by Brian Hodge
“It’s too late,” I told her, and we stood in the chill gloom, huddled within our coats as we dared one another to care, to feel, to reach out for a touch of warmth against whatever awaited us one day. I was drawn to look once more at my brass name. “Why? Why show me this?”
Sighing, Francesca drew herself very straight, tall as she could stand. Her gaze lingered on the crypt wall, and I noticed that her tight bun of hair was beginning to fray.
“All things end,” she said. “My life, yours, your voice … my family … empires. All things. Except for Julius. He goes on. But I believe he goes on because he fears what may come next. If it’s painful he will hate it. And if it’s too loving, I think he will hate it all the more. Even so, I think he would like to find out, if only he had the courage. And someone to find out with. To grow old and die with. We can endure a lot, if we’re not alone.”
As she must have been. Poor Francesca — she might never have spoken from any greater personal experience.
“How much would you sacrifice to live out the rest of your days as a normal man?” she said.
“I’m not the one to ask. Even though something wonderful did come of it, what was taken from me is gone forever.” And it was fed to a dog … wasn’t that right?
Her narrow smile reappeared. “But if you could trade your voice for what they cut away, would you?”
It forced me to think. Would I relinquish that seraphic voice for the chance to be all its creation had denied me? A husband and father; a grandfather? The greater part of me rejected it, for that life was so very commonplace. Yet it was exotic, too, for it was something I could never, ever achieve.
“I don’t know,” I told her.
“I believe Julius would. I believe he’s ready. At long last, he’s ready.”
“But how? Julius is … what he is. As you say, he goes on.”
“All things end,” she said once more. “When they seem not to, the trick is to find the sacrifice. And” — her smile began to broaden — “the heart to love enough to look for it.”
She died two months later, when winter seemed its coldest, its wettest. She died with us at her side, not so far gone that she didn’t know we were there, although I wasn’t fooled. Francesca died alone, just the same. But she died well, her eyes open to the final minute, with spirit enough to extend either an open hand or a clenched fist to whatever met her beyond life’s lacy black veil, depending on whether she liked it or not.
I hoped to meet her again someday, when my turn came. But not too soon.
“No Francesca,” said Julius, the day after she was buried. He stood in the doorway to the kitchen that was nothing like the one she’d kept, filled now with dirty utensils and strong whiffs of food past its prime. “I’d forgotten what that was like. There was always a Francesca.”
“Always?”
His back to me, his short ponytail tangled upon one shoulder, Julius nodded. “As good as always.” When he turned in the doorway, I saw that he was crying, slow tears rolling down cheeks that had never seemed sharper. “I never told her foremothers to pass that name down through the generations. They just did it. All on their own. I think it must have been a kindness to me, so that when one died, or grew too ill to continue working, it would be all the easier to welcome the next. I’d always know whom to expect.”
“Is that such a good thing?”
Julius bit his lip before shrugging his slumped shoulders. “I don’t know anymore. Francescas came and Francescas went. I could know their names a hundred years before they got here. That, and one other thing: that someday they would die. I always knew to expect that much … and still, I was never ready when it happened.”
We lived in silence for the rest of the day, except for those lone moments when the winter wind blew especially hard, shifting course for a time, coming from the brittle gardens and the crypt beyond. On the wind seemed carried the songs of ages past, sung by dead throats, and we would look at each other, Julius and I, as if daring the other not to hear it.
And I knew that those things we find most beautiful are made so by the brief span of their lives.
He had me sing for him that night, as most nights. Not so different from my very first night here, only now I did not retire to my own room once the song’s last breath was loosed. Julius lay down first, the lights off throughout the villa, the room bathed in a soft glow of candles on which our bed seemed to float like a raft.
I climbed onto the bed, knelt just behind him, the top of his head aligned between my parted knees. We had grown to favor the lullabies this way, because I could look down and see the full effect my voice was having on his body, and Julius could, in turn, gaze up to see me rising above him, like an angel, or a gargoyle.
I kept my fists closed, as I had for the past few minutes. And had I known when Francesca died that I would be singing Julius his final lullaby in a few nights? I must have. I only now wish I had sung one to her as she lay dying, something to carry with her into that blackest night.
I would not let her down now, for she too had loved Julius, as if the mother of an ancient son, a son handed down through many generations of mothers.
A son she had finally entrusted to his lover.
“Make it beautiful,” Julius whispered from below me, gray eyes sad and trusting in the candles’ glow. “And make it mourn the lost.”
“Yes,” I whispered, and emptied my right hand long enough to stroke the silken blond hair away from his forehead. The back of my hand caught a tear as it fell — but then why not mourn for myself? We would both be making sacrifices this night.
Then I sang, sang as I never before had, every note balanced on the edge of heartbreak. Long, slow, sustained notes of infinite sadness, Cherubini’s Requiem in C Minor. It was music to mourn the passing of anything, everything, from a friend to an age. All things end, for all things must, the beautiful most of all.
And when the requiem was finished, I opened my hands, gripped their contents with trembling fingers. I bowed my head, deeply, so that I could kiss Julius on unsuspecting lips.
