Twenty-two

While Petra takes Adele to school, Ben and Suzanne sit at the table with their coffee, Suzanne with a bowl of cereal. She has given Ben a plate with sliced banana and red globe grapes, figuring maybe he can eat fruit, but he pushes even that aside. He tells her she doesn’t have to go to the funeral.

“I want to,” she says, meaning it, “but my contract is pretty unforgiving, and performance night is almost here. I’m going to talk to Anthony. I want to come.”

Today the quartet breaks from preparing the Black Angels and works on the Haydn quartet it will play during the concert’s first half. Sometimes Suzanne regrets advocating for the piece; at other times it feels right. Today it feels like shelter, a building she knows and needs, a place to be.

The quartet plays well, each of them and the four together. It is one of those days on which years of practice distill into a clean energy and the work seems easier than it is. When the last notes are played, rehearsal disbanded, and her viola back in its case, the shock and sadness of Charlie’s death return, streaming into the whirlpool of Suzanne’s other emotions—her grief for Alex, her fear of Olivia, her delight at Ben’s successful premiere, her sorrow that his moment of triumph was undercut so immediately by his brother’s death.

When Suzanne talks to Anthony, he proves surprisingly human: he tells her she should go to Charleston, practice schedule be damned.

“If I missed a family funeral,” he says, moving their stands to the wall, leaving the room in the condition they promised, “Jennifer would have me bullwhipped in Palmer Square.”

Suzanne picks up the water bottle Petra has left by her chair and sets it by her purse. “So you know that about her?”

“More than anyone, believe me.” He brushes his trousers with the palms of his hands, wiping off chalk and rosin dust. “Which isn’t to say that I’m unhappily married. We all have our arrangements—give up this to get that. I know you guys don’t like her, but Jennifer helps make me who I am, and I love her for it.”

“Thank you, Anthony.”

“Don’t tell anyone I’m going soft. I wouldn’t send you off if we weren’t ready for the performance, and I don’t want Petra and Daniel thinking they have a license to sleep all day.”

Petra is lurking outside and startles Suzanne as she emerges from the subterranean practice room. The day is overcast but weirdly bright, and the buildings and trees are gray outlines against a metallic sky.

“Is he all right?” she asks.

“Yeah, he’s being great, actually. Told me to go to the funeral.”

“No, Ben. Is Ben all right?”

Suzanne shrugs. “I suppose. Inasmuch as he’s ever all right.” She is thinking that he cried in front of her for the first time, wondering if it will be the only time. It has made her want to protect him, even from Petra’s curiosity.

“Tell him I’m sorry.” Petra hugs her suddenly.

Suzanne steps back and hands Petra her discarded water bottle. “You can tell him.”

“Sorry for you, too. I know you liked Charlie a lot.”

When they get home, she tells Petra she’s going to lie down for a few minutes and then pack a bag for Charleston, but instead she searches for the shell that Charlie gave her at Folly Beach. She is surprised when she remembers that she put it in her box of Alex mementos. Her box of souvenirs has become a coffin, containing reminders of only the dead.

She holds the shell in her hand as they enter Charleston, Ben pressing their car slowly into a downtown clotted with summer tourists. Their route takes them past the location of one of her worst professional memories: the night she played the Grand Canyon Suite as a Jaguar was raffled. But it also takes her through more pleasant memory terrain, including the theater where she played in the small orchestra for a theatrical event at another year’s Spoleto festival. They’d had fun, the group seated behind thick black netting, visible only partially to the audience, only to the first few rows, playing music that was easy yet not uninteresting, music that was fun. Before and after, they’d sit outside in the warm breeze, listening to the stage performers speak Chinese, watching them warm up for their contortions, legs behind their heads, cigarettes hanging from their dry lips.

She unfolds her hand, uses one palm to press the shell into the flesh of the other until it hurts, and then examines the temporary imprint.

As much as she wishes they could stay at a hotel—guesses, even, that Ben’s mother would prefer it—it is not possible to suggest. And Ben’s sister now occupies the house she and Ben once lived in, the one intended to be a home for their child. Morbidly—she knows this—she wonders what happened to the mattress she stained with blood, the only physical evidence that her child existed.

