Love, Death & Rare Books

by Robert Hellenga

  “Nothing will happen,” Carl said. “Nothing much. But it’ll be easier if we do it now, before rigor sets in. I’ll come down later. Give me an hour. I’ve got some business at the home in St. Anne anyway. I’m sorry, Gabe. I’m going to need a death certificate from Dr. Kerry, but you don’t need to do anything right now except crank up the air conditioning. You can close her eyes if you want to.” I pulled the lids down with my little finger. “But just be still for a while. Give yourself an hour.” I was reminded of the advice I’d heard Delilah giving to someone on the phone.

  “Crank up the air conditioning. I’ll bring some dry ice over. In about an hour. We’ll wash her and you can leave her where she is overnight, but she’s got to be refrigerated or in the ground by tomorrow afternoon if you still want a green burial. I’ve got all the permits.”

  Saskia and I helped Carl wash the body. “It’s a good thing to do,” Carl said, and maybe it was, but it was hard. I could feel the grief sinking into me, with no words to contain it. I couldn’t stop thinking of Olivia as the person she had been until a few hours ago, and not the leaden weight in the bed where we’d made love and read to each other and fallen asleep in each other’s arms. And as we swabbed her mouth out with vinegar, these two realities became harder to reconcile. Trying to think of them was like trying to force two magnets together, like the little black and white dogs I played with as a child. Of course, when you turn one of them the opposite way, they snap together: No motion has she now, no force, She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks and stones and trees. It was unbearable. I didn’t understand how she could have loved this poem.

  We wrapped bricks of dry ice in thick cotton towels and put them in the bottom of a long wicker basket. We wrapped Livy in a light linen shroud and lifted her into the basket.

  The next morning, about an hour after first light, Sarah stopped by to see Olivia. When she realized that Olivia was dead, she wanted to administer extreme unction. I almost sent her away, but then I asked if she’d like to sit with us for a while, and she did. The three of us sat in silence till the sun rose over the dunes. Sarah pulled back the shroud and kissed Olivia’s forehead and said good-bye. I pulled the shroud back over her face, which looked the same. The dry ice that Carl had positioned under her neck and back was still smoking or steaming. The air conditioning was on full blast and it was chilly.

  Booker dragged his blanket out of the closet and jumped up on the bed.

  About 9:30, Saskia went for a swim. I watched her from the deck and waited till she turned around and headed back to shore.

  Carl and his assistant came over about ten o’clock. We drank some coffee and then they loaded Livy into the removal van and drove off.

  I wanted to go to The Dunes and speak to Augie, but I didn’t want to leave Saskia alone.

  “I’ll be all right,” she said. But she was crying as she drank a cup of tea.

  “You won’t swim out again?” I was afraid to ask, but I had to. She shook her head.

  Augie was in his chair. The TV was on low. The picture was clear, but I couldn’t see what it was, couldn’t understand.

  “Augie,” I said. “Livy’s dead. È morta.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “Last night. Saskia and I washed her body. Now she’s nothing. A rock or a tree. But it was good to touch her. I’m sorry now I didn’t help wash my dad, but I’ll do it for you.”

  “The women used to do that,” he said.

  “You walk through a door and disappear. You can’t explain it. Well, maybe you can. I have a rough idea. You don’t die all at once. It’s like lights going out when it starts to get dark. No, when it starts to get light. They don’t all go out at the same time. The enzymes break down the cells; microbes start to multiply…”

  There was a bowl of fruit on the table.

  “So,” Augie said. “It’s all over. You didn’t call me.”

  “I’m sorry. I wanted to tell you in person.”

  “A tutto c’è rimedio fuorché alla morte. There’s a remedy for everything except death. Your daughter with you?”

  “Saskia?”

  “You got another daughter?”

  I didn’t feel like explaining, didn’t want to correct him. “She’s probably going to Jordan pretty soon.”

  Augie was eating a ripe peach with a knife and fork. He still had juice on his chin. “You want one?” he asked. I shook my head.

  We buried Olivia that afternoon, earth to earth, the first green burial in the St. Anne cemetery, in a new section at the back. A reporter was there to cover the action. Carl had called in some favors and twisted some arms to get the permits. Augie rode with Saskia and me in the limo. Reverend Sarah said a few words and we went home.

  Montaigne has a lot to say about death, but I don’t think he got it quite right. The problem isn’t your own death, it’s the deaths of other people, people you love. He should have figured that out after the death of La Boétie. Maybe he did.

  I was glad that Saskia was with me. In St. Anne. She wasn’t sure of her plans, but I knew that there were good things in store for her. She knew Arabic, for one thing. That gave her a leg up. She didn’t have to be in Amman till the middle of October.

  After the simplest of all funerals—Sarah said a few words—Saskia and I went down to the lake for a swim. The water was very cold. An east wind had blown the warm surface water out. Cold water from the depths had moved in to replace it. After a short swim, we walked along the beach all the way south to the Loft and I told Saskia about coming here with her mother, back in 2009. She remembered calling her mother, calling her on her new cell phone, and her mother telling her she was having a dirty weekend. “You were with her then, in the car. When I called.”

