Bereavements (16 page)

And then the sweet-faced boy intoned in his deep man’s voice:

What shall I sing
   To my Lord from my window?

What shall I sing?
   For my Lord will not stay—

What shall I sing?
   For my Lord will not listen—

Where shall I go?
   For my Lord is away . . .

A face sickly pale, a smile grossly fixed—for Mrs. Evans knew the ghastly poem, she begged: “Bruno, please—” desperate for him to stop.

He misread her request, thinking she was enjoying it, and continued, eerie and dramatic—

Whom shall I love
   When the moon is arisen?

Gone is my Lord
   And his grave is a prison—

What shall I say
   When my Lord comes a-calling?

What shall I say
   When his feet enter softly . . .

“Bruno—!”

Leaving the marks
   Of his grave on my floor?

Enter! My Lord! Come from your prison!

Come from your grave!
   For the moon is. . . .”

Before he got to “ . . .
arisen!”
he was astonished to see Mrs. Evans’ head nod, her eyes roll, body loosen as if all her joints were undone, and fall back upon the couch. She had fainted.

The day, or rather the night, for Graciela Felecita Rivera to die had arrived, and she knew it. Not when she woke that morning, because she no longer slept at all, sleep being consigned to those imbued with living, not trafficking borderline with death.

She knew it because her body—what remained: the fragile chrysalis after the winged insect has flown—had told her so, as it told her that if something, anything had to be done consistent with the peculiarities of human nature (rituals, prayers, confessions, forgiveness) then it had to be done quickly, for there were only minutes of possible mobility left.

There was only one thing she desired to do. Since she could no longer continue her blackmail, which had failed to wrest from Aurelio the love that was so rightfully hers, then the time for retribution had come. If not in her husband’s arms, she must lie dead at his feet, for, of course, this was murder, not suicide, and she wanted to be as close to him as if he had reached out his hands and strangled her.

So it was not strange, really, that a vaguely human if somewhat grisly arrangement of bones and skin, the nightgown so rotted it all but shredded from the body as she rose, found the strength to slide from the bed.

Oddly, she troubled to put a foot into each open-heeled slipper, then, half-naked, spindly, she staggered, each sliding slipper a soft sigh, from bed to door, from door to hall, from hall to living room where she saw but did not comprehend the pale blue blinking eye of the television screen lighting the room.

If she did not “understand” the TV, her mind long ago having lost much of its power to name things, how much less she understood what was happening on the floor as she leaned forward to look.

There a naked man and a naked boy entwined more intimately than ivy to ivy, lay in shuddered embrace, both so imminently orgasmic they could do nothing but dream-eyed and choking with passion, ride the crested break of the wave that shattered them. Egoless, mindless, they watched with a secret, careless eye as the bones in the doorway moved forward, then, all its queer parts collapsing at once, fall over them, a heap of blackened debris.

Ultimately—Aurelio solemn, Angel aghast—they twisted their depleted bodies from under the corpse and, shoulder and foot, carried the weightless shell to the couch.

Before they covered it with a sheet, Angel’s bizarre autonomous moment of thought was that his mother was so light and empty inside, he could, if he desired, attach a long clever string to her breastbone and, if the day were windy, take her out and fly her like a kite.

Ammonia: strong and biting. Mixed with it, a cheap scent, usually found in lavender sachet, together with a vibration in her head like a thousand nesting bees.

Mrs. Evans woke to a circle of constrained faces bending over her. Dori! Cook! Rose! But who was the fourth: the youngest, the most handsome, with eyes so wide and frightened?

It was Bruno David Carlson-Wade, of course, standing on a chair and three thick books that he might be tall enough to wave a over-sized paisley-print handkerchief above her face as life surged back, eyelids fluttering like the wings of a dizzied cabbage moth.

Once awake and up, she impatiently pushed all the servants away, thanking them, as usual, for their care and concern.

Yes, she was quite all right; yes, she was fine.

“Rose-dear-Rose . . . ” (which was the girl’s sometimes nickname) “ . . . how many times have you seen me faint?”

—The time Jamie had pretended to be dead and was found floating face down in the Palm Beach pool, a small secret tube in his mouth, a hidden snorkel, in order to breathe.

—The time—how many years ago?—when her one and only volume of poetry (half an inch thick) had arrived from the publisher. The moment
Doves and Jackals
was placed in her hand, she was unconscious on the floor.

—The time Jamie’s nose was broken from the swing of a baseball bat, and he ran to her screaming, drenched in blood from head to foot: a tunic of glistening scarlet.

—The time . . .

Well, the times were too numerous to recall. But so reminded and reassured, the servants sauntered out like soldiers after squad drill, leaving the convalescent Mrs. Evans in possession, perhaps at the mercy of, the (to them) minuscule man, horrid homunculus, weird, bizarre gentleman caller of the day.

He would
not
get down, but kept standing there like a misshapen, melting snowman: stricken, solemn, guilty, tall on his books and chair.

“It was not your fault,” Mrs. Evans assured him, her face still pinched, bled of its color. And it wasn’t. How was he to have known how often, with what wild, sick passion she had prayed and still prayed for
her
Lord to come from his prison, grave-marks or no on the floor?!

“Your tea is cold,” she complained. “And we haven’t opened your
petit-fours!
”

That brought him down: at least he consented, for she had to lift him bodily, for fear he would fall, from the books and dried-out, glue-weak antique chair.

The touch of him in her gathering arms brought a chill of slight revulsion and delight, but such a rush of wild pity she had to blink back sudden tears. How thin! how pathetically frail he was! under those ill-fitting clothes; so light, virtually weightless, it broke her heart: a doll filled with down, a puppet of jointed styrofoam.

Worse: she had the queer feeling that he had stuffed himself here and there—with bunched-up cloth fixed to boney flesh with scotch tape—to fill him out, broaden his shoulders, create the illusion of muscle where none grew at all, giving him a final fullness and shape that resembled (though it remained a mockery of) the normal.

So what choice was there?—what choice remained?—after she had gutted herself with
a petit four
so densely rich and sweet, the first bite almost choked her!

Not goodbye (forever). No, no!—instead: “come back! come back!” I am guilty. I am responsible. Therefore, I must love you, pity you, dance with you . . . Crocodile!

Mrs. Evans received a charming little card from Bruno: flowered and, good heavens! yes—as she held it to her nose—scented.

“What are you laughing at?” Rose wanted to know.

“Oh—? Nothing. Just a card from the person you love most in the world.”

The girl paused in her dusting. “And who might that be?”

Mrs. Evans affected astonishment. “You don’t know! Rose-dear-Rose! From Mr. Carlson-Wade, of course, thanking us for a lovely afternoon. And, asking for another.”

The maid shrugged off the insult.

“If he visits again, I’ll supply myself with a magnifying glass.”

“Now, now. We mustn’t be unkind. Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.”

To which Rose had to agree, being Irish-Catholic, though admittedly, charity often had to be deliberate, painful and forced.

“I don’t mind the other one so much—the black one.”

“Angel? He isn’t black! What makes you say that? If anything, he’s lighter than Jamie. And like Jamie’s father, his father is pure Castilian.”

“I don’t mean his skin; his features.”