I should have left Dad’s spirit in peace next to my mother at Memorial Fields cemetery. Instead, I decided to drive out to Cross Road Lane and Passage Way, the corner where their graves were located. This barren area of fresh plots had no shade, so, as a weeping mourner, you felt as though you were basting in your own juices. The only people I ever saw around were the gravediggers eating long sandwiches out of white paper, chewing and staring like blank-faced cows in a field.
I was in that depression again, and the only way I can describe it is to say that it was a deserted place. I told myself I could see Dad in my own way, whenever I felt like it, as clearly as I could see myself in the mirror. I got into my Jeep and sped down the long driveway to get Dad out of the grave, to stop this charade. I thought about his tactics, how he’d tried to soften my heart, which he’d described as an icy one. “You’re not like your mother,” he used to say. “She cried for everyone.”
I drove, my head in a fog, to Memorial Fields. I was thinking that this dying thing Dad had pulled on me was just like him. He always tried to rile me in one way or another. He used to try to get me going by telling me about his diabetic Mom. She died when he was a seven-year-old boy. Or, his sister, Edie, who died of an aneurysm when she was just eighteen and beautiful; he saw blood trickle out from the side of her mouth. The way he told me about her death, I could envision a hospital room in the hue of old linen, heating pipes hissing, one folding chair next to the bed, dragged in from the lounge, and a brick wall the shade of brown gravy and so close you could lean out the window and touch it. The only color in the room I could imagine was the blood on Edie’s ivory skin. He told me his memories in all their versions. He had a knack for slipping in one heart wrenching detail. At that time, they didn’t have the impact that they were having on me now.
I was lingering in the beginning stage of grief a little too long, unable to do much besides cook for Ray and clean out the fishpond. I wasn’t moving on to the next step, the one after denial. But now that I had reached the mature age of thirty, who was to tell me that I couldn’t have Dad back, that is, in my own way?
I arrived at the cemetery where Dad was buried. I got out of the Jeep and saw the family plot in the new section. The new part of the cemetery was terraced; the freshest plots on the highest level were mounded with heaps of cut flowers.
I walked to the grave and stared at Dad’s chiseled name—Phillip Joyce, 1930-1996. I stood still, with my eyes closed, for a long time. I stood there so long I began to smell him—that mixture of heavy starch and Old Spice cologne, the same scent on his white dress shirt that I still kept hidden in the back of my closet. The warm breeze and thick air at the cemetery made his smell so intense it was almost too much. Now I could smell his neck. I opened my eyes, stared at the ground, and then closed them again. I felt my father; I felt the insides of his wide, thick-skinned palms, my hand in his. He came to life in me.
Dad was sitting on the edge of his gravestone, his cane hooked on his forearm as he relit his pipe, puffing steadily to get something going, and, after a few moments, I smelled the cherry tobacco. God, how I had missed that smell!
“You’re late,” he said. He lightly slid his dapper self from his seat, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His flushed cheeks made him appear ruddier than usual; the heat had already gotten to him.
“It took you this long to come and drag my ass out of here?”
“Look, Phil, it took me a while to figure it all out. I guess I’m not too bright.”
Like so many times before, we felt suddenly parched.
“I could go for a cold one.” He was writing something, stick-in-sand fashion with his cane, in the small bed of dirt at the bottom of the headstone.
When he got in the car I was taken aback by the unfamiliar musty smell of his clothes. He was usually so particular—hard creases down the legs of his pants, coordinated argyle socks. He always carried a small comb in his back pocket.
“Leaving Mom a note?”
He didn’t answer me. I knew he was observing the way families decorated their plots with greenery or geraniums, and how some were lax.
First thing I did was drive Dad to our home. We got out of the Jeep, walked around back passed the semi-circle of rose bushes, and up the back steps, which took us through the screened porch and out to the back patio facing a small marina.
We sat on the wicker rockers, nursing a couple of bitter Heinekens. The cherry tobacco smoke stretched between us like floating taffy.
The boat basin across the way is an historical landmark, because of the old mill on the water’s edge that used to grind grain in the early 1900s. The soldiers from the English army, during the revolution, camped out by the mill, directly across from our bedroom window, prior to their attack on nearby Greenwich, Connecticut. During the summer, after dusk, you can hear fireworks being shot from the amusement park half a mile away and see the sky flickering like a florescent light losing its juice. At times, the explosions tricked me into the sound and drama of a war being fought a stone’s throw from our porch, the vibrations of the cannons and cherry bombs throbbing unevenly in my chest.
