Bereavements

by Richard Lortz

  Without body, without heart. Soon without mind, because he was giving that away, too, slowly losing it, letting it go, in fevers and dreams, in nightmares and visions.

  The peculiar sweetness he smelled so often and which he thought emanated from Mrs. Evans, he decided was his very own. It was the sweetness of death, the foretaste, the physical manifestation of the kind of sleep he was beginning to long for.

  And the boy in the mirror who had dropped Angel in a faint to the floor, wouldn’t have done so a second time—if he ever saw him again. Because the image was as unreal as the sweetness.

  He’d seen Jamie’s picture—gazed at it trembling, knowing that that’s what he wished for, that’s what he wanted to be. And in his illness, he became that—created, manifested, projected the-thing-that-is-loved behind a golden sheen in the glass—stripping the boy of his clothes the way his father so often had his—“just to see”—before the man’s aching arms seized him: eyes-fevered, eyes-hungered, eyes-feasting, filled to overflowing with a ripened love.

  So the vile connection took shape. In this fantastic circuitous route of mind, heart, body, the extrapolation was this: to be loved is to die. To be loved one must be dead.

  Dori carried Angel down from Jamie’s room to the kitchen, the boy laughing because he really could walk,-he wasn’t that weak, though he did feel peculiar and feverish in the head.

  One look at his flushed face, the queer, far-away look in his eyes, a touch of fingers to his cheek and Delia was sure he had a fever.

  Deciding to keep an eye on him, she bundled him in a robe and sat him before the fire in her sewing room which annexed the kitchen. She watched him gulp down a large cup of warm sassafras tea, his eyelids fluttering closed as he drank the last sip.

  When he’d dozed off, or so she thought, though he hadn’t, remaining pleasantly drowsy, listening to every word that was said, she returned to the others.

  “He’s a puzzle!”—looking at Dori, almost angrily, as if the man possessed a solution he wouldn’t reveal. “One minute a fever, sky-high I’d swear, and the next none at all! And so moody, so often depressed. Dori, when you get back to New York . . .” She stopped, reminded that the future was so very uncertain, Angel’s most of all. “Poor child,” she concluded, “what’s to become of him? He does have a family—a father at least, didn’t you say?”

  “Yes. But he’ll not go back to him; that much I know. There was—trouble of some sort. She’s already taken care of it, legally. You know how she is, what she can do if she wants to! Sometimes I think she could move Los Angeles to New York by picking up the phone.”

  He paused, looking at Delia whose expression retained its worried concern. “She’ll take care of him—one way or another.”

  “Mostly the one way,” Delia replied, her voice slightly hard; “not at all the other. Do you know what she gave us,Jodi and me, for Christmas? One thousand dollars, in hundred dollar bills, all crisp and new—without any card, no signature. I wouldn’t have known who sent it—unless I knew. That’s what was in that nice white legal-size envelope you handed me.”

  Dori shrugged, pretending indifference, though he knew exactly what she was feeling. “So? I got the same. What is it? You suddenly hate money?”

  “No.” The woman turned away, sighing. “I’d never hate money. I was too rotten poor as a child. But . . .” She turned back. “I needn’t explain; you and I, we know each other too well. And her even better. We love her too much and forgive her too often.” She looked toward the room where Angel was “sleeping.” “But he!—he doesn’t want money!”

  “Why not, if it buys the things he does want?”

  “Oh Dori! What nonsense! How can it buy what he wants?”

  “What does he want?”

  Delia laughed. “You’re putting me on. You know all this better than I. He wants what she promised. He wants her to love him.”

  Dori agreed with one soft word. “Yes.”

  And Delia—“But how can you give, how can you get what’s already owned?” Adding bitterly—“The dead own the living. If he wants that kind of love, he’d better die.”

  It snowed again, the fine powdery kind: so much at the caprice of the wind, it fogged across the windows in thick gusty clouds.

  Goaded, pestered, prodded by Delia, who bundled him up and literally pushed him through the door, Angel went out for a little while, with the half-hearted inclination to try skating over the bumpy ice on the frozen pool, an area of which twice now, Dori had cleared in the hope the boy would use it. But it was impossible to see ten feet away. Blinded, Angel stood at the pool’s edge, hat off, tongue stuck out to taste the icy prickles, then came into the house a snowman, stomping into the kitchen for Delia to complain about as she towel-dried his hair.

