by Ed Ifkovic
Then, abruptly, out of breath, she stopped, seemed to be surprised to be standing there, and rushed back to her pew, where everyone seemed to notice for the first time a fifteen-year-old boy sitting there with her, a handsome lad with a fine intelligent face, dark, curious eyes, a lanky but solid build. Excited, I sought Eben and Stanley, the grandfathers, but, I noted, Stanley stared down into his lap. Eben, across the aisle, was a sight. He stared at the boy, his grandson, with an intensity that was almost too painful to behold: raw, naked, curious, but a look too complicated to interpret. I looked back at Julia, sitting back down, red faced, a little embarrassed, and I thought: how strong she was, driven by some inner flash-fire of steel and goodness and compassion. Well, I told myself, this alone was worth the price of admission.
But my reverie was shattered by a sudden high-pitched wail, someone collapsing under the weight of grief. Busybody heads, including mine, abandoned Julia and her son, that angelic mother-and-son tableau, and searched out the noisy keener. It was, surprisingly, Jason Fargo, Carlotta’s second husband, whom I had not even noticed in the church. The small, jowly man, the subject of that argument I overheard my first night at the Inn, the real estate entrepreneur from Weston who also owned the summer-stock playhouse there. That Jason Fargo, whom Carlotta once maligned to me as a “leech on the body of my fame,” a man she’d married within a year of Peter’s father’s suicide, but himself lasting barely a year in a marriage to the volatile actress. Back in her life again, I knew. But was he back in her arms again? Or, as Carlotta insinuated that night, in Martha’s bed? That Jason Fargo, sitting alone midway back in the church, among strangers, and not with his current wife or any of his college-aged children.
Well, I observed, filled with wonder, that Jason Fargo had suddenly started bawling and shrieking, an unstoppable display that stunned the congregation. Even the placid Reverend Mr. Winters, hiccoughing his way through his own fragmented elegy of Martha, stopped and looked up, as though expecting to see an errant child throwing a tantrum. Jason wept in a sloppy, sputtering fashion, shoulders hunched up and head wobbling like a carnival toy. Gulping, gasping, he was hysterical. He also looked tremendously embarrassed by his emotional collapse, but the man seemed helpless to contain it.
“Damn him,” Carlotta mumbled, and Peter shot her a withering look.
One of the somber ushers, accompanied by one of the funeral-home staff, managed to lift Jason by the elbows, tuck him under their care like a frail grandfather, and lead him out into the falling rain.
A hum covered the congregation, lifted up to the rafters, hung in the air like a low-grade electric current.
The Reverend Mr. Winters now seemed in a rush to conclude the services. But glancing at Carlotta, I was stunned to see the flush of purple anger in her face, the revulsion. She caught my eye, and in that second I spotted stoniness there, so icy I had to turn away. Peter had put his arm around his mother’s shoulder, protectively, and even Delia was leaning in, like a mother bird. But Carlotta shook off Peter’s concern and turned to me, whispering in my ear, “He was always a weak man, Edna.” I did not quite catch her words, and mumbled, what? Carlotta spoke through gritted teeth. “For some reason I only married weak men, one after the other. Three damn losers.”
Outside, rushing to the Pierce-Arrow, with Eben holding an umbrella overhead, I caught sight of an anonymous automobile parked away from the funeral procession. Through the dim, wet day, I could make out Trooper Wolniak, hidden behind a windshield speckled with raindrops, slumped back in his seat, watching, watching. I smiled.
So few people attended the burial in the hilly graveyard a mile or so from the church, in the vast but weathered Small family plot, with limestone or granite stones dating back to Revolutionary War days, the entire section ringed by a rusty wrought-iron fence. The land was soggy with waterlogged leaves, and a flock of maddened sparrows twittered on a ledge of the caretaker’s shed. I stayed in the Pierce-Arrow, bone-weary and damp, watching the ritual. Carlotta looked small standing by the open grave. She rocked back and forth.