How often I would say to Ray, “Phil should see this place.” There was nothing else my father liked better than to drink an ice-cold beer and feel the effects of the waterfront.
I had my chance now. “The Mohegans…” I paused to let him get the full sweep, his green eyes looking blue. “Kayaked from here and on out through those two islands.” With the sun on the barn-red mill in the background, we watched the play of local history in front of us. I dreaded the thought of nighttime, when all this would turn pitch black and the mosquitoes would rise.
Dad raised his cane, poking the air in front of him, counting the slips across the way. He was an entrepreneur himself. There was a plate of old cheddar bits on water crackers on the wrought-iron table next to him, but he seemed only to be thirsty.
“You’re really guzzling, Phil. No bars up there?” I was priming him; the whole shebang about what goes on after you die would come up out of him like a belch.
“Hey. I gotta get back. Your mother’s gonna know something is rotten in Denmark.”
“Shit, Phil. The least you can tell me is the availability of a cold one. Or, do you come from a hot place?”
Dad left the porch, drifted through the French doors, and into the house. They were stuck from the dense heat, but I yanked them open and trailed him. He was walking, more like gliding, away from me, on the hardwood floors, slowing to admire the early American crystal displayed in the china cabinets. He had a taste for elegant things. My living room curtains were full and deep. The raw yellow silk was draped away from either sides of the windows on brass rosettes before falling into long, fluted tails. I expected more of a reaction from him as his figure shimmied past them.
After his little tour, or whatever it was he was trying to prove, he went out the same way he came in—he was superstitious that way—and made his way to the car.
I followed him out to the Jeep. He was already sitting in the passenger seat when I unlocked my door. He was eyeing the Lynch kids down at the end of the driveway. I knew what he was thinking, but he didn’t start in on me about having my own brats. I started the car and let the AC kick in full-blast. Dad was fiddling with the radio, looking for a Schubert Waltz. He passed through every AM and FM station until he found what he wanted. It’s funny how you forget the annoying habits of someone after they’re gone.
“Phil, you never change. And, put on your seat belt. Shit. What’s the difference now?”
Finally, Dad found a composition by Schumann: “Of Foreign Lands and Foreign People.” I had played this song on the piano as a child, in simple form, while he’d sat in our backyard smoking his pipe. Now the song made his head drop back on the headrest as if he were slipping into a nice, hot bath.
“Haven’t heard the good stuff in a while. Have you?”
My father’s eyes closed again, the way they did on that first sip of beer.
“Jesus Christ!” I screamed to jolt him. “His mother!”
No reaction. Fuck, I thought, at least call me a heathen for old time’s sake.
“So, Phil, do the tongues of fire pant over their heads—you know, the big dipper and the other two—the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost? Do they sit on thrones, like those chairs we used to have in the basement? No one wears shoes, I know that—bet they have the native feet like me.”
I turned off the radio.
Phil started to whistle a lusty melody. It sounded like an old German beer garden dance. His whistle was so powerful it always made me a little envious. The tune, performed with too much rubato, filled the car with his growing evasiveness. I probably wouldn’t even miss him when he went back.
On the ride back to the cemetery, with Phil in the passenger seat like an outpatient, I knew I could snap him out of that trance by flooring the gas pedal. Frankly, I’d thought by now he’d be talking about all his relatives, his mom, his sister. I dreaded hearing about Edie. On the other hand, if he had seen her, I was more than willing to listen.
Dad pressed his own foot on the floor in front of him as if he had his own brake. We slowed down.
“You still have the lead foot—want to get yourself killed?”
“Is it worth it, Phil?”
He looked like he was thinking about other things.
“OK, good ole Phil has to get back before they lock the pearly gates. No time for his only daughter.”
He fooled with the radio.
So, this is what I get for suffering? I was going to remind myself next time it wasn’t worth it. Ever since Phil had died, there’d been a steady backbeat in my head. Can you see me? Give me a sign? Having too good a time? And, just as often, it went like this: Don’t look now.
