by Cowley, Joy
‘Listen to your mother,’ Dad used to say. ‘I never had a chance to learn music and look at me, missed out.’
No, Dad, I don’t think you did miss out. She worshipped music and we all envied her but you know, it is not possible to make a god of something without making a demon also.
I walk over the wet newspaper blown against the step and push open the glass doors, say, ‘Hi!’ to Rex the doorman who sits on the corner of his desk eating a hamburger. He oomphs at me, his mouth too full for conversation. What was the profound thought that I brought in out of the rain? Oh yes, gods and demons. You could say that was the problem with music, or poetry, or any of the arts. Once you opened the door to beauty you lived in a haunted house forever.
You, Dad, you worshipped her.
The elevator is an old and predictable friend that starts with as much effort as an invalid getting out of a chair. It shudders. Its cables creak. It whines and groans out the sad story of its day. Then it lurches to a stop on the fourth floor and trembles with the effort of opening its doors, reminding me once again of its martyred existence. In a corner of the elevator is a list of the signatures of attendants who have checked and serviced it. The last person signed, King Kong.
I turn the key in the lock which also creaks. Lal says the building went up circa 1930. Clever lady that Circa. Lived for centuries and created houses, poetry, music, always signing with the date. I told Lal that Circa’s equally famous twin brother designed political systems and never signed his name. But what made me think of that? Oh shoot, I’m tired.
Our apartment is in darkness, warm, scented with garlic and ginger and lemongrass, and I realise that Lal must have prepared supper before he went to Poughkeepsie this morning. I turn a light on. There’s the head of an aubergine in the sink and some scraping of carrot, a few dry husks of garlic, a pot of water on the stove for the rice. I take off my wet jacket, drop it on the floor and check the phone for voice mail. Yes, yes, from Lal, two messages.
‘Delia, sweetheart, there’s an aubergine curry in the fridge. If you want you can grill yourself some chicken as well. I’ll do the rice and breads when I get there. I expect to be in by nine.’
The second is in a different voice.
‘Delia, I have your news, sweetheart, and I am so very sorry. I’ll finish these specifications as soon as I can and try for an earlier train. I forgot to mention there’s some of your favourite dessert, mango kulfi, in the icebox.’
I erase the messages. Lal knows me. He doesn’t have to put on the mask of tragedy or placate me with sweetmeats. I go through the apartment switching on every light and put some Purcell loud on the CD player. Ta-rum, ta-rum. Ta-ra, ta-ra. Trumpets bounce spitballs off the ceiling and walls and the maidenhair fern shivers, ta-ra, ta-ra, as I throw a suitcase on the bed. Why am I doing this? It’s so pointless. There is still time to back out. Sorry, Bea, crisis at work, flights all booked, plane got hijacked. Sorry, Bea, but even the thought of going back to New Zealand bores me witless.
When Lal comes in he instantly reads my mood and gives me space. I wish he wouldn’t. But he’s right, of course. If he did try to console me I would push him away. Our conversation becomes a game of tennis between the kitchen and my bedroom.
I bat at him. ‘I’m afraid Sylvie’ll forget to phone Foss and Hillman on Friday morning. Then there’s the marble. They sent the wrong samples.’
‘Internet,’ he lobs back. ‘Or aren’t they on-line in New Zealand?’
‘Lal, remember that obsolete slogan – customer comes first? We let down one client and it’ll go around like a forest fire.’
‘Nothing’s going to happen,’ he says.
‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’ I bellow. ‘You’ll all sit on your hands, godammit, and there is so much on right now. The timing is disastrous.’
He comes to the door, holding a wet spoon. The smell of curry follows him like a bridal train. His eyes reflect volumes but all he says is, ‘You’re upset, sweetheart.’
Upset? Well, ha-tiddly-ha, what an erudite observation. Upset as in spilled? Tipped over on my ear? Carefully, I close and lock my suitcase. ‘Yes, I’m upset. I’m angry.’ I drag the suitcase down to the floor. ‘I don’t know why I’m going. There’s nothing I can do.’
