by Laura Argiri
“Oh, Simion, really,” Doriskos began. “That’s the sort of thing that I—”
“No, allow him,” said Karseth, who took it and gravely returned Simion twenty cents. “After all, as he pointed out several times, you didn’t do this to him, he did it to himself. If you ever should do something to him, you can pay the bill. And the price,” added Karseth in a low and blandly dangerous voice. “For now, you keep him lying on his back, well propped up, and watch him in case he should vomit again and choke. You probably won’t hear a peep out of him until tomorrow afternoon. Come and get me when he wakes up, or leave word with Helmut if I’m not in. And even after he’s mended from this, he’s not to drink a drop of alcohol or coffee, or to smoke cigarettes, by the way. I’ve seen him around campus smoking as if it were his profession—well, he’s not to. Who was it that died, by the way?”
Doriskos had hoped fervently that the coffin would remain in Caroline until the villagers decided to put it decently underground, but it didn’t. Instead it seemed that they had embalmed Lincoln and put him into their church crypt until several complicated exchanges of funds and permissions had been completed. Then, in early October, with all these arrangements finalized, the authorities of Caroline Village seized their opportunity to put Lincoln on the train to his long home. His boxed body arrived around midday on October 8. Doriskos, fresh from one of the interminable faculty meetings, was met by Kiril at the door, providentially barring his further progress until it was all explained.
“Dorias, I didn’t want you to stumble over this on your own—the corpse is here. In the front hall.”
“All the gods, that man died of consumption! Simion could catch it! D’you mean to tell me that you let someone bring that box in here, full of the animalcules of the tuberculosis—”
“It has a certificate saying it’s lined with lead and has a glass seal over it. Impervious, it’s supposed to be. Certified. Here’s the key to it.”
“That is certainly of enormous comfort to me to know that it’s certified,” said Doriskos. “Fuck all! What in Hell do I want the key for, Kiril?” Then, drawn by some queasy curiosity he didn’t understand, he took the key from Kiril’s hand and walked charily over to the long mahogany-and-steel-plate thing—it looked like a very large cuff-link case. He turned the key in the lock, lifted the lid, and looked through the glass shield. “Ugh…poor fellow. Looks like Madeline Usher. Don’t tell Simion I said that. Here.” He locked the box securely, then handed the key back to Kiril. “You take that key and throw it down someone’s privy, or something. For Simion’s purposes, this box arrived locked and sealed. I’m going to wash my hands now. You go call at the undertaker’s and make arrangements for them to come get that posthaste.”
With grim conscientiousness, Simion made the funeral arrangements that Lincoln wanted. In his will, Lincoln had specified and underlined, “As an unbeliever, I wish no Christian death-ceremonies.” Simion intended to abide by this wish and did so, though at a vast cost in aggravation. Actually, the undertaker did his best to spare his young client annoyance about the unconventional arrangements and kept them in strict confidence, but the stonemason who sold Simion the stone and engraved it according to his orders could not keep quiet. He was vexed not to be able to provide and charge for an elaborate cross, angel, or grouping of doves. Furthermore, he was shocked that Simion had chosen no Bible text, no flowery epitaph, but a fragment by the Alexandrian mathematician Claudius Ptolemy: “So no longer of earth am I, but touch divinity and partake of immortality.” The scandalized artisan’s whisperings eventually rose all the way to the ears of Noah Porter, the aged college president. Porter, who had already held his office when Lincoln was a youth and had felt warmly toward him, called Simion into his office to remonstrate with him and try to persuade him to permit the services to be read.
“It’s not a matter of what I permit,” Simion managed to say. “He left very strong, clear instructions for me to have it this way. I want to have it as he wanted it.”
“But surely he was erratic in his last days! Surely—”
“He wasn’t. I was with him two days before it happened, and he was sharp as a pack of tacks. His will was written and notarized last year, anyhow. Please, I think he died with a clearer head than most people have in perfect health, and I want to honor his desires. He said no Christian rites.”
“But you certainly aren’t implying that he was not a Christian?” asked Dr. Porter, wringing his hands.
