Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, Lydia Millet [top romance novels .txt] 📗

short and curly when the picture was taken, and his smile easy. He wore a suit and tie that clearly dated from the 1970s. Ann wondered if his mother had asked him to pose for the photograph, and if she had thought back then: One day I may need this when there is no more of him.

In the front pews the mourners seemed somber but not shocked, mourning but not grieving, except for a red-haired woman with freckles in the third pew, who sobbed.

The priest read, —Even so must the son of man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.

Increasingly Ann could not hear the priest because of the sound of the red-haired woman sobbing. The sobbing grew in volume till it was half-choked, raw and full of phlegm. It was so loud that other people were also prevented from hearing the words of the priest, and turned around and stared.

The woman finally stood up, quickly then, and scrambled out of the pew, banging along the row of seated mourners. She was bowing to their disapproval by leaving, Ann could feel it, but even in leaving they could not let her be: the awkwardness of her progress along the jutting row of knees drew scorn. There was a very soft murmur of irritation as she bumped along the knees, almost imperceptible. She ran past Ann and Ben, alone at the back, and let the heavy doors slam behind her.

Later Ben was talking to Eugene’s mother on the receiving line—he had one of her hands in both of his and was leaning in close over her small white head, listening—when Ann’s eyes strayed over the floral arrangements to a stained-glass window, purple and pink with white lilies on an emerald-green bank. She did not like it, she was thinking, she did not like the colors of Easter on the window because they were the colors of pre-filled Easter baskets at the drugstore, bursting with chemical additives beneath their plastic wraps. She did not like the stylized, curving lilies: they projected a clinical, professional indifference, and the light they let through was a feeble, trapped light.

Then she noticed something behind the lilies: the moving silhouette of a man’s hat over hunched shoulders.

She excused herself and slipped outside, walking in a hurry around the corner of the church to the window. There was no one there, only a gate that prevented her from going further and a ragged, weathered wooden fence topped with barbed wire, up close to the building’s back wall. It ran beneath the window just a few inches from the crumbling adobe brick. Behind it were some rusted oil barrels, lying on their sides on the ground, a hub cap, and a waterlogged pile of colorful beach towels. There, on a rising wrinkle sticking out of the earth, was the face of Minnie Mouse streaked with dirt. There too was a smiling turtle.

But not enough room for a man to pass.

She thought she must have made a mistake: there must be several windows with lilies on them, behind which a man in a hat could have walked. She gazed past the oil barrels into a stand of pines, and saw nothing moving, not even the trees. It was still. Maybe the shape of the man had been a fluke of angles and sunlight, a shadow cast from far away.

Back inside she walked along the windows, but there was no other window with lilies. She did not know why it mattered to her that a man in a hat might have walked past the window.

Ben was still talking to Eugene’s mother when she slipped back inside, or rather she was talking to him. After a while he clasped her hand and walked toward Ann. He had never met Mrs. Lopez before, Ann was thinking, and in all probability he would never see her again, but watching his face as he came nearer she recalled him telling her once that all grief was the same.

He had been weeding her yard while she read on a lawn chair. She had found him in the phonebook. Surrounded by what she knew, the gentle slope of the hill behind her house, the pale-green bluster of chuparosa bushes, snakeweed and grass, he was swallowed by home, he was natural there.

She herself held a paperback, a dog-eared, doleful Russian novel in which a gloomy family marched steadily toward death.

Despite this she kept smiling.

Later he commented on the book. He said the book had it wrong, that it was not happy families who were all the same and unhappy families who were different but the reverse.

And a while after that he had uprooted a spindly, homely plant with minute yellow flowers the size of pinheads, and held it out to her.

—These are called London Rockets, he went on softly. —They’re an invasive exotic. As the name suggests they came from the Old World, all the way across the ocean. They never evolved here. They’re tourists.

That night, lying awake, she had repeated “invasive exotic” to herself. She had repeated even “as the name suggests.” She called him again the next morning and he said it was a relief to hear from her, because he had thought about it at some length and decided the yard was not finished.

It might not be finished for years, he said.

And now he came walking toward her leaving the frail mother behind the flowers and the photograph, and a white-gray light streaming through the Easter window.

The room was almost empty by then.

The same night she curled into the fetal position and he held her cold toes in his hands to make them warm. They were lying in bed and she told him about the dream of the atom bomb, the squirrel, and her mother as a young girl. Days or weeks had passed since the dream, enough for her to forget how long it had been. She did not tell him she suspected herself of being