In the center of Ashmont, the main roads met in a cross at Four Corners. While we waited for the light to change I looked out the window at the Getty station, which stood diagonally across Birch Street from the Reformed Church. Whenever we passed through this intersection, my father used to sing “Getty to the church on time,” and Justine and Meggy and I would pretend to shoot ourselves in the head, Archie Bunker–style.
Next to the church stood the flower shop owned by Luanne Oberheim’s father. Luanne had been in Justine’s class since nursery school; they played clarinet together in the junior-high band, but in high school they split off from each other. Luanne went the way of the Honor Society, while Justine became what the nerds called a Populette. Still, in commemoration of the girls’ friendship in their earlier days, Mr. Oberheim had donated all the floral arrangements for the funeral.
“Stop,” Justine said, and I thought she wanted to get out and buy flowers, but when my mother braked by the curb my sister didn’t move. She caught her breath. “There’s Candy,” she said, softly, and turning toward the sidewalk I saw a long-haired girl in jeans and an Eagles jacket strolling down the street. Candy Samuelson had been a friend of Justine’s all through high school. She was a member of the Cat House gang and the cheerleading squad and the pack of Populettes who, after their senior prom, had to drive the event’s King and Queen to Albany Medical Center because of alcohol poisoning (the royal couple had been doing shots of schnapps in the janitor’s room). Candy and Justine both belonged to the Choraliers. Had it been only four months since I’d watched them stand with the other white-robed graduates, on risers in the gym decorated for commencement, singing “The Lord Bless You and Keep You”? It seemed impossible.
Do you know that hymn? The words move across the music with a sharp, sweet pain, which, once you’ve felt it, stays as memory in your bones:
The Lord bless you and keep you,
The Lord lift his countenance upon you,
And give you peace
And give you peace
The Lord make his face to shine upon you,
And give you peace.
We watched as Candy stopped, twirling her hair around a finger, to read the sandwich menu posted outside the Leading Roll. Then she pulled money out of her jeans pocket, counted it, and stepped inside.
“She doesn’t look very different,” Justine said. She sounded surprised. “Don’t you think she looks about the same?”
“I guess,” our mother answered, though in truth I don’t think she had any idea what my sister had asked.
“Well, hell, as long as we’re stopped here, let’s get some flowers,” Rosemary said. She slammed the car door and disappeared inside Oberheim’s, then came out with an armful of green tissue paper, which she tucked under her seat.
The cemetery stood on King’s Hill, where we used to go sledding before the town built a monument to Ashmont’s military men and women who’d died in Korea and Vietnam. Summers, the granite obelisk engraved with soliders’ names served as our home-free in freeze tag, until Lois Phelps came through one day, walking her father, and yelled at us for disrespecting the dead.
Even before we parked at the graveyard gate, I realized that we couldn’t have timed our visit more poorly. To get to the cemetery we had to drive past the high school, where a football game had just ended. The players were scattered as they walked to the parking lot with their families, but the cheerleaders moved together in loud, giggling packs. The girls had on the same uniform Justine used to wear—black pleated skirt, black knee socks, a white turtleneck under a black sweater with an orange A on the chest, saddle shoes tied with orange laces. Some wore ribbons in their ponytails; others had shorter, layered haircuts—they must have all had the same stylist at Shear Amazement—which they flipped back from their faces with slim, confident hands. Their voices started in murmurs, but turned almost triumphant as the words reached the sky. We are the Eagles, mighty mighty Eagles! Everywhere we go, people want to know. Who we are. So we tell them…
I shifted in my seat so that my sister was in the corner of my eye. Justine stared straight ahead; she’d put on her Walkman earphones, and I saw that she had turned the volume all the way up. Next I looked at my mother. She had the line between her eyes that meant she was concentrating on not feeling anything. As I listened to the cheers, a stray line from Pushkin swam up to me (Know, at least, the sounds/That once were dear to you), making my sinuses sting.