“I didn’t bring the matter up, but yes, that’s true,” Simion said miserably.
“My dear young friend!” bristled Porter, who evidently had managed to get quite the wrong idea of Lincoln as an undergraduate. “He was a man of immaculate life, even as a youth. He—”
“I know he was a man of immaculate life, he was too sick to be anything else, but a Christian he wasn’t. It’s not right to be angry with me at a time like this for refusing to say that he was something he wasn’t, sir. I’m only saying what I know for a fact, not anything I made up to be malicious. Plus, he not only wasn’t one, he hated the whole business.” Why did Christians always act the way that they claimed the Jews did at Golgotha, given half a chance?
Porter turned ruddy with anger and glared at him. “Young man, that is an outrageous thing to say! And in such circumstances!”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Porter. I don’t mean to be rude. It’s only that I’m under a great deal of strain, and you’re placing me in an untenable position. I have to do what my friend wanted, or I’ll never forgive myself. If I give permission for what you want to do, I may be off the hook with you, but I won’t ever be off the hook with myself, and my conscience will stab me every time I think of this funeral until I’m old. You’re putting pressure on me to act with moral cowardice, which I don’t want to do. Please try to see it my way—it is my affair, after all.”
Porter stroked his chin and glared frigidly from his deep-set eyes. “But is it entirely your affair, young man?”
“Well, I mean to do what Mr. Lincoln wanted in the part of it that is my affair, and my province,” said Simion. “I think I had better go. May I go, sir? Good afternoon.” He felt dizzy by the time he’d gotten out of Porter’s darkish and stuffy office and into the open air and autumn sun; he wondered if politeness sometimes cost you something straight from the centers of your bones.
Still, even when the hole had been opened in the earth and the rough men hired to dig it began to lower the box down on ropes, Simion had his nerves in control. His own conscience felt fine about doing what Lincoln wanted. At the hothouse, he had selected for the grave an armload of lush flowers—white lilacs, white roses, white lilies, orchids barely lavender, and a pale mist of ferns. He chose white because of Lincoln’s love of snow and winter and allegiance to the gods of boreal cold despite the wear and tear they inflicted upon him, and because of the secrets he knew. “Virgin and martyr,” he’d thought. He’d spent unstintingly on these flowers. He held them lightly in his arms as the box was lowered into the hole; standing between Doriskos and Andrew, he displayed the composure that Lincoln would have wanted of him. “I’ll be fine,” he thought, “if no one insists on talking to me much, or making me say more than thank you.”
However, it would not be that easy. Apparently Dr. Porter did not regard the subject of Lincoln’s funeral arrangements as a closed one, for now he moved to Simion’s side and put his bony hand on his shoulder.
“My boy,” he said, with tears in his eyes, “will you not reconsider your earlier decision?”
“Please, not this again,” said Simion.
“Before it is too late,” Porter persevered.
“It was too late for him when he was seven years old and the tuberculosis bacillus made itself at home in his lungs. Too late is long past! If I were to let you change my plans, does it occur to you, I’d be doing it for you—who didn’t lead his life, or suffer what he suffered, or do what he did for me! And he faced what he had to face with a clear head, alone, with none o
f these religious…consolations!”
“That was his choice,” said Porter urgently, probably ready to postulate some pathological state of mind to invalidate that choice.
“Yes—exactly! That was his choice, and this is his choice!”
Doriskos did Simion the vast favor of interposing.
“Please, Dr. Porter,” said Doriskos, “we need to do it as we’ve got it planned out. The boy is very distressed and has been very unwell of late, and it’s best that he get home as soon as possible.”
Porter opened his helpless hands and backed off, but it was an ugly moment. If Moses Karseth had been there, he would have favored Doriskos with a blistering glare for treating Simion like his wife in public. The dignitaries who were there didn’t interpret that shielding gesture in its true context, but they knew it as something extraordinary, something alien. They disapproved of the gesture and at the same time responded to it; thus responding, they and Porter resigned their resistance.