  Later, after cocoa, he mooned (as she called it) all afternoon The snow had stopped and he could go out again, but preferred lying by the fire in her sewing room,staring into ember and flame as if what he saw was as absorbing as a tv melodrama of passion and crime.

  Dori was in town (with no clue concerning his errand or when he would return) and Jodi off in his greenhouse. Upstairs, in a suite of rooms as palatial as the Plaza’s, Mrs. Evans, only once calling down for a small bottle of wine, remained incarcerated and incommunicado.

  Did the cat have his tongue—hm? (Delia asked.) Evidently not, because it seemed to be working well, having consumed all seven cookies that had gone with the cocoa. “Surely there must be something you can do. Jodi has a whole stack of magazines in his room. Or why don’t you go to the library and get yourself a book; Jamie kept dozens on the . . . ” She changed the wording: “there’s lot’s of children’s, I mean boys’ books there. I’ll bet you never even looked. One whole section on the left wall as you go in.”

  There was no reply; not even a gesture to indicate he had heard.

  So, if not exactly offended, Delia found her patience and inventiveness exhausted and let him be.

  Supper without Dori was also a dreary and silent affair, Jodi reading a week-old newspaper, and Delia moody herself, profoundly worried, though she concealed it, and not particularly inclined to fake cheerfulness and coax the boy into life with small talk.

  Ultimately there was no need to. The moment she started fixing a tray for Mrs. Evans, his spine straightened in his chair, his heavy eyes brightened and became dancingly alert.

  Presently, as she worked, he said: “I could save you the trouble. I could take it up.”

  Delia sighed. She needed no crystal ball to read his mind. “Even if you knocked, she wouldn’t answer. If you persisted, she’d angrily tell you to go away. I know how she is. No one’s to bother her. If she wants anything, she rings down, and I’m the only one to answer the phone. Those were her instructions.”

  Angel nodded. “I know, but—”

  “All I do anyway, is leave the tray on the table in the hall near her door.” She poured hot coffee into a two-cup silver pot, observing: “She won’t drink this, or eat hardly anything, but I go through the motions.” She stopped to look at Angel, so restless in his chair. “What is is?”

  “I was wondering . . . Could I—could we—sort of put a flower on the tray, a rose? Jodi brought in some fresh ones for the front parlor.”

  Delia was disarmed, and pained. “That’s a very sweet thought, but I don’t think it would mean anything to her, really. I’ve never done it before.” She joked: “I think it’s done only by newly wed husbands who bring their brides breakfast in bed.”

  Angel was unconvinced. “Well it might mean something if it came from me.”

  “And how would she know that?”

  “Well—I could pin on a message—on the rose, I mean. I could say . . . ” (his eyes moving rapidly, his chin beginning its chaotic jerk) “. . . I could say—Happy New Year.”

  Delia almost dropped the silver cover she was about to put on the casserole dish.

  “Good heavens, I didn’t know; I’d forgot! It’s the 31st. It never once entered my
mind.” She kissed Angel, and the top of Jodi’s head. “Happy New Year! Happy New Year!”

  “Well it isn’t—yet,” Angel said; “it comes at midnight.”

  “You don’t say,” Delia murmured, back at her tray, “when we’re all snug in our beds. What are you waiting for? Quickly now! Where’s your New Year’s rose?”

  He was off to get it, bringing it back in a flash, dashing through the door with: “Is it a bird? Is it a plane?” And he laughed, possibly the first moment’s real pleasure Delia had seen on his face in days, paining her heart.

  He ripped a page off the grocery list pad on the wall, and scribbled his message with a hand that shook.

  Just that!? just that!?—“Happy New Year?”—So ordinary, so cold. If only Delia wasn’t looking . . . ! He wanted to pour out his heart: I love you, I love you, ten thousand times over, and then over again.

  His signature was so illegible it almost couldn’t be read. Under it, half covering with a hand as he made it, so Delia wouldn’t look, he criss-crossed two ragged lines for a kiss.

  Contrary to Delia’s expectation, Mrs. Evans this time took the silver urn of coffee into her rooms, left everything else untouched. The rose was still there, the paper message unfolded, evidently read, but there was no reply, no acknowledgment at all.

