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Authors: Brunonia Barry
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almost floor-to-ceiling Tiffany windows, which cast a film of ashy rose over the interior, making everything look beautiful, if slightly surreal. The church has the kind of stark elegance found only in this part of the New World.
We sit off to the side in the Whitney box, with its horsehair cushions and dusty velvet covers, once a deep wine color, now a crushed, fraying pink. The seats in the center of the church have been restored, and that is where the congregation sits. Even today, when it is so crowded that people are forced to stand in the back, the only box open is ours. This is probably due to liability issues rather than segregation, but it seems somehow to be a way of setting us apart from the crowd. Because we face the people and not the pulpit, it feels as if we’re sitting in a display case. I see people stealing glances at us when they think we’re not looking. Maybe that always happens at funer-The Lace Reader 57
als, those looks, maybe it happens all the time, but the families never notice because they’re facing forward, looking at the coffin and not the congregation.
Already it’s almost ninety degrees outside. “Too early for this,”
I hear one woman say as she comes in. Her tone is mildly accusing, and I turn around to see who she’s talking to, but it’s a general comment meant for no one in particular, or maybe for God, whose house this is supposed to be. It’s as if she’s documenting something, going on record. People do that in this part of the country—they register weather extremes the same way they balance their checkbooks, making sure they get credit for everything and don’t incur any charges that don’t belong to them, as if the weather itself were controlled and obliged to produce a finite and determinable number of hot, snowy, or rainy days that must not be exceeded. The church is filled with women, all wearing hats and linen sundresses, almost southern-looking, out of place here against the cold stone architecture. My eye is drawn to the center of the church and a group of women, each one dressed in a different shade of purple and wearing a red hat. These are Eva’s regulars at the tea shop, a group she considered friends.
People fan themselves when they first come in, using whatever they can find: a sun hat, a program from last Sunday that has fallen to the floor. Their sighs are audible. The stone church is not airconditioned but holds the dank feeling of a New England fieldstone cellar, damp and cool, with a memory scent of apples from last fall’s Harvest Days and spruce left over from Christmas. The people get calmer as they finally begin to cool down; they stop fanning and fidgeting. There are even some momentary smiles of recognition tossed back and forth and then covered with the more appropriate somber demeanor. “Try to act as if you’re wearing black,” I once heard a Hollywood director say to one of his actors. That’s what these people are doing.
58 Brunonia
Barry
The only people who actually are wearing black are the witches, but they wear black all year. They are also the only ones who are not treating this as a solemn occasion. They talk quietly among themselves, greeting others as they come in. Death isn’t the same for the witches, Eva told me once; she said it was because they don’t attach the prospect of eternal damnation to it.
Dr. Ward gives the eulogy. He talks about Eva’s good works, about all the people she helped. “People are defined, finally, by the good works they do.” He runs through a list of Eva’s works, things I never knew about my aunt, things she might have boasted about if she’d been another type of person. I realize the selfishness of children. We love them, and we revolve around their universes, but they don’t revolve around ours. I left here when I was a child, and in some ways I haven’t grown up yet. That I didn’t know these things about my aunt speaks to that fact. I feel sorry about that as I sit here. I
We sit off to the side in the Whitney box, with its horsehair cushions and dusty velvet covers, once a deep wine color, now a crushed, fraying pink. The seats in the center of the church have been restored, and that is where the congregation sits. Even today, when it is so crowded that people are forced to stand in the back, the only box open is ours. This is probably due to liability issues rather than segregation, but it seems somehow to be a way of setting us apart from the crowd. Because we face the people and not the pulpit, it feels as if we’re sitting in a display case. I see people stealing glances at us when they think we’re not looking. Maybe that always happens at funer-The Lace Reader 57
als, those looks, maybe it happens all the time, but the families never notice because they’re facing forward, looking at the coffin and not the congregation.
Already it’s almost ninety degrees outside. “Too early for this,”
I hear one woman say as she comes in. Her tone is mildly accusing, and I turn around to see who she’s talking to, but it’s a general comment meant for no one in particular, or maybe for God, whose house this is supposed to be. It’s as if she’s documenting something, going on record. People do that in this part of the country—they register weather extremes the same way they balance their checkbooks, making sure they get credit for everything and don’t incur any charges that don’t belong to them, as if the weather itself were controlled and obliged to produce a finite and determinable number of hot, snowy, or rainy days that must not be exceeded. The church is filled with women, all wearing hats and linen sundresses, almost southern-looking, out of place here against the cold stone architecture. My eye is drawn to the center of the church and a group of women, each one dressed in a different shade of purple and wearing a red hat. These are Eva’s regulars at the tea shop, a group she considered friends.
People fan themselves when they first come in, using whatever they can find: a sun hat, a program from last Sunday that has fallen to the floor. Their sighs are audible. The stone church is not airconditioned but holds the dank feeling of a New England fieldstone cellar, damp and cool, with a memory scent of apples from last fall’s Harvest Days and spruce left over from Christmas. The people get calmer as they finally begin to cool down; they stop fanning and fidgeting. There are even some momentary smiles of recognition tossed back and forth and then covered with the more appropriate somber demeanor. “Try to act as if you’re wearing black,” I once heard a Hollywood director say to one of his actors. That’s what these people are doing.
58 Brunonia
Barry
The only people who actually are wearing black are the witches, but they wear black all year. They are also the only ones who are not treating this as a solemn occasion. They talk quietly among themselves, greeting others as they come in. Death isn’t the same for the witches, Eva told me once; she said it was because they don’t attach the prospect of eternal damnation to it.
Dr. Ward gives the eulogy. He talks about Eva’s good works, about all the people she helped. “People are defined, finally, by the good works they do.” He runs through a list of Eva’s works, things I never knew about my aunt, things she might have boasted about if she’d been another type of person. I realize the selfishness of children. We love them, and we revolve around their universes, but they don’t revolve around ours. I left here when I was a child, and in some ways I haven’t grown up yet. That I didn’t know these things about my aunt speaks to that fact. I feel sorry about that as I sit here. I
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