yours for a song chapter 3

[figureofdismay]

Roman would never have a clear memory of his father's funeral service. The images he heard were of the amber dimness of the church, the draped, wreathed coffin at the front of the church, and the vague white shape of the surpliced priest behind it at the pulpit – he found out later that the arrangements for the actual service had been made by conference call in a complicated wrangle between the family lawyer, Marcia, and the parish priest and the local diocese to allow someone of Logan's lapsed faith and notorious standing to be given an all bells and whistles Catholic service, and an agreement had been struck to allow the funeral Mass and Communion of a rich sinner who hadn’t set foot in the parish in 62 years in exchange gifting the church with a new roof and restoration of their stained glass windows, which had apparently been damaged in a storm in the 80s and badly botched on repair.

Marcia had then asked Roman if he wanted to be a pallbearer with his older brothers, but he'd declined, unable to do more than shake his head and look down. Marcia had told him that that was alright, it was a lot to ask, that the rest of the bearers would be much taller anyway so it would work out fine, easier, but that he'd had a right to be included if he had really wanted to be, and no one else has thought to ask. Marcia was more practical than the rest of the family, Logan's only pragmatic and world-aware partner as far as Roman knew, and one of the only people among them who seemed to remember that Roman was a grown son and not a child or adjunct daughter. He was glad she had asked, but he had left the brownstone as quickly as possible after that conversation. It had been his only trip back to the house since Logan died, and now the image of the downstairs parlor was tied to the ideas of Logan's absence and the phantom weight of his body in a wooden box resting on his shoulder, and Roman didn't know how he'd go back again. He'd walked in with Marcia in the procession, instead, with Caroline and Shiv and Nate walking just behind. He’d watched Karl and Frank's balding heads as they walked ahead rather than acknowledge their burden.

There had been a phalanx of press camped out on the street and spilling over onto the front church grounds, as well as a small group of protesters who had come to celebrate the demise of the oligarch, who had shouted from behind a security cordon. Pictures would come out with the next news cycle of him, taught-faced and frowning, wind-flushed over his cheeks and nose which granted him a tearier look than the reality, with Marcia on his arm looking polished and solemn, as inscrutable as always. Karolina would tell him that it was a good look for them, the sadness of the youngest prince softened both Logan's image and his own as an LA party boy, and he'd find no response beyond insisting that he'd never been a party boy because it turned out that partying was actually really boring. He'd wanted to say that he didn't want to get stuck in the pathetic mourning role either, but it felt too much like defying Logan to say it aloud.

He spent the first part of the mass, an unknowable eternity feeling like he would be sick. As the priest read a flattering eulogy, and read passages from the bible, psalms, parables, Roman didn't know, having been raised in a vaguely protestant non religion where christmas and easter were parties that his parents put on, planning anxiously how to edge out of the pew and make an unobtrusive dash for the bathroom, to be sick or shake himself to pieces again – impossible – and digging his thumbnail against the edge of his lip, scraping and scraping the plush nap of his black coat where it covered his thighs, breathing slow and careful.

He'd had such a bright interlude of normalcy at breakfast, Gerri Kellman continuing to humor him for reasons known only to herself, and then his mother paying him kindly attention. The reasons for the trip had seemed distant and impossible. Roman had thought he was turning a corner already. That the panic that had kept him in LA that extra time, which Ballard, the LA therapist he'd fired as he left, had told him was his subconscious trying to tell him something, was his ego and control issues trying prevent him from realizing the inevitable, that his father was dead no matter how he felt about it, had lifted from his mind leaving him clear-eyed and steady.

Then he'd gotten out of the car at the church yard and had to follow his brothers, his uncle, and his colleagues carrying the undeniable, unmissable box containing Logan, and he'd had to depend on Marcia's claw-like grip on his elbow to keep him shuffling in the right direction. So Gerri was right, he thought, as he'd slipped under the fog, it hadn't really hit him yet. Not til that moment.

Sometime around when Connor got up to speak the queasy panic let go into a wavering, a heaviness, a catastrophic tiredness. He couldn't hear when Con said over the fuzzy echo in his ears and the effort to sit straight, like Logan would demand, took all of his attention. Then Ken spoke, and then Frank. Frank looked old and sad up at the pulpit, Roman thought with startelement, even older and sadder then when he'd told him that Logan was assigning him to LA, or the last time Logan fired him. He couldn’t track what either of them said, either, the words warping and slipping past him without his comprehension.

