The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

Author:Rebecca Makkai
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-06-19T04:00:00+00:00

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Yale dodged the people congregating in the church lobby and ducked down a back hallway to find a place for his box. He put it behind a beanbag chair in what must have been a youth group room, a place where the kids had painted the walls with daisies and frogs and Beatles lyrics.

Then he straightened his suit, damped his hair down in the bathroom, found Fiona, and helped her with the flowers she was carrying. He gave her the necklace from Nora, said she mustn’t ever wear it around her cousin Debra, and Fiona held up her curls so Yale could fumble with the clasp behind her neck. “I’ve never done this before,” he said, and Fiona, for some reason, found that hilarious. He helped straighten the chairs in the sanctuary. Yale appreciated the chairs: less ass-numbing than pews, less likely to dredge up negative childhood memories.

By the time Charlie arrived, the front of the place had filled. Charlie was trailed by some of his staffers—Gloria, Dwight, Rafael, Ingrid. They must have changed at the office, then walked here together. They’d be walking back together too, while Yale wandered off alone. Yale caught Charlie’s eye, and a minute later Charlie was there beside him, smelling like aftershave.

The minister spoke about community and friendship and “the family you choose,” tremendously aware of his audience, obviously practiced in this sort of thing. How many of these funerals had he personally overseen? Fiona got up and told a story about the day Nico introduced her to Terrence. “He warned me that Terrence had a sense of humor,” she said. “And so I was terrified. I kept waiting for him to put a whoopee cushion on my chair or something. But he didn’t crack a single joke. At the end of lunch he looked at me and he said, ‘You’ve taken care of your brother your whole life, and I—’” Her voice had run into a wall. She tried again but no sound came out. She said, “It would’ve been easier if he’d said something funny.” They all laughed, just to add their voices to the room, to get her through this. “He said, ‘You’ve taken care of your brother all your life, and I want you to know I’ve got it from here.’ And he did. He didn’t know what he was signing on for, but he was with Nico to the absolute end. And now he’s taking care of him again.” She barely got it out. A girlfriend walked her down from the lectern, rubbing her back.

One of Terrence’s teaching colleagues read a poem Yale couldn’t focus on. The minister led everyone in a meditation. Asher, who was a classically trained baritone, sang the “Pie Jesu” from Webber’s new requiem—a song Yale had only heard a soprano recording of, but that worked just as well for Asher, for the cello Yale had always imagined living in Asher’s throat. Yale, no more Catholic than Asher was, reveled now in the sound of Latin, those pure, liturgical vowels, the crunch of Q’s and C’s.

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