  I nodded.

  She thought she might forget about Jordan and go to grad school in linguistics, but by the time of Olivia’s memorial service, she’d gone back to her original plan.

  The memorial service, at the end of the week, was at the cemetery. About a hundred people gathered at the grave. And Booker, who ran back and forth, interrogating, looking for Olivia. I was surprised to see so many people from Reverend Sarah’s protest groups, and so many people who’d met Olivia at the children’s story hour she’d organized at the library; and people from the church, and customers who knew her at the shop. David was there too. I didn’t notice him at first. They all had something to say, and by the time we were done, I realized that Olivia’s footprint in St. Anne was bigger than mine. And in a funny way this lifted my spirits.

  Sarah said a few words about Olivia’s spiritual journey. How the nuns at the Episcopal monastery near Grand Rapids had been praying for her. She read a card from the Mother Superior. David spoke too, about her love of Nature. And he recited the poem that was always on my mind:

  A slumber did my spirit seal,

  I had no human fears;

  She seemed a thing that could not feel

  The touch of earthly years.

  No motion has she now, no force,

  She neither hears nor sees;

  Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,

  With rocks and stones and trees.

  Augie spoke too. He was nervous and spoke in Italian without realizing it. “Lei potrebbe far sentire un vecchio di nuovo giovane.” She could make an old man feel young again.

  Afterward we went back to the house for a drink: Saskia and Sarah and Augie and David and Delilah and I. Augie had brought a bottle of homemade limoncello, which we drank in our Duralex glasses.

  “Why is the lake so blue?” Saskia asked after a while.

  “Because,” Delilah said, “it’s reflecting the color of the sky.”

  “And why is the sky so blue?”

  “When I was a kid,” I said, “I used to see ads for The Book of Knowledge that promised to explain why the
sky was blue. I suppose we could look it up in Wikipedia,” I said, but no one really cared.

  Saskia wanted a sauna. She’d become quite the expert and offered to get the fire going. She and Olivia and Sarah had taken saunas together; and she and I and Olivia and Augie had taken saunas together; and Olivia and Saskia and I. But it would be the first time for this particular combination, which included David and Delilah, Adam and Carla.

  Saskia got up and stood with her hand on the doorknob of the door that opened out onto the south side of the house. I think we all felt a little awkward, but no one wanted to say “no.” It was embarrassing to say “yes” and just as embarrassing to say “no.” Maybe “self-conscious” rather than “embarrassing.”

  I poured a little more limoncello into our glasses, and Augie cautioned us against drinking too much before a sauna.

  Saskia went out to start a fire.

  “I got an e-mail yesterday,” I said, “inviting me to enroll in a program that would enable me to reach my highest potential. There were two parts to it: physical cleansing (eliminating toxins) and discovering my inner warrior.”

  No one wanted to know more.

  When Saskia came back in, she looked around and said, “Did I miss my cue?” After about half an hour she went upstairs and came down with a stack of Turkish towels and a couple regular bath towels and was the first to slip out of her clothes. She wrapped one of the towels around her—young, confident, beautiful, sad. Reverend Sarah was the last. She stretched and shook out the muscles in one leg, then the other. Like a runner before a race. She was beautiful too. In fact, everyone was beautiful.

  We sat in towels for another fifteen minutes, and then we took turns showering in the outside shower. Booker went down to the beach. We wrapped our towels around ourselves again, entered the sauna, took off our towels and sat on them, not looking at each other. At least not directly. Except for Saskia, who sat nearest to the fire, so she could ladle water from a bucket onto the hot rocks, and who looked at everyone. We’d never had that many people in the sauna before. I kept counting and kept coming up with different numbers, usually seven or eight of us, all speaking in such complex counterpoint that it was hard to tell us apart.

  “I don’t care for that poem. I never understood why she liked it. Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course; With rocks and stones and trees. It’s horrible, brutal.”

  “Maybe it’s going back to Nature, being one with Nature. Who wrote The Sand County Almanac?”

  “Aldo Leopold.”

  “Doesn’t he say it’s comforting to think that our bodies are part of the natural cycle, that we’ll decompose and become part of the natural world? That’s what green burial is about.”

  “But what does it all mean?”

  “What does anything ‘mean’? Maybe nothing means anything.”

  “If nothing meant anything, we wouldn’t be sittin’ here wringing our hands and cryin’.”

  “Is that what we’re doing?”

  “It’s an old blues song. ‘C. C. Rider.’”

  “What do you want to know when you want to know what something means?”

  “The meaning of the porter scene in Macbeth? What you want to know is, how does it fit into the play as a whole?”

  “What does a carrot mean? What does a dog mean? What does a person mean?”

  “What does first sex mean?”

