by Anne Roiphe
We arrive. The cemetery gate is wide open. Furious barking comes from three large dogs penned in a cage. In Greek mythology the dog Cerberus guards the gates to Hades. I think of the river Styx, which brings the dead to the shores of the afterlife where they will reside, shades, shadows, nonlives, ever after. These dogs are not mythological. They must be there to frighten grave robbers or more likely grave vandals. We ignore them and take our cars up the hill toward the top where a group of graves, a few newly dug, soft brown dirt marking the spots, wait. Most have large marble markers with names and dates and a few words on them. My oldest grandson finds the grave we are looking for and we walk over to the site. A white cloth is taped across the face of the stone. My son-in-law takes off the tape and removes the tape dispenser, a green plastic tongue, which was left on the ledge. The little girls are strangely quiet, hanging on to any hand offered. I give all of the grandchildren small rocks that H. and I had brought back from the Rainbow River in Alaska, where he had caught his biggest salmon, the one he was most proud of. I remember him holding it in his arms, almost too heavy for him, water dripping from its gills, blood visible on the jawline and the glassy eyes staring, not at the camera but at eternity. I remember the silver gills, a few shedding from the fish onto his yellow rubber boots. Each child places one of the stones on the edge of the monument. The words can be read in black chiseled letters, and in the line below are the dates of his life, its beginning and its end.
We say three psalms, all of us reading them together. We say the Kaddish. We stand a moment or more. Suddenly I remember the sound that came from H.’s throat as he stumbled up the steps of our lobby and collapsed on the floor beside me. It was a moan, but not a moan. It was a reedy sound, like that of a loon from across a lake in Maine. It was like the wind entangled in the branches of an old oak tree. It was like nothing I had ever heard before, this sound. Perhaps it was simply the air rushing out of lungs, the compression of the throat from the sudden constriction of muscles. I hear this sound again standing by the grave site. I don’t actually hear it. I remember it, which is close enough to cause a trembling in my legs. I will not tremble. The little girls are now running about on the grass. I am of two minds. I would like to stay and stay by his grave. I would like to leave immediately. We have paused before the omniscient eye of the universe long enough. Faintly at a great distance I hear the dogs still barking.
I am not overcome with emotion. I am numb. I look out over the landscape, under the rising power lines, which swoop up the nearby hill and down the next one. I see graves as far as the eye can see. The commonality of death calms me. The grief of it all is absent from the warm spring air. The new grass is growing even in the freshly dug earth. My three-year-old granddaughter asks her mother, “When people die do they still have selfs?” Her mother says, “I don’t know.” I know but I wouldn’t tell a three-year-old.
On the way back to the city, leaving the cemetery behind, leaving my own grave, a plot beside H., to lie empty a while longer, I find tears leaking out from beneath the rim of my sunglasses. Why? No new sorrow has come my way. No new loss has hit me. I can tolerate tombs and marble stones and grass plots and cemeteries with open gates. I can accept the fact of death, even my own, with calm. I can accept that there is nothing or almost nothing left of H. by now. So then why the tears, which I have trouble stopping and must stop because we are going to have a picnic in the park and I don’t want my family to find my face wet with tears.
Who cares if I cry, I think. I imagine there are other families in which the widow might wail at the grave site, might weep loudly for hours, her children’s hands on her shoulders, hugging her, their own tears and loud cries mingling with hers. There is nothing wrong with that scene, I watch it on television as it is broadcast from Iraq daily, but it is not our way. My children would be embarrassed if they saw me crying. I would be embarrassed by my red nose and my hurt eyes. I would feel vulnerable and even here with my children I need a face, a face to hide behind. I consider this in the car as we are driving and tears are falling despite my effort to stop them, despite my effort to discover the reason or unreason for them, exactly. I am supposed to be the mother, the one that protects the children. If I am unraveling that will frighten them. But they are old enough to understand, old enough to tolerate my tears without fears that something will collapse beneath their feet. But I can’t shed my disguise. I struggle to regain composure. Then my son-in-law who is driving perhaps sees out of the corner of his eye my red nose, my leaking tears. He asks me when I first met H. He knows the story. But I start to tell him anyway. And in the telling the tears stop. Why, I don’t know. But I have to select my words, pace my tale, color in the details. I am a storyteller after all. I grow animated with description. I am involved in telling. I am not weeping. I tell him about the party I was supposed to go to that night forty-one years ago but didn’t go to because H. had asked me out to a movie and sounded so shy on the telephone that I thought he might not call back if I refused his first invitation.
If anyone had said, “I know you must feel sad, seeing the grave,” I would have wept. So I am glad no one did. If anyone had said, “You must miss him,” I would have wept. No one did. They must have received signals from me that I would not want them to come so near. There was a time in their lives years ago, their teenage years, when everything I did embarrassed them, but now it was my own wish to remain dignified that kept me quiet and contained.
Dignity, what is it but a wall that blocks out, that locks in.
I think about my mother. She died forty-four years ago. I had been in a black limousine provided by the funeral home when we came down the same highway I was on now. I don’t remember the name of the cemetery. It was March and there had been a winter storm a few days before. White mounds of snow clung to the sides of the highway and the trees were barren. She never knew H. or her grandchildren.
