Paul Is Dead

by C. C. Benison

  3

  To include her stepdaughter and step-granddaughter in the obituary or not?

  Lydia glances at the samples she culled from the Free Press’s online obits section. The funeral director offered to compose it but she turned him down, vaguely affronted. Of course, how could he know anything of her professional background? She’s worked in one editorial capacity or other, freelance or staffer, for several Bay Area publishers in thirty-five years and has been, for the last eleven, editor-in-chief of the esteemed independent (well, formerly independent) Berkeley-based publisher, Countervail Press.

  Writing the obituary for her mother gives Lydia a funny feeling, as if the very act were drawing her somehow closer to her own inevitable death. She shifts her attention to Helen audible in the hall on the telephone in yet another recitation. Quite suddenly, yes. A neighbour found her. Yes, a good age. Lydia drops her fingers to the keyboard:

  It is with great sadness we announce the passing of Marion Patricia Eadon (née Clifford) on July 4, 2008 at the age of 84. She will be remembered

  lovingly remembered by daughter Lydia

  Lydia pauses again. Should she incorporate Ray’s last name? Technically, she is Mrs. Ray Beddoes, which is how her mother addressed birthday cards to her, but she never really relinquished the surname she was born with, and Ray never insisted she did. She types in “Beddoes” anyway. She’s missing him terribly.

  She chews at the skin along her thumb and thinks again about whether to include Ray’s daughter, Erin, and his granddaughter, Misaki.

  Marion met Erin—what? twice?—in San Francisco. When Ray moved with Lydia into the house on Lincoln Way, Erin was a spikey, peevish teenager living with her mother in San Mateo and visiting her father once in a blue moon. Erin removed herself to Japan in her twenties to teach English, wedded a Japanese boy, and softened in the wake of motherhood. There have been trans-Pacific visits. There is Skype. Lydia is in love with Misaki, eight years old and cute as pie, grateful in a way she can’t bear to acknowledge to herself that Erin gave birth to a girl, not a boy. She’s eager for their patriation to the States, which is why Ray is in Japan. He’s helping Erin extricate herself from a failed marriage and fraught custody battle. It makes no sense for him to leave for Canada for a funeral, then circle back to Asia. They’re counting pennies these days.

  Lydia wonders how her mother handled the spectre of grandchildren, never able to match or trump her friends in a showdown of wallet photos. Marion couldn’t say that, yes, she had a grandchild, because that would lay bare the lie forty years ago that Lydia had decided to stay in San Francisco to finish her education. Marion had a grandson, born May 26, 1970, who disappeared into the arms of strangers hours after he was born. Name? As the child swelled in her womb, Lydia tried to resist this dreamy rumination, but couldn’t: Jennifer or Elizabeth or Michelle, if it was a girl; Andrew or Matthew or David, if it was a boy. Matthew it became. Lydia’s only glimpse of Matthew was a little shred of blue blanket visible over the nurse’s white shoulder as he vanished through the door, vanished from her life, vanished from conversation.

  Lydia handles grandmotherhood—as a number of her contemporaries have lately slid into the state—by doing what she did when her contemporaries became mothers—forcing herself to imagine all these little parcels of vanilla or chocolate flesh as kittens or puppies, something lovely she can coo over without feeling her heart shatter. For a long time, she couldn’t bear to have another child because she couldn’t bear to think about the stages she’s missed with her first—first words, first steps, first teeth, first day at school. And when she thought she could bear it, she remained childless. Secondary infertility, the doctor confided to her. Ray hid his disappointment. But he had one child at least. They had one. Erin. And a grandchild.

  Marion never ever alluded to her absent grandson. And never asked her why she never had another child. Emerging from childhood to view her parents in a colder light, Lydia came to see that her mother’s values lay in externals: in how she looked and how the house looked. Marion might have elected to remain childless herself if her times had permitted. She had the one, perhaps for presentation sake. Some children crave a sibling. Every baby boomer seemed to have one. Lydia didn’t. Dorian didn’t either. She recalls this now. Being only children was among the things that bound them at first, in grade four, though Dorian gained a half-sister, later, when he was too old for it to matter.

  She moves the cursor and reluctantly removes mention of Erin and Misaki from the screen. She imagines the funeral reception. There will be enough questions to answer.

