by Neal Bowers
In the living room, as Davis bent over his suitcase to rummage for socks, his head filled with a freeway rush and he could hear his own labored breathing from a great distance. “Eat something,” a faraway voice insisted. In the dining room, a pair of spotted bananas he had missed last night lay in their wooden bowl, sodden with ripeness. He swallowed each in two sour bites, then gulped a glass of water and sat down to wait for the sugar rush while performing his litany of recriminations: “Should check blood sugars more often, should eat on a regular schedule, shouldn’t play games with eyes, kidneys, life. Could end up whittled down to a wheelchair.”
His mother had used overripe bananas for banana pudding, mashing the bruised crescents into a sucking pulp, adding plenty of sugar to cover the decay, layering little wafers and burying everything in meringue. The light on the carpet was the color of pudding gone bad, and Davis felt the bananas rising in his throat. “Calm, calm. Deep breaths.” He waited. The whole house smelled of bananas, his mother’s concoction cooling.
As Davis recovered, he felt his anger rising, as it often did after insulin reactions. “Damned disease! Thoughtful gift from my mother.” Then he argued against his own bitterness, “Unfair. Not her fault.”
And yet diabetes lurked on her side of the family, skipping generations, missing her and finding him. Pointless to go through this rage, but he hated himself for the flaw, the failure that defined him. Hated her for the inheritance. Hated himself again for hating her. It was a closed loop within which he circled himself. “Stop,” he commanded, thrusting out of orbit.
Knowing he needed more food, he looked for the keys to his mother’s car. She usually left them hanging from the ring with the door key in the lock, but they weren’t there. When a cursory search failed to turn them up elsewhere, Davis suddenly realized he didn’t know where his mother had died. He assumed the end had come at home; yet if she died at someone else’s house, whoever brought the car back could have kept the keys.
When Aunt Goldie had phoned him at work in Des Moines, she had said only, “I’ve got awful bad news for you, darlin’,” never uttering the word “dead” because everything could be extrapolated from her broad, dark announcement and somber tone. Within minutes, Davis had made airline reservations and was on his way home to pack, never considering the logistics of his mother’s death.
Death’s mechanics now became supremely important. He had assumed her heart gave out from the years of chronic angina, yet no one actually had told him that. During the car trip from the airport, Uncle Oscar had described the whereabouts of each family member when news of Ellen’s death came, had given those details with the precision of pins in a map; but he hadn’t mentioned where the death had occurred, or its cause.
The need to know everything began to overshadow Davis’s grief, and the dullness and anger following his low blood sugar were overwhelmed by anxiety. “Gotta think this through. Where’s her purse?”
He was up again, moving frantically through the house. No purse anywhere. “Damn! Have to be logical about this. If she had an attack here and called for an ambulance, she could have taken it with her to the hospital.” But anyone experiencing the pain of a heart attack wouldn’t give a shit about her purse; she’d just want help.
Davis was dialing Oscar’s number when it occurred to him there was probably a spare set of keys somewhere, a thought that brought relief, as nothing could be worse than being chauffeured by Oscar. And if he made the call, Goldie would tighten the noose of her breakfast invitation.
Now the search changed from obvious places to cabinets and closets. “Out of sight but handy,” he reasoned as he yanked out bureau drawers. When he lifted the small vase on his mother’s dresser, something metallic chattered inside, and he dumped the contents into his palm—a small ring of keys, two for the Ford, one for the house, and a fourth that Davis didn’t recognize. “All right!” he exulted. “Something’s finally going right.”
As he put the vase down, he saw himself in the mirror, unknown for a split second: a middle-aged man with a youngish look, tall and sallow-faced, a slight crease at the corners of his mouth. “God, I look awful,” he said aloud, touching a forefinger to the puffy spot under one of his eyes. Then, backing up, he stood in profile. “Not bad for forty-five,” he rationalized, lost in time. When his focus shifted and he could see the bed reflected behind him, the companion pillow peeking from under the sheet, he felt foolish, as if he’d been discovered in his vanity. “You idiot,” he said, leaning forward, almost touching his nose to the face looking back.