It was clear that the football traffic was going to interfere with our visit. People who didn’t drive to the school used the cemetery as a shortcut. Sure enough, we saw them coming through the trees as we made our way toward our destination, the northeast corner by the fence.
“Let’s wait a minute,” our mother said. She paused by a cluster of headstones engraved with the name Parnell. The Parnells were one of the first families in Ashmont; a main street was named for them, and so was the picnic pavilion at the town park. It was an almost cozy feeling, standing among these graves. The older ones—belonging to Thaddeus and his wife Abigail, their children Mary and Forrest and Louise—lay in a half circle under the giant elm tree, where the first plots were struck. You could barely make out their birth and death dates, although you could tell that most of them began with 18, and Thaddeus and Abigail were born in the 1790s.
The subsequent generations of dead Parnells were arranged in a semicircle behind their ancestors. The most recent addition was Stephen, 1937–1984, the father of the most unpopular boy in my class. Doug Parnell had more money than any kid in town, but he always wore the same clothes to school, and rumor had it that he never washed his hair. His father was killed in a boat accident in the Caribbean the year we were in eighth grade. The full story never came out.
The best evidence that the death had happened under questionable circumstances was the slimness of the account that ran in the Ashmont Star. The newspaper printed the standard obituary, next to a photograph of a business-suited Mr. Parnell. The obituary said only that he had “died suddenly, out of town.” There followed several paragraphs about his life in Ashmont, his survivors, and the civic contributions he and his family had made, along with a bank address for anyone who wanted to send money to a scholarship fund the Rotarians had set up in his memory.
If Doug’s father had not been a Parnell, or if he had been a recent transplant to the town, the Star would have printed the details everybody knew already by word of mouth—that there was a woman involved who was not Doug’s mother; that there were, most probably, also drugs. And that the boat accident was surely not an accident at all, but an explosion planned to coincide with Mr. Parnell’s being alone onboard when the bomb went off.
So you could gauge your status in Ashmont, and how much loyalty you were entitled to, by the way the Star treated you in its pages. When my father and Meggy died, it was a big story on Albany’s TV broadcasts and even in the Knickerbocker News, whose publisher called my mother beforehand to say he was goddam sorry, but they were going to lead with it, it was goddam news.
But the Star ran only a single-column item at the bottom of page two, saying that Thomas Dolan, 46, and his daughter Margaret, 15, died in an apparent murder-suicide June 29 at the family’s Pearl Street home. There was information about the funeral, a line about our father’s life (“Mr. Dolan, whose former employers included the Morgan Insurance Co. and Zenith Realty, worked at Wolf Subaru at the time of his death”) and one about Meggy’s (“Miss Dolan, an honors student at Ashmont High School and a member of the girls’ softball league, played the leading role in the Ashmont Repertory production of the musical Annie in 1981.”). The story ran under a photograph of a mother-daughter fashion show at the Methodist church. Even through my numbness, I remember being grateful that the Star had buried the story. In a perverse way, it made me realize that our family must have meant something to this town.
My father hated cemeteries—he would drive miles out of his way to avoid passing one—but I have always, without quite understand
ing why, felt comfortable around graves. Even before the deaths in my family, I liked to walk through burial grounds and read the inscriptions, like Gone but not forgotten and Called home. My favorite was on Boston’s North Shore, at the edge of Rockport, where my friend Ruthie and I drove to celebrate the day our finals were over in sophomore year. In that graveyard with a view of the ocean, I lingered longest over a stone belonging to a boy who had died in 1789 at the age of two months, twenty-two days. His epitaph read:
When the angels shall blow the trumpets
And souls to bodyes join
Millions will wish their lives
Had been as short as mine.
When I read it out loud to Ruthie, she made a face. “Bummer,” she said, and then she laughed, but I could tell she wanted to get out of the cemetery, that she had only agreed to come with me because I promised to drive her down to Hyannis the next time we heard of a sighting of JFK Jr. there. Reading the baby’s headstone, I imagined his parents, and how their grief must have been eased by the belief that their baby was better off dead—that they, being alive, were the unlucky ones, still with years of earthly trial ahead before they ascended to Paradise.
