The Loved One Read online

  “Oh,” said his guide, “how foolish of me. We’ve come into Primrose by mistake. This,” she added superfluously, “is occupied.”

  “Yes.”

  “The leave-taking is not till the afternoon but we had better go before one of the cosmeticians finds us. They like to make a few final adjustments before Waiting Ones are admitted. Still, it gives you an idea of the chaise-longue arrangement. We usually recommend the casket half-exposure for gentlemen because the legs never look so well.”

  She led him out.

  “Will there be many for the leave-taking?”

  “Yes, I rather think so, a great many.”

  “Then you had better have a suite with an ante-room. The Orchid Room is the best. Shall I make a reservation for that?”

  “Yes, do.”

  “And the half-exposure in the casket, not the chaise-longue?”

  “Not the chaise-longue.”

  She led him back towards the reception room.

  “It may seem a little strange to you, Mr. Barlow, coming on a Loved One unexpectedly in that way.”

  “I confess it did a little.”

  “You will find it quite different on the day. The leave-taking is a very, very great source of consolation. Often the Waiting Ones last saw their Loved One on a bed of pain surrounded by all the gruesome concomitants of the sick room or the hospital. Here they see them as they knew them in buoyant life, transfigured with peace and happiness. At the funeral they have time only for a last look as they file past. Here in the Slumber Room they can stand as long as they like photographing a last beautiful memory on the mind.”

  She spoke, he observed, partly by the book, in the words of the Dreamer, partly in her own brisk language. They were back in the reception room now and she spoke briskly. “Well, I guess I’ve got all I want out of you, Mr. Barlow, except your signature to the order and a deposit.”

  Dennis had come prepared for this. It was part of the Happier Hunting Ground procedure. He paid her 500 dollars and took her receipt.

  “Now one of our cosmeticians is waiting to see you and get her Essential Data, but before we part may I interest you in our Before Need Provision Arrangements?”

  “Everything about Whispering Glades interests me profoundly, but that aspect, perhaps, less than others.”

  “The benefits of the plan are twofold”—she was speaking by the book now with a vengeance—“financial and psychological. You, Mr. Barlow, are now approaching your optimum earning phase. You are no doubt making provision of many kinds for your future—investments, insurance policies and so forth. You plan to spend your declining days in security but have you considered what burdens you may not be piling up for those you leave behind? Last month, Mr. Barlow, a husband and wife were here consulting us about Before Need Provision. They were prominent citizens in the prime of life with two daughters just budding into womanhood. They heard all particulars, they were impressed and said they would return in a few days to complete arrangements. Only next day those two passed on, Mr. Barlow, in an automobile accident, and instead of them there came two distraught orphans to ask what arrangements their parents had made. We were obliged to inform them that no arrangements had been made. In the hour of their greatest need those children were left comfortless. How different it would have been had we been able to say to them: ‘Welcome to all the Happiness of Whispering Glades.’ ”

  “Yes, but you know I haven’t any children. Besides I am a foreigner. I have no intention of dying here.”

  “Mr. Barlow, you are afraid of death.”

  “No, I assure you.”

  “It is a natural instinct, Mr. Barlow, to shrink from the unknown. But if you discuss it openly and frankly you remove morbid reflections. That is one of the things the psycho-analysts have taught us. Bring your dark fears into the light of the common day of the common man, Mr. Barlow. Realize that death is not a private tragedy of your own but the general lot of man. As Hamlet so beautifully writes: ‘Know that death is common; all that live must die.’ Perhaps you think it morbid and even dangerous to give thought to this subject, Mr. Barlow; the contrary has been proved by scientific investigation. Many people let their vital energy lag prematurely and their earning capacity diminish simply through fear of death. By removing that fear they actually increase their expectation of life. Choose now, at leisure and in health, the form of final preparation you require, pay for it while you are best able to do so, shed all anxiety. Pass the buck, Mr. Barlow; Whispering Glades can take it.”

  “I will give the matter every consideration.”

  “I’ll leave our brochure with you. And now I must hand you over to the cosmetician.”

