by Joan Barfoot
Upstairs Sophie did, in fact, poke her head into Nora’s room, out of obedient habit plus a wish on this of all days to do whatever she had to do as well as she could. Max had helped; a thorough weep had as well. She found Beth lying across the bed staring up at the ceiling, hands crossed over her belly. Melodramatic as ever. Shockingly full of shit. Sophie’s resolve grew very weak very quickly. “Get up, Beth, this isn’t your room. And get a grip. Phil’s dead, for heaven’s sake, people have other things than you on their minds.”
Beth was off the bed and onto her feet in such a singular swift motion that Sophie stepped back. The look! And the voice. “You’re not my mother,” Beth warned in a low, hard, scary tone. “Don’t tell me what to do. Don’t ever do that.”
Whoa. As Phil would say. Sophie turned right around—let Nora deal with the drawn-draped battiness inside her bedroom.
Although Nora hasn’t dealt with it, and now here they all are in a long black car being driven to, of all astonishing, outrageous events, Philip’s funeral. Time in the past couple of days has become more and more tangled, stretching and spiralling, twisting with far greater complexity than the dailiness of regular life suggests could be possible. Also, it exists on a pinpoint: only now. Nora looks out at the tidy lawns and contained, thriving gardens and blank doorways floating by as if she has not seen any of this before and knows nothing about it; as if it holds promise, and she is young and does too. But it is this moment, not that one. The car turns into a wide driveway, then under a portico where a plump man in a dark suit is waiting to open her door. Nora wishes these were times when veils still shrouded faces. She would like, not to hide exactly, but to keep herself private. The man’s hand reaches for hers as he helps her from the car, bowing slightly. “How do you do. I’m Hendrik Anderson. I am very sorry for your loss.” His voice is lighter than his body. “If there are ways I can be of service …” and he lets the sentence trail away. His next word, in brighter tone, is “Sophie.”
Sophie is awkward gaining the pavement, having been sitting in the centre, and being not exactly petite. By the time she’s on her feet, Hendrik steadying her, she is flushed. “It’s good to see you again,” he tells her. “May I say, if you don’t mind, you look splendid.” So she does. The dramatic effect of black suit, black stockings, brilliant springy red hair suits her remarkably. The snug fit of the suit doesn’t hurt either. Getting ready, she considered her appearance a sort of last gift, both spartan and lavish, to Phil. There you go, then. You did more for me than you could have imagined, and now this is all I can do in return.
Something like that. Hendrik Anderson’s admiration is quite nice as well.
His guiding hand moves on to Beth, who emerges swaying and bending, graceful and hardy as a forsythia branch. No ungainly exit for her.
Whose eyes meet whose here? Not Nora’s and Beth’s; or Nora’s and Sophie’s either, Nora perhaps recognizing a posthumous, brilliantly red-haired, black-wrapped gift when she sees one. Beth’s and Sophie’s eyes do meet, in one brief hard look; Sophie’s and Hendrik’s in a warmer one that comes with an acknowledging nod. Max has made his own way from the car and takes Nora’s elbow. Hendrik fits himself between Sophie and Beth. In this formation they leave the side shelter and under bright hot August sunshine make their way around the corner of the funeral home towards its formal front entrance. One woman is red-haired, one is blonde, one is dark. None of them is very old, or very young. One has gratefully relaxed her fierce grip on virtue, one is becoming less beautiful, one is lost for visions but watchful. Hendrik, speaking up to include the full group, says, “There’s already quite a number of people here. I don’t know if any will want to speak—normally we would know details like that—but it should be a pleasant service.”
Pleasant service. Nora’s eyes narrow, but since she’s walking ahead with Max, Hendrik Anderson doesn’t see this. Sophie admires how he’s trying to keep people soothed and benign. It’s not his fault the arrangements are haphazard, or the people on edge. Mourners must generally be on edge, but this is different. The three of them are not exactly like members of a real family bringing to a loved one’s funeral their disparate but predictable modes and levels of grief, their varying interests and very long memories.
