Claire bent her head and repeated a couple of well-chosen mantras. When she looked up the sky was moving to the north, and so did she. It hadn’t been easy to leave Swamiji. And only much later had she realized that it had not been easy for him to instruct her to go. Any Western woman was a boon to an ashram. And Claire especially had been nice for him to have around. She was tidy, for one thing. Best of all she’d shared his love of plants and helped him to categorize and bottle herbs. But it wasn’t until Delhi and the outdated Western music piped into the airport lounge—“… you always smile but in your eyes your sorrow shows,”—that she knew he had loved her. Well. She’d loved him, too.
Claire passed the Holy Child Grammar School, where she’d gone as a child. She and Michael used to ride to school and park their bicycles right against that very chain link fence. She hung her head and crossed the road toward the church. A lovely old place it was, orange-bricked and landscaped in green, early Spanish Mission style mostly, but with Roman effects: flabbergasting stained glass and cathedral-like heights. There was a dark and hollow coolness to it, not unlike the Baths of Istanbul. She thought she might go in, just to sit down in the darkness and get out of the heat for a moment, but there seemed to be a funeral going on. Wasn’t it awfully early for a funeral? She walked around the corner to the front. How horrible those black hearses were. Eerie, like that in front of the low-hanging gray sky. Claire stood stock still. She poised her camera. The doors of the church drew open and a swarm of people suddenly filled the tall steps. There were so many that they toppled onto one another. A stout young woman in black keeled over the white coffin and passed out. There was a great deal of jostling, someone was yelling, and almost all of them were in tears above the small white coffin.
Then it hit her. It was the child who had been murdered. They must have upped the hour of the mass to avoid the media. There was no shortage of cops. Twelve of them, she counted. And the captain. Very grand looking with gold braid and hair parted cleanly by a razor. Cops were used to funerals, weren’t they? Claire stood there, hypnotized through the lens, but she couldn’t bring herself to shoot. She had the perfect angle and the right long lens and she knew she’d make the cover of the Post in a minute, but there was no way she could shoot that wailing herd as they moved toward her. No way. If there was one thing that she had learned from life it was that you did not make your fortune from the private agonies of victims. You just didn’t. If there was any sense to the world, to her own existence, it wasn’t going to come from giving life to that picture. Some things, Claire knew, just weren’t worth being paid for. She lowered the camera.
Several people, those daily churchgoers who had no relation to the funeral but who stood around caught up in the drama, watched her curiously. One nervous-looking young man with red hair made a move as though he were coming over to say something, perhaps chastise her for her camera, but he changed his mind and turned away. The cries from the murdered child’s mother echoed horribly through the vestibule. Then thunder rolled not too far off. No doubt it was raining already over Manhattan.
Claire headed home. There was no traffic on Myrtle Avenue. There never was. Just the shiny trolley line still taking off in both directions. Lord, the cries of that poor woman! How did Zinnie do it? She saw pain like that all the time. And worse. No, there couldn’t be much worse than that. In Richmond Hill, no less.