  She left the room and Dennis at once forgot everything about her. He had seen her before everywhere. American mothers, Dennis reflected, presumably knew their daughters apart, as the Chinese were said subtly to distinguish one from another of their seemingly uniform race, but to the European eye the Mortuary Hostess was one with all her sisters of the air-liners and the reception-desks, one with Miss Poski at the Happier Hunting Ground. She was the standard product. A man could leave such a girl in a delicatessen shop in New York, fly three thousand miles and find her again in the cigar stall at San Francisco, just as he would find his favorite comic strip in the local paper; and she would croon the same words to him in moments of endearment and express the same views and preferences in moments of social discourse. She was convenient; but Dennis came of an earlier civilization with sharper needs. He sought the intangible, the veiled face in the fog, the silhouette at the lighted doorway, the secret graces of a body which hid itself under formal velvet. He did not covet the spoils of this rich continent, the sprawling limbs of the swimming-pool, the wide-open painted eyes and mouths under the arc-lamps. But the girl who now entered was unique. Not indefinably; the appropriate distinguishing epithet leapt to Dennis’s mind the moment he saw her: sole Eve in a bustling hygienic Eden, this girl was a decadent.

  She wore the white livery of her calling; she entered the room, sat at the table and poised her fountain-pen with the same professional assurance as her predecessor’s, but she was what Dennis had vainly sought during a lonely year of exile.

  Her hair was dark and straight, her brows wide, her skin transparent and untarnished by sun. Her lips were artificially tinctured, no doubt, but not coated like her sisters’ and clogged in all their delicate pores with crimson grease; they seemed to promise instead an unmeasured range of sensual converse. Her full face was oval, her profile pure and classical and light; her eyes greenish and remote, with a rich glint of lunacy.

  Dennis held his breath. When the girl spoke it was briskly and prosaically.

  “What did your Loved One pass on from?” she asked.

  “He hanged himself.”

  “Was the face much disfigured?”

  “Hideously.”

  “That is quite usual. Mr. Joyboy will probably take him in hand personally. It is a question of touch, you see, massaging the blood from the congested areas. Mr. Joyboy has very wonderful hands.”

  “And what do you do?”

  “Hair, skin and nails and I brief the embalmers for expression and pose. Have you brought any photographs of your Loved One? They are the greatest help in re-creating personality. Was he a very cheerful old gentleman?”

  “No, rather the reverse.”

  “Shall I put him down as serene and philosophical or judicial and determined?”

  “I think the former.”

  “It is the hardest of all expressions to fix, but Mr. Joyboy makes it his speciality—that and the joyful smile for children. Did the Loved One wear his own hair? And the normal complexion? We usually classify them as rural, athletic and scholarly—that is to say red, brown or white. Scholarly? And spectacles? A monocle. They are always a difficulty because Mr. Joyboy likes to incline the head slightly to give a more natural pose. Pince-nez and monocles are difficult to keep in place once the flesh has firmed. Also of course the monocle looks less natu
ral when the eye is closed. Did you particularly wish to feature it?”

  “It was very characteristic.”

  “Just as you wish, Mr. Barlow. Of course Mr. Joyboy can fix it.”

  “I like the idea of the eye being closed.”

  “Very well. Did the Loved One pass over with a rope?”

  “Braces. What you call suspenders.”

  “That should be quite easy to deal with. Sometimes there is a permanent line left. We had a Loved One last month who passed over with electric cord. Even Mr. Joyboy could do nothing with that. We had to wind a scarf right up to the chin. But suspenders should come out quite satisfactorily.”

  “You have a great regard for Mr. Joyboy, I notice.”

  “He is a true artist, Mr. Barlow. I can say no more.”

  “You enjoy your work?”

  “I regard it as a very, very great privilege, Mr. Barlow.”

  “Have you been at it long?”

  Normally, Dennis had found, the people of the United States were slow to resent curiosity about their commercial careers. This cosmetician, however, seemed to draw another thickness of veil between herself and her interlocutor.