Beth isn’t listening. She is watching Nora and Max walking ahead. Her eyes are, specifically, on Nora’s straight, stubborn, unloving spine.
“I’ve brought some music,” Sophie tells Hendrik, passing him a CD from her purse. “I’ve marked the song we’d like played at the end of the service. Is that okay?”
“That’s just fine. Thank you.” He doesn’t even look to see what it is. How calm he is when so much is uncertain and, for all he knows, tasteless.
More uncertainty: on the front steps stand a couple of strangers, the woman smoking, the man with his hands in the pockets of a dark suit. He is balding and blue-eyed and thin-lipped, and looks more irritable than mournful. She is wearing white sandals with bare legs and a pale blue cotton dress, belted with a narrow white leather strip that causes her hips to appear broader than they probably are. Her fingernails are painted bright red, with toenails to match. Her hair is chin-length and, yes, streaked honey-blonde. “Lynn,” says Nora too loudly, and holds Max’s arm harder.
Well, well.
Sophie looks curiously at this woman, this Lynn, as their small brigade moves up the walk, up the steps. Here is someone else Phil must have loved, however unsatisfactorily. A man of wide and various tastes, it seems; many compartments, or several stages. She is struck, regarding their tableau, this visual evidence of Phil’s experience, by what a small space she herself could have occupied. She had four years in the household, a couple of months in his hands, no time at all in his bed. Whereas with this woman for a few years, and then with Nora for many more, he accumulated hundreds, thousands, millions of words, touches, views, moods, adventures, every variety of embrace they desired in any time and any place that they chose. With them he even had time and leisure for silence. Whatever he and Sophie knew of each other was comparatively an eyeblink. There are photographs tucked in envelopes in the sideboard back at the house of Phil as a ruddy, glinting kid with one cheerful parent or other; as a sullen, spotted adolescent standing off on his own, hands jammed in pockets; a few from those swift moments when a boy’s body shoots up, fills out, shoulders and features reshaping themselves into a different, grown creature, not finished, but with the mould clarified and beginning to set.
Soon after those photographs were taken, he would have met this smoking Lynn, and a few years after that, Nora.
The woman takes a deep drag and, after looking about briefly, tosses her cigarette into Hendrik’s shrubbery. “Lynn,” Nora says. “I didn’t know you smoked. You didn’t used to, did you?” A peculiar greeting to the woman whose husband she made off with nearly two decades ago, but Nora hasn’t thought of Lynn, that wounded bride, that righteous figure in their brief domestic melodrama, as someone with weaknesses. “Die bitch, die,” this woman screamed, not remotely weakly, from the street below Nora’s apartment.
“Nora,” Lynn says, not screaming now, nothing so hot, or even warm. She indicates the thin-lipped man. “This is my good second husband, Bill. Bill, this is, let’s see, my considerably less good first husband’s second wife.” He nods. No one shakes hands and, evidently a man of few words, or a grumpy one, or uncomfortable or timid, he doesn’t speak.
Lynn surely rehearsed that. Now it’s Nora’s more extemporaneous turn. “This is our friend Max, and this is Sophie, Philip’s and my assistant. And Beth, who has modelled for some of my work. Everyone,” and her voice also is level, but sharp, “this is Lynn, my good first husband’s first wife, and her second, no doubt also excellent, husband Bill.”
There is this to be said for so comedically brittle a scene: it’s a diversion. It exposes a whole welter of prickly emotions that are, even cumulatively, much smaller than grief. Some of the people who formed a mob at the gate wore buttons that read, “Wha
t would Jesus do?” which Nora thought, as a matter of fact, was a question they might well be asking themselves. At the moment she is wondering, What would Philip do?
Philip would throw a big arm around this Bill’s shoulders. He would say, “Come on, let’s get out of here, go get us a beer. Do you play pool? Are you interested in poker?” But Philip isn’t available to play merry host, he isn’t here to look from Nora to Lynn to Bill and remark, “I bet we have some things we could talk about, right?” and let loose one of his head-back belly-laughs. Nora says quietly, “Actually, it’s nice you’re here. Philip would have been pleased.”
“Do you think so? Would pleased be the word?”
