Eden Close Read Online Free PDF Page B

She was
the only woman there who wore a veil—a hat with a black veil from another era, even in the heat. The other women—women from the Ladies Guild, wives of dairymen—wore sleeveless summer dresses and stood in clumps, stooped, their necks bowed by what seemed to be the thickening of old age between their shoulder blades. Yet she stood erect and alone, in black, the only one there to wear that color. Not family, yet nearly that, the geographical accident of being the only neighbor having given her the status, almost, of a sister.
    When he had spoken to her on the phone the night of his mother's death, she was, as she had always been, reserved with him—even if, on this occasion, for a sentence or two, a trace of something softer crept into her voice—and he found he could not call her anything but Mrs. Close, as he had since he was a boy. But at the burial, after the funeral, aware of her presence for the first time that day, he looked up and saw that she was watching him. She looked away quickly, and he remembers her standing on the hill, gazing out over the gravestones, beyond the iron fence, listening but not bowing to the prayers. He thought, or felt, how distant she had always been, even before the shooting. She seemed more fragile than he had, as a boy, known her to be—but though he knows she must be in her mid-sixties, she had at the burial the bearing of a younger woman, a bearing some women never achieve.
    After the burial, everyone returned to the church. It had been arranged without Andrew's knowledge. There was coffee in a large green metal urn and brownies and cookies someone had baked,
refreshments,
a woman he didn't know whispered softly, touching his arm on the hill. When his father died, his mother had provided food at home, and he had thought then how macabre it was to entertain, to eat, so soon after you had put a man into the earth. He himself had had no appetite for days after his father's burial, as he has none now and didn't at the church today.
    There were old worn green velvet drapes up on a stage and a portrait of Jesus on a wall. Metal chairs were unfolded and placed near the table with the food, as if for a children's dance. He stood benumbed, not from grief but from strangeness. People came and said soft things to him and moved away and chatted with more animation, out of his hearing, to each other. It was the strangeness of being in a room that you had known overwell as a child and that hadn't changed in any detail but now seemed as unfamiliar as death.
    She came up to him and explained:
The guild thought you wouldn't want the trouble.
He understood that they saw him now as a bachelor again. She was still wearing the veil, and he couldn't clearly see her eyes. He wanted, almost maliciously, to walk out, for he thought, with a slight irritation, that someone could at least have asked him if he wanted this, but the impulse passed. It was right, he remembers thinking, that she should stand with him; she was as strange in that place as he was.
    He looks at the clock over the sink. It reads twelve-fifty. He thinks he might have to resort to the sleeping pill after all, but then remembers that he can't; he's had the brandy.
    He looks out the door in the direction of the Close farmhouse, but he can't even perceive its outlines. There are no lights on anywhere—not even the faint glow of a night-light. Somewhere upstairs, he knows, Eden is lying on a bed or sitting in a chair, the darkness irrelevant to her.
    Â 
    A FTER HIS mother had asked
Where's Edith?
they stood together, waiting. Andy had his hands in the pockets of his shorts; his mother had her arms wrapped around his elbow. Andy knew it had to be Mr. Close who was hurt; how else could there have been that awful crying? A policeman opened the back door and called to two others. Andy, straining, could hear bits of grunts and breathless sentences. "...is talking now ... medium height, a mask, yellow shirt, she's