The poem was called "With Rue My Heart Is Laden." I don't know why he chose that particular one. We knew that the Corcorans had asked him to read something and I expected that they had trusted him to choose something appropriate. It would have been so easy for him to choose something else, though, something you would think he would pick, for Christ's sake, from Lycidas or the Upanishads or anything, really-certainly not that poem, which Bunny had known by heart. He'd been very fond of the corny old poems he'd learned in grade school: "The Charge of the Light Brigade,"

"In Flanders Fields," a lot of strange old sentimental stuff whose authors and titles I never even knew. The rest of us, who were snobs about such things, had thought this a shameful taste, akin to his taste for King Dons and Hostess Twinkies. Quite often I had heard Bunny say this Housman aloud-seriously when drunk, more mockingly when sober-so that the lines for me were set and hardened in the cadence of his voice; perhaps that is why hearing it then, in Henry's academic monotone (he was a terrible reader) there with the guttering candles and the draft shivering in the flowers and people crying all around, enkindled in me such a brief and yet so excruciating pain, like one of those weirdly scientific Japanese tortures calibrated to extract the greatest possible misery in the smallest space of time.

It was a very short poem.

With rue my heart is laden

For golden friends I had,

For many a rose-lipt maiden

And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping

The lightfoot boys are laid;

The rose-lipt girls are sleeping

In fields where roses fade.

During the closing prayer (overly long) I felt myself swaying, so much so that the sides of my new shoes dug in the tender spot beneath my anklebones. The air was close; people were crying; there was an insistent buzz which came in close to my ear and then receded. For a moment I was afraid I would black out. Then I realized the buzz actually came from a large wasp flying in erratic darts and circles over our heads. Francis, by flailing at it uselessly with the memorial service bulletin, had succeeded in enraging it; it dove towards the weeping Sophie's head but, finding her unresponsive, turned in midair and lit on the back of the pew to collect its wits. Stealthily Camilla leaned to one side and began to slip off her shoe, but before she could, Charles had killed it with a resounding thwack from The Book of Common Prayer.

The pastor, at a key point in his prayer, started. He opened his eyes and his glance fell on Charles, still wielding the guilty prayerbook. "That they may not languish in unavailing grief," he said in a slightly amplified voice, "nor sorrow as those who have no hope, but through their tears look always up to Thee...."

Quickly I bowed my head. The wasp still clung with one black feeler to the edge of the pew. I stared down at it and thought of Bunny, poor old Bunny, expert killer of flying pests, stalking houseflies with a rolled-up copy of the Hampden Examiner.

Charles and Francis, who weren't speaking before the service, had managed somehow to make up during the course of it. After the final amen, in silent, perfect sympathy, they ducked into an empty corridor off the side aisle. I caught a glimpse of them speeding wordlessly down it before they turned into the men's room, Francis stopping for one last nervous glance behind and already reaching in his coat pocket for what I knew was there-the flat pint bottle of something or other I'd seen him take from the glove compartment.

It was a muddy, black day in the churchyard. The rain had stopped but the sky was dark and the wind was blowing hard. Someone was ringing the church bell and not doing a very good job of it; it clanged unevenly to and fro like a bell at a seance.

People straggled to their cars, dresses billowing, holding hats to head. A few paces in front of me Camilla struggled on tiptoe to pull down her umbrella, which dragged her along in little skipping steps-Mary Poppins in her black funeral dress. I stepped up to help her, but before I got there the umbrella blew inside out. For a moment it had a horrible life of its own, squawking and flapping its spines like a pterodactyl; with a sudden sharp cry she let it go and immediately it sailed ten feet in the air, somersaulting once or twice before it caught in the high branches of an ash tree.

"Damn," she said, looking up at it and then down at her finger, from which a thin seam of blood sprang. "Damn, damn, damn."

"Are you okay?"

She stuck the injured finger in her mouth. "It's not that," she said peevishly, glancing up at the branches. "This is my favorite umbrella."

I fished around in my pocket, gave her my handkerchief. She shook it out and held it to her finger (flutter of white, blown hair, darkening sky) and as I watched time stopped and I was transfixed by a bright knife of memory: the sky was the same thundery gray as it had been then, new leaves, her hair had blown across her mouth just so ...

(flutter of white) (... at the ravine. She'd climbed down with Henry and was back at the top before him, the rest of us waiting at the edge, cold wind, jitters, springing to hoist her up; dead? is he ...? She took a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped her muddy hands, not looking at any of us, really, her hair blowing back light against the sky and her face a blank for just about any emotion one might care to project ...) Behind us someone said, very loudly, "Dad?"