“Maybe not. Maybe impressed, though. Or touched.”
“Or gratified.”
Okay. Nora turns abruptly to Max. “We may as well go in, shall we?” Philip, who never opposed non-lethal tensions as long as they entertained him, would be enjoying this. He might even, as Lynn suggests, be gratified, not only by all the attention but also its jittery qualities. That same jitteriness, however, does make it difficult to concentrate on happy moments with him, on characteristics and memories and pleasing pictures. He wouldn’t like that so much.
Sometimes he feels likeable, other times not. Sometimes his appealing qualities have their opposing aspects; which is ordinary enough, and rather like love, in that qualities which at some point attract may well come, down the road, to repel.
Hendrik Anderson was right, there’s a good turnout; a surprising number, really. There are Philip’s poker pals, some fellows he drank with, or fished with, and wives. Ted Marlowe, that’s nice, it’s probably not all that common for a doctor to attend the funeral of one of his patients. Dave Hamilton and Susannah, too, they must have juggled court schedules and appointments to be here. At a glance there’s no sign of Joy Geffen, who perhaps feels an offering of food was enough and the loss of an afternoon’s business too much. There are also familiar faces besides Lynn’s that don’t come from around here, but from other parts of his life: clients, suppliers, people like that, who turned into friends, and who could shift gears quickly enough, or were idle enough, to get here in time. It appears some people have ignored the no-flowers rule. There are several stiff, unappealing arrangements, the local florist rising ineptly but profitably to the occasion. Still, people have tried. In this town, never mind elsewhere, Philip had a life, lives, with little connection to the women now moving to the front row of seats: Nora first, followed by Sophie, then Beth. Somewhere behind them come Lynn and her Bill; but it is Max, Nora, Sophie and Beth who take the places for family, which is a stretch, all things considered.
Nora’s eyes are locked on the plain casket, a sight that nearly knocks her to the floor. Philip is inside, right there. This is real. This is so staggeringly real that she falls into her seat as if stabbed, every surface and organ in sharp, shooting pain. It all hurts, all over again. She can feel Max looking at her, alarmed. Did Philip feel pain anything like this, alone in the night?
Look at that box—has she made some bad, irreversible mistakes here? If he’d been in charge of arrangements, Philip would have paid better attention to shadings and grains in the wood, whatever it is, of the casket. It wouldn’t have looked so utilitarian in his hands, although he might have liked its simplicity. He used to say, “Too many people think style is decoration. I think it’s paring back until only what’s essential is left.” Gingerbread, curlicues, wooden or brass folderol made his lip curl. “Camouflage,” he called it. “And worse, cheap sentiment.” He told customers attempting rebellion, “You want to make a statement, not fiddle around with extra bits. Let a piece be honest and say what it needs to. Leave it alone.” This less-than-imposing box may fulfil his requirements for honesty. It definitely makes its own simple statement. But something much more complicated is inside, and should that not be reflected?
Something may be inside, but it is not Philip. Remember that. Hold in mind, along with much else, Philip the young, grinning, forthright, promising, naked man in a doorway.
This straightens her up, this makes her smile.
Sophie closes her eyes so that she can not only see Phil’s hands, but can feel one resting comfortingly on her shoulder, moving tenderly to her throat. In this way he is still taking care, being careful, which is good, and causes her lips to curve upwards.
It must say only good things about him that he leaves women smiling.
Except Beth. Beth, dressed in pale yellow, presenting herself calmly and firmly, feels quite vividly the quivers around her of unease and antipathy and, as she knew there would be, acquiescence, although she’s also perfectly aware of Nora making sure Sophie stays between them. She watched that tense, mean little scene out on the front steps with a mildly interested eye on Philip’s first wife, assessing his tastes, which must have been wide to include both that woman and Nora, never mind Sophie, who Beth believes must be included. Beth has walked past those people on the chairs back there as if she were strolling a runway, fully conscious of movement and beauty and an exaggerated, professional grace that once was water to her and air, and having done all that, heard all that, felt all that with the acuteness and inevitability of a dream, she now cannot take her eyes off the casket.
