The Family of Max Desir

by Robert Ferro

  They all went into the den. Max stepped outside on the terrace but the rain was still falling and he stood under the eave of the house. It was seven o’clock. He wondered if she might still be in the house, or if he thought she could be anywhere or anything at all. He went back to her room but the door was closed. The doctor arrived and went in, and as the door opened Max saw Madelaine standing next to the bed. She had propped a pillow under Marie’s chin. It seemed as if she was sinking down into the bed.

  Jack and the doctor sat at the kitchen table while Feeney filled out the death certificate. John did not come in. Robin was with him in the den. Jack wanted to know what to do next and Feeney said to call the funeral home and they would undertake everything. Then he said, Maybe you should close these curtains when they take her out. I don’t think you want to see that. It’s pretty grim.

  When the doctor left, Max went into Marie’s room. The smell of sickness was now the smell of death, nearly a sweet smell. His mother’s forehead was cool. Jack came in.

  I don’t know what I feel, he said, to which Max did not reply. Jack said, That’s our mother.

  The doorbell rang. A short man with a big head and a face like a Leonardo caricature stood in the hall. He had large flap ears, a flat face and a long jaw like a fish. This ghoul had come for his mother. Another normal man stood in the doorway, his gloved hands clasped in front of him like a waiter. They both wore black suits.

  Everyone went back into the den, leaving the two men alone in the hall. Only a few minutes later Madelaine opened the double doors from the dining room and said they had gone.

  IX.

  FROM THE OUTSIDE, GREY’S FUNERAL HOME resembled a suburban bank in the neocolonial style. Inside a modest theatrical monumentality had been achieved despite the low ceilings. Various-size rooms gave off a wide central hall lit with torcheres. In one of the rooms an old lady lay resting between viewings, within a bower of ferns and flowers like the cover of a greeting card. Mr Grey, of the several Grey brothers, bore a strong resemblance to a neighbor in Indian River who had been very sweet to them as children; had in fact been Penny’s godfather. This coincidence had the same effect now on Robin and Max as it had on Mary Kay the week before. They sat in a small office. Mr Grey asked for the name of the cemetery. It was thought they would need the largest viewing room. This being Thursday, Mr Grey suggested Tuesday, the day after Memorial Day, as the first possible day of interment. That would mean a wake of four days. They, however, wanted three days, meaning burial on the holiday. Mr Grey doubted this was permitted.

  They went downstairs to look at coffins in a display room like a candy shop, with large boxes of chocolates, certain frilly lids opened, lining the walls. As they were leaving the house John had said he wanted the best, in bronze. But they let Mr Grey go on. The bronze cost seven thousand dollars. Its interior was cream-colored cut velvet with shirred edges and a little puff pillow. Mr Grey explained a mechanism that raised the body for viewing and lowered it for closing. The coffin’s eventual inviolateness could not be guaranteed.

  Marie had never actually said she wanted a mausoleum but Max heard from Penny that Marie had told John she didn’t want to be buried in the ground, in the cold ground; nor did she want to be buried on the shoulder of the LIE. They asked Mr Grey about building a mausoleum. He replied that they were very expensive, requiring a large financial trust, nor did he think one could be built nowadays that would be completely safe from vandals. Later, when Max conveyed this information to John, the image of his wife’s looted tomb hit him with the force of a slap in the face, and the idea was dropped. Mr Grey asked them to select a dress, cosmetics and a picture of the deceased to work from; he would send someone to the house later to collect these things.

  John wanted the coffin to be open during the wake. Everyone else thought it should be closed. Penny said, Mom avoided everyone when she was sick. She would not want anyone to see her now. But John said they would wait until they had seen the body on Friday evening to decide.

  IT WAS STILL DAYLIGHT WHEN THEY ARRIVED at Grey’s, John and the four of them. Mr Grey showed them into one of the smaller rooms, where the coffin had been placed temporarily, and left them alone. John stood over Marie and said softly, No, no. That’s not right.

