by Darren Greer
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after lunch, people begin to come. It is a tradition in Advocate when someone dies for visitors to come expressing their sympathies and carrying plates of food — sandwiches and squares and cookies. It is a bad tradition, in my opinion. My mother, Jeanette, and I are exhausted from sitting up all night and answering the phone all day. We would like nothing better than to retire to our rooms for a nap.
But we have to entertain.
Pot after pot of coffee and tea are made.
The squares are eaten, the sandwiches demolished. Some people bring roasts and casseroles, assuming for the next few days we will be too grief-stricken to cook. My mother appreciates it. I notice how she assumes by default the position of head of the household. Jeanette hangs back, taking a secondary role. My mother does not intend for this to happen. The potential lay dormant in her in all these years perhaps, and comes to the forefront out of necessity.
At seven o’clock we push the last visitor out the door.
“Thank God,” my mother says. “I’m beat.”
Another knock comes at ten after seven.
“You get it,” my mother says. “Entertain them if you wish, or tell them we’re tired and send them away. I’m going to rest.” She disappears up the stairs, as Jeanette already has.
I open the door. To my surprise, Pavel is standing there. He carries no sweets or sandwiches. He hands me a sympathy card and says to give it to my mother. “Deanny told me,” he says. “She gave me directions.”
I honestly believed after rebuffing his advances the weekend before I would never see him again. I had underestimated his persistence. Or maybe he was just following convention. Maybe in Russia you drove an hour out of your way to give sympathies to a man you barely knew.
“My family is tired,” I tell him honestly. “They’ve gone to bed.”
“How are you feeling?” Pavel asks me.
“Fine,” I say. “You want to come in?”
“Let’s go for a walk instead,” says Pavel. “It would do you good to get out of the house.”
Once again it is a glorious Advocate evening. July-warm, with the sun setting on the Protestant side. Pavel and I walk towards downtown.
“How do you feel?” he says.
“Fine,” I tell him. “It’s hard to believe she’s gone.”
“Old people,” says Pavel, “hold sway over our lives for so long, that it’s not just they that die. Ideas go with them. Principles. Ways of life. In some ways the death of someone old is more shocking than the death of someone young.”
“Yes,” I say.
Pavel has touched upon exactly what I’ve been thinking and feeling. But I don’t want to discuss it.
“I suppose,” he says, “you’ll be going back to Toronto soon.” It isn’t a question.
“On Friday,” I say. “After the funeral, and as soon as I make sure Mom and Jeanette are okay.”
“Have you made a decision about the eulogy? Have you prepared any notes?”
This is the first time that day anyone has asked me that question. Faced with the blatant reality of my grandmother’s death, it seems harder to think of myself up there at a pulpit accusing her of things. But neither do I feel disposed to shower her memory with kind words. I am wavering. I can feel that. I tell Pavel I simply do not know yet, but I am leaning towards the negative.
“You haven’t got much time,” says Pavel. “Perhaps this is a time for healing.”
“That only happens in novels,” I tell him. “Real life is more complicated.”
“Novels can sometimes be true,” he says, and grows silent.
I appreciate Pavel’s romantic streak, but tonight it annoys me. I refuse to discuss it. We walk to the end of Tenerife Street and turn around and come home. When we reach the door he asks me if I have considered his offer.
“Of what?” I say. “A relationship? Now is hardly the time, is it?”
“Don’t hide behind convention, Jacob,” he said. “It doesn’t suit you.”
“Fine,” I said. “Where would we live? Here or in Toronto?”
“Details,” said Pavel. “Unimportant incidentals.”
“It’s not unimportant to me.”
“Give the eulogy,” Pavel said. “Let it go.”
“I’ll think about it,” I say.
I leave Pavel on the doorstop and close the door behind me. Then I call Deanny and accuse her of playing matchmaker on the day my grandmother died.
“He wanted to come,” she says. “I only gave him directions.”
“He asked me about the eulogy. Did you put him up to that?”
“I did not,” said Deanny. “Maybe it’s just his common sense. Why do you hold on to things so, Jake? All that is ancient history.”
“Not for me. I see it every day at my work. The same sickness. The same bigotry and intolerance.”
“Give the eulogy,” Deanny said. “Don’t you understand that it is your grandmother’s way of asking forgiveness?”
“I understand that. But you assume I have it in me to forgive her. I don’t. I don’t want to forgive her. I don’t want to let it go. Someone has to keep the memory fresh, otherwise we’ll forget.”
Deanny sighs. It is deep and resigned. Perhaps that is how it sounds after she loses a case. “All right,” she says. “I won’t bother you anymore about Pavel. Or your grandmother’s funeral. Just answer me one question.”
“Which is?”
“Do you think your uncle would have wanted you to behave this way?”
“I do,” I say.
“You lie,” says Deanny. “David forgave everyone at the end. Even your grandmother. You’ve made a protest out of your life, in the name of a man who didn’t believe in protest. Who believed in forgiveness. What would he say if he were here to see this?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “And neither do you.”
