Now she moved, a queen at the moment of her coronation, to the foot of the coffin and stood gazing at the glory of her son in a darkened fury, adding—a grace note at the end of an elegy—“I’ve been sick with the thought that it may have entered his body.”
It was like a book that had ended, with just an epilogue left to read, a play minutes before curtain, or a fugue—with all the single voices and contrapuntal themes finally stilled—with only the “marked climax” for which the fugue is noted still to come.
It came—the marked climax, the epilogue, the beginning of the play’s end—with a tableau: three figures of the dramatis personnae remaining on stage. One was dead, two alive but barely living: a boy burning with fever, ill with the loss of an indispensable love, quick to hallucinate, dream while awake, subject to visions; and a dazed, drugged woman getting ready to die, seeking to destroy with herself what she believed she possessed and had acquired through a profundity of grief and desire and ultimate, absolute faith—destroy that perfect, dreadful finger which is able to wither the fig tree.
“He moved,” Angel said.
They watched, and together saw Jamie’s eyes close. Then open.
One hand, crossing the other on his chest, sank down, disturbing its environment which became undulant, small eddies moving upward to agitate the hair.
The lips parted. The boy smiled at his mother, then in a slow drift turned his head toward Angel, unable quite to see, but filled with longing and desire—reaching, reaching out to possess the sun like the frieze of golden children on the walls.
If it had been the croak of a raven, the cracked hoarse cry of a crow, the sound couldn’t have been uglier.
It was Mrs. Evans, revolted, now seizing the corners of the coffin with a rattle of rings on the glass.
“You must leave,” she whispered to Angel, her throat too constricted to shout. “Now. Or it will be too late.”
Her lips continued to move but her voice was gone. Silent, speechless, shaken with fury at the loss, she crowded herself between Angel and the coffin.
Then something cracked in her throat, freeing a shattered voice: “He extends, he reaches, he becomes. I’ve given him life, but I can’t stop giving.”
There was that astonishing evil in her eyes whose other name is love, and in her eyes also were all things possibly angelic, whose other name is Love.
The moments passed, as well as the temptation in the desert.
“Come help me kill myself,” she said, taking his hand.
But it wasn’t as easy as all that.
She smashed the top from the bottle, almost smiling as it spat, then frothed in a fountain, having thrown a shower of blood-red roses across the white of her dress.
She filled the glass, put the bottle down, then with one hand scooped the other full of pills, haphazardly, all colors, which she raised quickly to her mouth, only to find herself struck with such force she fell half across the coffin.
“I won’t let you do it!” Angel shouted, smashing the bottle, before he stamped underfoot every pill he could find.
Jamie groaned. Startled, Mrs. Evans looked down to see him twisting in agony, straining wildly against the glass that contained him.
Sick with pity, she stepped back, then, weeping, fell to her knees, covering her face.
Why, in that moment, should she think of Jamie’s father? Perhaps because of his “moment of truth.” How many such moments did one need in a lifetime?—the bull dead (so many, so often!) at his feet, he triumphant, the crowd frenzied, shrieking its adoration.
One pays—whatever the price. Years later—not so many—the beast was triumphant, the crowd silent and dumb with awe. The impossible had happened: Carlos de Vinaz Rojas had been tossed, trampled, gored to death and lay broken and bloodied at the feet of the snorting brute.
With his mother’s drop to her knees, Jamie’s agony stopped. He was still for some moments, then began to move: small, ambiguous gestures, but these quite relaxed, the body apparently feeling its renewed life, sensuously loving itself, aware that its source—his mother’s love, her faith, if still wavering, irresolute—was beginning to return.
The boy stretched, smiled, the mysterious light of the coffin growing more abundant. He turned his head to one side to let his eyes find his mother’s with a gaze that carressed them.
One hand, the left, drifting through its sea of honey, now without effort, with pause, without the slightest impediment or strain—as if the environment, the atmosphere of the entire world itself were honey—moved through and outside the glass of the coffin. There it rested.
On her shoulders, Angel’s grip which had been strong, ready to pull her away, now loosened, relaxed; one hand, the left, reached forward, became still, rested lightly . . .
Of course she knew what was to happen next. The first step: the ring. After that: the others, the entire transmutation.
Behind her, she felt Angel press close, his breath grown shallow and rasping—so close she could feel the fantastic speed of his heart.
“It’s okay,” were his whispered, incredible words. “I’m ready.”
It was Love, not love, which had spoken, and she answered in kind, seizing one of the heavy candle-holders, straining to lift it from the floor.
“Help me!” she wailed, pitting her small strength against the weight of it.
Angel was at her side and together they swung it into the air in an arc, crashing the leaded base of it into the center of the coffin.
While preserving an unaltered outer surface, a shell of perfection, the “pearl,” that “tiniest seed of air” that so worried Mrs. Evans had long ago entered Jamie’s body and done its work quickly. Like a worm in wood that can fell a giant tree, it internalized swift flowers of decay.
Jamie, abuptly freed from his coffin, empty of the life his mother had given him, the temple of a body without a spirit, became instantly what it was and what time would have made it.
After the coffin shattered, more implosion than explosion, with fragments, daggers, splinters of gleaming glass curving inward and caught, the honey then erupted outward and down in a slow undulant river of luxurious, tumbled languor and ease, taking a fantastic Jamie with it: a monstrous beauty of melting body and boy. Parts of him—fingers, eyes, hands, head—became the flotsam of a sea of separate selves, curving with the curve of the thick stream that contained it, carried it, crowded it into a disordered collage of debris at one end of the golden room.
Woman and boy, heart to heart, arms locking each to each, looked down at a blackened head, a scroll of liquid hair gluing a golden mask to a face empty of eyes.
They stumbled out, arms still locked, one creature with four legs, so ungainly they finally fell on the steps and had to separate.
“Wait!” Angel cried, and ran back into the tomb.
Freed from her spell, relieved so in mind and heart that her state was euphoric, Mrs. Evans disregarded the moment’s delay, and before she could even begin to wonder why he had gone back, he’d rejoined her.
What reason to hurry? Why haste? No reason at all except joy. Hand in hand, laughing and awkward, constantly falling into snowdrifts they could barely see because the moon was gone from the sky, they ran up hills, down valleys, toward the house in the distance, every window of it ablaze with light, the front door opened, flooding the giant pillared porch.
And to the left, below the house, they saw a small dancing light: Dori no doubt, returned from his errand, anxious, fearful, distressed to the core of him, out searching for them both.
They had to stop because her breath was too short, and in the brief delay, they looked at the sky, a streak of violet dawn having cut a knife-blade’s thickness of brilliance in the blackness to the east.
“It’s morning,” Mrs. Evans breathed; “a new day.”
“It’s New Year’s Day!” Angel laughed, for a rose is a rose after all.
How sentimental can one be?
It was ridiculous, embarrassing, to have the urge a
nd the vulgar need to say it, but she did: “A new day; a new year. Angel . . . a new life.”
And they were off again, running and laughing.
A minute later, she stumbled and fell.
As Angel’s hand helped her up, she felt the hard, cold touch of his ring. The one from the crackerjacks box?—with its ruby eye of cheap red glass?
No way.
This one was still sticky with honey. The astonishing boy must have had the desire, the impudence, the nerve, to snatch Jamie’s ring from the floor of the tomb—because, feeling it, she read unmistakably, as she’d done once before—the blind reading braille:
This book was set by Comp/Set photocomposition in Garamond type face by Foto-Ready Production. It was designed and produced under the supervision of The Town House Press in coordination with the author, and manufactured by Hamilton Printing Company.
Bereavements Page 21