  Marie’s face had been painted, with rouge and even eye-shadow. She had never used eyebrow pencil; now two half-moons gave her face a look of attention or surprise that seemed ludicrous with the eyes closed. The wig was too high off her neck and too low on her forehead, and even this could not account for its look of mistaken artificiality, of glossy deceit. The dress, a black gown from their cruise ship days, had been chosen for its high neck, but now the cloth seemed to cut into her skin. Her body was imprecise in places, as if the dress had been stuffed with paper. For Max it was not a question of whether the coffin should be opened or closed. Having her look this way, even in the ground, as if there had never been any distinction or beauty in her face, was more than he could accept. He looked at his father. I’m going to take this stuff off, he said.

  Mr Grey came back in. Jack said softly to Max, That looks terrible. Max suggested that everyone except Robin leave the room. The only thing John said was, Do you think you can get it off?

  Max closed the folding doors and he and Robin went and looked at their mother. The absolute stillness within the casket induced in him a dizzy, druggy swirl; he reached out to touch the seemingly translucent hands, the left folded over the withered right. Like the skin on her face, they had been painted, and when he touched them they were hard and cold, like something on the thaw, flesh and ice. He tried to rub off the rouge with his handkerchief but a fixative had been sprayed on as a final step. He discovered that the skin when moved did not move back. He tried to free the neckline of her dress but it was fastened at the back with a hook. He reached behind to loosen it and Robin leaned over to see what he was doing.

  The dress digs into her neck, he said. I can’t undo it without lifting her head … And the wig’s on backward.

  Max, no, Robin said, It can’t be.

  That’s why she looks so strange. He lifted the hair and mesh covering Marie’s temple and showed Robin a piece which was supposed to fit behind the ear.

  Oh my God, she said. I can’t believe it. How could they do that?

  We can’t let her stay this way, he said. You’ll have to hold her head while I unhook the dress.

  They had often exchanged such instructions while Marie was sick. Robin hesitated a moment, perhaps thinking it through, then reached down and carefully lifted Marie’s head up off the pillow with both hands. Max again reached around for the hook and eye.

  Max, hurry, she said. I feel like it’s going to come off in my hands. Suppose it did.

  Don’t think like that, he said.

  But it’s so heavy … It’s her head.

  Don’t think like that, he repeated. He unfastened the hook and Robin lowered Marie’s head back onto the little pillow. She shuddered and hugged herself. He was able now to draw the material away from the neck. Robin took a deep breath and said, We need something to take off this makeup … I’ll ask. She went through the folding doors.

  Max reached down and slipped the wig from his mother’s head. Short coarse gray hair had grown back in the last months of her illness though she was still bald on top. Without the wig, which was crimped and crushed on one side, all her vulnerability returned. He would not let his own doubts stop him—the magical taboos, the mystical fears. His mother’s body had been processed like an animal trophy of great rarity. It was now what was left of her, dressed and made up as if nothing had happened— no cancer, death, no gutting and draining, infusions of formaldehyde, injections of paraffin and silicone, no paint. Without the wig something was restored, if only the beautiful, unchanged shape of her head, and a certain sexless resemblance to both her parents in old age. But these remnants were no longer her and he could not let anyone see her this way.

  Robin returned. She came up to the coffi
n and said, It’s her again without that wig.

  She handed him the cosmetics case they had sent over.

  Mr Grey is nervous, she said. He just told me they hired a specialist to come in and do the makeup.

  Fresh from a gypsy wedding, Max said. The wig was only on backward…. He brushed the crimps out of the wig and put it back on Marie’s head; arranged it. With cold cream on the tip of his handkerchief, he wiped off the drawn eyebrows, the eyeshadow and most of the rouge. He smoothed out the rest of the remaining color and added powder from her compact.

  That’s fine, Max, Robin said.

  He did something else to the wig and stood back. The mortal remains of his mother, bewigged, dressed in black cerements, lay in the bronze vehicle with the cream velvet interior which, like a sportscar through a paper billboard, would pierce the veil. He wished it was over.

  John came in with Penny and Jack. John looked at Marie and said, That’s better, and looked again through his bifocals and said, Thank you, children. It’s better now.

  But she still can’t be seen this way, Max said. She would not want you to do that.

  I can’t close the coffin yet and have it end, John said. Mr Grey, who seemed never to be far away, appeared again and said they could open the coffin for Mr Desir privately before each session of the wake, to which arrangement John reluctantly agreed. They now left him alone in the room and as they were coming into the hall the funeral director approached Max.

