The Truth About Death

by Robert Hellenga

  He shook his head and put his hand on Marginalia. “This is an astonishing book,” he said, and we took another look at some of the images and talked about the exhibit at the Morgan and about my prospects as a cartoonist, which were not good. He explained the facts of life, cartoon life.

  “You can’t just walk in off the street and expect to sell a cartoon to the New Yorker. It’d be like me going to the Morgan Library and asking them to let me curate an exhibit.”

  “I didn’t realize that,” I said. “I’m sorry I took up your time.”

  “You’re not really risk averse, are you?” He laughed again. “Don’t answer that. I’m glad you came,” he said. “You don’t need to apologize. But I want you to forget about drawing cartoons. Stick with your marginalia.” He paused. “I am going to hang onto this last one, though,” he said. “ ‘The Truth About Death.’ Pretty funny. You did a nice job on God’s face. Uncanny. The dog too. I think you found your line here, your style. The others are too labored. This one does what a good cartoon should do: it simplifies everything.”

  “My husband was dying—I mean really dying—while I was drawing this,” I said. “I labored over the other ones, but this one just happened.”

  He wanted me to change the drawing a little. “Give God a cell phone instead of a landline. But don’t touch the dog. The dog is fine as is.”

  “I can do that,” I said.

  “You don’t need to do it now,” he said.

  “Can you see things on your Google Glass? I mean the whole world?”

  “As long as it’s on the Internet.”

  “Could you see my home in Galesburg?”

  “The funeral home?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like you to see it,” I said.

  “Galesburg, right? What state?”

  “Galesburg, Illinois.”

  “Okay, Glass,” he said. “Funeral homes in Galesburg, Illinois.” He looked through the glass and then at me. “There are three, right? Oldfield, that’s you, and Lake Mortuary, and Peterson-Ward?”

  “Do you see any photos?”

  He tilted his head, ran his finger along the temple, and tapped, once, twice. “Oldfield and Daughter, Funeral Directors,” he said.

  “It used to be Oldfield and Son. Simon’s grandfather started the business.”

  He tapped again.

  “That must be your husband and your daughter standing by that sign, and that’s your dog. In a green uniform.”

  “That’s Olive. Next to Simon.”

  “Do you want to look?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t need Google Glass to see them.”

  “Your daughter was going to take over the business?”

  I nodded. “She was, but then she went to Rome and fell in love, and then she was killed in a hit-and-run. Olive is dead too. Liver cancer.” I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes.

  Mankoff didn’t say he was sorry for my loss. He didn’t say anything for a while, and then he said, “So now you’re trying to figure out the truth about death?”

  “I am,” I said. “I was hoping we could put our heads together.”

  “You don’t need any advice from me.”

  “I do,” I said. “At least I did. I needed to come here. I needed to show you some of our cartoons.”

  “Are you going to write something about this?” he asked.

  “I am now,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. “Just remember all the things I’ve told you, and pump up my part, okay?”

  We exchanged books. I signed Marginalia with “Warmest wishes” and drew a little gryllus wearing a Google Glass. Mankoff gave me a copy of How About Never. He signed it and drew a self-portrait under his name on the title page. I already had a copy in my briefcase. Now I had two. I asked him to sign the second one for Jack and Sally.

  I gave him the tin of shortbread and he pried off the lid and took out a piece.

  “I gave away a few pieces on my way here,” I explained. “That’s why the tin isn’t full. But you can make more.” I handed him the recipe, which I’d typed out. “Give this to your wife. Put it in the tin.”

  “This is delicious,” he said, taking his first bite. He put the recipe in the tin, and we said good-bye, and Colin, Mankoff’s assistant, led me through a maze of cubicles to the elevator. I gave him my card. “Give this to Mr. Mankoff,” I said.

  I walked through Central Park on my way back to Jack and Sally’s. Four miles, but I was in no hurry. I sat on a bench by the reservoir and fed two packages of crackers to the pigeons.

