A Permanent Member of the Family

by Russell Banks

  Though Jane’s husband, Frank, had never been close to the Pelhams—he was what was called a Keene native; the Pelhams, like his wife, were “from away,” as local people put it—he respected Jane’s friendship with Isabel and told her to stay down there in Florida as long as she wanted. He’d be in hunting camp up on Johns Brook with the guys for the next week anyhow. Maybe longer if he didn’t kill his deer right off. They could pull in Ryan whatzizname, you know, the Hall kid, to take care of the dogs.

  WHEN ISABEL ARRIVED to meet Jane at the Miami airport in her Chrysler convertible, top down, Jane was thrown off by the warm, welcoming smile on her friend’s broad, suntanned face. No grief-stricken tears, no trembling lips. Jane tossed her suitcase onto the backseat, got in and hugged Isabel long and hard, a consoling hug. Isabel was smaller than Jane, trim, and for a woman, especially a woman her age, muscular. She wore a white silk T-shirt and a flouncy pale blue cotton skirt and sandals.

  Not exactly funereal, Jane thought. Taking in the new car, she said, “I like the color, Isabel. I bet it’s called something like ‘espresso.’ Am I right?” Actually, she did like the color and hoped she didn’t sound sarcastic.

  “Ha! It’s called ‘tungsten metallic.’ I wanted ‘billet silver metallic,’ but this was the only convertible they had on the lot, and I wanted a convertible more. So, listen, do you mind if we pick up George’s ashes on the way home? Since we’re in Digger O’Dell the Friendly Undertaker’s neighborhood.”

  Jane said no, she didn’t mind. Isabel’s jaunty tone confused her. “Is his name really Digger O’Dell?”

  Isabel laughed. “No, but he is friendly. Maybe too friendly. I think it’s Rick. Ricardo O’Dell. He’s Latino, despite the name. Argentine, maybe.”

  While she drove she punched a string of numbers into her cell phone. Steering with one hand and holding the phone to her ear with the other, Isabel cut swiftly—expertly, Jane thought, for someone who never drove in traffic like this—through the snarl of cloverleafs and on- and off-ramps that surrounded the airport. In minutes they were up on Route 112 speeding east toward Biscayne Bay.

  Isabel pulled into the sunbaked lot next to the large cinder-block cube that O’Dell’s Funeral Home shared with a tire store, and parked. She asked Jane if she’d like to come inside with her. “It’s kind of creepy,” she said, “but interesting.” Rick O’Dell had told her he’d be with a client in the Comfort Room when she arrived, but he’d leave the urn with her husband’s cremains in the reception area. She could simply take them. Nothing to sign.

  Jane said sure, she had never been in a crematorium before. She felt rushed by Isabel, pushed into doing something she’d prefer to avoid, but decided to let it go. Isabel was probably experiencing a wave of grief-induced mania. A way of not succumbing to grief itself. Sometimes that happened after the death of a spouse.

  They entered a darkened, windowless hallway. There was a plastic folding lawn chair by the door at the far end, and on the chair a small cardboard carton with a yellow Post-it note stuck to it. On the note someone had written Isabel Pelham in red Magic Marker ink.

  “I’m reasonably certain that the ashes inside that box are George’s, not mine,” Isabel said.

  “God, I can’t tell if you’re being morbid or funny.”

  “Both.”

  “Let’s go. This whole thing is freaking me out a little,” Jane said and turned to leave.

  “Wait. Check that out.” Beyond the door was a larger room, a showroom of some kind, lit by flickering fluorescent ceiling lights. On a high four-wheeled cart in the middle of the otherwise empty room was a white casket with its lid up. The interior of the casket was lined in rolled and pleated white patent leather. Except for what appeared to be a bowling ball inside an aqua ball bag, the casket was empty. A vacuum cleaner tank and a length of coiled vacuum hose and extension tubes lay on the tile floor beside the cart.

  “Check that out. Don’t you just love Miami?” Isabel whispered. She pulled her iPhone from her purse and snapped four quick photos of the scene. “It’s so fucking surreal here. Everywhere you look. I’m thinking of buying a real camera and taking pictures of everything. Might be a whole new career.” They could hear the muffled voice of a man speaking Spanish in the Comfort Room farther down the hall.

