by Joan Barfoot
Two months ago, on the first day of summer and shortly before Nora left town, she stood up with Sophie when she and Hendrik got married in Nora’s backyard, the funeral home having been deemed either inappropriate or too likely to be otherwise occupied. Sophie was awash in very pale green, fabric and skin, for the occasion. “Imagine at my age,” she laughed, “getting accidentally knocked up.” Obviously she was doing much more than running a household and posing for Nora and having pre-dinner drinks and long conversations with Hendrik or Nora or both. How would she have met the undertaker of her dreams had Philip not required his services? More unintended consequences. They pile up.
The townspeople will be counting the months on their fingers. Not that this will harm Hendrik’s business, these things happen and are hardly scandalous any more, and even if they were, there’s never a shortage of dead to be dealt with. Anyway, Nora has to get out of her head that vision of villagers with pitchforks and torches. Now they will just have lurid recollections to tell themselves of blasphemy and death in the house on the hill.
Of merry widows.
Of egotistical widows who appear to imagine the townspeople will think of them at all; whereas out of sight, out of mind is more like it. Back there, Nora and her household will become just a remote recollection of a few bright, sharp, injurious moments. People are only the stars of their own films, not anyone else’s. In the long scheme of things that means that even the lunatic butcher will be reduced to a mere walk-on in Nora’s own flick.
It’s lonely, though, having to carry the whole movie herself after years with Philip as co-star. Being a third at dinner, no longer part of an even number, is the least of it really.
Philip would be happy, Nora thinks, he would be genuinely pleased for Sophie and Hendrik. He would wish Sophie well, in an easy-come, easy-go way, and if he were here now might say to Nora, “Isn’t it great how things have worked out for her?” and would mean it, and would reveal nothing to Nora at all. He went to his grave with that secret; although grave, in this instance, is metaphorical. Philip doesn’t have one of those. She hopes he likes where he is.
Finally Nora and Sophie and Hendrik make their way through the crush to fetch up together. “My God, Nora, it’s crowded,” Sophie says. “Are you pleased? You must be.”
“Yes, Max does these things right, doesn’t he? I’m so glad you could make it. You’re well?” Because in the earliest months, Sophie threw up a lot.
“Perfectly fine now.” As pregnant women sometimes do, Sophie rubs her belly reflexively, comforting and being comforted is how it looks, as well as somewhat smug. “I was wondering how I’d feel watching people check out those portraits of me, but there’s so many people I don’t see how anybody can see anything.”
“I’ve never been to something like this.” Hendrik’s round face beams, newly balding spot likewise. “I need to talk to Max about buying one of the pictures of Sophie. Or maybe all three.”
“They’re awfully, um, lively, aren’t they? Where would you hang them?”
Hendrik operates at a higher pitch than Philip’s bass, but his laughter is just about as satisfactory. “Maybe in the foyer right at the entrance, what do you think? That’d take people’s minds off their troubles the minute they walk in the door. Plus give them something more gorgeous to talk about than flower arrangements and bodies.”
Lucky Sophie. Nora grins. “Yes, I can see that. The perfect spot. Very uplifting. How long are you two in town?”
“Till tomorrow night. Soph and I have a major hotel room and we want our money’s worth.”
“What if somebody dies?”
“Then they’ll just have to wait, won’t they?” Sophie says Hendrik’s work not only doesn’t trouble her, it’s among his appeals. Nora almost understands what she means.
Sophie leans slightly, nods leftwards. “You see who’s here?”
“Beth, yes. Max must have tracked her down, I wonder how he did that? And why. Do you know who the guy is in the wheelchair?”
“No, but I bet she’s not his nurse.” Nora and Hendrik laugh. Sophie is gratified by this recent ability of hers to amuse. It seems to have something to do with heeding Hendrik’s instruction—advice—to “lighten up on yourself now and then, okay?” Okay. She was well on her way to doing that anyway, under Phil’s tutelage, but Hendrik puts these matters in broader perspective. A man whose profession is death learns to take a longer, lighter view of anything less, Sophie supposes. If he’s smart. Which he is.