Then Ewan got up, which pulled Roman's awareness to the surface, almost, and didn't seem to be part of the plan because everyone in the family rows were shifting around nervously and checking if they had known.

Ewan stood at the pulpit utterly silent for long enough for the room, the whole packed church full of Logan's family, friends, colleagues, contacts and enemies, to start to shift and cough. Then he said, "My brother was a hell of a bastard. We hadn't spoken face to face for five years. But I loved him. I have to live with knowing I couldn't protect him when it mattered, and I couldn't make him be a better man. But now he's dead and I know we were both too stubborn. At least it's over now. And one day, Logan, I'll see you in hell, for I know we're both bound the same way."

The local priest rushed forward as Ewan ambled away back to his seat at the end of the front row. The priest scratched his forehead nervously and fiddled with his notes. "Well, thank you, Mr. Roy, for that… for that… I'm sure that Mr. Roy will not… Yes." And then set off solemnly into the next prayer, and then there was singing from the choir loft, that seemed to come from everywhere. He drifted as the music continued, almost as if he was being rotated in an open and ringing depth, alone and far beyond speech, and only jostled back to himself when Caroline on one side and Marcia on the other chivvied him to his feet for the next part when the congregation was expected to stand. He looked up at his mother’s still, carefully poised face and felt a strange chill at the way she seemed unfamiliar to him, and unreadable, at the way her eyes glittered chilly even when she looked down at him and patted his forearm.

It was cold when the procession followed the coffin out to the church yard. The rain had come in, clouting the church windows like fistfuls of gravel thrown at the eaves as the communion line shuffled along – despite what he’d said about his eventual destination, Ewan, dragging Greg after him, was the only one among the immediate family to join it – and had closed the November midday in a grey, wooly dark as if it was already evening. The grass squished and slipped under Roman’s black dress shoes. He concentrated on watching his feet, not sliding, not thinking, not watching the dark, glossy box, now bare of its drape and glistening with rain and holy water. He hung back, avoiding Caroline, Shiv, Ken, and Connor and all the rest of the family who stood bravely out front before the priest.

Most of them were unprepared for the weather. Rain was beading and splotching along the stiff, glossy brim of Marcia’s silk hat with its ineffectual bit of net, and Shiv’s red hair was darkening to ruddy brown and hanging in strings. Connor huddled into his coat collar and charcoal flat cap, and Ken stood stoically bare headed and forlorn, his cropped hair and bleak eyes and the slope shouldered stiffness of him making him look like a mannequin or a penitent monk. The handful of dirt that Marcia ritually dropped was half mud, and her son – who had joined them in Scotland at some point when Roman hadn’t been paying attention – had had to offer her his dark navy pocket square to wipe her hands clean. Shiv darted forward and dropped her handful of hothouse flowers into the grave as if peering fearfully over a cliff’s edge and then stumbled back, for Nate to take her arm again.

By the time the graveside service dispersed, Roman was soaked to the scalp and shivering, his limbs and jaw tense and braced against the cold. Still he hung back. When the funeral was done, when he walked back through the church and out into the world, he would have to meet the part of reality that came after Logan. It didn’t seem possible. He could only picture a yawning black in place of any kind of life no longer shaped around his father’s influence. It hadn’t seemed like it would happen even when he heard that Logan’s plan went down, an interrupted argument with a producer on the backlot of one of their studios which had never been resumed after his phone had rung.

No matter how deeply he’d been gripped by horror and shock, he hadn’t really thought that Logan’s death would ever be as real as a funeral, or that his absence would really continue afterwards. He’d make his usual kind of entrance, a helicopter and bombastic shouting, an arm flung out to either clap his shoulder or push him aside and chastise him for ever believing that he’d do something so fucking moronic as getting himself and his mistress killed. But a heavy box had been borne into a hole in the ground and the priest was giving gentle, perfunctory condolences to Ken and Rava, Shiv and Nate, Connor and Suzanne. Caroline had already gone ahead, and Marcia and Amir.

