by Jane Smiley
“Well, the day of the funeral came around, and, as per instructions, they had it at the church, and no one came, because he’d been such an ornery old cuss. The only people in the pews were Essie and her sister. They were sitting there waiting for the minister, and here comes a man carting a big heavy box, and he sets it into the foot of the coffin and turns and walks away. The sister says, ‘Essie, what’s that?’ And Essie says, ‘Well, Ezra made me promise that after he died I would go to the bank and get out all his money and put it in a box and bury it in his coffin with him.’ And the sister says, ‘Essie, you have always been a sucker since the day you married that man, and you’re still a sucker.’
“‘Well, he said Jesus would provide, and I did promise, and I never went back on a promise.’
“‘How much money is in there?’ says the sister.
“‘Five million dollars.’
“‘And you in this old coat!’
“Well, Ezra said that Jesus would provide, and I believed that Jesus would provide, and Jesus has provided. It’s a miracle.’
“So her sister gets all excited and says, ‘What did Jesus do?’ And Essie says, ‘He told me to write a check.’”
This got a pretty good laugh. Elena herself laughed, though of course she was a little shocked that Charlie would tell a joke that mocked his right-wing political allies, but she had learned her lesson, and she didn’t say anything. Charlie himself laughed, pleased at the response. She glanced quickly at Max. He had a good-natured smile on his face.
Cassie regarded Charlie with a straight-man look and said, “I don’t care about the money. If I fall over in the street, you can hand it to the nearest homeless person, but I want my handbag, with my wallet and my digital camera and my address book, and my checkbook, and my pen, and, let’s see, the car keys—”
“Why the car keys?” said Delphine.
“Because they belong to the handbag. When you sell the car, you can give them the extra set.”
“I’m surprised you don’t want a Viking burial,” said Delphine. “Pushed in the Saab off the end of the Santa Monica Pier.”
“I’m not asking to be treated like a king or a queen. I’ve just never gone anywhere without my handbag, and anyway, I especially like the one I’m using, and I don’t want to be separated from it prematurely. You know Ray McGalliard, don’t you?” she said to Delphine. “He’s eighty-two. He told me he never buys a pair of shoes without wondering if he’s going to die before they wear out. And he’s perfectly healthy, to all appearances.”
Delphine said, “You always talk about your death as if it will be a good joke that you’ll be around to enjoy. You don’t take it seriously.”
“Why should I? It’s not my business.”
Delphine tossed her head.
In the momentary silence, Zoe said, “Death is actually not first on my list of bad outcomes. What you really don’t want is yourself at eighty on The Tonight Show, wearing some strange hat and your hands shaking as you light yet another cigarette, to be the last lingering image the public has of you, so that when they go back and look at some movie you made when you were twenty-five, they say, ‘She actually was rather pretty when she was first starting out.’”
Joe passed the doorway and looked in again, still not happy. For that matter, Elena got a similar sense from Monique and Marya—that the ten of them had overstayed their welcome. Zoe, too, glanced at Joe, but then she said to Max (with a preliminary glance at Isabel), “Are you going to do an all-naked talking-heads picture in your bedroom with Madonna and Clint?”
Isabel snorted.
Max said, “Actually, Elena and I spent the day in the library yesterday, looking at pictures of Russia. Elena read up a little on Gogol.”
“He wore a pageboy,” said Elena. “I read some other things he wrote. They were quite funny. Not at all like Taras Bulba. That one called ‘The Nose’ would make a great cartoon.”
“Though I think someone did that,” said Max.
“Oh,” said Elena, and she felt surprisingly crestfallen, as if her incipient Hollywood career, which had begun the day before, had ended already.
