Windchill Summer

by Norris Church Mailer

  “Cheryl Ann, the only reason I’m letting you in the embalming room is because you’re family of Lucille and Jim Floyd, and they are my family. I don’t do this for everybody. We have to maintain the dignity of the departed.”

  “Mr. Wilmerding, I appreciate all this, but I don’t need to go in the embalming room. I think I’m just going to look after Tiffany LaDawn in the grieving room.”

  Mr. Wilmerding was old, nearly sixty, bald and short and fat. Fat men fall into two categories—the ones who fasten their belts over their bellies, and the ones who fasten their belts under their bellies. Mr. Wilmerding was an over-belly belter—a long strap of brown cowhide buckled with a big gold Masonic lodge buckle, tightly snugged practically under his armpits, held up his giant pair of khakis. He had to buy such a big size to go around his middle that the pant legs flapped like pup tents around his skinny little ankles. The person who designs these things really should figure out that not every man who has a big paunch also has fat legs. Actually, in spite of it, Mr. Wilmerding was kind of cute, with white hair, rosy little cheeks, and twinkly blue eyes. Like ol’ Santa. Only more dignified.

  The funeral home was a three-story white frame house built around the turn of the century. It was set back in a big, shady yard with several large magnolia trees, loaded down with fragrant, waxy white flowers. The trees were so thick all along both sides of the street that they met and formed a canopy over the road, and it always seemed like late afternoon, even when the sun was high overhead.

  Mr. Wilmerding lived alone in the private apartment on the third floor, Mrs. Wilmerding having passed away two years before. He had embalmed her, himself. She wouldn’t trust anybody else to do it, which is a little weird, but then again it kind of makes sense.

  Until she got sick with cancer, Mrs. Wilmerding had done all the hair and makeup on the bodies, but toward the end she got pretty weak and couldn’t manage it. That’s when they hired Lucille, since she was always hanging around the place on account of Jim Floyd, and had made friends with the Wilmerdings, who, unfortunately, weren’t able to have any kids of their own.

  When she heard that they needed somebody, even though she had never been to beauty school and didn’t have a license, Lucille begged until Mr. Wilmerding gave her a tryout.

  Her first trial client was a ninety-two-year-old woman, who had probably never worn lipstick in her life but sure needed something to brighten her up, having died with a severe case of liver disease, which had turned her skin duck’s-foot yellow. When none of the old woman’s family objected about the rosy lips and cheeks, and in fact commented on how nice and colorful she looked, Mr. Wilmerding gave Lucille the job.

  And he was glad he did. Besides the fact that she livened up the place, he was real pleased at the way Lucille fixed up his wife when she passed on. But then, before she died, Mrs. Wilmerding and Lucille had spent many a long afternoon up in her bedroom, practicing hairdos and makeup until Lucille got it right. They even took some Polaroid pictures of Mrs. Wilmerding lying down in various coffins and outfits until she decided on the one she liked. At the funeral, everyone said she had never looked better.

  The funeral home had a truly ingenious setup that Mr. Wilmerding designed himself and built into the wall. It was a dumbwaiter the length of a coffin. Jim Floyd and Mr. Wilmerding could just unload the body from the hearse into the basement on a roller belt, embalm it, scoot it into the dumbwaiter, hoist it on up to the second floor, dress it and fix it up, put it into the casket, roll the casket back into the dumbwaiter, and lower it to the first-floor viewing room. There, a sliding wall behind the coffin stand opened, and the coffin was slid, like a loaf of bread out of the oven, onto the platform. If they thought about it, people marveled at how Mr. Wilmerding could get those heavy coffins up and down the stairs, as fat as he was and all.

  The walls of the funeral home were flocked red paper, and the floors were carpeted in thick red shag. Deep. Quiet. In the receiving room, as you came in the front door, a large, gold-framed picture of Jesus, His large blue luminescent eyes looking up at the sky, yellow beams of light coming out of His head, hung above the mantel over a candelabra of gold cherubs.

  A pair of glass doors led into the viewing room, and then, separated by a screen, came the grieving room, where I planned to keep Tiffany LaDawn. It had a kitchenette and a couch, which made down into a bed for the person who stayed there all night with the bodies.

