Strub’s Funerary

Strub’s Funerary is Argus’s leading funeral and embalming business, a family institution whose work gives the town’s deaths a public form and offers practical care to the bereaved. Under the direction of Aurelius Strub and his wife, Benta, it is known for technical skill and the serenity of the bodies it prepares; their niece Clarisse Strub is both an apprentice and its expected successor. Through its handling of the dead—from the Watzka cellar tragedy to Eva Waldvogel’s funeral—the practice stands where professional ritual meets intimate grief.

Family Business and Reputation

Aurelius Strub directs the town’s funerary work, assisted by Benta and their young niece Clarisse, who is training as a mortuary assistant. Clarisse is expected to inherit the business. Her future is already legible to her schoolmates: in a town where most people will eventually need funeral services, she is the person who will attend to their bodies. That prospect complicates her relationships with her peers, even as she becomes known for her intelligence and composure around death.

The practice is described as the most advanced and well-respected funeral establishment in its part of the state. Aurelius earned a diploma from one of the first itinerant embalming instructors to visit North Dakota and continued to make technical improvements. Embalming was only beginning to take hold in the region, but the Strubs’ work attracted calls from distant towns. People who had seen bodies prepared and displayed by the family found comfort in their serenity, making the business’s reputation depend not only on technical achievement but on the calm its work could offer mourners.

Clarisse’s Training and Place in the Practice

Clarisse’s professional future follows the early loss of her parents. She had imagined leaving Argus and pursuing drama, but after their deaths she had to give up further schooling and theatrical play to help in the family business. Her aunt Benta recognized her aptitude for embalming, a skill the novel links to an ancient art that was then gaining acceptance in the Dakotas. Clarisse’s inheritance is therefore both a vocation and a constraint: she takes her place in a respected practice, but remains in the town she and Delphine once dreamed of leaving.

The work also gives Clarisse a distinctive position among Argus’s young people. She excels at dissection in school and learns to move between the practical requirements of mortuary work and her own theatrical imagination. When Delphine visits her at the funeral home, Clarisse wears a white gown, green mask, rubber gloves, and dark glasses; her familiar black curls reveal her identity. She removes the mask and gloves to greet her friend, but first checks that no one is watching, because the Strub family expects solemn behavior in the presence of the dead. Their private reunion briefly reopens the playful world of the two girls, who had once performed together in town theater.

Delphine’s access to the funeral home is unusually intimate. During Clarisse’s unexplained illness, Delphine accompanied her through a prolonged course of treatment supervised by Doctor Heech, holding her hand through the painful injections. Delphine was the only person outside the family, apart from the doctor, who knew what had happened, and the only nonrelative admitted to the basement sanctum of Strub’s Funerary. Their friendship crosses the threshold between ordinary social life and the family’s private working space, establishing the trust that later matters when Delphine must face a death of her own.

The Funeral Home in Argus’s Life

Strub’s Funerary is not separate from the town’s broader encounter with death. Argus prides itself on civic participation and religious respectability, yet shocks recur: accidents, violence, sudden deaths, and losses that leave unanswered questions. The funeral business continues to flourish amid these events, a steady institution in a place where public confidence cannot keep death or wrongdoing away. Its presence makes mortality visible even when the town would prefer to return to ordinary routines.

The family’s work is also a service that links households to communal ritual. When Eva dies, Delphine calls the funeral home rather than attempting to manage the next steps alone. Benta answers, having followed Eva’s illness and anticipated the call. She offers to come with Clarisse, recognizing that it will be difficult for Delphine to receive her friend in the new role of funeral director’s assistant. The exchange shows the practical side of the practice—its readiness to respond—as well as the personal knowledge that makes its service feel continuous with the life of the town.

Eva’s Death and the Strubs’ Care

After Eva dies, Delphine prepares her body and calls Fidelis. She feels unable to join the family in the adjoining room and is unsure whether she can accompany Eva to the funeral home, although Eva had made that request. When the Strubs arrive at the back door in their long, pearl-gray hearse, Clarisse embraces Delphine with practical kindness and helps bring her into the room where Fidelis and his sons are gathered. Aurelius then gently tells Fidelis that the family will take good care of Eva. Fidelis lowers his wife to the mattress, and the family’s grief finds expression before they step away and leave the Strubs to their work.

The scene clarifies what the funeral home offers and what it cannot do. Its staff can receive the body, guide the bereaved through the immediate aftermath, and assume the responsibilities of care; they cannot make the death less final. Clarisse’s presence matters because she is at once a professional member of the Strub family and Delphine’s old friend. The funeral practice becomes a bridge between Delphine’s private loss and the communal rites that follow, while maintaining the boundaries of the family’s work.

Public Ritual and Continuing Memory

The Strubs’ services appear in the social fabric of Argus beyond the moment of death. Roy Watzka’s funeral is well attended, with flowers in the church, a church-hall dinner, and photographs placed facedown in his coffin over his heart, as he had instructed. In later night walks, Delphine visits the cemetery where Roy and Eva are buried. She associates Roy’s grave with his history of drinking and imagines his presence beside her in the afterlife; Eva’s grave lies beneath a pine tree Delphine planted, whose roots she imagines reaching down to cradle her friend. The cemetery’s measured rows and square stones make it an ordinary, maintained place, even as it holds the losses that continue to shape Delphine.

The institution’s significance extends beyond Argus. In 1954, during a visit to Germany, Fidelis joins other surviving master butchers to sing at the unveiling of a monument to the victims of the bombing of Ludwigsruhe. Delphine watches the ceremony, where the men’s singing becomes entangled in her perception with smoke and ash. The scene places public commemoration beside unresolved memories of wartime destruction: the dead have been buried, and the monument is unveiled, yet the past remains present to her. Strub’s Funerary is not part of that German ceremony, but the book’s recurring funerary and memorial settings frame a wider contrast between the work of tending the dead and the difficulty of making peace with what caused their deaths.

In Argus, the Strub family’s business gives death a skilled, recognizable process: the body is received, prepared, and entrusted to public mourning. Its reputation rests on technical care, but its most consequential work is relational. Through Clarisse’s inheritance, Delphine’s friendship, and the family’s attendance at Eva’s death, Strub’s Funerary joins professional duty to the fragile support people need when private loss becomes communal fact.