Back at the Inn guests sat in motorcars lined on both sides of the front road. I finally returned with Carlotta and Peter and Delia, but caterers had already set up tables in the dining room, in the library, in the sunroom. “It would have been too much for Julia,” Carlotta had told me the previous day, and I’d nodded. I should think so. Now, back at the Inn, friends and neighbors left their cars as Carlotta led the way inside. The rain had stopped, save for a pesky mist, an occasional drizzle, but inside there were fires blazing in all the rooms, candles lit on the mantels and tables, the day’s chill gone now, and I realized the Inn probably looked that way a hundred years back, before electricity: shadowy and cozy, warm, toasty, welcoming.
As Carlotta greeted the guests who embraced her and mumbled their sorrow, I picked at the food, and found it wanting: platters of chunky cheese pastry, dried chicken the color of bark, vats of German potato salad that resembled building mortar, Parker House rolls burnt at the edges. Sunken chocolate and yellow cake that seemed wooden, dull-looking apple and pumpkin pies. A disaster, and I noted the guests tried everything, left most of it on china plates. I drank passable coffee, made so by the addition of thick farm cream I poured in generously.
Carlotta was overly animated, flitting from one guest to the next, like a manic butterfly, fluttery, a little too loud and frenzied, clinging on to casual embraces a little too long. She looked ready to explode. “Oh, Martha—how she loved a fire in this room!” “Do you remember when Martha told that story of the owl that got into the house. She was sitting right there!” “Martha always said . . .” “Martha believes . . .” She went on and on. “Can you believe . . . her very words . . . a kind heart, hers . . .” On and on, to utter distraction. People fled her, bunching in protective huddles. Carlotta swirled and pounced and hovered, the words rushing out in growing crescendo, to the point where her voice became raspy and uneven. “Carlotta,” I whispered, taking her elbow, “sit down, please. Relax.”
Carlotta stared, wild-eyed. “Edna, I can’t. I’m—I’m delirious.”
She looked feverish, in fact, and her cheeks—so heavily rouged and creamed—were shiny red, flushed, unhealthy.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
Carlotta muttered, “I feel like I’m all wound up, a toy that’s going to break into a thousand pieces.”
Jason Fargo arrived late, and I was surprised he dared show up, given his histrionics in church. I’d noted that Eben had disappeared after dropping us off, returning to the tenant house. And Stanley Lupinski, the surprise mourner, obviously had returned to his house next door. Julia Lupinski sat in a corner chair, talking to no one, her son silent at her side. For once not serving the household or dusting a table or rolling out pie dough, she folded her body in, staring into space, nursing a lemon phosphate, both hands encircling the glass, as though she feared it might slip from her grip.
Then Jason began making apologetic rounds, insinuating himself into each cluster of folks.
He took my hand, squeezed it. I had been talking with Bob Benchley and Neysa McMein, and he interrupted. “I’m so sorry,” he stammered. “I’m a sentimental old fool, you know. And funerals make me maudlin . . .” I looked away, uncomfortable. I hardly knew the man. To be sure, in my own life I believed in holding my own emotions close to my spinster’s chest. Public outbursts of tears and recrimination, well, hardly. Neysa McMein, looking like one of her illustrated American girls on a McCall’s cover, what with her bright, open face and sparkling eyes, stared at Jason as though he were a new form of life, recently unearthed.
Jason then moved on to the next hapless victim. “I’m so sorry. Did you see me in church? I—well, Martha was special—to all of us.”
By the time he reached the smoldering Carlotta, who stood by the sideboard with red wine in a soda glass, she was ready for him. “Carlotta,” he began, “can you believe me? Why I . . .”
I’d followed his vagabond movements,
watched Carlotta put her hand up, actually covering the man’s mouth. “Stop, Jason,” she hissed. “Just stop. I’m the only performer at this funeral.”
“What?” He blinked, his eyes suddenly filled with tears.
“Don’t you think that you should save your emoting or, rather, leave it to your actors in your playhouse in Weston, for God’s sake?” She was furious, her words coming out slow and methodical. “Why did you come to the funeral anyway?”
He looked surprised. “To pay my respects. I knew Martha . . .”
Carlotta, her voice raised, careless of who overheard her: “In the Biblical sense?”
“For God’s sake, Carlotta, we just came from a funeral.”