What a surprise, this monstrous, easy affection Sophie has come to feel towards Hendrik, this man whose plump hands are adept with the chemistries of transforming corpses into recognizable loved ones, deft with the tiny stitcheries that hold features and expressions in place. They treat every body, dead or alive, with the tenderness it is due. He elides the awful distance between life and death, makes it run through his fingers like a single bright ribbon.
All that.
It wouldn’t be fair to compare him and Phil, whose concerns, at least until the last moment, were entirely weighted towards life, but it is fair to say Hendrik is a very different man to be with. Phil was enveloping, not to mention distinctly encouraging, whereas Hendrik feels simply solid. Phil cultivated carefreeness, which is different from care.
It seems she does compare them. Fair or not, dead man must lose.
Hendrik didn’t exactly court Sophie but he did, with cautious invitations to his home and gentle questions about her history, her nightmares, her pleasures—her life—demonstrate a real interest. Sometimes, naturally, he was busy. Later, although he said “I wouldn’t tell anyone else these things, only you,” he recounted funereal tales. As to the business itself, “I’m one of the few independents left, but I won’t sell out to a chain till my dad’s gone, and maybe not even then. It’s important to him that I’m the third generation.” That was good, that sounded loyal. A decent man.
It’s interesting that a substantially older, plumper, balding man may have his own brand of attractions, even if they don’t much resemble Phil’s, or even Nick’s. On a winter evening as they sat on his sofa watching rising snowbanks out his window, Hendrik said quietly and politely, as if offering coffee, “I wonder, would you care to go to bed?”
Why, yes, as a matter of fact.
An actual bed makes a difference. So does the privacy to thrash about and make noises. So does the leisure to rest, even to stay overnight. The thrill of danger is absent, but what luxury in its place, not least time for long conversations under quilted cover of dark.
There’s not so much space for Martha Nkume’s hands to get a bony grip either, when Hendrik’s body is nudged into Sophie’s.
With Nick, she’d taken birth control pills. Phil had long since had a vasectomy. Stupidly, Sophie supposes, the question of birth control, or even safety, didn’t arise between her and Hendrik. What were they thinking, how could it be that she was actually surprised to be pregnant? “I have something to tell you,” she said to him hesitantly, fearful that interest and delight would not carry them through.
“Oh,” said Hendrik. And, “Oh.” Tears came to his eyes. He rested his head on her shoulder.
Hendrik, one of her increasing burden of miracles, also had his whole life flipped sideways by the morning the women woke up and Phil failed to.
Sophie’s image of Phil’s hands, so gravely and deliberately etched into memory, is now almost entirely commemorative. It’s a long time since she’s felt them—so long they might as well be hanging on a wall now, like Nora’s paintings. Hendrik has said, “From the sound of it, I’m sure I can only be grateful to him,” which is probably true. Sophie remains grateful herself. She can still see Hendrik hurtling out of his office just off the entranceway of the funeral home as she stood there holding the blue carry-all containing Phil’s clothes.
What would Phil say of all this, if Phil had a voice?
But he does not.
Sophie and Hendrik speak of death, naturally—it’s his wor
k after all. “Death,” he said once, “is the one certain gift every parent gives to their child. Us, too,” and at first this was shocking. Not a nice thought at all, the sort of remark Nora might make on one of her more brutal days.
“You mean we’ve condemned our own child to die?”
They know they’re having a daughter. A daughter! Imagine!
“Condemned, that’s not the right word. At least I hope it’s not. All I mean is, once a person’s born, death is absolutely the outcome, and it’s wise to bear that in mind if only to stay alert and make every day count. But really, for as long as it lasts, it’s life that we’re giving—oh Sophie, I didn’t believe this was going to happen to me. I’m so happy.” Her, too. It takes some getting used to, though, happiness, and his way of thinking.
