Bereavements

by Richard Lortz

  The man was, with these words, drained of energy and interest in both his son, and in the beauty and keen sense of full-flowered selfhood of his own exposed body.

  “Go see her,” he advised Angel softly. “You haven’t looked in today; say hello. After all . . . ” He didn’t finish, but crushed the beer can, watching it crinkle like paper under the pressure of his broad fingers.

  Angel didn’t move. His eyes dropped from his father’s now-expressionless face to the black curled hair on the chest, the flat expanse of clearly-muscled stomach with its half-hidden navel, to the rounded, too-full crotch; then quickly to knees, feet, floor, where they remained.

  “After all . . . ” Auri repeated, concluding this time, “she’s your mother.”

  Dear Bruno . . .

  Among the very few options available to her, Mrs. Evans considered her salutation. She desired to write a brief, pleasant letter, but a preliminary one, subject to editing and thoughtful review, then copy a final draft.

  She scratched out the Dear Bruno. Obviously, it was too personal; indeed, in bad taste, even to a boy.

  He had addressed her Dear Madam—But to return, Dear Sir, would be offensively formal, defeating at the very start the purpose of her letter.

  Dear Mr. Carlson-Wade . . .

  That also seemed inadequate—more the beginning of a business letter than one designed to be a warm gesture of possible exploratory friendship.

  Well, then, since she intended to give her “wheel of fate” a hearty if not totally vigorous spin, why not, Dear Bruno?

  She wrote it again. No; it was impossible, even after the boy’s daring exposure of himself, his extravagant, “I . . . mail to you what is essentially my heart.” Perhaps he regretted the words now; sobered, in the sane light of morning, they may have appeared an embarrassment.

  Besides . . .

  She couldn’t traffic in hearts, his or any other; not while Jamie’s still beat within her. Dead? Even his body, when she dared to look, remained exquisite, as perfect, untouched by time—she’d seen to that!—as the day, the hour, he’d been placed in the tomb, while his spirit, his quintessential self was as much alive in her as ever. Just as she had given him out to life with a cry of agony at birth, so too, she had taken him back in, in death, and in agony different, but no less severe. The womb that carried him now, nurtured him, the new gestation that would make his “death”-in-life a “life”-in-death, was of spirit, and mind, not body, his food passion, not blood: the kind of faith and madness that moved mountains into seas.

  I’ll find a way!

  Mrs. Evans jolted into consciousness with a small breathless cry, disoriented, not knowing what had happened.

  She glanced down.

  Dear Bruno . . .

  But she had begun the letter at eleven-thirty and it was now well past midnight!

  She felt depleted, drained; her forehead and the corners of her mouth were wet. This was the third time in the past month “it” had happened. Troubled, she dried herself, again remembering the interview, fake or genuine, with Mrs. Luz: the contorted face, the trace of foam upon the pale lips, a shattered voice evoking the “dead” with an impressive prelude of barking gibberish and garish “evidence.”

  Had she been doing that too?—fake or genuine—imagining or discovering a capacity, a growing talent—whatever its name—to do the same? And would she soon be hearing voices, moving objects with her eyes, hanging misty cords of ectoplasm in the air like wash upon a line? Either way, wasn’t it a shocking joke, a warp of mind, another symptom (as Robert would say) of her indulgent Jamie-madness?

  “Carma! Bury him; be done with it!”

  Done with what?—the foolish man! She hadn’t buried Jamie, and never would. She had glorified him. But was she now hopelessly, helplessly beginning to drown in her own poetry of death?

  If she didn’t get help, or couldn’t, or manage someway to help herself, if she could not be where she was, and do, for the living, what needed to be done—through these absurd letters, if need be: through “Bruno,” “Angel,” whomever and whatever, then she knew she’d continue her increasing blackouts, and her dazed night-long wandering through the Village streets, or—more likely—be waking Dori at one, two, three in the morning, begging for the car and that wild drive to Long Island to fling herself, senseless, raving on the steps of Jamie’s tomb, calling to him, coaxing, demanding he “rise,” sometimes with magical gestures, as if she, too, had a finger to wither fig trees and feet blessed or cursed enough to walk on water . . . calling, calling her son with no means to stop herself, her shame and embarrassment acute, because Dori was always standing by, frozen, unable to help, only to watch, to wait for all her raging passion to spend itself until he could finally kneel, cradle her head, feed her sips of brandy; whereupon she would rise, composed, like shaken royalty, an epileptic queen before her serfs, murmuring with absurd hauteur, “I’m all right, all right now, Dori.”