  “Oh well!” Angel said, his voice a cracked bell, an octave too high—so cheerful God must have covered His ears.

  Angel slept fitfully, waking, dozing, waking again.

  It had taken days for him to get used to the immense, almost painful silence of the country, particularly at night when it pressed against him like a heavy weight—in itself sometimes enough to rouse him from sleep.

  At eleven, he was suddenly fully awake, up on an elbow reading the phosphorescent hands of his bedside clock.

  He thought he’d heard a noise, a loud one. Could it be Dori, returning so late; perhaps the slam of a garage door in the wind?

  He listened and heard nothing . . . or, yes—a quick, curious and pleasant illusion or hallucination if they have those for the ears. For a few seconds he thought he heard city sounds: night voices, street voices, traffic, shouts, rattles, blaring horns, the crash of a bottle some drunk had thrown from an upstairs window. It was always wild in New York on New Year’s Eve. Perhaps that’s what he missed, maybe that’s what woke him—the very fact that he wasn’t doing what he was used to. He always did something to celebrate the New Year, even if only to stay awake and lean out a window, making the loudest noise he could the moment the clock struck twelve.

  But tonight he had no horn to blow, no rattle to shake, no city street to open a window to, so he could yell and scream and shout Happy New Year!

  Well then . . . A pot or a frying pan would do, two of them, or even one with a large metal spoon; better, a soup ladle if he could find one.

  And there it was!—what he would do, born out of sleep: the thought thought before he’d had time to think it, the decision made.

  Part love, part hate, part passion, part plea, part rage, part revenge for the atrocity she’d made of the rose, part devil-may-care and fuck-it-all for the moment—regardless of the consequences, at midnight he was going to bang a frying pan like fury, like the fallen angel he was, loud enough to wake the dead, outside of Mrs. Evan’s door.

  He went to the kitchen, then to the pantry where the large pots were kept. He tested every one he could find, knuckling each quietly until he found one that reverberated, had resonance, promising clatters and clanks so loud they’d rattle one’s bones.

  A giant spoon or ladle was next, and looking for this, he happened to glance through the room’s large double windows that faced the grounds on the northwest side of the house.

  The night was clear now, and there must have been a moon, because pale eerie light was resting everywhere, settled so strongly on the hills and into the vallies of snow, it looked as if dawn were arising hours before its time.

  Then—an amazing thing! Far down in one valley, so far it looked like a toy, like a tiny “manger” where Christ was born, he saw Jamie’s tomb, its door open, its windows flooded with yellow light.

  He only half dressed, no scarf; just his navy pea jacket which he’d left on a chair in the kitchen, and, unable to find two, only one wool glove. No boots for the snow, just sneakers, but wings on his heels because he knew she was there; she had opened the great bronze door as only she could, and it was important, imperative that he be there, with her.

  He ran, sprawled, staggered up the hills, rolled and tumbled his way down, to arrive, breath steaming the air, shaking with fear, body temperature risen, gathering strength as he walked up the fourteen marble steps—one for each year of Jamie’s life—to stand in the blaze of the open door.

  The snow which was fresh, newly fallen, silenced his footfall; she didn’t hear a sound as he mounted the stairs, edged himself in and stood motionless for moments, as graven as she, her head bowed, her hand almost a fist between her eyes.

  The coffin remained a blurred haze in the periphery of his vision; there might not be time!—he’d feast on it later. Before anything else—and there was nothing much else in the tomb to see—his eyes had gone to Mrs. Evans, knowing with the instancy of God what she was doing.

  She was seated on a ledge that bordered the room—meant for flowers but which in her passion for privacy she’d decided not to let Jodi use; her fur coat thrown from her shoulders behind her. She’d taken off ankle boots which she’d placed on the floor beside a blood-red scarf and knitted gloves. Her dress was white, so simple it might have been a nightgown, and a gold cross hung from her throat.

  Beside her on the ledge was a bottle of wine, unopened, and a round long-stemmed glass, the kind he had found days before in the snow. Next to these, in scattered disorder, was one large bottle and tens of small vials and glass containers, several opened, spilling out pills in a multiplicity of colors: red, blue, yellow, violet, green . . .

