Dearly Beloved

The dead are the easiest audience I have ever had. They never fidget. They never check their phones. They never look at me the way the living do when I say something true, as though I have just reached into their coat pockets and pulled out something they were hoping to keep. Judge Harold Pemberton lay in a walnut casket at the front of St. Brendan's, and six years after he paid me to write his eulogy, I stood at the lectern to read it aloud. "Harold Pemberton believed in order," I began. "He alphabetized his spice rack. He sentenced four hundred and twelve people in his career, and he remembered every name. What he did not believe in, until very late, was mercy. He told me so himself, in a rented room above a bookbindery, on a Tuesday in March, with his hands folded like a man waiting for a verdict." A small laugh moved through the pews, the nervous kind. It was the sound of people hearing the truth about someone they loved and discovering it did not hurt as much as they had feared. That is the whole trick of my work. I write eulogies for people who are still alive. They sit across from me for six weeks while I ask the questions their families never will, and at the end, I give them a speech they will never hear, sealed and dated and locked in my vault until the day it is needed. They pay me a great deal of money. Mostly, I think, they pay for the questions. When a client dies, I come and I read what I wrote. I do not change a word. That is my only promise, and it is the reason anyone trusts me with something this private. I write what is true, and I do not soften it afterward to make a room more comfortable. I wear the same black dress to every funeral. It has pockets, which is the only thing I require of clothing. I keep my hair pinned and my shoes quiet and my face still. I do not stay for the reception. I do not accept condolences, or hugs, or business cards pressed into my hand by people who have suddenly realized they are afraid of their own endings. I read, and I leave. Those are my rules, and I wrote them myself, and they have kept me upright for six years. Pemberton's daughter sat in the front pew with a spine like a ruler. I had written a paragraph for her, the one about the birthday letters he wrote every year and never mailed. I could see her bracing for it. I could see her deciding not to cry. Near the back, Theo caught my eye over a wall of white lilies. He had arranged every flower in the church, and he looked, as he always did at funerals, like a man apologizing to the room for being cheerful by nature. He lifted two fingers from the pew in front of him. Breathe, the gesture meant. You're doing fine. I turned the page. "He never mailed them," I said. "He kept them in a shoebox in the bottom drawer of his desk, and he told me he wasn't ready for her to know that he had been wrong. I think he was wrong about that, too. I think he was only afraid." The daughter's hand rose to her mouth. It was a good moment, a clean one. I felt it settle over the church like snow, and I felt what I always feel in that second, a quiet and private gratitude that I was the only person in the room permitted to say the true thing out loud. Then I reached the last page, and I did something I have never done in six years of reading other people's endings. I looked up. I don't know why. I would like to say there was a reason. The page said what it had always said, a gentle closing about doors and forgiveness, and the room was waiting, and instead of reading, I let my eyes travel the length of the church, over the bowed heads and the black umbrellas dripping in the aisle, until they reached the very last pew. A man sat there alone. He was tall, even sitting. Dark coat, no umbrella, rain still caught in his hair as though he had walked here the long way and hadn't minded. He was perhaps thirty or thirty-three. He was not looking at the casket. He was not looking at the flowers. He was looking at me with an attention so complete that it felt less like being watched and more like being read. Every other face in that church was wet. His was dry. I heard my own voice before I decided to use it. "The truth," I said, "is the last kindness we can give the dead." That was not on my page. I want to be exact about this, because exactness is all I have. That sentence was not in the speech. I had not written it six years ago in a rented room, and I had not planned to say it today. It rose out of me whole and unasked for, the way a name rises when you see a face you can't place. And I knew the sentence. Of course, I knew it. It was the one line of my own work I had sworn never to say again, the closing line of a eulogy I had read exactly once, at a funeral I did not stay for. "And the first one," I said, "we should give the living." The man in the last pew was already speaking. Not aloud. His lips moved, barely, half a second ahead of mine. He said the second half of that sentence before I did, word for word. Not like a person guessing. Like a person who had carried it for years and had finally been handed the right moment to set it down. I stopped. Silence in a church is a particular thing. It has weight, and a texture, like cloth. I stood in it with a page of Harold Pemberton's truth in my hand and felt, for the first time in my career, the ground of my own calm tilt beneath me. The priest coughed gently. The daughter turned her head to look at me, confused. Somewhere near the lilies, I felt Theo go very still. I looked down at the page. I found my place. I read the real ending, the quiet one about doors and forgiveness, and my voice did not shake, because my voice had never once been allowed to. When I looked up again, the last pew was empty. Outside, the rain had thinned to something almost polite. I stood under the church's stone awning with my hands in my pockets, counting the cars at the curb the way other people count breaths. "That," said Theo, appearing at my elbow with a lily still in his hand, "was either a stroke or a stage direction." "Did you see him?" "See who?" "A man in the last pew. Tall, dark coat. He was sitting alone." Theo considered this with the seriousness he reserved for questions about flowers. "Ines, I was busy being responsible for four hundred stems of lily. If a man sat in the last pew, he did so quietly, which, in my experience, is how all the worst ones do it." "He knew the line." "Which line?" I did not answer. Theo studied my face, and his own softened. He has known me since we were nineteen. He knows the particular stillness I go into when something has gotten past me. "You said something off the page," he said. "I've never heard you do that." "I know." "Do you want me to look for him?" "No," I said too quickly. I heard it. So did he. "It's nothing. I was tired. Pemberton was a hard one." Theo tucked the lily into the pocket of my coat, where it sat like a small white apology. "You are a terrible liar," he said, kindly, "and it's your best quality." I let him walk me to the car. I let him say something funny about the priest's shoes. I even laughed, and it sounded almost real. But in the driver's seat, with the engine off and the rain starting again, I opened my mouth and said the sentence one more time, quietly, to no one. The truth is the last kindness we can give the dead, and the first one we should give the living. I had said it once before. Six years ago, at a funeral with two hundred mourners, I had not looked at a single one of them. That was rule number one. I read, and I leave. Sitting in the dark car, I wondered for the first time what else I had not looked at.