She speaks kindly but minimally to her mother-in-law, who has put herself together with clothes and makeup but whose face reveals something broken inside. Sometimes, when she closes her mouth, her upper and lower lips don’t quite line up, and she does not rearrange them. Her stare has gone sideways, too, but still she manages to look at Suzanne with disapproval.

Suzanne determines to fold herself into something small and quiet, to be helpful but not fully there. She keeps their belongings neatly stored in the guest bedroom, tidies the gardens outside when Ben’s mother is inside and the kitchen when Ben’s mother steps into the yard. Blameless, she thinks; she wants to be blameless.

The days after her mother’s death were a span of too much food, of neighbors and friends and distant cousins she’d never heard of bearing casseroles and pies and muffins and fruit salads—far more than one grieving person could eat, dishes that spoiled, leaving Suzanne later to thaw and eat the posthumous food her mother had cooked for the freezer. At Ben’s house, it is different. Despite his mother’s standing in local society, her membership in a church, her many clubs, there are few visitors. Flowers arrive in florists’ delivery vans, filling both the house and the funeral home with expensive arrangements, but people do not arrive with them, and no one brings food except Ben’s sister, who has stopped by a bakery. Suzanne cooks some simple dishes to have on hand and slips out to a sandwich shop for a platter in case people do show up.

Ben moves about his childhood home, seeking empty rooms and not eating at all.

At night Suzanne stares at the floral wallpaper, the matching bedspread, the beads hanging from the reading lamp. Ben stares at the ceiling.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“What’s okay?”

She turns to him. “I have no idea. Stupid question.”

“I’m okay.” He turns off the lamp, and the room turns powdery with only the pale summer-night light that slides through a gap in the heavy brocade curtains.

The funeral is efficient. That’s how Suzanne thinks of the short service at the Episcopal church—family and parental friends in the front few pews, Charlie’s beach pals in the back. Suzanne touches the closed casket, which is shiny enough to return her own image, stained burgundy and perfected as if airbrushed.

She remembers the time she complained about the Grand Canyon Suite and the raffle. Ben’s mother said musicians shouldn’t gripe about efforts to enlarge their audience. “You’ll never make a living if no one comes. Maybe playing music people want to hear is a good thing.” Charlie smirked and said, “And what about your church, Mother? Should the priest tell people what they want to hear, soften its stance on adultery to increase its audience?” Her face tightened as she told him it wasn’t the same thing at all. “To them it might be the same thing, a kind of infidelity,” Charlie answered, and Suzanne didn’t even bother to mask her smile.

Now she sees tears in her reflection and pulls back her hand from the casket’s cool, hard surface, wishing she had been as good a friend to Charlie as he had been to her, wishing she had been more alert. Her sin, she thinks, is not adultery but self-absorption, of cutting herself apart from the people she is supposed to love, the people she does love. It’s what Petra was trying to tell her.

The service is followed by a scattering of ashes from a small rented yacht.

“He would want to be in the ocean,” Suzanne whispers to Ben, holding his arm, trying to say and do the right thing.

Overhearing, Ben’s sister says, “He would want to be with our father. This is where our father is.”

“Of course.” Suzanne mutes her voice. “That’s part of what I meant.”

Ben’s mother joins them at the prow on the way back to shore. With her regal stature, she reminds Suzanne, just a little, of Olivia. Or, more accurate: she reminds her of Olivia come unhinged. Though her lipstick is perfectly applied, the mouth underneath still sits crooked, makes her frightening.

“Such a terrible, terrible accident,” she says. “I know he would have found the right kind of woman if this hadn’t happened. Then he would have been all right. He still could have done so much in life. He would have had children and a business, everything a man’s supposed to have.”

Suzanne is still not certain of the surrounding details—she has not wanted to pressure Ben—but she knows that Charlie took his head off with a shotgun and that his mother has not cried in front of anyone.

Ben walks away from them and stands alone at the back of the boat, looking out to the sea that holds the remains of the only other men in his family. Suzanne faces the curvature of the shoreline, the wind off the ocean buffeting her back, her hair lashing her face in irritating strands. The sounds of wind and wave and fluttering sail meld into a single wail, its tone at first cello-like and then giving way to a plaintive bassoon and finally the sound of sea from a shell. In that moment, Suzanne hears the very sound of grief.