Chapter 32

Effen refers Gustie’s family to a colleague in a neighboring town. The obsequies turn into morbid entertainment as the media obsesses over the mystery of the mother who would kill herself and her children. The deaths are a big story within a bigger story, and everybody wants to tell the biggest story.

Effen can’t leave The House, lest he be consumed by journalists. Brendan, the colleague, arranges a private visit past midnight, after deadline for the local papers, but it’s no use. Reporters are posted outside Brendan’s establishment around the clock. Farrell suggests asking the police for an escort to get Effen inside. The proposal is doused by the knowledge that nothing will stop the Fourth Estate from shouting questions and shooting photographs. The man whose calling in life has been to help others say goodbye to their loved ones can’t say goodbye to his own.

So Effen remains in The House, four floors above the ground, beyond the reach of ordinary daily doings. Matt and Ben run the business. They and Harry and Vince and other staffers stop by with words of comfort or to see how The Owner is doing. Harry’s wife cooks a pot roast dinner. The parts and parcels are delivered in a couple of roasting pans, wrapped in aluminum foil. Effen thanks Harry and his wife, who he’s always called Mrs. Harry, but he later tells Farrell he can’t understand why someone would want to do that sort of thing for him. He can just as easily call the market in town and ask Dave to deliver an order.

Farrell knows he’s not ungrateful. He’s a giver, unacquainted with being on the receiving end of humanity’s softer side. The enormity of that giving flowers in the night, when the visitors have gone and The House is closed and silent. Farrell can’t open herself wider or hold him in deeper, and she can’t stop herself from crying out as her body responds to what he’s doing to her. It’s not a matter of ecstasy for the sake of ecstasy. She’s never before known or appreciated why women wanted to have children with their particular men. Now she does know; she wants to give Effen a child, to somehow make up for what he’s lost. What he leaves in her has got to settle and grow. The thought of the process is as tactile and exciting as the process itself. The kiss of cool air between her legs as he leaves her is enough to prime her for more.


Come morning, Effen encourages Farrell to go to the funeral. She doesn’t want to leave him, but considers that, with Matt and Ben on the premises, she knows he won’t be alone. “Say a few prayers for me, too,” he says, adding an embrace that recalls the fervor of the last hour before dawn.

The scene at St. Mark’s, a little Romanesque church, is the mass enactment of grotesque diversion that Farrell’s feared. People who left Fair Mantle days before have returned, either to sincerely pay their respects or to be part of the event, The girls’ classmates cry into their parents’ coats. The press lurks inside and out, looking for willing interviewees, searching out the best angle for shooting pictures of the three white caskets.

Farrell sits at the end of a pew on a side aisle near the back of the church. Brendan, a dignified man in his sixties, asks her to give F.N. his regards; he’ll try to stop by later in the day. She wishes she could sit closer to Brendan and his staff. The Brutons haven’t showed, at least not yet. She would appreciate being able to sit with someone she knew when she first lived in Fair Mantle.

Father Alph is in white vestments and the choir sings hymns of eternal life and resurrection, but Gustie’s family is still in black and her mother and a lot of the congregation sob throughout Mass. Father Alph, she knows, has prepared a eulogy and has officiated at countless funerals during his career of thirty-some years. Still, upon ascending the pulpit he appears stricken. He can’t seem to open his mouth. When he manages to speak, his message of innocence and the promise of forgiveness emerges on a voice that cracks early and often. In a revelation that has reporters scratching furiously in their notebooks, he says that Gustie had left behind a written message saying only “Luke 23:34,” the line, in the Gospel of Luke, in which Christ on the Cross says of his executioners, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” “Augusta did indeed not know what she was doing. God alone knows why. And God alone will see that she is released from the torment drove her to act in the ultimate denial of hope.”

Farrell is as unable to control her tears as she was unable to control herself in bed. Surrounded by the sights and sounds of grief, she covers her face with her hands and surrenders to the sorrow, anger, angst and adoration that’s percolated within her since news of the deaths. The arm around her shoulders and the offer, in the voice of an unknown male, of a handkerchief are a kindness that make her cry harder. She wants to stay for Gustie and the girls, but she wants to leave. And she doesn’t want Effen to see what a mess she’s become. He might fall apart. She can’t let him suffer more than he’s been suffering.


Farrell doesn’t know that Effen has given the staff the day off. Contrary to what he’s told her, he is alone in The House.

He meant what he said when he told her to say a few prayers for him.

He’s known for several days that there really is one last thing he can do for his wife and daughters. A last something. Then everything will be finished.

The house is quiet now, and cold. He explains all in a letter to Farrell, then hides the letter amid the music on the harpsichord.

He silently rebuffed as cowardice the painkillers Bruton gave him after the incident at the farm. Now he twists off the child-resistant cap, fills a glass with water and downs the pills one after the other.

He’s seized from behind. His mouth is forced open. Something hard slips past his teeth and rams the back of his throat. The items he thought he just consigned to the innermost regions of his anatomy return to daylight on an explosive surge that doubles him over and keeps him heaving even after there’s nothing left to send up. He feels torn through the middle. The floor rocks. Tom Von Aldo’s yelling at him to stay awake. He’s draped over something hard. The impact knocks the wind out of him. A torrent of icy water pelts the back of his head and neck. He tries to get away, but he’s held fast. He screams.

