“Possessively, would you say?”

“I suppose so. Certainly I was angry that Denyse was determined to take over and have everything her own way, especially when it was such a foolish, showy way. I was still furious about that matter of engraving the coffin with heraldic doodads that weren’t ours, and couldn’t ever be so, and which my father had rejected himself, after a lot of heart-searching. I want that to be perfectly clear to you; I have no quarrel with heraldry, and people who legitimately possess it can use it as they like, but the Staunton arms weren’t ours. Do you want to know why?”

“Later, I think. We’ll come to it. Go on now about the funeral.”

“Very well. Beesty took over the job of seeing the people from the papers, but it was snatched from him by Denyse, who had prepared a handout with biographical details. Silly, of course, because the papers had that already. But she achieved one thing by it that made me furious: the only mention of my mother in the whole obituary was a reference to ‘an earlier marriage to Leola Crookshanks, who died in 1942.’ Her name was Cruikshank, not Crookshanks, and she had been my father’s wife since 1924 and the mother of his children, and a dear, sad, unhappy woman. Denyse knew that perfectly well, and nothing will convince me that the mistake wasn’t the result of spite. And of course she dragged in a reference to her own wretched daughter, Lorene, who has nothing to do with the Staunton family—nothing at all.

“When was the funeral to be? That was the great question. I was for getting it over as quickly as possible, but the police did not release the body until late on Monday—and that took some arranging, I can assure you. Denyse wanted as much time as possible to arrange her semi-state funeral and assemble all the grandees she could bully, so it was decided to have it on Thursday.

“Where was he to be buried? Certainly not in Deptford, where he was born, though his parents had providently bought a six-holer in the cemetery there years ago, and were themselves the only occupants. But Deptford wouldn’t do for Denyse, so a grave had to be bought in Toronto.

“Have you ever bought a grave? It’s not unlike buying a house. First of all they show you the poor part of the cemetery, and you look at all the foreign tombstones with photographs imbedded in them under plastic covers, and the inscriptions in strange languages and queer alphabets, and burnt-out candles lying on the grass, and your heart sinks. You wonder, can this be death? How sordid! Because you aren’t your best self, you know; you’re a stinking snob; funerals bring out that sort of thing dreadfully. You’ve told yourself for years that it doesn’t matter what happens to a corpse, and when cocktail parties became drunken-serious you’ve said that the Jews have the right idea, and the quickest, cheapest funeral is the best and philosophically the most decent. But when you get into the cemetery, it’s quite different. And the cemetery people know it. So you move out of the working-class and ethnic district into the area of suburban confines, but the gravestones are really rather close together and the inscriptions are in bad prose, and you almost expect to see jocular inscriptions like ‘Take-It-Easy’ and ‘Dunroamin’ on the stones along with ‘Till the Day Breaks’ and ‘In the Everlasting Arms.’ Then things begin to brighten; bigger plots, no crowding, an altogether classier type of headstone and—best of all—the names of families you know. On the Resurrection Morn, after all, one doesn’t want to jostle up to the Throne with a pack of strangers. And that’s where the deal is settled.