Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  At the end of the Requiem, Jerome and the others followed the casket to the doors. Fred and Tom were standing n a corner of the yard, their backs to them, and Fred had a hand on Tom's shoulder. The grandsons lifted the casket and carried it down to the sidewalk. The slow and uneven step and scrape of their feet on the cement. The casket swaying with their steps. Flesh without which they would not be. A turn, another sidewalk, the irregular step and rattle of their feet over the leaves. Cars sighing past on he highway beside them.

  The casket rumbled over the rollers and was locked in place. Jerome got into the following car, Charles and Tommy and Luke and Carl and Fred Jr. and Tim got in, and there was a wait as the other cars filled. Then the hearse began to move toward the corner, past a large hall where the Stars of the East used to meet, by a house, then another, the last on this edge of town, and then it moved faster and Jerome followed, past a vacant lot, the swimming pool, then started the climb to the Catholic cemetery, a weedy, untended cemetery on a sandhill, with a wrought-iron fence, pushed down in spots by vandals, around it on three sides; through the gate, broken off its hinges and perpetually open, and up to the top of the hill. The hearse stopped. There was a dark mass of movement on the hilltop. A hundred or more people were gathered around a canvas shelter where a hump of dirt covered with a carpet of artificial grass, lay like a huge log.

  The grandsons stood at the rear of the hearse and waited for the funeral party. It couldn't have been more than fifty degrees (Jerome's shoulders kept twitching with chills), but he saw big beads of sweat form on Tommy's forehead and run down his wrists below his sleeves. Crowley whispered, Jerome and Charles took hold of the head, Luke and Tommy took hold, then Carl and Fred Jr., and when the casket was clear of the hearse Tommy's hand slipped off the tubular rail. He stepped away, horrified that it had, and the entire weight of the corner bore down on Jerome. He skipped back to brace himself and there was a shock as he stopped the others. Across from him, Charles was flashing white and gray. Jerome took hold with' both hands and could see his face, his glasses, reflected in the casket, and decided to become a priest. A priest? What kind of slip was that? No, a doctor, a doctor for life!

  Crowley pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket and handed it to Tommy, and he gripped the carrying rail with it. They moved next to the grave and placed the casket on the velvet-curtained platform. Jerome stepped back to make room for his father and grandmother and uncles and aunts, who were taking seats on the folding chairs under the shelter, and saw, on a flat-bed truck a few feet away, a headstone of granite with Neumiller across it, and at its bottom, on the right side, his grandfather's name and the dates of his birth and death, and, on the other side, his grandmother's name, with the date of her birth and a blank square. Beside him was the grave of his mother. Beside it was an oval marker over the grave of the daughter she'd lost in childbirth. The ground that covered them was covered with oak leaves. Oh, Lord, give me a chance, he thought.

  Standing close were Augustina, his grandmother's brother and sister, J. D. Prell, Alex Craig, the Cunliffes and the Shaws, and, farther back, Mrs. Strawrick, who shook her head when he caught her eye, appalled by death. Luis and Martita came up and stood on either side of him. In another part of the crowd, higher up, were a dozen of his father's former students, one of them in an Air Force uniform. From the height of the hill he could see the empty swimming pool, and remembered that in his grandfather's last years, when there was little for him to do, he'd come to the pool to check the buildings and equipment, or back-flush the filters, and once heard him say, "When I die, I want to be buried on the hill there, facing the pool, so I can watch my grandchildren."

  Father read the graveside rites and then raised a round-headed aspergillum and gave it a shake, and droplets of water scattered over the casket and drew up into mounded beads on the waxed wood. Father rested a hand at the casket's head and turned his eyes up as with a private thought, and the crowd began to disperse and move down the hill.

