Now, I must explain that my funeral is in the early seventies, an era in which Vermont ladies are inclined to bedeck themselves with beehives, my native state forever behind the times - a.k.a. “backwards” - including Charlene Mally; which is why she is leaning over my casket from my top side down, her stiff-sprayed beehive fastening to the Vietnam War medals Melody inappropriately pinned to my Brooks Brothers suit. And it’s not until George, in his inimitable, commanding way, begins ushering my grieving friends back to their pews that anyone notices the provocative posture of a voluptuous female glued to my cold, dead face. As raucous as Rolundo was but a moment before, and as clamorous the crowd, not a sound can be heard save the swishing of wood-handled fans as though the air is at fault for the view. Even George doesn’t makes a move – a rare sight to behold – Charlene’s undulating posterior rising and falling like Beethoven’s Eroica in an eagerness to disown her score. And Aunt Martha? She’s nowhere to be seen, or felt, or tuned-in, or however two spirits get in touch, leaving me alone with my body. My corpse, with Charlene attached.
The solution comes to me with the same dispatch with which Reverend Rolundo, decrepit as he is, sprints for the vestry door. Recalling what Aunt Martha has taught me in the five short days since, as she puts it, I “vacated the premises”, I manage a permit to “reenter”. Charlene may never kiss again, for the one I give her evokes such a shriek that it leaves her hairpiece affixed to my chest like a mohair vestment in sacramental brown. Literally tearing herself from my chest, she rears and whirls as though fending off attack, jumping astride George’s back as my wife lets go a piercing scream at the phantoms deserting my casket - the sight of a headless horseman, galloping for the vestibule with the stolen soul of her man, enough to bring her round.
A revelation comes to me - and Aunt Martha, as well. Here I am, reposing innocently, my body lying, as it were, on a sacrificial altar, a catafalque of all the miseries I’ve left behind. And my peers? they’re all, with one accord, rubbernecking: watching the spectacle of George and his wigless rider make for the exit. It’s like I’m safe at the back of the world. No one sees me. No one, at the moment, even remembers me. I’m free. Unencumbered. Uninhibited. Free. Free as a baby.
“That’s a good idea, my dear,” Aunt Martha chortles, startling me anew. “It’s your second chance. One wrapped in an infant’s blanket and placed under your own family tree. A tree planted right here in Plainfield. What more could you ask for? Being born again in your own hometown – which, come to think of it, is something your dear parents were praying you’d experience the last time around.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask, surprised by her reappearance. “And aren’t you ashamed of the mess you’ve made of my final respects?”
“Not ‘talking,’ Melvin, ‘thinking,’” she parries. “Thought is our mode of communication now, not speech,” she corrects, ignoring my question of shame. “Where once you thought one thing, felt another, said a third, and did a fourth, here your thought is clarion, the tongue’s artifice of no account. Antiquated. And the sooner you concede that the gauze of speech can no longer hide old emotional wounds, the quicker you’ll find you heal. The truth shall set you free, taught our dear Lord. Remember that one? No, I suppose you don’t,” she thinks rhetorically, giving my casket a piteous look, “but I know you remember the Rogue case…the Boston sperm bank…your deposits there, and how Melody yearned for a child. It’s still possible, you know. Her baby could be you!”
My eyes are on Melody again, the grieving villagers smothering her in ill-timed condolences. “Sorry about that woman,” the Reverend’s wife declaims; and, “Sorry about that crazy eulogy,” Charlene’s mother adds. A baby might be just what Melody needs, I decide. And pregnancy would be a good defense against George, too. (I recall several recent plights where George cried fowl when a lady cried wolf.)
“There you go again,” Aunt Martha chides, “conniving will get you nowhere, Melvin. Truth. It’s truth we deal in here. And I don’t mean the kind you were paid to defend in court. Here, the truth shall set you free, not incarcerate you. Think about it: set-you-free…rhymes with Mel-o-dy. Set-you-free. Mel-o—“
“I get it, Auntie, I get it.”