Shaking the keys as if they were dice, Davis stepped out the back door into a balmy morning. He had forgotten how mild the early spring days were in Tennessee. Nothing like Iowa, where no one dared put even a potted fern on the porch before mid-May, when the last freeze date was past.
Before starting the car, he picked up the paperback lying on the passenger seat and shook his head at the title: Rebellion of the Passionate Heart. “I guessed almost right,” he thought, flipping the pages until he came to a turned-down corner halfway through:
Tiffany had always been willful, even headstrong, and she was accustomed to having her own way. But there was something about Brock’s indifference that excited her, made her want to yield.
Davis closed the book and tossed it onto the backseat, laughing in short exhalations through his nose at the thought of his mother eagerly turning the pages to watch poor little Tiffany gradually brought under the control of dominating Brock.
His mother was anything but submissive, had been the dominant force in her own marriage, holding down a job and running the household. “I’ve got better things to do with my time than dust bric-a-brac,” she used to pronounce. And Davis remembered how unyielding she was in any argument.
The old car sputtered, so Davis let it idle for a minute; when he accelerated to pull out of the driveway, the noise evened into a full roar. “What a jalopy,” he thought, imagining all the neighbors peeking out their windows as he rumbled down the street.
It was nearly nine o’clock, and the breakfast rush was over at Red’s Bakery on Riverside Drive. Without checking his blood sugar, Davis ordered a cream horn and a glazed cinnamon bun. Better to err on the side of blood sugar highs today than to risk another insulin reaction. Anyhow, he had left his blood monitor and insulin in the car. Tucking his Medic Alert bracelet underneath his shirt cuff, he pretended to himself that he was normal and could eat whatever he wanted.
The morning paper was lying on a table in the corner, and as Davis flipped through it, sipping coffee, the obituaries caught his eye. In an inky box was a picture of his mother, one he hadn’t seen before, younger and prettier than Davis remembered. Beneath the photo were the standard details for the dead:
Mrs. Ellen Banks, 64, wife of Mr. Ralph Banks, deceased, died early Wednesday morning. She is survived by a son, Davis, presently of Des Moines. Services will be held at 2 P.M. Saturday, at Berkley’s Funeral Home.
The starkness of the black-and-white picture and the directness of the little blurb made Davis breathless, as if he’d been pushed from behind and was falling down a great chasm. Standing up abruptly, he tipped over his coffee. “Shit!” he muttered, oblivious to the other people in the room. “Goddamn it!”
A waitress rushed over with a damp towel and mopped at the spill. “Don’t worry, sugar, I’ll get you another cup,” she said, giving Davis a sidelong look as he stood motionless, arms drawn back, fingers spread as if disavowing responsibility.
When he saw that everyone was staring at him, he muttered “Sorry. Got the night-shift spasms” to no one in particular, then careened for the door, rubbing his eyes and faking a big yawn. When he got to the car, he realized he still had the newspaper. Folding the pages to his mother’s smiling face, he propped the paper on the steering wheel.
“Died early Wednesday. What the hell does that mean?” Of course The Clarksville Leaf Chronicle never provided the cause of anyone’s death, out of a longtime tradition of defe
rence to the families. Readers were left awash in speculation and rumors often much worse than the true story. Ellen Banks could have hanged herself with an extension cord, for all anyone knew. For all Davis knew.
*
When he arrived at Berkley’s Funeral Home, the door was locked, but someone heard him jiggling the handle and came at once.
“Sorry, forgot to open up at nine. I’ve been so busy since I got here early this morning that it just slipped my mind. I’m Mr. Berkley.”
Davis shook the extended hand, which held his a few seconds longer than he expected.
“And you are . . . ?” asked Mr. Berkley, his voice rising with the last word.
“Banks. Davis Banks.” He felt odd admitting his true identity so readily.
“Ah, yes, Mr. Banks. It’s your mother, isn’t it?” Mr. Berkley asked rhetorically, tipping his bald head down to look over the top of his glasses.
