“I’ll come back later,” Maureen says, feeling the hostility, “when they’re gone. Call me on my cell phone.”
After she leaves, I walk the property. Everything is green, lush, there’s a smell of growth in the air. It’s beautiful here, but there’s no future, unless you want to farm, or be a squire. I have no desire to be either.
Too quickly, it’s nighttime again. Sam and Emily take off—they’ll be back early in the morning. I call Maureen. She comes over immediately.
“You don’t look good,” she observes. We’re sitting in the living room. The lights are out. “You’re not getting any sleep, are you?”
“I will, after tomorrow.” I’ve seen my reflection in the mirror. I look like a raccoon, the bags under my eyes are so black.
“You’d sleep if I was sleeping with you. I’ll spend the night here, if you want me to,” she offers. “I want to be with you. And you need me to be with you.”
I’m shaking. I pull her close to me.
“Trust me, Fritz. We’re nothing if we don’t trust each other.”
My mother is dead because of me. I have to turn this corner. “Be patient, Maureen. Please.”
“I have been, you know that. But I have to know it’s going to happen.”
“It will. I promise.”
• • •
My bed, barely adequate for me when I was a kid, is absurdly small for the two of us. Arms and legs tangled up all together, bodies pressing against each other. Love, yes; desperation, unquestionably.
I lie with my head on her stomach, on her lean hard thigh, she strokes my wet, sticky hair, fingers twining strands like a woman weaving a quilt, rubbing my shoulders, drawing me to her, her back to me, two spoons. I feel energy leaving my body, a spirit-feeling, evil cares and woes drifting up to the ceiling, soul-phantoms curling out the windows, into the deep, enveloping night.
The ghosts of my parents are in the house with us. I can almost see them, moving from room to room. In my mind I’m moving through the old rooms with them—kitchen, parlor, porches, then outside. I am in here, they are out there. They are leaving, together again.
I come back into my body. Maureen’s breath is warm on my face. We fall asleep, grasping each other.
The first thin ribbon of color is beginning to show in the bottom of the sky when I wake up. For a moment I’m disoriented, until I remember where I am.
Maureen isn’t here. Her note is propped up on the side table next to my bed, so I won’t miss it.
Fritz, darling—I can’t be at your side at the funeral this morning, although my heart will be aching that I’m not. But I know there will be more harm than good if I’m there. This is your family’s time, and there shouldn’t be any discord. I will be with you in spirit, and will say good-bye to your mother later, when the others have gone.
There is, also, another issue, which I fear is deeply dividing us. I can’t give my heart and soul to a man who might not be around for the long haul, because of his inability to stop tilting at windmills, a destructive habit that could be fatal. I’m not interested in wearing widow’s weeds, not until I’m an old lady with grandchildren. It’s time to call this obsession quits, Fritz, and get on with our lives. When you have made the decision to move on with me, in a life clean of regret, looking back, and attempting payback, call me, and I’ll come running.
Don’t be angry at me for taking what could be construed as the cowardly way out. I wanted to tell you this in person, but I knew you would try to talk me out of it, and I know this is the right thing to do. I hope you understand.
All my love, Maureen.
P.S. If James Roach shows up, either ignore him, or be civil. You’ll feel better about yourself, and that’s the most important thing.
I crumple the note, toss it in the wastebasket. I understand why she feels obliged to do this, as well as her feelings for my safety, but I hate that I’ll have to endure the ordeal of the funeral service without her. We could have worked things out without her running away from them.
But she’s right, in the practical, real-world sense: there would have been tension between her, Sam, and Emily, and that wouldn’t be good. Dinah would feel it, too, which would make matters worse. And I also know, in my heart, that I’m not ready to let James Roach walk away from this without trying to bring him down. I owe that to my mother. I owe it to myself.
I can get through today by myself. Later, hopefully, Maureen and I will work everything out and we’ll be together again. Because once this is over I’m not going to let her leave me again, or put her in a position where she feels she has to.