I jumped, startled and guilty. It was Hugh. He was walking briskly, half-running, and in a moment had caught up with his father. "Dad?" he said again, placing a hand on his father's slumping shoulder. There was no response. He shook him gently. Up ahead, the pallbearers (Henry indistinct, somewhere among them) were sliding the casket into the open doors of the hearse.

"Dad," said Hugh. He was tremendously agitated. "Dad. You gotta listen to me for a sec."

The doors slammed. Slowly, slowly, Mr. Corcoran turned. He was carrying the baby they called Champ but today its presence seemed to offer him little comfort. The expression on his big slack face was haunted and lost. He stared at his son as if he had never seen him before.

"Dad" said Hugh. "Guess who I just saw. Guess who came. Mr. Vanderfeller," he said urgently, pressing his father's arm.

The syllables of this illustrious name-one which the Cocorans invoked with very nearly as much respect as that of God Almighty-had when uttered aloud a miraculous effect of healing on Mr. Corcoran. "Vanderfeller's here?" he said, looking around. "Where?"

This august personage, who loomed large in the collective unconscious of the Corcorans, was the head of a charitable foundation-endowed by his even more august grandpapa-which happened to own a controlling interest in the stock of Mr. Corcoran's bank. This entailed board meetings, and occasional social functions, and the Corcorans had an endless store of "delightful" anecdotes about Paul Vanderfeller, of how European he was, what a celebrated "wit," and though the witticisms they found frequent occasion to repeat seemed poor things to me (the guards up at the security booth at Hampden were cleverer) they made the Corcorans rock with urbane and apparently quite sincere laughter. One of Bunny's favorite ways to start a sentence had been to let drop, quite casually: "When Dad was lunching with Paul Vanderfeller the other day ..."

And here he was, the great one himself, scorching us all with his rays of glory. I glanced in the direction Hugh indicated to his father and saw him-an ordinary-looking man with the good-natured expression of someone used to being constantly catered to; late forties; nicely dressed; nothing particularly "European" about him except his ugly eyeglasses and the fact that he was considerably below the average height.

An expression of something very like tenderness spread itself across Mr. Corcoran's face. Without a word he thrust the baby at Hugh and hurried off across the lawn.

Maybe it was because the Corcorans were Irish, maybe it was that Mr. Corcoran was born in Boston, but the whole family seemed to feel, somehow, that it had a mysterious affinity with the Kennedys. It was a resemblance they tried to cultivate-especially Mrs. Corcoran, with her hairdo and faux-Jackie glasses-but it also had some slight physical basis: in Brady and Patrick's toothy, too-tanned gauntness there was a shadow of Bobby Kennedy while the other brothers, Bunny among them, were built on the Ted Kennedy model, much heavier, with little round features bunched in the middle of their faces. It would not have been difficult to mistake any of them for minor clan members, cousins perhaps. Francis had told me of walking into a fashionable, very crowded restaurant in Boston once, with Bunny. There was a long wait, and the waiter had asked for a name: "Kennedy," Bun said briskly, rocking back on his heels, and the next instant half the staff was scrambling to clear a table.

And maybe it was these old associations which were clicking around in my mind or maybe it was that the only funerals I had ever seen were televised events, affairs of state: in any case, the funeral procession-long, black, rain-splashed cars, Mr. Vanderfeller's Bentley among them-was linked for me in dreamlike fashion to another funeral and another, far more famous motorcade. Slowly we rolled along. Open cars of flowers-like convertibles in some nightmare Rose Parade-crept behind the curtained hearse. Gladiola, dyed chrysanthemum, sprays of palm. The wind was blowing hard, and garish petals shook loose and tumbled back among the cars, sticking to the damp windshields like bits of confetti.

The cemetery was on a highway. We pulled over and got out of the Mustang (flat clack of car doors) and stood blinking on the littered shoulder. Cars whooshed past on the asphalt, not ten feet away.

It was a big cemetery, windy and flat and anonymous. The stones were laid out in rows like tract homes. The uniformed driver of the funeral-home Lincoln walked around to open the door for Mrs. Corcoran. She was carrying-I didn't know why-a small bouquet of rosebuds. Patrick offered her an arm and she slipped a gloved hand in the crook of his elbow, inscrutable behind her dark glasses, calm as a bride.

The back doors of the hearse were opened and the coffin slid out. Silently, the party drifted after it as it was borne aloft into the open field, bobbing across the sea of grass like a little boat. Yellow ribbons fluttered gaily from the lid. The sky was hostile and enormous. We passed one grave, a child's, from which grinned a faded plastic jack-o'-lantern.