Back in the city we go to the park carrying bread and cheese and homemade cookies and sesame noodles in containers and seltzer and water and we sit on the grass under a blossoming cherry tree and we eat and drink. The little girls run around playing hide-and-seek behind the trunks of trees from which they were never hidden. The littlest one tries to hide by pulling her dress over her head. We laugh.
Alone in my apartment I walk from room to room. Wherever I sit I am uncomfortable and move somewhere else. What I would like is a summer camp for adults my age, with a communal dining room and taps at night and weekly movies and campfires and songs and a hike to a place where a stream runs down between high rocks and birch bark and pinecones fall on the dark soil that crunches underfoot. But such a place if it existed would be filled with the near-blind, the hardly hearing, the limping, the sad, the lonely, the diseased or about to be diseased. It would be hard to keep up one’s courage there. And after years of living in one small place with many of the same people with the same politics, same professions, with the same favorite restaurants, how easy would it be to go elsewhere? A summer camp that never ends is not such a good idea.
I revisit the idea of selling this apartment and moving away. I once again read the real estate section of the newspaper looking for places in the northern woods, places near the ocean, places where the sun shines all year, places where I could go and start again. I read the prices. I compare them. I wonder if I could really go and if I went would I sit alone wherever I was. A friend calls. We talk about a movie we had both seen the week before. It was a good conversation. I am all right after all. I do not need a male, or a partner, to make me complete. I am good enough as is. I am through with e-mails and matches online. If love should come to me again I would welcome it. If I am without love ever after I can console myself with the thought that ever after is not so long now and that my memory is good and can comfort me if I need comforting.
THERE IS A GREEK MYTH ABOUT AN OLD COUPLE, BAUCIS and Philomen, who live in a poor hut on the edge of the forest. The god Hermes comes to visit them and they offer him some of the milk that sits in
the pitcher on their table. They offer him bread and shelter. The Olympian sees how poor they are and is grateful for the kindness of the simple man and woman he sees before him. He reveals himself as a god and tells them he will grant any wish they have. They ask him to allow them to die at the same moment, so that one will not have to suffer without the other. Hermes agrees. A while later they both die in the same instant and their bodies are instantly transformed into two trees that grow toward the sky side by side with their branches intertwined and the wind touching their leaves and the sun rushing down to warm their bark. Unlikely story that. But I understand the wish that prompted that tale. Widowhood, as I am now growing accustomed to it, can be a calm place. I can pretend I am a tree with my branches locked in another tree. I will be a tree that can bend with the wind and survive a great storm.
I go to a concert for young artists and hear an amazing pianist play Mozart. The lights in the theater remind me of the candles we set in soap bars and sent out into the lake long ago when I was a child. The stars above watched over my candle or so it seemed to my innocent eyes. Tonight the lights shimmer and fade against the crystal and the gold that line the tiers of red velvet seats. The audience barely breathes. The pianist bends and waves above the keys, his long arms reaching like the wings of a bird.
I walk along Broadway and pass flowers in buckets in front of the Asian greengrocer. Among them I see tiny orchids on a long thin branch. I look at the pale petals, pinkish at the center, white in the middle and then almost purple at the ends. What a miracle a flower is. I buy three branches just for myself. These shapes and colors are not miracles, I know. I really do know. These qualities came about through the ages to attract insects, to survive predators, to secure the sunshine, all for the purpose of spreading themselves across a field. Nevertheless the bundle in my arms, wrapped in a white cheap paper with a vine-like design across it, is proof that sorrow is only a slice of the story and the other portion is brilliant in the sunshine, gentle in the dusk and perfect in my arms.
I do not have my soul mate and most likely will never have another but I will be fine. I can read. I can think. I can work. I can see friends. I can watch my grandchildren grow. I can walk in the park and I can listen to music and I can argue politics and I can pass, if fate allows it, from old to older in the usual manner. I will be sad often but not always. I will be lonely most always but not unbearably so. I will look forward to small things, a dinner with friends, a movie, the first orange persimmons. I will miss sex. I will miss conversations after midnight with the covers pulled up tight across the chest to keep the warmth inside while cold air frosts the windowpanes. I will have no one to tell good news or bad. I will miss the unsaid things that passed between H. and me. But I will manage without them. I will make new friends in unexpected places. I will take a trip somewhere I have always wanted to go. I will not let grief become my constant companion. I will refuse its offer to accompany me to the corner, to the night, to the next month.
If the owl and the pussycat went to sea in a pea-green boat and the owl flew off, the pussycat better pick up the oars and row toward shore—she has, after all, neither wings nor gills. She must dance by herself by the light of the moon.
About the Author
ANNE ROIPHE is the author of fifteen books, including Fruitful, which was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Award. She has written for the New York Times, the New York Observer, Vogue, Elle, Redbook, Parents, and The Guardian, and is a contributing editor to the Jerusalem Report. She lives in New York City.
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Jacket design by Christine Van Bree
Copyright
EPILOGUE. Copyright © 2008 by Anne Roiphe. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © JULY 2008 ISBN: 9780061871214
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