The Truth About Celia Read Online Free PDF

his daughter, or at least he is not ready to ceremonialize her: in his own way he has been memorializing her ever since she was born. When she was three she swallowed a button. When she was five she climbed a maple tree. When she was six she found a yellow jacket in her room, but she wouldn’t let him kill it. He had to capture it in a butter dish and set it free outside. He is standing in the living room, staring blankly out the window.
    Janet does not know which dress to wear to the service. She has inspected all of them, draping them over her body with the collar pinned under her chin and the sleeves trailing down her arms so that she looks in the mirror like a statue of Saint Francis blessing the animals. She has looked at each dress more than once—so many times, in fact, that they have become just so much fabric to her, a great illimitable ocean of fabric—and she is sitting on the floor now, paddling her hand through them like Celia used to do when she crawled beneath the carousels at the department store. She owns only two black dresses, both of them of the sexy little number variety, and while she would love to wear simply her blue jeans, softened to velvet from years of laundering, she knows that she cannot. She hears Christopher downstairs, shuffling into the kitchen and rinsing something out in the sink. It was only two weeks ago when he told her that the only reason she didn’t like James Agee’s
A Death in
the Family
was that she couldn’t stand to believe that the world was sad, and she told him that the only reason he didn’t like John Fowles’s
The Magus
was that he couldn’t stand to believe that the world was meaningless, and he said, But the world
is
sad, and she said, But the world
is
meaningless, or at least it can be, Christopher, and then somehow she ended up insisting that it was time to have a funeral—it had been four years, after all, it was something she needed, and if he wasn’t ready for a funeral, then surely he could allow her a simple memorial service, was that too much to ask? When the phone rings, she is briefly startled, as though someone has suddenly appeared in the room screaming. She does not remember when she began flinching at the sound of doorbells and telephones, at all the familiar announcements of company, only that she was different once, a few years ago. She answers the phone to the voice of Reverend Gautreaux, who says that he is just calling to see if she is ready for the ceremony tonight and to ask how she is holding up, but he has no advice to offer when she says that she can’t seem to find a proper dress.
    The Reverend tamps a cigarette quietly against his wrist-watch, flexing his toes in the cool deep carpet of the vestry. He tells Janet that if there is nothing else, he will see her this evening at the pavilion, the weather should be lovely, and if she needs any last-minute help before then, she can always find him here at the church. I should be okay until tonight, she says, and he tells her, Well, just in case, then. . . . After he hangs up, he lights his cigarette, smoking it quickly, furtively, and then lights and smokes a second one. He has told his new assistant, Miss Unwer, that he has already quit smoking, and he allows himself to hope, though never to pray, that he will finish before she discovers him. He has hidden a palm-sized fan in the wardrobe to loosen and disperse the smoke, but when he turns it on, it makes the angry, granular whine of a horsefly, and he does not like to use it. He can see the smoke hovering over him in a thin fog. He will be offering the eulogy tonight. He is a young man, only twenty-nine, barely out of seminary, and this is his first congregation. He notches his lighter into the empty cigarette packet and conceals it in a small inner drawer of the wardrobe atop a neat stack of other cigarette packets. He has two secrets, the lesser of which is his smoking habit, and the greater of which is this: he has been unable to pray