A Marriage Made at Woodstock

by Cathie Pelletier

  He had intended to sit in his car and watch, maybe even listen to the sounds of gravel being flung onto the casket, but he found himself graveside. Not even he knew anymore what he might do. Life had become one big mystery. The workers didn’t hear him approaching, his footfalls lost upon the soft padding of graveyard grass.

  “I only paid eight hundred bucks for it,” one was saying, his words punctuated with a jab of the spade. “All it needs is a good tune-up.”

  “It’d look real good with chrome wheels,” the other said. Frederick stood behind them, peering into what was left of the hole. The mixed aroma of fresh gladioli, of fresh earth, of fresh summer air was almost invigorating to him. Only bits of the casket could still be seen, a gray wood peeping through the earth here and there. When they turned and saw him standing there, the shovelers stopped their work instantly. They leaned on their shovels, uneasy looks on their faces, men who expected to be caught for things they’d done years ago, jailed for childhood misdemeanors. Such is the terror of the underclass.

  “We was told to finish up here,” the one wearing a Red Sox cap said apologetically. Frederick wanted to put them at ease, to be friends with the men who had not only dug his mother’s grave, but were now filling it up. He looked from one to the other. What could he say to them? Come away, O human child? Or How about those Red Sox, huh? He needn’t tell these men that the world’s more full of weeping than governments can understand. He needn’t tell these men anything. He merely nodded. Then he reached a hand out, offering to shake, but the hatless man misread his intent. The hatless man, instead of shaking, passed Frederick his spade.

  “Are you sure, man?” he asked Frederick.

  For a second Frederick considered handing the spade back. But in his hands, it felt powerful. Just in gripping its handle, he felt he understood what his ancestors had probably learned about a hard day’s work. Sometimes, it was good for the soul. The mattock was a primary agricultural tool for Neolithic and ancient peoples around the world, Mr. Bator reminded him. It was used for the loosening of soil. Frederick nodded a thank-you to the hatless man. Men were meant to work with their hands, to use them in some kind of labor. Now he was no longer a bystander in his mother’s death. He was included. He would not need to sit in the Naugahyde front seat of his car, as though it were a smelly booth at the diner, and watch this turn of events. He would participate.

  He took off his suit jacket and tossed it onto the grass beside a flower arrangement. Dearest Friend, the banner read. It must have come from old Mrs. Cary. Frederick was glad that Mrs. Cary had grabbed up the silver tea service from the yard sale. What good was a silver tea service in the wash of a lifetime? He had read about Anglo-Saxon tribes who took all the belongings of a dead man, seized them from his widow, and piled them on the outskirts of town. Then the men mounted their horses and raced toward the booty, the winner taking all. That had been a kind of primitive yard sale, that dispersal of a man’s life. Frederick understood, now, his mother’s statement. “This is a life sale.” Sometimes the two were interchangeable.

  The hatless man sat back on the little hillside, wiped his brow, and then popped a cigarette out of its packet. He lit up. Smoke curled into the blue air, a sweet soft smell of tobacco, the way it must have smelled to those first settlers of Virginia when tobacco was still an agreeable thing. With each spadeful of earth that he lifted up, Frederick offered a silent mantra, a litany of good-byes to his mother. The man in the Red Sox cap went back to work, his spade biting the loose ground next to Frederick’s, the splat of his earth sounding in harmony behind Frederick’s own splat on the coffin’s lid. They labored side by side, two sweating men. Two men getting a job done. Frederick wished that he was bilingual enough to speak the Language of the Male. They could chat about chrome wheels, and tune-ups, and the Red Sox. Could the three of them sit together over Budweisers like men do in those beer commercials and toss back a cold one? Frederick could see himself peering into the black eye of the camera: You know what I like to do once I’ve buried my mother? he’d ask, and then the sound of a beer top popping, a slow fizzing noise. I like to sit back and enjoy a cold Bud with my fellow grave diggers.

  How could he know that this would be the place where it would occur? How could he ever guess that the bulwark of stored-up pain would crumble when it did, while he was hovering over his mother’s grave? But it did. They had finished the shoveling and had patted the ground into a solid mound. He had handed the spade back to the hatless man, and they had shook hands.

