Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  ‘I say.’

  All those years he had put up with her during her camel-blanket depressions, and stood up for her when Paul and Lily made snide digs, while pretending to be so decent and fair. All those years of her lovers, and himself as ‘lover boy’ when she was off men, and the last ghastly time when she had walked around the house in her underwear and then screamed about his filthy mind when he accused her of coming on to him. All those years, and then when things might have worked out, with the two of them at home and Terry getting some kind of dumb job when he graduated from high school, she went and married some guy he never even heard of. Drummond Blake, a tax accountant, a man with custody of a twelve-year-old daughter who looked like him, except she didn’t have a beard yet.

  Terry went to the wedding to be his usual sunny, devoted-son self. Afterwards, while he was staying with his North Shore grandparents, he sent his father a cartoon of Drummond Blake. Drum and Fife. He had him dressed as a revolutionary soldier, with a paunch and bandy legs and a gross head with legless things alive in the beard.

  His cartoons were getting more cruel and far-out. He didn’t do carefully drawn witty comic strips any more. He stabbed people on to the paper as grotesque caricatures. He had sent one of President Ford stumbling over a dead bag-lady to the Washington Post. He would make his fortune and give it all away to unworthy causes and live in embittered poverty.

  Brian called home. His promise to do that had been one of the conditions for letting them come on this hike, although they would have come anyway.

  ‘Your father called my folks,’ Brian said when he came back to the booth. ‘He wants you to call him.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘How should I know? Just call him, is all.’

  ‘All right, all right.’ If they were going to have a decent night’s sleep together in the back room of the railroad apartment, there was no sense in getting Brian mad. ‘Lend me a dime.’

  ‘Call him at your grandfather’s in Dedham, right?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because that’s where he is, dope.’

  Terry received the news from his father in silence. He did not believe it anyway. Gramma wasn’t that old. She was ironing tablecloths somewhere and spraying polish on the leaves of her houseplants.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ his father said. ‘I know how you must feel. I feel like hell, but your grandfather is amazing. The funeral is Wednesday. Eleven o’clock. Come to the house first and you can go with us to the funeral home.’

  ‘I can’t make it,’ Terry said.

  ‘What do you mean, you can’t make it?’ His father’s voice rose so high it broke. ‘Where are you, for God’s sake? Get a bus, hitch, rent a car. I’ll pay. Just be here.’

  ‘Sorry, Dad.’ Terry looked round at the two girls who were sitting near the pay phone, and looked away again, their smirking eyes on his back. ‘I can’t.’

  Barbara turned up at the funeral home, without her new husband, thank God, although Paul was curious to see what he looked like, after getting Terry’s caricature.

  ‘Did you talk to Terry?’ Paul asked her.

  ‘I can’t reach him.’

  ‘I did. He said he couldn’t be here.’

  ‘Oh – bad.’ Barbara curved up her mouth into her tight smile, with the lips sucked in. ‘Your wife is very lovely.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Paul said stiffly. ‘And thank you for coming.’

  ‘I never had anything against your mother.’

  Lily had no dark clothes on the Cape. She wore a grey dress with a lot of white on it. Barbara was in black, with the pearls her parents had given her when she married Paul. She looked very elegant. Her long manicured nails brought back to him the hysteria when one of them broke. Her hair was a lighter yellow, still short, but fluffier. It reminded Paul of how her usually sleek head had looked if she washed her hair at night and woke with it wild, and would not go down to bring up coffee for them, in case she saw the paper-boy.

  Muriel would have been amused that she came. ‘What in the world is she after?’ she would have wanted to know.

  Just before the service started, when everyone had been seated in the air-conditioned, flower-fragrant room where the casket was enthroned, Terry came in at the back.

  Lily saw him and nudged Paul. Terry’s brown curls were unwashed and uncut, and looked as if they might have bits of twig and leaves in them. Among the politely dressed mourners, he was insultingly ill-clad. But he was there, in hiking boots.

  Paul put a hand on his father’s arm.

