Cecile had wolfed down a tart on the sly—she was famished, greedy for food and love and beauty—everyone else seemed to have better management of self. In fact the rest of the tarts were untouched, and she wondered if she dared have another. The younger people, Tim and Fiona and some of Warren’s friends who’d just gotten in from New York, were hugging each other, laughing and crying, talking with an earnest intensity she never felt anymore, while Polchikov held out the terrible crystal of his life for Martha’s contemplation and Drew quizzed the pedant-mystic who had helped clean the room.
“He didn’t suffer,” she said, taking his hand in both of hers. “He just set his spirit free.”
Drew gave her a look of boiling contempt. “What did his body look like, after he set his spirit free?” he asked.
Her gaze dropped. “Well, if you’re just curious—”
“Call it that,” he said, chin jutting, challenging her. He was always determined to batter through to some hard truth, until he seemed like a man hammering at a peach to get the stone. Cecile felt her eyes closing and caught herself just as she fell asleep, and Martha touched Drew’s arm:
“Take her home, sweetie, look how tired she is. Tim’s here, and Fiona … Which reminds me, when are you two going to have a baby?” She looked happy all of a sudden, flashing a conspiratorial glance at Cecile—they were women together; they overruled, enlivened the men. Drew looked cornered, likely to strike, but she paid no attention. Circumstance had given her license to say what she pleased.
“You’d be a wonderful father,” she said. “The boys got so much from you—they did, Drew. And we need children in this family … especially now.”
This family? Had Drew, leaving his position as Martha’s lover, taken on the role of her son—since there was a vacancy at the moment?
“She’s not going to be my baby’s grandmother,” Cecile told him as soon as they were back outside.
“It’s too early to leave,” he said.
“It’s two A.M.!” Snow blanketed the narrow street so the town looked as it must have a hundred years ago: proud and lonely, face to the sea. Down by the dark church a gray figure stopped still under a streetlight, waiting for a skunk to nose across the road.
“Which is when things really happen,” Drew said, pointing up to Martha’s window, where the candleflame belled in a brandy glass, and three figures swayed in an embrace.
“Drew, it’s a wake, not a party,” she said. “And Martha is not your mother. Tim is your stepson, not your friend. They need a father, those kids,” she said, remembering suddenly not to use the plural, “… not a drinking companion.” In fact, she needed a father herself—or two, really, one for herself and one for her child.
“I could strangle you,” he said, between his teeth—and she thought how, years ago, seeing her slip her dress off over her head, he’d said “… like vellum,” with awe. Smooth and white, ready to have a history scrawled over—she had loved to see herself that way—an erotic angel who could magically erase decades of a man’s life and earn herself a soft bed thereby. With this image she, who had wanted the most tender and encompassing love, had distracted herself, as he bent her over the back of the sofa, to have her—the first time—from behind.
“Another death, then, for you,” she said now, in the hard voice of the woman she’d become. To think, she was asking him to father another child.
* * *
The day of the funeral. The gathering afterward would be at Drew and Cecile’s, Martha’s place being too small and Emerson’s too macabre. In the mirror Cecile saw her black dress was all wrong—even in the shop she’d known she’d have nowhere to wear it, but seeing herself in the mirror had imagined herself happy with a man who loved her, so couldn’t resist buying it. She tied a dull scarf at the neck, listening to Tim, who was dressing in the next room with Warren’s friends, as they chided each other over their clothing—who had the proper stuff for a funeral at this age?
“Yeah, Eli,” Tim said. “When was the last time you put on a matched pair of socks anyway?”
“Your wedding, bub,” Eli replied. Cecile had danced with him there—his shirt had come untucked, his tie askew, his hair sprang comically off his head, and he’d clutched at her waist, holding on for dear life. “You dance divinely!” she’d said, and he spun her out and they crashed back together and bumped their heads, laughed, tried again. Then, of course, she’d had to sit back down with the grownups, who were still talking about Vietnam.
