Early Warning

THE FUNERAL WAS a riot of floral exuberance — not just lilies, but daffodils and tulips and sprays of apple and pear blossom. Frank Langdon sat with his daughter, Janny, about six pews back on the right; his wife, Andy, and their month-old twins, of course, couldn’t come all the way to Iowa. Janny, two and a half, was behaving herself. Frank took his hand off her knee, and she stayed quiet. The broken sounds of tears being suppressed rose all around him. Frank’s sister Lillian, her husband, Arthur, and their four kids were two pews ahead on the left. Mama was sitting in the front pew, staring straight ahead. Granny Elizabeth was sitting next to her, alone now — Grandpa Wilmer had died in the summer; in the intervening nine months, Granny had traveled to Kansas City, St. Louis, and Minneapolis. His mother liked to cluck knowingly and say, “She’s blossomed, hasn’t she?”

His brother Joe’s baby, the same age as his twins, looked like she weighed what they did together. Joe’s wife, Lois, and her sister, Minnie, passed the baby back and forth to keep her quiet. Frank stared at Minnie for a moment. He had known her his whole life, walked to school with her for years, known always that she was on his side. Maybe she loved him still. Frank cleared his throat. Annie, the child’s name was. Janny couldn’t get enough of her — she talked to her and stroked her head if she got a chance. Across the aisle from Minnie were Frank’s brother Henry, his communist aunt Eloise, and Eloise’s daughter, Rosa. His sister Claire — fourteen, nineteen years to the day younger than Frank himself — kept turning her head and looking at Rosa, and why not? The girl was at her peak at twenty, severe and slender, with the look of a French actress. She made Henry, who was only months older, look like a girl, Claire look like a sheep, Andy, even glamorous Andy, look like a frump. Rosa was much more alluring than his aunt Eloise had ever been. Frank looked away. It was his father’s funeral.

After the interment (where Janny wanted to walk from grave to grave, smelling the daffodils in full bloom; Frank didn’t stop her), Frank calculated that he’d kept that sad smile on his face for eight solid hours. He held his drink, Scotch and soda — supplied by Minnie, who was now assistant principal at the high school and lived here, apparently comfortably, with Lois and Joe. Frank watched the neighbors come and go. This house, much grander than the house they’d grown up in, was industriously clean. The famous dining room with the sliding French doors that had been the envy of farmers around Denby, Iowa, all through Frank’s childhood, still had flowered wallpaper and heavy moldings. While he was pondering the double-hung windows, Arthur Manning came up to him, as if they were merely brothers-in-law who just happened to see each other at a family funeral. Frank often wondered if his sister Lillian had any idea of what her husband talked to Frank about, or the uses he put him to.

Arthur held Tina against his shoulder. She was three months now, wiry and active, as if she planned to head out the door any moment. Arthur’s tweed jacket was festooned with a folded diaper. Arthur jiggled and comforted a baby the way a great athlete hit a ball, as if his adept grace and evident reproductive success were the easiest thing in the world. Tina burbled and muttered, wide awake and not crying. Frank admired this.

Arthur said, “How are Richie and Michael doing?”

“Coming along,” said Frank.

“What are they now?”

“A month. But they were four and a half weeks early, so let’s call them newborns.”

“Precocious, then,” said Arthur, with a straight face, and Frank smiled a real smile. He said, “It’s a good thing Mama hasn’t seen them. She might suggest putting them down.”

Arthur’s eyebrows lifted.

“Mama’s strict about babies. If you aren’t good-looking, you could be carrying something contagious.”

Arthur kissed Tina on the forehead.

“Don’t worry, Arthur,” said Frank. “Tina would pass.”

Arthur laughed. But Frank could see it — even at his father’s funeral, Mama doled out words and smiles like stock options. Annie and Lillian were the preferred stock; Timmy, Arthur’s oldest at six, the class-A common stock; Debbie, five, Dean and Janny, both two and a half, the class-B common stock — not much of a risk, but not much of a dividend, either. Tina, who could still turn out to be blond, could rise in value or decline. As for Frank himself, well, he had taken his company private, and Mama didn’t have much of an investment there at all — a peck on the cheek, a reassurance that everything was going to turn out fine. Frank lowered his voice: “Have you talked with Eloise?”

Arthur jiggled Tina again. His voice was low, too. “We clinked glasses, but we haven’t exchanged actual words.”

“Were you congratulating each other on the death of old Joe?” Stalin had been dead about two weeks.

“I think we were.”

“Did your organization have anything to do with it?”