The Throat

I told him he looked wonderful. The black silk tie was perfectly knotted. His trousers were pressed, and the white shirt looked fresh. I smelled a trace of aftershave.

'I wanted to make sure.' He stepped back and turned around. The back hem of the suit jacket looked a little crumpled, but I wasn't going to tell him that. He finished turning around and looked at me seriously, even severely. 'Okay?'

'You got the jacket on by yourself this time.'

'I never took it off,' he said. 'Wasn't taking any chances.'

I had a vision of him leaning back against a wall with his knees locked. 'How did you sleep?'

'Very, very carefully.' Alan tugged at the jacket of his suit, then buttoned it. We left the house.

'Who are the old geezers with John?'

'His parents. Ralph and Marjorie. They just came in from Arizona.'

'Ready when you are, C.B.,' he said. (I did not understand this allusion, if that's what it was, at the time, and I still don't.)

John was standing up beside the car, looking at Alan with undisguised astonishment and relief.

'Alan, you look great,' he said.

'I thought I'd make an effort,' Alan said. 'Are you going to get in back with your parents, or would you prefer to keep the front seat?'

John looked uneasily back at Geoffrey's blue disaster and Isobel's declamatory van and slid in next to his father. Alan and I got in at the same time.

'I want to say how much I appreciate your coming all the way from…' He hesitated and then concluded triumphantly, 'Alaska.'

There was a brief silence.

'We're so sorry about your daughter,' Marjorie said. 'We loved her, too, very much.'

'April was lovable,' said Alan.

'It's a crime, all this business about Walter Dragonette,' Ralph said. 'You wonder how such things could go on.'

'You wonder how a person like that can exist,' Marjorie said.

John chewed his lip and hugged his chest and looked back at the reporters, who hung one car behind us all the way downtown to the Trott Brothers' building.

Marjorie asked, 'Will you be back at the college with John next year, or are you thinking about retiring?'

'I'll be back by popular demand.'

'You don't have a mandatory retirement age in your business?' This was Ralph.

'In my case, they made an exception.'

'Do yourself a favor,' Ralph said. 'Walk out and don't look back. I retired ten years ago, and I'm having the time of my life.'

'I think I've already had that.'

'You have some kind of nest egg, right? I mean, with April and everything.'

'It's embarrassing.' Alan turned around on his seat. 'Did you use April's services, yourself?'

'I had my own guy.' Ralph paused. 'What do you mean, 'embarrassing'? She was too successful?' He looked at me again in the mirror, trying to work something out. I knew what.

'She was too successful,' Alan said.

'My friend, you wound up with a couple hundred thousand dollars, right? Live right, watch your spending, find some good high-yield bonds, you're set.'

'Eight hundred,' Alan said.

'Pardon?'

'She started out with a pittance and wound up with eight hundred thousand. It's embarrassing.'

I checked Ralph in the rearview mirror. His eyes had gone out of focus. I could hear Marjorie breathing in and out.

Finally, Ralph asked, 'What are you going to do with it?'

'I think I'll leave it to the public library.'

I turned the corner into Hillfield Avenue, and the gray Victorian shape of the Trott Brothers' Funeral Home came into view. Its slate turrets, gothic gingerbread, peaked dormers, and huge front porch made it look like a house from a Charles Addams cartoon.

I pulled up at the foot of the stone steps that led up to the Trott Brothers' lawn.

'What's on the agenda here, John?' his father asked.

'We have some time alone with April.' He got out of the car. 'After that there's the public reception, or visitation, or whatever they call it.'

His father struggled along the seat, trying to get to the door. 'Hold on, hold on, I can't hear you.' Marjorie pushed herself sideways after her husband.

Alan Brookner sighed, popped open his door, and quietly got out.

John repeated what he had just said. 'Then there's a service of some kind. When it's over, we go out to the crematorium.'

'Keeping it simple, hey?' his father asked.

John was already moving toward the steps.; 'Oh.' He turned around, one foot on the first step. 'I should warn you in advance, I guess. The first part is open coffin. The director here seemed to think that was what we should do.'

I heard Alan breathe in sharply.

'I don't like open coffins,' Ralph said. 'What are you supposed to do, go up and talk to the person?'

'I wish I could talk to the person,' Alan said. For a moment he seemed absolutely forlorn. 'Some other cultures, of course, take for granted that you can communicate with the dead.'

'Really?' asked Ralph. 'Like India, do you mean?'

'Let's go up.' John began mounting the steps.

'In Indian religions the situation is a little more complicated,' Alan said. He and Ralph went around the front of the car and began going up behind John. Bits of their conversation drifted back.

Marjorie gave me an uneasy glance. I aroused certain misgivings within Marjorie. Maybe it was the ornamental zippers on my Japanese suit. 'Here we go,' I said, and held out my elbow.

Marjorie closed a hand like a parrot's claw on my elbow.

2

Joyce Brophy held open the giant front door. She was wearing a dark blue dress that looked like a cocktail party maternity outfit, and her hair had been glued into place. 'Gosh, we were wondering what was taking you two so long!' She flashed a weirdly exultant smile and motioned us through the door with little whisk-broom gestures.

John was talking to, or being talked at by, a small, bent-over man in his seventies whose gray face was stamped with deep, exhausted-looking lines and wrinkles. I moved toward Alan.

'No, now, no, mister, you have to meet my father,' Joyce said. 'Let's get the formalities over with before we enter the viewing room, you know, everything in its own time and all that kinda good stuff.'

The stooping man in the loose gray suit grinned at me ferociously and extended his hand. When I took it, he squeezed hard, and I squeezed back. 'Yessir,' he said. 'Quite a day for us all.'

'Dad,' said Joyce Brophy, 'you met Professor Ransom and Professor Brookner, and this is Professor Ransom's friend, ah—'

'Tim Underhill,' John said.

'Professor Underhill,' Joyce said. 'And this here is Mrs. Ransom, Professor Ransom's mother. My dad, William Trott.'

'Just call me Bill.' The little man extended his already carnivorous smile and grasped Marjorie's right hand in