  “I sure am sorry, man,” the hatless one said. The other man tapped Frederick on the back, as though he were knocking at the door of some strange house.

  “Hang in there, buddy,” the Red Sox hat said. “I lost someone I loved, too. It ain’t easy, brother, but you gotta do it.” Frederick hated to see them go. In their words, in their quick touches, there had been the camaraderie of the sixties, that sense that he was part of the Family of Man. They had patted his back. They had shook his hand. They had called him brother.

  As the pickup disappeared from the cemetery in a spray of pebbles, Frederick dropped to his knees beside the grave. When he cried, he cried about loss, the loss of his mumblety-peg championship, the loss of Leslie Ann Doody, the loss of his family members, the loss of his wife, the loss of a childhood, because he had, very young, taken upon himself the burden of the adults in his life. He had set out to make his mother happy and his father less angry. It had been his job, his youthful calling, and he had failed miserably. He might have stayed there all afternoon except that a new batch of mourners was making its way into the graveyard. They were coming with their own grief, with their own freshly dead, and Frederick would leave them to it. He got to his feet, wiped his eyes, and straightened his tie. The sun had begun its descent into the west as Frederick put on his suit jacket and went home.

  • • •

  A pitcher of martinis before him, Frederick unfolded the Dear John letter from his soon-to-be former wife, Chandra Kimball-Stone. Marital Dissolution Papers, a little poem, really. In some ways, he was almost relieved that an answer to his estrangement problem had finally arrived. But in those other ways, those ways that speak of time spent, of books shared, of movies watched, of breakfasts eaten, of mornings awakened to, the news was devastating. For three days, ever since his mother’s funeral, he had eaten nothing. Food had lost its pleasure for him. He found himself thinking of fasting, of cleansing himself of all those old Stone impurities. He thought of Gandhi, using up all his fat reserves, growing lean yet moving closer to the day when he would be shot by a Hindu fanatic. Had Gandhi dreamed of sugarplums, juicy and sweet? Or did he dream of the gun, waiting up ahead with time, unintelligently, the bullet lingering in limbo?

  It was his brother, Herbert Stone, who broke the three-day fast in which Frederick found himself partaking.

  “Remember,” Herbert said, “that this, too, shall pass.” He had dropped by on his way to the clinic. He hadn’t phoned before stopping by, but niceties meant nothing to Frederick now. Herbert popped two slices of bread into the toaster. Then he pried a frozen can of orange juice from a mound of ice in the freezer. Frederick listened to the spoon clinking about in the glass pitcher as Herbert stirred. He wondered what it would have been like if his mother had done such a thing. But meals at the Stone residence had not been happy gatherings, the way one might imagine the Kennedys at dinner, world events being tossed about while one passed the peas. Dr. Stone had hired a housekeeper, who also cooked the family dinners. Sometimes they ate together. Mostly, they ate when they thought of it. Frederick’s most consistent memory of the dining room table was a picture of Dr. Stone sitting alone before his dinner plate and reading the evening paper.

  “If I have to start eating again,” said Frederick, “how about dinner tonight at the China Boat?”

  Herbert shook his head, a smile appearing on his face. “I got a hot date tonight,” he said.

  Fr
ederick wasn’t surprised. “Natalie, the temptress?” he asked. Herbert shook his head again, the smile growing. “Is she of legal age?”

  “She’s forty-four,” said Herbert. “She’s your age.”

  Frederick considered this, and then he knew. “You’re kidding,” he said.

  “Nope. It’s Maggie, my ex-wife,” said Herbert. “We’re going to dinner at the Kimberly Inn. They’ve got a great rotisserie duck basted in Chinese bead molasses, sherry, soy sauce, and garlic.”

  Frederick was delighted to hear this news. Not about the duck, about the date. They could begin the pinwheel again, slowly. Herbert and Maggie and Frederick were at least a start. Their mother had left them a kind of legacy after all. It was her funeral that had reunited them.

  “Good for you, Herb,” said Frederick. “I don’t know what you did wrong last time, I just know that it was you who did it. So don’t do it again, okay?”

  “I’ll try not to,” said Herbert.