‘Come and eat,’ Lal says.
‘I don’t want to eat.’
‘You will.’
I follow him to the kitchen. ‘There’s only Beatrice. She and I have always been chalk and cheese. We don’t even look alike.’
He nods over the table as he lights the candle. Oh-oh, candlelight. White damask cloth and napkins, silver servers. Bring out the handkerchiefs.
‘Delia’s last supper?’ I ask.
He smiles and cups his hand around the match to blow it out. Then he goes to the counter and puts on the oven gloves. ‘It’s not surprising you have little in common.’
I shake my head. ‘We’ve always been miles distant. She was this real whiny kid. She had dolls. I had my paints and pencils. She was fat. I was skinny. She was Dad’s girl. I spent more time with Mum. All her life Bea got exactly what she wanted, only when she got it she didn’t want it any more. She wanted what I had.’
He opens the oven. ‘She probably admired you.’
‘Lal, don’t do this.’
‘Some things are self-evident,’ he says into the oven.
‘You have never met Bea! You’re making these facile judgments because you can’t bear to be helpless when I have a problem. Actually you know zilch.’
‘I know you are Scorpio and she is Gemini. That’s a lot of energy to go wrong between you.’
‘Energy? Oh! Choice coming from an Aquarian!’ I stop, look again at the table and hit my head with my hands. ‘Lal! It’s your birthday!’
‘You’ve had other things to think of,’ he says.
‘I’m sorry, Lal. Mea culpa. I grovel. I didn’t even get you a present.’
He puts down a steaming dish of aubergines. ‘One birthday’s much like another, so long as there are plenty of them. Your father wouldn’t have wanted any more.’ He goes back for a bowl of dhal, another of yoghurt and a stack of naan breads.
‘It’s not Dad’s death that made me forget. I feel awful.’
He fills our glasses. ‘Good,’ he says, ‘go on feeling awful. You forgot last year too. But okay, sweetheart, I’ll survive.’
‘I’ll bring you a gift from New Zealand.’
He laughs. ‘A T-shirt with sheep.’
I love his laughter and the way it shapes his face. In our student days he looked too young to be handsome. His body had matured, leaving his face still in childhood, pink lips, rounded dimpled cheeks, huge eyes with lashes like spider’s legs, straight baby hair that flopped when he ran. Now most of the hair and the plumpness has gone and his skin sits fine and smooth on his skull. The dimples have been lost in the lines between his nose and mouth, and his eyes, still large, are nested in deep sockets of blue and purple shadow. When he was young, his face moved a lot, every emotion on stage. Now it is much more still, like an autumn landscape of hills and hollows. When I look at him in this candlelight, I feel the contours as sleek as carved wood under my hand.
‘So,’ he says, ‘you will have almost a week down there.’
‘What are you getting at?’
‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I was merely reflecting that other visits have been stopovers on the way to Sydney or Melbourne or Cape Town.’
‘Leave it, will you, Lal?’ I raise my glass. ‘Happy birthday.’
‘Thank you. You really don’t want to talk about it?’
‘No.’ I nod towards the CD player. ‘Let’s play something else. I’m sick of Purcell.’
Hours later, I am lying in bed, listening to distant sirens, when I begin to shake. It happens for no reason. The emptiness within me becomes charged with an electricity that sets my arms and legs going like the old elevator. I feel no grief, no loss and now, no anger, yet even my teeth are rattling like hailstones.
I get out of bed and go to Lal’s room.
‘Lal, are you awake?’
‘Yes?’
‘Can I sleep with you?’
He has already moved over and pulled back the covers. ‘You’re very cold,’ he says, putting his arms around me.
‘I know.’
‘You’re not getting sick, sweetheart?’
‘No.’ Already the warmth of him is easing through my nightshirt, my skin, the muscles in spasm. Something inside me that has been like a fist all day begins to relax and open.
He strokes my hair. ‘You are so unlike my mother.’
