Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  They'd helped build the fireplace when they were eleven and twelve, along with Rose Marie's husband, Kev, a brick mason who was the Scoutmaster then, as part of their requirement for the masonry merit badge. Boy Scouts. He'd been in the funeral home another time. Kev wasn't a Catholic and had asked him to ask Mr. Crowley, who was, if the Scouts could have a can of mortician's wax to simulate injuries for a first-aid demonstration at a camporee in Peoria; Charles knew theatrical makeup from their father, and formed lumps and bruises colored with blue and green eye shadow, fashioned cuts and gashes with the wax, and then filled them with artificial blood, a general effect that was so gruesome visitors to their booth thought they'd brought in accident victims from the street, and Charles, who was figuring out how to fake a compound fracture with chicken bones, had to temper his realism.

  They went along the Methodist church, with its stone buttresses and tall steeple, where a dozen Legionnaires had once gathered, backed by a second squadron around the Opera House, all armed with shotguns, and had noisily tried to rid the town of its overpopulation of pigeons. Shot rained down a whole day. Was the fall of the least pigeon known? If anybody didn't think so, they should be shat on. The wide porch on the corner of the block was brightly lit, and they started passing parked cars, then went up the steps and across the porch into the anteroom. The air was musty and smelled of some sort of cheese. From the long inner room, carpeted and hung with heavy drapes, he could hear the constrained and broken intakes of breath that couldn't be called sobs, and the mingled exclamations, as if a partly conscious crowd were trapped and in pain, which he'd heard only in this place, and thought that if only the living suffered, as far as was known, then why wasn't there a more humane and private way of alleviating the pain of death than funeral homes?

  Charles left his side and an elderly woman in a long black dress, with gray and frizzily thinning hair, came out of the inner room on a cane, her head nodding with the effects of advanced age, and studied him from behind glasses with magnified gray eyes he'd seen before. He went to her and took her free hand, frail as ashes, and said, "Aren't you my Aunt Augustina?”

  "Yes, I am," she said. "You must be one of Martin's boys."

  "I'm Jerome."

  "I think I've seen you twice, though I can't recall the times exactly now, but you surely do resemble your dad. He and your ma always seemed m such a rush when they visited us. Then you went to Illinois, then Clarence went, and the farm got such a shambles. Isn't this a shock about your grandpa, poor man? None of us up north could believe the news. He was through only last summer and all of us were saying how hale and healthy he looked then. I came down with your grandma's brother and sister, and was surprised at the drive. It's so long! We hardly had a chance to talk with Marie, we got in so late. Father Krull wanted so badly to come, too, but he's in a rest home now and feeling poorly, the dear soul. I don't believe I'll be able to go back in that room again. He looks too lifelike to me. I keep expecting him to sit up and say, 'What's all this fuss about?' Why, I remember the day when—" Her eyes misted and her head began to wag once more. "Oh, but that's another story," she said, and patted his sleeve. "You go on in and see your grandpa, now."

  At the far end of the inner room, in an alcove banked on three sides with flowers, against a raised and beige-lined casket lid, he thought he saw the profile of his grandfather, but looked away and saw him next to Adele, moving from one floral bouquet to the next, examining the cards on them, and then whispering to Adele what seemed words of comfort. Vince. Without his father alive, Vince seemed him.

  Martin came in, his walk as burdened as if he'd aged ten years, and sat beside his mother and took her hand. Laura and Ginny followed and sat close. Susan and Marie came in clinging to one another, their heads inclined as if leaning into a terrible wind. Fred stepped out a door down a hall from the alcove with the funeral director, Mr. Crowley, a poker crony, carrying folding chairs, and helped Crowley and his assistant set them in rows, and then went into the anteroom, where businessmen and suppliers were standing around, picked up an unlit cigar, gripped it in his teeth, and began greeting people and resuming conversations as if he knew where each had left off.