  ‘Terry made it.’

  ‘Oh, good.’ Even Steven smiled in a perfectly comfortable and natural way. He sat peacefully, with his knuckly brown-spotted hands in his lap, waiting for the service to begin, and prepared to give it his courteous attention.

  The minister stepped up alongside the casket. He nodded to the Judge, and the Judge nodded back.

  A service amid the textured wallpaper and thick grey carpet of a funeral home bore even less relationship to its subject than a service in a church. At other funerals, Paul had never been able to think about the dead person dutifully for a whole half hour, and he did not suppose all these people could either.

  Some were known to him, some not. The Judge had greeted them all. Several colleagues were there, and people connected with the courts, including some defendants in whose favour he had found, after long hearings, and two of his greatest fans, a man and woman he had convicted two years ago, with an award of one of his humane Even Steven sentences.

  This large insulated room with blinds drawn against the sun must be full of wandering private thoughts, drifts of other people’s memories, a phrase of music, a commercial jingle, pictures behind the eyes, philosophies: We’ve all got to die, but not yet. One down means it’s not me.

  This time it’s part of me, though. It’s my childhood gone. Paul’s father was his adolescence and manhood. His mother had taken with her his childhood, in which to her he could eternally do no wrong. I am always a grown man now, Paul realized, while they were standing to sing a hymn. I never did enough for you, and the last thing I could have done, I didn’t do, because I drove away towards Route 128 and left you to die alone.

  Years ago, his mother had taught him that when you die, you go up to the gates and they let you in, whoever you are, whatever you’ve done – because it wouldn’t be worth dying if there were winners and losers up there, same as down here – and gave you a job to do, like making guests feel at home by letting them set the table. If that was what she believed, that was how it would be for her, if we create our own life after death, as before it. Except that by now she might have realized that no tables would need to be set with her briar-rose silver pattern, as she moved faster than light away from the contented personality and neat body she had discarded in favour of whatever came next.

  It was Lily’s first funeral since she came to the United States. She had no idea that she would see the body of her mother-in-law. When she went with Paul through the reception-room into the larger room, with the same reverent music coming out of the walls, she stopped and said, ‘The coffin’s open.’

  ‘It usually is, in a place like this. Dad wanted it, and so did she.’

  Muriel wore pale blue, the dress that was new this year and had been to two weddings and a few summer cocktail parties, and the dinner of the Norfolk County Bar Association.

  ‘Come, darling. Come up to her.’

  Lily had never seen anyone dead. After she made herself look at Muriel, she felt she still had not.

  The line of people filing soberly past held back. Paul took Lily’s hand, and she peered over the edge of the coffin, like looking into the frozen-meat compartment at the supermarket. They had set Muriel’s hair with tighter waves than she liked, and made up her face more elaborately than she had ever done. Her small domestic hands were crossed on her bosom, which they must have padded out, because didn’t people go flat when they stopped breathing?

  Did everyone who passed by to pa
y their respects have a look to see if the blue dress was moving, like the Sleeping Beauty at Madame Tussaud’s? Muriel’s eyes were closed, but she was wearing her glasses.

  Thank God she had left the girls with Nora and James.

  With Muriel exposed to view in this cheating fashion – was it fair to let people see you dead rather than just remember you alive? – it seemed rude to turn away. Lily went to Paul and his father and stood close to them. The Judge was very carefully dressed in his dark pin-stripe with a silver tie, every strand of grey hair in place, pinkly shaven, very gentlemanly. Paul’s mouth was set in the way that told Lily that he was not as relaxed as he looked, and he was worried about Terry, but he was talking to people and helping them to find seats, in charge of himself and the occasion. He was the kind of man who was reassuring to have around at weddings and funerals.

  After Lily sat down with him, she looked round her, because she could not sit up front there and stare at what was left of poor Muriel, and she saw Terry shuffle in like a small jeopardized alien, from another world.

  Because he slid into a metal folding-chair at the back, Terry did not see that Gramma’s casket was open until the service was over and his father beckoned him across the room to come up front.

