by Cowley, Joy
Francis says to his mother, ‘Are you wearing that?’
She glances down at her rust-coloured suit. ‘Yes. I thought.’
‘I’m wearing a beige dress,’ I announce.
Bea gives me a quick smile and I am surprised at how healthy she looks, although some of that colour might be make-up.
Chloe moves around the table, the pleats in her black dress parting over her pregnancy. ‘Funerals are much less formal these days,’ she says and I get the feeling that she is excusing an indiscretion on my part.
Bea says to me, ‘You’re still in your dressing gown.’
‘You were in the shower.’
‘Well, I’m out now.’ Then she looks at Francis. ‘We stayed up late last night.’
‘I know,’ he says. ‘I heard through the wall. That’s okay. We’ve checked out and put the luggage in the car.’
‘You’ve checked out?’ she says.
‘We might have to leave the wake early. The flight’s at six. But don’t worry. If it’s not convenient we’ll get a taxi.’
‘I’m taking you to the airport,’ she says. ‘I have to see you off. I told you not to check out of the motel, Frank. I said I was attending to that.’
Chloe says, ‘Francis and I thought we should pay our own expenses.’
‘It’s not what I arranged. It’ll be very confusing for the office, I’ll have to go and sort it out.’
‘No confusion,’ says Francis. ‘We just checked out and paid for our room.’
‘Have some breakfast,’ says Chloe.
‘I’ll be back in two ticks,’ Bea tells her.
I have showered, dressed, patched the remnants of my face, swallowed two soluble aspirin and Bea is still not back from the office. Neither Francis nor Chloe mention it and neither do I. We all know what Bea is like when she’s zeroing in on a target. Men are like food to her. She can’t help herself. A nibble here, a snack there, occasionally a three-course meal. I used to wonder how Francis coped with the continuous change of role models, although the years at a Marist boarding school would have given some stability. He’s a nice young man. I suspect that under the veneer of prim efficiency he is quite gentle. Chloe is more difficult to read. It’s important to her to be socially correct but beneath that there is a fire which may one day erupt and scorch a lot of people.
Francis says, ‘Mother tells me you went to New York in the early nineteen sixties.’
‘Mid-sixties. I had a scholarship. From Auckland I went to the Rhode Island School of Design and then to a job in New York. I decorated storefront windows. Not the biggies like Saks or Macys or Bloomingdales. Just a chain of little drug-stores. The pay was good, I was in a student apartment and I lived thirty-six hours a day.’ I laugh. The headache is receding and Chloe has made excellent coffee.
‘It must have been a very interesting era,’ says Francis. ‘Everyone talks about the sixties as a time of heightened social awareness. Mother says you marched in the Vietnam War demonstrations.’
I am surprised Bea knew that. Mum must have told her.
‘It was a time of rebellion, wasn’t it?’ says Chloe.
‘We rebelled against everything,’ I reply. ‘We even rebelled against rebellion. Lal, Charlie, me, we shaved our heads to see the musical Hair. Lal and Charlie had the words “bald is beautiful” painted on their scalps and I wore a wig of turquoise chicken feathers.’
Chloe’s smile gets small and Francis examines his red and navy striped tie for God knows what. I’ve lost them. Oh Lordy, how do you carry something funny and wonderful out of its time and place to plant it in alien soil? I seek safer ground and start talking about his childhood visit to Disneyland and how he loved the helium balloon I bought him.
While they are washing the breakfast dishes, I check my e-mail and find a message from Momo about a new job on the Lower East Side which I shall need to look at next week. That is all. I call the apartment and find that a company dinner is going on in my absence. Not Sylvie and Aaron. It’s Friday night. Antwan and his lady are there, Philippa and Regus, Mark. Mark? I feel a twinge of anxiety. Mark is so talented with the stuff of trees that he should be making violins or warm-bellied Spanish guitars. The veneer screen he did for the apartment on Washington Square is a museum piece. I do not want to lose him but his love for Lal has become so intense that anything could happen.
As always, Lal reads my silence.
