Part Two: The Empty Chair
The funeral was on a Friday.
Eleanor had arranged it with the help of Charlotte and Richard’s longtime assistant, Margaret, who had worked with him for twenty-three years and who managed the logistics of grief with the same undemonstrative competence she had brought to everything else. The church held four hundred people. They came — business associates, dockworkers in their good coats, foundation staff, city officials who had known Richard for decades, people whose names Eleanor recognized and people whose names she did not but whose faces held the specific expression of someone who is grieving something real.
She had reserved the front row for family.
Her own sister, Patricia. Charlotte. Charlotte’s husband, James, who had flown back from a conference in Singapore specifically and who Eleanor noted without comment, because noticing without comment was something she had learned to do well. Margaret, who Eleanor had placed in the family row because she was family in the way that mattered.
And one empty chair.
It had Thomas’s name on a small card, in the same format as all the other reserved seats, because until the morning of the funeral Eleanor had believed — had needed to believe — that he would come. He had been in Aspen for Victoria’s birthday celebration, a long-planned trip that he had mentioned three weeks earlier when the doctors had said weeks, not months, and which Eleanor had assumed, with the assumption of a mother who cannot fully abandon hope, that he would cut short.
He had called her the previous evening.
“I’ll try to make the morning flight,” he had said. “But the party goes late, and the passes can be icy in November, and honestly, Mom, Dad would understand. He always understood.”
Eleanor had stood in her kitchen with the phone against her ear and looked out the window at the dark November garden and thought about all the things that Thomas had, across his life, decided his father would understand.
“The service is at eleven,” she had said.
“I’ll try.”
He did not try hard enough, or did not try at all, or tried in the specific way that constitutes going through the motions of an intention without the intention itself. At ten fifty-five a.m. on a gray Friday, Eleanor stood in the vestibule of the church with Charlotte beside her and looked at the filled pews and the empty chair in the front row.
“Begin,” she told the pastor.
Her voice did not break. She had decided, somewhere in the previous eleven weeks, that she was going to be very honest about things, starting now. The chair was empty. The service would begin. Both things were true and she was not going to manage or soften either one.
She sat in the front row beside the empty chair and listened to people speak about her husband, and most of what they said was true, and some of it was the truth arranged to be more comfortable than the truth actually was, and she listened to all of it with the same expression.
Charlotte, beside her, did not look at the empty chair once. Eleanor understood this as a form of mercy — Charlotte managing her anger by not allowing it a focal point.
The dockworkers from the Baltimore yard had sent a delegation. Seven men in dark coats, sitting together in the fifth row. After the service, their representative — a man named Clarence who had worked for Richard for thirty years and who had the handshake of someone who has spent three decades moving cargo — found Eleanor and held both her hands and said: “He knew every name. Every single one of us.” He said it simply, as a fact, which made it land harder than any eulogy.
She drove home in the car with Charlotte, and they did not talk about the empty chair, and they did not need to.