  “Eighteen months,” she said briefly. “And now I have almost come to the end of my questions. Is there any individual trait you would like portrayed? Sometimes, for instance, the Waiting Ones like to see a pipe in the Loved One’s mouth. Or anything special in his hands? In the case of children we usually give them a toy to hold. Is there anything specially characteristic of your Loved One? Many like a musical instrument. One lady made her leave-taking holding a telephone.”

  “No, I don’t think that would be suitable.”

  “Just flowers? One further point—dentures. Was he wearing them when he passed on?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  “Will you try and find out? Often they disappear at the police mortuary and it causes great extra work for Mr. Joyboy. Loved Ones who pass over by their own hand usually wear their dentures.”

  “I’ll look round his room and if I don’t see them I’ll mention it to the police.”

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Barlow. Well, that completes my Essential Data. It has been a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

  “When shall I see you again?”

  “The day after tomorrow. You had better come a little before the leave-taking to see that everything is as you wish.”

  “Who shall I ask for?”

  “Just say the cosmetician of the Orchid Room.”

  “No name?”

  “No name is necessary.”

  She left him and the forgotten hostess returned.

  “Mr. Barlow, I have the Zone Guide ready to take you to the site.”

  Dennis awoke from a deep abstraction. “Oh, I’ll take the site on trust,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I think I’ve seen enough for one day.”

  Four

  Dennis sought and obtained leave of absence from the Happier Hunting Ground for the funeral and its preliminaries. Mr. Schultz did not give it readily. He could ill spare Dennis; more motor-cars were coming off the assembly lines, more drivers appearing on the roads and more pets in the mortuary; there was an outbreak of food poisoning in Pasadena. The ice-box was packed and the crematorium fires blazed early and late.

  “It is really very valuable experience for me, Mr. Schultz,” Dennis said, seeking to extenuate the reproach of desertion. “I see a great deal of the methods of Whispering Glades and am picking up all kinds of ideas we might introduce here.”

  “What for you want new ideas?” asked Mr. Schultz. “Cheaper fuel, cheaper wages, harder work, that is all the new ideas I want. Look, Mr. Barlow, we got all of the trade of the coast. There’s nothing in our class between San Francisco and the Mexican border. Do we get people to pay 5,000 dollars for a pet’s funeral? How many pay 500? Not two in a month. What do most of our clients say? ‘Burn him up cheap, Mr. Schultz, just so the city don’t have him and make me ashamed.’ Or else it’s a fifty-dollar grave and headstone inclusive of collection. There ain’t the demand for fancy stuff since the war, Mr. Barlow. Folks pretend to love their pets, talk to them like they was children, along comes a citizen with a new auto, floods of tears, and then it’s ‘Is a headstone really socially essential, Mr. Schultz?’ ”

  “Mr. Schultz, you’re jealous of Whispering Glades.”

  “And why wouldn’t I be seeing all that dough going on relations they’ve hated all their lives, while the pets who’ve loved them and stood by them, never asked no questions, never complained, rich or poor, sickness or health, get buried anyhow like they was just animals? Take your three days off, Mr. Barlow, only don’t expect to be paid for them on account you’re thinking up some fancy ideas.”

  *

  The coroner caused no trouble. Dennis gave his evidence; the Whispering Glades van carried off the remains; Sir Ambrose blandly managed the press. Sir Ambrose, also, with the help of other prominent Englishmen composed the Order of the Service. Liturgy in Hollywood is the concern of the Stage rather than of the Clergy. Everyone at the Cricket Club wanted a part.

  “There should be a reading from the Works,” said Sir Ambrose. “I’m not sure I can lay my hand on a copy at the moment. These things disappear mysteriously when one moves house. Barlow, you are a literary chap. No doubt you can find a suitable passage. Something I’d suggest that gives one the essence of the man we knew—his love of nature, his fair play, you know.”

  “Did Frank love nature or fair play?”

  “Why, he must have done. Great figure in letters and all that; honored by the king.”

  “I don’t ever remember seeing any of his works in the house.”