‘Mother is here,’ he says in a tone that contains much more than three words.
I don’t need to thank him. That too is understood.
Then he asks me how I liked the video clip.
I laugh. ‘You and Aaron! I suppose now you’re turning my office into a refuge for the homeless.’
‘What a nice idea. So there is a philanthropic bone in your pecuniary body! We’ll have it all set up by the time you get back. How’s it going down there?’
‘In a few minutes we’re leaving for the church. It’s okay, Lal. Everything’s okay.’
‘You sound a little tired, sweetheart. Are you hung over?’
I laugh. ‘I’m seriously impressed by anyone who can mind-read long-distance.’
‘It’s not difficult,’ he says. ‘Too much wine and your voice is a dead petunia.’
‘I know. But that aside, there is no cause for complaint. Please give my love to everyone.’
‘Especially to my mother?’ he says.
‘Especially to your mother.’
We are all reasonably composed by the time we get to the church although Bea is glowing in a way that is far from funereal. When I try to skewer her gaze she turns her eyes away not from embarrassment but to protect herself and the secret of her little flirtation. She is as smug as the proverbial cat with canary fluff on its mouth.
Francis checks all the car doors to ensure that his luggage will not be stolen during the Mass, and we cross the road to the church. As we walk up the steps, a crowd of ghosts rush at us, all the stages of childhood, chattering and clattering at our heels, overtaking us and hushing at the holy water font. I hear the stern swish of the nuns who taught us, see Mum in her stiff skirts and jellybean hat, walking with a white-gloved hand tucked through Dad’s arm, and the other families, Daniel Levett with one leg shorter than the other, eyeglasses like the bottom of lemonade bottles, who could sing like all heaven, Marie-Louise the redhead who died of meningitis and my friend Bernadette who became a Mission sister and went to Peru. They are all here, with the suddenness of beggars, so demanding that for a moment I am lost in a crowd and I do not hear Father O’Donnell’s greeting. He shakes my hand and asks about my jet-lag. Then he says something about Dad. ‘It was a good death,’ he says. He has printed leaflets for us. In memory of Francis Joseph Munro, 1916–1998. I see that we are much too early. The church is empty except for the polished wood casket in front of the sanctuary.
Father O’Donnell steps back and looks deliberately at Bea, Francis and Chloe. ‘I’ll be available if there’s anyone wanting the sacrament of reconciliation,’ he says. The old fox. He didn’t come down in the last shower.
We walk down the aisle to a pew near the casket and Bea says, ‘What do you think of the sunflowers?’
The yellow flowers, arranged in the shape of a cross on the casket, have their own ghosts – standing at the kitchen window, on the north wall of the house, in a vase on the table, lying across the lettuce plants after a storm. The spectres gather in the dull space at the back of my eyes and remind me that my father is in the casket not six feet away from my elbow. ‘He loved sunflowers,’ I say to Bea.
Actually, it was Mum who loved sunflowers which, in retrospect, seems an odd choice for her, and he loved whatever she loved. He grew them for her. He surrounded her with sunflowers and any other kind of sunshine that might warm the cool dark corners of her life. He did not seek to understand her. He simply adored her.
Bea, Francis and Chloe are kneeling in prayer. I look around the interior of the church and am surprised that it has changed so little i
n fifty-odd years. I remember my First Communion here, Bea’s First Communion when she wriggled up onto the seat and asked me how Jesus got from her stomach into her heart. There, by the lectern, is the spot where Father Brennan collapsed and died on Good Friday, which everyone said was a particular sign of grace, although no doubt it was because the poor guy was horribly overworked and Lent was the last straw. The crucifix is the same, so are Mary and Joseph and the statue of the Sacred Heart. All that old kids’ stuff. I think it meant something once, although I am not sure what.
Lal and I have long discussions on the objective nature of reality, our ideas running like eager puppies through the underbrush of religions. We hunt down the common ground and play with it, tossing it back and forth, bouncing it against philosophic argument and quantum physics. Lal believes we exist simultaneously in two worlds, a spiritual dimension which is the true reality and this physical dimension which is but a small interlude. He doesn’t call it life. The other is life. This is maya, the Platonic shadowland, a small dream. He says that the question of evil and suffering in this existence becomes invalid when we see the space between birth and death as the blinking of an eye. That’s the gospel according to Lal.
