The living are made of nothing but flaws. The dead, with each passing day in the afterlife, become more and more impeccable to those who remain earthbound.
— MAEVE DE JONG, LOVE AND OTHER FOLLIES OF
THE GREAT FAMILIES OF OLD NEW YORK
THE REVEREND’S DRONING HAD CEASED AND THE bagpipes had picked up. Henry’s eyes went skyward. The air was full of life, but he felt washed out inside and unsure what emotion belonged there. The crystalline blue above and delicate green of the leaves looked all wrong to him, as did the rich earth he’d just helped to shovel over the body of his father. The old man had always seemed so frightfully imposing to Henry — from the time he was a motherless boy hiding behind his governesses’ skirts until the day Schoonmaker the elder had insisted his son marry Elizabeth Holland or be disinherited. Now the father was powerless; he would soon be dust. They had never been close, and Henry knew that if anything he should feel as though an oppressive winter garment had suddenly been removed from his shoulders. But as he stood there, blinking at all those sympathetic faces, he began to feel that the summer sunlight was, bizarrely, rather cold.
A few days before, he had longed for Paris. Today he would have given anything to be there already, sleeping in Diana’s arms in some garret room where no one would think to search for him.
When he saw her, it required everything he had not to halt the Schoonmaker family’s ascent and go bury his face against her breast. She was standing there, petite and beautiful, her face even more rosy and gorgeous than usual against the black crepe dress she wore. A black ribbon, which held her hat in place, made a dramatic line under her small, pointed chin. Those soft brown eyes, protected by thickets of lashes, stared into his until he almost couldn’t bear it.
“It’s time to go,” said Penelope, at his side. She wore a fitted black dress and a hat of gleaming feathers, and yet she had been surprisingly subdued and dutiful all day. Henry glanced over at his best friend, Teddy Cutting, who was standing with the other pallbearers a little way off. This was one fact that Henry felt unalloyed gratitude for — that good old Teddy should have returned to New York just then. Later they would have a drink and set things right. Now, with a nod, he communicated to his friend that his mistress needed company, and then he took his stepmother’s arm, and began to move up the hill with the others. In a few moments he was accepting a final round of condolences from various business associates of his father, loitering by the family coach, who he, in truth, had difficulty distinguishing from one another.
“Henry,” Isabelle wailed, once they were situated in the coach. She blew her nose loudly into a black handkerchief. “Whatever will we do now?”
The horses were urged into motion; soon they would be making the long trip downtown via Broadway. He glanced behind him over his shoulder, through the small window in the back, at the hordes paying their last respects, and at the river, which glittered reflecting the afternoon sun. He had no idea what she should do now, and yet a strange voice — unfamiliar to him, and yet decidedly emanating from his own throat — said, “We are Schoonmakers. We will carry on.”
To his left, from Penelope’s general direction, came a barely audible snort. His sister, Prudence, sitting across, gave him an aggrieved and skeptical look.
“He was a man,” Isabelle went on, in the broken, awed voice of eulogy. “A great man. He was too good.”
Henry’s dark eyes glanced to his right, where his stepmother sat amidst an abundance of black crepe, her complexion gone pale as never before, her girlish yellow curls invisible under her hat and veil. Nobody had ever called his father too good, even without the heavy emphasis on the intensifier, not even when he was a child. He was surprised by the thought that perhaps Isabelle, who was after all a second wife of only a few years, who had not borne her husband any children, felt that her position in the family was vulnerable. There was something profoundly stricken in her aspect, and he decided after a moment’s reflection that it was more likely that she felt guilt for her romantic antics in the months before she became a widow.
Then her hat came off, and he realized for the first time how bizarre the heart is. For he could see, in her red eyes and ghostly pallor, that amongst whatever other emotions, she had, once upon a time, loved him, and that the memory of that lost affection would haunt her forever. “Oh, Henry, you must carry on. He had so many hopes for you. He talked of how his Henry was a Harvard man and how he would take over the family business and what a charmer he was”—here, Penelope snorted again, although the older Mrs. Schoonmaker paid her no mind—“and what a good representative of the family he would be, once he grew out of his wild stage.”
The carriage hit a bump in the road, and all four were jostled. Isabelle was thrown forward and then back against Henry, who could not have felt more shock if the carriage itself had sprouted wings and taken flight. He couldn’t remember a time when he was not painfully aware of his father’s dim view of his louche lifestyle, nor could he recall the old man offering him a single encouraging word. His stepmother, meanwhile, had rested her head against the breast of his black coat. “You will see,” she went on, her tears beginning to soak through to his shirt. “He was hard on you so that you could be great too, and you will learn in time that he was always right.”
Henry placed a hand on her tremulous shoulder, and tried to sit up, straight and powerful, as though he were trying on the part of the son his father had always wanted.