So I always felt calm, approaching the gray strength of a stone, and more than that, I believed in the words “at peace,” although I had no idea what it might feel like. As my mother and Justine and I made our way past the Parnell family’s plot, I knew that whatever Doug Parnell’s father had suffered on the way to or during his death, it was over now, as it was for my own father.
The only one I couldn’t believe this about was Meggy.
We waited until a parade of bicycles shot past us, then made our way over to the corner where newer graves stood by a row of maples iridescent in the sun. “I’m not sure I can do this,” my mother said, sounding as if someone were choking her. The headstones jutted up out of the ground next to each other, my father’s closer to the fence. When it came time to choose the burial sites, my mother told the caretaker that she wanted the smaller stone placed where it would never be cast in shadow by the bigger one.
The engraving on Meggy’s stone ran the depth of the marble face. Margaret Olivia Dolan, b. October 26, 1972, d. June 29, 1988. My mother had gone through my poetry books and selected, as an epitaph, the last stanza of William Blake’s “A Cradle Song”:
Sleep sleep happy child.
All creation slept and smil’d.
Sleep sleep, happy sleep,
While o’er thee thy mother weep.
At the time, I wondered if she chose that verse because she hadn’t, in fact, ever cried over Meggy—at least not that we had seen. Justine said she believed our mother could cry only in private. I thought it was possible she might have forgotten how.
Yet she was affected, clearly, by seeing the words now on the stone. I was afraid she might fall over, and Justine and I both seemed paralyzed at the prospect of catching her. Grabbing air, my mother gripped the top of my father’s headstone and leaned against it instead of one of us. “Jesus,” she said when she could get the words out, her throttling complete. “I can’t believe that’s Meggy.”
“It isn’t,” Justine told her, sounding like someone who had been asleep for a long time.
When our mother stepped away from our father’s stone, we read the inscription.
Thomas Edward Dolan
b. February 15, 1942, d. June 29, 1988.
He was loved.
The last line had been added below the name and dates only after Justine and I told our mother that we wanted it there. We would pay for the extra letters, we said. Of course, she didn’t take our money. Now it was this phrase that she bent down to trace with a white and feeble finger.
“Oh, God,” she groaned, and I knew it wasn’t because she hadn’t also loved him that she had at first resisted the chiseling of those words. It was because she felt guilty about still loving him, even after what he had done. She fell against Rosemary and let her shoulders go with a shuddering, tearless paroxysm that reminded me of what I learned once about afterbirth, in a film about babies being born. Grief, like the baby, was already out, but there was still something inside that could be dangerous to the system if it weren’t also expelled.
Justine and I watched our mother, but we did not look at each other. I think we both knew how much it was possible for us to bear in that moment, and it did not include meeting a sister’s eyes.
And yet something about the day—the sharp scent of leaves, maybe, or the echo of cheers in the trees—kept me from being able to summon the measure of sadness I’d felt at the funeral. Glancing at Justine, I could tell she was experiencing a similar surprise. As apprehensive as we had been about coming to the cemetery, now that we were here it was almost a letdown. The surge of grief we anticipated had taken a different route, and we were distracted from death by the insistence of life around us: leaves crunching under our feet, the sound of raised voices in victory, the imagined snap of apples being bitten on porches all over town. Rosemary knelt to place a bunch of baby’s breath down tenderly, making a frame around Meggy’s name. Instead of the pain I expected, I felt only love, and it would not allow anything else to approach the space it filled in my heart.