The church is filling and there is a hum of voices behind us. Donna and Erueti Rawiri come down the aisle to say they are glad to see me. Matthew Sheehan, Aunty Em’s son, shakes my hand and tells me in almost the same sentence that he has got kidney stones and a new car. The funeral director, in a very British pin-striped suit with a carnation in the buttonhole, says a few words. No one offers condolences. Dad’s death brings a quiet relief.
What gets to me is the music. Bea told me it was to be played before the Mass and I thought, oh my God, not the ‘Moonlight’ again, but when I hear the notes falling, triplet drops into the hush of the church, a sense of loss fills me to become something sharply physical. I don’t cry these days. That’s part of the general dehydration that comes with hormone change. And I am far removed from the child who sought displacement hurt by digging her nails into her palms. I simply sit here absorbing the pain which becomes enormous, a crucifixion without resurrection, and I don’t know why I have it.
I grew to hate the ‘Moonlight Sonata’. He asked for it so often. He would sit on the couch near the piano, his tobacco packet on his knee, and he would roll the next day’s supply of cigarettes while she played. He had no aptitude for music. He didn’t know one composer from another. He would make comments like, ‘That high bit was nice,’ or, ‘You got through that quickly,’ and she would smile at him as though he had said something profound. When she got to Beethoven’s Moonlight, though, that was different. He would put the tobacco aside, rest his head on the back of the couch and close his eyes, and his face would get a look that could not be described except to say that his skin shone. It did. It shone as though there was a light behind it.
When I was fourteen I wanted to play it. She said it was too hard, so I taught myself, copying her expression and phrasing. My efforts must have sounded awful but no one said so. Even now my hands are full of it. I can feel the stretch of the octaves in the left, the rocking motion of the right. At the age of fourteen I made the amazing discovery that those fluttering notes were tethered to earth by G, a sonorous G grounding all that moonlight and preventing its escape into the night.
Bea puts her hand over mine. She is offering me a Kleenex. Well, yes, I am crying. So much for the oestrogen fall-off theory.
The church is more than half full, mostly parishioners, I think, and Father O’Donnell, whose prodigious memory has not been blunted by time, welcomes everyone by first name and begins in his dry old voice which still has a bit of an Irish lilt. How old is he? Must be older than Dad.
I am not comfortable here. The church has become suffocatingly small, as has the ritual. Small too, the child who used to kneel here, a matchstick of a girl who once dreamed of becoming a religious sister. I don’t know why I wanted that. Even then I could not have lived with a vow of obedience. I think it was the influence of the nuns who taught us. They laughed a lot, real laughter that glinted on glasses and shook veils and double chins. There wasn’t a lot of humour at home.
Francis walks solemnly to the lectern and reads from the first letter to St John. He says, ‘Dearly beloved, let us love one another.’ He looks across the congregation. ‘For all love comes from God.’
I am wondering about 51st Street at this moment where it is 10.15 pm. The others have probably left and Lal will be helping Manorama clean up the kitchen. She’ll be tying his striped apron over her white sari and showing her affection for him by telling him how lazy he is. She reminds me of the negative drawing exercises we had to do at art school where the composition lay in the space between the objects rather than the objects themselves. When she loves, she scolds and those utterances of endearment now come my way. Oh Delia, you are not eating well. Delia, you should not wear such dull colours. Delia, do something with your hair.
‘There is no fear in love but perfect love casts out all fear.’
Lal says that when they came to New York from Singapore, she was a Christian with high heels, western dresses with padded shoulders and shoulder-length hair in a page-boy fashion. Now she belongs to a Ramakrishna ashram in New Jersey and although she has never been to her parents’ India she covets all that is Indian with an exclusive zeal. She wears white saris, sandals, and her long grey hair, knotted at the back of her neck, is without adornment. Devotees of Ramakrishna do not proselytise, she keeps telling us, for they believe that all religions are equally valid. Still, she never stops trying to convert us and she has a few sharp things to say about the Harekrishnas down the road. Manorama may meditate each day and fast each week but she is, thank God, human.