This was going to be worse than Davis had imagined. He had always hated funerals, and this unctuous little man seemed to guarantee that this one would be particularly loathsome.
“Well, please come to my office. Would you like some coffee?”
“No thanks,” Davis replied, fixing his gaze on the fleur-de-lis pattern in the carpet as he walked.
The office was upstairs, at the end of a labyrinth of hallways. Luther Berkley had taken over this rambling antebellum house twenty years ago and completely remodeled the inside to suit his death business, making the elegant mansion a perfect emblem of the New South. From the street, the brick facade and white columns evoked images of an earlier time; but inside, the place was a maze of gloomy rooms with sliding partitions and doors that folded back against the walls.
Settling into a leather swivel chair behind a large mahogany desk, Mr. Berkley said, “I’m so sorry about your mother.”
“Did you know her?”
“Well, yes, of course. We met eight years ago when your father died.”
“How did she end up here?”
“I don’t think you understand, Mr. Banks. Your mother made all the arrangements eight years ago—for her own burial. When she took care of your father’s affairs, she also made arrangements for herself.”
“What kind of ‘arrangements’?” Davis asked, sarcastically emphasizing Mr. Berkley’s vague word.
“Why, all of them, of course. Our pre-need plan takes care of everything—mortician fees, coffin, burial—everything.” As he said this, Mr. Berkley rolled closer to his desk and spread his hands across the blotter in a proprietary way.
“You mean my mother paid you in advance for her own funeral?” Davis sounded incredulous even to himself. He wondered where she got the money before realizing it had come from his father’s life insurance.
“That’s right. Eight years ago.”
“She never mentioned it to me.”
“That’s not so unusual. People don’t want to upset the family. You don’t have to do a thing, Mr. Banks. Not one little thing. As I said, our pre-need plan takes care of everything. It’s a pity we had to discontinue the program a few years ago. Costs, you know. But we’re standing behind all our earlier contracts, naturally. Would you care to view the body?”
There was a business-as-usual flatness to this invitation, but the words “view the body” startled Davis. He knew he wasn’t ready for that and flashed to the time he had last seen his mother. It was Christmas, when they had gotten on each other’s nerves.
“I don’t care what you do,” she had said, emphasizing the word “what” as if it were something unspeakable. “You’re hardly here long enough to call it a visit, anyway, so just go on back to Des Moines.”
As always, they patched it up and parted on decent terms; but his last memory of her was that evening when she tried to wheedle him into staying past the twenty-sixth. Her strategy in all arguments was to disguise her last offensive as total surrender, and Davis could still see her fanning out the newspaper to erect a partition between them, pretending to read but really waiting for him to acquiesce.
“You all right, Mr. Banks? Mr. Banks?”
“Yes . . . yes, I’m fine,” said Davis, half gone into the rest of his reverie—an unsettling vision of his mother laid out, somewhere in a dead-end corner of the maze. “Just fine.”
“Well . . . would you like to view the body?” offered Mr. Berkley a second time.
“Yes, I suppose.” His answer surprised him, because he definitely did not want to see his mother’s corpse. A sense of duty had overruled his fear, the way a parent takes a child by the hand and leads him into the antiseptic smell of the doctor’s examination room.
Mr. Berkley asked him to wait in the hallway while he went into the room—“to turn on the lights,” he said—but he was gone longer than the time it would take to flip a switch. When he finally returned, he said, “Now we can step in.”
The small room was filled with about forty folding chairs, set up to leave a broad aisle down the middle. Directly opposite the door, the coffin stood in front of a wall of burgundy curtains. The lid at one end was propped open, but from where he stood Davis couldn’t see anything; and as he shuffled forward, he kept his eyes on the curtains, letting his mother’s face come slowly into the periphery of vision.
She looked natural. It was a cliché, what everyone said at funerals, whether they meant it or not; but Ellen Banks looked natural. “Oh, Mama!” he said, just above a whisper. He had expected her to look waxen, artificial, like a bad replica of herself, so the shock of seeing his mother exactly as he remembered her sent a tremor through his legs. Backing up, eyes fixed on that familiar profile, he sat down on one of the folding chairs.