“I love you,” I told him, so that he might, in years to come, think of it as the last thing he heard.
And then I plunged the nails into his ears, one through each eardrum, weeping but secure in the knowledge it was the only way. He screamed, he convulsed, but I held tight to those steel shafts, worked them like swabs, so that there could be nothing left of any membrane to grow back together. Only when I felt that deafness was assured, permanent, did I pull the nails free, hurling them across the room. Only I could hear the chime they made against the wall.
Julius was doubled in agony, his body perfect in the yellow-orange glow, and I looked, looked enough to last me a lifetime — I would never again see him any younger than he was this night. When would it begin, his descent into years that could never be turned back? When would I look upon him and see age needling its lines into his flesh, like scrimshaw carved into fine old ivory?
I did not know. But I would be there.
I fell beside him, my hand upon his hard shoulder while I spilled apologies he could never hear, and he pushed me away. I retreated to the edge of that vast bed, curled onto my side — and was Francesca watching from somewhere, proud?
After a time, Julius draped himself over my bare back. I felt the slow drip of his blood along my spine. Soon, our breathing fell into sync, and I looked to the years ahead with a fear that he might come to hate me, if he didn’t already. I imagined Julius strangling me in my sleep, as even now his hand reached over and around me, fingers lingering upon my lips before loosely clenching over my throat. But he bore no harder, as if all he wanted was to hold onto the one dear thing he would forever be denied.
I knew the feeling.
I had lost my audience of one.
But if I could not be heard, there was always love to fall back on, and tonight, at least, love seemed surer by far.
Come Unto Me, All Ye Heavy Laden
Phenomenon: Spend enough
years far from a place once known intimately and it ceases to exist as anything but a fossil. It slips into the icy shadows of some crevasse in time, then freezes, less real now than places you’ve never even been.
Not that she’s never gone back for a visit home before. Minnesota isn’t that far from Chicago, less than a workday’s drive from the North Side, and in ten-plus years you can count on the gravitational tug of the occasional holiday, the odd death in the family. Claire always putting on her best compliant Stepford face until she can get back to the real world. But she’s always made the trip alone before — not so this time, and it makes a difference, Rik’s eyes making her take a fresh look for herself, on the verge of apology: Yes, this really is where I grew up.
It isn’t dead but it’s comatose for sure — no surprise to anyone who was ever a teenager here. But because of Rik and wondering how he sees everything she would otherwise take for granted, she’s forced to note all the differences between then and now, subtleties of hope and deterioration. Which buildings have been rehabilitated, and which are gone: downtown an old theater demolished and pulled from its block like a bad tooth; two blocks in another direction a restaurant burned to the ground and not rebuilt, its loss no more significant than the dissolution of a wart. She’d never eaten a satisfactory meal there anyway.
It’s holding its own in population, or perhaps it’s a trifle shrunken and the latest crew of city fathers is squeamish about changing the sign on the edge of town. For appearance’s sake, don’t you know, but if you had a dollar for every man, woman, and child, you’d still have enough for a decent used car, all the better to drive away. Away from this place where visitors who don’t know any better can be excused for thinking it might still be the sort of town where it’s safe to leave your doors unlocked at night. And maybe it really had been when her parents were toddlers and Grandpa Edgar was the same age as she and Rik, but now you’re talking fifty-some years ago, before the onset of picket fence atrophy.
Their six-day visit straddles the weekend, and out of a sense of harmony Claire agrees they’ll meet the folks for church services that Sunday morning. Better the lost sleep than heading across an ocean for a year, leaving her parents believing her to be the heathen that she really is.
“But please, hon,” her mother says, and frowns that way she perfected two decades ago, a mixture of disapproval and groveling. “Go easy on that awful eye shadow. And run a brush through your hair, okay? Could you do that?”
Claire looks to her father for support, or at least an ally in principle, but he’s doing his imitation of a deaf man, gathering together their Sunday School lesson books for the third time and looking at his watch, so she just says, “Sure, Mom,” and eats the remainder of her corn flakes while they leave. Rik still asleep in the guest room down here, a floor away from her enshrined bedroom, separate beds helping maintain the illusion that neither of them has genitalia and a sex drive.
An hour later they’re racing across town to heed that ten-thirty call to worship, Rik in the passenger seat and peering about in each direction.
“I don’t think I’ve seen this many steeples and bell towers per square mile in my entire life,” he says.
“Afraid you’re going to burst into flames?” she asks.
“Wait and see what happens if I get near holy water.”
“You’ll be safe, then, my parents are Methodists. The worst thing anyone could throw on you is three-bean salad.” Dropping her hand to his wrist, squeezing. “You’re a real trooper, going through this for my sake. You didn’t have to.”
He shrugs. “When in Rome.”
She grins. “And a couple weeks from now, in Paris?”
“We fuck a lot more and cut back on showering, is the impression I get.”