  Lydia is sitting at the old Georgian bureau desk in her father’s den. Bibs disappeared here every day after work if he wasn’t working late. DO NOT DISTURB. Here he kept his own cache of liquor. Here Marion placed a bowl of fresh ice daily. Here he reclined on a red leather sofa and listened to jazz on his own Webcor phonograph. An hour later he would emerge in a fug of cigarette smoke and smoky rye. (The daddy smell. It lingers still in this office.) He took his place at the head of the table and withheld his thoughts from his wife and daughter.

  Bibs’s den is the only room in the house—other than her childhood bedroom—untouched by her mother’s decorating cravings, and it’s remarkable, given that Bibs died ten years ago, that Marion with her mania for renovation didn’t sweep in and turn it into a guest room or a little conservatory. When Lydia arrived yesterday, it looked as if the room hadn’t been swept at all, or dusted, in some time, as if the cleaning lady—the faithful Mrs. C.—were barred from entering. Lydia twists her head and looks around at the couch, its leather worn in predictable places, at the wooden filing cabinets, the ’70s-vintage record player that replaced the Webcor, and the shelves of dull-covered medical texts and Louis L’Amour novels—all of which she, helpless to stop herself, dusted and wiped, even though she knew most of it would be carted away. Did her mother grow fond of Bibs’s old things in his absence? She’s not sure. The room felt sealed off when she arrived. Entombed.

  The word “entombed” sends a chill down her spine. She twists her head back to the task at hand and finds instant comfort in the pleasing Georgian symmetry of small drawers and aligned slots in the desk interior. It was here she found a copy of her mother’s will, folded now next to her elbow.

  There were no nasty surprises, thank god. Her mother named Lydia executor and, but for some small bequests, the sole beneficiary. But how much money is there? Bibs left his widow sufficiently provided for in his will, but he left a sizable sum to the Society for Manitobans with Disabilities that surprised Marion and Lydia by its munificence, though not by its inclusion.

  Bibs had a brother younger by fourteen months. They were “Irish twins.” They do look like brothers, at a glance. Lydia can see this in the picture of the two, aged twelve and almost-eleven, that sits with a few other others on the desk: A snap of Marion and Bibs, confetti-covered, on their wedding day, a formal sepia portrait of Bibs’s mother and her sister, Nell and May, in their best little-girl dresses, haunting uncertainty in their round little faces, and a formal black-and-white high school portrait of herself, her expression as stiff as the mortar board on her head, but it’s the one of her father and uncle she lifts for closer examination. She knows it best. A copy sat on the old sideboard at Eadon Lodge. Bibs and Lits. Malcolm and Wallace. Wallace is “Lits”—little. Malcolm is “Bibs”—big. It’s a studio portrait, black and white. Lits’s face appears vaguely apprehensive. Bibs is holding his hand. In childhood this troubled Lydia. Boys don’t hold hands! Why are you holding Uncle Lits’s hand, Daddy? Bibs was a man of few words. These few weren’t illuminating: Because he was my brother.

  The gesture, the hand drawn to the other, is protective. Lydia sees that now. Protective against what or whom? And there’s a wariness behind Bibs’s squint. Yes, there is. Wary of what? Who wielded the camera?

  She studies the boys’ features, the narrow, high bridge of the nose, whi
ch she shares, the large eyes, the generous forehead. But Lits’s face is longer. His ears protrude. There’s no subtext in that squint. Lits has an intellectual disability.

  Lydia’s grandfather, Henry—made a widower by the birth of his second son—took his two boys overseas in the 1930s. Lydia has thought it remarkable of her grandfather, in those days when people with intellectual disabilities were hidden away, institutionalized, god help us, lobotomized, to take Lits on such a long journey—train, boat, train. And perhaps it wasn’t wise. Lits caught influenza and died at Narborough, in Norfolk, where the Eadons originated, from where Henry Eadon emigrated in 1903. Lits was buried there, in the churchyard.

