by Ann Beattie
Now the priest was standing next to Marshall, mentioning Evie by name: first name, middle name, maiden name, married name—all the endless, confusing identities of women born in Evie’s generation—and then, his words obscured by a howl of wind, clasping Marshall’s hand, the ceremony apparently finished, the Bible clasped in his gloved hand, the ungloved hand he had used to turn the pages extended to everyone who gathered around them. The priest offered further condolences as Marshall returned the priest’s handshake. He thought how different this funeral had been from his father’s, when he and Gordon had stood alone at the grave, listening to a soprano sing a song his father had loved, an a cappella version of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” His father’s lawyer had been the only other person present. The lawyer and the singer had come together, in a limousine. Where had the woman been found? She was short and not at all attractive—Gordon had joked that the lawyer had borrowed her from amateur night at some nightclub—wearing blue harlequin glasses and singing with a voice alternately glorious and shrill, her spike heels sinking in the grass during the laboriously prolonged song. It would have pleased Gordon, who loved ironies, to know that their father had mistaken a poem written to mock another poet for a deeply felt expression of conflict, but he hadn’t told Gordon that. It had seemed too disrespectful of his father, who had been moved by something he hadn’t known was ultimately a kind of joke. Evie would have been at the funeral except that she had the flu, and Sonja hadn’t come because she had had a miscarriage the night before. Gordon had said with great relief that his wife was also ill. Marshall doubted it, though no doubt Gordon had also thought he’d been lying when he said Sonja was sick. Why had he hesitated to tell his brother the truth about Sonja’s miscarriage?
A man and a woman about Sonja and Marshall’s age, who had come late, reminded Sonja that they had often visited Evie when they went to the rest home to see the woman’s mother. They were Catholics, Sonja had noticed during the funeral; they had genuflected, and now the woman greeted the priest by name as she reached out to clasp his hand.
Marshall excused himself and walked toward the old man, stopping to say hello and to hug Mrs. Azura, who had been Evie’s neighbor in the townhouse she’d lived in before her stroke. Mrs. Azura was a kind woman who had brought jars of homemade soup to the nursing home, who had always insisted to Evie that she would eventually make a full recovery and return to her home, where they would be neighbors again. Mrs. Azura had been so emphatic with Evie in saying they would be living side by side again that Sonja had never been sure, until Mrs. Azura’s house went on the market while she continued to speak to Evie as if her being away was only a temporary thing, that the woman knew better than what she was saying. Another woman from the townhouse complex was also at the funeral, but Sonja knew her hardly at all, and Mrs. Azura had to whisper her name to Sonja so she could greet her: Andrea FitzRoy, a divorced woman in her late fifties who had taught Evie how to do bargello. She had strawlike dyed hair and clown circles of rosy color on her cheeks. As she offered her sympathy to Sonja, clasping her hand to communicate her sincerity, Marshall reappeared and said that the old man’s attendant had explained that the old man had lost his voice to laryngitis. He had told Marshall that Evie had been a longtime friend he had known many years back, someplace in New England, the attendant thought. The old man’s name was Ethan George Bedell, and he had been a college friend of Marshall’s father. He had known Gordon and Marshall when they were little boys—too little to remember him, he was sure. Marshall did not remember, but he was surprised that Evie had kept contact with someone through the years who was such an old friend, but of whom she had never spoken. Mr. Bedell had asked the male nurse to bring several photographs to give to Marshall. He had brought them but left them in the glove compartment of the van, he’d told Marshall, not sure what would be the proper time to present them. As he delivered this information, he had obviously been torn between staying at the old man’s side and immediately going to get the photographs. Marshall had, of course, asked them to join the others at their house for coffee. He reported this information to Sonja in bits and pieces, interrupting himself to thank people for coming, to make sure they understood the directions to the house. Listening, Sonja remembered the day not long ago when she had sat beside Tony in his car, imagining a fantasy garden, while he had questioned her about directions to the new motel. “Just follow me,” the priest said to Mrs. Azura, who finally had to admit that she had no car, that she had taken a cab to get there. The priest insisted on giving her a ride, as Marshall gently scolded her for not calling them to arrange transportation to the funeral.
“He does not have good health,” the man wheeling Mr. Bedell past them said. “He thanks you, but he is unable to continue on to your house.” Standing behind the wheelchair, the man rolled his eyes upward. What was this? Dismay at not being able to stop for coffee, or a more general roll of the eyes about everything: old age, bad health, death?
“You and Evie were friends for many years,” Sonja said a little louder, crouching to look into the old man’s face. She nodded in agreement with herself, because the old man only stared. “I’m Marshall’s wife. Evie’s stepson’s wife,” Sonja said, gesturing toward Marshall.
“He does not hear well,” the man behind the wheelchair said loud enough to startle Sonja. “He told me when he still had his voice that he knew all about you,” the man said, in a more conversational tone of voice.
