The Front Pew

Margaret Ashworth had not meant to go to the funeral. She had meant to go to the dry cleaner, which was next door to the church, and she had been early, and the church doors had been open, and she had a weakness — she would have called it that, a weakness — for slipping into the back of other people's solemn occasions. A wedding glimpsed, a christening. It cost nothing and it reminded her that the world went on having days. Since Gerald died she had needed reminding. So she stepped into the cool of St. Brannock's, into the smell of lilies and old stone, and she took a seat at the very back where a stranger could sit without rudeness, and she read the order of service that someone had left on the pew. A celebration of the life of Vivian Pell. 1958 to the present year. Beloved, it said, and listed the things she was beloved by, and Margaret read the name three times because it meant nothing to her at all, and that was correct, that was the appeal of the thing — to grieve, lightly, anonymously, for a woman one had never met. The church was perhaps half full. A good turnout for a private grief. Margaret let her eyes move over the backs of the heads the way she always did, inventing small histories, deciding who was family and who was duty. And her eyes reached the front pew, the pew kept for the closest, the pew of the truly bereaved, and stopped. There was a man in the front pew, on the aisle, and his shoulders were moving with the particular helpless rhythm of someone weeping without dignity, weeping past the point where dignity is available. Margaret knew that rhythm. She had a great deal of recent expertise in that rhythm. And she knew, also, with a certainty that arrived in her body before it reached her mind, the set of those shoulders, the cut of that grey hair at that collar, the way that particular man held his particular grief. It was Gerald. It was her husband, Gerald Ashworth, sitting in the front pew of the funeral of a woman named Vivian Pell, weeping as Margaret had never once in thirty-eight years of marriage seen him weep — not at his mother's death, not at the diagnosis, not at anything. And Gerald Ashworth had died two years ago in February, and Margaret had chosen the coffin, and she had stood at the open grave in the cold, and there was a stone with his name on it in the cemetery on the Truro road that she still could not visit without sitting in the car for ten minutes first. The organ began something quiet. People rose. Margaret did not rise. She sat in the back of St. Brannock's with the order of service crushed slowly in her hand and watched the back of a dead man's head, and she did not faint, and she did not cry out, and she was rather proud of that afterward, though afterward was a country she had not yet reached. She made herself think. It was her one good trick, thinking; Gerald had always said so, in the tone that turned a compliment into a small fence. There were explanations. A brother — but Gerald had had no brother. A resemblance — but a wife of thirty-eight years does not mistake a resemblance, not the shoulders, not the grief. A man who had faked his death and let his wife bury an empty box, or worse, a stranger — and there it was, the thought, fully formed and unforgivable and impossible to put down again. The mourners were filing out. The man in the front pew rose last, and turned, and for one moment, before a pillar took him, Margaret saw his face across the length of the church. It was Gerald's face. It was older — two years older, exactly two years older — and it was wet, and it was the face she had slept beside for most of her adult life, and it was looking, with red and swollen eyes, at the photograph of Vivian Pell propped among the lilies, with an expression Margaret had wanted, and never once been given, for thirty-eight years. She did not go to the dry cleaner. She sat in the church until it was empty, and then she sat a while longer, and somewhere in that long cold quiet she stopped being a widow and became something she had no word for yet — a woman who was going to have to find out, now, far too late, exactly who it was she had put in the ground.