  By the time the boys—Jack Junior and Adam—came into my room to wake me up from my nap, the anniversary dinner had begun. I fluffed up my hair with a brush and slipped on the red dress I’d bought for the occasion. The guests had arrived and were eating slices of pâté on crusty bread, drinking champagne and a French rosé, and were inhaling the aroma of a bouillabaisse that had just been delivered from Bistrot Jacques in a big tin stockpot. We watched Jack assemble a salade de gésiers de canard on a beautiful white oval platter: mesclun, tomato wedges, green beans, hard-boiled eggs, boiled new potatoes, sliced cucumber, and the gésiers—sautéed duck gizzards.

  “You can’t really do the gésiers at home,” Jack explained as he cut them into thin slices. “They’ve got to be cooked over low heat for a long time. In France you can just buy them already cooked in the grocery store. They come in little plastic pouches. The boys love them,” and to demonstrate he picked up a couple of slices with his fingers and placed them in his sons’ open mouths.

  I’d never shown my cartoons to anyone except Simon, and now Bob Mankoff, and suddenly I was hungry for a wider audience. I didn’t want to make a faux pas by interrupting the drama of the duck gizzards, but I thought of Mankoff’s advice—“Don’t pay any attention to what other people think about you, because it doesn’t matter”—and fetched my portfolio—a manila folder—from the guest bedroom. I laid six cartoons out in a row on the sideboard.

  I soon had everyone’s attention. Who can turn away from a cartoon? No one. Everyone, the boys included, admired them and even laughed out loud at some of them. “The lost funeral home of the elephants” was the favorite. Everyone insisted that I should send all six of them to the New Yorker, and I realized that I hadn’t mentioned my trip there to anyone, not even to Jack and Sally, and I didn’t mention it now, didn’t mention “The Truth About Death,” which I’d kept to myself; didn’t mention the fact that Mankoff had wanted to “hang on” to it.

  I put the cartoons away and had a glass of the rosé—Côtes de Provence—which was from a vineyard in Provence co-owned by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. “It’s very hard to come by in the United States,” Sally told me. “No one can get more than six bottles.” She leaned toward me and whispered in my ear: “Jack says it’s not just another crappy celebrity wine. He says it’s really good.” And she started to laugh.

  “It is really good,” I said. And it was, and the salade de gésiers de canard was really good too, though most of us were a little apprehensive about the gizzards. At least at first. And the bouillabaisse was heavenly, the tarte aux abricots divine. The coffee was robust, the pear cognac sweet and tart at the same time.

  We toasted Jack and Sally and wished them many happy returns of the day, and Jack promised another dinner as soon as “Medieval Marginalia” opened at the Morgan.

  * * *

  I’ll be staying in New York for a few days while Jack and Sally fly up to Quebec for a little vacation and to check out some French-Canadian restaurants. I’ve got three long meetings scheduled with Cyrus at the Morgan. Even though it’s summer vacation, the boys will be at the Calhoun School from eight thirty to three thirty every day, working on a full-scale production of Romeo and Juliet. I should still have time to take in the Unicorn exhibit at the Cloisters, the Parmigianinos at the Frick, and the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney, but I’ll probably have to skip the Italian Futurist exhibit at the Guggenheim. After lun
ch I’ll stop by the school’s performing arts center on Eighty-First Street to watch the boys working on the set or rehearsing their lines or figuring out their blocking. Jack is Mercutio on stage and a carpenter when he’s working on the set; Adam is a torchbearer in the first act, Mercutio’s page later on, and a scene painter when he’s not on stage. We may grab some sandwiches at Zabar’s around the corner and take them home for supper, or we may wait till later, take a cab to Bistrot Jacques, and eat bouillabaisse or pasta with grilled artichokes, or we may pick up something at the little grocery store on Eighty-First Street near the condo that Jack and Sally wanted me to look at. Or we may order pizzas, or maybe we’ll just break out the peanut butter and jelly. We’ll figure out something.