  • • •

  In the attic a smell of heat and mold rose up together. Frederick poked about the boxes, lifting a top here and there, reading the scribbling Chandra had written on the sides that described the contents. When he found the box that held his medical books he sat on the attic floor next to it. His father had wanted him to be a doctor and for a time Frederick even believed that he wanted it, too. Mr. Bator had been such a wonderful teacher, such a great influence, that Frederick imagined for a time that his whole life could be spent in medicine. Biology, as Mr. Bator taught it, had been Frederick’s greatest subject all through high school. He could toss off medical definitions as easily as his peers could name popular rock songs. But, to Dr. Stone’s parental dismay, he hadn’t gone to medical school. It began with a squabble between father and son, just after his high school graduation, and ended with Frederick moving out of the family house. He had spent his first year out of high school at work in the roofing business, rather than at college. The problem had been Vietnam. Dr. Philip Stone, an army dentist, had always envisioned that his sons would go eagerly to war. “The army will be your greatest education,” the doctor had prophesied. “You’ll be ready for college after two years in the military.” This was 1966, before Vietnam had burst into a full bloodbath. At odds with his father, Frederick had been forced to put off his education, for he had no tuition money to pay for it. It was the year in roofing that enabled him to finally begin his studies, but by that time medical school had lost all its interest for him. He had already bought his first bell-bottoms and was wearing a headband decorated with peace symbols. He had taken that first historic toke from somebody’s glowing joint. He had let his hair grow to his shoulders. How could he tell some rock star punk today what long hair had meant in the sixties, how it had separated kids from their parents and grandparents. How it got them expelled from colleges and universities. How it assured that they would be glared at in restaurants, denied at banks, eyed suspiciously by the police and airport personnel. Dr. Philip Stone had told his son never to come home again until he looked respectable. “I’d rather you turned out a queer,” his father said of the flowing hair. “At least that’s something the neighbors can’t see.” Feeling like a perpetual orphan, Frederick had been welcomed in by the huge wide arms of the sixties, to a family that accepted him for who he was, that embraced his triumphs and rued his failures. He even lived for a time in a big rambling house where everybody touched everybody, a commune full of folks who needed families, who all sat around the table eating dinner, then singing songs by Dylan and Baez. The times they are a-changin’. They sure as hell were. They were changing a lot. More than a hundred and fifty American cities had caught on fire, literally, with the same bright orange flames that were turning up on television sets, in those film clips from Vietnam. And in those photographs in Life magazine, the billowing orange fire of bombs being dropped on peasants. The fire of war. In Detroit and Watts, the fire was the color of racism and poverty, a black and white fire, because only the rich had color television sets. And through it all, Lyndon Johnson was peering helplessly out of the windows of the White House, afraid to be the first American president to lose a war.

  To Frederick Stone, it had seemed as if the whole world was on fire. He and his father hadn’t spoken for an entire year. By 1967, when Frederick was accepted at Boston University, a half million American soldiers were entrenched in Vietnam. It was, for Frederick and his peers, the Summer of Love. Yet General Westmoreland would be crying out for a hundred thousand more young men, and Frederick didn’t want to be one of them. Herbert Stone, however, did. Always the son who wanted to please, Herbert had abandoned his studies at vet school and gone off to fight the undeclared war. Frederick had never doubted his brother’s motives. He had never once believed that the apolitical Herbert Stone had gone to the jungles of Southeast Asia to stop Communist aggression. Herbert was only interested in fulfilling his father’s notion of war, that of a young Rupert Brooke donning khaki and walking boldly away from the cricket field. As long as Herbert could come home alive, maybe he would then get some needed attention from Dr. Stone. Frederick, on the other hand, had chosen to protest that same war while working weekends to put new roofs on Portland houses. But he made enough money in roofing to pay for his college education. After his first year at Boston University, he spent his next three summers at Down East Roofers, Inc., in order to pay for the next year, and the next. And he had graduated with a degree in English literature all on his own. Dr. Philip Stone was unable to make it to the commencement services. Frederick could no longer remember the reason. But, unlike back in high school, he no longer cared that his father was not in the audience of happy faces on graduation night.

