impressions revealing more about the speakers than about the subject. I sat staring at the television picture for a long time. Tony Martin was singing “I Hear a Rhapsody.”
I finally padded on down the hallway to go to bed. Someone had slipped a small envelope under my door. Sighing aloud from weariness, I picked it up. It was a note from Harriet Dierker on paper with a. Raggedy Ann doll smiling in one corner. Larry Blankenship was being buried in the morning and she thought I might want to attend the graveside service. She gave me the details. She was a presumptuous little woman. But I went to bed, eschewing my baseball researches, and before I slept I decided I’d better attend.
Larry Blankenship’s funeral was a peculiarly tearless affair and had something about it of an old fraternity meeting, something musty like the feel of Pa Dierker’s handshake. It took me awhile to catch the falsity of it; it was a breezy, cool morning with the treetops rustling in the characteristic solemn hush of the cemetery. Past the various gray marble gravestones, past the trees and the iron fence, cars sped along a parkway but they were soundless, gliding.
I had gotten to the cemetery early while the other mourners were at the church. Standing on top of a gentle knoll, with a huge elm rustling overhead, I leaned on a very old, cracked marker and watched the hearse lead the small parade through the high gate, around the reflecting pool, and along the path of finely crushed pinkish gravel. There weren’t many cars following the black Cadillac hearse but they were all top of the line: Mark IV’s, Cadillacs, Mercedes. For a guy who never quite made it, who was such a persistent loser, Blankenship had very tony friends.
I’m not sure who I thought would be there. But it didn’t take a genius to identify them, particularly having had access to my father’s photograph albums. One at a time they emerged from their automobiles, stood blinking in the sunshine before moving off across the green.
Father Martin Boyle arrived in the midnight-blue Cadillac limousine driven by another priest, doubtless Father Patulski, his housemate. Boyle was round, rolled when he walked, stumping a bit with the aid of a blackthorn stick, knobbed and lethal-looking. His gout must have been bothering him. His thin hair, red still glittering through the gray, blew silky in the wind and wraparound dark glasses hid his eyes. He plodded toward the open grave with its mound of moist dark earth.
The Dierkers came next in their Mercedes sedan. Pa shambled on the grass and Ma, birdlike, held his arm, steadying him. He looked pale, a sick man with his sickness accentuated by the string tie which seemed to be part of the uniform the gravebound habitually affected. His suit hung obscenely, like loose flesh, a skin about to be shucked. His wife looked like his keeper.
James Crocker, still giving off the illusion of fitness regardless of his heart troubles, drove himself in a gunmetal-gray Mark IV. He was wearing a dark-blue suit, carefully shaped, the vanity of an old athlete. His hair was silvery, wavey, thick; his glasses were heavy black plastic. He spoke briefly to Pa Dierker, then fell in beside the two priests. He looked fit enough to climb up and man a bulldozer himself; I’d have bet he spent a good deal of his time in a hard hat where the buildings were coming down and the buildings were going up.
General Goode looked very little changed from the old days when he’d learned I was going to Scandinavia and had asked me to deliver a package in a village not far from Helsinki. For a long time I’d thought him an evil, perverse man, and then I’d undergone some slippage. Perhaps he’d been as much a victim as I. But it had taken a great many nights with the baseball-record books to get rid of the picture of the old man dying.
Now Jon Goode was walking toward the gravesite looking almost unchanged; medium height but looking taller because of the formality of
I finally padded on down the hallway to go to bed. Someone had slipped a small envelope under my door. Sighing aloud from weariness, I picked it up. It was a note from Harriet Dierker on paper with a. Raggedy Ann doll smiling in one corner. Larry Blankenship was being buried in the morning and she thought I might want to attend the graveside service. She gave me the details. She was a presumptuous little woman. But I went to bed, eschewing my baseball researches, and before I slept I decided I’d better attend.
Larry Blankenship’s funeral was a peculiarly tearless affair and had something about it of an old fraternity meeting, something musty like the feel of Pa Dierker’s handshake. It took me awhile to catch the falsity of it; it was a breezy, cool morning with the treetops rustling in the characteristic solemn hush of the cemetery. Past the various gray marble gravestones, past the trees and the iron fence, cars sped along a parkway but they were soundless, gliding.
I had gotten to the cemetery early while the other mourners were at the church. Standing on top of a gentle knoll, with a huge elm rustling overhead, I leaned on a very old, cracked marker and watched the hearse lead the small parade through the high gate, around the reflecting pool, and along the path of finely crushed pinkish gravel. There weren’t many cars following the black Cadillac hearse but they were all top of the line: Mark IV’s, Cadillacs, Mercedes. For a guy who never quite made it, who was such a persistent loser, Blankenship had very tony friends.
I’m not sure who I thought would be there. But it didn’t take a genius to identify them, particularly having had access to my father’s photograph albums. One at a time they emerged from their automobiles, stood blinking in the sunshine before moving off across the green.
Father Martin Boyle arrived in the midnight-blue Cadillac limousine driven by another priest, doubtless Father Patulski, his housemate. Boyle was round, rolled when he walked, stumping a bit with the aid of a blackthorn stick, knobbed and lethal-looking. His gout must have been bothering him. His thin hair, red still glittering through the gray, blew silky in the wind and wraparound dark glasses hid his eyes. He plodded toward the open grave with its mound of moist dark earth.
The Dierkers came next in their Mercedes sedan. Pa shambled on the grass and Ma, birdlike, held his arm, steadying him. He looked pale, a sick man with his sickness accentuated by the string tie which seemed to be part of the uniform the gravebound habitually affected. His suit hung obscenely, like loose flesh, a skin about to be shucked. His wife looked like his keeper.
James Crocker, still giving off the illusion of fitness regardless of his heart troubles, drove himself in a gunmetal-gray Mark IV. He was wearing a dark-blue suit, carefully shaped, the vanity of an old athlete. His hair was silvery, wavey, thick; his glasses were heavy black plastic. He spoke briefly to Pa Dierker, then fell in beside the two priests. He looked fit enough to climb up and man a bulldozer himself; I’d have bet he spent a good deal of his time in a hard hat where the buildings were coming down and the buildings were going up.
General Goode looked very little changed from the old days when he’d learned I was going to Scandinavia and had asked me to deliver a package in a village not far from Helsinki. For a long time I’d thought him an evil, perverse man, and then I’d undergone some slippage. Perhaps he’d been as much a victim as I. But it had taken a great many nights with the baseball-record books to get rid of the picture of the old man dying.
Now Jon Goode was walking toward the gravesite looking almost unchanged; medium height but looking taller because of the formality of
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