A green striped canopy, of the sort used for lawn parties, was set up over the grave. There was something vacuous and stupid about it, flapping out there in the middle of nowhere, something empty, banal, brutish. We stopped, stood, in awkward little groups. Somehow I had thought there would be more than this. Bits of litter chewed up by the mowers lay scattered on the grass. There were cigarette butts, a Twix wrapper, recognizable.

This is stupid, I thought, with a sudden rush of panic. How did this happen?

Traffic washed past up on the expressway.

The grave was almost unspeakably horrible. I had never seen one before. It was a barbarous thing, a blind clayey hole with folding chairs for the family teetering on one side and raw dirt heaped on the other. My God, I thought. I was starting to see everything, all at once, with a blistering clarity. Why bother with the coffin, the awning or any of it if they were just doing to dump him, shovel the dirt in, go home? Was this all there was to it? To get rid of him like a piece of garbage?

Bun, I thought, oh, Bun, I'm sorry.

The minister ran through the service fast, his bland face tinted green beneath the canopy. Julian was there-I saw him now, looking towards the four of us. First Francis, and then Charles and Camilla, moved to go stand with him but I didn't care, I was in a daze. The Corcorans sat very quietly, hands in laps: how can they just sit there? I thought, by that awful pit, do nothing? It was Wednesday. On Wednesdays at ten we had Greek Prose Composition and that was where we all ought to have been now. The coffin lay dumbly by the grave. I knew they wouldn't open it, but I wished they would. It was just starting to dawn on me that I would never see him again.

The pallbearers stood in a dark row behind the coffin, like a chorus of elders in a tragedy. Henry was the youngest one. He stood there quietly, his hands folded before him-big, white, scholarly hands, capable and well-kept, the same hands that had dug in Bunny's neck for a pulse and rolled his head back and forth on its poor broken stem while the rest of us leaned over the edge, breathless, watching. Even from that distance we could see the terrible angle of his neck, the shoe turned the wrong way, the trickle of blood from nose and mouth. He pulled back the eyelids with his thumb, leaning close, careful not to touch the eyeglasses which were skewed on top of Bunny's head. One leg jerked in a solitary spasm which quieted gradually to a twitch and then stopped. Camilla's wristwatch had a second hand. We saw them silently conferring. Climbing up the hill after her, bracing his knee with his palm, he'd wiped his hands on his trousers and answered our clamorous whispers-dead? is he-?-with the brief impersonal nod of a doctor....

-? Lord we beseech you, that while we lament the departure of our brother Edmund Grayden Corcoran your servant out of this life, we bear in mind that we are most certainly ready to follow him. Give us grace to make ready for that last hour, and protect us against a sudden and unprovided death....

He hadn't seen it coming at all. He hadn't even understood, there wasn't time. Teetering back as if on the edge of the swimming pool: comic yodel, windmilling arms. Then the surprised nightmare of falling. Someone who didn't know there was such a thing in the world as Death; who couldn't believe it even when he saw it; had never dreamed it would come to him.

Flapping crows. Shiny beetles crawling in the undergrowth. A patch of sky, frozen in a cloudy retina, reflected in a puddle on the ground. Yoo-hoo. Being and nothingness.

... I am the Resurrection and the life; he who believeth in Me, even if he die, shall live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die....

The pallbearers lowered the coffin into the grave with long, creaking straps. Henry's muscles quivered with the effort; his jaw was clenched tight. Sweat had soaked through to the back of his jacket.

I felt in the pocket of my jacket to make sure the painkillers were still there. It was going to be a long ride home.

The straps were pulled up. The minister blessed the grave and then sprinkled it with holy water. Dirt and dark. Mr. Corcoran, his face buried in his hands, sobbed monotonously. The awning rattled in the wind.

The first spadeful of earth. The thud of it on the hollow lid gave me a sick, black, empty feeling. Mrs. Corcoran-Patrick on one side, sober Ted on the other-stepped forward. With a gloved hand she tossed the little bouquet of roses into the grave.

Slowly, slowly, with a drugged, fathomless calm, Henry bent and picked up a handful of dirt. He held it over the grave and let it trickle from his fingers. Then, with terrible composure, he stepped back and absently dragged the hand across his chest, smearing mud upon his lapel, his tie, the starched immaculate white of his shirt.

I stared at him. So did Julian, and Francis, and the twins, with a kind of shocked horror. He seemed not to realize he had done anything out of the ordinary. He stood there perfectly still, the wind ruffling his hair and the dull light glinting from the rims of his glasses.

