15
15 Mr. Wilgosch invited them over to watch the president’s funeral on his new color TV. She knew the kids should see it, should take part in the historic moment. It was a way to hang onto their handsome young president as long as possible. She joined them in the farmhouse’s shabby, dark living room, around the small screen that really did pull them all together into a common experience. Her eyes hurt as she watched, but she couldn’t cry. She could barely speak about Chris to anyone. She hadn’t told the children. All she could do was keep moving. “Man must endure his going hence, even as his coming hither,” she shouted to herself in the car, driving home that awful evening. Chris couldn’t endure, but Mary Leader had to. I have to. Despite grief barreling toward her one more time. Like a freight train. She didn’t plan to keep the news from the kids. She just couldn’t be the one to speak the words. Soon they found out, but in the rush of news about the assassination, there weren’t too many questions. “Be getting your own television one of these days?” Mr. Wilgosch teased her, and she snorted. The kids recognized her sound of dismissal : “Ptssh!” It certainly was interesting to watch this public event, and it drew folks together in an interesting way, to all be watching the funeral cortege. But usually the sight of someone watching TV—slack jawed, eyes glazed—did not look healthy to her. She didn’t want to see her and Jim’s kids looking like that. Childhood was for play, and high school was for learning, and spending hours gaping at a little blue box didn’t ‹t in one iota. Melina begged and Becky begged, but they knew it was no use. “When? When would you consider buying one?” Melina pushed her. “Eight,” said Mary. They groaned. “Eight what?” said Sean. “You can’t just have eight. Days? Years? Minutes?” “Eight.” They knew it was no use; they dropped it. She never retreated from “Eight,” nor elaborated on it. At night, blessed oblivion. She washed down a phenobarb from Dr. Bodamer with a gulp of room-temperature gin. Seagram’s in the bot142 tle with goosebumps on the shoulders was her favorite, sweet and spicy, not like swallowing knives. It tasted like juniper trees. She didn’t even go to Chris’s funeral mass, though she knew she ought to go visit Chris’s uncle. Take him some food. She drove by St. Mary’s of the Lake the afternoon of the mass, but she couldn’t bear to go in. Suicide was a mortal sin, she even believed that, and yet if Father dared to talk about sin—if he dared to mention sin, or hell, in connection with Chris Olivet—why, she’d have to walk out, or kill him. “The Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world,” the missal said, and sometimes Mary thought to herself, “And you priests bring it right back.” She remembered how it helped her to decide that despair was a sin. Yes, but it helped because I made the decision that I was in despair. I named the hour and date and ›avor of my sin. I came to it myself. It was some kind of decision I made; it can’t be made by someone else. Why doesn’t the church trust us one bit to be capable of . . . dear God in heaven, what’s the right word, growth? Discovering who we are? What Chris had done enraged her, just as Dr. B. had predicted would happen. Man must endure his going hence, and Chris could not endure it. Why couldn’t he ask for help? What was so terrible that someone, somewhere, couldn’t help? How could she go on, if every important friendship in her life was going to be so unpredictable, so painful, the very ›oor upended on her like this, broken into a thousand pieces when she needed it most? The day of his mass she drove to the church, then drove right on past. On impulse she went up to the bluff where Chris had destroyed himself. She looked at his last view. She parked and climbed down the cliff to the shore of Lake Michigan, and walked up the deserted beach. In the offshore wind, surf broke like a froth of dirty, frayed...
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