Max said, “It could be done again.” He looked kind and amused, as if reading her mind. And then, right in that moment, in that room, in front of all his relatives, she was quickened with love for him. Max himself came into sharper focus, and when he then let out the briefest, most delicate sigh, she heard it more clearly. The brightness that suddenly enveloped him, she knew, was the brightness in her own eyes, her own rods and cones, her own optic nerves. The loveliness of his hair and face and shoulders was her own flesh vibrating more intensely at his proximity. But what created this love was a suddenly vast sense of every story he had told her—Max as a boy in knickers (knickers!) walking to school; Max in Vietnam in the latrine, and the latrine suddenly toppling over and sliding down the hill; Max at the dinner table with his girlfriend’s mother, eating Chinese takeout with Lee Strasberg; Max and Ina taking photographs of one another in the doorway of some apartment behind LAX, surrounded and overwhelmed by the bougainvillea; Max and Lilli Palmer standing in the snow, her in dark furs; Max on the stage at the Oscars, pushing his hair out of his eyes; Max with a scowling baby Isabel on the beach; Max staring at Zoe, and staring at her again. Max driving his car. Max sitting alertly beside her, watching a movie. Max looking tall and busy, walking down Melrose. Max sleeping on his back in the sunlight in his own bed. Her mind was full of images of Max, and though they were not all complete, they were all immanent—any single one seemed able to manifest at any moment. Some were ones she remembered from times she had spent with him, and others were ones she had imagined from things he had told her, but all were equal in their power to animate her tenderness toward him. Here was Max, fifty-eight years old! So many adventures bundled together and patting her on the knee! Really, she thought, how was it possible to love a young man, a boy, in comparison with loving an old man? She couldn’t remember; it was hardly imaginable.
And yet here was Charlie, over on the other side and down. She didn’t love him. His adventures left her cool, even put her off. Here was Paul—and she appreciated him more than she had before yesterday, especially the way he sat quietly surrounded by hangings and crucifixions and burnings at the stake, suggesting techniques of mental discipline in an even, deep, steady tone of voice, techniques that part of her found helpful and part of her found simplistic and silly—she would never love him, either. How strange it was, after all.
Cassie leaned around Stoney and stared down the table at Delphine. For once, thought Elena, she seemed a little put out. She said, “Well, then, you tell us how you see your death. You’re seventy-six years old, and you’ve had a long time to think about it.”
“Oh,” said Delphine. “It doesn’t seem that long.”
“Long enough,” said Cassie, challenging. Elena wondered if there was going to be an argument at last.
Delphine picked up the napkin in her lap, turned it around, laid it in her lap again, and smoothed it with her hands. It was thoughtful but uncanny, like the gesture of a little girl, Elena thought, making sure she was neat and clean before addressing the grown-ups. Finally, she said, “Well, last night I went into the suite, the Reformation/Counter-Reformation Suite. I was looking for a movie to watch, and I’d seen all the ones in my room—”
“What movies are in the Bird Room?” asked Simon.
Delphine looked at him. She said, “Winged Migration, Green Mansions, The Birds, The Birdman of Alcatraz, one just called Birdy. Let’s see, The Birdcage.”
“Pretty eclectic,” said Stoney.
“Shh,” said Isabel, but in fact Elena could see that the interruption had allowed Delphine to regain her customary self-possession.
“Anyway,” said Delphine, “I found The Seventh Seal. Remember that one?”
Max let out a long hum of appreciation. He said, “I saw that first when I was a freshman in college. I saw it five nights in a row, every night the film society showed it.”
Max nodded. Elena had never seen the movie, though she had heard of it.
“I need to buy a copy of that,” said Max.
“Everyone dies in that movie,” said Cassie.
“No, they don’t,” said Delphine. “Quit interrupting me.”
Cassie sat back and made a lip-zipping gesture.
“Who hasn’t seen that movie?” said Delphine.
“I haven’t,” said Charlie. Elena shook her head. Simon said, “Never heard of it.”
“I’ve heard of it,” said Isabel.
“That was my mother’s favorite movie of all time,” said Paul, “except for Three Coins in the Fountain.”
Max smiled at this, and Paul returned his smile, or seemed to. With the beard, you couldn’t really tell.