The old clapboard church that my parents worshiped in for over sixty years, and that my brother, sister, and I were baptized in, is filled to overflowing. Sam and Emily, Dinah and her husband, Phillip, who’s also a doctor—a radiologist—their kids, both young adults (I’m closer in age to my niece and nephew than I am to Dinah, my sibling), sit in the front pew with me, as we receive the mourners who come up the aisle to pay their final respects to mother.
Dinah and I had a private moment at the house before the funeral home limousine carried us here to the church. It was comforting, seeing her.
My big sister has changed noticeably in the four years since I’ve last seen her. Approaching sixty, she’s a woman who’s happily given up battling the aging process. She no longer is coloring her graying hair, nor does she seem concerned that her backside and thighs are thickening. She is at peace with herself, and radiates contentment. In that respect, she is her mother’s daughter.
“Mother had a wonderful life.” She’s taking this stoically—she’s a doctor, she sees death as the final step in an inevitable cycle. “Better this way than a lingering illness. Ever since she had that seizure last year I was afraid she’d have something more debilitating and wind up a helpless invalid in a nursing home. She’d have hated that. It was her time,” Dinah concluded philosophically.
It wasn’t mother’s time, that’s the problem. She wasn’t ready to die, death was imposed on her. But I’m not going to clue Dinah in about what’s been going on. Let her be at peace with mother’s passing.
Johanna and Agatha Mortimer file by to pay their respects. To my surprise, they’re accompanied by Ed Flaherty, Roach’s friend who I met the time I went out sailing on the yacht; the day Wallace almost killed me. Mrs. Mortimer has her hand on Flaherty’s arm for support. She needs it; she’s shaking.
“I’m so sorry, Fritz,” Johanna whispers as she takes my hand.
“Thank you,” I whisper back, thinking of how awkward Maureen would have found this encounter. Maybe her instinct was right, I have to admit.
“We’ll talk later,” Johanna says before she moves on.
I nod, mutely. Her mother and Flaherty mumble regrets as well. I didn’t know Flaherty knew my mother. Mrs. Mortimer looks terrible. Mother’s death has hit the old folks hard; they’re all wondering which of them will be next.
James Roach is absent; thank God for that. He sent a huge wreath, the biggest one in the church. Typical of him—he’s the kind of rich bastard who thinks he can buy anything. If I’d been drinking I’d have kicked the damn thing out the church door. I don’t know how I would have reacted if he had shown his face. Punched him out, probably.
Buster isn’t here, either, which is a shame, because he really liked my mother, and she felt the same toward him. He called last night, full of regret: he’s in the middle of a trial he thought would be over yesterday, but it dragged on, and he can’t get off. He sent his love for mother and good feelings for me. We’ll have our own private wake later.
The doors are closed, the funeral service begins. The minister’s remarks are knowing and loving. He’s a youngish man, in his early forties, but he and mother were friends—age was irrelevant to her, she cared about what was in your heart. She was the president of the women’s auxiliary at the church, so she and Pastor Morton spent time together. He enjoyed her vivaciousness and spunk, and recalls a few memorable inci
dents that evoke welcome laughter from the assembled mourners, all of whom want to remember mother in a positive, uplifting way.
The service is brief, as we requested. Some prayers, the sermon, a few of mother’s favorite hymns, and it’s over. Sam, Dinah’s husband, Phillip, their son, Jason, and three older men, decades’ long friends of mom and dad’s (only a few are left, and fewer still are fit enough to carry a heavy box), and I hoist the simple pine coffin onto our shoulders and carry it out of the church and into the hearse. At one point Sam, standing next to me, coughs, and I realize he’s been drinking: I smell vodka on his breath. It’s a common fallacy that vodka leaves no alcohol trace. Experienced drinkers—I qualify as one—can easily detect it. Sam needs a booze crutch to get through this, I realize sadly.
