The Futilitarians

  No, not really, or rather she’d never thought of it that way. She told me she knew early on that’s what she wanted when she grew up.

  “When I was a young girl in the fifties, I went to a friend’s house on Father’s Day and on the table in their dining room was a cake shaped like a necktie. I thought it was extraordinary. That cake left a big impression on me. That people would do that. I knew I wanted that, wanted to find ways to commemorate, to celebrate.”

  “Celebrate what?”

  “Being alive.”

  One of the most formative revelations of her life involved a necktie cake? It wasn’t even a spiritual epiphany. It was silly and secular. I could feel my face scrunch in disbelief as I moved the grits around my plate. She must’ve noted my expression.

  “You know, growing up, our household was very staid, very… conservative.” She was choosing her words carefully, searching for both accuracy and an inoffensive way to describe the dead. “There was no real celebrating. Just that one gesture, the cake, seemed so remarkable to me.”

  Then, in 1964, having graduated from college and gotten engaged to Dad, she volunteered for nine months in Anadarko, Oklahoma, tutoring and teaching kids from several different tribes, many of whose ancestors had come west on the Trail of Tears. Living in a large apartment with a rooftop for gazing across the Plains and starry nighttime talks with her roommate about the future, she had her first taste of true independence; she wouldn’t have another until Dad died forty-eight years later. During this in-between time, of planning and the anticipation of married life, she found a book, The Year and Our Children, about various ways of celebrating the Catholic liturgical year and cultivating a “domestic spirituality.” She and Dad were committed to Catholicism and had already decided they wanted a big family (a dozen kids!), and she knew she wanted to create a family culture of celebration, of ritual, of codifying joy into the calendar. Over the years, she’d try out different suggestions from the book, a Saint Nicholas puppet play, making yearly Advent wreaths, Epiphany dinners. Though she instigated all these, she credited Dad with keeping them going, insistently, year after year. She thinks he clung to their traditions out of a fear of change and that persistent void. “Everything to excess” was his motto, as he aggressively celebrated the holidays, overfilling Easter baskets and buying the biggest turkeys, seemingly more concerned with secular spectacle than spiritual observance.

  Even if Catholicism didn’t stick with me, celebratory ritual evidently did. I wondered if that desire to cultivate a domestic spirituality somehow informed the ECRG. By November, the monthly ECRG meetings were already a part of our sons’ childhood household rhythm as well, though they experienced it on the periphery. When Mom started arranging cheese on a cutting board after work, the boys knew it was an ECRG night and got excited about raiding the table for Sara’s decadent sweets as the adults talked and flipped through papers and opened wine bottles. Like our parents, we were shaping our family’s experience through ritual and tradition. And as with that necktie cake, we could shape it into whatever we wanted.

  After breakfast, Mom and I drove to Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, where unfortunately, too often, there was something to commemorate. We were bringing flowers for Rebecca’s birthday. The twins were born on November 19 and 20, before and after midnight. They entered the world complicating things, already vying for their own space, with their two separate birth dates and celebrations. Mom said Rebecca was always envious that Rachel got her birthday breakfast in bed the day before she did. As much as they loved being twins, that tension to have your own separate life and identity persisted, with different schools and friends and haircuts and fashion sense. Though in the end, that twin connection won out over everything.

  The day before, on Rachel’s birthday, Otto had a doctor’s appointment near Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, so we dropped by to pay our respects and, since I knew I’d be coming with Mom the next day, tidy up the tomb. It would need to be cleared of any dead or dying plants left over from All Saints’ Day, observed a few weeks before. Formerly a citywide holiday to venerate the dead, it used to be a high social occasion, cemeteries crowded with vendors, the living leaving tributes of flowers and candles for their dead, and Masses said among the decorated and freshly whitewashed tombs. But in my lifetime that old Creole tradition has dissipated considerably, as many tombs have been abandoned for generations, the dead forgotten, the lineage of memory severed. All Saints’ Day has been whittled down to a few votive candles and de rigueur chrysanthemums or bouquets of plastic flowers here and there, brightening the aging marble façades with fresh attention, a Mass or two, and maybe a few preservationists with trowels and buckets, trying to revive an old wreck of a crypt. For All Saints’ Day, I’d taken Mom to a nursery to carefully select the chrysanthemum plants for our own dead—spiky purple blossoms for Rebecca, smaller but more prolific russet ones for Rachel, and for Dad, golden shaggy leonine flowers, exactly ten, one for each of us, Mom said.