“It’s simple, really,” said Delphine. “It’s the middle of the fourteenth century, and a knight and his squire are just coming back to Sweden after ten years at the Crusades, and they find out that the plague has preceded them.”
“Good immune systems to get that far,” said Isabel.
For once, Dephine gave her a look. For once, Isabel was abashed. “They wake up on the beach and start reconnoitering. The squire sees a monk sitting next to a rock and goes over to ask the news, and when the monk doesn’t answer, he pulls on his hood, and the camera shows what he sees—the monk’s dead face, his eyes picked out by the shorebirds and his skin partially eaten away. Then Death himself appears, a few minutes later. Death and the knight decide to play chess. If the knight wins, he gets something. If Death wins, that’s it. It’s all black and white, of course.”
“I remember it as a scary movie,” said Zoe. “Very contrasty, with the faces of the characters a little overexposed and really pale.”
“Practically the first thing, the knight and the squire go into a church, and while the squire is talking to a painter—”
“Who says, ‘People always prefer a skull to a naked woman’—I remember that clearly,” said Max.
“Is that true?” said Elena.
“Only on opening weekend,” said Max.
Delphine ignored them. “The knight goes into the confessional and confesses all of his doubts about the existence of God and the meaning of life. Then he brags about his strategy for beating Death at chess. Then the priest, who is Death, turns around—”
“He’s fucked,” said Simon.
“But not right away,” said Delphine. “In the meantime, there’s a young couple, Mary and Joseph, and the baby Michael, traveling actors and acrobats. He sees visions and she doesn’t.
“The knight and squire come upon a young girl being executed as a witch. The knight wants to find out from her if God exists, but all she can do is cry out.”
“You watched this movie voluntarily?” said Charlie. “I gather that I’m in the British Colonial Room, because I watched The Lives of a Bengal Lancer. I also watched A Passage to India the other night.”
Max chuckled.
“Pretty soon, a procession of flagellants comes by, bearing several crosses and whipping themselves and each other, crying out and chanting ‘Dies Irae,’ which I think means ‘Day of Wrath.’ The group stops, a priest gives a hellfire-and-brimstone sermon, and everyone falls to their knees, and all of this begins to look dangerous when a smith, whose wife has left him for one of the actors, finds Joseph in the tavern, eating, and goads the patrons of the tavern, with, of course, the assistance of the priest, into tormenting him for no reason other than that he’s an actor. But the squire happens to come in, and happens not only to save him, but also to injure the priest, though exactly how I couldn’t tell. It looked like he poked his eyes out—”
“Eew,” said Isabel.
“—but he seems fine later. In the meantime, the knight has befriended Mary and Michael, and they are chatting together when Joseph and the squire show up. After that, they all decide to take a shortcut through the forest and head for the knight’s castle, where his wife has been waiting for him for ten years. On their way through the forest—”
“As I remember,” said Max, “the forest scenes were filmed in a backlot in downtown Stockholm, and of course they had to be extra careful with the camera, since modern high-rises were looming all around them.”
“The soldiers show up with the witch, planning to burn her at the stake in a clearing. The knight is quite excited by her reappearance, because this time she’s lucid, and able to tell him about the Devil. She asks him to look into her eyes, and she says that she sees the Devil everywhere. But in her eyes, he only sees terror, and all around them, he only sees the usual scene. Then the soldiers build the pyre and set it alight, and it’s clear that the girl will not be saved. They’ve broken her hands and tortured her, and she doesn’t want to recant, anyway. You have to say to yourself that of course the soldiers must look exactly like devils to her. After watching until they can’t stand it anymore, the knight and his friends leave. The girl is lashed to the framework, staring in horror at the bonfire, rigid with fear, and suddenly she relaxes and slumps to the side, and below her you see Death kneeling. It is he who has had mercy upon her, and preserved her from more agony. That’s when I realized that The Seventh Seal is a comic masterpiece.