“I could guess,” says Deanny. “And you can too, if you’re honest with yourself. He’d tell you to give the eulogy. He’d tell you to forgive your grandmother. He’d tell you to forgive yourself.” Deanny continues talking, but by then I have hung up.
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i’ve made arrangements for funerals of our agency’s clients, men who had no one to handle them. Most have no money or insurance. If they do, they drew on it long ago using the viatical companies, who parasitically advance people dying from aids a portion of their life insurance benefit if they name them legally as beneficiaries upon their death for the remainder. Many take this option. Who can blame them? The moral ambiguity of these companies aside, the men need the money, or want to live in comfort as they die. In some cases, family and friends have abandoned them and they have no one to leave their policies to.
The funeral arrangements for my grandmother are different. She took care of everything. She did not want to be buried in a nice dress, but simply a pantsuit she often wore around the house. My mother was baffled why she would want this. She wanted a nice casket, but did not want it lined with plush or velvet. The undertaker had to rip the lining out of the casket, which came pre-installed, and put in the cotton to adhere to my grandmother’s wishes. She also wanted my grandfather’s medical degrees buried with her. No one, not even her old friends, could fathom the reason for this. Nonetheless, her wishes were carried out
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two days after my grandmother died my mother asks me about the eulogy. I tell her I haven’t written it.
“It’s not hard,” she says. “And it doesn’t have to be very long. Just a few nice words about her life.”
“I don’t think she wanted nice words. I think she wanted the truth.”
“Tell the truth then,” my mother says.
“I’ll be damned,” I say, thinking of Deanny, “if I’m going to forgive her. She’s trying to force me.”
My mother shakes her head. “We should have never let you stay here back then,” she says. “We should have sent you away until it was over. It affected you too much. You h
ave become hard.”
“You do the eulogy then,” I say.
“She didn’t ask me,” says my mother.
She rarely gets angry at me. Even as a boy I don’t remember her punishing me. She is a perfect mother, as far as I am concerned. But she is unhappy with me now. She tells Jeanette I am still vacillating on speaking at my grandmother’s funeral. Jeanette is less perturbed; she says I should humour an old lady’s final request and stop taking it so seriously.
The atmosphere of grief that overlaid our house is starting to evaporate. Jeanette and my mother still cry a little, turning off and on like faucets, but no one seems completely heartbroken. Grandnan had been sick for months. Perhaps it is a relief not to have her lying comatose in the upstairs bedroom anymore.
I tell Jeanette I didn’t know Grandnan well enough to give a fitting eulogy. “You and Mom knew her better,” I say. “Why don’t you write it?”
“That’s not what she wanted,” Jeanette says. “She wanted you.”
“Maybe she did,” I say. “But I can’t write it. I’ve tried, and I’ve got nothing to say.”
“I don’t understand,” says Jeanette, “why it’s so hard to write a few words!”
“It isn’t. But don’t you understand? It’s a betrayal to the men I work with who have mothers and grandmothers like her. And to Uncle David? I’d be a hypocrite.”
“You’re one now, in my opinion,” says my Aunt Jeanette. I don’t think she meant to say it. It just slipped out.
“Jeanette!” my mother says.
Jeanette looks at me, and then my mother. She shrugs. “I just meant he counsels people on how to get a life, right? And then he refuses to get one for himself.”
This upsets me, and I challenge my aunt to show me how my life is less valid than hers.
She mentions Pavel. “I talked to Deanny,” she says. “Why don’t you just date him? He sounds like an amazing person.”
I go to my room, angry. Two more days and I can leave Advocate behind. It isn’t just this drama playing out over my grandmother’s death. There’s also an old drama playing out underneath. It is as if the two times have merged — my grandmother’s death and my uncle’s.
Eventually my mother comes into my room. “Jeanette says sorry. She wasn’t thinking, and she’s distraught. We’re all a little thrown by your grandmother’s passing.”
“It’s okay,” I say.
“Can I sit down?”
My mother sits on the edge of my bed, as she used to when I was a boy. I notice how old her hands look, how her legs are mapped with blue veins. I tend to think of my mother and Jeanette as still young, but they aren’t. My mother will soon be sixty. Jeanette not long after. Neither one of them will have to work again, if they don’t want to. Grandnan will have left them enough money to get by. Knowing them, they will choose to work. They are good daughters.
My mother says she is not going to trouble me about my life any longer. “We’re just concerned,” she says. “Jeanette and I. We know how lonely you are in Toronto. You can try and hide it from us, but all you have there is work, and that is never enough to sustain anyone.”
“I know,” I say.
“Have you ever thought,” my mother says, “of starting something here? A small agency like the one you have there? To help people in this region?”
“No one is dying here,” I say. “No one is sick.”
“Not now,” says my mother. “Or not that we know about. But perhaps you could help prevent those sorts of things from happening. Counselling children. Going into schools. Educating them, before they go off to big cities on their own.”
I had never thought of this. I do not want to live in Advocate, but this would be a noble project. A useful one, though I know I’ll never do it. I tell my mother I will think about her proposal.
“Now about Pavel,” says my mother.
“That was none of Aunt Jeanette’s business.”