  “That would be Digger O’Dell, the Friendly Undertaker. Comforting some poor widow in the Comfort Room with his hand on her knee. Or maybe they’re in the crematorium. I wonder where that is. Probably the basement.”

  She made a move to enter the showroom, but Jane grabbed her sleeve and stopped her. Jane said, “Jesus, Isabel, let’s go now. You’ve got what we came for.”

  Isabel lifted the small cardboard box from the chair and opened it. Inside was a polished mahogany container the approximate size and shape of an old-fashioned milk bottle. “Like it?”

  “The urn? Yes, it’s . . . tasteful.”

  Isabel held the container by the neck and examined it slowly. “Hard to imagine all of George coming down to just this. Ashes to ashes, I suppose. He was such a big man, over two hundred pounds. Reduced to a pint or so of ashes. ‘Cremains.’ Want to take a look?” she said and started to unscrew the black plastic top.

  “Jesus, no! Not here. C’mon, Isabel, let’s just go now!” Jane said and walked quickly down the hallway to the door, opened it and stepped into the blinding sunlight.

  LIKE A REALTOR TRYING to sell her the apartment, Isabel took Jane on what she called The Tour, first the condo and then the public areas of the building, and Jane learned that her newly widowed friend was planning to live alone in Miami Beach in the high-rise condominium on Sunset Harbour Drive with spectacular views of Biscayne Bay and the downtown Miami skyline across the bay. There was a pool in the building and a health club. An attractive marble-floored lobby with an attendant on duty day and night and twenty-four-hour camera surveillance. Isabel demonstrated how from her glass-walled aerie she could watch the glittering cruise ships glide silently out to sea. She could look down from the terrace and observe the seagulls and pelicans from above. She could spy with binoculars on lovers and smugglers and partygoers in their yachts moored at the yacht club adjacent to her building. Which was how she spoke of it, Jane noticed, as her building. Previously in their weekly phone conversations she had called it our building.

  There was something weird going on with Isabel, Jane thought. She was not prepared for her friend’s sprightliness or her suddenly fortified willfulness and new enthusiasms. This was not the Isabel she had known for more than half a lifetime, the woman she had come here to console.

  Isabel said, “I love that there are so many blacks in the building and that most people in the city speak Spanish. I never realized how sick I was of being surrounded by people who look and sound just like me. I’m going to learn Spanish,” she said. “You hear a lot of Haitian Creole, too. I’m becoming a permanent legal resident of Florida,” she added. “I’d rather vote here where my vote counts, rather than in New York where I’m just another liberal Democrat. I made an appointment this morning online to get my Florida driver’s license.”

  “Will you live here year-round?”

  “I’ll probably use the Keene house in the summer months. At least for now.”

  “I thought you and George planned on eventually moving into that Christian retirement community, the one down in Saratoga Springs. What’s it called, Harmony Hills?” They were Episcopalians, the Pelhams, not really churchy, but believers. And do-gooders, as Frank called them. At least George was. For years he had spent his summer vacations building houses for Habitat for Humanity. Isabel was sort of a New Age Christian, Jane thought. Isabel and George were more conventionally religious than Jane, who described herself as a Buddhist, and her husband, Frank, who’d been raised Catholic but pointedly claimed to be an agnostic, as if it were a religion.

  Isabel said, “God, no. That place was always George’s idea. Not mine. He turned seventy-three last June and planned to check into Harmony Hills befo
re he turned seventy-five. While he could still enjoy it, he used to say.”

  Jane knew all this, but had never done the math. “Wow. If he’d lived, you’d only be, what, sixty-four? Awfully young to be living in an old-age home, Isabel.”

  “No kidding. We had a crisis coming down the road like a sixteen-wheeler. It’s not really an old-age home, though. It’s called an ‘adult community,’ with an assisted-living facility and a nursing home attached, so as your body and mind deteriorate you get shuttled from one stage to the next without having to leave the premises until you’re dead. So, yeah. Close call.”

