side and blue sky and clouds on the lid. I bet Tom would have loved that. He wanted to treat the whole thing as a joke. Dying, I mean. To show he wasn’t afraid.”

“I see,” said Terence, who didn’t see at all. He was wondering: To show whom? It seemed to him that death always had the last laugh, anyway.

“We spent many an hour coming up with outlandish funeral arrangements. Before he found out that the cancer had returned, of course. For the longest time, Tom didn’t tell me how ill he was. He just kept on making a running joke out of the idea of dying, that’s how brave he was. Or stubborn. I thought he’d be around for another twenty years.”

Terence nodded. So had he. He had always meant to look up his father, to see if they had anything in common. One of these days. It was always going to be one of these days. But he never got around to it. He supposed he had put it off partly out of embarrassment, or fear of being rebuffed, and partly from a desire to be successful beyond reproach when he did seek out his father. Now that he had seen the cozy hill farm his father called home, Terence wondered if such distinctions would have mattered to the old man, and if he would ever get over the uneasy feeling that he had missed something.

“He joked about it right to the end,” Vance Howard was saying. “Tom once said he wanted the hearse to do a donut as it pulled into the pasture, and you know I actually tried to talk them into it, but Elton Grier-the fellow that runs the funeral home-he said that Lincoln was a brand-new vehicle, and he wouldn’t hear of it.”

Terence tried to picture a low-slung, gray Lincoln hearse skidding around a rolling cow pasture making ruts in the grass. It would have been something to see, all right, but he supposed it was just as well that the funeral director had erred on the side of caution. After all, his father wasn’t here to watch anyhow.

“You a racing fan yourself, then?”

Terence smiled, hearing his mother’s voice in his head. Racing, she would have said in a voice like maple syrup. Do you mean the Preakness? Any races involving automobiles were considered by her to be a sport of philistines, right down there with bowling and pro wrestling. It’s just driving around in circles, she would say. When he was an adolescent, it had been fun to argue with her, to say that if race car drivers weren’t athletes then what about jockeys, but now he avoided the subject with her altogether, in order to escape the inevitable comments on his obviously defective paternal DNA. It was odd, though, because he had known nothing about his father’s interests.

“Your daddy would have been pleased that you came,” said Vance Howard. “You are his only family, you know, and I can see the resemblance. I know you never got to meet one another, but he never forgot you. Used to talk about you every now and again. I remember when you got accepted into Yale a few years back. He was real proud of that. He’d want you to know that. Your name’s Terry, isn’t it? I think he said he named you after Terry Sanford. That was always Tom’s favorite governor.”

“I’m Terence,” he said, offering his hand. Nobody had ever called him Terry. Ever since he could remember, his mother had treated him as a little adult and insisted on formality; and since prep school boys devise rude nicknames