  Gayle was beside Fred, a hand of his in hers, her black-hatted head on his shoulder. Martin sat with a handkerchief in a clenched fist. Laura leaned and whispered to him. He nodded and rose as if from sleep, turned to his mother, and then his knees gave out as hers had. Jerome started for him, but Laura was there. He leaned on her and took hold of a chair until his strength returned, and then got his mother to her feet. He put an arm around her and gripped her free elbow, and they started down the hill with heavy strides, their heads bowed close, and Jerome realized that one of the reasons they'd moved to Illinois was so his father could be close to his mother, and if this hadn't been so, if they'd been different people, or if there'd been a difference in their relationship, then perhaps his father might not have been able to exist after their mother died, and what would they have done without a father?

  Jerome got into the car, where Charles and the cousins were waiting, and drove out of the cemetery toward town. Tommy turned to Carl and said, "Is Mom back there?" Carl craned to see out the rear window and said, "No,” while the car swayed them all in time to the end of this. Tommy punched the cigarette lighter and pulled out a mashed pack of Lucky Strikes. He shook out two, lit them both, and handed one to Jerome. "Here," he said, "I thought you could use one of these. Jeez, it's really something to think he's dead and going inside that ground there, isn't it?"

  *

  On the way to Forest Creek on Wednesday, on the way back to school, Jerome tried to think of what to say to help console his grandmother, and saw, halfway there, a black man, the first he'd seen in the county, working on a power-line crew; the man kept his head down Uncle Tomishly, but Jerome could feel his eyes feed on him. Good.

  They went into the house without knocking and found their grandmother in the dining room, at the table where she'd laid out so many meals for them, staring out the picture window toward the shop. The room was overlaid with a light that made the walls seem insubstantial. At the sight of him and Charles, her lips compressed, tears started dropping off her jaw, and she shook her head as if in apology. Jerome kissed her cheek and she held him from the chair. "I know," he said. "I'll miss you. I'll write. Dad has some good new for you. Marie will be staying here." He chafed her hand between his. "Grandpa was always very strong, and what he'd probably want now is for us to try and be half as strong. It's a way of showing we believed in him."

  His words sounded rehearsed in his ears, but she pulled herself from the chair and clung to him for so long he was sure she'd never let go, and he felt how stout and healthy her body was, and must always have been.

  *

  Two weeks later, at school, he got a letter from his father, thanking him for being so helpful at such a difficult time. He mentioned that Lionell had called from California, sounding drunken and emotional, and wondered why he hadn't been notified in time to attend the funeral, which he surely would have done. "I called your Grandma Jones the same morning I called you at school," he wrote, "and assumed she told him." He also enclosed a clipping from the Pettibone Courier-Express.

  CARD OF THANKS

  As a teacher, much of my life has been

  taken up with giving assignments to others,

  and now the family has given me one—that

  of saying thank you to a community for the

  many favors that were extended to help console

  us during our loss and your loss of C.J.C. We are

  all grateful, but we know, too, that if Dad could have

  had a last wish it would have been that there be little

  time spent in grieving and mourning his passing.

  We all have work to do—our daily work and the

  more important work of being kind and helpful to

  one another. No man was more successful in that

  sense than he. After another thank you from all of

  us, then, let's be about my father's business.

  Tearfully submitted,

  Martin C. Neumiller

  Jerome put the letter and clipp
ing down on his desk and stared at the wall for an hour. That night he dreamed about a hawk, a hawk high above the crossroads of Hyatt, and saw from its height how it was to watch a dozen shadowed figures of children scatter from the playground of the parochial school and go running down the darkening streets in different directions toward the smells of supper rising in as many individual ways as there were lit and ordered homes anchored along the blocks below, while ahead of him, over the fading squares of fields and summer fallow, lay the dark mass of Hawk's Nest, his unoccupied and rooted throne. Home again with a settling of wings in a cottonwood in the night air. Home again. Home.

  39

  TO GRANDMA JONES

  [Portions of this letter, as indicated by ellipses, have been deleted due to the personal nature of the material.— ed.]

  606 Race

  Urbana, Ill.

  April 26, 1963

  Dear Grandma.