  Lydia travelled to England once, in 1987, for the London Book Fair. On impulse, on a spare day, she took the train to King’s Lynn, then found a cab to take her to Narborough. She couldn’t find Lits’s stone in the graveyard at All Saints Church. There was a helpful directory to the burials pinned to a board inside the church, but though there were several Eadons, there was only one listing for a Wallace Eadon (1843–1899). The elderly sexton who happened to be trimming the churchyard grass had no recollection of another Wallace Eadon. She reported this absence to her father in a phone call after she returned to San Francisco. You had the wrong church then. She didn’t argue. Bibs was beginning his slide into dementia then. He was furious, as furious as he had been seventeen years earlier when she broke the key to Eadon Lodge sneaking in with her then boyfriend, Ross.

  Lydia looks up from the framed photograph as Helen pokes her head through the door, coffee in one hand, phone in the other.

  “How goes it?” Helen’s sympathetic, of course, but she’s enjoying this, the busy-ness. She’s almost done phoning various relatives.

  “Fine,” Lydia replies, glancing at what little she’s written. “Thanks for making the calls.”

  “Who are those two sweet boys?”

  Lydia is still holding the picture. “Bibs and Lits,” she answers, replacing the frame atop the desk.

  “Ah, yes, of course.” Helen knows the story. “Is there anything else I can do?” she adds, moving to the couch. Lydia nudges something behind her laptop, a gesture Helen notes from the corner of her eye as she turns to sit. The will, she guesses, and here’s Lydia being silly secretive about it—observing proprieties, Marion-like. And thinking of Marion, she hopes her cousin wasn’t a fool with the money. She knows about Lydia’s housing dilemma, though Lydia’s breezed over the details, affecting unconcern. She and Ray have rented the house on Lincoln for decades, in a sweet deal, from a couple who moved to Bolinas. But the couple’s children recently inherited the property and they share nothing of their parents’ hippie qualms about ownership. They want to sell it. Lydia has first refusal. House prices have collapsed in many cities, but not in San Francisco. The two little Gen-Xers want a hair under a million dollars for the 3-bed, 2-bath, 1,800 square-foot Outer Sunset house. Lydia and Ray are scrambling, Helen is certain. And there’s trouble brewing at Lydia’s workplace on top of it.

  Lydia doesn’t immediately respond to Helen’s offer of help. Her thoughts are snagged on Lits and where he might be interred.

  Thank god her mother changed her mind about burial. Bibs—before his mind turned to jelly—left instructions that he be cremated, with the proviso that his ashes not be interred like his father’s, that they be scattered at Eadon Lodge. But Lydia and Marion, each for her own reasons, decided to ignore his wishes. Together, they scattered Bibs’s ashes over Assiniboine Park, in the middle of bitter February, quickly, furtively, two black figures in a stark white landscape.

  Lydia can tolerate a religious service, but never graveside—the lowering of casket into cavity fills her with atavistic horror. Marion thought scattering Bibs’s ashes in a public park in the dead of winter undignified. She remained po-faced as confetti of her late husband caught the sun and glittered in the air before descent to the snow along the riverbank. What changed Marion’s mind about burial? She didn’t want to be alone through eternity. At least this is what Lydia presumes.

  “Lunch, perhaps?” Lydia at last responds to Helen’s solicitation.

  “How about pigs-in-blankets? You know, sausage rolls?”

  Lydia looks at Helen sharply.

  “I saw them in the freezer. Can’t think of the last time I ate one. But a bit greasy and heavy, I think, for … now.” Helen slows. She studies Lydia’s frown.

  The frown is staunching nausea. “Let’s go out somewhere,” Lydia says. “I shouldn’t be much longer with this.”

  Helen rises. “Then I’ll leave you to finish.”

  Halloween 1969: Lydia is at the kitchen island tonging sizzling pigs-in-blankets from the oven tray onto a platter and battling a sudden wave of queasiness, when she sees Dorian emerge from the darkness of the back stairwell. A whiff of the outdoors curls off him. So does a whiff of something sour. She didn’t hear the back door open, the clomp of shoes on the steps. Her ears were pitched to the rising decibels in the living room. She’s beginning to realize parsley-lined platters are a mistake.

  “I didn’t think you would come,” she says, striving for an even tone as her heart lurches. Two months have passed since she last saw him, at Eadon Lodge, and no day has gone by without images of the last twenty-four hours there ripping into her thoughts. Her eyes travel from the beige trench coat Dorian’s wearing—is that new?—to his face, cheeks pale as breath, summer tan vanished. New beard—blondish-red, straggly, Rasputin-y. Hair brushes shoulders now. He’s wearing a fedora, of all things. His eyes are bruised. The full impact of him fills her with dismay and breaks her heart at the same time.

