There was a lot of quiet and looking at our fingernails and trying not to turn this exchange into a commercial for Alzheimer’s medication. Civil accusations here and there about fatherhood and being a son. The self-reproach in my guts going sha-zam. And then that inevitable primetime line from one or the other of us, so scripted for a scene like this you can smell it from the outset: What do you want from me? It was as if the sun had been instructed to laser a strait through my cranium. Look, look at the frolicsome squirrels in the shade; they seem so…saved. There used to be a cabbage-loving bunny rabbit somewhere around here. And then more quiet between us, hanging there like a drape. “The silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me,” said Monsieur Pascal. And so they do.
Our bourgeois banter ended with her saying, “Cut the grass,” and me replying, “You read my mind.”
BOREDOM INTERWOVEN WITH dread, and all I could wish for was Gillian there at my arm to make the abominable viewing and funeral less agonizing, and not because of morbidity or malaise but because having to endure alone the obligatory kindnesses of the supposed-to-be bereaved is an appalling penance. Gillian could have shaken some hands for me, forced some smiles and niceties, even told the multiple strangers from my family’s past to move along, move along, now, the line is long. (Ignore, obviously, that bit in the last episode about how I reconciled myself to Gillian’s absence and decided I didn’t need her anymore, et cetera. Sometimes a man needs to say a thing to hear how stupid it sounds.)
The whole day and a half before the viewing, and after I mowed the lawn, I slept nearly slaughtered in my boyhood bed: the dreams of rhapsody once dreamed there! (Although, not true, actually: the only dreams I can recall are the usual whitewashed ones that don’t interest me enough to describe them for you, reader, who will be interested even less because you no doubt know that dreams, contrary to the opinions of an eyeglassed Austrian analyst on cocaine, don’t mean a goddamn thing; so the next time you’re reading a writer who finds it necessary to give you a meaningful dream sequence, especially in italics, consider that gimmickry a license to skim or else to drop the scribe entirely.)
I was overcome with another exhaustion that felt bulimic, my body emptied out and ready to vaporize. Somewhere from the subterranean kingdom of sleep I could hear voices down the hall, the front door open and close, a laugh, a sob, and perhaps a song. I like to believe my mother checked in on me as I reposed—lay in repose—for an entire earth rotation. Perhaps she put a palm to my forehead and pecked my cheek. The only time I rose from bed was to fill out a personal check for Morris Hammerstein—in the memo line I wrote, For Mocha—and then I slouched to the street corner, fed the envelope to a blue box.
Charles Agonistes, I was too lethargic, lachrymose to drive the six minutes to my condo to get into a proper-fitting suit and tie, and so I wore one of my father’s getups, a size too big and stained at the knee, but who, really, was going to give a shit? You know how a wake goes: you’ve been to a dozen. My father’s was like every one of those, except this time I was the one suffering there in the front row—up and down, up and down, hello how are you, hello how are you, thank you for coming, thanks very much, yes thank you, I know I need a haircut. Cousins crawled out from different corners of town; my father’s former business colleagues materialized. You wouldn’t have believed the amount of bad polyester in that room, outfits worn only thrice a lifetime. From my chair I could see Dad’s nose stabbing up from the coffin’s ruffled cavern; it could have been anyone in there. But it wasn’t anyone, was it? It was him, he, my father.
I never was a good enough son.
Mom seemed like Hera there at the casket, more or less divine and absolutely in control, wearing navy blue instead of black. Not every death rings in a festival of slobber, especially when the dead is a sixty-year-old misanthrope, and for this, at least, I was relieved.
But it occurred to me (in a flash, as the sayers say), as I watched my Hera mama greeting the party crashers: What if she’s pleased that my father is gone? What if she’s planning to live, really live, now that the unhealthy hater-of-life is about to join the worms? What if—gasp—she already has a lover picked out, someone who resembles, say, pre-plastic-surgery Kenny Rogers, white beard and potbelly and all? Could this be the reason I had not seen her weeping? Was there a Carnival cruise in her immediate future? A ribbed old-lady one-piece bathing suit?