  Mr Desir, he said, I’m sorry. It was the way she was made up in the picture.

  And Max said, My mother, in the picture, was going to a captain’s ball, not her own funeral.

  He went outside. Mary Kay and the others were arriving.

  What’s it going to be? she asked. And he said, Closed.

  EACH DAY AND EVENING OF THE WAKE John went to Grey’s a half-hour early. Afterward Mr Grey would close the lid, using the mechanism he had demonstrated to Max and Robin to lower the body deeper into the casket, and drape the coffin with a six-foot blanket of yellow roses. By the second day the room was filled with flowers, with an overflow into the room of the lady next door. Everyone they had known in Indian River came to pay his respects. Max was able to introduce Mr Grey to Penny’s godfather—Rassendyl face to face with the Prisoner of Zenda. Women his mother’s age walked vigorously through the street door: the survivors. It seemed as he looked down into their rumpled faces—short elderly women whom Marie had known for forty years—that any resentment they had felt for the Desirs becoming rich and moving away from Indian River was forgotten for the moment. Mrs Boyle and Mrs Kruger, both widowed and frozen in the amber of late middle age, each held one of his hands. Mrs Boyle said, Your mother was a wonderful person. And Mrs Kruger added, Everyone loved her.

  He thought the closed coffin spared everyone many of the actualities of the occasion. A picture of Marie had been placed on a small table. In the picture Marie sat on the bow railing of the Mara, in a red sweater and a white angora tam, a soft smile on her face; behind her and because of the angle, all was blue sea, no sky. It had been taken five years before, on a cruise with the Naval Cadets to Lake Champlain with Dan and Phoebe, and was perhaps the picture they should have given to Mr Grey.

  The Desiderios took up nearly three rows. They came each day of the wake and stayed until evening. They went elsewhere for lunch, but at the end of the day they returned with John to Hillcrest. The women cooked dinner and afterward did the dishes, leaving only when they had done everything they could think of. They were all dressed in black. In winter they would have produced black cloth coats for the occasion. They had always seemed, to Max, to be dressed for a funeral.

  A curtained alcove off the viewing room was reserved as a retreat for the immediate family. But John never left his place in front of the coffin in the middle of the front row. A steady flow of visitors approached him. He did not cry and seldom talked. Every hour or so he knelt at the prie-dieu alongside the coffin. Jack or Max dealt with Mr Grey, arranging things as they went along.

  By Sunday afternoon the alcove had been breached by several Desiderio cousins who wanted to exchange information less formally. As a direct consequence of their parents’ entrenchment in Brooklyn, all eight of them had scattered to the winds. One was a policeman in Boston, another a florist in L.A. One lived in Hawaii, another in Florida, the rest in New Jersey. Six had come back for the funeral. Two Max knew were gay but had married anyway and produced children. Early on he had advised one of them on the matter, which advice had not been taken, and he had chanced to see the other cousin years before in a bar downtown. Ill-met by moonlight, proud Titania. That made three, possibly four out of a generational crop of twelve people: it was a network they glimpsed of ribs and hollows, as they crawled beneath the dim, vaulted cellars of the cathedral.

  A journalist friend of Jack’s came in with a copy of The New York Times, which contained Marie’s obituary.

  MARIE DESIR

  Special to The New York Times

  Hillcrest, N.J. May 26—Marie Desir, wife of John M Desir, president and chairman of the board of Mara Products, died at her home here Thursday after a long illness. She was 69 years old.

  She was born in Italy and came to the United States in 1913. Besides her husband, she is survived by two sons, John, Jr, and Max; two daughters, Roberta Quinlin and Angela Rourke; two brothers, Daniel Defilippo, and Frank Defilippo, and nine grandchildren.

  No mention of the way she had died; all such journalistic discretion meant cancer. That Daniel had survived his sister was a moot point. Reading the obituary in the Times gave it the stature of a review, of a production in which they had all taken part. Max saw his father thank Jack’s friend and hold both of the man’s hands as if in some great dedication, his head tilted to one side in a manner he used only when delivering a compliment.