As Roman loitered by the stone wall dividing the consecrated graveyard from the rest of the church grounds, looking up at the peaked and spired and crenelated shape of the early Tudor edifice which his family had pledged to freshen up and appease in Logan’s name, he noticed a cessation of the patter of icy rain on his head, and the waft of faint, dry aromatic citrus and some kind of spicy white flower which was becoming familiar, Gerri Kellman’s perfume.

She’d come to stand beside him, hand holding the umbrella brushing his arm. He looked over at her, catching a glance of her well proportioned profile and shining, neat french twist, but looked down again before she could catch his eye. Baird Kellman was already on his way into the church, a broad black-coated figure hunched under his own umbrella, so Gerri must have doubled back to collect him. The idea struck him, registered through the morass of realization that had taken over and shaken him.

“Is it your intention to remain out here?” she asked quietly. It wasn’t a needling question, just blunt, non judgemental, and nearly whispered in the reverberant space under the umbrella. “One of the cars could stay behind, if you needed some more time.”

“No, I… I just. We’re really leaving him here, huh. Just, out in the rain here in fucking Scotland.”

“We are,” Gerri said. He felt her watching him as she spoke. “I don’t think he minds, though. These were his wishes, after all.”

Roman sighed and crossed his arms tight across his chest, shoving his cold hands into the damp protection of his coat sleeves. Fucking bastard didn’t just die, he wasn’t even going to be burried anywhere the family spent their time, aloof and inscrutable til the very end, valuing his childhood of nostalgic horrors beyond any of the vast success life had offered him later. Even in death they couldn’t measure up. “Yeah. I guess so. I don’t think he really thought it would really happen to him, though.”

“None of us did,” agreed Gerri with a sigh. “If you’re coming, the memorial tea starts in an hour, and the drive takes 40 minutes.”

“Right. Yeah, of course.” Roman thought about getting in the car and waiting out the ride back to the hotel with a kind of claustrophobic flinch, but he did want to be back in his room, with the door closed, and the rest of the reality of the day shut out behind him. “I’ll be right behind you, I guess.”

“Alright, Roman. Don’t linger too long, hmm? It would be better if you didn’t get hypothermia out here. We don’t really have time for that today.” Her honey voiced bluntness was warm rather than critical, a simple reminder of facts. Gerri stepped slowly towards the church and Roman found himself keeping step with her, leaving the demarcation of the cemetery gate behind.

“You better hurry and catch up, or Baird’ll leave without you,” he said, nodding ahead at the church door, which stood open and dark where the last of the graveside party were shuffling in past the priest, with Kellman no longer in sight. Roman stopped half way up the path and Gerri continued for half a step and then looked back when she realized he was no longer jostling next to him, a worried question unmasked in her wide eyes.

“I thought you were coming along,” she protested, strangely unguarded.

“Sure, I am. I’m just going that way,” he gestured at the worn path around the side of the church building, “No fucking way am I shaking hands with some strange priest and letting him tell me what a great man pop was, so.” He shrugged and ducked out from under the shelter of her umbrella, the raindrops resuming cold and ticklish on his face and head, and set off across the sodden grass.

“Be careful of reporters,” Gerri called, quietly sharp, and unnecessary – as if he was unused to the media’s relationship with his family and his person – but he appreciated that it didn’t sound the nanny-ish bleat of some minder who expected the worst of him, but concern about his getting hounded.

He looked back from the half shelter of a narrow evergreen shrub beside the church wall to watch her smile blandly and march past the priest, her umbrella unwavering until she reached the doorway, the neatly rounded and perfectly tailored hourglass shape of her in her black sheath dress and belted black coat, the dual flamed flicker of her perfectly curved calves below the hem and the gleam of her hair as she disappeared through the gloomy arch.

He almost looked further back, to get one more glimpse of the cemetery yard within its slate bounds, a wide, grey-green hill overlooking lower hills, overlooking a quick scrabble of rock and the iron-blue breadth of the Tay and the tree-lined farther bank. He almost looked at the neat, muddy hole in the ground they’d left, to see if the gravediggers were already filling it in, now that the service was done and mourners were gone. Something cold and shivery fizzed and squirmed in his gut and Roman put his head down and turned away.

He hurried past the subdued, yelping press, doused by the late-autumn rain, past the guiding hands of the security team, and slid into the empty back seat of a car.

*