“Pretty soon, it’s back to the chess game. By this time, the knight knows Death has him beaten. They play, and chat, and then Joseph notices them, and realizes that the knight’s opponent is Death. And the knight sees that the actor knows, so the knight happens to knock the pieces off the board, and while Death is replacing them, Mary and Joseph and the baby escape. Later, in the midst of a storm, the knight, the squire, his girl, the smith, and his wife come to the castle, where the knight’s wife has been waiting for them, and in the last scene, while they’re sitting at the table, reading from the book of Revelation, Death comes knocking at the door, and they all rise to greet him. Only the knight can’t stand it, and he can’t understand it, either. He puts his face in his hands and calls out to God, but the others stand quietly, and pretty soon, a shadow comes over them, one by one. In the very last scene, Joseph sees them dancing on the crest of the hill, silhouetted against the sky. And I saw why everyone loves this movie. It’s incredibly comforting, because it tells you that if you are in the presence of death long enough, it doesn’t matter whether life is meaningless or meaningful.”
Delphine looked at Cassie and said, “The knight, I could see, was reared like I was, to always be thinking about God and always be praying for the will to obey and do the right thing, because that’s how they disciplined us girls in those days. It was especially important for us little ‘Negro’ girls to be perfect, because, as far as we could tell from the behavior of the teachers, God was already not well disposed toward us. They said that God was merciful—that even though we were Negro girls, and not English girls, God was willing to take care of us if we did every single thing we were told. If we did every single thing we were told, and things still went wrong, well, we must have missed some little, crucial detail, and surely it was that very detail that God cared about above all others.” Her voice was even. “We were told that God had infinite mercy and was infinitely forgiving, but I realized even then that if we were to judge by the way our teachers treated us, that certainly could not be true, because ‘strait is the gate and narrow is the way.’ So of course the knight was afraid. He was afraid of God, not Death. But the others were smiling, because they didn’t have to worry about God.”
“It’s true,” said Paul, “that Jesus has a lot to answer for. My own view is that monotheism has been a pretty toxic idea for humanity. There is a lot of debate right now about whether humans have an inborn, biologically based propensity to belief in the Higher Being, or Beings, and if so, why that would be.”
“We talked about that in one of my anthro classes,” said Isabel. “I wrote a paper about how it’s all nurture. My theory was that since young humans require nurture and authority for such a long
time, they can’t help constructing an image of authority in their minds that amalgamates all the authority figures that they experience early on, and then culture provides them with a method of naming that image and cultivating it. I tried to devise an experiment that would test if there is an inborn propensity to worship God, but my professor and I couldn’t think of a way to remove the presence of authority. I did get an A on the paper, though. She said it was ‘carefully thought out.’”
“There’s no real evidence that human civilizations do any better under polytheistic systems,” Paul went on in his usual careful, or, you might say, pedantic, way. “But it could be that the ritualized displays of human sacrifice that seem to have been ubiquitous in pre–Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions were more about poor technology than anything else. I guess I see the Trade Center victims and the bombing victims in Iraq as types of human sacrifice, the altar being the world stage, and Allah and God being the bloodthirsty deities who require propitiation. Did we talk about fetishes at one point?”
“We did,” said Zoe. Elena realized that she no longer called him “dear one.”
“Oh, good. Well, that idea seems to me apropos whenever religion comes up as an organized, public institution.”
Now everyone was quiet, as well they might be, thought Elena. A sigh came from Max, then from Isabel. Elena herself thought she might sigh, but what sort of sigh? Exhausted? Relieved? Uncertain? Silverware made little clinking sounds as it was placed on dishware. Elena looked at Simon. He had picked up the wine bottle and was perusing the label. He put the wine bottle down and smiled at her. She smiled back at him. Charlie was being quiet. Apparently, Charlie had approached Mike and Al with his investment proposal yesterday afternoon and been turned down not very graciously. Elena didn’t know what she felt about that. At any rate, Charlie was being so quiet that Elena was surprised when Cassie said to him, “Whatever you think about the war, do you really want to be all alone for it?”
And Charlie answered, “No.”
Max caught her eye.