  Then he’d guide her gently away from the bronze door, down the marble steps, around the pools splattered with their waxen-white of water lilies, along the pebbled paths, across wet grass to the house where servants watching from afar, shadowed ghosts in their robes and nightgowns, were gathered upon the steps like a tableau upon a stage, light from the open door flooding from behind them, their nervous hands having wrung themselves wet and still.

  Book II

  DEAR BRUNO David Carlson-Wade . . .

  There. That seemed exactly right; his full name, quite as he had written it, neither formal, nor informal, but with just that touch of jest, of playfulness that was needed.

  I received your charming letter . . . No, no. I was pleased?—yes, I was pleased to receive your very nice letter . . .

  “Nice” seemed an excellent choice since no other word in the English language was as universal, innocuous, and meant absolutely nothing and everything simultaneously.

  . . .your very nice letter, and am in your debt for so informative an account of yourself and your. . . No, that was much too stilted.

  . . .your very nice letter,but rather than reply with details of my own . . . That was not what she wanted, either.

  . . . your very nice letter. Period.

  Could you come to tea on Saturday afternoon at the above address at about three o’clock? Since you work, I assume a weekend hour would be most suitable for you but if this is inconvenient, please telephone and we will arrange a more agreeable time.

  If I do not hear from you, I’ll look forward with interest and pleasure to meeting you on Saturday, the 8th.

  Yours—

  And now the signature, another problem. Well, her full name would be best, and amusing, like his in the salutation, so she signed it: Carma de Vinaz Rojas Vincenti Harrington-Smith Evans.

  Seeing the absurd length of it, she laughed. Never, in years, had it been necessary to write so many of her names.

  How Graciela Felicita Ruiz managed to capture the wildly handsome Aurelio Carlos Rivera as a husband had always, from the beginning, been something of a mystery.

  She was unattractive in both face and form, and the fact that she was a pure Puerto Rican Black became, even before the first week of marriage was over, a strongly-felt if never verbally-expressed source of condescension on Aurelio’s part. Of course, something else was wrong, not only the color of her skin, something that had nothing to do with her at all, but with Aurelio: an inexplicable difference from other men, a dreaded quality she sensed, but never named, though others did—in whispers.

  Consequently, Graciela’s success in keeping the man at all was considered by neighbors and friends to have been wrought by her well-known knowledge of the black arts: through magic, potions and spells.

  If this was true, it was a serious mistake and her ultimate tragedy. To endure her jealousy and frustration through the following years of neglect, though she quickly gave him a son, she turned to one of the great weaknesses in her blood: alcohol.

  Fifteen years of suspicion, pleading, threa
ts and occasional hysteria, along with drinking and the blackest of the black arts, failed to capture, or perhaps re-capture, her prize. So, at forty-two years of age she apparently decided to abandon the fight for her beautiful husband, and die.

  On the other hand, she may have imagined that the slow act of her dying would be a kind of blackmail Aurelio would pay on demand. If she truly expected this, it didn’t work. All she succeeded in doing by her refusal to eat was to become more disgusting and hideous to look at.

  At the conclusion of a nine-weeks’ fast, she had turned into a skeleton propped up against the pillows in her bed, the dark skin curiously translucent, stretched tightly and glued over bones.

  She could barely move, and never spoke. She had no bowel movements at all, and if the small amount of urine (since she sipped occasional water) that managed at great intervals to squeeze out from between her legs was darkly ochre in color, it had no odor at all, and so, unobjectionable, was simply left there to sink into her mattress and dry.

  Of course, doctors were called: as it turned out, a young knowledgeable pair who were quick to confirm each other’s diagnosis. They advised hospital care, but since Aurelio refused, Graciela remained at home.