  THE FUNERAL SERVICE was held at All Souls Episcopal Church with a small group in attendance. The urn holding George’s ashes was placed on a pedestal in the nave with George’s Yale class of 1962 yearbook photograph beside it. George’s tennis coach was present, along with the rental agent for their condo and six or eight acquaintances from the building, retired northerners, couples they had intended to get to know better but hadn’t quite got around to yet. Otherwise the congregation was made up of George’s three siblings and a sprinkling of their spouses, children and grandchildren. And Jane, of course, who sat in the front pew next to Isabel throughout the brief service, after having declined the priest’s invitation to say a few words about George, share a few memories, tell a personal anecdote about George’s lifelong love of the Adirondack Mountains, which the priest mistakenly called the Appalachian Mountains. Jane was slightly phobic about public speaking. One of George’s younger brothers spoke of George’s love of the Adirondacks, and one of his nephews reminded the gathering of George’s willingness to write recommendation letters to Groton, his alma mater, whenever a male Pelham applied for admission.

  Except for Jane, there were no representatives from the High Peaks Country Day School or the town of Keene. Which made sense, Jane said to Isabel when she groused about the absence of mourners from the north. It was an expensive full day’s travel each way, and most people up there no doubt assumed that there would be a memorial service in Keene in June or July, after school let out and the summer people who knew George personally had come back from their winter homes and Isabel had returned from her own sojourn here in Miami Beach.

  “Yeah, right,” Isabel said. “If I return to Keene for the summer. And if I decide to hold a memorial service.”

  AT THE RECEPTION back at the condominium, Isabel set the urn with George’s ashes on top of the sideboard in the dining area, then stood next to the urn as if to lend George’s authority to her words and announced in public for the first time that she had decided to stay on alone in the condo in Miami Beach for the rest of the winter. “I’ll have George’s ashes to keep me company,” she said. “But only until I take them back to Keene and scatter them from the top of Mount Marcy, which is what he always said he wanted. By then I should be able to live without him beside me any longer.”

  She added that she planned to use George’s life insurance money to buy the condo they’d been renting and from now on she’d winter over here permanently. She was so uncharacteristically firm that no one in George’s extended family tried to dissuade her.

  After the other mourners had departed, George’s family members, who were staying at the Lido on Belle Isle, took the opportunity to go out for Chinese food. They wanted to discuss among themselves George’s money, most of which, since he and Isabel were childless, would soon belong to Isabel. George and Isabel had worked as underpaid teachers their entire married lives and between them had built up a million-dollar TIAA-CREF retirement account. But George, his two brothers and his sister were descended from early-twentieth-century owners of mountains of Minnesota iron ore plus several subsidiary steel-dependent industries in Pittsburgh, and George’s portion of the family estate was many times the size of his half of their TIAA-CREF account. From the start George had micromanaged both his and Isabel’s modest personal finances, so there was reason for the family to fear that their sister-in-law, who as far as they knew had never paid a bill on her own or written a check for more than the weekly groceries, would not be a responsible custodian of her new wealth.

  George had taught math and geometry, but Isabel had taught literature and art history, and the family viewed her as mildly eccentric, possibly artistic. Isabel’s background did not reassure them, either. Her parents had owned and operated a small motel in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. A bright only child, she had been a scholarship student at Smith when she met George, who had just taken a teaching position at nearby Deerfield Academy. They hoped that George had had the foresight to establish a trust naming one or all three of his siblings as trustees, a trust that would provide Isabel with a monthly income sufficient to cover her ongoing expenses, while preserving the rest of George’s estate for future generations of Pelhams. They wished they had discussed this eventuality with him years ago. But when it came to money, George, like his siblings, was as closemouthed as he was tightfisted, and no one had been willing to broach the subject with him.

  ISABEL AND JANE, like teenagers, ate standing in front of the open refrigerator, picking with chopsticks from cartons of leftover take-out curried chicken salad and couscous. Afterward, Isabel opened a chilled New Zealand sauvignon blanc, and she and Jane went out onto the balcony, carrying their wineglasses and the bottle. They sat and drank and watched the evening sun slide across the darkening sky. The coin-sized buttery yellow disc, when it slipped behind the skyscrapers and glass and steel office towers on the far side of Biscayne Bay, swiftly turned into a large scarlet fireball.