  Jack and Sally will be back in time for the performances of Romeo and Juliet. And then, unlike Olive, I’ll be turning back, back to Galesburg, where I’ll live the life I’ve been given. Bart is dead. Louisa is dead. Hildi is dead. Simon is dead. Olive is dead. Everything that I know about them happened in the past. That’s just the way things are, just the way Olive explained them to me. I’ll sit at the library table in Simon’s tower, surrounded by great works of art, though I’ll probably change things around as soon as I get home. I’ll have to give it some thought. I’m aware, of course, of the limits of great art. Even of the greatest art. You can’t eat it or drink it. You can’t curl up on it and go to sleep. It won’t keep you dry if it’s raining or warm if it’s snowing. It won’t keep you afloat if you’re drowning. It won’t cure a cold or replace a broken hip. Well, you can’t explain it, but then you can’t explain any of the great mysteries, can you? A sword blade in an old painting flickering with the light of burning towers; a dog extending the paw of affection; the tip of a lover’s finger tracing your name on the inside of your thigh; Renaissance angels balancing effortlessly on stepping-stone clouds; your first oyster.

  I’ll look through our scrapbooks of cartoons too, and I may even sit down at my drawing table and sketch some of Simon’s ideas—I have a long list. But later. I already have too much on my plate—classes to prepare, a session to chair for the CAA Conference in Chicago, a plenary lecture to write for the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, and an exhibit to curate for the Morgan Library.

  Just one more thing, though, before I go. I’m going to leave my cartoons with you. Six of them. So you can judge for yourself. But the last one—“The Truth About Death”—I’m going to keep to myself till I hear from Bob Mankoff at the New Yorker. It shouldn’t be long now. He’s got Jack and Sally’s landline number here in New York, he’s got the number of the new iPhone that Jack gave me, and the number of my landline in Galesburg, and he’s got my street address and my e-mail address. I expect to hear from him any day.

  “By crikey, Wilson, it’s the lost funeral home of the elephants.”

  “Well, I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later.”

  “What happened to all the wind turbines?”

  “ ‘To be or not to be, that is the question.’ Good, now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “Daddy, you promised we could see the Ding an sich.”

  “I can have her for you by tomorrow noon.”

  A CHRISTMAS LETTER

  I was in Florence, Italy, when my father died. It was Easter Sunday and I was staying with old friends, the Marchettis, in their apartment near Piazza delle Cure, a quiet neighborhood on the north edge of town that you entered from Via Faentina. We hadn’t gone into the center for the big Easter celebration, but we’d watched the dove and the exploding cart on television.

  We were just sitting down to our first course—a rich broth thickened with egg yolks—when we got a telephone call from my sister. Signora Marchetti answered the phone. My sister didn’t speak Italian, but she managed to make herself understood, and Signora Marchetti waved me to the phone in the small entrance hallway.

  “Are you ready for this?” my sister said.

  “I’m ready.”

  “Dad’s dead,” she said. “Out at the club, he fell down in the locker room. Drunk. They couldn’t rouse him. He was dead by the time they got him to the hospital.”

  “I thought they kicked him out of the club?”

  “He got reinstated. He got a lawyer and threatened to sue them.”

  My father had taken up golf late in life. He was a natural athlete and soon competed with the club champion. After my mother’s death he’d bought a small Airstream trailer and rented space on a lot across the road from the club entrance so he wouldn’t have had to drive home at night if he stayed late at the bar, which he often had.

  “Where are you now?” I asked.

  “I went out to the trailer earlier just to have a look, but I’m at the house now. Dad’s house.”

  “It must be pretty early.”

  “Seven o’clock,” she said.

  I pictured my sister, Gracie, in the breakfast nook of the kitchen we’d grown up in, a lovely Dutch Colonial house about a mile north of town—a house that my father had built himself with help from his father. I pictured her sitting on the built-in blue bench at the built-in blue table, the cord from the phone on the wall stretched over her shoulder.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Just sitting here.”

  “How are you?”

  “I’m fine, in fact. How about you?”

  “I’m fine too.”

  “Have you met up with your friend yet?”

  I’d come to Florence ostensibly to borrow one of Galileo’s telescopes for the Galileo exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, where I was employed as an exhibit developer. But really I’d come to see a woman with whom I was madly in love, a Scottish-Italian fresco restorer, Rosella Douglas, who was working on the frescoes in the apse of Santa Croce.