  Weeks later, on Rachel’s birthday, the plants were spindly enough for Otto and me to toss into the dented metal garbage can over by the Prytania Street gate. While I brushed errant magnolia leaves from the tomb’s base, he ran among the narrow avenues and between the crypts and larger mausoleums, looking at the dates, the exotic places where some inhabitants had been born, and the archaic names chiseled into the marble tablets. On a tomb in an adjacent row, he saw his own name leap out from among the nineteenth-century names. He was thrilled to see it, and I suggested we get some paper and a pencil from the car and do a rubbing. After Rebecca and Rachel died, my mother and I had wandered the cemetery with pencils and tracing paper to make rubbings of ornamentation that she liked and might want to use for our tomb’s tablet whenever she finally got around to having the twins’ names engraved. A weeping willow, a wreath, a draped urn, a lamb. All these archaic symbols, all meaning more or less the same thing. As I held the paper over the cold, slightly gritty marble (it was starting to “sugar,” as old marble sometimes does), Otto gingerly rubbed the side of the pencil over it, and the heavy serifs and circles of his name materialized within the shadowy graphite cloud, his work a palimpsest of the engraver’s almost two hundred years before. I wondered what he was thinking. What was I imprinting on him? What was this place, this family, imprinting on him?

  For years, I’d referred to Rebecca and Rachel to our kids as “my sisters who died” or “your aunts who died,” burdening us all with dread, and also mystery, since I’d always curtly replied to their inquiries that they had been very sick, or sometimes that they’d died from sadness. Telling myself that I was waiting for them to be old enough to understand seemed like misdirection. I knew that as soon as I told them the truth, I’d risk seeming like a different mother to them, more vulnerable and wounded, our family like a different family. I didn’t want to introduce self-destruction into our shared history. A common fear among us surviving siblings was that some myth of the young, beautiful, gothically interred twins would be internalized by our own children, but not the realities of their lives, which were vibrant and loving and messy and so, so sad. But one day, in conversation with my boys, I happened to call the twins “my sisters you never met” and it felt like such a relief for us all. Just my referring to the twins differently freed us of the weight of focusing on their deaths, and spooled open their lived lives, the possibility that they could’ve been known. The twins will never be real to our children and they are becoming less real to us, but sometimes I’ll see a photograph of them that I haven’t seen in a while, some awkward, off-guard expression or gesture that captured the reality of their lives better than a camera-ready smile, and I’m jolted back into the fact of their existence. They were here. They were loved.

  For the twins’ birthdays, Mom had brought cut flowers for their personalized urns, positioned like sentries on either side of the tomb. As I distributed the lilies and alstroemeria between the two vases, Mom and I joked that they’d better be even. We took our usual graveside posture, h
eads bent, holding hands. Tears and deep sighs. Tried to block out the nearby presence of a shuffling tour group. We prayed the Our Father. Mom asked God for forgiveness for Rebecca and Rachel. Then she asked for forgiveness for all of us.

  Over the years, forgiveness had become a dominant, guiding impulse for Mom, especially more recently, since Dad’s death had raised so many questions for her, about their marriage, about what was kept from her and her own role in that. Once when I asked about his drinking, she said she never trusted herself to recognize the signs. She was so busy and focused on us kids and her teaching, she didn’t have time to notice or to reflect. Not even the gin under the sink behind the 409? No, she laughed. She was a terrible housekeeper and had someone come in to help out or delegated chores to us kids. Besides, there was no time for real communication between them. She was isolated at home and he worked so much, traveled, volunteered at homeless shelters, rode his bike on the levee sometimes forty miles a weekend. It was a pattern set in place when they were first married. Think about it, she said, he graduated from college, got married, started law school, taking classes at night while clerking during the day, had eight kids and never stopped working for the family. She admired it, appreciated it, and gave him the space to have his own life. Forty-odd years later, at his funeral, not one but two maître d’s from a restaurant she’d never been to showed up at his funeral to express how much he’d meant to them over the decades. How did he fill up the space she gave him? She’ll never really know.