I should have been considering how zig leads to zag, but I tell you, as those imitation mourners filed in and out for two loathsome hours, all I could fathom was my mother with glasses of martinis, beneath disco lights, at the business end of a dance partner who knew the hop and twirl.
As for my father: the mortician had sewn his mouth into a hint of a grin, which was comical considering that he hadn’t smiled in twenty years or more. The skin of his face: a Halloween mask. His hair: combed aslope in a Cary Grant do that never would have occurred to him. What did they do with his blood after they siphoned it from him? I supposed they dumped it down the drain. I stood at the coffin after almost everyone had gone, hands deep in pockets—one had a hole—head cocked as if at a bookstore, and I began feeling shamed for not feeling shamed, for faulty tear ducts, heart like a sewer. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I improve, be full time first-rate?
There in the hallway—all marble floors and Greekish statues on pedestals—waiting for me in a brown slippish dress only about fifty percent appropriate for a wake, stood tiny Mindy Sirento, my first girlfriend from freshman year of high school. We had swapped virginities at fifteen years old, she too young to take pleasure in it, me too young to tell topsy from turvy. I had seen her earlier at the casket and was grateful when she vamoosed out the side door without needing to come offer me blah-blah. Her mother had perished of lung cancer soon after we had begun dating, and Mindy’s response was to turn herself, yes, into a professional cigarette smoker. So that’s what her face looked like now on top of the adolescent acne ruts: it looked like tobacco.
From what I had heard with one ear over the years, she was divorced now, a regular in rehab, had a daughter somewhere. And she had come to my father’s wake why? When I stepped into the hallway she clicked over to me in heels, my name on her tongue, and soon we were embracing. Her perfume and hairspray: made by Marlboro. Her lithe five-foot frame: it seemed my body recalled the hills and valleys of it.
“Charlie,” she said, touching my beard, “you look like a junkie.”
“And I feel all jungly.”
Come, she insisted, outside to smoke, my wrist in her grip, that body a stranger to me for the past eighteen years. Was she going to make me talk? Did she want an update on two decades? I had the feeling she needed to borrow money. I stopped at the bathroom and said I’d meet her in a minute, and when she went out back by weeds and trees to choke down a cigarette, I escaped through the front door, all around me the evening like a bruise. Aside from the obvious—acid baths and iron maidens—what’s more uncomfortable than being pinned under an obtuse conversation by someone you knew in high school, before you were actually you?
Later that night, after the last of the hangers-on departed from our house and the free food they had come for—unabashed chubbies almost every one of them, devouring piles of potato salad and oblongs of garlic bread—my mother and I stood in the now-hushed dimly lit kitchen. The aluminum buffet trays of leftover food sat stacked on the stove, bags of bread in the corner, wine bottles making a city on the countertop.
I said, “Well, the worst is almost behind us. After the funeral tomorrow the worst of it will be done.”
“For you, yes.”
And I told her then of my vision: of her happy and dancing, living out the last thirty years of her life with a pre-plastic-surgery Kenny Rogers.
“You’re a dreamer, dear.”
She made a move to put the cleaned dishes back in the cupboard, but then thought better of it and instead sat at the island counter, pulling off earrings and rings.
“Now’s your turn to get sp
icy,” I said.
“You need a haircut and shave, Charles. Father Henry will think you’re homeless tomorrow at the funeral.”
I loosened the tie still snug around my neck, the very tie, I wouldn’t remember until much later, that Gillian had bought for darling Dad on one of his ungrateful birthdays.
“Did you see your cousin Sammy tonight at the wake? He looks drug-addicted.”
Nothing important, I could see, was going to get talked about. How much suburban realism can a family take? And who had the energy?
“Was that Mindy I saw? Mindy what’s-her-name? Your first girlfriend?”
I grinned. What could I do?
“Her acne never cleared up.”