  I looked up at the Marchettis eating their soup at the long table in what was a combined kitchen–living room–dining room. Was someone listening to me? Luca was the only one who understood English, but he was seated at the far end of the table next to his grandmother.

  “She’s skiing in the Dolomites,” I said. “She’ll be back tomorrow night. I’m going to meet her at the station. Have you called people yet?”

  “I’m going to do that today.”

  “Do you want me to come home?”

  She laughed.

  “What about the funeral?”

  “His body went to the junior college. They did the removal last night. They’ve started a mortuary science program. They’ll cremate what’s left—send us the ashes.”

  “Dad was full of surprises, wasn’t he?”

  “We’ll have to have some kind of memorial service when you get back. Maybe out at the cemetery.”

  My sister and I had been looking forward to this moment, but we hadn’t really planned ahead. “Whatever you want to do will be fine,” I said. “You’re the one who’s had to put up with him.”

  “Sometimes I think I should have moved away like you did.” But then she met Pete, and that was that. No way Pete was going to leave Green Arbor. Though they were divorced now, and Pete had in fact left Green Arbor. Probably to get away from my father, who had treated him like an errand boy.

  There were sixteen of us at the long table. Signora Marchetti (Claudia) had kept a bowl of soup warm for me. Chiara, who was my age, forty, put it on the table in front of me and stood for a moment with her hand on my shoulder. I’d spent a year at the Marchettis’ as an exchange student when I was in high school, and then again when I came back to Florence on a study-abroad program, and then at various other times over the years. Chiara was like a second sister, and Luca like a younger brother. I got on well with all of them and with their cousins and aunts and uncles and with the grandmother, Nonna Agostina, who was seated in the place of honor at the head of the table.

  Faces turned toward me as I took my place at the opposite end of the table from Nonna Agostina.

  “My sister,” I said. “Calling to wish me a hap
py Easter.”

  I had to make a conscious effort to suppress my relief, my sudden joy, though in fact it was more complicated than that. I was glad that my father was dead, but I wasn’t glad that I was glad. I would have preferred to be grief-stricken. And I was saddened by the sharp contrast between my own little family—Gracie, Dad, and me—and the extended family—four generations—passing their empty plates to Chiara and Luca, who were helping their mother and father clear the table. But the soup was delicious, and so was the roast baby lamb. Sensation is sensation.

  When I first heard of the Oedipus complex at the University of Michigan—we were reading Oedipus in a “Great Books” course—I knew exactly what Freud was talking about. Dad had become more and more abusive toward my mother, who suffered from tic douloureux. She was a lovely woman, small in stature, but bighearted, generous-spirited, deeply religious. She played the organ and directed the choir at Methodist church. You just married me for the money, he’d say to her. Drunk. For a free ride. It would have been a blessing if he’d died first. She could have lived out her last years in peace instead of in a nightmare.

  And where was I? I’d run away. To Ann Arbor. And then Chicago. It was my sister who bore the brunt of my father’s anger during the last years of my mother’s life, and beyond. I was afraid of my father—most people were—and my only attempt to intervene was a disaster: It’s Christmas Eve. I’m a wise fool, just home from Ann Arbor for Christmas vacation. My sister has taken Mom out on a last-minute shopping trip. They’re not home by five o’clock and Dad is working himself up into a rage. Every fifteen minutes or so he goes out to his gun room at the back of the garage for a nip of Jack Daniel’s, which he has to do because drinking is not allowed in our house. “I try to be a good husband …” he says, over and over. “I do everything I can … And now look at this …” He shrugs helplessly. “She’ll be overtired.” He’s indulging in his favorite fantasy, which is that everything he does is for my mother’s sake. He calls me in Ann Arbor, for example, on Sunday mornings. If I’m at home, in my dorm room in Adams House in the West Quad, which I usually am, he’ll want to know why I’m not in church. “Your mother wants you to go to church—And you’ll go. Next Sunday you’ll attend the Methodist Church or I’ll come up there and find out the reason why.”