Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (33 page)

When Harriet came back to the room one afternoon after a long and mindless walk through the streets of the Vieille Ville, about which she could remember nothing, she had been startled to find Benedict lying on the bed, weeping. She had rubbed his back and stroked his head and whispered “It’s all right, it’s all right,” into the back of his neck, and they had fallen into a deep sleep together.

“I don’t even know what I think anymore,” Harriet said to Benedict as they lay together in the darkness much later that night. Neither of them was able to eat much, or sleep through the night during this time, and they were both haggard. “I mean, I am simply tired of words, of my own thoughts, of my own mind.”

“You were her best friend, Harriet, and you were good to her,” Benedict said, reaching for her hand.

“Was I? I don’t think I knew very much about Anne, or our friendship. I think she loved me more than I loved her, or more unequivocally, anyway.”

“There’s no way to measure that.”

“Yes and no. I mean I don’t think I was ultimately as good a friend to Anne as I said I was. I didn’t understand her love. I basked in it, and at the same time I was oblivious. Do you see what I mean? I don’t think I recognized her pain, I was blithely critical, I thought everything could be solved if I took her away from Victor. I thought I could dictate changes in her life. I thought of myself as the grown-up, and I treated Anne as though she were my apprentice. Maybe she really did love Victor. But there was something grim about it all, as though it were a sentence being carried out. It was as if Anne was absolutely compelled to do everything the way that she did it, starting long before I ever laid eyes on her. She was on some
track that I never saw, and I thought I knew better. Oh, Benedict, who the hell did I think I was?”

“Harriet the spy?” Benedict kissed her forehead and hugged her tightly.

“More like Harriet in vain.” Harriet sighed.

“My Harriet the brave,” Benedict whispered.

The service would be more of a memorial than an actual funeral, without a body in a coffin. Harriet wasn’t sure where the dividing line lay between a funeral service and a memorial service. It was soon enough after Anne’s death to qualify as a funeral. Gay would have known.

In one of several telephone calls with Henry Gordon in those numb days, he had asked Harriet to have his daughter’s body cremated and the ashes shipped to him, so that he could scatter them on her mother’s grave in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

“Henry, I think scattering human ashes in a cemetery is illegal,” Harriet had whispered hoarsely into the telephone, through streaming tears.

“Then they will arrest me and put me in jail. Perhaps they will put me in the electric chair for such an offense,” Henry had replied, his voice ever civilized as it traveled the distance between two continents that he himself had journeyed in his lifetime.

Harriet found a string quartet at the university who would play—Brahms and Schubert, which seemed like a reasonable compromise that she might have made with Anne: neither Rachmaninoff nor Lester Young.

A young minister met with Harriet and agreed to conduct
the service. He urged Harriet to speak, to give a brief eulogy herself, but she told him she couldn’t do it. He was unusually flexible, for a man of the Calvinist cloth, and he promised to include a minimum of religion. He asked Harriet a lot of questions about Anne and looked at Harriet with sad eyes. He insisted that she call him Lucas. His English was quite good, and when Harriet complimented him on that, Lucas told her that he had American cousins in Indiana, and prior to divinity school, he had gone to a community college for two years in South Bend.

“Sounds like dancing,” Harriet had replied automatically, and he had smiled politely.

Harriet and Benedict closed up Anne’s apartment in one long day of packing and sorting and discarding. Lucas helped, and Harriet gave all of Anne’s furnishings to him, either for his personal use in his sparsely furnished quarters or for appropriate distribution. Harriet couldn’t believe that there were any needy people in Geneva—she had glimpsed none—but the minister, clad for the occasion in faded American blue jeans, assured her that in the parish there were families who could make use of the clothing, who would be glad to receive such nice dishes, such a good mattress, and such lovely linens and bedding.

Harriet selected a small group of books and a Rachmaninoff record, the horsehair shawl, and a handful of other things, and Benedict packed up a box to ship back to New York. Henry had made it clear that he wanted nothing, but said that he hoped Harriet would keep anything of Anne’s that meant something to her. As she listened to his voice, Harriet had thought about Anne’s ring, which she had strung on a gold chain and was now wearing around her neck. She decided he didn’t ever need to know about it.

Before they dismantled Anne’s stereo to box it for the parish-house youth center, Harriet demonstrated its workings. At the first notes of the Django Reinhardt record, which had a light coat of dust from having sat on the turntable for a week, Lucas began to beat time with one hand on his thigh, while playing air clarinet in accompaniment.

Benedict, who was carrying bags of rubbish past them to take down to the bin in the cellar, grinned and asked, “Does Calvin know about this guy?”

“Who?” Harriet asked, straightening up, uncharacteristically slow on the uptake.

“Calvin. You know, Calvin and the Calvinists.”

“Do you know Alvin and the Chipmunks?” Lucas asked eagerly.

The service was held late in the afternoon, to accommodate the workday at UGP. A surprising number of people attended, perhaps twenty. Everyone sat quietly while the quartet played to the conclusion of
Death and the Maiden.

“Lucas looks sixteen years old,” Benedict whispered to Harriet. He gripped her hand tightly. “Are you sure he’s allowed to do this?”