“Failing to plan is planning to fail,” she scolds. “Gotta make use of what you have…or had.”
“You reduce life’s hurdles to croquet wickets,” I argue. “You can’t imagine how many purse-packets of tissues Melody cried into wads and shreds. If a baby were possible, we would have five by now.”
A bone-rattling chill overtakes me as I recall that, while Aunt Martha was among the living, her strength was often derived from the weakness of others - my aunt’s fingers doing a paradiddle on my casket. Suddenly, I find myself complicit in her Delphic implication. Maybe Thoreau was right: To regret deeply is to live afresh!
There is nothing more improbable than life, its war of loss and gain so never-ending.
II
The untimely death of Melvin Morrison has become George O’Malley’s Damascus. Transcending grief, his own life comes back like curtain calls, his every indulgence a play on memory’s stage. Only three months have elapsed since Melvin’s demise, but they seem more like years; for George is thinking deeply, mumbling into depths he’s never plumbed.
Maundering along the blue-iris banks of his late-summer pond, George’s morning is alive with promise, its color, its sound, all astir in the Green Mountain breeze: the gently sloping meadows laughing with lupine; foxglove bells dipping to the buzz of bees; bobolinks and purple finches warbling their answering calls; even an army of ants appearing friendly, old soldiers filing quickly out as though intent on following his lead.
But where is he going? At forty-three he is more than ten years Melvin’s senior, a disturbing fact nipping at his nonchalance like a rabid dog. He’s reached that ripeness of age when one should just sit back and enjoy a kind of virtuous fondness for women, a time when imagination should prevail over action, when desire should be sweeter than satisfaction. If he’s known anything intimately, it’s selfishness; its accusing finger marring the walls of his solitude. With Melvin’s death has come an awakening, a vision of life, of love – the promise of life in love - a season for sharing, a quest for that happiness known only by two. A quest Melody Morrison personifies.
Melody is not easy to forget, her very name like the song within; her delicate beauty, her porcelain blue eyes, a comforting tune playing down the halls of George’s mind - halls that should remain empty for a time, the smack of impropriety barring the doors; impropriety reminding him painfully of his flight from Boston, his attempt to start anew in Vermont. One tryst too many it had been - the wife of his Boston law partner. But Melody is different: a wife, yes, but a wife with promise, one who will eventually be coming out like a debutant at some merry widows’ ball. Time is all that matters now: time to bury the dead; time to amend his ways; time to court the future, that ever beckoning part of one’s life Melvin just proved dubious.
Circling his pond, his steps strike under him awkwardly, unsteadily, much unlike the purposed man he’s always been; his array of courtroom triumphs having lent him a strut, a conquistador’s grace, a way of exiting boardrooms and bedrooms as though danger were his sole pursuit. But now he finds himself mincing, cautious, fearful his pleasant rearrangement might fall apart, might crumble like his recent expectations: those randy desires he harbored when engaging a local commune to landscape his rolling grounds, to border his pond, to make his new estate as beautiful and wild as the hippie girls he thought his employment would buy. But they ignored his advances, going about their work like Pavlov’s dogs, planting their flowers in a practiced routine allowing no notice of strangers.
And a stranger he is. A stranger in Vermont, and estranged from Boston, his escapades precluding his appearance in court – which is why Melvin had handled the Rogue case; another notch on the bailiwick that could have been his had he not forfeited it by a notch on his bedpost
. Young Melvin had been his hand, his greedy finger from a safe but manipulative distance in the Back Bay pie - as well as a front to Vermont’s nobility. For so these Vermonters seem to be, four generations the minimum tenure before one has right to the title. And now Melvin has abandoned him, leaving him a peasant in a princely realm. It’s not as though these knights of the farm will do him harm; but neither will they take him in, their cold-shouldering silence shrugging him off with a kind of righteous, indifferent impunity.