  “Didn’t you want me here?” Dorian manoeuvres the linoleum and reaches for a sausage roll with a kind of studied nonchalance, but the pastry sears his fingers and he drops it with a quacking fuck. The smell of booze on his breath invades Lydia’s nostrils. There’s a rankness around him. Briony’s told her that he’s been cutting most classes; she says he passes the days in one of the off-campus bars, plastered, stoned, whatever.

  “Did you drive?” Lydia lets her eyes drop to the broken pastry roll, its flakes scattered over the counter.

  “Walked. I asked you, didn’t you want me to come?”

  “You’re shouting, Dorian. Look, I didn’t mail engraved invitations. I haven’t seen you since—”

  Lydia stops herself and scrapes violently at a sausage roll. Some of them have burned on the bottom. The greasy smell is turning her stomach. Her mornings lately have been punctuated with nausea. She flicks a glance at Dorian. What costume is this? What’s he supposed to be? The tie, the shirt collar, the coat, the hat, the beard, the hair. Jesus in business dress? She doesn’t want to look at his face, but she can feel his eyes boring into her.

  “Your parents closed up the cottage, yes?” Dorian’s speech is over articulated. He’s drunk trying to sound sober.

  “Yes. Of course they closed the cottage. Well, Bibs went up and closed it. Before Thanksgiving.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “No, he didn’t say anything. What’s there to say?”

  “I mean, did he notice anything?”

  “Like what, Dorian?”

  “Like … the signature on the wall.”

  “Paul’s signature? I washed it off.”

  “The missing blanket.”

  “My father doesn’t notice things like that.”

  “Your mother does.”

  “There are half a dozen old blankets in that cupboard. She doesn’t count them every time she goes up.”

  “But it was that Coronation blanket—”

  “Steed,” Lydia finds her nerve, reverts to a pet name. (He is Steed. She is Mrs. Peel. They loved The Avengers.) She lifts her eyes to meet his, which are bleary. “I’ve told you before—Marion only puts up with Eadon Lodge for my father’s sake. She hates the place and the stuff in it. She won�
��t notice. She won’t care. And if she does, I’ll make something up. It’s only a blanket. Please don’t worry.”

  “They’ll come looking for him, Lydia.”

  “We have our story, remember? Remember?” She lowers her voice to a crisp whisper. “You’ve got to stop this … this … look at you! Dorian, you look like hell.”

  “Maybe that’s because I feel like hell. I am in hell! Aren’t you in hell, Mrs. Peel?”

  The words feel like a slap in her face, and they sting. A sob clutches her throat. She battles it, thinks: if only she could slap his face, slap him hard, Dorian, the author of this misery, of her own misery, of her own double hell. Zen-slap them back to their former world of innocent obedience. She swallows hard, gestures with the spatula toward the door to the front rooms. Pastry flakes float to the floor. “You’re the one who wants to be an actor. So start acting. Get out there and act. Act normal.”

  “What the fuck do you think I’ve been doing all my life?”

  “And what is this costume?” Lydia redirects the spatula down toward Dorian’s calves. She’s noticed them bare and hairy below the hem of the trench coat and above the black socks and shoes. “What are you dressed as? What are you supposed to be?” But the truth swiftly dawns. Incredulous, she asks: “Did you learn that from Paul, too?”

  Too?

  “No, I did not learn this from Paul, too.”

  He fiddles the coat buttons with the speed of a sober man and flings open the flaps. She assumes he’ll be wearing short pants or, at least, underwear. He is not.

  The white dress shirt is tucked up around the pale abdomen. The necktie points to a pink snake in a garden of red-blond thatch. Lydia averts her eyes. Up they race, to Dorian’s face, wreathed in provocation and glee and triumph, and higher still, as if drawn by an irresistible force, to the ceiling lamp, a simple white ellipse—nothing like the electrolier suspended from Eadon Lodge’s high ceiling—its cool efficient glow nothing like the rich golden radiance that two months ago in the gloom of a damp August evening burnished that abdomen, those thighs, that thing, then rod not snake.