by Jane Rule
“We aren’t in Texas,” Lily said.
A notice at the front desk informed them that the lowered flag was, indeed, for Wallace Kurr.
“You weren’t all that glum at the space he took up on the front page,” Lily reminded him, “and, after all, we’re eating out in his honor.”
“But the flag is for prominent, not notorious citizens.”
“They’re more or less indistinguishable.”
Here their conversation was interrupted by greetings from Martin’s colleagues and their wives, rather more of them than Martin had expected on a week night until he remembered that there was a cocktail party scheduled in the lower lounge for a retiring dean whom Martin despised.
“Oh God, now that we’re here, I suppose we should just…nod in.”
But, of course, there was no nodding in on such occasions. The speeches had just begun.
Why ever had he let Lily give in to him about coming here where such pomposities as this could so often override conviviality? Looking at the numbers in the room, Martin worried that he would not get a table, certainly not a good table, in the dining room. Nearly everyone here was old enough not to be leashed to a babysitter and could easily stay on. Perhaps the thing to do was to persuade Chester and Margerie over there to go downtown with them for dinner.
Oh, these deadly phrases, “inspiring mentor,” “distinguished contribution,” for a man who had been elevated to dean in order to spare him and his department the embarrassment of dwindling enrollment in his ill-prepared and haltingly presented lectures, to get rid of his reactionary presence on committees. It was as ridiculous as lowering the flag for Wally.
Yet Martin’s basic satisfaction reasserted itself at the thought of Wally, at this very moment a cold corpse waiting for flames and worms. Retirement after all was a little death, this ceremony a dress rehearsal, at which the corpse, unlike the bride, was present.
It was too much to hope that the parting gift would be something witty and original like, say, a goldfish bowl or a spittoon. Occasionally a man with a confessed hobby got a fishing rod or some golf clubs, but this fellow was handed his retirement on the expected silver platter, unsuitable for either carving turkey or handing round martinis, its only function to be cleaned.
Because they were at the back of the room, Martin and Lily did get a table, a window table, in the dining room, and Chester and Margerie, whom they’d known since their undergraduate days, came to join them.
“What a surprise!” Chester said. “I thought such politicing was beneath you.”
“An honest mistake,” Martin explained. “We came over to celebrate the just demise of Wally Kurr.”
“Ah, Wally,” Margerie said. “He was my first rabbit test.”
“I guess, when you live in the fast lane, you get there quicker,” Chester observed mildly.
“He was not in the fast lane,” Martin said. “He’s been right off the rails for years.”
“You’ve never forgiven him Clara’s suicide, have you?” Margerie asked.
“If I had to list the number of things that I haven’t forgiven Wally, that nobody should forgive Wally, we’d be here all night. Shall we start with snails?”
“Lovely,” Lily agreed.
“It says here ‘escargot.’”
“Have we been speaking French?” Martin asked.
“Martin is only purely bilingual,” Lily reminded them.
“Otherwise we’ll get the English equivalent to joual.”
“Snails it is,” Chester agreed. “I’m sure that’s what Peter Trudeau eats in Toronto.”
“When we saw the flag, Martin wondered if he’d been shot.”
“Who decides about that flag, Chester?” Martin demanded.
“A committee,” Chester answered from behind the wine list.
“Everybody knew Wally,” Margerie said, “After all.”
“Without Wally the local papers would have had to shut down for lack of news,” Chester said.
“For lack of scandal.”
“The difference?” Lily asked. “Martin’s faith in destiny has been restored tonight.”
“Surely not?” Chester looked at Martin.
“No, but still it is wonderful to see justice with her sweet, impartial face visit this planet. She is not after all in permanent eclipse.”
“Death’s boatman takes no bribe, nor brings E’vn skilled Prometheus back from Hades’ shore,” Chester intoned in his unfortunate tenor.
“Is it really necessary to gloat?” Margerie asked. “What about his present wife and all those children? Where’s the justice for them?”
“He settled all his property on her before the last time he declared bankruptcy, and that’s over two years ago, plenty of time for him to have dealt himself back into the game.”
“Were you a tiny bit jealous of him, Martin?”
“If I was, I am no longer. May he rest in peace,” Martin said, raising his glass.
“Were you really ever jealous of Wally?” Lily asked on their way home.
“Why is it that women have always excused Wally?” he asked in return. “I suppose it’s understandable that a nice girl like Margerie would go to bed with him when she was nineteen. She didn’t know any better. But why defend him now?”
“He died good looking and, you think, rich.”
“Good looking? He was as thin as a stork.”
Lily was tactfully silent.
The phone was ringing as they walked in the door. Lily answered it, listened for a moment, raised her eyebrows, and then said, “Just a minute. He’s right here.” She put her hand over the receiver and said, “It’s Joan Kurr.”
“I don’t even know her,” Martin mouthed frantically.
Lily shrugged and held the phone out to him.
“Yes?” he said, he hoped with some sympathy in his tone.
Then, after a long pause, he said, “Yes,” again, and it came out more like a reluctant admission of guilt.
When he hung up the phone, Martin said in disbelief, “Do you know what I’ve just agreed to do? I’ve just agreed to be one of the pall bearers!”