What manner of man can flourish in such guarded soil? From dung he’s sprouted, and by dung he’s profited; though the stench drove him out - his own stench, he admits, allowing a chuckle. He’s pressed the grape of life to its last drop and still come away with a thirst; a deficit he blames more on the vineyard than any care he failed to give it. A logical conclusion, too, when one senses the pollen of life astir in the Green Mountain air. Even his old farmhouse seems more alive, more alert than the Charles River brownstone he abandoned, its chiseled facade, under a century of soot, but a stone-shuttered shadow from a lamp-lighted past. Still proud is the old house he bought in Vermont, proud as the brawny men who hewed it from the wilds, bequeathing it a kind of primitive grace outlasting the decay of years – years following each other like beads on a rosary till the house has become like a prayer, a chant in the praise of life, of living, of everything vital he’s missed; coming, as he has, from a city where men spread their nets to catch the wind and only go home to die.
To die? Death is a certainty. Life is not. Life is a challenge echoing from Melvin’s grave. A challenge for Melody. A challenge for him. A challenge best met by two - as from his rambling back porch he turns to survey his pond, the enveloping meadow, the distant copse of silver maples disturbed by the mountain breeze, their waving leaves like so many hands in a fluttering farewell from the past - a past he’s pleased to quit.
The breeze comes down to play, to rattle the wind-chimes the hippies hung from the Boston fern, the music like that of a bell, a telephone summoning him through his house and into the front entry hall to press the black crescent piece to his ear, muttering, quizzically, as though questioning the source of the rings:
“H-hello…hello?”
“George?” a sultry voice queries, “…George, is that you?”
“It’s me, Charlene,” George gasps, trying to sound composed, collected. “Just a little winded from a jog round the farm, that’s all. Part of my new, holistic workout,” he fibs, reaching for a horsehair chair he’d found in the barn and placed in his hall for some husband he might wish uncomfortable, “my spiritual regeneration. But what’s up? Why’d you call?”
“Well…I called,” Charlene hesitant, selecting words as though avoiding a contretemps, “I called because I have an idea. A suggestion…something to aid your regeneration.”
“You do?” the old carnal man coming alive within, “and what makes you think I need help? Maybe it’s me that’ll regenerate you!” he blurts, suddenly thrilled at the prospect of conquest.
“Now George…Mr. O’Malley,” she parries coldly, “you know I’m not that kind of…well, never mind what you do or don’t know. What I meant was I have an idea for your practice. A suggestion that might bring you a client. You’ll have to agree: it’s been dead around here since…since….“ Trailing off, she leaves the impression of tears.
“Now, now, my dear,” George croons, his reformed persona doing battle with the inner imp, “I was just pulling your pretty little leg, that’s all,” he charms, wishing he could do just that – and more. “Now, tell me what you’ve got on…on your mind!” he finishes with a start, stumbling over a recalcitrant imagination.
“Clients, Mr. O’Malley. Clients,” she redirects.
“Call me George, dear. Save your Mr. O’Malley for the clients – if, or when, we land any.”
“But that’s just it, Mr. O’Mal— George, that’s why I phoned; because if you have no clients, I have no job - though I do have a solution,” Charlene topping mundanities with an afterthought.
“Talk on, darling, I’m listening.”
“All right…George…it’s like this. I figure the locals don’t need a stranger butting into their affairs when there are native attorneys who know whose skeleton is in which closet; and, more importantly, who has the keys. The way I see it, you’re a sure loser in their view, a distinct disadvantage…like some yokel trying to get sugar from an elm. You don’t know where to tap,” Charlene’s red lacquered nails tapping her handset indicatively.
“And you do, I suppose?”
“Sure, I do; but I’m not a lawyer. All I can do is lead you to the right tree.”
“And then what? Leave me out on a limb?”
“No, it’s not that simple. For just because I point out a sugar maple is no guarantee it’ll give up its sap. And even if it does, there’s still the secret of turning the sap into sugar, you know. I reckon the Boston Irish don’t know squat about that.”
