The Family of Max Desir

by Robert Ferro

  It was here that, coincidentally, the local parade came to its own Memorial conclusion, with a distant, competent taps. This military aspect, addended to what had been at every moment a highly detailed funeral, and coming just as it was ending, had a profound effect on the mourners. All the power of theater was thrown at them. They were overwhelmed by the sound, the associations, the complete and utter certainty that all are doomed. It gave them a deeply satisfying sense of the funeral’s completion, and of the achievement in the end of a meticulous, civic, somewhat larger significance. The tumbling three-notes of the distant trumpet, floating through the trees, fell into a single long threadlike sound that drifted farther off and disappeared.

  THREE MIDDLE-AGED IRISH WAITRESSES in flats, a short bartender, and a blond secretary from Mara Products who looked like a beauty queen had prepared the house for the reception. The last words spoken by Father Bill over Marie’s coffin, and she would have deplored their omission, had been, The family has asked me to invite everyone back to Hillcrest for refreshment before the trip home.

  Perhaps seventy-five had come back. White-skirted tables were poised to waltz about the principal spaces. The dining room table was edible. The house at first seized everyone’s attention. Wasn’t it her? Wasn’t it beautiful?

  Madelaine came, toward the end, with another black woman, and carrying Aisha. She introduced the woman to Max, at the same time handing Aisha to him, and saying to the woman, This one’s okay.

  He took them through the buffet and sat with them while they ate. Penny came along and snatched the baby, who went along happily. When Madelaine’s friend went back to the buffet and they were alone for a moment, he said, I’m very grateful to you, and Madelaine reached over and patted his hand and said, I know you are. We all did it for Marie. She was very proud of you all.

  If I give you something, Madelaine said, will you promise not to open it until I leave? She took a small box wrapped with brown paper and string out of her bag and handed it to him.

  It is you, he said. Why didn’t you tell me?

  I am tellin’ you, she said.

  Her friend came back from the buffet with two cups of coffee. We can’t stay, Madelaine said. She’s helping me move.

  Where are you going?

  Oh not far. I gave your daddy my address.

  Can I come and see you and Aisha?

  I don’t think you’ll want to, she said. But if you do, call and make sure I’m there.

  HE HAD REMEMBERED IT AS PORCELAIN but it was bronze. The reins were gone. A small piece of paper was taped to the neck: Max, 1955.

  X.

  ONLY JOHN, MAX AND ROBIN WERE INTERESTED in visiting the grave. Penny and Jack avoided it altogether. John went every day, Max every week.

  When the caretakers did nothing to clean up the plot Robin undertook the job herself. A web of weedy surface roots covered the ground like a net. She pulled up long lengths of it, ripping it loose like tattered carpet. Understanding the particulars—the hard stony ground unturned in decades, the insipid grass, roots and assorted tendrils—she returned with her gardening tools. When she had cleared the surface she began turning over the ground with a spade. Toward the center of the plot the shovel struck something hard, just beneath the grass. It was too large and flat to be a stone or rock. Agitated and in a way frightened, she pulled away some of the overlying sod, exposing a flat dirty gray face of cement. In the oddness of the situation, in an old cemetery, it appeared to be an unmarked and forgotten grave. It seemed unnecessarily close to the surface, as if, through the years, it had mysteriously risen up through the ground. And if it was not a grave, what was it? and why hadn’t the gravediggers discovered it, or said anything if they had?

  She called John, who arrived as if at the scene of a traffic accident prepared to identify loved ones. He had had nothing to do with the selection of the cemetery or plot and might have expected something to go wrong with it. He poked around in the dirt. The stone or piece of cement was rectangular in shape, absolutely flat across the top, about two feet wide by five feet long; too small to contain a body unless it was that of a child. It lay across the plot perpendicular to Marie’s grave, toward the foot of the mound of dirt.

  What the hell is it? John said with a note of panic, of desperation in his voice.