So Lincoln had his way, and Simion the disapproval of the pious elderly men. He felt himself trembling as he watched the shovelfuls of damp earth fall. The gentlemen looked as grieved, he thought, as if they really did think that the rites at a funeral weeks after the death truly affected the ultimate destination of the honoree. As if they sincerely imagined that Lincoln, basking under the sweet sun of Elysian Fields, Afterworld, was going to be tapped on the shoulder and handed a ticket to North Styx because of words unsaid here in New Haven. Their attitude more than irked Simion, it offended him that the unadorned sorrow of the rite should be interrupted and that Lincoln’s burial should be sullied by this kind of fuss. One of the reasons that Simion had admired Lincoln so totally was that Lincoln had refused the fantasies with which most people warm and soothe themselves through life. No heaven with white carpets and angels playing Handel cushioned his long awareness of his mortality. A logician and a true critic of ideas, he had added items to his personal belief system only if he thought they were true, not because they were comforting. It was insulting for people to insist upon comforting themselves with such delusions for loneliness they hadn’t imagined, and pain of which they could not imagine the shadow—to demand a palliative for their little grief.
“I will, I will behave with dignity,” Simion thought. “He despised hysteria too.” Simion rebuked his own anger, held his composure. Then the gravediggers turned to go as soon as they had the hole filled, and the sloppy job they’d done brought Simion out of his glaze.
“What are you thinking of!” he cried, not hearing the strident anger of his tone. “Don’t you leave this place a mess! Tamp down those sods and don’t leave it with mud showing!” The laborers shrugged, then moved to obey; after all, this was being paid for. The rest watched the workers arrange the ground cover to Simion’s satisfaction. Then they watched the boy himself, as he whipped off his black gloves to fetch a double handful of fresh grass to cover a mud smear they’d left; he knelt and arranged the tufts of grass, then his armload of bridal-looking flowers. He found himself distressingly unable to arrange them right. He finicked with them, one way and then another; then he looked up at Doriskos and said in a small voice, “Help me, it looks awful!”
Doriskos crouched down and made a couple of deft changes, and Simion noted them and looked at him with silent and abject gratitude: That’s right. Thank you. Doriskos then got up and offered him his hands.
“Now I’m taking you home. You’re tired, and this is all you can do here.”
Simion let himself be pulled to his feet, in too much pain to perceive the unflattering stares aimed his way. He had the sudden urge to curse with every curse word in his vocabulary at everything and nothing, and once he was in the cold, satiny inside of the carriage with the door closed after him, that was what he intended to do.
He didn’t, though. Once he was inside, the urge passed as the urge to sneeze can pass. There was some terrible cold sensation in his head. His eyes felt frozen. He said nothing. His mind felt like a pond must feel when the air temperature drops forty degrees in a couple of hours.
In the next month, in fact, Simion managed a great show of outward agreeableness and equilibrium. He endured his birthday celebration when he became eighteen, which seemed perfectly inconsequential. Eventually, inevitably, the strain of all this came home.
On a sunny day in December, a breath of balm between one howling gale and the next, he and Andrew cut an afternoon class. They’d borrowed Gray Matter for a ride in the country through the season’s first snow, and Simion disgraced himself by sliding bonelessly off the horse in the sort of dead faint that is appropriate for the heroines of George Sand novels, but not for young men with serious stiff-upper-lip pretensions. And right in the middle of some inconsequential sentence, some unstrainful friend-chatter…
Andrew had to pull with all his strength on the reins to steer Gray away from the supine Simion; Gray in his skitty alarm nearly threw Andrew, and only with difficulty did he get him under control. Not trusting him to refrain from bolting, he rode him over to the nearest fence and tied him, then ran back to Simion.
When Simion came to, he found Andrew as near as he would ever see him to outright panic, for apparently it had been twenty minutes since he slid liquidly sidewise from his pretty new English saddle. They were quite alone in an old fallow field, the smoke of the nearest farmhouse barely visible in the elegiac false-spring light. He was unable to say any calming words to Andrew, as the next thing he did was to throw up his lunch and have several waves of wrenching dry heaves. The snow, full of the coming winter’s griping cold, sent a chill up through him, but he didn’t care. The mouthfuls of yellow bile and froth froze on it. “I can’t move,” he whispered, amazed at how true it was. The thought of Lincoln freezing solid under six feet of this turned around in his mind’s eye. He imagined a case of blue crystal, a sarcophagus of ice sinking through thick and silent blue waters.