Hendrik glows when he puts his hand on her belly. She catches him regarding her sometimes with an unnerving rapture. If Phil in his way saved her, it occasionally feels as if in a not dissimilar way she’s saving Hendrik. “I’ve had girlfriends,” he says, “womanfriends, I mean, but not everyone likes the business I’m in, or they can’t cope with the uncertainty, that it’s hard to make plans, or it’s just hard having death in your face all the time. Whatever.”
So it seems he was lonely. Or resigned. There was no one in particular sitting in that second Muskoka chair in his yard after all. “But there was something about you, Soph”—no one else calls her Soph, but that’s okay, too—“when you came through the door that day with the clothes. The way you knew what you wanted, and were determined to get it. And of course,” and he smiled, glinting upwards at her, “you’re beautiful, too. Quite a package, all in all. I thought, I’d better grab this one.”
To be considered beautiful and brave and determined—that’s a bit over the top. Day-to-day, night-to-night coexistence shades and modifies their impressions, though, and incipient parenthood is a challenge in itself—how often has Hendrik listened to Sophie throw up? “I’m sorry you’re suffering,” he said. “I wish I could help.”
“That’s all right, you’ve done your part. Save your strength for walking the floor with her at three in the morning.”
“It’s a deal.”
What Sophie likes, besides Hendrik himself, is that living right inside a house of death, maybe like skydiving or tightrope walking for someone fearful of heights, puts terror where it belongs: right in the familiar, habitual heart of the matter.
“From what I’ve seen,” he says, “death itself is easy enough, it’s the dying that’s hard.” So in that way lucky Phil, slipping off in the night with one quick, easy step. Other people endure long, awful journeys to the same destination. At visitations and services, Hendrik hears all the stories of death either begged for or fended off beyond reason. “There are people,” he says, “who just refuse to recognize that that’s what’s going to happen, no matter what. That can look brave, but it tends to be sad.” The best deaths are also the rarest: “People who understand it will happen and set out to meet it by gathering up their own grace.” No, Hendrik says, he can’t put it better than that. Some people, given the opportunity, die well; many don’t. He makes it sound a shame to miss the chance to try. Someone like Phil, for instance, would never find out what, approaching the end, he was made of.
Truly, and in a funny way these conversations have become ordinary and interesting to Sophie, not morbid at all. “Sometimes I think humans are simply arrogant,” Hendrik says. “So much resistance and struggling, as if our own non-existence is the worst thing that could possibly happen—don’t you think that’s just insane self-importance?”
Sophie has heard the word arrogant before. From Nick, long ago, and from Janet, too, during Sophie’s brief, unthera-peutic therapy. And perhaps she was arrogant. That compulsion to sacrifice, much less save, must at least have reeked of self-importance and pride. Quite possibly her real problem was less an obsession with virtue and more a wilful blind spot when it came to appreciating the gratification involved. A failure to realize that no good act is without its rewards. Being human.
Being human is a broken-hearted business. She was wrong (if human) to set herself to forgetting as much as she could of what she’d learned about heartlessness. That deliberate amnesia, it now seems to her, came close to making her heartless herself, or at least hardened. She did try after all, she did something. She bears permanent witness. There will always be nightmares, the sights and the pungent smells, the remembered sounds, joyous and grief-stricken, will always appear on TV from one terrible place and another. Sophie will send money, and she will write, passionately and repeatedly, to politicians and governments and aid agencies, conducting the business of witnessing as best she can: both the most and the least she can do. Unlike Martha Nkume, she is just lucky. Unlike Martha’s wizened little Matthew, or wretched, wrecked Mary, Sophie and Hendrik’s daughter will also be lucky, arriving in a world intent on providing whatever she needs and, moreover, able to do so. A cosmic crapshoot has landed them in this time and this place, rather than that one. A tragically lopsided crapshoot, as a matter of fact.
Hendrik says, “You’re not a better or worse human being. You did a good thing, and now you’re doing a new, different, surprising good thing. Isn’t that great, Sophie? So many good chances?”
It’s great all right.