  Robin said, Mary Kay mentioned this plot was marked as sold for years on the manager’s map and they only discovered it when she got here.

  You mean somebody was already buried here? he asked. We’ve buried her next to a stranger? Robin! His eyes went red, filled up and ran over. She’ll kill me, he said.

  Dad, now quit it. You’re jumping to conclusions. You don’t know what that is. She touched his arm and looked up and under at his downturned face. Let’s go find the manager and ask him, she said, and they started off through the maze of plots and monuments.

  This predictably calming walk led them to a kind of gothic religious folly that had been erected inside the entrance gates by the builders in 1875. About the size of an eight-room house, it was made of stone and mortar, with the buttresses, spire, stained glass and pretensions of a cathedral. Even standing directly in front of it, the structure seemed still to be a block away. It was used now only as a warehouse and shed; what had been the miniature sacristy had become the manager’s office.

  Whatever, God help him, was in the plot with Marie, it must go, John thought, and knocked loudly on the sacristy door. It opened and an immensely fat man, all the larger for emerging from the toylike structure, came outside.

  Are you the manager? John asked, and the fat man nodded. Well, I’m John Desir. I just buried my wife here a while ago.

  The manager nodded again. Next to Willingham, he said.

  Well, we just found something buried in the ground there, next to my wife. Right there! A great big thing … I don’t know how this happened but whatever it is I want it out of there right away.

  The manager stood for a moment, perhaps waiting for more. Then he went back into the sacristy and came out again with a shovel. As they were starting off through the graves, Max drove through the gates. Robin came around and got into the car.

  You are not going to believe this, she said as a preamble. Through the windshield Max saw his father’s distraught expression, the fat manager’s toy shovel.

  Now what? he said.

  Something in the plot besides Mom, she replied. I was digging up those roots and hit something. It scared the shit out of me.

  What do you mean, hit something? What is it?

  I don’t know, she said. Something big. Maybe it’s another grave. I couldn’t even find the edge of it.

  The macadam road made an arc around the section through which John and the manager were walking.

  Is it near the grave? he asked.

  It’s practically on top of it. I can’t see how they missed it. Dad is vibrating.

  They reached the grave first. The mound of dirt was in the second of its many stages and had a slightly melted look. Half of the rest of the plot had been cleared, and part of that had been turned over with a spade. You could see the beginning of an outline.

  The manager, lumbering a distance behind John, approached, stuck his shovel in the ground once and announced, It’s an old foundation.

  For what? Max said, and John and Robin said, For what?

  An old memorial that was never built, the manager replied. He started to dig out one edge of a long cement rectangle. The three of them watched.

  This is mortar, the manager said. Been here a long time. I’ll have to look it up.

  Didn’t you look it up when you sold it to us? John asked.

  Not marked, the man replied. We would never have sold it to you if it was.

  Watching him work, Max felt it was no different from seeing him dig her up. The manager said they would need a winch. John went off with him to speed things up and Robin and Max stood there.

  Charming, she said.

  He said, It’s just like the tumor, and she sa
id, Yes, but this one’s operable.

  He thought of it also as the remains of the walled city, he supposed, although that interpretation was far too benign for the situation. The manager, his tentlike trousers slipping down to expose a quivering belly of folds, alternated between digging out the sides of the foundation, which disappeared several feet into the ground, and standing on it and attempting to break it up with a sledgehammer. As it was, he explained, it would be much too heavy for the winch.

  Would you please tell me, Robin inquired, how the diggers didn’t see it? How they missed it? It’s practically touching the grave.

  Just missed it, the man said, puffing from the exertion and taking the question as an excuse to stop. He had succeeded only in slightly rounding two of the corners. He dug some more, then stopped again.

  This was for a big stone, he said. One of them obelisks maybe. Family changed their mind and got a bigger plot. The old manager never wrote it down, just left it marked sold. Then he died, someone else came in and that was that—a secret. He took the sledgehammer and slammed at another corner.