“The way people danced then,” Drew was saying. “The sexual frenzy!” Cecile and Warren and Tim had been children, of course, with only the barest understanding. Now Cecile took a pair of Drew’s socks across the hall to Eli and found him bent double as over a wound, with Tim kneeling at his side. They didn’t see her, and she slipped down the stairs as he started to cry in great retching masculine sobs.
Drew grinned, a dizzying anomaly, and went for the liquor cabinet.
“Hair of the dog that bit him,” he said.
“He’s not hung over, he’s crying,” she said. “It’s a funeral. A funeral. Someone has died. Your son.”
“He wasn’t my son,” he said. “They were never mine. It wasn’t like that. You weren’t there.” He looked surprised, as if he’d just remembered. It was true, of course—she’d been home with her own parents, those waifs lost in the phantasmagoria of the seventies. When she saw Drew she’d wanted him just because he was solitary, harsh. She’d chosen her husband the way men choose their mountains; now she was tired and cold and the air was too thin to breathe.
“He was someone who needed you,” she said, wondering if she was arguing for Warren or herself, and thinking that now it was Drew who needed her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s a hard time, that’s all.”
“But you’re right,” he said, stern. “You’re quite right.” And looked straight into her eyes. “I failed him, as I would fail a child of yours.”
Her eyes filled, but where she would cry, Drew seemed to parch, until a fissure split him down the center. Marrying him, she had contracted to do his weeping for him: she might weep all the rest of her years.
On the way to the church he drove slower and slower as if he hoped they would never arrive. She tried to think of summer light on the water, the dusky seaweed gardens and the green shallows paling with the tide. Now the bay looked hard as steel, too bright—the air had that frozen clarity; she could see the morning shadows across the dunes in Wellfleet fifteen miles away. It was high tide, and waves slapped against the seawall, spraying the pallbearers as they carried the coffin in.
“The black hearse, come for Warren,” Drew said with cold dread. Yes, it was real. Cecile set a hand on his arm but he pulled back—Martha would see them. Ten years now and he was still guilty, still protecting them from her. Father a child now, when Martha had lost one of hers? Never—it wouldn’t be fair.
But Martha must have realized this, that was why she’d brought it up last night. She’d been giving them her blessing.
The hearse driver, standing at military ease at the curb, glanced quickly over at Cecile—it was Wizz Mancini, dope dealer and sometime taxidermist whose moonlight job at the funeral home had been the source of some hilarity. He smiled at her with sorrowful tenderness now, not a spark of the usual lechery—in his suit, with his long, thinning hair carefully braided, he seemed entirely dignified and respectful, someone who’d seen enough of death that he could meet it on natural terms.
Inside, Drew stood for a moment with Emerson—they looked alike, weathered to silver like thousand-year-old olive trees.
“Woe betide,” Drew said after a while, and Emerson nodded, and another long silence was broken by Emerson’s asking Drew what he thought about the Serbo-Croatian situation. Cecile’s interest fell away, and when she listened again Drew was describing a story he’d read, about a father and son blown off course during an afternoon sail. “Finally they’re standing on a rock, while the tide rises—he puts the boy up on his shoul
ders … there’s nothing else he can do.”
Unbearable, to be responsible for another life. They looked off past each other, and Cecile imagined taking them into herself, healing them. The feminine fallacy, that sense that a man might complete himself, cure himself, by sacred immersion in her. Had she learned nothing, seeing that for all her warmth Drew had never thawed? In fact the kindest thing she could do for him might be to spare him from becoming a father.
Warren was dead, they could have their way with him, assigning him this or that role in their stories, each one using him as he or she liked. The church was full, everyone in town had come, humbled, washed through by it all. Last week they’d gone back and forth on their errands, never quite sure whether it was all right to be reading on the sofa when the dust was thick underneath, whether the baby ought to be comforted or left to cry … whether to send Warren to the hospital though he said he’d rather die. Last week their opinions had been quite definite: some acts were despicable, some could be forgiven. Now there was nothing to do but stand here and bear this together—and everything else fell into shadow—they remembered how little they knew. Bill Friedrich, whom Drew had punched in the jaw years ago when he made some crack about Martha, came in and pulled Drew into his arms.