“I agree,” says my mother. “But you know your Aunt Jeanette, and small towns.”
“I’m mad at Deanny too,” I say. “She should never have told her. I know Pavel likes me. And I like him. But we live in different cities for God’s sake. I don’t plan on travelling a thousand miles every weekend, and I don’t think he does either.”
“Fine,” says my mother. “Just make sure that’s the honest reason, and that you’re not fooling yourself.”
“I’m not,” I say.
“You’re not a city boy, Jacob. Do you know that? Some are. But you’re not. Your aunt and I have always known that. You went to Toronto to get away from us, not because it was the place you wanted to be.”
“Not from you,” I say.
“Her then,” says my mother. “I meant what I said. We should not have allowed you to stay here when Uncle David was dying. It was too horrible for a child of your age to see. You were old enough to register and yet not old enough to fully understand. Jeanette and I both feel it harmed you. You would likely not have done the work you do if it wasn’t for it, do you agree?”
“So?” I say. “I do good work. I make a difference.”
“Yes,” says my mother. “And I’ve always been proud of you for it. I think your grandmother was too, if you want to know, though I don’t think she could have said it. But a person must have more than work in his life. You must have some happiness.”
I do not lie to my mother and say I am happy. It would cheapen the moment. Before either of us can say anything more we hear the doorbell ring below.
“That will be Dalton,” my mother says. “Come on. Let’s go listen to the old woman’s final words.”
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dalton smith has been my grandmother’s lawyer since he opened his own practice in Advocate years before. She chose him because he is Catholic; her lawyer before had been United. There hadn’t been a Catholic lawyer in Advocate since the fifties. My grandmother liked to say this was because Catholics usually didn’t go in for such morally ambiguous jobs.
“Except for the pope,” Jeanette said on one occasion, though out of my grandmother’s earshot.
Dalton is not a stereotypical sharp lawyer. Although his suit is dark and crisp, he is short, and corpulent, with a beet-red complexion which my grandmother suspected was the result of secret drinking. He eases his bulk into one of my grandmother’s antique wing chairs — I could almost hear her protests it would collapse under the strain — and lays an expensive leather briefcase across his lap, opens it, and draws out two manila folders.
“Please let me get through the broad strokes of the will,” he says, “before you ask questions. Most of them will likely be answered by the document, and what aren’t I’ll field when we’re done.”
He begins to read. The language is dry and technical, but it is plain enough to be understood. My uncle used to say professional language was designed to exclude, a kind of linguistic old boys’ club, and anyone could learn it if they were willing to spend the time.
There are surprises in the will. She left the house to her daughters, and to each of us, including me, she left three hundred thousand dollars.
We all knew my grandmother was loaded. We expected her to leave us something. My mother expresses surprise it is this much.
“You don’t understand,” says Dalton. “Your grandmother was worth almost five million dollars. The sale of your grandfather’s practice, their savings, and his insurance she invested in dividend-bearing bank stocks. She lived frugally, and never touched the principal. After her donations to the church, and the town, and her heirs the remainder of the estate is three million dollars.”
Jeanette whistles. “And she was always complaining she was broke.”
Dalton doesn’t smile. He seems professionally incapable of it.
“So who is the rest going to?” asks my mother.
We expect, I think, the Catholic Church for the conversion of the Protestants. Perhaps a donation to the town to ensure a park or public building is renamed in her honour. None of u
s are expecting what he says.
“The remaining money is to go into a trust, which is to be administered by Jacob McNeil, her grandson,” Dalton says.
There is an expression that a room is so silent you could hear a pin drop. In this case that would be an understatement. You could have heard a single molecule of air bump against a feather. Dalton shakes his head, and for a minute I think I do see a smile there. A ghost of one, at least, though fleeting and soon replaced by his official deadpan. “It would be more accurate, I suppose, to say your grandmother wanted to donate the remainder of the estate to charities, with you as charitable executor.”
“Which charities,” I ask instantly. A part of my brain is processing this quicker than my conscious mind. I know what is coming.
“Any charities,” Dalton says. “Whichever ones you choose. You are the sole trustee. You can do with it as you want. You have carte blanche.”
I am stunned. I think we all are. After a few minutes trying to organize my chaotic thoughts I say, “Surely she knew where I will put this money?”
“I think she knew exactly,” says Dalton. He truly is a good lawyer. Sixty years of family history do not phase him at all. He continues on with the business at hand. My grandmother was smart getting him to do this instead of my mother and Jeanette, who, I can tell by their bewildered expressions, are as blindsided as I am. “I believe that’s why she’s doing it. But it is conditional.”
“Upon what?” I ask.
“Father Harry told you about the eulogy?”
“You know about that?”
“Yes,” Dalton says. “She wanted to give you time to prepare, and so she instructed Harry to tell you before she died. In order to become trustee for the remainder of the estate, you have to do the eulogy.”
“I won’t do it,” I say suddenly. “I won’t be subject to posthumous blackmail.”
“Understand,” says Dalton. “The money she is leaving you personally is not conditional. You will get that, regardless. It is only the charitable money in question.”