Early Warning

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THE FUNERAL WAS a riot of floral exuberance — not just lilies, but daffodils and tulips and sprays of apple and pear blossom. Frank Langdon sat with his daughter, Janny, about six pews back on the right; his wife, Andy, and their month-old twins, of course, couldn’t come all the way to Iowa. Janny, two and a half, was behaving herself. Frank took his hand off her knee, and she stayed quiet. The broken sounds of tears being suppressed rose all around him. Frank’s sister Lillian, her husband, Arthur, and their four kids were two pews ahead on the left. Mama was sitting in the front pew, staring straight ahead. Granny Elizabeth was sitting next to her, alone now — Grandpa Wilmer had died in the summer; in the intervening nine months, Granny had traveled to Kansas City, St. Louis, and Minneapolis. His mother liked to cluck knowingly and say, “She’s blossomed, hasn’t she?”

His brother Joe’s baby, the same age as his twins, looked like she weighed what they did together. Joe’s wife, Lois, and her sister, Minnie, passed the baby back and forth to keep her quiet. Frank stared at Minnie for a moment. He had known her his whole life, walked to school with her for years, known always that she was on his side. Maybe she loved him still. Frank cleared his throat. Annie, the child’s name was. Janny couldn’t get enough of her — she talked to her and stroked her head if she got a chance. Across the aisle from Minnie were Frank’s brother Henry, his communist aunt Eloise, and Eloise’s daughter, Rosa. His sister Claire — fourteen, nineteen years to the day younger than Frank himself — kept turning her head and looking at Rosa, and why not? The girl was at her peak at twenty, severe and slender, with the look of a French actress.

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