“Although you seem to think it is your personal . . .” She paused, at a loss for words.” He walked away. “Don’t turn your back on me,” she yelled.
The room got quiet. Peter rushed over and whispered something to his mother, and she smiled thinly and walked with him into the kitchen, his arm around her shoulder. Everyone started buzzing again, a little too loudly. Fascinated, I drifted into the kitchen, and saw Carlotta sobbing into Peter’s chest. But as I turned to leave the room, I collided with Henry and Peggy Fenwick, both of them, as they sought out Carlotta. “Mr. Fenwick,” I managed.
The politician nodded. “Henry, please.”
“And call me Peggy,” his wife told me.
I nodded back. We stood there, the three of us blocking the entrance to the kitchen, a triptych of uncomfortable mourners, nodding at one another like marionettes on loose strings. I found myself staring at an ostentatious pin stuck in the lapel of Henry’s charcoal-black herring-bone suit, some elaborate gold and silver eagle, encrusted with some blue-glass stones. A lodge pin? Costume jewelry stolen from Peggy’s hope chest? He saw me looking at it. “The Great War.” He tapped the medal with his index finger. “Too old for battle with the doughboys in France, but devotion to the cause on the home front.” I had no idea what the man was talking about, but I’d had enough experience with homegrown, bombastic politicians with their need for emblems and decorations, especially in a time of electioneering.
“A hero, nonetheless,” Peggy informed me, admiration in her voice. “Henry is a genuine patriot.”
And, most likely, a simpleton, I thought. Fourth-of-July heroes, I’d often termed them. And Peggy, the cheerleader in gingham and sunflower hat. Now I watched Fenwick rub the glossy emblem with a thumb, polishing it. “Order of the Home Brigade,” he announced. Then he sighed. “But we’re not here today to celebrate me but Martha . . .” A line said with such authority that I turned to see if a crowd had gathered, with red, white and blue bunting festooned over placards. But in that moment, oddly, I observed a startling and unexpected sea change in the man, which got to me. For Fenwick, mentioning Martha’s name and her premature loss, actually teared up, the rugged face dissolving. Real grief insinuated itself, I realized, the slick politician momentarily forgotten. He started to tremble, and he looked away, as though seeking a place to hide.
Peggy’s voice broke the silence. “Henry feels, Edna.”
Henry looked at his wife with a glare that was not a happy one, as though he resented her words. Hmm! I thought. Perhaps there was a real man lurking beneath the surface of that campaign-stumping bandwagon façade. He started to say something to Peggy, who seemed oblivious to his very real grief, but stopped. He smiled at both of us.
Peggy tapped him on the wrist, mother-like, and he let her. Peggy, I noted, was expensively attired: the glittery Fevre wristwatch on that comforting arm, real pearls, an afternoon tea dress I recognized as from Bertrand on Fifth Avenue. The well-tempered politician’s wife, sophisticated and urbane but with sufficient country flair and pastoral glow to appeal to the voting farmer who slopped his pigs at four in the morning.
“Let’s talk to Carlotta.” Peggy nudged her husband. “Peter just makes her sob even more.”
That line struck me as peculiar, but then the Fenwicks knew Carlotta better than I. Perhaps the moody, handsome son, so much his mother’s son, could, indeed, make her fall apart.
Late in the afternoon, the guests drifting away, particularly my New York friends who tumbled into Bunny Wilson’s Stutz Bear-cat and headed back to the city, I sat by myself in the parlor and simply watched the hangers-on. Jason Fargo, more subdued now and quiet, sat by his lonesome in a rocker by the fireplace, chain-smoking one cigarette after another, his face puffy-looking and slack-jawed. But then he was joined by Delia, who jarred him from his narcotic reverie as she immediately launched into conversation about Jason’s struggling playhouse in Weston. Jason stared at her, empty-eyed, as she rambled about the play that Peter was working on. Would he schedule—was there the possibility—of a reading at the playhouse? A run-through? A testing before a live audience? “It’s not like a try-out in New Haven,” she summarized. “Of course.” Straining to hear, I actually heard her whisper, “It’s not like he’s Edna Ferber.” Snide, biting. She added, “He’s written a part for me, one of the leads, a rich part really, and I told him it’s brilliant and . . .” She looked up to see me staring, absently. Nervous, she rallied. “And Miss Ferber could come. It would be a delightful, even delicious, evening.”