  When Max returned the next day an orange tarpaulin covered most of the plot, anchored by rocks and puddles of water from a heavy rainfall during the night. Next to the grave the tarp bulged over a trapezoid of wood planks covering a hole dug around the old foundation block. He threw back the tarp and removed one of the planks. The block had been dug out to a depth of three feet. Near the bottom of one side a comer of Marie’s coffin vault had been exposed like a bone. The vault and the block had been less than a foot apart. The block of mortar, greatly reduced in size, sat tilted in the hole. Off to the side under the tree lay a pile of chunks and fragments that had been chipped from it.

  The next day it rained again. The morning after that John was there at seven to supervise. By the time Max arrived the manager and one of the gravediggers had got chains under the block and were ready to winch it out. In the end they smashed it up completely and carted off the pieces in a wheelbarrow. As the manager was about to shovel dirt into the empty hole, Max saw him from Marie’s point of view—a fat colossus at the edge of the void. Max went over and stood beside the man while he shoveled, until ‘he corner of the vault had been covered again. It wasn’t that he thought she could see them, as from the perspective of a window in the ground; it was more a question of being the last person to see anything of her.

  HE REALIZED THAT HIS RELATIONSHIP to his mother had not changed. He had only to speak to her aloud at the grave. After her long illness it seemed natural to imagine or assume her reactions; he was used to the idea of not being sure she had understood or even heard him.

  And then at times, infrequently, he imagined she said something to him. He thought she said, Mrs Koenig is being very nice to me.

  Who’s Mrs Koenig? he asked.

  Down the line, she replied.

  The Koenig stone, nearby, was a large elliptical slab of considerable style, surrounded by a well-kept, waspishly mature privet hedge. William T and his wife Elizabeth. Died 1913 and 1927. The tombstone, dating from the first death, had thus been the widow’s work. He thought of Mrs Koenig and his mother sitting at a small table amid the graves, having tea, getting acquainted.

  In this way the Koenig stone stood out from the rest, and he saw that with modifications and refinements, it might do for them.

  THE PROPRIETOR OF THE NATIONAL MONUMENT COMPANY explained that they could have anything they wanted, anything at all. Max saw nothing in the display yard that resembled the sort of thing he and Mrs Koenig had had in mind.

  People don’t go for anything big or fancy anymore, the man explained. His name was Don. Too expensive. They walk in, choose a footstone or a plain slab and that’s it, wrap it up. On the other hand, I like to be able to accommodate a project like your own.

  Anything you want, he said again. Just suggest it and we’ll draw it for you, lifesize, just as it will be, so you can see it.

  Robin, John and Max all nodded. Max took out his drawing of an obelisk surrounded by a free interpretation of the Koenig stone, all of it mounted on three steps. Now that he looked at it again, he saw how big it was. It was the sort of thing they might have put up in Indian River as a war memorial.

  Robin whispered, Large darling, into his ear. And Don said, How tall did you see the obelisk?

  … Eight feet? Nine feet? he said.

  Don pulled out a pocket calculator and dialed Cincinnati. That would be twenty thousand just for the obelisk, he said.

  John said, Holy smoke.

  Don took a pencil and decapitated the obelisk at the shoulders. He removed the steps. What we need is a basic shape to work from, he said. Like this.

  What remained was the Koenig stone without the shallow apse in the middle or the urn, and done in right angles instead of curves. With the obelisk removed, the space between the two arms looked empty.

  I saw a stone in the cemetery, Max began. It’s got an urn in the center.

  An urn? John said. Don reached up and took down a book of urns. An urn, John said again.

  Don suggested they go look at the stone, since it was nearby, which they did. John agreed as soon as he saw it, adding only that he thought the urn should open so they could put flowers in it, and Max said, I don’t think we should simply copy some body’s stone. Don said, Don’t worry, I think I know what you mean. Give me a week to do a preliminary sketch.