  But her attachment to forgiveness crystallized for me when we drove up to Angola together to meet Ronald for the first time. Like me, Mom had been corresponding with him since his release from Death Row and into the general prison population. On the ride up, we talked a lot about Dad, about his attachment to Ronald, about how she worried that our children’s generation might not be able to appreciate the wondrous mystery of human life, the miracle of our existence on this planet, because they spent so much time on their little screens. After enduring the gauntlet of security measures and boarding the bus with the other family and friends of inmates, we arrived at the main visitors’ dining area. The place had a school-fair feel to it: handmade signs on poster board by different groups running the concessions, the Hispanic Club, the Literary Arts Club, the Asian Club, the Sober Club; wood and leather crafts, like chess sets and belts, for sale; a play area for kids; and a portrait-taking corner with a bucolic painted backdrop.

  It was peak visiting hour. As we waited for Ronald, a man deep into a well-thumbed Koran, who was selling quilts to raise money for the prison hospice, helped us procure a table, and told us the wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time story of how he’d ended up in Angola, how hard he worked while inside to better himself, and his plans for after he was released, namely getting the heck out of Louisiana and back to his home in Texas. Though all of the inmates were wearing variations of blue chambray shirts, Ronald was easy to spot when he finally made it in through the holding area. His was a classic stocky Cajun build, but with pale hair and eyes, and a ruddy face. His wire-rimmed glasses and tucked-in collarless shirt gave him a ministerial air. A little nervous and anxious, he explained that we were the only visitors he’d had since he’d been off Death Row and he’d never even been inside this building before. As he looked around, taking it all in, Mom and I assured him that lunch was our treat, and arranged the Xeroxed menus from the different clubs in front of him.

  Indecisive and reluctant to order, Ronald settled on one of the least expensive options, Convict Tacos from the Hispanic Club and a soft drink from the Literary Arts Club. But any self-consciousness as we tried to mesh our disparate worlds evaporated as Mom asked him about his studies at the seminary. From his correspondence, they seemed fairly rigorous, and he was eager to share. Mom had majored in Christian culture and before long they had somehow landed on the subject of Calvinism and predestination and whether or not God has a plan for us. Ronald thought yes, God does, a very specific plan for our individual persons and paths. Mom thought about it in more general terms, of God knowing humanity’s potential for good and evil. Eventually I excused myself to acquire the tacos, navigating an elaborate system for ordering food devised so the inmates never touched the cash, tickets in triplicate and trips back and forth across the hall between the concessions and cashier’s booth.

  Since Ronald was immersed in Bible study, he asked what our favorite books were. I didn’t have one but mentioned Ecclesiastes, and said that I’d read that there was some doubt about its provenance. Ronald paused thoughtfully and said the Bible was absolutely the true word of God passed down through the millennia. Another pause allowed us to accept his position. Unsurprisingly, his favorite was Job, and Mom said, “That was Dad’s, too!” All three of us shared a polite, knowing laugh. Job’s extravagant suffering—marauders killing his livestock and servants, all his children dying when a storm collapses the house where they’re dining, skin overtaken by sores, unsympathetic friends giving him bad advice—is all just part of a game between God and Satan to test the durability of man’s faith. There’s an absurdity to the tragedy and the searching for answers and the disconnect between all parties involved. In the end Job seems to accept that man cannot know God, man cannot even know himself.