‘The holy gospel according to St John.’ We all stand and Father O’Donnell grips each side of the lectern with knobbly hands. When I last saw Dad his hands looked like that, white with brown blotches and blue veins, knuckles large, nails ridged and irregular. I look at my own hands, spotted brown and have a sense of us all moving on the same escalator.
‘Love one another as I have loved you.’
I agree with Lal that a forgetting is necessary for this existence. If we remembered the reality of our being, we would all be like lemmings, jumping over a cliff to get back to it. But we do carry something from the other side, an awareness of beauty, for example. Where did that come from? It’s of little use to basic survival on this planet. We must have dragged it over from somewhere on an invisible umbilical cord.
Lal and I have dissected many a salad or muffin in discussions on the human experience of beauty and we have never come close to defining it. Thank God, there are still large areas of life that escape the tyranny of rational process.
In the 1970s, when it was clear that Lal and I had developed a solid friendship, Manorama’s eyes grew bright with the hope for grandchildren. Did she think that the young New Zealand artist had some alchemy that would remake her beloved boy? She did not speak it. We could not speak it. But we both read the brightness, the eagerness, and felt pain for her. She, with the same sensitivity she has passed on to her son, saw her error. The light went out but nonetheless she insisted on treating me like a daughter-in-law.
‘Praise be to you, Lord Jesus Christ.’
We sit and Father O’Donnell leans over the lectern, peering at us over the top of his glasses. ‘Near to six years ago most of us were at the funeral of Agnes Munro. Frank was sitting right there, as broken a man as you’d ever see. He never recovered from the loss. And I was thinking at the time, that Frank and Agnes Munro were like Siamese twins joined at the heart. Hardly ever did we see a time when they weren’t a couple, the two of them in town shopping, at the school, at the Mass, and not just in the same physical proximity, so to speak. They were truly one in spirit, one in love.’
I glance at Bea. She came back from the Rosary last night with eyes as fat as doughnuts but she is not crying now. She is staring past Father O’Donnell, her e
yes fixed on some thought between him and the back of the sanctuary.
He talks about the holy love between man and woman as being not only the true symbol of the love of Christ for his Church, the love of God for the human soul, but also a means to it. He quotes a seventeenth century rabbi who said that when a man could not pray he should seek God in the arms of his wife. Then he tells us at length how the love of a couple like Frank and Agnes Munro validates and enobles a vow of celibacy.
‘The writer of the St John letter whom we believe to be the beloved disciple himself, tells us that there is no fear in love but perfect love casts out all fear.’
Yes, but why do we hunger so much for the perfect, Father? Tell me where does that come from? Everything in nature is imperfect, in a state of coming or going, so what planted in us the knowledge of perfection and the desperate leaning towards it? Not the experience of the womb. That’s not nearly as comfortable as people used to think. Is it like a sense of beauty, another little remembering creeping through the forgetting? And I’ve got another addendum for your homily, Father. There is fear in love. The picture of Cupid comes framed in fear. The fear of being devoured by love. The fear that love itself will be lost or worse, not returned. It’s the fear of being a Mark living with a pain he did not choose but which he holds possessively because it’s better than emptiness. And Beatrice. What about Bea and her fear of loneliness, equating that with the need to fill a hole at each end of her body? And me? The jackpot question. I guess mine has always been the fear that I would lose myself in the same helpless, hopeless way that she did. My mother. Oh, they knew fear, Father, especially after that summer. It was a cancerous thing that did not stop with them but invaded the furniture, the walls, the children. I saw her fear at the piano playing Schumann’s Traumerei at three times its normal speed, all those dreamlike notes turned into a nightmare of clashing sound and breathless terror, and I watched him in his lonely place on the back porch, his eyes dark through the tobacco smoke.