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from religiously indifferent backgrounds, nominally Jewish, effectually disinterested. Even their political causes and charitable interests had been nonsectarian; they had never supported Zionism or the Temple or the B’nai Brith.
    But in the end Jack had telephoned someone and got the name of a rabbi.
    They did it because it was the easiest solution and because Esther had always been comforted by ceremony. “It’s the least we can do,” Jack had said somewhat obscurely—what more could be done for her now?—and Paul had acquiesced because he had no reason to object, and no energy for dispute.
    You preserved a modicum of sanity only because there were so many idiotic decisions you had to make. When was the funeral to take place? The burial? Whom should you ask to attend? In the end he found that the funeral director took care of most of the details and the rest sorted itself out: their closer friends telephoned, and after accepting their condolences with as much grace as he could produce, Paul told them the services would be held Friday at two-thirty, gave them the address of the funeral home and listened numbly to their repeated expressions of sympathy.
    Still he was surprised by the number of people who put in appearances. The rabbi, who had never met Esther, spoke briefly from a simple dais in a chapel-room in the mortuary. His remarks were dutiful and innocuous; afterward they all went out onto the curb on Amsterdam Avenue and there was a fairly well directed confusion of finding seats in limousines and organizing the vehicles of the cortege in the proper order. Sam Kreutzer and Bill Dundee stopped on the way to their cars to touch Paul on the arm and speak murmured words. Several people from the office were there and he was surprised to see a client here—George Eng, the Chinese executive vice-president of Amercon, with whom he and Kreutzer had lunched Tuesday.
    Two couples from their apartment house came; and there were various cousins and nephews and nieces from Manhattan and Queens; and Esther’s sister-in-law from Syracuse, representing Esther’s brother Myron who had a minor diplomatic post in Malaysia and had been unable to come. He had, however, sent the largest of the floral arrangements.
    Paul found himself standing at the graveside cataloguing the attendance as if there were some point giving good marks to those among their acquaintances who had chosen to appear here.
    The casket had been closed from the outset; there had been no viewing. Paul had not seen her since he had left the apartment Tuesday morning; she had been following the vacuum cleaner from room to room. He felt no desire to view her remains and had suffered impatiently through the “mortuary scientist’s” obsequious explanations of why it would be best to do it this way. Boiled down it amounted to the fact that she had been mauled badly by the attackers and the autopsy surgeons had cut her up considerably, and while it was possible for the morticians to put her back together, it would be expensive and unsightly. On the way out of that meeting Paul had been surprised when Jack had made a bitter remark about “plastic surgery on the dead”; it was not Jack’s usual tone, it betrayed his strain. Throughout the week Paul had been quite alert to other people’s behavior, he had observed their reactions to the events without ever wholly observing his own. It was as if reaction was still to come: he existed in a hiatus of emotion, waiting for the explosion or the crash or the tears, whichever it was to be. He half expected to go off like a Roman candle.
    Jack stood beside Carol, holding her arm. Carol was stiff in protest against all of it. Like her father she had not yet come out of it; unlike him she had withdrawn into an obvious shell. Her eyes windowed resentment more than anything else. She looked terrible, he thought: she stood with a caved-in posture, her hair hung damp and heavy