  This must be about the dozenth time. I've tried to write in many different ways and moods, as you probably know, but no words came. I've been trying since last November, when Lionell called and said Grandpa was dead. I was so shocked that none of what I said or wanted to say got through to you. I still don't think he's dead. I see him somewhere in a childlike part of me, and although I know that in the terms of the world he's gone, he's still not for me. He never really will be either, unless I come to California, which I'd like to do at this point in my life, and see that he isn't there with you and Lionell, or if I ever went to Minnesota to the farm and didn't see him there. Walk out the door. And then Lionell was also saying that you were very sick too and so I've been trying to write ever since.

  Part of what happened was when I heard about Grandpa, I'd just received a part in a play, a major one where the acting is all- important, and that was Richard II. I've been trying to compliment myself on the role to compensate for how I feel, but I can't. All I can say is it's of the most direct and honest things I've been through. My director was excellent and drove me up to the stars, so all I had to do was keep a straight face and once in a while smile at him. As the lady in the costume room keeps saying, "You've got a life. Live it awhile, kid."

  That's one production. Then this spring I was asked by the same director and had the very good fortune to be Estragon in Waiting for Godot. Do you know it? Well, Gogo, or Estragon, is this tramp who —Oh, well, your guess is as good as mine. He talks a lot. Sound familiar? But he has to keep the audience up, or interest in the play a Gogo going, and just being smart isn't enough. So here I am, from a king to a bum, huh? What do you say? Or as the king I recently played put it, "Thus play I in one person many people, and none contented." I'm still up on it.

  Because I haven't seen you or written for so long, I feel like a lump of avocado pit we put in a jar in grade school once, and then watched it grow, which it did, just barely, but did! I wish I could say now that I have a lot of blossoms all in a row for you. That sounds like the sort of stuff I'm trying to read!

  I've been thinking of you so much, I've even written a poem.

  Thank you, thank you,

  Dearest Grandmother, and

  Thank you over again.

  You've loved and honored

  Me all of these years,

  Just by being the person you've been.

  Remember all the good times we had together on the farm? I'd walk to the old sunken foundation where the ice blocks were kept under sawdust, and say to Lionell, "Summer is here." It's a way of life I still have left because of you. I remember, too, how we did the dishes and went picking berries together, and how you once leaned against a counter where I was standing and it seemed your weight held up the house. I think you were doing a crossword puzzle.

  Well, I know you were because its squares are still a part of me. Forgive me for everything, Grandma, dear . . .

  . . . and remember thinking how you were in a way really my mother. I mean, my mother since she's been gone. And you seemed to understand that and, what's more, intended it to be . . . and in another way were more than my mother because you and I always agreed — didn't we? — and I used to argue with her about the ways of life. But you were never angry with me in any sort of way and not ever a fuss, because it seems that even you knew that you meant more than my mother to me. And our relationship has been intact for a much longer time. When I disagreed with her in the way that I did, for instance, it was only her way of telling me she would die soon, I realize now. So I've seen that, too. And I've known you, from the best I can tell, from the day I was three and her only until I was nine, and that's all she knew me. But you've been in touch from the time I was eight or less. So see how much I owe you? You've kept me alive. That's why I had to write this, even if it is hurried, and get it off right away. I'm not even going to look at it again, although I see my handwriting looks funny on some pages. Here, This is for you.

  Helen, thy beauty is to me

  like those Nicean barks of yore.

  That gently, o'er a perfumed sea.

  The weary, wayworn wanderer bore

  To his own native shore.

  All of my love forever,

  Charles

  [This letter was returned to Charles by Olivia, his grandmother's oldest sister, who said in her letter to him that his grandmother had died of abdominal cancer two days before Charles's letter arrived, and commiserated with him for the way circumstances had come together; and then said that she would be more than willing to take over—if he was agreeable, of course—the job of being his mother from now on. A radiantly speckled maple leaf lying in blue shadow on the sunshaft-lit seat of a worn and well-used old captain's chair.— ed.]