  Frederick put the lid back on the box of medical books and pushed it into a corner. He would give them to the local library, except that they were now outdated. A lot can happen in twenty-odd years in the medical world. He opened the next box, old photos of his early marriage. There was Chandra on the beach in her rose skirt. There was Frederick hovering over a cake for his twenty-fifth birthday. He stared at a photo of Chandra and him with the Fosters, all with their arms around one another. They were going to be friends forever, weren’t they? Then the Fosters moved to New Jersey and in a short time the two couples had lost touch. He looked at Karen Foster’s pretty, young face. Jim Foster’s thick mustache. They were the hippiest of all their friends, the Fosters were. Jim had a knack for fixing up old houses. He had done so for a half dozen friends and had never accepted a penny payment for any of it. Such was the atmosphere in which they all lived. Karen had a way of sowing cosmos and dill and lots of chrysanthemums in among the marijuana plants in her immense garden. Frederick wondered if they were still the free spirits they professed to be eternally. Somehow, he felt quite sure, Jim Foster was the owner of a renovating firm these days, and Karen was operating her own landscaping business. She would have cut her long flowing hair into the short style that was so popular among women of the nineties, Maggie’s new style. And Jim’s mustache would be considerably tamer, his own hair cropped to a business respectability. Lots of their other friends had gone on to teach school and become parents. Some had even disappeared like moles into banking and the law, which would have been the ultimate cop-out back when they were listening to Jefferson Airplane, Iron Butterfly, and the Grateful Dead. This was the opposite of what Timothy Leary had meant when he encouraged everyone, especially junior and senior executives, to turn on, tune in, and drop out. But now Timothy Leary was involved in something to do with space migration and had stated that drugs are stupid.

  There were photos of other faces, the old college crowd, even friends they’d made at Woodstock and then lost somewhere down the years. He looked at the youthful faces, one at a time. They were just kids, all of them. And yet he had experienced such a rush back then, a pure electrifying shot of life, the kind of adrenaline flood that never happened anymore. It was all ahead of him then, his future a fluttering butterfly, events
waiting to explode any which way he wanted them to. Because he didn’t know any better. And now that he did know better, all he had to look forward to was the end of it all. Come away, O human child, for the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. When had it happened that he had grown away from being that young man who captured Chandra Kimball’s heart at Woodstock? When had his youth receded, escaped into old memories and photographs? He still didn’t feel grown up. And he suspected that most of his generation were in the same halfway house, an emotional teetering between becoming their children and becoming their parents. But their playground had been the sixties! The worst of times, the best of times, the craziest of times. Frederick could remember college professors who were wearing crew cuts one day and talking about the Monroe Doctrine. The next day they’d be tripping about campus in bell-bottoms and headbands, saying things like “groovy.” You could be certain of nothing. And now, with this distance from his youth, the way historians distance themselves from wars, Frederick had come to the conclusion that baby boomers didn’t want to grow up. And, to make matters worse, they had raised up a new generation of brats. The fashion world, always the first to identify and exploit mental delusion, was catching on. Oscar de la Renta was now designing shorts that would resemble a baby’s diaper. People were beginning to wear pacifiers about their necks, symbols of a less complicated time: I suck, therefore I am. Yuppies—thanks to the sincere religion of Mutual Funds—were able to buy their pacifiers in sterling silver for a hundred and fifty bucks a shot. Infantilism, or so the pop sociologists were calling the trend. So what was a basically self-centered and egotistical guy like Frederick Stone to do, in the face of such debauchery? Such unabashed excess? Such extravagant self-indulgence? Even the Romans had had the common decency to regurgitate in private. But then, the Romans hadn’t had Geraldo. The Romans had been light-years away from television, that back-talking box that could convert light rays into electronic signals, that could bring the face of Rush Limbaugh, that roly-poly, pasty-faced Baby Huey of the airwaves, the undisputed King of Infantilism, spitting and gurgling forth, and all without a bib. Public tantrums. And then there was the other side of infantilism. Eleven- and twelve-year-old girls were staring out from the covers of magazines, their eyes heavily made up, their flat cleavages pushed up into a premature bloom. “Try me,” their eyes suggested to male buyers. “If my mommy scares you, I promise I won’t.”