“Depression killed him,” he said, “same as cancer, or stroke.”
“Let the family through, please,” said Polchikov, having assumed the role of usher, and set a hand on Cecile’s shoulder, guiding her down the aisle toward the second pew.
“We’re not family,” Drew said, but Cecile had seen Tim standing up front all alone.
“Actually we are family,” she said, suffering Drew’s murderous glance and feeling for him. He’d been so resolute in solitude, fathering no children, keeping even his lovers at arm’s length, and still he found himself enmeshed, every flinch and shrug pulling at the human web …
“Because Tim needs you,” she answered the unspoken question.
“Needs…,” he said—was there no end to the modern bathos? Martha was just behind them, the organ had begun. He was caught; he sat down, and Polchikov edged in beside him. “Of course, my father’s coffin was draped in the flag,” Polchikov said as Martha ascended the altar with her eulogy.
She might have been addressing Warren’s commencement. He was “a hunter, fisherman, artist, an individualist who preferred bear meat to steak, who knew his way in the wilderness…”
… and only lost it, Cecile thought, among men. Martha ought to write for GQ, she thought—could she not say one true thing?
“It was Warren’s life, and he lived it, and ended it, as he chose,” she went on, so Cecile wanted to jump up and object. Though she supposed a mother might be forgiven for suffering a failure of honesty while eulogizing her son. She’d have liked to blame Martha, despise her, and forget her—and forget Warren’s death from despair.
Tim went to the altar—to say how he’d looked up to his younger brother—and Cecile started to cry. That was the absurd truth of it: Tim who was steady and capable, a lawyer with a marriage and soon a child, had admired Warren, who fumbled through in terror, collecting women and unemployment, taking on the glamour that always fills a vacuum. Yes, we die after long lives during which the brave admire the fearful and the strong envy the weak! Amazing, when she thought of it, all the hours and days one spends without weeping, considering that none of us really knows the other, mothers are blind to their own children, eulogies sound like press releases and … Polchikov gave her a Kleenex; she blew her wretched nose.
Martha, who had turned around to face the congregation, glanced back with fond sympathy at the sight of Cecile weeping openly for her son.
Anyone who wished might speak. “I’m … I was Warren’s girlfriend,” a girl in a leopard-print coat said, and another jumped up and fled out the back door. Beth sat across the aisle, holding an old lumpy jacket around herself as if she was freezing. Every few minutes she’d sigh and her face would go more numbly haunted as she stared intensely at the floor. A man in a tweed coat stood up and read from a typed sheet: “I’m Ned Fisk, a professor of Warren’s, and I speak for all of us at Ramsey when I say what a promising artist we’ve lost. His work was juicy, you could really feel its effect, and at the same time it had an intelligence, a … walking interiority that we at Ramsey are always searching for and very rarely find.” A bubble in Cecile’s throat broke from giggle to sob—no wonder Warren had fled. But Martha crossed the aisle and took Fisk in her arms.
“I’m not as eloquent as the professor,” the next man said, “but I’ve done some hunting in the north country and I can tell you that I have only respect for a man who can bring the mighty bruin down.…”
They were, all of them, reminded of the shape of their own lives. Everyone spoke from his own grief or pride, Polchikov telling about his father, and Nita Schorb whose son had bullied Warren all through school and was in the county House of Corrections now, describing the deep bond she and Martha would always share. “There are so many ways to lose a child…,” she said.
“I’m an artist myself,” someone else was saying, “and even though I’ve been much more successful … acclaimed … than Warren, I…” Cecile wanted to jump up and shriek at them, that they were supposed to be talking about Warren, raising him as a real, whole man one last time. But it was too late, he would live only as an actor in other people’s dramas now. If she’d walked home with him, kissed him instead of Drew … but who could know?