  As we ate our Convict Tacos, Mom said that her favorite was Jonah, one of the shortest books in the Old Testament. God has tapped the good and pious Jonah to go tell the people of Nineveh that He is going to destroy them because of their sinful ways. Jonah tries to avoid God’s request by taking a boat to Tarshish instead. Mom said that what happens next is what everyone associates with Jonah. God sends a storm to torment the boat, and since Jonah has told the crew he is fleeing God, they throw him overboard to save themselves. But God has also sent a huge sea creature to swallow Jonah, and he ends up in the belly of the whale, in total darkness and lyrical, biblical despair. All thy billows and thy waves passed over me, compassed me about even to the soul, the depths closed me round, the weeds were wrapped about my head. Jonah famously emerges after three days, transformed and resolute, and goes forth to Nineveh, where the king actually takes heed of his warning. In a sort of Pascal’s Wager fashion, the king says God may or may not smite us, but we shouldn’t take chances, and commands everyone to don sackcloths, rub ashes all over themselves and even their beasts, and start fasting. Jonah then leaves the city walls to camp out in a hut to watch what God will do next. When he realizes that, after all of his effort, God has forgiven the sinful denizens of Nineveh, he becomes angry.

  This is the part Mom loves to retell, using her quietly excited teacher-voice and careful gestures. God sends down a gourd plant to grow over Jonah at night and give him comfort as he waits in the sun, for which Jonah is grateful. Then, the next night, God sends a tiny worm to destroy the plant, and Jonah gets angry all over again. The book ends with God telling Jonah, You’re upset about losing this little gourd plant that grew up overnight and yet you want me to wipe out a whole city of six score thousand repentant sinners? And their cattle?

  When I asked her if Jonah stopped being angry with God in the end and also forgave the people of Nineveh, she said that you never find out. The book just ends with God’s question about the cattle, leaving room for the reader to think about how he or she would respond. Ronald nodded in agreement, giving meticulous attention to his unruly taco. It was the smallness of God’s gesture that Mom loved, and the way the story showed God’s sense of humor, the gentleness with which He teaches Jonah about forgiveness, admonishing us to look beyond ourselves, our anger at the world, at our foiled missions, at the injustices, real and perceived, and to recognize that everyone is deserving of forgiveness and salvation. The lesson arrives through the tiny, the finite, the gourd plant, the worm.

  Mom has always exulted in the small. Over one spring breakfast soon after Dad died, she excitedly recounted the most fantastic thing that had happened over the past week. She was moving a chair on the front porch and felt something strange on the weave of its back. Inspect
ing, she found a chrysalis, which she knew housed a monarch because she used to grow them with students in her classroom. First thing every morning for a week, she’d check its progress on the back of the chair, feel it harden inside, and see the pupa’s colors darken to a milky black and orange. One morning, the chrysalis was split open and empty, drops of blood on the concrete porch below the chair. She was so joyful, explaining that the butterfly shoots blood into its wings as they form. She didn’t need to see the monarch, watch its tentative unfurling and first wobbly wing beats; it was enough to see the drops of blood. I realized that she truly lived in a poetic state of gratitude for the finite and awe of the infinite. It was the key to Mom’s balance and spiritual happiness. I’d always envied her faith, the capacity for universal forgiveness. My fear is that I’m more like Dad, angry in his hut, in a disgruntled vigil over the city, aggrieved that things didn’t turn out as he’d wanted them to. For Mom, though, we’re all citizens of Nineveh, worthy of forgiveness, trying out our sackcloths, rubbing our beasts with ash, hoping we’re right about God’s mercy.

  We finished up our Convict Tacos and Sprites, and I organized our Styrofoam containers to take over to the trash, by now overflowing with the remnants of hundreds of shared meals. All around us in the cafeteria, parents, children, siblings, friends, lovers, were winding down their visits in attitudes of almost unbearable intimacy, leaning across tables and holding hands, standing in prolonged hugs. We knew that many of these people were from New Orleans, as our city feeds much of the population of Angola. We knew that emanating from this place was another vast unknowable sphere of pain and loss that many of these men had caused or been victims of. Ronald wanted a picture of the three of us together, so we lined up with others in the waning minutes of visiting time to pose in front of the backdrop. It was a lovely painting, maybe eight feet by eight feet, a soft, nearly autumnal palette of bright green trees and warm gold grasses, a landscape in transition. Through the middle of it, a chalk-gray river faded into a haze of trees and winding banks. As we approached it together to pose and smile, I wondered if the painter, most likely an inmate, had done it from memory of a place he once knew, or if he’d created it entirely out of desire.