  Tom was in a chair in the corner farthest from the alcove, by himself, staring down, his big work-stained hands gripped between his thighs. Scott stood in another corner with his arms crossed and heavy eyebrows raised high. Emil was at the front of the room talking to Jay, whose face was gray-green and who leaned against the wall as if propped there, the mainstay, monetarily at least, of the family now. Davey came in without his glasses, an arm around Rosa's waist. Emil would talk to Jay and then break off and go to the casket and clasp his hands and stare at his father as if to recognize a familiar aspect there, and then unclasp them and put them on the casket's edge, his hip against it, angling his head to see his father more full in the face, and then return to Jay, but soon he'd be at the casket again, clasping, reclasping, repeating the same movements in a pattern as formal as a dance.

  Rose Marie sat beside somebody Jerome didn't recognize, Kev. Kev didn't come to church and it was the first time Jerome had seen him out of his work clothes. His thick hair was slicked back and bore an indentation from his baseball cap. He sat with his elbows on his knees, in brown pants and a jacket with padded shoulders, murmuring as though to console Rose Marie, and looked more inconsolable than most of the sons.

  Jerome went up to the casket so he could leave. He wouldn't look at his grandfather's face; even from a distance it appeared healthy in an artificial way, his hair lilac-colored under the hidden lights; with Jerome's mother the mortician had worked from an old photograph and her hair was waved in the style of the thirties, intolerable to look at, she'd been so vain about her hair and being in style. His grandfather's right hand rested over his abdomen. The fingers and back of it were scarred from accidents with tools, blue-ivory nicks. The upper joint of his little finger was gone. The tip of his index finger wasn't there. An angular piece was sliced away from the top of his thumb, and Jerome saw him and his grandfather in the shop that afternoon, planing down a cabinet door, when blood, thrown from the planer blade, flew over the ceiling and walls—more startling because there was no cry of pain—and spattered their clothes and faces and pooled on the planer table and soaked into the cabinet door, and then his grandfather held up the thumb and pinched its base, wrapped a handkerchief around it, and got into his panel truck and drove off to Martita.

  A hand took hold of Jerome and an arm encircled him. "Are you all right?" It was Emil. "I say, are you all right?"

  "Yup," Jerome said, and heard the word in a watery re-echo in his mind as though four different voices, none Of them his own, had spoken.

  "You don't look well," Emil said. "Here."

  He was led somewhere and seated, and his hearing, which was blocked with a sound like the sea, cleared, and then the veil over his vision cleared, and he went back and sat beside Tom.

  Father Hart-Donovan went to the prie-dieu at the head of the casket and everybody except the businessmen and Jerome's grandmother and father, who sat with his arm around her, knelt on the carpeted floor and prayed the Rosary. When it was over, people went to the alcove and began filing past the casket, and going out.

  "I want to see him!" his grandmother said. "I want to say— I want to see him."

  Martin and Davey took her under her arms and helped her to her feet. Her knees gave out again. They got better holds, her gray coat bunching and rising above her dress, and she went forward a few steps, supported by them, as a foot lifted and dragged, and when they got close to the casket, said, "I can't, oh, no," and covered her mouth. They turned, their faces ashen, and began to walk her back, but she cried, "No, no, nor and shoved them away with such force her hat flew off, and then turned and threw herself over her husband's chest. People in the crowd cried out. Martin and Davey tried to free her, but she wouldn't let go. Father Hart-Donovan came up and talked close to her ear, and she began to sink where she stood. He took hol
d of her, and then Martin got on the other side, and they brought her back to her chair again.

  Tom and Tommy and Charles and Tim and Kev got up and walked out, and Jerome saw Emil start toward his mother, as he himself went down the hall where he'd first seen Fred, hoping Fred could bring some detachment to the air. He opened the door where the funeral director and Fred had come out with the chairs, and was in a white room with glass-covered cases that held surgical-looking equipment and tools. A white porcelain table tilted up toward him at an angle. There was the perforated plate of a drain at the lower end of it.

  *

  He stared up at the oblong, too hot with the covers and yet chilled without them, physically ill, and then heard movement in the other bedroom and the sound of bare feet, and Charles, silvery and mirage-looking in the moonlight, came through the door. He searched over the desk and then part of his face was bronzed by a match; he got the cigarette going and sat.

  "Could I have one of those?" Jerome asked.

  Charles jumped in the chair. "Oh, you're awake. I ran out. I'm sorry. Did I wake you?"

  "No."

  "Oh, good." He lit a cigarette from the one he had going and passed it on. "How are you feeling?"