  “Find something, Barlow. Just some little personal scrap. Write it yourself if necessary. I expect you know his style. And, I say, come to think of it, you’re a poet. Don’t you think this is just the time to write something about old Frank? Something I can recite at the graveside, you know. After all, damn it, you owe it to him—and to us. It isn’t much to ask. We’re doing all the donkey work.”

  “Donkey work” was the word, thought Dennis as he watched the cricketers compiling the list of invitations. There was a cleavage on this subject. A faction were in favor of keeping the party small and British, the majority headed by Sir Ambrose wished to include all the leaders of the film industry. It was no use “showing the flag,” he explained, if there was no one except poor old Frank to show it to. It was never in doubt who would win. Sir Ambrose had all the heavy weapons. Cards were accordingly printed in large numbers.

  Dennis meanwhile searched for any trace of Sir Francis’s “Works.” There were few books in the bungalow and those few mostly Dennis’s own. Sir Francis had given up writing before Dennis could read. He did not remember those charming books which had appeared while he lay in the cradle, books with patterned paper boards and paper labels, with often a little scribble by Lovat Fraser on the title page, fruits of a frivolous but active mind, biography, travel, criticism, poetry, drama—belles lettres in short. The most ambitious was A Free Man greets the Dawn, half autobiographical, a quarter political, a quarter mystical, a work which went straight to the heart of every Boots subscriber in the early twenties, and earned Sir Francis his knighthood. A Free Man greets the Dawn had been out of print for years now, all its pleasant phrases unhonored and unremembered.

  When Dennis met Sir Francis in Megalopolitan studios the name, Hinsley, was just not unknown. There was a sonnet by him in Poems of Today. If asked, Dennis would have guessed that he had been killed in the Dardanelles. It was not surprising that Dennis possessed none of the works. Nor, to any who knew Sir Francis, was it surprising that he did not. To the end he was the least vain of literary men and in consequence the least remembered.

  Dennis searched long fruitlessly and was contemplating a desperate sortie to the public library when he found a stained old copy of the Apollo preserved, Heaven knew why, in Sir Francis’s handkerchief drawer. The blue cover had faded t
o gray, the date was February 1920. It comprised chiefly poems by women, many of them, probably, grandmothers by now. Perhaps one of these warm lyrics explained the magazine’s preservation after so many years in so remote an outpost. There was, however, at the end a book review signed F.H. It dealt, Dennis noticed, with a poetess whose sonnets appeared on an earlier page. The name was now forgotten, but perhaps here, Dennis reflected, was something “near the heart of the man,” something which explained his long exile; something anyway which obviated a trip to the public library… “This slim volume redolent of a passionate and reflective talent above the ordinary…” Dennis cut out the review and sent it to Sir Ambrose. Then he turned to his task of composition.

  *

  The pickled oak, the chintz, the spongy carpet and the Georgian staircase all ended sharply on the second floor. Above that lay a quarter where no layman penetrated. It was approached by elevator, an open functional cage eight feet square. On this top floor everything was tile and porcelain, linoleum and chromium. Here there were the embalming-rooms with their rows of inclined china slabs, their taps and tubes and pressure pumps, their deep gutters and the heavy smell of formaldehyde. Beyond lay the cosmetic rooms with their smell of shampoo and hot hair and acetone and lavender.

  An orderly wheeled the stretcher into Aimée’s cubicle. It bore a figure under a sheet. Mr. Joyboy walked beside it.

  “Good morning, Miss Thanatogenos.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Joyboy.”

  “Here is the strangulated Loved One for the Orchid Room.”

  Mr. Joyboy was the perfection of high professional manners. Before he came there had been some decline of gentility in the ascent from show-room to workshop. There had been talk of “bodies” and “cadavers”; one jaunty young embalmer from Texas had even spoken of “the meat.” That young man had gone within a week of Mr. Joyboy’s appointment as Senior Mortician, an event which occurred a month after Aimée Thanatogenos’s arrival at Whispering Glades as junior cosmetician. She remembered the bad old days before his arrival and gratefully recognized the serene hush which seemed by nature to surround him.