  Off on the far side, a stairway went down into the cellar, where the embalming took place. I had been down there once with Lucille when no one was around, just to see what it looked like, and let me tell you, it was something right out of an old horror movie—you know, the ones where the car breaks down at night in a storm and the girl and her boyfriend go up to take shelter in an old castle that has a mad scientist at work in the cellar, cutting up people and reanimating them.

  It was hard not to imagine Carlene lying on the cold marble slab table in the middle of the room. The floor was concrete, slanted toward a drain in the middle, and a deep sink and countertop ran along one wall. In the corner sat a round white machine that looked like an old-timey gas tank. It pumped the blood out and the formaldehyde in.

  I got queasy just looking at the equipment with nobody on it. No amount of love nor money could entice me to go down there with a mutilated body, especially one belonging to somebody I knew. Even sitting in the grieving room would be hard, knowing what was going on just under my feet.

  After he lectured me some more about proper demeanor, Mr. Wilmerding finally let me into the funeral home. Of course, Lucille and Jim Floyd had already gone down to the cellar and left me.

  “Lucille! Where are you? Where is Tiffany LaDawn?”

  “She’s down here, Cherry!” Lucille hollered from what sounded like the bottom of a well. “Jim Floyd is setting up. He needed me to help him. Come on down.”

  Great.

  “Bring her up here, won’t you? Please?”

  “Oh, Cherry, don’t be silly,” Lucille bellowed up the stairs. “There’s nothing down here that’s going to hurt you!”

  Mr. Wilmerding had gone upstairs to his apartment to get ready. I took a deep breath. All right. I would just run down the stairs, grab the baby, and come right back up. I wouldn’t even look at Carlene.

  The light in the basement came from bald lightbulbs hanging from wires in the ceiling. They swayed and cast shadows that kept changing the shape of everything they lit. I had to make my legs go into the room.

  Jim Floyd was laying out the instruments, and I tried not to look at the body, which was lying on the slab under a white sheet. The head was covered, but the toes were sticking out. Yellowish-white waxy toes, their nails painted a bright fuchsia. Seeing that pink toenail polish, it hit me like a baseball bat: Under this sheet was Carlene Moore. One night, not long ago, she had painted her toenails with bright pink polish, probably put on a pair of sandals and some dangly earrings, and gone out thinking she was going to have a good time. For the first time, her death was real. It nearly knocked the breath out of me. A person could be alive one minute and stone dead, stretched out on a marble slab, the next. One day, that would be me lying there. One day it would be every single person alive on this earth.

  Tiffany LaDawn started to cry. I jumped. Lucille rushed over and picked her up.

  “Oooh, is Mama’s wittle baby dirl hungwy? Mama will div her a wittle snacky-wacky, wight now! Mama’s wittle dirl want some tittie-pie?”

  Lucille unbuttoned her shirt and unhooked her industrial-strength nursing bra. No wonder the poor little thing was so fat that she couldn’t open her eyes.

  “Lucille, are you crazy! Don’t nurse her in here! My gosh, think about all the germs!”

  Tiffany LaDawn was already guzzling and slurping, practically smothering in the billows of breast. Lucille had to pull part of it back off her nose so she could breathe.

  “Eat, Tweetykins, and den Aunt Chewwy will take oo upstairs and wock oo in a wockey chair, Mama’s wittle sw
eet patootie.” Lucille talked exclusively in baby talk to Tiffany LaDawn. I didn’t see how the child would ever learn the English language. No wonder most little kids can’t talk plain.

  I watched in fascination as the baby nursed and thin, bluish milk ran down her mouth. It didn’t look anything like real milk that you get in the grocery store. A time or two, she drank too fast and started to choke. Lucille lifted her and pounded her on the back, then popped the huge pink nipple back in her mouth.

  “What do I do if she gets choked? I don’t think I could pound her like that.”

  “You just pat her. Gently but firmly. Here, you can burp her. Try it.”

  She plopped the baby into my arms. I was paralyzed. So far, I had managed to avoid actually picking her up. She looked up at me with big grayish eyes, the first time I had seen them. Lucille had put a stupid-looking headband around her bald little head. Pink, with a satin rosette. I was afraid it would give her a headache, it looked so tight, but she didn’t seem to notice it. She waved her arms around and somehow got her little hand tangled up in my frizzy white hair. I tried to unwind the strands from her fist before she ate them but didn’t make much headway. Babies have got a phenomenal grip.

