Short Stories: Five Decades (Open Road) by Shaw Irwin

Author:Shaw, Irwin [Shaw, Irwin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-02-26T06:00:00+00:00

Goldilocks at Graveside

She was surprised to see him in the church. She hadn’t known he was in Los Angeles. And there had only been the one notice in the one newspaper—“Ex-State Dept. Officer Dies. William MacPherson Bryant died last night at the Santa Monica Hospital, after a long illness. Entering the foreign service in 1935, he held posts in Washington, Geneva, Italy, Brazil and Spain, before resigning for reasons of health in 1952. The couple were childless and he is survived only by his widow, who, under her maiden name, Victoria Simmons, is the editress of the Women’s Page of this newspaper.”

The church was almost empty, as Bryant had made no friends since they moved West, and there was just a scattering of people from the paper, who came as a matter of courtesy to the widow, so Victoria saw Borden almost immediately. It was a dark, rainy day, and he was sitting alone, in the rear of the church, near the door, but his blond head was unmistakable. Irrelevantly, while paying only half-attention to what the minister was saying, Victoria remembered the secret nickname by which, among the three of them, Borden had been called—Goldilocks.

There were only two cars in the cortege to the cemetery, but Borden found room in the second car and stood bareheaded in the rain during the ceremony at the grave. Victoria observed that he was now dyeing his hair and that, although at a distance there was still an appearance of boyish good looks about him, up close his face was lined by fine wrinkles and seemed dusted over by uncertainty and fatigue.

As she walked away from the grave, an erect, veiled, middle-aged, slender woman, tearless behind the black cloth, Borden asked her if he could drive back with her. Since she had come out to the cemetery with only the minister and there was plenty of room, she said yes. Borden’s voice had changed, too. Like his dyed hair, it pretended to a youthfulness and energy that she remembered and that was no longer there.

The minister was silent most of the way back to town. Victoria had only met him for the first time the day before, when she was making the arrangements for the funeral. Neither she nor her husband had been members of the congregation and the minister had that slightly aggrieved expression that one remarks on the faces of the representatives of religion when they know they are only being used out of necessity and not out of faith.

Among the three of them they spoke no more than thirty words on the way back into town. The minister got off at the church and after his embarrassed little handshake, Borden asked Victoria if he could accompany her home. She was in perfect control of herself—all her tears had been shed years before—and she told him she didn’t need any help. In fact, she had planned to sit down directly at her desk when she got home and start working on the full page for the Sunday issue, both because it needed doing and as a remedy against melancholy.

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