  The sickness, after all, wasn’t understandably physical and therefore real: it was one of the mind and the will, thoughtful, deliberate, a disease of hurt, rage and revenge, of murder turned inward to devour the self.

  It had a name, of course; at least the doctors, if somewhat inaccurately, gave it one: two beautiful words, so lovely they were a poem that tripped lightly from the tongue,

  Anorexia nervosa.

  If Aurelio came into the room, Graciela’s lifeless, sunken eyes might light up for a moment, a brief bright fire of hope that the blackmail was finally to be paid, even if paid to a skeleton. But if her son, Angel, came in, as he did for a few minutes daily, his timid face stricken with pity and horror, she shut out the sight of him, or finding the barest bit of strength, lifted a few black bones to wave him away.

  Fearing, and perhaps half-hoping, that his father would ask to see it, Angel actually wrote a composition, “a essay” as Auri had called it: a scrubbed, crossed-out, misspelled, ungrammatical, miserable two-and-a-half pages about a hunting trip in the “Addarondocks” and his brave if fatal encounter with an “annormos” bear which attacked him with its “pear of powerfull paws” and, oddly, ultimately hugged him to death.

  How the essayist could die and then live to write the tale remained one of the paradoxes with which his small psyche had no trouble whatsoever.

  His father didn’t ask about the composition.

  In fact the man’s slightly beer-and-tv-bloodshot eyes looked up quite dumbly as Angel shyly—half-real, half-put-on—entered the room, ostensibly because something on the TV caught his eye.

  Aurelio had forgotten his son was there, but seeing him, smiled his most irresistible, only-for-you smile, his surprise and pleasure, if slightly alcoholic, deeply genuine.

  He’d been sitting so long in one position that he groaned in exaggerated pain as he removed his big hairy legs from the couch (on which, opened up, he slept) and placed his feet on the floor, patting the seat next to him—where the boy had spent so many TV years—inviting Angel to curl up in comfort beside him.

  “The late show’s goin’ on”—his eyes back on the screen. “Com’on. Le’s see what it is; maybe somethin’ good.”

  The MGM lion growled into view, faded and somehow mangy in its small square box, accompanied by some tinny music on flawed, slowed-down tape.

  Aware of his son’s deliberate delay, his hesitancy, Auri’s face clouded. He turned from the blue-white blink of the screen that had announced “This Time for Keeps” starring someone called Esther Williams, to coax the boy with a frowning, good-natured if vaguely hurt look of reassurance. “Com’on; nothin’s going to happen.” And he patted the seat again.

  Angel wet a few ink-stained fingers, rubbed them against his shirt, pretending to clean them, but really to impress his father that he’d been hard at work. Then, all of his muscles tight, without any of the snuggling-up pleasure that had gone on for so many years—since he was five, perhaps, or whatever age his eyes had learned to make story-telling sense of the TV screen—sat down beside his father.

  It was one o’clock and he should be in bed, that is, if he intended to go to school the next day, but Auri never cared how late he stayed up. If he did fall asleep during the show, which of course had happened more often than not over the years, he seldom knew, for his father would carry the sleeping boy to the studio bed across the room, remove his sneakers and levis and tuck him in.

  There had been a growing enjoyment to this ritual and Angel, particularly during the last year and for a reason that revealed its purpose only recently, had sometimes faked or half-faked the sleeping part, letting his head droop and then fall against his father’s smooth, firm shoulder or hairy chest.

  Being handled, being touched so lovingly, Auri straining to be quiet and gentle—the tug on the heels of his sneakers, his fly unzipped, the pull of his jeans down his legs—all this had a half-conscious, dream-quality of growing sensual pleasure.

  It was to this bedtime ritual, however, surely universal and common to every father with a small sleepy son, that Auri’s “nothin’s going to happen” referred, because Angel, at fourteen, was hardly small, and something had definitely happened just a few weeks before.

  Instead of a heavy-lidded head dropping to Auri’s shoulder or chest, it had slipped slowly lower until, like a great round warm stone, it rested in Auri’s lap. The boy—a few heart-pounding moments later, only half asleep, having mixed accident with secret purpose—experience the slow, growing excitement of his father’s sexual arousal.