Later he remembered some hard shift in his emotions, but he didn’t remember that he’d cried, or that his crying was to tears what a runaway pulmonary hemorrhage is to bleeding. He cried and raged and cursed John Ezra’s god in a transport of profanity, in terms that Andrew had never heard anyone use aloud. He seemed to hear nothing that Andrew said. Finally this tidal wave moved off and left him lying there on the snow, hiccupping, two fingers in his mouth. It was only as the sun began to lower and the cold began to come down in serious that he came back to himself somewhat.
“We have to go,” said Andrew. His stiffening fingers found the last clean bit of his handkerchief and wiped Simion’s eyes, then he put it to his nose as people do with little children. “Here, blow. And let’s see what we can do about getting home.”
“Can’t move,” said Simion, floating in that interior region of eternal cold.
“You have to. Night’s coming on, and we’ll freeze out here. I’m from New Orleans—I’m not made for this. Now try, do.”
Simion had trouble even standing; Andrew had him put his arms around his neck from behind, lifted him piggyback, and with great strain mounted the two of them onto Gray. Simion rode pillion this time, his arms around Andrew at the waist and head resting on his nape; he was half-asleep. Back at the house, he flung himself onto his bed in all his clothes and almost snarled as Andy began to yank his boots off his cold feet.
“Andy, you have to go,” he rasped through a throat already going sore. “Dori won’t like it. He’s skitty about people he doesn’t know being in the house.”
“He knows me perfectly well. I’m not going until Dori gets home. And I’m going to tell Dori what kind of shape you’re in, and that he ought to look after you better. You’re brooding on this death, and you need some goddamned distraction. Christ alive!” cried Andrew—“I’m missing my lesson. DeForest is apt to dismiss me outright. He has plenty to do other than cater to the vagaries of lazy young tenors, as he’s told me plenty of times.”
“Tell him you fainted. I did, I’m willing to share it with you.”
“You more than fainted…you…” Andy considered whether to tell him the rest; it was patent he didn’t remember it yet. “You have to get out of this state, or it could get dangerous. I’m worried about you! I never worry about people,” said Andrew, between vexation and dire concern. “What’s the matter here? He doesn’t seem to help you or make you happy, or understand how…” Imperiled you are, Andy had wanted to say.
“On the contrary, he’s very sweet to me. You saw how he took care of me at the burial. He managed to stop the discussion so we could go home. Can you imagine it—holding up a funeral to tell the responsible parties how to do it! They make me so mad I could just throw myself down on the ground and scream!”
You’ve just done the equivalent, and I don’t think you have the strength to do it again, and I know I don’t have the strength to watch it, thought Andy. Aloud he said, “Try not to dwell on them so much.”
“I’m not dwelling on them. I wish I could kick their nuts in, that’s all, assuming they’ve got any. Nothing I hate more than interfering Christians,” said Simion. He said it, too, with that edge of obsessive anger that Andrew found most daunting of all his tendencies and most inimical to a happy and well-conducted life. “Unless it’s just the general vileness of life.”
“Well, as well as the general vileness of life, there are also pretty hotels and pretty music and pretty horses. I think you need to be thinking about those things,” fumbled Andrew. He felt around for the right words to reignite hope, which was the thing he saw daunted and faltering here. “Look, darling! Someday you’re going to be a very wealthy man and realize all your friends’ hopes for you. I don’t know how it’ll happen, but I’m sure it’ll happen. You’re going to be able to buy all the nice clothes you want, and all the books, and you’re going to be very dearly loved because you’re unusual and not boring. You just have to get through this nasty patch here, and I think that’s best achieved by not brooding. Does he understand—about whatever godawful things happened to you up in the mountains before you came here, that you won’t tell me about but that I’m sure went on, just from the evidence of things like this?”