Aunt Beulah’s house had been sad, too. The peeling wallpaper, the clutter everywhere, the scuffed hardwood floors and dusty bookshelves. And now here it was again at the funeral home, more evidence of dilapidation and neglect. The carpet, probably a pretty shade of rose at one time, was faded and worn. Around the entrance it looked almost gray. Tacky still-life prints hung on the walls—flowers and fruit, both of which in real life started the inevitable process of decay almost as soon as they were picked.
The man who came forward to meet them as they entered was everything you’d expect from a second-rate establishment. His black hair was thickly oiled and combed straight back from his high pale forehead. He wore a pained smile, perhaps in keeping with the atmosphere of mourning, and his dark suit had the sheen of cheap fabric. Moreover, it hung loosely on him, obviously made for a more robust man than the one who even now seemed to be wasting away inside it. In the breast pocket was tucked a maroon handkerchief the same color as his necktie. His shoes had a hard Formica shine.
He took Aunt Beulah’s hand as if they were old friends. “Is this the granddaughter you were telling me of?” he said softly, glancing toward Celia. His voice was too lubricated, too womanly.
Aunt Beulah nodded. “Celia, this is Mr. Shelby, one of the directors here. He’s been such a help to us.” She nodded again and addressed the man. “This is Sadie’s granddaughter, Celia, and her fiancé, Al. I wanted them to see her before you closed the casket.”
Mr. Shelby gave a little bow. “Just as we discussed,” he said primly. “If you’ll come this way.” The way he walked reminded Celia of someone on a tightrope, the shiny pointed toes of his shoes touching first with each small step. They passed silently across the carpeted lobby and into a hallway. “Here we are,” he said, stopping at a doorway and motioning them in. “Take your time. We’re running well on schedule. We won’t need to close the viewing for another half hour at least.”
The viewing—the word made Celia cringe. The room was dimly lit, and eight or ten flower arrangements flanked the casket. “That one’s yours.” Aunt Beulah pointed to an arrangement of pink roses and miniature white carnations as they stepped forward. Celia noted that it was the largest arrangement there, which didn’t surprise her, considering what little she knew of her grandmother’s friends. Not exactly well-heeled, any of them. They’d be far more likely to give a donation to the missionary fund at church in memory of her grandmother than to order flowers, which most of them would see as throwing away good money.
The lid was open, and though Celia thought this whole concept of a viewing was barbaric, she knew she had to look. She had tried to brace herself for what she would see. Fourteen years was a long time. A lot of changes could take place in a person’s appearance during that time, especially if there had been illness toward the end. As she stared down at her grandmother’s face, however, she was amazed at how few the changes were. Her skin was as Celia remembered it, like cream parchment that had been crushed and then smoothed out again. Her features were the same—no evidence of drastic weight loss or great suffering. She might have simply lain down for a rest and drifted off.
The biggest difference was her hair. Someone had curled it, and it was longer than she used to wear it. She must have been really sick these past few months, Celia thought, or she never would have tolerated it that long. If there was one thing her grandmother was particular about concerning her appearance, it was her hair. It had to be kept short and away from her face. The longer style and the curls gave her a softer look, more grandmotherly. The way she used to wear it, short and brushed straight back, had always looked hard and manly in Celia’s opinion. She had never looked like a grandmother who would bake cookies or hold you in her lap and read to you, although when Celia was younger she had done those very things whenever she came to visit.
They had dressed her in a cranberry suit with a large plastic-looking pearl brooch at the neck, and one gnarled, brown-mottled hand lay across the other. Celia’s eyes rested on the hands. She realized she had rarely observed Grandmother’s hands idle before.
“Doesn’t she look precious?” Aunt Beulah whispered. It wasn’t a word Celia had ever thought of using to describe her grandmother. Grim, industrious, practical, hard-nosed, judgmental—those all fit, but not precious.
She continued to stare at the hands—the hands that had opened a Bible every morning at breakfast and every night at supper and had traced the words as she read aloud to Celia. They were the hands that had persisted in knocking on Celia’s bedroom door every Sunday morning during that last year they lived together and had touched her on the shoulder to let her know it was time to wake up and get ready for church. They were the hands that turned on the radio in her bedroom and time and time again moved the dial from Celia’s favorite rock station to the Christian station that played gospel music and preaching twenty-four hours a day, then adjusted the volume so it practically burst her eardrums.
They were the hands that had always put together some sort of casserole for the potluck supper at church on the first Wednesday of every month and then helped to serve the plates of others as they went through the line. They were the hands that prepared a meal at home every other night of the month for the two of them, that set the table with her unmatched silverware and the dishes she had bought a place setting at a time through a special offer at the grocery store. Celia could see those dishes as clearly as if she were holding one in her hand right this minute. White, rather small for dinner plates actually, with a little gold scallop around the edge and in the center two little robins in a brown nest. A little old-fashioned, certainly not what you’d call fine china, already starting to discolor by the time Celia had left for college.
