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barely seen for the next thirteen, despite the three children they shared?
    He looked awful, and somehow that pleased me. It meant he must have loved her a great deal, and I’d often wondered. He looked ten years older. Maybe they had never stopped loving each other. Maybe he was the last thing she thought about.
    We were in the master bedroom, gracefully filled with Pamela’s antique French furniture, which had just arrived from Paris to replace the simpler hotel stock. Everywhere was the heavy scent of Rigaud candles and warm lighting, Pamela’s trademarks; she always used pink light bulbs instead of white. In the dead of winter masses of fresh flowers were always in place on every surface. There was some discussion of Bridget and Bill. Bill had said on the telephone that he didn’t have a dark suit or any money—he was flying in from Topeka the next day and wanted to buy the suitthere. I said I wanted to go to New Haven to see my stepfather. Father said that was a bum idea, he absolutely forbade it; Kenneth had been calling every half hour and had some terrible plan to cremate Mother and have us all there while a service was said during the cremation; it sounded to him as if Kenneth had really gone crazy, and as my father, he was going to insist that all three of us children stay in the apartment with Pamela and him for the next few days until the memorial service, which was obviously going to take place whether or not there was some depressing service over her body while it was in the oven. Did I have any idea how morbid it would be to go up there to witness a cremation? Absolutely nuts, as if Bridget and Bill weren’t headed enough in that direction anyway.
    “But, Father,” I argued, “Kenneth has nobody, no family there with him at all. Maybe he
is
desperate, and after all he’s my stepfather and he’s been good to me—”
    “Brooke,” interjected Pamela, “did you know there is a good possibility that your mother killed herself?”
    I was very tired. “No, she didn’t, Pamela. Kenneth said on the phone that it was her heart; it had been bothering her.”
    “She was very unhappy, very unhappy with the play. Sometimes these things are for the best. If she were that disturbed—”
    “She couldn’t have killed herself. Of all the people in the world, she’d be the last—right, Father?”
    Father was silent.
    I answered myself. “It’s out of the question. Impossible. She had too many people who meant too much to her.” Me, I thought, Kenneth, Jeff, Willie, Bridget, Bill …
    Pamela had an indescribably sweet tone to her voice, an understanding smile. Patiently, as to a child: “She wasn’t feeling well, Brooke, and she may have taken an overdose of sleeping pills.” Was there no end to the horror? She had never even
met
Mother; there was something obscene about
her
telling me that Mother was dead, that she had killed herself, that she was unhappy, that one should be philosophical about these things; dangerous instincts began to rouse themselves and sniff at my heels like bloodhounds and it was too late to call them off. No aspect of this was any of Pamela’s business and no rationalization could make it so. If Father was incapable of dealing with the situation, that was tough as far as he and I were concerned, but the last thingI’d asked for was the insinuation of an outsider, particularly a lady who was working too hard at becoming my next stepmother, replacing the last one, of whom I was very fond and would have given anything to have seen standing there in her stead.
    The telephone rang, galvanizing Father into the kind of action in which he was most comfortable.
    “Josh, hello.… Ya, ya, this is a real bitch.” (Father had his own personal affirmative, never yes or yeah but ya, which he barked instead of spoke.) “No, we don’t know yet. Hello, Nedda, darling.… No, the kids are all fine. Brooke is here and the other two arrive tomorrow.… Ya, I definitely think a memorial