Hymns, sermon, a persistent feeling of being out of place — the rest of the morning proceeds about as she expects, and then an organ recessional shoves them blessed back into the aisles and toward the sidewalk, and Hell comes to God’s house. Her mother’s right arm looped through Claire’s left, preventing quick escape, and she’s compelled to renew acquaintances with people she hasn’t seen in a decade, some of them. Local business owners aged another ten years by chronology and twenty by stress, and blue-haired teachers who seemed grave-bound even when she was little, goggling at her as though she’s still supposed to be nineteen, then pawing and smiling as though they have some sort of claim on her. Her mother does most of the talking for her, leaning forward with a nod and saying, “Claire’s in the arts now, you know,” as if that will explain everything about her, her hair, her eyes, saying it the exact same apologetic way you’d tell someone, “She needed a metal plate after the wreck, poor thing.”
Her father glows with his own brand of muted pride whenever her mother gets to the rest of it: “She’s leaving for Paris next week, for a whole year. Yes! She won an apprenticeship with a world-famous photographer!” And of course none of them have ever heard of him, of Gerard Rameau, any more than her parents had, but that’s just as well, because if they’d ever seen his work … well, let them all just assume he takes nice pictures of pretty flowers and leave it at that.
Rik teases her in the car on the way back to her parents, his voice turning provincial and adoring and treacly sweet: “Ohhh, you’re a photographer? I took a picture once, you betcha. I have a Polaroid Instamatic, you know.”
“All right, that’s enough.” But she’s laughing.
“And will you be driving to France?”
Laughing mostly with relief to be away from the crowd of familiar strangers and who they think she is. “For sanity’s sake alone,” she tells him, “we really have to get away by ourselves this afternoon.”
“I’ll second that motion,” Rik says, “but is there anyplace we can actually escape the natives and their quaint customs?”
“In deference to the sabbath, I’m thinking of exposing you to a genuine religious experience. No way can we leave town in a few days without introducing you to the Patron Saint of Cranial Deformity.”
Six miles from town, that’s all it is. She clocks it on the odometer, something she never bothered to do before, and she’s surprised. A dozen years ago, give and take, the distance along the desolate country lanes seemed so much farther, the excursions out spent sandwiched between sweaty bodies and going deaf in the ear adjacent to the nearest speaker from music she’d now be loath to admit she ever listened to. Six miles to revisit this little chunk of her past, this undiscovered country where the laws of their parents had been overthrown. Six miles. Child’s play.
“A cemetery,” says Rik. A purebred product of Chicago, he pretends to be impressed. To him, cemeteries are manicured parks fenced off between major avenues and locked down each night like prisons. Not this rough-hewn acreage overrun with American-gothic ruins, a mile or more even from the nearest farm house.
Square brick pillars flank the dirt and gravel drive leading in, but there’s no gate and never has been, and the right-side pillar is embedded with a stone rectangle carved with six Romanesque letters: GILEAD. Except it’s broken now, a jagged crack meandering from top to bottom like a lightning strike.
“Not just any cemetery,” she says.
“You’ve brought me here to torture me with memories of your first clumsy lay?”
“Only if you beg.”
Turn in off the worn-down blacktop and the drive leads straight back, but it dips and rises and dips again, with a serpent’s undulations, because the land isn’t flat. Instead, it rolls. The gravestones travel in waves and in perpetual shade, or at least in spring and summer they do. The trees here have never known the cruelty of saws, fat-trunked with age and their upper branches have meshed into a single canopy as if to thwart the eye of God. Green as a rain forest, she remembers, but it’s autumn now, the canopy a splash of reds and oranges and yellows, while leaf-fall has begun to dapple the ground with pools of afternoon sunlight.
The car creeps forward over the hills until they’ve lost sight of
the pillars, then she parks in a familiar spot and when they leave the car she wonders if after ten or twelve years the ground remembers the weight of her tires, the tread of her feet, the pressed shape of her bottom and her shoulders. If it forgives the times she retched up an acid bellyful of cheap wine.
“Come on, this way to meet the Saint,” she says, and Rik falls into step beside her lanky gait as they weave a path above the dead. This far back the tombstones are humble things, not the bulky gleaming monuments of more recent decades, but thin gray wafers standing at snaggletooth tilts, crusted green and black with lichens, and their dates — 1840s and -50s, some of them — and tragic ornate script all but obliterated by time. Rik seems pleased enough by it all, and even though it’s European history that he teaches, rather than American, he’s still suffused with that low-key enchantment of being around old things.
A few dozen paces from the car and they can begin to see it, Claire of course knowing what to expect, Rik not nearly so forewarned. It teases him with glimpses blocked by tree trunks, by branches, by the rise and fall of the earth. It lures him on, offering a bit more of itself every few yards. And as they draw nearer it happens just the same as it always used to, something she noticed years ago when for laughs they’d bring along the unsuspecting — a friend’s cousin from out of town, someone like that. Your first time, the closer you get, the less briskly you walk, approaching with slowness turned exponential. The foot hesitates, then falters. You emerge into a small clearing where the canopy gives way, or refuses to grow, and by now you understand that your eyes don’t deceive you, and so, as if held back by some primal instinct for self-preservation, you cover the rest of the way in halting steps, as though creeping up on something that may bite.
Birds, the only sound, and finally Rik breaks the silence with an incredulous little laugh. “Good God,” he says.