Celia had dropped one of the plates while washing dishes one day not long after coming to live with her grandmother. It had broken neatly into three large pieces in the sink, the two robins separated in the blink of an eye. Without a word her grandmother had reached over and let the soapy water out of the sink, then picked up the pieces and dumped them into the plastic pail she used as a trash can. Celia had begun crying, something she used to do regularly during those early days. Her grandmother had only six place settings of the dishes, and now only five plates were left. It was the thought of the incomplete set that filled Celia with dismay. And it couldn’t be replaced. The grocery store had run the offer for only a few months years ago.
“It’s only a plate, Celie,” Grandmother had said. “Save your tears for things that matter.” And she had turned to get the broom out of the pantry, then gone about sweeping the floor. She wasn’t the kind of grandmother who kissed and hugged. At the time it had seemed harsh and unloving to Celia. It was one of the things she had used as justification for turning against her grandmother during her last year of high school.
Aunt Beulah put an arm around her now. “Y’all can stay here a few minutes, okay, honey? I need to go out and speak to Mr. Shelby about something. Is that all right?”
Celia nodded. “Sure, that’s fine.” She glanced at Al, who was bending over the flower arrangements, humming tunelessly and reading the names on the cards. She tried again to remember why she had thought it would be good to have him along. He looked at her and smiled. “‘Bethany Hills Virtuous Women Sunday School Class,’” he said, pointing to a card and winking. It was on a live plant in a basket—ivy, fern, and a small flowering vine of some kind. The whole thing would no doubt be dead within a few days.
She looked back at her grandmother in the casket. She had heard of people’s faces looking strangely sweet and peaceful in death, but Grandmother’s face looked . . . well, she couldn’t really think of the right word for it. It wasn’t really peaceful. Maybe resigned was the word. The face of someone who had known early on that life was a far cry from perfect and who had never seen her conviction overturned, yet someone who didn’t question it, who knew that’s just the way it was.
If she were a betting woman, Celia would be willing to lay down money that on
e of the songs they’d sing at the funeral would be “In the Sweet By and By.” She knew she could sing the words to all three stanzas this very minute if she wanted to even though it had been years since she had last heard it. The chorus played through her mind now: “In the sweet by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful shore.” They had sung it often at Bethany Hills Bible Tabernacle. No doubt it had been a favorite at all the churches here in Dunmore, Georgia.
She imagined most people would gasp with shock as they stepped through the pearly gates and gazed about at the splendor of heaven—if there even was such a place, which she doubted. But she couldn’t for the life of her picture her grandmother doing such a thing. Her grandmother would take one look around, nod briskly, and say, “Nice—exactly what I expected it to be,” then go on about her business.
There had been a time when Celia had thought she knew her grandmother far too well and could hardly stand to be in the same room with her. But now, looking down at her lying in the casket, she felt that she hardly knew this woman with whom she had lived for three whole years.
She had expected to feel angry on this trip, and she had started out that way. Anger was the kind of emotion that could carry you through a funeral with perfect composure. She hadn’t expected to look down at her grandmother and be flooded with this strange, mixed-up conglomeration of guilt, regret, curiosity, sadness. This woman made my life miserable, she tried to remind herself. She didn’t have a loving bone in her body. All she cared about was a bunch of rules in that big black Bible of hers.
But even as the thoughts came, something deep inside spoke words she hadn’t heard for years: “For now we see through a glass, darkly . . . but then shall I know even as also I am known.” She shook her head to try to clear it. And once again her eyes traveled to her grandmother’s hands. They were large hands, roughened by work like a man’s.
She remembered the first day she had come to live at Grandmother’s house after her parents’ funeral. This time was different from all the other times she had visited. She was alone this time, and she was here to stay. Barely fifteen, she was just a few weeks into her sophomore year of high school. She hadn’t been in on all the decisions, of course. It had all been arranged without her consent, presented to her as the way things were going to be from now on. As far as she knew, though, there had been no fight over who would get her. It certainly wasn’t as if everybody had wanted her.
Her father’s parents had never been much involved in her life and had both proceeded to die within two years of her parents’ accident. They were even older than Grandmother, but as nonreligious as Grandmother was religious. Celia had called them Papa and Mums, not out of affection but because her mother had told her to. Papa had taught astronomy and physics at one time at a private college in Minnesota, their home state. Mums was an organic horticulturalist. The few times they had flown down to visit Celia’s family at their home near Atlanta, they had observed everything with quiet disapproval. They appeared to be stymied as to how their youngest son had ended up in the South, married to a Georgia girl with whom he had fallen into the habit of attending church, in a lowly denomination like Baptist, no less.
They had picked at the meals Celia’s mother had prepared and had gone to bed early. Mums told them one evening at supper about a study she had helped put together with a professional nutritionist to determine the correlation between a woman’s fertility and a diet high in organic vegetables. It was clear to Celia, though she was only ten at the time, that Mums wasn’t really talking in general terms but was pointedly telling her mother that her inferior diet was the cause of her inability to bear her son more than one child.
Whereas Grandmother’s hugs were few and stiff, Mums was a violent hugger, at least of Celia and her father. She couldn’t remember ever seeing Mums hug her mother. Celia remembered hating it after her parents died, the way Mums would suddenly fall upon her at all hours of the day and embrace her at length, shaking with silent tears. Papa and Mums had spent a week at their house, during which Celia started avoiding them, retreating to her bedroom and locking the door. She remembered the profound relief she felt when they finally left. She might grumble about having no say in her relocation, but she knew she never would have chosen to go live with them.