She left me alone in a kitchen I had eaten in perhaps twelve thousand times. I couldn’t decide whether to sit, stand, or squat. And then I realized—because apparently I had been incapable of a realization prior to this moment—that I hadn’t eaten anything with nutrients since dinner with the Hammersteins in Colorado ten days earlier. What I felt then was more than a sudden hunger after weeks or months of living like a slob. Think of a termite let loose in a lumberyard: I assailed the baked ziti, lasagna—not the beef slices—cold vegetable medley, and buttered Italian bread with the can-do outlook of a goblin intent on regurgitation, and then drank an ungodly amount of merlot (you ever seen a milk-drunk newborn with a dangling head and those stars in his eyes? that was me) so that the sensation I finally went to bed with—crabbing sideways down a too-narrow hallway—came close to what a Brahmin must feel on the verge of Vedic bliss.
During the night, hours or minutes or perhaps mere seconds after I lay on my boyhood bed, I was awakened by what I heard in my furry wine-sleep as a moan or groan, from down the hall in the direction of my mother’s room. I did what one does upon hearing said moan or groan in bed in the nighttime: I lay cadaver-still and listened hard for another. When I thought I heard one I tiptoed to the door and peered down the dark hall; my mother’s own bedroom door was ajar, an almighty moonlight knifing through the crack.
Why I crawled down the carpeted hallway, nearly on my stomach in a covert commando mode, instead of walking upright like a respectable biped, I cannot say exactly, but my guess is that I was aware—on some level I am not frequently in touch with—that I perchance might be confronted with a display too repellent for words. Such as what, for example? I didn’t know: my mother in sorceress garb trying to converse with the spirits; my mother on her mattress with a battery-operated pleasure utensil; my mother counting prescription pills to determine how many she would require to discontinue her respiratory function.
But what I saw was altogether different: my mother standing at the window, pondering the moon, embracing my father’s bathrobe, her mouth and nose pressed into the collar, she and the bathrobe swaying, ever so slightly, as if to the music of a slow dance.
AT THE FUNERAL the following day—just as cinematic as any funeral you’ve ever seen on the big screen or bedroom tube: heavy sun and vast grass, deep grave and rows of stone, black duds and women in bonnets, teardrops into kerchiefs and roses on the casket—Father Henry delivered a predictably maudlin eulogy chockablock with proclamations of what Christ wants, knowledge he knows by way of personal interaction with humankind’s white-robéd savior and all-around model of handsomeness. Adenoidal and lethal on logic, Father Henry had gotten too old for this. It was like listening to Jack the Ripper stutter through a sermon about the civic rights of sex workers. I was this close to pulling his plug and dishing the requiem myself, a little dirge I had rehearsed just in case: Avoid the eventual, I would have proclaimed. Be neither ho-hum nor humdrum.
But I couldn’t do it because my mother and her navy-blue dress never would have forgiven me. As Father Henry nattered on about Christ’s notion of eternal reward and made sentences about my father that were not true, at my side my mother nodded in agreement or esteem. I could not knock from my memory the picture of her swaying in the moonlight with my father’s bathrobe. When the northbound coal train blasted along at the rear of the cemetery, the engine’s rumble squashed the priest’s voice for a minute or more.
The giant gravestone before us—a tri-stone? what’s it called?—bore the names of my father to the right, my mother to the left, and Bartholomew dead-center, his ten-year-old body a corpse for nearly twice that long. My father didn’t include me in the family plot. I was just a teenager when he had to choose this stone; even then he must have felt that I was not worthy of our bunch, that I was an embarrassment and blight. Why? What could a teenage boy have done to his father to earn such ire? Be born beneath the wrong alignment of stars? Or was he protecting me, thinking it an ugly omen for a teenager to see his name in a cemetery so many decades before his own demise (barring unforeseen car crashes and such)? Which was the truth? And why did it even matter anymore? He was erased now, there in that ten-grand crate before me, the mahogany of it lustrous in a late morning sunbeam.
Father Henry said Amen, I said Amen much too loud, the director of the funeral home concluded the service in her very sensitive voice to invite the attendees back to the chapel “for a meal the family has prepared in memory of their beloved”—I’d prepared no such thing—and then people began dispersing this way and that.
