St. Dale

for their associates, his was not one he would ever want to share with anyone outside his own generation.

“I was your dad’s best friend, I guess. We were in Vietnam together, and we kept in touch over the years. We’ve been neighbors since I retired and moved out here. How’s your mother?”

“Oh, you know her?” Terence could not keep the surprise out of his voice.

“I remember her well,” Howard said. Neither his expression nor his tone of voice gave any indication as to how he felt about the former Mrs. Palmer.

“I’ll go with you if you like,” his mother had said when she phoned with the news, and he’d announced his intention of attending the funeral.

If I like, thought Terence. You were married to him, weren’t you? But that question would have used up a year’s worth of plainspokenness in his family, so he let it pass. He could picture his mother sitting at her desk in the morning room in her at-home uniform of cashmere twinset and pearls. There would be a vase of fresh-cut tulips in front of her, and perhaps her cup of morning tea. Right now she was probably leafing through her monster address book to see if they knew anybody who mattered near Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Her view of life seemed quite feudal to him sometimes, especially her conviction that if you went to an unfamiliar place, you must always present yourself to the most influential family you could connect with in the area. He used to joke about it. Mother in heaven: “Is Saint John the Divine anywhere about? I attend a church named after him.”

Surely, though, rural Wilkesboro would be beyond the reach of her Rolodex. At the other end of the telephone, Terence had sat at his own desk looking at this week’s page on his Papini leather desk diary. Would it be convenient for you to attend the funeral of your biological father? he asked himself. He sighed and drew an X through all the appointments for the next two days. He cradled the receiver between his jaw and shoulder as he wrote. His mother was still rattling on about how she had come to be notified about the funeral. From the law firm who had represented the deceased, apparently. Terence, who was consulting his planner, hadn’t been paying close attention.

“Will you know anybody there, Mother?” he asked when she finally paused for breath.

Terence heard a gasp and then silence, a sound which he recognized as his mother’s moment of deliberation before saying something cruel in the gentlest possible way. Pas devant les domestiques might be her motto. Or devant le monde, perhaps, in her case, because she considered most of the rest of humanity to be inferior in some way to her own little circle. Not that she was ever rude about it. Heaven forbid. Her response to this was to treat other people with a formal civility, a tacit sympathy for their social handicaps: lack of money, lack of pedigree, physical defects, unprestigious alma mater. When Terence had brought school friends home to visit, he always knew where each one stood in his mother’s estimation by the scrupulous courtesy which she displayed toward those found wanting. “Your mother is so sweet,” his public school friends from church would say, and Terence would writhe in silent mortification, knowing that he had seen the last of them.

“No, dear,” she said at last. “I wouldn’t know anybody down there. He never remarried, so there’s only you for family, I suppose. I had met his parents, of course. Simple, earnest people but of course they died years ago.”

Simple people. And I’ll bet you bought them really expensive presents while you were their daughter-in-law, Terence was thinking. That was another velvet subtlety in Claudia Paxton Clark’s rules for killing with kindness. If she really liked and respected you, she gave you jokey, trifling presents on Christmas or your birthday, because it was assumed that you could buy whatever you really needed or wanted. Only social inferiors received elegant, costly gifts. The fact that most of the recipients never saw her generosity as an insult in no way diminished her satisfaction in the gesture.

Terence knew she didn’t want to go to the funeral. Wouldn’t go. If he insisted, she would reluctantly agree to accompany him, but it wouldn’t happen. The night before they were due to leave, something would come up to prevent her going. A virus, a domestic crisis, car trouble-anything vaguely plausible, though never, of course, true. Anyhow, he was in New York and she was in Washington, so they couldn’t travel together, and she would be no help at all with “ordinary people,” so why should he bother to insist on her coming? He would get a direct flight from LaGuardia to Charlotte, and rent a car there for the rest of the journey. Getting a few days off from the brokerage shouldn’t be a problem. After all, you could only go to your father’s funeral once- well, you could go any amount of times in these dysfunctional days, Terence corrected himself, but this was his biological father, and surely that funeral was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Anyhow, Merrill Clark, his stepfather ever since he could remember, was such a fitness zealot that he would probably outlive everybody else in the family, so surely this paternal funeral was a rare occurrence in Terence’s life. He did not mind going alone.

