whatisay | PSL: Quentin's Funeral

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PSL: Quentin's Funeral

Capitol funerals are oleaginous with wealth. Today they assemble to commemorate Quentin Compson not just with tears, but with commissioned oil paintings, fireworks, an orchestra playing some lugubrious dirge, with wines ages two hundred years and flowers genetically engineered to have the deceased's initials appearing naturally on each petal. The young man's body is no longer a matter of sodden, lifeless flesh but ash compressed into a shimmering jewel, set at the middle of a wreath of designer oleander at the base of a portrait picturing him more present than any who knew him ever saw him. The painted eyes look aware, like they're taking in every detail around them, while in life Quentin always seemed a step out of time, thinking of something else, half-listening to the conversation.

Jason, fifteen years old, hasn't seen his father sober since the older Jason went to identify the wax-white, water-bloated corpse in the mortuary. This Jason, in a new suit with a tag on the back of his shirt that itches his neck, had stayed home with his mother, listening to her mewl about how could this happen to her, how could Quentin have done this to her. He'd expected to feel something when his father came home, either relief or grief, because everyone was supposed to feel something when a sibling died, but the only emotion that had surfaced was a strange sort of unease that he'd quickly choked off with disgust that his father didn't even bother to come straight home, and instead arrived drunk.

"Did you drive like that?" Caroline had asked. "Did you want me to have to identify a body today too?"

The older Jason's drunk at the funeral, too, trying his best to stand still and not sway next to his black-clad wife and eight-months-pregnant daughter and her new husband. Benjamin's been left home; his crying would be "upsetting". Uncle Maury's had a few too; Jason's starting to suspect that maybe he's the only sober one, sharing company with Caddy's fetus. When the eulogy ends, having described a person Jason's certain never actually existed, there's a reception with pay-per-plate seating and photographers and fireworks in the background.

His mother pretends to faint from crying, although her face is dry, and calls for Jason, her 'last remaining son', to come help her. Jason slips outside just out of her eyesight, not wanting to engage, hoping she just assumes he didn't see or hear her while Maury props her back up. He heads round the back, slouching on a bench in sight of the parking lot, reconnoitering every half hour or so to see if things have died down. His nose, fresh from a rhinoplasty, is straight now, but there are fading bruises under each eye, covered by slight makeup. He undoes his tie and unbuttons his jacket, then finally just flings the latter off onto the lawn somewhere.

At some point his father goes to a microphone and starts rambling about the nature of time and his daughter's wedding and then Jason's just done, incapable of anything but disgust with everything here.

He heads back to the bench and picks up some pebbles, chucking them at the pigeons just to see if the birds will fly away.

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She sniffles and whimpers and sits there for a while longer, until she's not crying as much anymore, then gets back up and shuffles to her doll, her skirt tripping her up once on the walk. She collects her doll and her gloves and sits back down to where she had been initially, a few yards from Jason.

"Quentin was nice. Caddy is nice. Only you're mean, so it's you, not your family."

Swann isn't looking at him, her gaze instead fixed on her doll, where she's carefully weaving the little yellow flowers into the blonde fake hair.

"Caddy's a slut and Quentin's dead," Jason says, but it's dull, the words more vitriolic than his tone. He collapses back down on the bench, listening to his father continue to slur on.

After a moment he closes his eyes, not to sleep but in an attempt not to cry, not from grief or sorrow but from anger at the injustice of it all.

"Quentin was still nice before," she tells him. She doesn't know what 'slut' means, and so it's hard to have a retort, but it doesn't change the fact that Caddy is nice, always has been.

He's quiet for long enough that she dares to peek back over at him with a frown. She knows that face, the way his eyelids are pushed together just a little too hard, the way his lips press closed too tightly and narrow. She knows it because she has it herself, often, but also because she's seen it on other people, on grown-ups. On her father, during her mother's rare visits back home, after they yell in his office and then her mother stomps away to a different wing of the house.

That look makes her stomach churn, and so she can only do the same thing she does for her father: she moves to sit at Jason's feet. Though she usually puts her head on her father's knee, she doesn't dare touch Jason, just sits close and speaks quietly.

"It's okay."

"No. It's not." Jason manages to quell the tears stinging at his eyes and opens them, face set with a firmness that overcompensates for the moment of weakness. It's like all the ugliness, all the viciousness of his features has circled around him in a protective wreath.

"You don't have anyone dead in your family. You don't know. You can't know." The only scandal with the Honeymeads has been occasional and oft-quashed allegations that Viatrix is unfaithful.