It’s a short drive to the ancient graveyard. Generations of Tullises and Bradshaws, along with Reynoldses, Miltons, Joneses, and other related ancestors, have been laid to rest here for over two hundred and fifty years. The burial, as was the service, is mercifully short, which is a good thing, because it is hot as a greased skillet today, over 100 degrees, with the humidity in the high 90s. Rivulets of water are running down my sides from my armpits. All the men, except the minister, my brother, my brother-in-law, and me, have taken off their coats. Looking around, I see pancake makeup melting and cracking on women’s faces, dark stains appearing under dresses and shirtsleeves. Everyone, old folks and not-so-old, beats the air furiously with fold-open fans the funeral home has wisely distributed.
Sam, standing to my right in the row closest to the open grave site, is sweating buckets. His face is flushed crimson; he looks dehydrated. That would be both awful and wonderfully comical—mother’s older son, Mr. Uptight, keeling over into her grave. Two old ladies, though, actually do faint, and are carried off to recuperate in the shade of the trees.
Then it is over. The casket is lowered, rose petals are thrown onto it, then handfuls of dirt, as Pastor Morton intones the biblical “ashes to ashes” and the rest of the mournful litany. The assemblage staggers up the hill to their cars.
I lag behind. “Good-bye, mother,” I say quietly. My eyes are full with tears. “I’m sorry you had to bear my sins. I can never make it up to you, but I’m going to try.”
• • •
I hitch a ride to the house with one of the stragglers. By the time I get there the wake is in full progress, mourners walking around with plates of food in one hand and glasses of whiskey or beer in the other. The air-conditioning is blasting away, but it’s still hot and muggy with so many people jammed in. The men are in shirtsleeves. Some of the women have shed their uncomfortable heels. I work my way to the bar at the far end of the living room, next to the French doors that open onto the veranda.
Louis, ever faithful, is mixing drinks. He fixes me a tall gin and tonic. “She was the last of her kind,” he says sadly, as I nod in mute agreement. He’s bearing up stoically, but I know he’s hurting inside, as are we all.
I move slowly through the crowd, accepting condolences and wet hugs, listen to old friends tell me what a pistol mother was, how proud she was of me, the usual stuff people say at funerals. There’s much conversation about the dreadful nature of mother’s dying, how shocked I must have been, and so forth. It was a terrible accident, everyone says that. There is also an undercurrent of something akin to condescension toward me. I was the accidental child, the mistake who didn’t quite make it—the one who had to come home and live by his mother’s grace because he had problems out in the world beyond the boundaries of our property. It’s nothing spoken, of course, but I feel it, the way I’m looked at, the way people turn to each other and talk low after I’ve moved on. Not a soul among these gathered here thinks, out loud at least, that the fire might have been caused deliberately. It was an old shack, jerry-built, the fire was a result of natural consequences. No one blames me for the fire, but many, I’m sure, hold me responsible.
Johanna Mortimer detaches herself from a group that includes her mother, Ed Flaherty, and my sister and her husband, and comes over to me. “Are you holding up all right?” she asks anxiously. “I mean . . .”
“As best I can, considering.”
“I don’t know what to say, Fritz.”
“You don’t have to say anything. I know you feel bad. Everyone does.”
She tries to change the conversation to something other than the usual “I’m sorry” pap. “How’s the bird-watching going?”
If only she knew. “I’m not getting out much these days.”
I don’t want to get into birding talk. To avoid the topic, I drain my glass, hold it up. “Refill,” I say, turning back toward the bar.
She doesn’t have a drink. “I could use one myself.”
I can’t tell her to bug off. That would be impolite, and even though Maureen has problems with her, I don’t.
“Vodka and orange juice, please,” Johanna tells Louis. We stand there awkwardly, not knowing what more to say to each other, while he makes our drinks. He hands me mine, begins on hers.
“Where’s Harvard’s representative from Hustler magazine?” a voice I don’t want to hear brays from behind us.
I take a deep breath, so that I don’t lose control of myself. “Can it, Sam.”
He’s broken up over this, and he blames me. Not that I’m blameless, by his lights, but there’s a time and place. Our mother’s wake, in her house, should be off-limits.