  Like this? Terry gestured at his jeans and dirty T-shirt and shrunk denim vest. His father nodded.

  Terry put out his hand to his grandfather, who bent to kiss him. He kissed his father. They had always kissed each other, and it was easier to go on than to make a big thing about stopping.

  He never knew if he was supposed to kiss Lily or not, and she never knew what he wanted. She said, ‘I’m so sorry. I know you must feel very sad about your grandmother.’

  For some reason, Lily seemed to Terry like a kindred spirit in this unreal gathering. She looked like Cape Cod, brown from the sun, with the top of her hair lighter than the rest, fidgeting on her feet, as if she were ready to run out with him and go sailing, or roll in the dunes, or collapse into the surf. So when she leaned forward uncertainly, he kissed her on the golden fuzz at the bottom of her cheek.

  Then he saw his mother watching him. Not mad. Coolly, as if he were an amusing child.

  Then he saw his grandmother.

  To cover his shock, he scoffed to himself about how conventional all this was, and how typical. Didn’t his family have the guts not to let themselves be manipulated by a funeral parlour called Stanhope & Towle?

  Two women turned away from the casket, and murmured to the Judge, ‘She looks beautiful.’

  ‘She looks dead,’ Terry wanted to say. He edged closer, sideways, without it being obvious.

  After the first shock of seeing his grandmother there at her own funeral, she did actually look sort of beautiful. Her fond, active face was smoothed out. The skin looked good enough to touch, if you wanted to touch a dead body. A sudden attack, his father had said, and Terry had imagined terror and pain; but this was only peace, masking the horror of death. All of this nonsense: the service, the minister who told them things about Gramma they already knew, the formally dressed people, the piped music, the quilted satin inside the open casket, maybe there was some point to it, because it was all so calm and normal in the face of the enemy of howling blackness.

  ‘You okay?’ His father put an arm around his shoulders.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Come back to the house with Grandpa and me.’

  Terry looked at his mother.

  ‘Go ahead.’ She nodded. ‘Give me a call later, and I’ll come and collect you.’

  Brian had gone back up another mountain. They had arranged where to meet. Maybe. Maybe not.

  Inside his grandmother’s house, he knew that he missed her. It wasn’t comfortable here now, these three men of different ages sitting behind half-drawn blinds and sharing a bottle of wine and chicken-salad sandwiches with the chicken and celery cut too thick, so that they fell out of the bread.

  ‘Can’t we go sit outside?’ Terry whined.

  ‘It wouldn’t be appropriate,’ his grandfather answered.

  He and Terry’s father talked about who had been at the funeral service.

  ‘She would have been pleased. She would have liked that,’ the Judge comforted himself.

  They told Terry he could stay here for the night if he liked, but if he did, they might expect him to go with them tomorrow to the cremation, where they would pretend not to know that the incendiarists would switch Gramma to a cheap casket after she rolled through the swishing curtain, and re-sell the expensive one with the carved bronze handles.

  ‘Let’s talk about your future, then,’ the Judge said.

  ‘Not now, Grandpa, don’t you want to –’

  ‘There’s nothing I want to do.’ The old man looked pretty bleak. ‘You graduate next year. What are your plans?’

  Mumble, mumble. Surely the Judge knew as well as everyone else in the family that Terry had been determinedly fending off plans.

  ‘He’s still got a bit of time to apply for college,’ his father said, ‘if he wants to.’

  ‘Wants to? He’s got to,’ the Judge said with surprising energy for a man who had just said goodbye to his wife for ever. He talked about some universities he had in mind.

  ‘I don’t think –’ Terry began.

  ‘If you think you can’t get accepted, you could always go to business school, like your father.’

  ‘Might be a good idea?’ Paul said, as a question. He was always careful not to push Terry. Too careful. Sometimes Terry wanted him to say, ‘Okay, this is the way it is. This is what you do.’ But the poor guy still seemed to feel guilty about the divorce, and marrying again.