All about her. Wouldn’t that have been distressing. Yet of course he did not; he had probably only heard some innocuous story from Evie. “You know about me from talking to Evie,” Sonja said. It was half a statement of fact—of course that would be how he knew—and half an expression of her puzzlement: How was it she had never heard of Ethan Bedell? “You must have read about the funeral in the newspaper,” she said.
At this, the old man vigorously shook his head no.
“He was contacted at his friend’s request by a nurse at the rest home, I believe,” the man said. He turned to Marshall. “Your stepmother, sir, was quite a favorite of the nurses. She did have a lovely way, and I offer my heartfelt sympathy.”
Marshall nodded, only half following. He had begun speaking quietly to the priest, giving him detailed instructions about how to navigate a particular route. Then Mrs. FitzRoy spoke to the priest. She thanked him for his sensitivity and said she assumed he knew that the 121st Psalm was one of Evie’s favorites, that she recited it so beautifully her friends often asked to hear it during their own times of trouble. Would it be at all fitting to recite that psalm at Marshall and Sonja’s house, or was such a thing not done? The 121st Psalm came back to Marshall, fragmentized: mine eyes; my help; neither slumber nor sleep. He thought he knew the other words, the other verses, but at the moment it ran together as if it were something he had to race through to the end. Why had this suddenly set off such a strange reaction?
Because outside the hospital … when he went to see McCallum … Jesus Christ: How could he have forgotten? That night, just before the snowstorm hit with real force, it had begun to come back to him, the memory of being a child, seated near his mother on a dark night, his father outside, his mother speaking earnestly to him and to Gordon, who had taken a paperdoll away from him. At first he had been quite angry at Gordon, but then, small as he was, he had understood that Gordon had his best interests at heart as he tried to make him pay attention. Gordon was also trying to placate their mother, whose eyes had moved more than once to the box of spilled paperdolls Marshall stared at with such fascination … the paperdolls on the floor, flat on the floor, dead, his mother had said the word “dead,” she had spoken of herself as dead, as a paperdoll put in a box, they must not cry, they must listen … and outside had been the sound of his father crying, or perhaps talking; there had been that indistinguishable sound and also the cat scratch of branches scraping the windowpane. Like an actor rehearsing, she had walked back and forth in her white nightgown, reading, at once passionate and s
lightly perturbed, as if she could not quite get it right, starting over, trying for the right intonation, the only intonation acceptable to her ear, his mother telling them she was dying, reading the 121st Psalm. Yes … of course Evie would love the 121st Psalm, because what did she not love that his mother loved? Evie and his mother had often read the Bible to them at night—sometimes stories from the Bible in an illustrated children’s book, but in time directly from the Bible. That night his mother had read the 121st Psalm, and Evie had stood in the doorway, visibly upset, not going toward either Gordon or Marshall to comfort them as she usually did, because they were crying too—first Gordon, then Marshall, imitating him, frightened at the way their mother appeared, astonished that he had had his paperdoll snatched away. From that night on, it would be what seemed an eternity until Evie comforted them again, and their mother … surely she could not instantly have disappeared, yet he couldn’t remember what had come next, couldn’t remember further interactions with her, or even how or when he had been put to bed that night.
It was not considered proper that young children be at funerals, so they had not gone to their mother’s funeral. He could vaguely remember Evie crying when the day finally came, combing her hair and looking at herself in the tall hall mirror with the gilded putti trailing flowery sashes in each corner, crying as she yanked a comb through her hair, punishing her hair, it had seemed, Marshall’s father ignoring her, ignoring his sons, who were taken care of that day, Evie had told him years later, by a neighbor woman who had always frightened them because of her long black hair. Both boys had been convinced they’d been left in the care of a witch.
After two years—a decent interval of time—their father had married Evie, providing a known quantity as a mother for his sons, having with her a much different marriage than he had had with his first wife. Not a business arrangement, exactly, but two people who seemed never to speak harshly, though neither did they seem to laugh—generic grown-ups, if such creatures could be said to exist. He had always been sure that his father thought he was doing the right thing, the logical thing, in marrying Evie and in trying to attain again a sense of stability for his sons, and therefore for himself. If they hadn’t loved each other, though, that would have been a tragedy. If his mother, in her white nightgown, had become a ghost whose presence permeated the house.… Because it now seemed more than possible that this was the case, he tried to put such thoughts out of his mind. He could remember berry picking with his father and Evie the summer after his mother’s death; taking turns climbing the ladder to string lights on the Christmas tree; hiking to a waterfall, laughing … she had laughed then … or had that been his own laughter, his and Gordon’s, running ahead, Gordon sliding in the mud? Did he remember it, or had he only been told about it so many times it seemed real?
He was almost to the parking lot, lightly holding Sonja’s elbow, talking—how, when he had been so lost in thought?—to Mrs. Azura, when he realized that Mr. Bedell and the male nurse were not coming to his house, the man had said not, so that he should follow them to the van and get the photographs.