  Lucille came to the rescue, plucked the hair off, and put the baby up on my shoulder. Tiffany LaDawn started to sneeze; my hair tickled her nose.

  “Here. Let me pull your hair back. You’ll choke her with that mop.”

  She grabbed a piece of rubber tubing and tied my hair back with it. I was afraid to ask what it had been used for.

  Tiffany LaDawn wormed around for a minute while I patted her as gently and firmly as I could, and then she let out a large burp and gushed a considerable quantity of soured milk onto my shoulder.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Cherry. Here. Let me wipe that off.” It smelled really disgusting. In spite of the ponytail, my hair was full of it. Lucille wiped at me with a diaper, but it didn’t do much good. I heard a loud creak, and jumped like I had been shot. Mr. Wilmerding was coming down the stairs. I really had to get ahold of myself and get out of there. “That’s fine, Lucille. Let me just take her back up.”

  “Okay. Yell if you need me.”

  Upstairs, I put Tiffany LaDawn and the seat down on the table and jiggled her. She seemed to like that. As she bounced, she looked around the room with wonder. Newborns weren’t supposed to be able to see much, but nobody can tell me there wasn’t a real person in that tiny body, and it seemed like she liked the bright red walls.

  She was cute, dressed in her little pink ruffledy dress and matching diaper cover with four rows of ruffles across the seat. I bet Lucille would never once put on the outfit I got her—teensy little blue jeans, tie-dyed T-shirt, and the cutest red tennies. I stuck the pacifier in her mouth, and she lay back, closed her eyes, and went to sleep. What a great kid. She was probably still worn-out from the birth. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to fight to get out of a place that small.

  Voices carried up the stairs. I tried to read a Voguemagazine that I had brought, but I couldn’t concentrate, even though Goldie Hawn, who I loved on Laugh-In,was on the cover and there was a story about her inside. Mr. Wilmerding sounded like he was right in the room with me.

  “This is a rare opportunity for you, Jim Floyd. It’s not every day we have a chance to see firsthand the workings of the state homicide department.” Mr. Wilmerding had an exceptionally loud, clear voice.

  “Looky here—the way they sewed up this incision down her stomach. Somebody knew what he was doing, all right. Fine job. Neat stitches like my aunt Nellie used to make. We’ll have to take ’em out, though, to get to the organs and embalm them. Have to inject the formaldehyde, of course. All those arteries cut during the autopsy. And we’ll have to rebuild this left breast. My, my, my. Just look at this! Lordy, Lordy, Lordy. Lucille honey, get me a jar of that derma wax out of the cabinet over there. And two or three of those sponges.”

  It suddenly got stifling hot. I had to get out of there. Even though Tiffany LaDawn was asleep, I unstrapped her from the carry-seat and put her on my shoulder. She whimpered and squirmed, but I jigged her up and down for a minute, and she went back to sleep. She felt so warm and cuddly. Alive. We went out the front door to the porch, and I sat in a white wicker rocker, clung to Tiffany LaDawn, and rocked.

  —

  It was nearly four hours later when Lucille came out. I had walked and rocked and fed Tiffany LaDawn her emergency bottle and burped her gently but firmly. I felt like an old pro. Lucille perched on the porch rail and lit up a Kent. She had quit smoking while she was pregnant, but now she wanted to lose some weight, so she had started back up again.

  “Are they done?” I was out in the yard, showing Tiffany LaDawn the squirrels. She wasn’t really into looking at things yet, but you never know what might register in those little heads.

  “Yeah. They’re done. I am just wrung-out. I wish you could have seen her, Cherry. You would have just broke down and cried.”

  “You don’t have to tell me about it, Lucille. That’s all right.”

  She let out a big sigh. I had never seen Lucille so subdued. I didn’t want her to tell me, but I knew that nothing in this world would stop her.

  “For starters, there was a bad hole in her breast where he shot her. Mr. Wilmerding filled it in pretty well with derma wax.”

  “Lucille, it’s all right. I don’t really need to hear all this.”