With so many people at their house for a whole week, going through closets and drawers and cupboards, dividing up everything, Celia had been in a daze. When she had asked to go back to school two days after the funeral, Papa and Mums had looked at her as if she had lost her mind. “You’ll not be going to school there anymore,” Mums had said, putting her hand over her heart and breathing deeply. “But I have to get my things from my locker,” Celia had said, and Mums had once again rushed at her and thrown her arms around her. “Oh, you poor, poor little child,” she had said. Celia remembered looking over Mums’ shoulder that day to see Grandmother staring at them, unsmiling, from the doorway.
When Celia was told that Grandmother’s house in Dunmore was to be her new home, she had the feeling of having known it all along. At the time she hadn’t realized that a lot of parents plan ahead better than hers had, that many have it stipulated in their wills who is to take guardianship of their children if something happens to the two of them. It wasn’t as if there were that many choices, though. Celia’s mother had no living siblings, and her father’s two brothers both lived in Minnesota and had large families of their own. Celia wasn’t even sure she would recognize either of her uncles if she passed them on the street.
At some point during that week Celia had stopped outside the kitchen, where a conversation was in progress. She had known she was the subject of the discussion. She heard Mums’ voice: “ . . . and my heart isn’t strong, you know. The angina’s getting worse.” There was silence, and then Papa had added, “The doctor had to double her blood pressure medication.” As Celia tiptoed away, she heard Grandmother speak up. “Like I already said, it won’t be as big a change for her if she comes to my house.”
* * *
Grandmother hadn’t made a ceremony out of that first day. She had handled it all with the same businesslike demeanor with which she paid her bills each month. Aunt Beulah and Uncle Taylor had been the ones to actually transport Celia from Atlanta to Dunmore. They had rented a little Hertz trailer to pull behind their car so they could fit in the things they were taking to Grandmother’s. Most of it had been sold—furniture and appliances and such—but Celia wanted to keep her bed and her mother’s cedar chest.
Celia’s parents didn’t have all that much, really. Her father had had big plans to finish a graduate degree in finance and marketing, but a single night course at a time made it slow going. The irony was that in spite of all his interest in the stock market, his own investments never did very well. At least that’s the idea Celia had gotten as a child. He was always buying and selling at the wrong times, it seemed. His job as co-owner of a shoe store was an up-and-down kind of business, and one of Celia’s clearest recollections of him was the way he would sit at supper and bemoan the plight of the small retailer in America.
Her mother would listen to him, a worried line between her eyebrows. Celia would watch the two of them and take smaller and smaller bites, as if by eating less she could ease the budget strain and make things better. She could look back on her parents’ marriage now and see that, though without question they had loved each other, they hadn’t balanced each other out the way a married couple should. They were both worriers. She never remembered her mother laughing off her father’s woeful speeches, whipping up a favorite dessert, for example, and saying something upbeat like “Well, so what? We’ve got each other, and that’s all that matters!”
It does something to a child’s sense of security to be part of a family like that. Celia knew that now. Her mother had always sewn all her own clothes and Celia’s, too, and had bought dented cans of food and ripped boxes of cereal at the Savvy Shopper, a salvage grocery store. Birthdays and Christmases were always celebrated, but cautiously. She l
oved her parents deeply, but she had grown into a little worrier herself, always hoping her father’s accounts would balance, that he would have enough each month to pay his two shoe clerks and the rent on his building, which was way too high, that each sale he ran would generate a little more business than the last one, although they never got many customers compared to the hordes that flocked into the big discount places like Shoe Bonanza.
Of course, looking back on it, he must have done better than he had let on because after everything was liquidated and the money was put aside for Celia’s college education, there was enough for the whole four years plus graduate school. As a child, however, Celia had never taken food and shelter for granted. As far as she knew, she might sit down for breakfast the next morning and be told there was nothing to eat.
She would watch her father reading the stock page of the newspaper and pray silently, Please don’t let him risk any money. Make him keep it all safe in the bank! Oh, how earnestly she had prayed as a child, up until she was around seventeen actually. And even though she never had realized the incongruence between worrying and praying, not until her grandmother pointed it out to her after she came to live with her in Dunmore, she had been absolutely faithful in her prayers up until her defection from religion in twelfth grade. Somehow she had gotten it in her mind as a young child that if she prayed regularly, in a certain place at a certain time, covering things in a prescribed order, she could hold her world together. Safety came from following rules.
The day her parents had gone to get the clothes dryer, however, she had come home from school and been so eager to get to her geometry homework, which was her favorite class after a whole week of tenth grade, that she changed her schedule around and skipped praying. Her geometry teacher, Miss Augustine, was beautiful and used her hands gracefully as she explained things. She had a long elegant neck like Audrey Hepburn’s, and she had worn the same pearl necklace around it every day so far, a necklace that Celia was sure Miss Augustine’s boyfriend had given her. Celia sat right in front of her desk and studied her worshipfully.
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