She turns her head and looks up at him, seems to see through his expression like she'd see through a pane of glass. Her face is calm and placid now, serene even, and she blinks.

"My grandpa died."

It's the closest she's been to a death in her life, but she was six and left away from the funeral, put in a room with Eta to watch her. She was kept away from even the other children, treated like a little doll in mourning, brought out only to be held by her father so that he could show how sad they all were.

It took a while before anyone bothered to actually explain to her that Grandpa Honeymead wasn't coming back.

"Even if... even if Quentin did do that to himself, he was... he was just sad. You have to be sad to do that. It's not anyone's fault, so it'll be okay later. People don't hurt forever when they lose other people."

"Your grandpa was old. That's different. People aren't going to cast your family out because your grandpa died."

Because that's what Jason's grieving for, not for Quentin, really, but for the life he had up until Caddy got herself knocked up. God knows it wasn't perfect, but it wasn't like the door had been blown off the house for the whole world to judge them.

The whole world is speculating, it seems, on what's going on in the Compson house. His parents are giving them good reason to talk about it all. Jason wants all the onlookers to drop dead and mind their own business.

"They're pulling me out of school."

Her head cocks a bit to the side. Even this young, she understands some of the different politics and standings between the families of their circle, but she doesn't understand enough to see how this would make the Compsons persona non grata. Of course, she also doesn't know about the rushed wedding, the vaguely suspicious circumstances, doesn't understand the implications of the elder Compsons' behaviors.

"Why?" Her tone is innocent, the way only a young child's can be. "You have to finish. It's important."

"I'll get tutored into getting my diploma. Mother wants me around the house more."

Sometimes Mother claims it's because she needs someone to pick up the slack because the Avoxes all got returned to the warehouse, untrustable. Sometimes it's because she can't bear to let Jason out of her sight for fear he might get taken from her too. Sometimes it's so she has someone at her beck and call that she can feel dignified crying on.

"They want to spare me the embarrassment, I'm guessing. Being the brother of a suicide."

"Why is that embarrassing? You didn't do anything."

But then again, Swann doesn't really understand someone's parent wanting them around more, either. Even when her mother is home, the two almost never interact, and with her father burying himself in work, Swann is generally left to her own devices with only her nannies and her Avox around to even notice her.

"What about your friends at school?"

"Maybe not me, but for all of us. The family, that is. Now everyone's wondering what it is we're like behind closed doors to drive Quentin to off himself and they're treating us like we're contagious." He finds he doesn't mind explaining it to Swann, talking out the logic behind it like he's untangling it in his own head. He's still bitter, still hateful, but talking is easier than letting it build up pressure and get confused in his head.

"They'll live." Jason's never really had close friends in school. Acquaintances, and the boys he hangs out with and used to manage their kite-making club for, but he's never had the sort of intimacy most people have with their friends. Even before he became a sullen teenager, he was isolated, always playing on his own.

He's still not being very nice, but the anger is no longer directed at her, and it's enough to keep Swann talking, even if she still doesn't comprehend a lot of it.

"Why did your family have to do anything to him? Maybe he was just sad inside. Sometimes I get really scared about things that aren't scary, and my daddy said that sometimes, people just feel a certain way. If things make me scared, maybe things made Quentin sad. Maybe he just didn't want to be sad anymore."

She's looking back down at her doll by the end of it, tightening the braids to make sure that the flowers don't fall out. She's been told a million times that dandelions are weeds, that if she's going to pick flowers, wouldn't she rather have the nice ones? But Swann has never understood why being a weed was supposed to make dandelions any less pretty or nice.

"Won't you be lonely?"

"It doesn't even matter if he didn't do anything. Everyone's going to look at us like we're zoo animals. They're going to see Quentin not being there more than they'll see any of us." A Quentin-shaped hole in the universe, sucking in people's views like a black hole. Maybe they'll make a pit stop on Caddy's protruding belly on the way, he thinks.

He shrugs. He hasn't thought about it that way, is angrier at the way people will think of him and his parents than he is about missing anyone.

"I don't care about them anyway."

She goes quiet, her brow knitting as she taps her toes together again, thinking hard. It's not easy for her to understand that transfer of blame, or why Jason is so sure about how people will treat them. She thinks that people would be nicer because of their loss.

"You're not... you're not zoo animals. Quentin was sad, that's all. And you're still here, and Caddy. And she's going to have a baby soon, and people will think about that instead, people like babies."

Turning her gaze back on him, she looks concerned, about him. "So you're just going to stay in your house all the time?"