  “I think she had been strangled, too. There were marks on her neck. But they are pretty sure it was the drowning that finally killed her. I just got done with the hair and makeup. They’re dressing her now, so you can come in and look at her in a few minutes. Here, let me have my wittle pumpkin.”

  I was a little sorry to turn Tiffany LaDawn back over to her mother, in spite of the fact that she was smelling pretty ripe. I should have changed her diaper, but Lucille hadn’t gotten around to giving me that lesson in baby-sitting yet. Could it be that all women have genes or something that get all fired up around babies? Not that I wanted one myself. But babies might not be the worst things. The place on my chest where Tiffany LaDawn had lain was damp and felt cool.

  Jim Floyd and Mr. Wilmerding came out after a while and joined us. Lucille gave Jim Floyd the baby. “Here, Jim Floyd, take her. I’ve got to go and pee.”

  He took the baby with slow, gentle hands, laid her on his knees, and rocked her back and forth. Nobody said too much.

  “Have you ever had somebody as bad as that before, Mr. Wilmerding?” I surprised myself by speaking.

  “Oh, honey, I’ve had worse than this. Lots worse. You remember back in ’fifty-nine, when the train ran over that car right here in town at the railroad crossing and those four kids got killed?”

  I nodded. I had been a little girl, but the shock of four teenagers dying tended to stick in your memory. It was the biggest wreck ever to happen on the train track, right in downtown Sweet Valley. There had been some others—it seemed like you couldn’t keep people off the tracks. Once, one of the pickle trucks from Atlas was run over by a train. Three hundred bushels of cucumbers rained down all over the highway, breaking windshields and causing several more wrecks.

  But this one was the worst. Apparently, the kids had been drinking and had all the windows rolled up and the radio blaring, so they didn’t hear the train whistle. Died drunk. Daddy said he hoped they’d had a clear moment to ask forgiveness before they died and went to heaven. Though you should never count on waiting until the last minute to get saved—you might not have time to get right with the Lord, and the first person you’d see waiting for you would be the Devil. I wondered for a minute if Carlene had had time to get right with the Lord as she was fighting for her life. It must have been hard to concentrate. I shivered.

  Mr. Wilmerding continued, “You probably don’t know this, but we had to go along the tracks, pick the body parts up and put them in pillowcases, and reconstruct them piece by piece. Like a jigsaw puzzle.”

  “How did you kno
w which piece belonged to who?” Jim Floyd was all ears.

  “Well now, Jim Floyd, we just had to use our best judgment. Two boys and two girls. We could more or less distinguish that much. There was a fifty-fifty chance it was going to the right one. Or at the least, one in four.” Mr. Wilmerding pulled out a can of Prince Albert and rolled himself a cigarette, long and thin, then licked it and stuck it in his mouth. We watched, mesmerized. He picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue, grunted as he reached down and struck a match on the bottom of his shoe, and lit the cigarette.

  “Man, that was a challenge. That’s the kind of thing they can’t teach you in embalming school, Jim Floyd. You just have to have a knack for it.” He took in a lungful of smoke. Blew it out.

  “Take the bones, for instance. Some of the bones were missing, or too crushed into splinters to form out the limbs completely. So we got us some wooden dowels and made new bones. We got screws and hinged little pieces of dowel together to make new fingers; got wire and plaster and made new rib cages. I molded breasts out of sponges and covered them with skin made of rubber sheets. And don’t ever underestimate the value of duct tape, Jim Floyd. If you don’t have another thing in your tool kit, always keep you a roll of duct tape in there.” He again drew in on the homemade, blew out the smoke, and diddled the ash off the end with his little finger. “Fortunately, the heads were mostly intact.”

  My stomach was feeling a little rocky. “Why did you go to all that trouble?” I asked. “Why didn’t you just put them in the casket and shut the lid?” I had never seen anybody so into his work.

  “No, sis. You can’t do that. You need to see the actual body. You need the closure. The family needs to be able to look at that body and know that it is really over. Once they see the body, they are satisfied that the loved one is not going to come walking up to the doorstep. Then the grieving process can start. I try to make them look as lifelike as possible, for the sake of the family. I like to think of it as my art. You paint pictures, don’t you, Cheryl Ann? We’re both artists, you and me. I just work on a different kind of canvas.”