  "Fair." With the cold he had, cigarettes tasted like the black papery crust around burned marshmallows.

  "I'm never going to a funeral again," Charles said.

  "I know.”

  "God!"

  Their orange-and-red cigarette ends flared and faded and glided from place to place as if in calligraphic communication with one another.

  "I'm going to quit school," Charles said.

  "Oh?"

  "I'm going out to California or New York."

  "Why?"

  "Act. See Lionell. Be a bum. What's the difference. There's no use hanging around here. This isn't home any more. It doesn't even feel like the same house."

  "Mmmb," Jerome said. Charles had a tendency toward theatrics and was usually too hard on others and, sometimes, himself.

  "I don't even feel Dad wants me around anymore. It's worse than catching hell. Shit! School's a bore anyway. It's just that Jill— A couple of weeks ago I got a letter from Laura wondering why my checking account in town was overdrawn ten dollars. 'Because I wrote a check,' I felt like writing back. Dad always used to cover those piddly amounts. Oh, hell," he said, and crushed out his cigarette and handed the ashtray to Jerome. "I'm going to sleep."

  "Me, too," he said, and rolled over and reached to put the ashtray on the floor, but was hardly aware of it touching down. He'd had an image of Kev again in the funeral home. Kev had been through the worst of the Pacific campaign—Iwo Jima, Tarawa, Okinawa—with the Marines, and had come back so shell-shocked and mentally displaced it was difficult for him to cope with everyday instances without seeing life and death in them. He read Zane Greys and other Westerns over and over, and then, with the advent of TV, had release at the turn of a knob. Their grandfather hired him, out of compassion, at first, and Kev discovered he liked masonry; a few years later he married Rose Marie. Their grandfather once said he thought it was time for Kev to become foreman of a crew, and Kev said, "Thank you, but no. I'll stick right here with masonry, if you don't mind. I'm perfectly satisfied with it." Prepared for the occasion. He was devoted to his family and had evolved into one of the few truly serene men Jerome knew. The only war story he'd heard from Kev was waking in a foxhole to shots, and then a Japanese officer falling into the foxhole on top of him, dead, but the officer also must have shot; Kev's buddy was dead, too.

  Tom once went rabbit hunting with a carpenter he was friends with, Ed Jorgensen, and as they were climbing a fence Jorgensen's .22 went off and hit Tom in the calf and the slug passed between both bones without touching them. Jorgensen kept saying, "He went up in the air higher than the fence we just climbed." Which reminded Jerome that Tom had also been a hurdler in high school, besides putting the shot and throwing the disc. The javelin was outlawed while Tom was in school, because a bystander had been pierced by one. He lived.

  Once when Emil was in Forest Creek (he came home a week or so each year), he took Jerome and Charles, boys then, out to the creek the town was named for, pale brown water over low sand bars, and let them pull the trigger of his .38, trained at a floating bottle. Davey made a home movie of the event: The noiseless pistol kicks back in Jerome's and Emil's hands. The camera looks at the bottle. There's a spout of water beside it. Another one. Then the bottle sends a fan-shaped spray of fractured shards across the creek, and rolls and begins to sink as the camera returns to the two of them with big grins. There's a disconcerting blur in the foreground, and then the lens pulls back and focuses, and the blur becomes the silver-colored hair of Grandpa Neumiller. He turns, makes a sign of apology, and steps out of the frame.

  Footsteps that sounded tentative and unfamiliar, and yet padded with a sureness out of the past—Jerome saw a sudden specter of Donny Ennis—came over the other room toward him, and then a figure stepped through the door. Charles. He held himself in a different way and his body gave off emanations of uncontrolled emotional surges that were fuguelike but somehow contained. He was sleep- ,i walking. It was the first Jerome had known him to do it. ., He sat on the bed and his head sank low and bobbed, and he said, "Yeah. Uh-huh. Orange grapefruits. Bum or burden the ring." It was the voice he used when he did Shakespeare. He lay and turned and crawled up the bed, and Jerome, on his side, his hand still on the floor, swung his ass toward him, a position he'd felt complications about, and kicked back his leg, and Charles wrapped both of his around it and dropped an arm across him. He could feel against his thigh Charles's erection grow and throb with his blood beat. Charles sighed. It was how they'd slept together in the double bed—in this bed when it was in their room in the house in Hyatt.