The van was equipped to carry the wheelchair in the front, locked into place in the space where a passenger’s seat would normally have been. He stood there as the man wheeled Mr. Bedell up the ramp, then rolled the chair into slats and locked the wheels. The man slid the door shut and came down the incline, turning to push a button at the side of the door to retract the ramp.
“He was too ill to come,” the man said. “Cancer of the esophagus. We call it laryngitis.”
“I’m so sorry,” Marshall said. “It was very kind to come out to give me pictures when it was such an obvious effort.”
“They’re nothing,” the man said quietly. “You hear about photographs being brought to a funeral, you assume it’s a Perry Mason mystery and something’s going to be cleared up. Mr. Bedell has me rerun those Perry Mason shows for him almost every night. Della Street always gets a smile from him, because he thinks she’s a smart girl even though her role is to be confused and to ask questions. She’s pretty, too. And the private investigator—did you know he was some famous gossip columnist’s son? Paul Drake. Handsome man. I’m afraid your two pictures aren’t much of anything, though: blurry pictures of a girl standing in a dress and sitting in a rocker. Don’t get your hopes up.”
“They’re pictures of Evie?” Marshall said.
The man nodded. “He has another picture of her, or he says it’s of her, that he didn’t want to part with. I guess you and I both can play Perry Mason well enough to assume Mr. Bedell loved your stepmother. The love of one person for another, I mean: that much I can sense as a student of the universe. Wait here and I’ll get them.”
He went around to the far side of the van. Marshall looked over his shoulder and saw Sonja, talking to Tony Hembley. Poor Sonja: she’d loved Evie so, been so good to her, driving to see her all those times he hadn’t gone along, bravely receiving the bad news so many days at the hospital. His heart warmed with love for his wife, his wife with her pretty windblown hair, standing and talking to her boss. Sonja made everyone comfortable. She had a way of getting on equal footing with people.
As the man had said, he could see at the first quick glance that the pictures were a letdown: a young woman, not recognizably Evie, standing and pinching out the sides of her skirt. “A Simplicity pattern definitely not simple” was written on the back of the photograph. In the second picture, the same young woman was sitting in a wicker rocker with an elaborately worked back in the shape of a heart, a baby on her lap who must have been either him or, because she looked so young, Gordon. “Martin,” it said on the back of the photograph. Martin? He looked again, wondering whether the old man might not have been confused. It could have been anyone—it didn’t seem to be Evie, but perhaps if her hair had been very different … He slipped them back in the envelope and thanked the man, calling up also to thank Mr. Bedell, his voice, he was afraid, loud but insincere.
“He does not hear well, even when you shout,” the man said. “He communicates with me in writing, and I write back. He asked me to give you the two pictures of your stepmother some time back, but I neglected to get in touch the way I should have. He showed them to her in the nursing home, and when he saw that she didn’t want them, he told me to look you up. Then I’m afraid the better part of a year passed, and then one day the nurse phoned.”
“Evie knew this was her?” Marshall said.
“Oh yes. Picture number one, she described every step of making that particular party dress. Picture number two was upsetting, though, so that’s when I took them back and changed the subject.” The man looked up at Mr. Bedell in the van. “I guess we’d all better count on changing so much we’ll be the only ones to recognize ourselves when we’re old. I don’t know about you, but I might cut some movie star pictures out of magazines, flash Denzel Washington and tell people down the line that was me.”
“You assume he was in love with Evie,” Marshall said.
The man shrugged. “Different times,” he said. “Maybe the old gentleman admired her.” He shook Marshall’s hand. “He’s got drawers full of things,” he said. “Maybe he’ll find some better pictures. If others pertain to you or your family, I’ll send them along. You know, eventually,” the man said.
Mr. Bedell, in profile, sat staring straight ahead while they talked. Marshall thanked the man and wished him a safe trip. He tucked the pictures in his inside pocket and started toward his car, where he could see that Sonja had already seated herself in the driver’s seat.
“Wait one minute, okay?” he said to her.
She nodded and he quickly walked back to the grave, where the two men who had been waiting in the background had begun to shovel dirt onto the casket. Someone was collecting the folding chairs.
“Everything’s okay?” he said to the man collecting chairs.
“Yes sir. My sympathies,” the man said.
“How will you mark the grave?” Marshall said. “Unt
il the tombstone is ready, I mean.”
“Sir?”
“I mean—” What did he mean? “You’ll … what, will there be some of those flowers on top? The tombstone isn’t here yet.”
“It will be delivered in a week,” the man said. “I’ve personally spoken to the stonemason.” He reached into his pocket and rifled through several pieces of paper. Marshall could tell that the man thought he was talking to a crazy person.
The man held out a typed-in form. Marshall read it with relief: the date ordered, the date delivery was to be made. As the man had said, it was to be delivered to the cemetery one week from today. She would only be anonymous for one week. He nodded as he looked at the form, and at the clearly printed letters in the rectangular space: