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Show Today, I am studying the light in this courtroom: the cold glare of the neon ceiling tubes, the stale yellow light from lamps on the desks, the way a single ray of sun penetrates a gap in the curtains. The ray is long and straight, descending from a height, like the medieval depictions of Truth. I am tempted to indulge in analogies: it touches no one; it does not illuminate the judge or the jury or the material on the desks; it only barely penetrates the gloom. But I am listening to Tate's account of my behavior at Sadie's funeral, three days after she had died. ". . . a kind of bed-costume ..." Tate is saying, to describe the clothes I had worn. I refuse to wear mourning-suits to these funerals; instead, I had put on the soft, pale, loose trousers and shirt Sadie had loved. Sadied had watched me once, before Maude's funeral, laboriously fasten a dark-colored tie around my throat. "Neckties are for hangings," she had said, "when J. die, wear this instead." She had taken from her neck a fawn-colored scarf, folded it laboriously in squares. "And this-this vulture-indulged in a public outburst," Tate is saying, though in fact what I did at Sadie's funeral was cry. It had not happened at Maude's funeral, nor at Bernice's, nor at any of the others, though I am always sad, but there was something sordid about watching the plumed, preened relatives who had collected for the rites of an ancestor they had neglected. I watched them gossiping, nudging, conducting their business, but what was so difficult was watching the commotion in all the variations of that dear dead face. I was overwhelmed, that is all, with the natural tragedy of the fragility |