  They were now to repair somewhere local for coffee. Max said he had to get back to Manhattan. He imagined his father and Robin went somewhere anyway.

  The next week they met again at National Monument. They cut down the height of the shoulders, using a curve Max remembered from a bridge in Florence; they fluted the columns, selected an urn that opened from the book, but made it taller, a little fatter. Don said the next step was a lifesize drawing. He would call them when it was ready.

  This time Max said yes to coffee but then Robin said she couldn’t stay, so Max and John went alone to a local Pancake House of international standing.

  John still looked afflicted with a bad head cold. Robin said he cried at the mention of Marie, or of anything to do with her; although he had not cried at either of these two meetings. It was still unique, as they sat down opposite each other in the booth, for him to see his father in a weakened condition. Robin said the only thing that made him stop crying was talk of the monument or being in church. He had begun to attend Mass every morning at St Jude’s. He had already made a preliminary but substantial donation to the parish, and had reserved Masses for two years for Marie on the occasion of every birthday in the family down to little John III, the youngest. It embarrassed him to cry in front of people, in front of his children. He seldom went to the office and did not make himself available for dinner. He said he didn’t feel right in their houses because of his moroseness. Except for Max they each asked him anyway, every week. Jack expected his father to find relief and comfort in his grandchildren and was offended when he didn’t. Jack said, He’s healthy, he’s rich, he’s comparatively young, and he has a big family. What more does he want?

  It had always been said of John Desir that if he joined a club or organization he was soon made its leader. In Indian River he had been president of the Holy Name Society, chairman of the Booster Club, perennially in charge of any and all fund-raising events. Father Bill had built and paid for one of the largest stone churches in the county with public donations and the advice and organizational help of John Desir.

  In order to offer its parishioners certain religious opportunities, the church in Indian River had made a connection with a monastery upstate for weekend retreats. John and Marie had gone every year, separately; as had Jack and Robin in high school. When at fifteen it was Max’s turn, he felt he had been discovered beneath a rock—a loathsome, sinful vampire in dusty dinner clothes caught out after dawn. Nothing would excuse him his sins—all that masturbation, Louella, the odd wrestling with Scott, plus a whole set of disgusting personal opinions and aesthetics. At fif
teen, the nape of a man’s neck sometimes made his heart dive in his chest. His uncle Dan’s smell, Mennen and man, made him feel he would like to be spanked, though gently and for no good reason. Was God, Christ or anyone else going to bother with such a person?

  His own retreat had been a theatrical experience, a three-day struggle to convince himself he was good enough for God. They ate well and kept relative silence, even at night. Every few hours they listened to a sermon especially tailored to the group’s principal concerns, sex and guilt. At the end of the weekend, just before Vespers, Max went for a walk through the monastery’s apple orchard, fifty trees distributed unevenly over a field of hilly mounds and troughs. Copper light came in at a slant through the wings to one side. The priest had begged them to accept Christ. Only ask forgiveness and all would be forgiven. Only ask.

  But really, he thought, did Christ know about men’s necks? Did God understand about Mennen? Besides that, it must all be put into words, for the priest in confession.

  The clear, fresh autumn air, the smell of apples and grass, the dark web of trees receding on their mounds in the distance, the slanting yellow light, the coarse bark, the gnarled roots, his own skin, the wind against it—all of this comprised a stunning coup de theatre against which he felt utterly helpless. It was quite clear in the surrounding perfection that God was here in the orchard, if only for the moment. Max looked around. He interpreted all this as a sign that even his sins would be forgiven, by the Designer of such a set, by the Director of such a scene. He took it as proof that God did exist and would accept Max into His mercy; would perhaps even go further and bless him, even sanctify him to His own use. Max would become a priest and thereby account for the beauty and purity of the air, the weblike perfection of the trees, the full, fresh happy release into the moment of all his fear and guilt; a holy priest who didn’t think or feel or suffer but for Christ.