  ‘Do me a favour,’ Terry sometimes wanted to say. ‘I’m an independent being. What you do doesn’t affect my life.’

  ‘I thought, maybe, well, um – I might try art school.’

  ‘You might, that’s true, if you think you’re good enough to make a career at it.’ His father considered this seriously. ‘Magazines, design.’

  The Judge made a sort of ‘Pfuh’ noise, and went upstairs to his study with a bunch of letters.

  ‘An advertising agency,’ Paul said.

  Terry felt very depressed. ‘Or maybe I’ll kill myself.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd.’

  ‘No, honestly.’ If you really did plan to kill yourself, would no one take you seriously?

  ‘Are you on drugs?’

  ‘No, Dad,’ Terry said wearily. If I was, I wouldn’t tell you, and grass doesn’t count anyway. When they legalize it, everyone will get into something else, until they legalize that.

  ‘Do your readers realize,’ Terry had written to the Boston Globe, on his school’s notepaper, ‘that drugs could be legalized out of existence, if Washington was prepared to give up their share of the profits?’ The Globe had not printed his letter.

  ‘How about booze? I know that a lot of kids –’

  ‘Don’t, Dad.’

  Terry meant, ‘Don’t feel you have to go through the litany,’ but his father said, with more spirit, ‘Leave you alone, is that it? Sit back and watch you mess up, so you can say, “No one wanted to help me”.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Terry laughed. ‘That’s about it, I guess.’

  ‘I love you,’ his father said despondently.

  ‘I do too. I’m sorry. I mean, I’m sorry about Gramma. I mean, she was your mother, and all.’

  Terry thought about his own mother, tricked out in a fancy casket, in her pearl-cluster earrings. He had better give up the odd times when he wished her dead, in case she went and did it.

  He and his father sat and looked at each other, with Gramma’s café-au-lait lace cloth between them, like their loneliness.

  ‘Sure you don’t want to spend the night here, Terry?’

  ‘I guess not. I’d better call Mom.’

  He turned on the television while he waited for his mother to fetch him. This house was clean, very tidy, no cooking smells. His father and grandfather were going out to dinne
r, which his grandmother had never wanted anyone to do, because for those prices, they couldn’t get as good as she could serve them.

  His father went outside to water her plants that were in pots and tubs on the patio. Unfamiliar in his dark suit, he looked less unhappy out of doors, with the hose in his hands, something to do.

  When his mother’s car stopped at the end of the front path, Drummond was driving it. ‘Bye, Dad.’ Terry hurried out, not wanting his father to see Drum and Fife.

  ‘Where’s your car?’ he asked as he got in.

  ‘I like your mother’s better.’ Scrounger. ‘You okay, son?’

  Terry nodded. He looked out of the window at the familiar streets and houses through which he had travelled since he was very small, with Mom and Dad a unit existing solely for him. Then he took the plug out of his mind to let it empty itself to a comfortable void.

  Nora was very sweet with the children. She told them that their grandmother had gone to sleep and woken in a beautiful place where there was bright light and green grass and friendly people waiting on the other side of a sparkling stream to greet her.

  ‘When my grandmother died,’ Rose Mary said, ‘they put her in a hole in the ground.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ Nora said brightly, ‘but she has still gone to the beautiful place.’

  ‘She was in the hole to stay. I helped throw some dirt on top.’

  ‘Not dirt, dear, earth. Soil isn’t dirty.’

  ‘How come it’s called soil, then?’ Cathy looked up, strands of fine hair across her eyes.

  ‘Bright as a button.’ Nora hugged her.

  ‘I want Gramma.’

  Nora did not say, ‘You’ve got me.’ You could rely on her not even to think of things like that. She said, ‘She’ll always be near you to look after you. She loved you very, very much.’

  ‘When I bow off the stage,’ James said, ‘will you say kind pretty things about me, Nor?’

  ‘Oh, shut up, you.’ Nora sat outside the house on what passed for a lawn, making daisy chains with the children. ‘You always turn everything back to yourself.’