  Five

  40

  FIVE AT THE TABLE

  "What's the time?"

  "What's the difference?"

  "Who wants to know?"

  "Where's it at, Captain Marvel?"

  "Eat it up," said Neil.

  There were five of them at the table. Jackie, the girl with the small hands, sat next to Vi, and Neil and Charles were across from the girls; Happy, who never smiled and had a pseudonym, was at the end of the table, near the steps, fiddling with a light meter from his camera case. They'd been coming into this coffee-house for the last couple of days, though they seldom bought so much as a cup of cappuccino, and the proprietor of the place, Chip, dark and burly, with a Manhattan sense of humor, was more than indulgent to them, and managed to persuade them to sit at a window table as bait. "Smile. Look stoned. Those people from Des Moines and Peoria expect to see freaks like you in a Village coffeehouse." But this afternoon, after a rooftop soiree where the five had poked down a joint apiece, except for Hap, they were so obviously high and unable to contain it that Chip, looking forbidding and concerned, told them to sit in the back room (did he actually care about them?) until they cooled off. It was down three steps from the main part of the restaurant and dimly lit, with a low tin ceiling and three windows along the top of its left wall; a drifter who sometimes waited tables was sleeping across some chairs in a corner, and somebody else was at the rear, in shadow, tuning up a twelve-string guitar; otherwise, they had the room to themselves.

  "God," Vi said. "Even tones sound off." "What's the time?" Jackie asked again. Her hands had always seemed small to Charles, but now, with his senses bending under the deliquescent effects of Red—or was it Gold?—high-class hemp, they looked unnaturally so, miniature and grotesque, a pair of sudden deformities she was exhibiting on the tabletop—why? —and when they were on the roof (they tried the entries of walk-ups and, when they found one that opened, went up five flights, and then up the sixth and onto the roof to smoke; a cop would have to come through the raised doorway they sat behind to catch them at this level, and by that time they could throw everything overboard) —when they were smoking on the roof, Neil, handing the weed to Charles, whispered, "Dig Jackie's teeny hands. Freaky."

  They were prancing around her face, turning on their wrists, performing near her mouth, posing on her chin, and now an index fi
nger tapped her front teeth below her lip that curved up in such a fleshily wrinkled way that whenever Charles could forget about her hands and focus there he felt the buzzing strum of a beginning erection come on.

  "Freaky.”

  Neil was a danger to Charles in reverse. He was eighteen, from Florida, and was now in the Army at Fort Dix —" 'Military Reservation' is right," he said, tugging a skimpy juvenile mustache the Army allowed him to grow, dark-brown, though he had carroty-red hair. He got a pass each weekend ("My master sergeant's gay") and appeared in the Village in a multicolored Mexican pullover with a brown karate belt around if ("I earned that"), a leather headband, a gold ring in his right ear, and went to the weekend acting classes at the David Neuman Modem Acting Studio. Charles, a summer student there, met him through Neuman, in a way; when students disagreed with Neuman, a cruel and demanding Malvolio with streaks of Richard III in him, he sent them onstage and had them perform an improvisation while he, a flawless mimic, mocked every unmotivated move they made, for the entertainment of the rest of the class, all of whom had to laugh or face being the next ones up, and Neil and Charles were appearing onstage so often, sometimes together, it was only natural for Neil to sell Charles a bag of grass so heavily cut with oregano all it gave him was a headache. He'd been promising to make it up to him ever since, as a friend.

  "The hands, the hands," Neil said now, and nudged him, and Charles, who'd just received the rapidly approaching roach from Vi, drew on it, his lips hissing as he carbureted in the way that was right for him, and then, stepping down on it with his diaphragm, turned and saw that Jackie's wide brown eyes, moist and dilated the more she smoked, were fixed on him with unconstrained fluidity; smoke was escaping from her lips and slithering through her stare, a waste.