“You were an usher in his first wedding,” Lily reminded him.
“For Clara’s sake,” he protested.
“And now for Joan’s?”
“It isn’t her idea. It was Wally’s, one of his mortal broodings after Clara died, no doubt.”
“Well, you did want to go to the funeral anyway.”
“But not as his…accomplice!”
“He’s dead, after all.”
“O death, where is thy sting. O grave where is thy victory?”
“Oh, Martin, where is your sense of humor?”
Martin flung himself into a chair, stared at the empty fireplace and said, “How could he do this to me?” silently adding again.
Martin, dressed in his only three-piece suit, which was dark grey, expected to be the only respectable man at the coffin. He did not worry about the safety of his wallet or his watch, for Wally’s friends would be in the upper echelon of crooks and gamblers who managed real estate in the city, sporting gold nuggets from their own mines on their watch chains. He did worry about his own good name among them in the report of this religious farce in the evening paper.
Having looked up the burial service in the prayer book, Martin discovered that the church, probably in times when the dead were buried in the churchyard, was suggested only in inclement weather for a ritual intended for the graveside. It was a cloudy day.
What choices among the ironies would the minister fall upon? “He heapeth up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them” or “Raise us from the death of sin unto the life of righteousness” or—and he read this one out to Lily as she was putting on her hat—“make me not a rebuke unto the foolish.”
“Which would be intended for us, no doubt,” Lily observed.
Even though they arrived early, finding a parking place was difficult. Martin cursed the limousines which dwarfed his beloved Mer
cedes, but he was able to squeeze into a place that a Lincoln had just failed to negotiate. His moral superiority was intact.
“Do try not to look smug,” Lily said. “I’ll save you a seat on the aisle.”
Martin turned to see that the other men loitering on the steps waiting for direction as pall bearers were all known to him not from the gossip columns but from the university, a classmate who had become a doctor, the president of Wally’s own class, a quite respectable corporation lawyer, the owner of a fish-packing company who had also been an usher at Wally’s first wedding.
He said to Martin, “To tell the truth, I wouldn’t be here if Mrs. Kurr hadn’t specifically asked me…”
One by one each confessed to a similar uncertainty, not having seen Wally in years, but each also felt an uneasy loyalty to those old ties of friendship when they had been young together, poaching on each other’s female territory, wrecking each other’s cars, predicting ill-favored futures for each other, and standing up at each other’s weddings.
Nobody wanted to say what they all probably assumed, that Wally had no other friends. Martin tried to remember if he’d felt any less cynical and out of place at Wally’s wedding. Martin had agreed to that only because he’d been in love with Clara himself and didn’t want anyone else to know it. But what humiliation had he to cover up here that made him agree to be in this bewildered company?
Between the funeral director and the minister, they were soon instructed on their simple duties and could join the crowd moving into the church.
“Who are all these people?” Martin muttered to Lily, for the church was full.
As he himself had facetiously predicted, they were all Wally’s old loves and his children. Also there were both prominent crooks and their bankers with their second and third wives. Across the church Martin spotted Chester and Margerie who would witness his embarrassment with some amusement.
Then he eyed the coffin, resting below the altar banked with pretentious flowers, which he and the comrades of his youth were to bear away.
“Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye, at the last trump, for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible…”
Martin snorted loudly. What they should have planned to do was drop the coffin in the aisle and let the body roll out for all to see the essentially corrupted remains of Wally Kurr, the womanizer, the crook, the killer, for he had killed Clara as surely as if he’d shot her himself.
Yet Martin found himself chanting, along with hundreds of other unbelievers, “Christ, have mercy on us.” And, sharing a hymnal with Lily, he raised his voice to sing, “Rock of Ages, cleft for me…” and pondered the lines, “All for sin could not atone/ Thou must save and thou alone…”
Where was the justice in all this? Though Martin believed no more in hell than in heaven, if he had to be burdened with Christian imagery, surely there should be a little more crackling of flames for this particular sinner.
At the end of the final prayer, Martin rose with the other men and walked up the aisle to the coffin. Unrehearsed and unaccustomed to manual tasks, they were clumsy with the flowers, clumsier still lifting the coffin and getting it down the steps, though it wasn’t really very heavy. By this time Martin was too anxious not to make a fool of himself to think of making a fool of Wally Kurr’s corpse. When the men had the coffin on the straight away of the aisle, they figured out the necessity of walking in step, and Martin had a sudden sense of the theatrical dignity of their task. So strong was the form that, though he believed not at all in redemption, he knew he and the others had become agents of grace, only needing to bear and forbear to the grave to defeat completely the justice he had come to witness.
As mechanical, as arbitrary as any device in the tragicomedies he had studied so long, Martin, the righteous man, shouldered his part of the burden of body and box out to the waiting hearse, then out of the hearse over the uncertain turf of the cemetery to the grave site on which a gentle rain began appropriately to fall.
Among the weeping women, including Margerie and Lily, Martin stood without solace.