  Isabel said, “Look at how when the sun gets halfway below the horizon you can literally see it move. It’s like the way the sand in an hourglass pours faster and faster as it nears the end. I should know why that happens, but I don’t. George would’ve known why. Something to do with optics and geometry, probably.”

  “Something to do with time,” Jane said and refilled her glass from the bottle on the table between them. “So, what will you do now?”

  “Interesting how we use ‘so’ to signal a change of subject. Anyhow, what’ll I do now that George’s gone?”

  “Yes. In your rapidly encroaching old age.”

  “I’m old, Janey, but not elderly. Not yet, anyhow. George liked to solve problems before they happen. I like to solve them after they happen.”

  “And now you can do that? Solve your problems after they happen?”

  “Right.”

  “I suppose it’s like when Frank needs some R and R he takes his gun or his fishing rods, depending on the season, and heads for camp with his male hunting and fishing buddies, and they tell lies and drink and let their beards grow and don’t bathe. When I need R and R, I go down to the monastery in Woodstock and sit zazen for a long weekend.”

  “No, it’s not like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you don’t have to choose between them. The huntin’ and fishin’ boys’ camp in the woods versus the monastery with the Buddhists. I had to choose. The Linger Longer Retirement Home for Old People in Saratoga with George versus a condo in Miami Beach with no one. One or the other. Not much of a choice.”

  “And now you don’t have to choose.”

  “No, now I can choose. And I’m choosing a condo in Miami Beach with no one.”

  “Well, I just meant that Frank and I are different. The way you and George are . . . were different.”

  “Right. So, Janey, to change the subject, can you stay on for a few days after everyone leaves?” Isabel asked. “I’m going to need help moving George’s things into storage, his clothes and personal stuff, things I don’t need or want. I’d just as soon keep his family out of it for now. I’d like to sort it out without them hovering over my shoulder. They’re not exactly vultures, but they keep mental and computerized inventories of just about everything. Like George did.”

  Jane said, “I remember how very neat and orderly he was. But I always admired him for that. Not like Frank.”

  “Right, he was not like Frank. More
like you,” she said and laughed.

  “In some ways, maybe. Are you okay, Isabel? You seem . . . I don’t know, like you’re holding back your grief. Your loss.”

  “You mean, am I in what you shrinks call denial? Probably. Down the road I’m sure I’ll feel crushed by his absence. I was so used to his presence. But right now the truth is I feel liberated by it. And only a little guilty,” she said. “And he didn’t suffer. We should all be as lucky.”

  ISABEL WENT TO BED EARLY—to avoid the company of George’s siblings and their spouses and mostly grown children and grandchildren, Jane figured. Despite an arduous and stressful day, Isabel hadn’t seemed in the slightest tired. The opposite, in fact.

  Instead of heading back to the Lido, where they had booked a string of rooms, the family lingered another half hour at the condo with Jane. It was a very chic hotel, they kept repeating, as if slightly confused and threatened by its stylishness and worried about the cost. They would have preferred to stay over on the mainland in a Marriott or Holiday Inn, but had wanted to take rooms close to their brother’s condominium, they said, in case their sister-in-law needed their ongoing comfort and help, which evidently she did not.

  When finally they left, Jane washed the glasses and shut out the lights one by one and went into the guest bedroom. She knew that Frank expected her to call tonight, because tomorrow he’d be in camp and out of cell phone range for at least a week. But she did not want to talk with him. She did not want to look at herself and Isabel through her husband’s critical eyes. Not tonight, anyhow, when her views of herself and her best friend were so indistinct and shifting. She sat on the bed in the guest room and decided to send him a text. She preferred whenever possible to send texts instead of speaking on the phone—with texts she was more in control of what she said and heard and when she said and heard it. Fewer surprises that way. Jane did not like surprises.

  She thumb-typed: I solve problems before they happen, and u solve them after they happen. She read the text over three times, then deleted it. She began again and this time wrote: When I need R & R I go 2 the monastery. When u need R & R u go 2 your man-cave. She half laughed to herself and deleted this text, too.