When we arrived at the grave I had an overwhelming urge to see Mom. Soft-shell crabs were in season now and the three of us could go out to The White Wharf on the harbor like we used to and order those frosted daiquiris. Just to see Mom, dressed to kill, wearing a lobster bib, would make me feel better.
Phil rose out of the car and looked a lot worse than when I had picked him up. I watched him drift over to the family plot. He positioned himself on top of his grave, holding his cane in midair like King Neptune. He sparkled in the blinding sun, hovering over the two coffins that lay beneath.
I put the car in reverse and parked. I got out, running zigzag over the sod, over all the bodies lying side by side in a six-feet-under ward, the cool dirt like filling spread between them. I became aware of my feet, stepping on the graves, knocking on the doors of the dead, causing enough of a reverberation to nudge them awake.
Dad used to warn me: Never walk on top of the souls six feet under, it makes them restless.
When I got to the grave, he was gone. I began the same routine. I stared hard. I closed my eyes. I opened my eyes. The smell of him came to me, but it was the musty one.
“Phil! Where the hell are you? Can’t take the heat?” I laughed at his predicament. “No beers where you’re going.”
I looked out over the horizon of headstones. He had been so colorful in his clothes; he even wore pink sometimes. If he were there, he would stand out against the green like a gangly flamingo.
The woman tending a grave in the next row watched me. She started to come toward me, a Hitchcock-type housewife, now a widow, dressed in a shift with a small trowel in her hand.
Go back to your support group. I ignored her and headed back to my car. I remembered the day of Dad’s funeral, the sound of the dirt dropping on top of his coffin. I could hear the sound now. It was caught in my ears. I had been so angry at the dirt that day. It had been dark, rich soil, the kind that was good for planting tomatoes. I’d hated myself for not fighting for him, for not getting him out of there. I had barely enough energy to kiss the red rose in my hand and throw it on top of him. I stood there long after others had left, picturing him inside his fancy coffin, his feet upright and stiff, like they had never been in life, with that dour look on his face.
I got back in the Jeep and checked the side and rear view mirrors for Dad to pop up again. He’d do something like that to throw me a curve. Driving through the maze of the old section, I noticed a mausoleum in the shape of a loaf of bread, covered with English ivy, a bunch of fresh white flowers tied to the handle of the iron door. I drove out the narrow exit, guilty, thinking I’d better start planting petunias.
At home, I walked out to the porch where Dad and I had been just a little while earlier. The untouched dish of cheese and crackers was still there on the end table. I sat in the rocker and finished the beers as boats pulled up to the dock after a calm day, their passengers tossing anchor lines.
I looked out, between the islands, and saw two Mohegans kayaking toward me, hootin’ and hollerin’, their tomahawks raised above their heads. I sat up, startled back into reality, and when they moved closer, I saw it was the Lynch children, sunburned, with snorkels banded to their temples, floating haphazardly on their paddle boat. I helped myself to a cracker, which had lost its freshness in the salty humidity, and watched the old mill turn as it had so many years ago.
Acknowledgements
A deep-hearted thank you to my husband, Mark Rossi, an impatient person who has shown my eccentric writing habits great patience. To my son, Ryan, a startling creative who inspires me with his unique vision and work ethic. Un grand merci to my daughter, Caitlan, my writing comrade and in-house editor. I would also like to thank my brother, poet Kevin Pilkington, who has shared this ‘writing bit’ with me our entire lives and never fails to support me. And, to his wife, Celia, my trusted reader and dear friend.
Thank you, Bob Fogarty, longtime editor of The Antioch Review, for making me remind my writer-self of a few things. For their consistent support: Tom Pilkington, Carlene Edwards, Ernesto Quinonez, Ray Bradbury, Peter Orner, Kevin McIlvoy, Mary Morris, Sheila Kohler, Suzanne Rossowski, Regina Ross, Jim Rosenwald, and Nancy Swallow. And to all my friends who read these stories along the way.
Infinite thanks to the charming Jaynie Royal, editor-in-chief and founder of Regal House Publishing, a visionary who believed in my fiction, and just gets it every time.
I feel so indebted to my meticulous and kind editor, Pam Van Dyk. And, to the entire Regal Team, thank you.
And, finally, in remembrance of my parents, Jack and Lillian Pilkington, the most generous of all characters.
This Side of Water Page 17