Tom endures the resistance another moment, then turns off the tap, hauls Effen out of the sink and sits him at the table. Water streams from Effen’s hair; his collar and sweater are soaked. Panting for breath, he leans forward, rests his head on his arms. Tom pulls him back, asking him how he feels.

Effen would rather deal with another visitor: Bruton lounges against the refrigerator, an expression of deep interest on his colorless face. “Thought we’d better keep an eye on you.”

Effen doesn’t care. “Get out of my house.”

“My boy, we’re all in this together.”

“Not Gustie and the girls.”

Effen tries to stand. Tom pushes him down. “Shit, France, be reasonable. We know it’s gone too far. Don’t bring it any farther.”

“Don’t you understand what has happened here? It’s not suicide. It’s murder.”

Brut is cool. “That’s right, Gustie killed the girls. We didn’t make her do it. As for her suicide? Who knew she would do such a thing? Who knew anybody would go out of their mind over what was really little more than a dispute among scientists?”

Effen rips into Tom. “You should have known. You lived with her. How did you think she’d react, with joy?”

“I know only what she showed me. She didn’t speak of deep things. She was a surface creature. A loving companion and a good mother, yes, but a being totally unable to venture into the profundities of life. In brief – and I mean no disrespect for the dead – she was a whore, a classic, golden-hearted whore, like something out of a Victorian novel.”

The assessment, so crude and without remorse, stuns Effen. Wide-eyed, looking as lost as he feels, he says he wants to change into something dry. He lets Tom help him from the chair. “A whore?”

Tom reels from the blow to his jaw. Safe in his room, Effen locks the door and snatches the phone from the nightstand. He means to call the county prosecutor. In his haste, he misdials.

Tom kicks in the door. “France, will you think!”

Tom’s calling Effen by the friendly diminutive, but there’s nothing endearing in his attitude. If anything, he looks bigger and stronger than ever. He twists the phone from Effen’s hand and shoves him onto the sleigh bed. “Francis! Think! We’re all in this together. We all stay of one mind and there’ll be no trouble.”

“Leave him alone,” Bruton orders. “He’s overwrought. So are you.”

Tom backs off. Effen sits up against the wall, which, he discovers too late, is not a position to be in when someone’s approaching you with a loaded syringe.

Less than an hour ago, Effen was readyto take his life. Now his insides loosen with fear. He inches up the headboard.

Bruton rolls his eyes. “Christ Almighty, Francis, this is not something out of the cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It’ll calm you down.”

“The way I feel, you’re gonna need an elephant gun—“
Effen bolts.

You don’t muck out a stable day after day without developing some muscle and stamina. As Tom should have learned that last day at the farm, Effen has a lot more substance than meets the eye. Tom snares him in the parlor, but his lust for freedom turns his savaged escape into a scrap worthy of the schoolyard. In the end, chairs and lamps are upended, and Effen is being dragged out from under the kitchen table. The metal legs screech along the floor as he holds on. His hair is in his eyes; his sweater, shirt and tee are far north of his waist; his jeans are unsnapped and heading south.

This is definitely not Francis Hume’s style. Not when he was a kid; not when he was in college, and most certainly not now. What to do? Go down fighting, making himself look ridiculous? Or go down with a scrap of dignity, even if that dignity is hanging from him like a severed limb hanging to a torso by a fleshy thread?

Effen goes limp. They want to control him? Fine. They can scrape him off the floor.
Tom’s not sure what’s happened. “France?”

Effen says nothing. He just lies there, eyes closed, chest heaving, ready to cough from the fust on the floor.

Tom drags him into clear space, rolls him onto his back. His arm flops against the linoleum. “Francis?” The voice is distressed.

Effen swallows hard, trying not to flinch as hot, sweaty fingers tickle his neck, feeling for a pulse. Hot, sweaty fingers open his eyelids.

Tom’s lips part. What’s he going to say?

Bruton is pushing the syringe, a tourniquet and a couple of packaged antiseptic swabs into his hands, muttering something about arthritis in his knees acting up. “Must be the weather. Or the aggravation.”

Effen says nothing as Tom finds the vein in his forearm and empties the syringe. He just looks at Tom. There are no questions. No accusation. No emotion.

Tom has seen that look before. It’s the same look that Anne used to give Gustie. Unnerved, he asks Bruton for a Band-Aid.

The need for so small an item in so absurd a situation strikes Effen as one of the funniest thing’s he’s ever heard. “A Band-Aid?” he breathes, half-giggling.

Tom, who isn’t laughing, applies the item, then, with Bruton’s help, pulls the unsteady Effen to his feet. They can’t fool around, he’s saying; they’ve got only a few minutes.

A few minutes? A few minutes for what?

Effen feels as if he’s stepped into a bottomless hole. He’s falling fast and far, and he’s sure he’s going to splatter whenever he hits the floor, but he can’t stop giggling. He has something to say to Bruton. Something so obvious yet so clever, he’s ashamed he’s never thought to say it before now.

“Et tu, Brut?”

Bruton has no idea that the abuse of his name comes from Effen’s memory of a student performance of Julius Caesar, when a smart-ass classmate deliberately said “Et tu brute” instead of the proper Latin form of the assassin Brutus’s name, Bru-TAY.

He scowls and stands aside as Effen collapses, engulfed by the drug.