There was one way in which his mother might be helpful, though. “What should I wear?” he asked.

Again the delicate hesitation. “Well, I hardly think it matters, Terence. Heaven knows what the rest of the mourners will be wearing. Anything from kilts to bib overalls, I should imagine. I think you should wear what you’d wear to anybody’s funeral. Don’t dress down, of course.”

“All right. My new black suit. The Armani.”

“Perhaps. Or even something a little less…obtrusive. Anyhow, darling, I think it’s very brave and martyrish of you to go to the funeral. You hardly ever take time off work for anything, poor you. I wish it could be a wedding-you know, something less dreary than this for your outing.” She paused again, and Terence waited for the rest of it. “Actually, Merrill and I have a dinner party this weekend. You know, the congressman’s wife has written a children’s book and I’ve put together a little group of people she might like to meet. Published people.”

Terence nodded to himself. This was the actual way that his mother gave gifts: by introducing people she liked to people who would be useful to them. Sometimes he thought of her as an elegant silk-clad spider, tweaking her web each time a new fly alighted. The mention of the dinner party had been intended as the broadest of intimations that she could not possibly attend this funeral, in case he had been too distracted to register her previous reluctance.

“You needn’t go,” said Terence. “After all, it’s only strangers. I don’t suppose it matters to him anymore. I just think I ought to attend. Thanks for letting me know.”

“Safe journey, darling,” she said. “And, of course, Merrill and I will send along a sweet little wreath.”

The most expensive one in the shop, thought Terence, replacing the phone.

On the red-eye flight the next morning, he tried to tell himself that he was not going out of vulgar curiosity-he hoped he wasn’t-but he didn’t suppose that one could sincerely mourn a total stranger, even if you shared half his DNA, and the truth was that he did wonder how his expensive and elegant mother could have come to marry the man she called “the hog farmer.” If she mentioned him at all, which happened no more than half a dozen times that Terence could remember.

When he was twelve, he had pieced together some of the story from old photo albums in a trunk in the attic. In fading snapshots, he saw the progression of his mother’s coming of age: the times they are a-changing, indeed. This impossibly young version of her was so strange to him that he found himself thinking of the girl in the snapshots as a seventies’ Barbie doll. There were high school photos in which a laughing Claudia Paxton with a Jackie Kennedy hairstyle and a watermelon-pink sheath dress posed with her girlfriends beside a Corvette convertible. There she was, a few pictures later, in a white prom dress beside the obligatory crew-cut jock in a white sport coat. Graduation gown, cradling a bouquet of roses. And then came the college pictures. The hairstyle changed after that and so did her outfits. Gone were the preppy clothes and the Breck Girl good looks. The collegiate Claudia, decked out in army fatigues, hunched over a folk guitar, scowling at the camera through a curtain of lank hair. Counterculture Claudia, cigarette in hand, sprawled on the grass with a gaggle of equally scruffy companions. A young marine began turning up in the pictures after that. Terence knew who he was because a version of that face looked back at him from the mirror. This was Tom Palmer, the soldier from Camp LeJeune, who met Claudia Paxton at a folk music concert, and three months later eloped with her to Dillon, South Carolina. It hadn’t lasted long. The young sergeant from the hills of Carolina and the genteel belle from the Tidewater had been chalk and cheese, and when the passion cooled, there was nothing to keep them together. Well, nothing except Terence himself, but apparently that hadn’t been enough.

After a few months of playing house as the wife of an enlisted man, trying to live on his army pay while her stock dividends piled up in the bank, young Claudia had taken the baby and gone back to her parents’ house. If her parents had wanted her back, they had used the perfect strategy: no hint of disapproval toward the declasse groom with the high school education, but refusing to provide any financial assistance to the newlyweds. Terence didn’t