  He almost choked with the horrendous pleasure and terror of the moment, tried to stop what he thought must be a visible beat of his quickened heart through the cage of his underfleshed ribs, and pretended to breathe heavily, groaning slightly, tossing in the deepest of sleeps.

  For some moments—and this was the hair-rising, total conspiratorial horror of it—Auri didn’t move, couldn’t move: he was too drowned in pleasure, half-senseless from the shock of finally knowing, with no doubt, what all the intimate games (including the fun-fights and harmless beatings-up) with his son truly meant, were all about. But then, almost instantly afterward, with a moral jerk of purpose, he gathered up the “sleeping” boy in his arms and carried him to bed.

  Unable to resist, and never one for too much subtlety, Auri found out what he wanted and needed to know. After undressing Angel as usual, he put a quick, light hand directly on his son’s crotch.

  Sleeping or not, the boy trembled with passion, and in a glory of shame came tumbling out all over himself at his father’s merest touch.

  There was no call from Angel, the phone didn’t ring, and Mrs. Evans spent a fretful, disappointed morning wondering why. She fussed with her daily mail, signed checks and papers by the dozens, and thumbed almost blindly through The New York Times.

  Had he forgotten the number, or, having written it down, lost it? Had he changed his mind? Had her voice, her manner, her tone, been overly-anxious, insistent: had she frightened him in some odd, unimaginable way? Had his father suspected the lie of the feigned situation and beaten the truth from him, making him promise, the trembling words forced from between bruised lips, never to consummate a meeting with “that strange woman” who wants God-knows-what from a teen-age boy?

  She recalled his yes, yes; his tens of yes’s, his that’s easy. Nothing at all had seemed wrong. No; it was her own impatience, the quality of her neurotic demand that she made of a delayed phone call a life-or-death necessity. She must be calm; there was no reason to doubt he would call as promised. As promised.

  Still, except for coffee, she left her 11 o’clock breakfast untouched, and spoke angrily to Rose because there was a hairline crack in the cup. Why hadn’t it been thrown away? Didn’t the foolish girl know that cracks in a cup
, on a microscopic scale, were immense harbors for billions of germs the size of ocean liners?

  It had been an inordinately silly thing to say, and poor Rose, slightly pink under her carefully-pressed white collar, held the beautiful bone china cup with its arabesque of delicate blue flowers an inch from her nose, searching, intially in vain, for the Leonardo da Vinci in its vast polluted pool.

  Evidently she found it. If the crack hadn’t been there, the spunky girl would have fought to the death maintaining its absence. The cup clattered, doom sealed, to its saucer, whereupon Rose picked up the tray, nose high, chin firm, and walked from the room.

  Mrs. Evans sighed, feeling guilty and depressed. But then, when Dori came in, she was quite as bad. He appeared, cap in hand, to tell her that Jodi had called to report an unexpected touch of frost that morning and did she remember that last Spring the greenhouse furnace had broken down beyond repair?

  Of course she remembered!

  “. . . Well!?” Was that a question? Was this some sort of memory test? Were all the servants conspiring to gather enough evidence to commit her to a state institution?

  The chauffeur looked so stunned, it altered her tone instantly.

  “Dori! I’m sorry! Don’t look at me so. You’ve seen me this way before. Now what is the question? Should the furnace be replaced? Yes! Of course! Immediately. There’s no need to ask. Am I to allow a thousand glorious flowers to perish in the cold, die, frozen to death, an army of fallen soldiers?”

  The metaphor was not only a horror, but forever, eternally unforgivable! If Dori had quit his job on the spot she couldn’t possibly have blamed him.

  Well—nevermind. Broken furnaces and cracks in china teacups; the servants had certainly been with her long enough to know and expect the atrocities of which she was sometimes capable.

  At that moment, the phone rang: purred, really, so vibrant and soft was its especially wired sound, and one of the four clear plastic buttons on top was blinking. But it was only ridiculous Rose, still unforgiving, announcing in a cool, too-clear voice that one of the attorneys, Mr. Comstock, adding vengefully to annoy her, “of Comstock, Little, Livermore and Greene” was on Number One and did she wish to speak to him.