  On Sunday evening, the last of the wake, John stayed the extra half-hour with the open coffin, and Max and Jack had to help him from his knees and into the car. On Monday morning Father Bill conducted a short private ceremony for the family at Grey’s. It had been at this point, before Grandma Desiderio’s burial, that John’s father threw himself into the coffin, an impulse that Max saw now in a different light. Mr Grey gave John Marie’s engagement ring and John turned and presented it to Robin. This had been Jack’s idea. It startled Robin and she wept for the first time that any of them had seen, and everyone wept with her, including Mr Grey. Max thought a man who cried at funerals like a woman at weddings shouldn’t be an undertaker.

  They stood together in a small anteroom while the casket was placed in the hearse and a second flower car was added to the cortege. Jack had taken charge of everything. John held onto his arm and said in a hoarse voice, You’ll have to help me, children. They came out the door under a canopy. The gray hearse, two black flower cars, and six limousines—all but the one filled with people and waiting—were stopped in the moment, as in a photograph. The five of them and Phoebe and Frank got into the first car, with Jack sitting in front with the driver. On the way to St Jude’s they drove past the house, and the hearse slowed momentarily, as if dipping its flags to the big white columns, the perfect shrubs, impeccable lawn. John said, Take a last look, Marie, which sounded ludicrous but which was exactly what Max would have said.

  St Jude of the Valley was filled with familiar faces, an enormous coincidence, the juxtaposition of all the elements of Marie Desir’s life, with a preponderance of Cadets and their wives.

  They settled into the first pew as a friend of Mary Kay’s sang “Ave Maria” in a sweet clear voice. The gorgeous coffin seemed to hover over the transept like a Magritte boulder, an object from another world, another idea entirely. His mother was in there.

  It was the first Mass he had attended in many years and much had changed: the banal English text with its domestic associations, the altar turned around so that the priest faced them like the host of a cooking show. They all took Communion. He was unacquainted with the latest rulings of what con
stituted a state of grace. He had never qualified after the age of fifteen and, he imagined, never would. After the rearrangement of the row, Max sat beside his father. John stared at Father Bill, who was cleaning up the altar in a distracted way. John seemed connected to the priest’s movements by a profound curiosity, for a ritual he had seen thousands of times but had never closely examined. His face was swollen with fatigue and weeping, with all the symptoms of a cold. When Father Bill said, And especially your dear departed servant Marie, John shuddered. During the eulogy Father Bill said, I knew Marie. I baptized and confirmed three of her children and baptized a few of her grandchildren. The Lord says, I am the resurrection and the life. Whosoever believes in Me shall not die. John nodded his head as if the terms of a contract were being explained to him.

  Jack had resolved as a last gesture to his mother to see that she was buried on Memorial Day, a bureaucratic dilemma. It had taken all weekend and considerable influence to arrange, including calls to three mayors, a judge, two police chiefs, and the head of the gravediggers’ local. Every municipality between St Jude’s and the cemetery had a parade planned for that morning. Three of them were diverted; police escorts helped to cut through two more. In both cases the cortege was longer than the parade. One spectacle slid by the other. From the people at the curb came long looks of docile respect, or of surprise with festive traces; children on their fathers’ shoulders did not perceive the difference and waved; old peo-ple wondered who had died so expensively; several policemen and a deft majorette held back an oblivious marching band. And on the other side came two hundred cars with their lights on, two rows of daytime moons, pallid amid the flashes of sunlight off windshields.

  To sweep sedately through fancy stone gates in a limousine had always been a particular image to Max and as they threaded into the cemetery he wondered if this was why. At a small distance from the gravesite the cars stopped and the hearse and flower cars went on alone. A few moments later they pulled up to a pile of little girls in party dresses. An awning sheltered the coffin from the intense beauty overhead. Chairs had not been provided and everyone stood in a half-circle three or four deep, in no particular order. Nick touched his arm. A few of the grandchildren were crying; only since the funeral had come out-of-doors was it real to them. Father Bill said, Lord, receive Your servant Marie, and Ashes to ashes, in a loud reedy voice that sailed over their heads and flew off in the light wind. He went on to the Twenty-third psalm, interpolating the valley of the shadow of evil for the shadow of death; and ended with the Lord’s Prayer. He asked God’s blessing and they felt the first soft concussive silence of the empty air.