Delicious? Well, hardly, I thought. Pernicious, perhaps.
I tried to cast her a suitably withering look, but sighed, knowing full well that my legendary crushing looks, so emphatic and stony, so dreaded in New York City, only worked on folks with a necessary modicum of intelligence.
Jason, to his credit, said nothing, seemed to see Delia for the first time, and simply stood up and walked out of the room. Delia smiled at me. “Perhaps this is the wrong time to discuss my career.”
“I didn’t know you actually had one,” I snapped.
“Miss Ferber, you do say the funniest things.”
At that moment Julia, emerging from her corner, her quiet son at her side, passed by, leaving. I reached up and touched her sleeve. “Julia.” The housekeeper paused, smiled.
“Miss Ferber, this is my son, Andrew.” We exchanged greetings, with me holding the boy’s firm hand, and the boy saying self-consciously, “We read one of your short stories in class. ‘The Gay Old Dog.’ I enjoyed it.” He grinned, sheepish. His remark surprised and pleased me. I liked the boy: steady eye contact, a kind of raw-boned self-confidence, an intelligent face, sturdy but lithe carriage.
“Julia, I was touched by your words today.”
Julia shook her head. “I almost couldn’t do it, but when nobody would hire me, years back, Martha did. Even though she knew my father and Stanley were a stone’s throw away. She was a—a blessed, good woman.” She looked rattled now, shook her head again, and walked away. Andrew nodded at me, then followed his mother out the front door. They’d be walking the path back past her father’s tenant house to catch the River Road bus. I wondered whether Eben, hidden inside, alone with his chickens and his apple sauce, would watch his grandson passing by. Such foolishness, I thought. Feuding was something I only did for recreation.
As the room emptied out, a newcomer appeared, and Carlotta, emerging from the hallway, her makeup rebuilt, frowned. I heard Peter whisper to Delia, “Nathan Brosnan—here. Really?” Nathan Brosnan, her last husband, whose letter had precipitated her change of plans the day Martha was killed. Not at the funeral—so far as I knew—and obviously waiting for the grievers to leave, he entered without knocking, looked around the room distractedly, then approached Carlotta. “I wanted to extend my condolences, Carlotta.”
“I’m surprised you’re here, Nathan.”
“Well, I did know Martha that year when you and I were married.” He looked around, spoke confidentially. “You know, Carlotta, I was questioned for hours by that Trooper Wolniak. A very annoying young man. He kept asking when you stopped in to see me. I told him, though I can’t exactly remember. And he kept saying, ‘Are you sure?’ I started to feel guilty.” He snickered, then coughed nervously.
She shrugged him off.
“No matter, Nathan. I’ve done nothing wrong. Everyone knows that.”
“It made me nervous.”
“You were always nervous, Nathan. That’s why we got divorced.” A cavalier, throwaway line.
His eyes got wide. “We got divorced because you got bored with me.”
“I can only take men in my bed for a year. After that, they’re, well, in the way.”
He looked around, embarrassed. No one but me was watching. He was another tiny man, like Jason Fargo, and could be his brother: a bushy moustache, slicked-back hair, a compact bantam rooster body with small hazel eyes in bony blotchy face. He’d shaved, but poorly, and a few vagrant tuffs of white-gray hair had escaped his blade’s attention. I knew he’d been a bookkeeper in Greenfield, though he’d lost his job after the Crash. Now, Carlotta had told me, he worked as a poorly paid town inspector, but I couldn’t remember of what department. Married again, within a year or so of his divorce from Carlotta, to a shrew of a wife—so said Carlotta—who took in sewing and laundry.
“I liked coming to the Inn,” Nathan said suddenly.
Carlotta started to laugh, uproarious, and I noticed she sloshed the contents of the glass she held. The wine splattered on the threadbare oriental that covered the wide-board floor. Lord, I thought, Carlotta had probably been drinking surreptitiously during the long afternoon.