  As he watched, her hand dropped from between her eyes; she raised her head to speak, but not to Angel; she still had no idea he was there.

  “Would you believe it,” she said to her son—with a smile and almost comic despair; “I forgot to open the bottle. And I can’t — here. I may have to smash off the top.”

  Her voice, its unnatural tempo, curiously precise and with effort composed, had the tranquilized quality Angel had come to know so well. But it was clear he hadn’t come too late.

  Reassured, with time left to use, his head now turned irresistibly toward the coffin. But first, the walls!—intricate mosaics of burnished gold, dark to palest yellow: red gold, green gold, gold gold, containing, portraying mysterious figures—a pageant of naked children, laughing, running, dancing, leaping, all reaching, reaching . . . for nothing one could see, perhaps the sun.

  The room otherwise was simple, bare, virtually empty. Only three tall unlighted candles in round smooth-faced floor-standing gold holders. These stood at the head-side of the rectangular slab of carefully “pitted” unpolished white marble that held the coffin.

  The coffin itself was glass, apparently seamless: molded or “poured”—its manufacture impossible to guess.

  Inside, suspended—“floating” midway and exactly centered in a clear but faintly amber liquid—was Angel’s golden-hazed boy in the mirror, the naked Jamie de Vinaz Rojas, Mrs. Evans’ son, his undersea hair radial and glowing, fanned about a face so fresh with color it seemed totally alive, the open eyes pristine, of the purest, the most glittering blue.

  Had she heard Angel—his breath, his rapid breathing?—felt his eyes upon her, or perhaps on Jamie?—knew noetically or intuitively that he was there? No matter. She turned and looked at him—with no surprise whatsoever—the surprise, the shock, the spilled panic and disorder of her wild regret at the accident of his being there coming so much later and so slowly that, whatever chemical she had taken, it had figuratively severed nerves and connections, so distancing her from immediate reality that time and space were elong
ated. She spoke and, listener to herself, the words became an echo, drifting back to her from the walls of a mountain far away.

  When she saw him—“Ah, Angel—!” was all she said, nothing more, quite as if he were the newsboy who had just now thrown the day’s paper to her door.

  The chemical had been valium—three, then three more. Sixty miligrams, only that, a match to light the end of the fuse. The rest was to come later; all the circus colors, the confetti, the rainbow of death. And with it, the finest, the oldest, the most ancient of her wines. Champagne, the very best, had bored her years ago, but burgundy of sufficient age, the right bouquet, exquisitely dry, clear as God’s eyes, would sometimes do. It would have to do now.

  “But good heavens!”—her drifting eyes settling on the bottle beside her—“I didn’t open it!”—forgetting she had just now told her son. “And I’ve brought nothing to open it with. What I’ll do . . . ”

  She turned her head toward him, preferring always to face the person to whom she spoke, having not only forgotten she had already mentioned the bottle, but also that Angel was there—now moved beside the coffin for a better view, bending over it, his face a mixture of amazement, curiosity and awe.

  The Valiums were working too well, too quickly. Might she not fall in a faint before she took the trouble to die?

  She roused herself, shaking the creeping narcosis from her head, stood up and moved majestically toward the coffin, her eyes on Angel, desiring to explain what he saw—and certainly not without drama—even more now than usual: expressive gestures, pretentious pauses, mannered postures, exquisite style. After all, these last moments were the coup de theatre of her life.

  And her death.

  “The most extravagant of my extravagant expressions of bereavement,” she said, her hand a white dove in flight settling on a corner of the coffin. “Twenty cubic feet of honey: clarified, sterile; every tissue, every cell in his body saturated.” There was an eerie happiness, almost ironic laughter in her tone. “If there are any Egyptian Pharaohs left in their graves, which I doubt, they’re writhing in envy for not having thought of this.” She paused, abstracted, with effort recovering the thought. “Of course, I don’t know if he’ll remain as you see him: perfect, unchanging, forever. There was, in the beginning an accident—” (and now her blood-drained face and heavy eyes returned to Angel, seeing him imperfectly) “—a small bubble was sealed inside, a pearl, the tiniest seed of air . . . ” (she looked for it as she had done a thousand times before) “ . . . which has since disappeared.”