Sympathy

The occasion was so miserable and had weighed on her so heavily for the days since the death, that the rain didn’t surprise her. It was cold rain with an extra wind that teased the hem of her long skirt. She should have worn boots. She should have worn a heavy petticoat. The church was across town, and she went to the curb, sticking her reluctant arm into the wind and wet to signal a cab, if one existed.

But one did. An old, fat Checker cab, the kind she loved from childhood, waddled into the puddle in front of her and stopped carefully, it seemed, so that it shouldn’t splash her. She opened the door and let herself fall into the cab, onto the cracked leatherette seat that had been repaired neatly with tape in a similar shade of brown. She laid her umbrella by the base of the jump seat, her bag beside her, around—in the Thirties. Or lower Forties. That’s all I know.”

“Don’t worry, lady. I know the one you want.”

Through the clouded plastic boundary, she could see his license, but only that it was there, and the back of his head. He wasn’t very tall. His name had a lot of letters in it.

From the window of the cab, deep against the back of the seat, the rain didn’t look so bad. She had thought in the last week that if the weather would only hurry up and be spring that her friend might rally again. He would be able to eat and could put a gentle layer of fat between this thin skin and his hard bones, he would be able to hold his own spoon to his mouth to sip first soups and then mushy solid foods, and then the day would come when he would leave the hospital, leaning forward to get out of the requisite wheelchair, and at the door he would stand on his own two feet and lift his head and smell the air like his dog whom he loved, and he’d say—something funny and gallant. He hadn’t been gallant before his illness, or if he had she hadn’t noticed. It had occurred to her also in the last week that it had been so long an illness, punctuated by rallies and retreats so often that maybe he should die since die was what he must do sooner or later, and being dead might be better than this. She had confided her thought in no one and when he did die one morning between friends at eleven a.m., she had tried to forgive herself and to say that she was just so tired.

“Mass?”

“I beg your pardon?” She hadn’t been called Miss in years.

“There’s a good quick Mass at Our Saviour this time of day. My dad used to drive us across Brooklyn to find the quickest Mass. Force of habit, finding the quick ones.”

“It’s a memorial service of some kind. I don’t know. I’m not Catholic. I didn’t have anything to do with this.”

Churches made her nervous. It wasn’t that her friend had been so religious, but he was a person of curiosity and when he admitted his illness was fatal he started to bone up on it, buying books that ranged from Why Bad Things Happen to Good People to pamphlets he found God knows where with important sections in bold; and, of course, biographies of stars who’d had various diseases. Along with researching the afterlife, he tried to read his way back to health with books that encouraged him to decide that he just wouldn’t have any of that death stuff the doctors were shoving down his throat. When his eyes faltered, he went back to his childhood religion which it seemed had been waiting for him all the time. Out of nowhere popped numbers of friends who’d been Catholic all along or who had just returned to the Church. It was they who were organizing the service.

“Won’t be...