  Jerome feel asleep. He dreamed about a Japanese woman whose arched body traveled in a second in and out of seven different planes around his enwrapped and heated core as it strode underwater and struck and rocked down narrowing hard-ribbed shore, and he felt from below his scrotum to the end of his expanded glans, a straight line, like a string tripped, strum and sob and open with affection on the bud, the flower, the ring of flesh, and the open door.

  *

  Martin and Fred stayed at the funeral home and sat up with their father's body through the night.

  *

  He woke to an empty bed with a fever, grayness in the room, a fullness in his head, and his joints stiff and aching—all the symptoms of the flu. But from where did the gray rain come? His teeth chattered as he got into his suit and tie, and after his first cup of coffee downstairs he was still being racked by disconnected, unpredictable chills he couldn't shake off. He shivered on the way to the funeral home, shivered through a service in a chapel there, conducted for the immediate family, and then aunts and uncles went up to the casket, one by one, for the last time. Martin and Davey tried to help their mother to her feet, but she jerked her elbows around as if irritated by their continual attentions and went to the casket, alone, a handkerchief in one hand, and put her palms to her husband's cheeks and kissed his lips. As she turned away, she kept patting one cheek, as if he were a child of hers asleep, and then covered her face.

  The casket lid was closed. The funeral director fastened it down with metal cranks. The grandsons who were pallbearers stayed in the room, as they'd been told to by Crowley, who had chronic laryngitis and a habit of looking up from the tops of his eyes, and usually wore a gray homburg. He said in a whisper, “The oldest boys, Jerome and Chuck, will be here at the head, where the cross is, and then we’ll sort of go down in age but keep the heights balanced. You tall guys, don’t lift too high now. The head’s the heaviest and the shorter guys are there . . .” Emil’s son, Greg, would walk at the head of the casket, and Paul at its foot, Kev was home with the younger children and Paul was wearing the jacket with the padded shoulders his father had worn the night before, and looked as inconsolable as Kev.

  Crowley whispered, "At the c
hurch we'll have a dolly there at the doors, because the aisle's too narrow for carrying down, and you just put the casket on that. Try to follow Jerome and step off with him, now. He'll also be driving his dad's car, and it'll be the first behind me." He put his homburg, black today, on his bald head. "Now we'll get this into the hearse, and I’ll explain some more."

  The casket was of walnut, lovely wood. There were tubular tails along each side for carrying "When I say lift," Crowley whispered, "all of you lift up at the same time, Now lift.” It was heavier than Jerome supposed; the weight of it pulled his left shoulder low. Then Tommy shifted his stance and Jerome was holding nothing. They carried it out a pair of back doors, down a lamp, and slid it forward over the rollers in the floor of the hearse. Crowley locked it in place. Jerome got behind the wheel of his father’s car, Tommy got in next to him, his face contradictory and tense, and Jerome began shivering again as the other pallbearers piled in and the family formed behind.

  The cortege pulled out. It wound through the streets of Pettibone and onto the highway, toward the church, which was apparently filled; people were standing in the walled yard around it, and others were gathered along the sidewalk in front. Out, and moving under the directions of Crowley, Jerome and the rest slid the casket from the hearse, went up an embankment to the sidewalk, went up the sidewalk to the church, up the steps to its doors, and placed the casket on the dolly. A few years ago his grandfather had persuaded Father to have an organ installed, an electric one, and a rear pew was removed to accommodate it; the nuns who came each week to teach catechism were gathered on chairs around it, ready to sing. Jerome looked at the filled church, at the businessmen and neighbors and friends, and then his eyes filmed and he had an image of milk spilling down a wooden stairs.

  The pallbearers went to a front pew roped by a purple rope, and the Requiem began. The sound of the nuns' voices and the organ filled the church with a feminine appeal that seemed to emphasize it was fall. Father came to the communion rail. "I hardly know where to begin," he said. T find it difficult to even speak. I've known C.J.C. for twenty years now, and he was one of my best friends." Jerome didn't hear another word; it was so personal, he mew if he listened he would, like Fred, be blowing his lose with vehemence, and, like Fred, would have to get up and leave the church. And then Tom got up and left, too.