Finally, he had the fact of her death firsthand, not long-distance over the telephone or in an empty house his mother might reenter at any moment, but in the still, unmistakable form holding its breath before him. “Outside of time,” he thought, and then felt silly for the euphemism. “Dead,” he said aloud. “My mother is dead.” He turned to speak to Mr. Berkley, but discovered he had discreetly withdrawn.
Davis approached the coffin again, this time studying his mother’s dress—a blue one he didn’t remember—and the way her hands were folded so her wedding ring was visible. The coffin was stained a dark walnut, with brass handles and a white satin lining. Davis looked behind the heavy curtains, curious to know if they covered a window, but found only a wall.
Leaving the room quickly, he surprised Mr. Berkley loitering in the hallway, trying to conceal a cigarette.
“Filthy habit,” he said, extinguishing the coals on the sole of his shoe. “Ought to quit.”
“You’re sure you don’t need anything from me?” Davis asked. “I mean, don’t we need to schedule things?”
“All the details have been taken care of by your relatives, Mr. Banks. You just put your mind at ease.”
Outside, Davis paused on the steps and breathed deeply. Directly ahead at the end of the parking lot, two redbuds were in full color. “Spring,” he said to himself, sounding the word as if he had just uncovered a hoax. He pulled off his sweater and pitched it onto the backseat before getting into the car; when he had started the engine, he sat, thinking of nothing in particular, lost in the deep rumble of the exhaust.
Responding to several short taps on the window, he turned full into the simpering face of Mr. Berkley, whose cheek almost touched the glass.
“Glad I caught you,” he said, trying to make himself heard over the roar. Davis killed the engine and rolled the window down halfway. “There is something I need from you. We’ll have a limousine for the immediate family. You know, to follow right behind the hearse. But we can only handle six people. It’ll save a lot of confusion if you can pick the six before the ceremony. Nothing’s worse than having everybody wandering around the parking lot after the service while we try to get all the cars lined up for the procession.”
Saying nothing, Davis turned the key in the ignition and pressed hard on the gas. The engine started in a great, stamme
ring eruption, causing Mr. Berkley to jump back. As he pulled out of the lot, Davis glanced in the mirror to see him standing with his hands hanging loosely at his sides.
CHAPTER 4
__________
UNACCUSTOMED TO SUCH a lumbering car, Davis ran the rear wheels over the curb when he turned onto Madison Street and headed downtown. Deadtown. Not much reason to go there anymore, except to conduct business at the courthouse. Gone the days of parakeets at Woolworth’s, toys at the back of McClellan’s, the pricey dresses at Mademoiselle’s. One of the two old theaters had endured, the Roxy, used now for amateur productions of Bye Bye Birdie and Waiting for Godot.
As he turned onto Franklin Street, an oncoming car sounded its horn and the driver screamed something while pointing up at the one-way sign. Davis pounded the wheel and held his hands palm up, yelling, “I didn’t know they’d changed the goddamned street!” But the other driver didn’t hear, his face red, fist pressed into the steering wheel. As he squeezed by, he shook his head with contempt. Jittery and angry, Davis backed onto the intersecting street, where another horn warned him as he squealed away in the right direction. “Rednecks!” he shouted into the hot air inside the car.
The word surprised him, and he wondered for a moment if he had really said it. But there it was, the aftertaste still in his mouth. Like it or not, these were his people, and he had often defended their nobility whenever the stereotype ambled into conversation, that slack-jawed, barefooted caricature. Amazing how such biases hold on, even in the face of the so-called New South, with its skyscrapers and commerce. Rednecks marry their cousins and get dumber with each generation, devolving into something simian. Why, they’d just as soon shoot you as look at you, the Gomers and Goobers and Jethros and Davises. If you call someone in your home Uncle Daddy, you’re probably a redneck. Even Ben Blau would think twice before telling that joke. But then he was family. You can poke fun if you’re a blood member. His father had once laughed and said to him, “You’re one of society’s worst nightmares, a redneck with a Ph.D.”