A man in the back pew stood and laced his fingers under his gut. “I never had the pleasure of meeting Warren,” he began. Cecile sank into her seat. “But he sounds very courageous, and his exploits seem to have meant a lot to his family and friends. Maybe he suffered something out for all of them … us … He looked straight at something the rest of us turned away from.…”
Wizz stood and motioned to the reverend for the benediction. The pallbearers came silently up the aisle. The ground was frozen; Warren would have to go into the vault.
* * *
The rest of them crowded into Drew and Cecile’s little house. They’d taken the paintings down: the storm at sea, the glimpse along the grass alley were replaced with Warren’s wild sweeps of color. It was as if they’d turned inward from the narrow windows they were used to peeping out of and realized they’d had their backs to a great vista all this time. The room was full as a rush hour subway so they had to brush against each other, absorb each other’s warmth, and Cecile felt herself passed embrace by embrace through the crowd, hardly knowing whether they held each other for consolation or only because death had given them license.
Whatever, she accepted it—she wanted to take every man and woman in her arms, feel them, smell them, kiss their mouths, make love to them … they were alive, all of them, and each with his own allure, the vision that arises from a glimpse … the woman whose fat braid fell against a heavy sweater, who no doubt had a soup simmering on her woodstove at home; the two ancient bohemians with their Gauloises; the kids, as Drew called them: Tim and Fiona and the others Cecile’s age, looking pale, sweet, and yes, so much younger than she.
Warren’s friend Eli appeared, wearing Drew’s socks and carrying a white lily.
“It’s beautiful, Eli, thank you!” Cecile said, going to kiss him.
He drew back. “It’s … it’s for Martha.”
Of course. Still, she was stung, and imagined suddenly that Warren had taken pleasure in the thought of these people scraping his brain out of the dresser drawers—he’d left no note because he wanted them to reckon with his flesh finally, with no veil of glamour, of language, between them. Well, she would take up his cause now, hate them in his stead.
“I’ll put it in water,” she said, but the stem was too long, and when she went to cut it the knife glanced off and sliced her finger. Blood spattered over the lily, dripped through the fist she held the finger tight in—she couldn’t bear to look.
“What an idiot!” she said, laughing anxiously, looking across the r
oom for Drew. Who returned her gaze with what she could only feel was hatred. To bleed, now, here? And then to laugh? He turned back to the woman he’d been talking to, lecturing her with angry animation while Eli led Cecile through to the bathroom, keeping her hand in the air. As they passed Drew, she heard him say something about Thomas Hardy, loudly, as if he was talking over a rude distraction. Better to have married a fat man, she thought, who would try to stuff the inner void with cream puffs, than this one, who took only bread, water and knowledge in order to remain above the ordinary longings of men.
“Thank God you’re a doctor,” she said as Eli taped the wound.
“It’s research,” he said. “I never actually touch a human being.” In the mirror behind him she saw herself smile joyfully because he was touching her, and looked away ashamed.
“Go, give Martha her lily,” she said. “I’m fine.”
A thin gray man came in and tapped her shoulder with timid urgency, like a child tugging at its mother’s dress. His wine, had she seen it? He’d brought a whole case.…
“Maybe someone put it in the basement,” she said, and seeing he needed company descended the stairs with him, imagining for some reason that he’d embrace her there. Warren had shattered the boundaries, anything was possible—but the man sank on the bottom step with his head in his hands.
“A whole case,” he said, nearly crying. “Where can it be?” They were face-to-face with a painting of Warren’s—a leering face with slashes of red and blue—that they’d decided not to hang, and behind it, the peaches Cecile had put up last summer. An advertisement, to say “Here, I am fruitful.” And stored them in the dark here so as not to show off.
“I lost a son myself,” he said, so lightly she took it first for aimless conversation; then she remembered it from the paper: he’d fallen from a highway overpass. Fallen or jumped, they couldn’t be sure.
Darling? Page 23