“We are here,” Lucas said, “because Anne Gordon made a decision. We are all very sad to be here. We might not like the decision. We might be very angry at the decision. But we have to acknowledge that it was her decision.” He had gone on to say other things, things Benedict told Harriet about later that were reasonable and appropriate, and for which she was grateful, but Harriet hadn’t been able to listen at the time. She sat, uncomprehending, until she heard the minister’s pleasant voice launching into a concluding reading of the Twenty-third Psalm. She listened for Good Mrs. Murphy.

Afterward, while the quartet played the heart-piercing second movement of Brahms’s String Quartet in B-flat Major, a movement that sounded to Harriet like death itself, people filed past her in an impromptu sort of receiving line. Harriet had decided against arranging anything in the way of a gathering afterward because she had no idea how many people would show up or who they might be. Thinking about what came next after this moment had just seemed like an impossible additional task.

She had telephoned Victor as soon as she had thought to do so, that first evening, at his home number, even before she tried to call Henry Gordon. When Annamarie had answered, Harriet had simply said, “I need to speak to Victor Marks,” and Annamarie had put the telephone down without another word and gone to get him. In that moment, Harriet first had the crazy notion that he wouldn’t be home because he was out with Anne, then could not believe that it was only twenty-four hours earlier that she had dialed the same number and listened to the same voice. What a difference a day makes.

Telling Victor, Harriet felt confused. She wanted to hurt him, but at the same time she knew that he was shocked, upset. The conversation had been over in a moment. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said. “Okay?” Harriet had no idea what they would talk about.

In fact, he hadn’t called, and they hadn’t spoken again. Harriet had next phoned the famous Miss Trout for assistance in locating Henry Gordon, and it was Miss Trout to whom Harriet had provided information on time and place for the funeral service. Miss Trout had assured her that she would personally prepare a memo that would go on every desk at UGP.

The people filing by and grasping Harriet’s hand treated her as Anne’s family, Anne’s chief mourner. Many of them approached Victor, who stood alone, and spoke to him in soft voices, discreetly acknowledging his loss. Harriet was numb, having wept through the Schubert, and the service, and could barely register the series of faces as they occurred before her. Most of them were from UGP, and a large group of them seemed to have come en masse and seemed to leave en masse. A tiny elderly woman had sat alone in the back, and Harriet had hoped to meet her; she had a kind face. But Harriet never saw her again, as she slipped out immediately after the service.

A short, stocky woman with an incipient mustache, wearing an incongruous straw boater, introduced herself to Harriet, and when Harriet didn’t recognize her name, the woman explained that she hadn’t known Anne, but was with a Mormon square-dancing group that had been in touch with Anne recently in the hope that she would join.

“We might have been able to help her,” the woman said sadly, and she pressed some pamphlets into Harriet’s hand.

Victor loitered in the aisle until he was one of the last. He shook Benedict’s hand and greeted him stiffly while Harriet endured the Mormon square dancer, and then he approached Harriet and put his arms around her. It was genuine; she could smell his grief. He felt old and brittle in his suit as she hugged him back. She had never realized how small Victor was.

“We mustn’t feel guilty, you and I,” Victor murmured in her ear. Harriet stiffened and pulled away from him. “Listen to me, Harriet,” Victor persisted. Benedict, who was talking politely with some woman, looked over, concerned. Harriet put up her hand to indicate that it was all right. “You could not have prevented Anne from taking her life,” continued Victor in her ear. He grasped her arm, almost as though he were feeling for a pulse, in precisely the spot Harriet knew his Auschwitz number was located on his own left arm. “Your
time with her may have prolonged the inevitable. Haven’t you realized that?”

“And why shouldn’t
you
feel guilty?” Harriet asked.

Victor smiled. He seemed genuinely amused at her question. He tightened his grip on her arm and led her partway up the aisle of the chapel, toward the open doors, beyond which lay Geneva going about its usual business in eye-blinking brightness. He stopped and turned to face her for one last moment.

“I should not feel guilty,” he explained, “because I do not believe in guilt.”

The musicians filed past Harriet with their instrument cases, each nodding to her. The last person in the chapel, other than Lucas, who lurked respectfully, was still talking to Benedict. She approached Harriet and introduced herself. It was Sonya Trout.

“I was very fond of Anne,” she said. “She was a lovely, lovely person. All of us at UGP are terribly sad at her passing away so unexpectedly.” Talking to Miss Trout, Harriet was able to stop her tears for the first time in hours. She wished she could report to Anne about this encounter. Miss Trout was wearing a beige suit. She carried gloves. Her shoes—she had hilariously enormous feet, like pontoons—were a matching beige. Her legs, Harriet noted automatically, were of the unfortunate English type that Gay called “beef to the heel.”

Miss Trout turned and gestured toward the front of the chapel. Two great bouquets of coral roses, for which Harriet had gone with Benedict to Place du Molard that morning, floated above their graceful glass bowls on either side of the apse. In front of the altar, there stood an enormous cylinder of artificial-looking white gladiolas. They had caught Harriet’s eye during the service, and underneath her paralyzing grief she had wondered about them.

“I selected the flowers. They’re from all of us at UGP.”

“Thank you,” Harriet said politely, making a mental note that Anne would have been as amused at Miss Trout’s declaration of fondness as she would have been appalled by the gladiolas. Miss Trout still seemed to have something more to say.

“I just want you to know,” she said, looking from Harriet to Benedict and then back to Harriet, “that whatever you may have heard, my relationship with Victor Marks is entirely platonic.”