"Oh, yeah, people will think about that." Jason laughs again, that mean, hopeless, exasperated, laugh. Because they'll think about that baby, and the rumors will whirl around, especially if it doesn't look a damn thing like Herbert. But Swann's too young for that, too young to know about where babies really come from.

"I don't know. Maybe. That seems to be Mother's plan." Jason feels like a toy being put back in a box, something that a great hand plucked up, played with and broke and now is going to relegate to some dusty mothball-filled corner. He feels like he needs every speck of concern in Swann's expression.

It's another thing she doesn't understand, and that makes it impossible to answer, the way he laughs and speaks sarcastically about Caddy's unborn baby. She just frowns at him.

"But what about what you want to do?" It's never occurred to her that his mother might just decide these things on her, wouldn't ask how he feels about it. It's rare that Swann's father asks her to do anything at all, let alone something so drastic and against her own will. Swann, at ten, essentially runs her own life, with her own staff to order around as she pleases, her only obligation being a more exclusive private school than any other in the Capitol, the one all the old money children attend.

He frowns back, pulling a face, childishly even.

"Doesn't matter what I want to do." Maybe that's what killed Quentin, having to shoulder the burden of being the eldest son. Now that he's dead Jason is to continue being his mother's blunt object to bludgeon the family with along with being the mantle on which they must hang the family name. "I have obligations now. Responsibilities to the family. You're just a kid - you wouldn't understand."

Her brow knits, and she's so confused. She crosses her arms, holding her doll to her chest, and leans back against the bench. She's too short for anything but her head to hit the edge of the seat, and it's uncomfortable, but she doesn't want Jason to know that, so she tolerates it and doesn't say anything.

"You're not a grown-up yet, what responsibilities could you have?" She thinks about her family, her father and mother and grandparents, and she can't imagine them saying she has to do anything 'for the family', because the Honeymead name stands on its own and she doesn't need to defend it.

"All the ones Quentin used to have. Making the family look good. Taking care of Mother and Father." He glares over his shoulder, back at the dinner. "God knows he can't take care of himself, and Uncle Maury's no fucking use."

Maybe he shouldn't swear in front of Swann, but that makes him want to do it even more. "Some nights Father doesn't go to bed because he can't even get up the stairs."

"But Quentin was gone at school forever." A year seems so long to her, to have been gone at school and then just never come back, and she's still not even sure that Jason's telling the truth about Quentin killing himself. Maybe Jason just wants to upset her, he likes doing things like that.

She frowns at him when he swears, but doesn't say anything about it. "Is he sick?"

"Well, Caddy's off and married now, too, so that leaves me." But it was always on him to take care of Mother. He looks over his shoulder at the source of the sound again, his father's yammering.

"What do you think?" Mr. Compson's alcoholism isn't even an open secret, because that would imply people aren't talking about it, aren't going to exchange jokes at his expense after the funeral is over if they don't have the decency to feign sadness for him.

"I'unno."

She shrugs. Swann is still young enough that she's rarely exposed to Mr. Compson, instead being shuffled off to nurseries and playrooms during gatherings, and with only one parent around, she doesn't even really have much opportunity to eavesdrop on adult conversations, to pick up those little tidbits of information that other children might absorb.

"Sometimes he acts like Grandma Honeymead when she was getting... um... dimensions? And then she died. That was when I was littler, before Grandpa died."

"You mean dementia."

The truth is, Jason doesn't know if his dad is 'sick' in a traditional sense of the word either. On the one hand, the evidence is undeniable, but Jason can't get over the fact that this is something his father does to himself. Every single night, by this point.

"The doctors say he has less than a year if he keeps drinking." And, well, he's obviously going to keep drinking, if the ramble in the background is any indication. He's only gotten worse since Caddy's pregnancy.

"De-men-tia."

She repeats it out of habit, each syllable separate so that she can remember it for the next time. She doesn't know anyone else with a drinking problem, at least not a public one -- her daddy drinks whiskey and bourbon and brandy after dinner, but only a glass. Two when Viatrix is home. For Swann, that's drinking, not endless amounts that leave one a mess in front of everyone they know. Not enough to kill you.

"Why doesn't he stop?"

"Maybe he wants to go be with Quentin."

Jason snorts, because he isn't sure if he's serious or joking there. It's only recently that he's realized his father has a drinking problem, that the constant inebriation and sloppiness is abnormal, that most fathers don't come home and drink until they can't stand.

"Will you miss him, if he dies?"

It's an innocent question, wondered aloud simply because Jason doesn't seem very attached to any of his family, hasn't said a single nice word about any one of them, and he has a lot more family to like than most people do. Swann doesn't know if she would miss her mother very much, but she would miss her father very much, and Eta even more.

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