CHAPTER.

8.

MY MEMORIES of the Corcorans' post-funeral get-together are very foggy, due possibly to the handful of mixed painkillers I swallowed on the way there. But even morphia could not fully dull the horror of this event. Julian was there, which was something of a blessing; he drifted through the party like a good angel, making graceful small talk, knowing exactly the right thing to say to everyone, and behaving with such heavenly charm and diplomacy towards the Corcorans (whom he in fact disliked and vice versa) that even Mrs. Corcoran was mollified. Besides-the pinnacle of glory as far as the Corcorans were concerned-it turned out that he was an old acquaintance of Paul Vanderfeller's, and Francis, who happened to be nearby, said he hoped he never forgot the expression on Mr. Corcoran's face when Vanderfeller recognized Julian and greeted him ("European-style," as Mrs. Corcoran was heard explaining to a neighbor) with an embrace and a kiss on the cheek.

The little Corcorans-who seemed oddly elated by the morning's sad events-skidded around in hilarious spirits: throwing croissants, shrieking with laughter, chasing through the crowd with a horrible toy that made an explosive noise like a fart. The caterers had screwed up as well-too much liquor, not enough food, a recipe for certain trouble. Ted and his wife fought without stopping. Bram Guernsey was sick on a linen sofa. Mr. Corcoran swung to and fro between euphoria and the wildest of despairs.

After a bit of this, Mrs. Corcoran went up to the bedroom, and came down again with a look on her face that was terrible to see. In low tones, she told her husband that there had been "a burglary," a remark which-repeated by a well-meaning eavesdropper to his neighbor-spread rapidly around the room and generated a flurry of unwanted concern. When had it happened? What was missing? Had the police been called? People abandoned their conversations and gravitated towards her in a murmuring swarm. She evaded their questions masterfully, with a martyred air. No, she said, there was no point in calling the police: the missing items were small things, of sentimental value, and of no use to anyone but herself.

Cloke found occasion to leave not long after this. And though no one said much about it, Henry too had left. Almost immediately after the funeral he'd collected his bags, got in his car, and driven away, with only the most perfunctory of goodbyes to the Corcorans and without a word to Julian, who was very anxious to talk to him. "He looks wretched," he said to Camilla and me (I unresponsive, deep in my Dalmane stupor). "I believe he should see a doctor."

"The last week has been hard on him," said Camilla.

"Certainly. But I think Henry is a more sensitive fellow than we often give him credit for being. In many ways it's hard to imagine that he'll ever get over this. He and Edmund were closer than I think you realize." He sighed. "That was a peculiar poem he read, wasn't it? I would have suggested something from the Phaedo."

Things started to break up around two in the afternoon. We could have stayed for supper, could have stayed-if Mr. Corcoran's drunken invitations held true (Mrs. Corcoran's frosty smile behind his back informed us that they did not)-indefinitely, friends of the family, sleeping on our very own cots down in the basement; welcome to join in the life of the Corcoran household and share freely in its daily joys and sorrows: family holidays, babysitting the little ones, pitching in occasionally with the household chores, working together, as a team (he emphasized) which was the Corcoran way. It would not be a soft life-he was not soft with his boys-but it would be an almost unbelievably enriching one in terms of things like character, and pluck, and fine moral standards, the latter of which he did not expect that many of our parents had taken the trouble to teach us.

It was four o'clock before we finally got away. Now, for some reason, it was Charles and Camilla who weren't speaking. They'd fought about something-I'd seen them arguing in the yard-and all the way home, in the back seat, they sat side by side and stared straight ahead, their arms folded across their chests in what I am sure they did not realize was a comically identical fashion.

It felt as if I'd been away longer than I had. My room seemed abandoned and small, like it had stood empty for weeks. I opened the window and lay on my unmade bed. The sheets smelled musty. It was twilight.

Finally it was over but I felt strangely let down. I had classes on Monday: Greek and French. I hadn't been to French in nearly three weeks and the thought of it gave me a twinge of anxiety. Final papers. I rolled over on my stomach. Exams. And summer vacation in a month and a half, and where on earth was I going to spend it? Working for Dr. Roland? Pumping gas in Plano?

I got up and took another Dalmane and lay down again. Outside it was nearly dark. Through the walls I could hear my neighbor's stereo: David Bowie. "This is Ground Control to Major Tom ..."

I stared at the shadows on the ceiling.

