A Funeral for Horace Alexander Voisine
Horace. An ugly name. The music they’re playing at the funeral was annoying. She’s sad. A little bit, maybe an emotionless sad, cold like a Chicago winter, but hollow and bitter, an almost obligatory sad, as if some downtrodden and suppressed human impulse was finally trying to escape the deep recesses of her being, stimulated by the sobs around her.
ing. Where did she work now? At that feminist magazine, on the Upper West Side, with the apartment overlooking the park and her hair, these days, was even more unruly, her eyes even more frigid, her diction even more acerbic. Abortion. She only heard the “or” when Allison had said that. The sound left Allison’s lips and entered her ears and immediately the “or” turned into whore and she looked at the black coffee shamefully and said “I couldn’t.” It was 1958 and things were different. The progressive doctors were in New York or Boston and she was so young and scared. Besides, he didn’t want her to. His eyes! How they had immediately obscured her view, blurring out everything but the lively, blue irises. She had gazed at him timidly and fawn-like. Nineteen, young, knowing no other men but her father and the few boys she had known from around town as a child.
The parlor was inexpensive. Why are the flowers real? She paid for fake ones. They were 100 dollars cheaper. If she gets billed for it, she’ll complain. They’ll feel bad for her. The death of her son was a twisted asset. They’ll have pity on her and her empty purse and her empty sadness. Her empty guilt started to creep up in her consciousness but she silenced it as the music got quieter and the cheaply clad priest stepped up to the pulpit. Horace.
He smiled, his voice was buttery and sharp, like a knife cutting butter and spreading it all over her naïve heart.
She remembered the day Horace exited the womb. Along with gestational fluid and blood- her blood, he had stolen her blood and almost killed her in the process, she was unconscious at that magical moment when he finally saw the artificial hospital light, and along with all that blood, he stole something else, her sexuality, tilled her garden and made it fruitless as a poet would say.
“You look like you could use some help,” were the words that flowed out of his perfect mouth and spread over her like the water of a warm bath with rose petals in it for added fragrance. What had she said? It didn’t matter. He helped her carry her books and coffee to a table in a secluded part of the café. He introduced himself with the charisma of a politician. A professor at a nearby college, some dignified-sounding position in the math department. “And what about you?” Who was she? A first-year English student, from a small town in Pennsylvania. Was she anything else? That was all she could muster and he laughed and told her about a time he had been in Philadelphia for a conference. She laughed, though she had never been to Philadelphia. Her father thought it was noisy and morally derelict. He was thirty-six. She told him her age, expecting him to walk away and leave her by her juvenile self, but he didn’t, and they talked for hours and arranged a time to meet for dinner.
Horace. Right, the ugly name. Why did she choose it anyway? Who was Horace? A philosopher? A mayor? Who knows. She liked the sound of it, the breathy “Hor” followed by the “ace” like the hissing of a poisonous snake. He called her a whore sometimes. Not Horace, he was much too innocent. Frustratingly innocent. Whore was what she heard when she told him that she had a child growing in her stomach. The word whizzed through the air like a bullet and struck her in the head and the stomach. It bounced around in her skull, found an opening within the folds of her cerebellum, and embedded itself there, becoming a part of everything that she thought and did and saw and heard and cried about. An abortion. Her avant-garde friend Allison had whispered that word to her over coffee at the campus café when she broke the terrible news. Allison, with the unkempt hair, bookish yet aggressive mien, and intimidating blue eyes.
The priest was chanting something about life everlasting and salvation and the children of God. God. If there were children of God, she wasn’t one. She hadn’t loved God and God had clearly never loved her as a punishment, but with funerals and death it’s always important to leave a little bit of room for God in case
They had kissed once, passionately, in Allison’s dorm room at Smith, then had both looked at each other with eyes that shimmered with the glint of fear and excitement. Allison was frighten-
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