  “I don’t know about a carrot, but first sex is easy. It means you’ve turned a corner, crossed a border into new territory. You can’t go back. That’s what things ‘mean’—turning corners.”

  “Aren’t the best things the things that don’t mean anything? Like dancing. Beauty. Swimming. Mountain climbing. The sound of the waves.”

  “Fucking?”

  “There’s fucking and then there’s fucking. You rub your dick back and forth and some stuff comes out the end.”

  “Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint.”

  “Marcus Aurelius. Montaigne quoting Marcus Aurelius.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything by itself. But you fuck your neighbor’s wife and you could fuck up your life. Her life too. You might find that you’ve turned a corner. That would mean something.”

  “Or your neighbor’s husband.”

  “Or maybe it was a wonderful experience and you never tell anybody about it, but you think about it for the rest of your life, whenever you’re feeling sad—and then you feel happy.”

  “‘No motion has she now, no force, She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees.’ Olivia must have thought it was okay.”

  Saskia ladled some water on the hot rocks, and we were enveloped in a burst of steam. The temperature was up to 140. We were quiet for a while.

  “At one with Nature.”

  “You gonna ask me about my plans for the summer?”

  “You going back to Italy?”

  “Eddie and I—probably not going to make it back now.”

  “I’ll be in Amman, Jordan, in the fall, working in a palace. Working for a prince.”

  “We’re going to miss you.”

  “I’m going to read Montaigne.”

  “You’ve already read Montaigne.”

  “‘Philosophy is learning how to die.’”

  “That’s Cicero, not Montaigne. Montaigne quoting Cicero. You know Al Bernstein got rid of his all his books, everything. He’s already gone to Israel. He wanted me to find someone who’d keep his collection together. Give it to a library. These things can get complicated. I arranged a deal with the Holocaust Museum in Chicago.”

  “I’m going to visit all the places my mother lived. She was born in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Learned to play the violin. Played all over the country. My dad heard her in South Bend, Indiana. She was playing with the Notre Dame Symphony”

  “And I’ll bet he said, ‘That’s the woman I’m going to marry.’”

  “How did you know?

  “I could see it coming a mile away.”

  “You think your old car will make it?”

  “I have faith.”

  “When will you be back?”

  “I’m not coming back.”

  “You got another parish?”

  She shook her head.

  “You’re just… leaving?”

  She nodded.

  The temperature was up to 150.

  “When he rolled away the stone, Jesus erased the line between the living and the dead. Before that, there was a river dividing the two worlds. You had to take a boat.”

  “Flannery O’Connor. ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find.’”

  “And now you think it’s a round trip, andata e ritorno?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Maybe he made a big mistake.”

  “Well, it was a gamble.”

  “Jesus didn’t move the stone. I thought it was an angel.”

  “The young man at the tomb was not an angel. He was just a young man.”

  “What was he doing there?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it.”

  “It was called a ‘golal.’ The stone was. Mark says it was ‘exceedingly great.’ What’s really strange, though, is the absolute unbroken silence concerning a spot that must have been a very sacred place to thousands of people, the circle of the Christian believers themselves, and outside the circle too. It never became a sacred site. Unlike the cenacle. You can still visit the cenacle, but nobody knows where the tomb was.”

  “What’s the cenacle anyway?”

  “The upper room where Jesus and his disciples ate their last meal.”

  “But Olivia’s still dead!”

  “What are you going to put on her stone?”

  We thought for a while as t
he temperature kept rising. We looked up at the big thermometer on the wall. Up to 160.

  “Don’t put any more water on the stones.”

  Saskia ladled more water anyway and another blast of steam filled the little sauna house.

  “‘Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks and stones and trees.’”

  “It’s too brutal.”

  “’Nella sua voluntade è nostra pace?”

  “In his will is our peace? I didn’t know you were religious.”

  “You got to be at my age.”

  “How about something from Shakespeare: ‘There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow’?”

  “It’s getting hot in here.”

  “Don’t say, ‘It’s like a sauna.’”

  “Does it get this hot in Jordan?”

  “It’s like this every day. In summer. It gets pretty hot. Actually it’s often one twenty, but that’s out in the desert.”

  “The legal limit for a sauna is a hundred ninety-four degrees. In the United States and Canada.”

  “That’s almost boiling.”

  “It feels like it’s boiling now.”

  “When you need me, put your arms around anyone and give them what you need to give to me.”

  “Too sappy.”

  “It’s not sappy.

  “Pretty hard to get all that on a tombstone.”

  “How about ‘carried by great winds across the sky’?”

  “That’s an Ojibwa saying. She’d like that.”

  “That was a plaque on the wall of Tony Soprano’s hospital room.”

  “Tony Soprano?”

  “A TV show, a kind of soap opera.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s still pretty good.”

  “You know, the last two months have been really hard. But right now I think they were the happiest time in my life. I was happy, and I didn’t know it. Can you be happy and not know it? I mean happy and sad at the same time?”