In some strange country between dream and waking, I found myself in a cemetery, not the one Bunny was buried in but a different one, much older, and very famous-thick with hedges and evergreens, its cracked marble pavilions choked with vines. I was walking along a narrow flagstone path. As I turned a corner, the white blossoms of an unexpected hydrangealuminous clouds, floating pale in the shadows-brushed against my cheek.

I was looking for the tomb of a famous writer-Marcel Proust, I think, or maybe George Sand. Whoever it was, I knew they were buried in that place, but it was so overgrown I could hardly see the names on the stones, and it was getting dark besides.

I found myself at the top of a hill in a dark grove of pines. A smudged, smoky valley lay far beneath. I turned and looked back the way I'd come: a prickle of marble spires, dim mausoleums, pale in the growing darkness. Far below, a tiny light-a lantern, maybe, or a flashlight-bobbed towards me through the crowd of gravestones. I leaned forward to see more clearly, and then was startled by a crash in the shrubbery behind me.

It was the baby the Corcorans called Champ. It had tumbled the length of its body and was trying to stagger to its feet; after a moment it gave up and lay still, barefoot, shivering, its belly heaving in and out. It was wearing nothing but a plastic diaper and there were long ugly scratches on its arms and legs. I stared at it, aghast. The Corcorans were thoughtless but this was unconscionable; those monsters, I thought, those imbeciles, they just went off and left it here all by itself.

The baby was whimpering, its legs mottled blue with cold. Clutched in one fat starfish of a hand was the plastic airplane which had come with its Happy Meal. I bent down to see if it was okay but as I did I heard, very near, the wry, ostentatious clearing of a throat.

What happened next took place in a flash. Looking over my shoulder I had only the most fleeting impression of the figure looming behind me, but the glimpse I got struck me stumbling backwards, screaming, falling down and down and down until at last I hit my own bed, which rushed up from the dark to meet me. The jolt knocked me awake. Trembling, I lay flat on my back for a moment, then scrambled for the light.

Desk, door, chair. I lay back, still trembling. Though his features had been clotted and ruined, with a thick, scabbed quality that I did not like to remember even with the light on-still, I had known very well who it was, and in the dream he knew I knew.

After what we'd been through in the previous weeks, it was no wonder we were all a little sick of one another. For the first few days we stayed pretty much to ourselves, except in class and in the dining halls; with Bun dead and buried, I suppose, there was much less to talk about, and no reason to stay up until four or five in the morning.

I felt strangely free. I took walks; saw some movies by myself; went to an off-campus party on Friday night, where I stood on the back porch of some teacher's house and drank beer and heard a girl whisper about me to another girl, "He looks so sad, don't you think?" It was a clear night, with crickets and a million stars. The girl was pretty, the bright-eyed, ebullient type I always go for. She struck up a conversation, and I could have gone home with her; but it was enough just to flirt, in the tender, uncertain way tragic characters do in films (shell-shocked veteran or brooding young widower; attracted to the young stranger yet haunted by a dark past which she in her innocence cannot share) and have the pleasure of watching the stars of empathy bloom in her kind eyes; feeling her sweet wish to rescue me from myself (and, oh, my dear, I thought, if you knew what a job you'd be taking on, if you only knew!); knowing that if I wanted to go home with her, I could.

Which I did not. Because-no matter what kindhearted strangers thought-I was in need of neither company nor comfort. All I wanted was to be alone. After the party I didn't go to my room but to Dr. Roland's office, where I knew no one would think to look for me. At night and on weekends it was wonderfully quiet, and once we got back from Connecticut I spent a great deal of time there-reading, napping on his couch, doing his work and my own.

At that time of night, even the janitors had left. The building was dark. I locked the office door behind me. The lamp on Dr. Roland's desk cast a warm, buttery circle of light and, after turning the radio on low to the classical station in Boston, I settled on the couch with my French grammar. Later, when I got sleepy, there would be a mystery novel, a cup of tea if I felt like it. Dr. Roland's bookshelves glowed warm and mysterious in the lamplight. Though I wasn't doing anything wrong, it seemed to me that I was sneaking around somehow, leading a secret life which, pleasant though it was, was bound to catch up with me sooner or later.

Between the twins, discord still reigned. At lunch they would sometimes arrive as much as an hour apart. I sensed that the fault lay with Charles, who was surly and uncommunicative and-as lately was par for the course-drinking a little more than was good for him. Francis claimed to know nothing about it, but I had an idea he knew more than he was saying.

I had not spoken to Henry since the funeral nor even seen him. He didn't show up at meals and wasn't answering the telephone. At lunch on Saturday, I said: "Do you suppose Henry's all right?"

"Oh, he's fine," said Camilla, busy with knife and fork.