My aunt was laying a yellow rose by my father’s stone when we heard a woman’s voice calling to us from up the hill, near the war memorial. “Margaret?” The voice was familiar, and instinctively I began to smile, though I had not yet caught sight of the person to whom it belonged. “Is that you?” Now we could make out Kay Lonergan in front of the obelisk, shading her eyes as she peered over to where we stood. Her son Matt was still wearing his football uniform, the shoulder pads making him appear monstrous. When he recognized us, he ducked and split off from his parents. The moment before he turned his face away, I saw that he looked scared. Ed Lonergan frowned and then, seeming unsure, lifted his hand in a stationary wave. We saw Kay say something to Ed and he continued on the way Matt had gone, while she began with hesitant steps in our direction.
“Kay,” my mother said, as fervent as a prayer.
“Who’s that?” Rosemary whispered to me, before Kay was close enough to hear. “She looks familiar.”
“Her best friend from when we lived here.”
“I think I remember her from the funeral. They’re the ones who pulled your mom out of the church when she started throwing things, right?” I nodded.
My mother and Kay hadn’t seen each other since that day, though for nearly fifteen years before that they’d been best friends. I expected my mother to exclaim and run to meet Kay, so I was shocked when, instead, she started hurrying off the other way, back toward where we’d parked the car. “Come on,” she turned to hiss at us, when we didn’t follow. But by then Kay had caught up.
“What’s going on, Margaret?” she said, addressing my mother across the expanse of graves between them. “Don’t tell me you’re running away from me.”
My mother took a few steps forward, trying to smile. “Of course not,” she told Kay. “How are you? I was just chasing a squirrel.” The absurdity of her lie made Justine and me look at each other, though we managed not to laugh.
“Well, talk to me. Come here.” Kay reached out and squeezed my mother hard inside a hug, and I saw my mother trying to pull away, though Kay held tight. “Where’ve you been? Didn’t you get any of my letters? And what’s with the unlisted phone?”
“We were getting some crazy calls,” my mother said. “Didn’t I give you the number? I meant to.”
Rosemary said to Justine and me, “You guys, let’s make ourselves scarce for a minute,” and my mother and Kay didn’t stop us, so we left the grave site and moved a few rows up the hill, crunching on dropped leaves. We were now standing in front of a family whose stones said merely: “Mother,” “Father,” and “Baby Daughter.” Nearby, at the grave of a child who’d died as an infant in 1949, a jack-o’-lantern that had no doubt been fresh a week ago rotted around a sign that said in elderly cursive, We miss you. Behind us, my
mother and Kay spoke now in urgent and intimate tones.
“I can’t hear them,” Justine said.
I reminded her that this was the point, though I had also hoped the sounds of their conversation might carry.
“So what’s the scoop?” Rosemary asked. She put her hand out to feel the engraving on a stone decorated with angel wings carrying a skull. “They’re best friends, but they stopped talking?”
“I think Mom feels guilty or something,” I said, grimacing at the pull in the back of my calves as we sidestepped up the slope.
“Gee,” Justine muttered. “I wonder why.”
“What?” Rosemary said.
“Nothing.”
“Shut up, Justine,” I told my sister, feeling suddenly sick. I went over to the edge of the cemetery and fastened my fingers in the fence. It was a dangerous thing to do, because from here I could see the backyard of the Waxmans’ house, and this was closer than I wanted to be.
After a few minutes, our mother and Kay came over to where we stood. I could tell from the expressions on both their faces that in that short time, something had already been worked out—erased, explained, reconnected—and that, like a shuttlecock in the air between them, they were eager to keep it in play.
“Kay’s invited us over for a little picnic,” my mother told us.
“No,” Justine said. When our mother raised her eyebrows, she added, “I’m not trying to be rude. But I don’t want to go over there.” My sister motioned toward our old street, from where we could hear the sounds of children playing.
“Well, I can understand that,” Kay said.
“So can I. But I would like to go, so we have a problem.” My mother folded her arms across her chest. It resembled a gesture of defiance, but then I realized that as the hour grew later, the air was becoming chill. “Ana, how about you?”
And Give You Peace Page 14
