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Show January 20. Wet, smog-infested morning, birds grovelling along the gutters, the odors of exhaust. Sadie is dead now, like Bernice and Maude and Annie and the others before her . . . My journals are often about the funerals; these funerals, one after the other, make me profoundly sad. "There are two kinds," I have been telling the court, and I have described what I've seen over the past five or six years: the small, perfunctory funeral, where just an isolated relative or two stands around the chapel, its altarpiece rotated to the appropriate religion, the listless clergyman reciting the specified ritual, and Judd, as director of the GoldenGlow, saying a few short, polite, inexplicit words. Nobody cares, and nobody expects to care. Then there are the family-convulsion funerals, like Sadie's, in which aunts and uncles and freshly shaven nephews appear like pigeons arriving from nowhere at the scene of food, gossiping, nudging, speculating upon the way the wealth and ornaments of the dear deceased will be distributed among themselves. Sadie's funeral, only a few months ago, was like this: a kind of extended-family convention, at which the business of the current generation is to be done. But Tate, the middle of Sadie's sons, had dominated the scene, taller, louder, more strident than the rest, and Luel, his daughter, was always at his side. I could see in their faces and the faces of the others all the features I had loved in Sadie: the small, alert eyes, the sharp high-bridged nose, the tiny, thin-lined lips, always full of laughter and fun, but in the different branches of the family these features are corrupted in different ways: in the oldest son and his children, into a tight-lipped greed; in the younger, into an uninteresting, thin indifference. In Tate and |