I smile that he should even compare us at this moment and rest my cheek against his shoulder. He never wears pyjamas. His skin is smooth and almost hairless and he smells of neroli oil.
‘You see how she wails and weeps gallons and then there’s an end of the matter, a true vata personality. You are such a pitta person, all that fire and you hold it in until it burns a hole in you.’ He laughs gently. ‘That is why you’re freezing. Do you want to stay here the night?’
‘Yes. May I?’
‘Of course.’ His hand still on my hair. ‘Do you want anything?’
I shake my head. ‘Just hold me Lal.’
‘Talk or sleep?’ he asks.
‘Sleep,’ I say and then I tell him how my office filled up with Dad.
2
Beatrice
I know I’m old when I want to call a priest, son. It’s Father O’Donnell’s curate Father Paul, such a lovely boy, with apple pink cheeks and a smile you could serve up for lunch. He brings me a cup of tea, half of it in the saucer, and offers me some bought biscuits in a tin. Gingernut and milk arrowroot. What a shame. Doesn’t anybody bake for them? I take one though, to keep the smile, and see his hands soft as bread dough, the fingers long, a perfect almond nail on each, white against the black trousers hanging low on his hips. He goes on smiling, smiling because he thinks I’m thinking bereavement and because they told him in the seminary that old women are safe. Don’t you believe it, son. Bless me Father, I have sinned. There was this joke, you know. Two men stand in the fires of hell and one is saying to the other, ‘Unfortunately, mine were all sins of omission.’ Move away, there’s a good lad. Never stand like that in front of a seated woman even if she’s as old as your grandmother, which she isn’t, and here he comes, Father Fion, as dry as an old crust, and that’s an end to it. The boy puts the lid on the biscuit tin and swings his lovely hips, innocent as milk-fed veal, out of the room, still smiling, bless his heart. We are back to funerals.
Father Fion O’Donnell is thin and stooped. The bones of his back show through his shirt, making a row of cotton reels and two budding wings. He walks with his elbows out wide and sharp. His glasses are always falling down his nose and he pokes them back up by the lenses which are permanently smeared with fingerprints. He folds himself into an armchair, looks at his notes, says, ‘Would Delia want to do a reading?’
‘I don’t think so. She’s not –’
‘What about you, Beatrice?’
I consider it. ‘No, Father, I don’t think I could.’
‘Tears are a gift,’ he says.
I shake my head. ‘Maybe Frank will. Francis. My son.’
‘I thought we might move away from a traditional reading and look at the first letter of St John, chapter 4. Some beautiful verses, there are, on love. As I’ve said so often, what really impressed me about your parents was the way they kept their love alive and romantic even in their older years. I would see them coming up the church steps on a Sunday morning, and it was something to behold, the way they looked out for each other. They’d be clasping hands and he would have his other hand under her elbow and their gaze would be connected with this wonderful light of pure love.’
I’m nodding, yes Father, but thinking they were just scared of falling down the steps. Mum had osteoporosis and Dad had broken an ankle when he was mowing the lawns that time. But yes, a reading on love would be appropriate.
‘I scarcely ever saw one on their own. Always a couple. They put me in mind of an old Sufi saying, God created man and woman from the one soul. That’s not Church teaching, mind you. It’s poetry. But I couldn’t help feeling that when your mother died sudden like that, your father’s soul was so entwined with hers that she took most of it with her. These last years have been a terrible trial for him. And for you, Beatrice, driving up from Wellington every weekend.’
‘Not every weekend, Father. Not quite.’
‘In the mystery of eternal life, I’m certain they’re together. You’d have to say that was God’s plan, wouldn’t you think? You know, sometimes you look at a man and you know his future’s in commerce or teaching or farming or maybe the church, but you don’t often think of a man having marriage as a true vocation.’
Why not, Father? Why the heck not? But I don’t say anything because he will laugh and flick the words away with his hand and tell me he’s too old for feminist politics. That’s the way it is. The tea in my saucer slops onto my skirt. ‘Yes, they were always lovers.’