A moment later I saw him emerge from the back of the group as if a phantom from movie fog: Friend, freshly arrived from Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever he had been putting bullet holes into the enemies of America. I nearly hugged him, wanted to weep on his clavicle. His six-foot frame looked very Gucci in a pin-striped black suit and tie; his beard was gone, his hair peach fuzz, and the cologne he wore was last Christmas’s Calvin Klein special at Macy’s.
“Friend,” I said, double-pumping his handshake. “You’re here.”
And then we embraced, two Comanche warriors meeting again on a mountain path somewhere in, say, Oregon.
“I’m sorry about your dad, Charlie.”
“He didn’t like you, Friend.”
“But I liked him. And he was your dad, no matter what. You can’t change that.”
“How did you get here so fast? When we spoke last week you were still over there, somewhere,” and I gestured right to indicate a different hemisphere.
He said he had hitched a ride aboard a Navy transport plane with a bunch of banged-up dudes coming home to convalesce, most missing limbs and other parts of import. Then he reached into a pocket and came out with an extra pair of shades, dark and bug-eye stylish, and he put them, tenderly, onto my face. My eyes felt okay for the first time in two days.
I said, “It means a lot that you’re here.”
“Charlie,” he said, “you’re the only friend I got. Which reminds me: you can stop calling me Friend in your stories. I’d be honored if you’d use my name again.”
“Groot! You’re back! All right.”
Just as we were about to begin the catching-up that needed catching, Father Henry wobbled over saying, “Mr. Groot, Mr. Groot, I don’t believe I see you in Sunday Mass anymore.”
“If you’ll excuse me, Father, I must offer my condolences to Charlie’s mother,” and Groot left me standing by the grave with him.
“Father,” I said, “have you ever noticed that you’re like so much toxic material on some people?”
The heat and his lard: he could barely breathe.
“Will you be coming to the meal at the hall of our church, Charles?”
A fat kid on the playground, he tried to dry his face and neck with a handkerchief, but he leaked faster than he mopped.
“Father, listen, I was thinking. We should have a Grand Inquisitor scene right now. I can play Ivan and you can be Aly-osha. It’s the perfect place for it. Think of the gravity it’ll inject into this part of my story.”
More labored breathing and his bulging eyeballs. He begged my pardon. His bulbous nose, not unlike Karl Malden’s, twitched as if anticipating a sneeze. And he simply stared at me, unable to settle on the meaning of my English.
Just
then, Groot sidled up beside me and inquired about the topic of our dialogue.
Father Henry said, “Charles wants a Grand Inquisitor scene to spice up his memoirs.”
“Always a bad idea to rip off Fyodor,” Groot said.
I said, “Are you kidding? I’ve been ripping off everybody from the Sumerians to the Beats, with lengthy stops in ninth century BC Greece and sixteenth century Spain.”
“Charles,” Father Henry said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you: you rather indicted me in that essay of yours, about Marvin Gluck. I never said you should kill him, dear boy.”
“You kind of did. Anyway, no Grand Inquisitor scene for us?”
Across the cemetery I saw my mother get into the funeral home’s limousine, and before she ducked down into the car she glanced about her left and right trying to spot her wayward son and wondering, no doubt, why he was not joining her in the limo to attend a costly buffet lunch cooked for ninety percent strangers and their ninety-eight percent ingratitude.
“Mr. Groot, please tell your friend Charles that I’m not about to stand beneath this sun and converse about the facts of Catholicism with someone who clearly believes them to be fictions. Especially not when a buffet lunch awaits.”
Groot said, “That’s just like your memoirs, Charlie: the tomfoolery between the fictions and the facts.”
He exhumed from his jacket pocket a pouch of chewing tobacco.
“That’ll do, Groot, thanks. There is no fiction in my memoirs.”
Then I told the priest, he who had baptized me naked and confirmed me clothed, that now was the perfect time to make Catholicism once again a literary affair. I mentioned the long list of Catholics who knew as much: Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, to say nothing of Cardinal Newman. I think I even ventured to say Dante and the good Father Hopkins.
Busy Monsters Page 19