“I thought she and mother were such great buddies,” he scoffs. “Doesn’t even have the decency to come to her funeral, for Christsakes. You really know how to pick ’em, baby brother.”
I’ve had it. That’s the last thing I need, shit from my sloshed brother. I whirl on him. “She didn’t come because of how you’re acting right now. She stayed away to keep peace in the family. I’ll tell her it wouldn’t have mattered.”
“’Course it didn’t. Doesn’t matter anyway. You’ve got her substitute right here.”
Johanna’s mouth flies open. The people around us start moving away.
“That’s all that matters to you, Fritz.” He looks at Johanna. “Texas, Maryland, wherever you go, it’s women and trouble. You’re a champ, Fritz. A champion bird dog.”
He’s gone too far. I’m going to punch his lights out, right here in our mother’s house, right in the middle of our saying good-bye to her.
“You’re drunk, Sam.” A woman’s stern voice: Dinah’s. “You’re acting disgracefully.” She grabs him by the arm. “Everyone’s watching you,” she whispers roughly in his ear. “If you don’t care about how our friends feel, think about mother and how appalled she would be.”
He tries to pull away from her. She holds him in a firm grasp. He belches—I can smell the whiskey from five feet away.
Dinah recoils. “You need some air, and a bucketful of coffee. Would you get some strong coffee and bring it outside to my brother?” she asks Louis.
“Right away, Miz Dinah.” He scurries off in the direction of the kitchen.
“I’m sorry about this,” Dinah says to Johanna.
Johanna is too flummoxed to respond.
Dinah pulls Sam out of the room, onto the back veranda. People are gaping. I see Emily, white-faced, watching her husband lose it. She stares at him and Dinah for a moment, then turns and runs out of the room.
There is a moment’s silence—then it’s as if nothing had happened. People go back to talking to each other, sipping their drinks, nibbling their food. Nobody wants to acknowledge such outrageous behavior, especially from Sam, the dutiful son. That kind of fuck-you stuff is supposed to come from me.
This time, I was the good guy. It’s a relief.
“Poor man,” Johanna remarks, staring out the French doors at Sam and Dinah, who are sitting on a porch swing. Dinah has her arms around Sam, is consoling him. I can see his shoulders are shaking—he’s crying.
“We’re all stressed,” I tell her. “Would you excuse me? I need some air myself.”
I go out the
front door, the opposite direction from Sam and Dinah. What a mess. I feel like jumping in my car and getting the hell out of here.
A voice cuts into my privacy. “It’s a bad time for everyone.”
I turn around. Ed Flaherty has come outside. He leans against one of the columns that holds up the heavy slate roof. Taking a pack of unfiltered Camels out of his shirt pocket, he shakes one out, fires it up, holds the pack out to me.
I haven’t smoked a cigarette in years, but I reach for one now. He lights it for me. I stand next to him in the shade, a cigarette in one hand, drink in the other. Flaherty’s right—it’s a fucked day all around.
“I never knew your mother, but everyone says she was a great lady.”
“She was.” The cigarette smoke burns. I rinse my mouth with gin.
“Agatha Mortimer revered your mother. That’s why I’m here, to lend her support. Agatha and I are friends. I’ve come to know Johanna as well,” he goes on. “She’s first-class.”
“She’s a nice woman,” I allow.
“Who was your brother referring to, in there? I heard the name . . . Hustler?” A curl of a smile crosses his lips.
“A woman I’m working with,” I answer, still pissed at Sam for his boorish tastelessness. “Who has nothing to do with Hustler. My brother’s sick joke.”
“From Harvard, then, I take it? I heard the reference.”
I shrug.
“I don’t mean to pry. I mention it because Johanna Mortimer resides in Boston, in case you didn’t know,” he offers up. “Perhaps they know each other.”
“I doubt it.” I don’t want Maureen’s name dragged into this, even via a disinterested third party. “Boston’s a big city.”
“The home of the bean and the cod.” He picks a stray piece of tobacco off his tongue, flicks it away. “I also came to convey James Roach’s condolences. He felt his being here in person might cause discord.”
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