‘I want to say something about that in my homily. Your parents shared something marvellous that restored people’s faith in marriage and in themselves. It meant a lot to me personally. Celibacy is a sacrifice. If marriage means nothing, you know, then the sacrifice is belittled.’
I am wondering how long it will take him to remember that I have had two marriages, three long-term de facto relationships and enough affairs to make the Guinness Book of Records. I put my cup and saucer down on the table. ‘I’ll leave it all to you, Father.’
‘And I thought I’d mention your mother’s last words to him. How he was working away in the shed and she just popped in to tell him she loved him on the way to get the mail and then her heart gave out down by the gate and she went to God just like that with the words of love still on her lips.’
Really! Was it like that? I don’t think so but I can’t take it away from him. I smile and nod.
‘You’re happy with the hymns?’ he asks.
‘Oh yes.’
‘We’ll have the piano music before the Mass. What a pity you don’t have her own tape but never mind, it’s the one she used to play for him, even if it’s another pianist. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Lovely thing. Never get tired of it. When is your sister arriving?’
But I can’t answer. Suddenly, I am full of tears.
A pregnant woman should not wear heels that high. And why is she in black? Frank too. Well, not quite. Dark navy, white shirt, tie in navy, white and red diagonal stripes and his father’s jaw, oh yes, Barry’s great nutcracker jawbone out there slaying the Philistines. Frank. Francis. He hasn’t got the same gift of the gab as his father, who could sell shit wrapped in cellophane, but the jaw is there. The mouth is neither Barry’s nor mine. It’s thin and wide, the same as Mum’s and Delia’s.
Spiky heels pick their way across the gravel and she says, ‘Did we make an appointment?’
‘You can visit any time,’ I tell her.
‘What Chloe means,’ says Francis, ‘is that they have a viewing room and they bring the – the departed out. You need to give them some warning.’
I know what Chloe means. ‘They’re expecting us,’ I say firmly. But it’s a lie, a lie, mud in your eye. We have to wait in a room of red carpet, blue satin chairs, masses of silk flowers, while they get him. Get him ready. There is music playing, something half sacred, half secular, tinkled out on a glockenspiel. Actually, I think it’s a dulcimer. The air is thick with the kind of perfume that gets sprayed out of cans.
‘It’s like waiting your turn in a brothel,’ I say.
Francis has some kind of muscular spasm and his face sets, but his wife doesn’t even flicker. She is very neat, nothing frayed or creased. Francis, too, for that matter. Always has been. Shoes shining, socks unwrinkled, laces done up just so. When he stayed on the farm he cried when he got sheep muck on his knees. He was eight years old, too. Where did he get that for heaven
’s sake?
Mr Bulson opens the door and invites us into the viewing room. He is not an undertaker but a funeral director and it’s not a coffin but a casket and my breath goes because he, because Dad. Lying there, so young. His skin is smooth, glossy with living colour. His lips are closed, almost smiling and his cheeks are full. The grey suit he hasn’t worn for years fits neatly at the shoulders. His knobbly hands are folded, thumbs interlocked, over the second button of the jacket. He looks so pleased, so real, so.
‘They must have found his teeth,’ I say to Frank.
‘Cosmetics,’ says Chloe.
‘Well now,’ says Frank. ‘Well, now, Grandpa.’ He puts his hands behind his back and rocks on his toes. ‘He’s just the way I remember him.’
‘They pad the cheeks,’ Chloe says.
Oh Dad! Tears are coming again. I lean over quickly and kiss him on the forehead. His skin is cold and not quite hard, like wax fruit. Oh Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad.
Frank takes my arm and draws me away. ‘Come on, Mother. Let’s go back to the motel.’
As I step back, Chloe moves up to the coffin and makes the sign of the cross with her thumb on his forehead. How can she do that? She never really knew him. Frank puts his arm around my shoulders and offers me his handkerchief. ‘You wouldn’t want him back,’ he says.