She likes it that Hendrik can talk about complicated mysteries in ways that are simple, but not stupid. “I have no more idea than anyone else what follows death,” he says with a shrug, “although myself, I’d bet it’s nothing at all. More arrogance, that we can believe in anything but our own disappearance. And putting faith in a system of fair punishments and rewards afterwards, that’s part of it, too.” It’s true there are at least six men in the world Sophie wouldn’t mind seeing in hell. She is less interested herself in reward, as it happens, than in punishment. On some scores she has no forgiveness whatever.
“My suspicion,” Hendrik says, “is that all we have is the space between the hour we’re born and the one when we die, so what’s to be done but our best?”
An awfully benign outlook. And possibly a little too simple. Sophie is still thinking it out for herself.
Still, happily, our best isn’t necessarily severe or particularly attached to mortality. Happily, it also includes driving here in the big black car previously ridden in by Sophie, Nora, Beth and Max to Phil’s funeral, and splurging on a hotel suite where, as Hendrik says, “we can play in the Jacuzzi and call up for anything that strikes our fancy from room service and walk around naked and watch movies in bed.”
Sophie intends to enjoy Nora’s party, and the hotel, and then tomorrow, as well, wandering the city with Hendrik as best she can in this lumbering state. She is not comfortable being this pregnant, but is persistently astonished by how cozy she feels. Like a large, self-contained package of warmth.
Which is probably basically how she appears, too, to anyone looking at Nora’s portraits of her. When Nora broached the subject of posing, Sophie didn’t expect the results to be so literal and recognizable. It also took considerable getting used to, disrobing in Nora’s glassy, airy studio, letting Nora drape one naked leg over the arm of a chair while Sophie’s other foot rested on the floor, with obvious results. She wasn’t sure why it mattered whether her hair was pulled up, back or loose, but it seemed to to Nora. So much actual touching involved in all this—had Nora touched Beth so intimately and often as well? If so, it wouldn’t be totally surprising if Beth were misled into imagining something more personal. It was personal enough to Sophie, aware that the hands adjusting her flesh had been intimately familiar with Phil’s flesh, too. She couldn’t tell, being regarded by Nora’s cool eyes, if those eyes were mainly an artist’s or a wife’s. Whether Nora was pondering shape and colour, or speculating about what pleasures Phil might have found there.
What would Phil have thought, looking on? Uh-oh, he might suppose.
Of course, what would he also think seeing his lavish Sophie spending herself so
quickly and remorselessly on his mortician? Frivolous, he might say of her. Hard.
Or he’d be glad for her. She has no idea, actually, what he would think. Honestly, her heart’s been so busy with change she doesn’t even think about him all that often, except for grateful reminders of what he made possible. But tonight’s different. He’s all around, scarcely avoidable.
When it came time, rather hurriedly, for the wedding, there was no one better than Nora to stand up beside Sophie, and no place except that significant backyard, where once upon a time she lay down with Phil. Although truthfully, in the event he scarcely crossed her mind.
Sophie chose a long, loose, pale green gown which went brilliantly with her hair, although less brilliantly, on the day, with her skin, since she was slightly ill with nerves and pregnancy. Mavis from the Old Town Bakeshop, not redeemed or forgiven but useful, spread her wings to produce canapés and crudités, as well as a three-tiered cake that was a one-tiered leftover by the end of the day. Sophie’s parents were there, and Hendrik fetched his father from the nursing home for a few hours. He also, having spent his whole life in the town, had several old, close friends in attendance. And there was Nora. The sun shone. The words of the service, so familiar, were new and astonishing when applied to them in particular. Everyone hugged and laughed and Sophie’s mother said, “I’m so glad for you, dear, he seems a nice, clever man—well, he must be clever and nice, mustn’t he, since he loves you?” Her father said, “Way to go, kid. You toughed it out and came through.” For the very first time, Sophie looked at them properly, a handsome pair in their sixties, still dealing with the fragile or duplicitous or brave of the world, and saw them as a couple, a team, a pair of elegant Percherons doing their work and companionably respecting each other with—this was the point—not much to do with her, really. They had their own lives; a good thing to realize before her own child arrived to become yet another loved but separate person with her own life.