She has never seen one before; has never even been to a funeral home. How plain and sharp-cornered it is. Signifying plain, sharp-cornered death, not abstractly or remotely but raw and up close. If she stood and took just a couple of steps, she could touch death. Imagine! She has a great desire to do that very thing, but—impulse control! She trembles, her fingers tap on her knees, her toes and heels click up and down. Sophie, sitting quietly beside her, doesn’t like her, and Nora, two spaces down, is avoiding her. Who loves her? Who should love her?
Grief rattles right through her and into her bones.
She smells the perfume in the humidity of that last, long drive home. She can hear her mother’s hoarse voice speaking of Beth’s promise, her several glittering futures. Here’s the weariness of her complaint of a terrible headache. To cure and end all of which, Beth prepared tea. And the words: “I know it’s bitter. Best to just drink it right down.”
She did that. To her mother, yes, but her mother also existed apart, an unhappy, hopeful woman who had been beautiful, and who mourned lost opportunities; who sat for long hours on hard chairs and drove many miles in search of those lost opportunities; who was even a child herself at one time, with playmates and parents and adventures Beth has no way of knowing about. A woman who later had conversations, maybe even tender ones, with Beth’s father.
Who then writhed her way out of experience and a whole long known and unknown history, right out of life. At Beth’s hands. She looks at the plain wooden box, she looks at her hands. “Oh, Mum.” She hears that from inside her head. She didn’t truly know; now she nearly does. She never called her mother anything as cozy as Mum, but that’s the word, glass in her skin, that comes to her now.
How could this be?
A sharp elbow slams into her side, a sharp voice whispers, “Beth. What the hell’s the matter with you? Stop it. Sit still.”
Daddy, too, whom she hardly called Daddy.
There would have been a service for her mother, there would have been people attending who knew her mother in ways Beth has no notion of. Horror would have accompanied them to that funeral, along with their sorrow. Beth might even have been more on their minds than her mother. Her story, what she did, would have wrapped itself around both her parents, crushing the life out of them. She hears her father’s tragic voice asking why. She smells the blood and feathers of dead birds he brings home. She sees her mother’s wide brilliant mouth, hears that husky voice speaking of accomplishments, prospects. She hears “Kentucky Woman” and recalls white dresses and edged, drawling accents and the scents of mascara and powdery blushes. There are hotel rooms with landscapes over the beds and television sets hidden behind cabinet doors, bolted down. She sees miles and miles of fields and expressways, roads
ide lilies and daisies speeding by, city towers and lights appearing ahead, fading behind. She speaks about the importance to the world’s children of song. She takes a turn down a promenade. She finds that point on the kitchen ceiling, a circular flaw, a water stain maybe, to watch.
She has accomplishments, she has prospects. See her smile invitingly, innocently, madly at all the judges in the world. She wins some, loses some, is rescued and saved again and again, perhaps due to beauty, by lawyers and doctors and others, until she is finally free, and then she is rescued and saved one more time, by Nora, who no longer needs her. Who does not want her. How can someone who has touched, bent and shaped her, who knows every inch of her and has used every pore, not want her; not care? Beth’s mother touched, bent and shaped her. And used her. And cared.
What does Nora know? What does she see?
Beth’s mother said, “If you’re not feeling well, or you’re unhappy, or someone’s said or done something that’s mean or unfair, don’t let it show when you’re up there. Do your best. Always hold on to that smile. Don’t cry till you win.” All right, she can do that.
Now there are three women smiling.
A blond-bearded, wispy-haired fellow in clerical collar bends to introduce himself to Nora. “I’m very sorry for your loss. I’ll do my best to say what needs saying. I hope you won’t find the service impersonal. It’s more difficult, not having known him.”
Nora nods. “I’m sure you’ll do fine.” Although she realizes immediately that he was not seeking reassurance, simply speaking a fact.
He begins the service with the 23rd Psalm. Just about everyone knows it and can recite along. It has a calming effect. Good for him. There is something to be said for ceremony; although after all she was probably more right than wrong in her choices, and anyway it’s too late to change them.