“You’d be surprised by what I know, sweetheart; especially when it comes to getting sugar from a sap,” he chortles. But having learned that to admit error is to acknowledge wisdom, he thinks better of calling her down, presuming the merit of her intentions. “Forgive me, Charlene,” he continues with delicate regret. ”I should be thanking you for your concern, not arguing your point. But you’ve been painting the problem, my dear, not the solution; and I’ve been aware of the problem since the day I convinced Melvin he was the solution…since the day we became partners. But Melvin’s gone, and the solution with him.”
“But it’s not gone!” Charlene exclaims. “The ‘solution’, as you call it, is very much extant. It lives. It thrives in the memory of Melvin. And what better connection is there to his memory than his wife? Don’t you see? If Melody Morrison were to let it be known she intends to complete her law degree and join the firm-“
“What?” George interjects, bouncing up from the horsehair chair’s hard coil springs “join the firm? Now that would be a coup, a real sympathy grabber…and a boon to my bank account, as well. But she’s said nothing to me-”
“And she probably won’t unless you go to her with the proposition…you know, like she owes it to Melvin to complete his dream, to see Morrison & O’Malley into its second generation: Morrison, Morrison & O’Malley – the O’Malley moniker if you live long enough, the plurality of Morrison representing Melody and her son.”
“Son?” George gasps, ignoring her disparaging reference to his age, “what son? They-they never had a son, Charlene. What are you-?“
“Melody’s pregnant, George. Thinks it’s a boy. And she’s planning to complete her degree. Thelma Peabody told me all about it.”
“Pregnant?” he echoes, “p-pregnant by-?
“By Melvin, of course,” she quips peevishly. “Who else would it be?”
“But-but-“
“A Rogue baby, George. Melvin left…well…Melody was able to conceive after the fact, so to speak.”
“The fact of what?…Oh! the Rogue Bank! I get it!“
“Get it, or forget it, George,” Charlene snips. “All that matters now is what we do with what Melvin left behind. His memory. A memory Melody can turn into dollars. Dollars, George. Dollars for all. The locals will back her. It’s their civic duty, their Christian duty, their selfish duty, even, to keep the keys in trusted hands.”
“…Keys?”
“The closets? The skeletons?“
“Oh, that! Yes…well, if what you’re telling me is true, it appears Melvin just let one out.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that between the two of us - between Melvin and me - we slipped one over on the Ways. Turns out it was Melvin’s last case – that Rogue vs. Way debacle – and since he’s not here to suffer the consequences, I’ll share a secret. There were two reasons Melvin represented the Rogue Bank in its suit to suppress the Ways. The first was because I got him retained. The second was because neither the bank n
or Melvin had a choice in the matter. The suit had to prevail. Otherwise, the Ways would have learned who the donor was…may have made it public; and that would have been the ruin of both the bank and its donor alike.”
“And who was the donor?”
“Well, let’s just say that after the way the Way kid turned out - lacking so many essential parts it gave up trying inside a year - there was no way the Way party could ever know the truth, which is why the Rogue Board and I operated sub rosa. We were the only ones who knew the donor’s identity.”
“Then, you…you were the donor?”
“Now, I didn’t say that, Charlene. I said I knew the donor.”
“No, you didn’t, George. You said you knew who he was; which is not necessarily the same as knowing him.”
“All right, I knew him. But he didn’t know-“
“He didn’t know what? That you knew him? Come on, George. How can you know a man and he not know you?”
“No. I meant he didn’t know he was the Way donor. Otherwise, there was no way he would’ve handled the Ways the way he did.”
“…Melvin? It was Melvin?”
“You guessed it. But I swear he never knew. You see, Melvin was a regular donor while a student at Harvard - which is how I met him. Not then, but later…after the Rogue Board called me in on the case. As a coincidence, I soon deduced that Melvin could be my way out. My way out of Boston, that is. I came up here to find him, prepared to tell him the perturbing facts…especially, if it made me his partner. But disclosure wasn’t necessary – telling him, I mean. Melvin was delighted to take me on. And I was just as delighted to hand him his first Boston case. It worked out well for all concerned.”
Twice Melvin Page 2