“From henceforth blessed are the dead…”
POWER FAILURE
LAURA THORNSTROM WAS WATCHING the late news, a habit which often gave her nightmares but consoled her that she hadn’t much longer to live, when the power failed. The color fled from the screen like water going down the drain, and she heard the silencing of all the small hummings in the house, fridg, freezer, pump. In the dark she heard only her heart beating and wondered at its independence from all those other gadgets she needed to stay alive. Every time this winter the power had failed, she tested the notion that she was too old to stay on alone on this little island so vulnerable to the weather and isolated enough to wait sometimes several days for help. In a power failure she had to haul not only wood for heat and cooking but water from the rain barrels, if they weren’t frozen, for washing and flushing the toilet. Even the thought wore her out.
She reached for the matches on the table beside her and lighted a candle. With its light she located one of the battened fluorescent lights, safer than any of the old fashioned lanterns now that she was both inclined to stumble and to be absentminded. She would do nothing tonight but go to bed, getting her extra quilt out to make up for the failure of her electric blanket. There was no wind; so perhaps there would be power in the morning.
The weight of the quilt on her arthritic feet made her moan, a bad habit born of living alone, for the sound of it didn’t comfort her, only made her feel sorrier for herself. But what did it matter when there was no one else around to be troubled by her moods? In the two years since Thorny had died, Laura had retreated not into a second childhood but into a second adolescence. Often sulky, melodramatic, and clumsy, she wondered if the only incentive to be an adult was an intimate audience before whom one was ashamed to brood and complain. Certainly, it was only since Thorny had died that she’d been angry with him in that hopeless way of adolescents, so often angry about what couldn’t be helped, shouting, “It isn’t fair!”
Well, it wasn’t fair that the power was out and her feet hurt and her husband was dead. She didn’t complain ever to her children because they would only say she was mad to stay here and should move back to the mainland where among them they could look after her.
She and Thorny hadn’t had enough money to retire in the city. They didn’t care. They sold their city house and fixed up their summer place, insulating it, getting a good wood stove, and putting in electric heaters for when they were too old to chop and haul wood. It had more bedrooms than they needed, but that had assured them visits from children and grandchildren, occasions Laura now anticipated with a mixture of pleasure and dread. She hadn’t really the energy any more to cook for them all and cope with the boisterous energy of the little ones. But, if she admitted that to anyone, the pressure was on again for her to leave the island.
They always came in the spring, summer, and fall when Laura loved the island and knew she would never leave it. She wore herself out before they even arrived, making sure no daughter or daughter-in-law would find the oven neglected, the kitchen floor sticky, the spare rooms fit only for spiders which were Laura’s undisturbed companions when she was alone. Her sons and sons-in-law were less insistent with her, helped instead by seeing to it she had plenty of wood to last the winter, stacked conveniently near the house, checking gutters, floor boards, light switches. Nobody expected her to take over Thorny’s jobs to prove she could stay on alone. Sometimes she wanted to snap at the girls, tell them she didn’t have to keep an AA motel rating for half a dozen guests to be permitted an independent old age. But she knew temper, too, was one of the signs.
Turning painfully in her bed, she tried to stop listening to all those voices, to the absolute silence of the house. Had she remembered to turn off everything, lights, heaters, the electric stove, the television so that the house wouldn’t blaze her int
o waking if the power came on before morning? It wouldn’t. And she didn’t care if it did. It was simply stupid to worry about being wakened when she couldn’t go to sleep.
It snowed in the night. Laura could tell by the white light in her bedroom when she opened her eyes. She could tell by the coldness of her nose that the power was still off. She felt entombed in her bed, the heavy quilt weighing down on her stiff, painful joints. Then she thought of the birds. In the snow they must be fed, particularly her pair of variegated thrushes who stayed with her through the winter, not like those rascal aristocrats who, like her closest human neighbors, went south for the winter. She and Thorny had, too, for a month or so, but they were always glad to get home.
Laura groaned as she hoisted herself out of bed, this morning so slowly that she knew one of these mornings she just wouldn’t make it. She had just finished her slow and layered dressing when there was a knocking at her door.
“Come in!” she shouted, knowing it would take her painful minutes to get to a door she never locked.
“It’s me, Jimmy,” called the voice in uncertain, deep register, “come to start your wood stove.”
“Why aren’t you in school?” she asked, having made it to her bedroom door which opened onto the living room.
“It’s Saturday, Mrs. Thornstrom,” Jimmy said to her, balancing an armload of kindling and logs. “I already swept your path, but I’ll bring in enough wood for the day.”
“That’s very kind of you, Jimmy.”
“My dad says there’s no use in having ten kids if they’re all good for nothing,” Jimmy answered with a grin. “If the power’s still off tonight, Peter’s going to stop by. He’s not worth much unless you tell him.”
“He’s only seven, Jimmy,” Laura reminded him.
“Yeah, but his memory’s as bad as old Mr. Apple’s. Senile at seven!”
Laura knew there was no point in offering to pay Jimmy. The O’Hea children were raised to do favors for people just like their father who managed to put enough food on the table because they all dressed out of the thrift shop.
“Can I make you a cup of cocoa?” Laura offered. “Think maybe there’s a doughnut around somewhere, too.”
