Exit Laughing (11 page)

“Here we are,” I say.

“Thank God,” says Oona. “It took ye till tomorrow to get here. Will I pour? Come on, Molly, what was on those papers?”

Gyles Pelly held them up for everyone to see, like he was the master at a school. There was jostling going on, and shoving, and pushing, but Molly and Bridie managed to edge forward, nevertheless. They saw pictures bordered with a chase of shamrocks, with harps and hills in the background. Irishmen held
shillelaghs
, or played pipes, and women in aprons were asking, “Will you go, or must I?” And one poster said: “An Irish hero! One Irishman defeats ten Germans.”

And there was a poem:

Father Hegarty placed his hand on Alice’s shoulder. I’m sorry, he said. Seems Fergal signed up for the Irish Guards only a month ago.

Thank you, Father, said Alice.

She watched Fanny Lynch walk out of the door and into the night. Then Alice turned on her heels, and the crowd divided like the Red Sea before Moses to let her through. But she didn’t go back to her stool. She stood next to the Mullan boys instead, and asked them to play “Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye.”

And the pipes were coaxed to cry their tune, and the fiddle rippled faster than a mountain stream, and soon the bodhrán was thumping like a beating heart.

And when they had finished, Alice said, That’s enough sadness for now, and she’d like the boys to play something merry the people could dance to.

It wasn’t until well after the beer was passed around that anyone took to the floor. Daddy and Uncle Mickey were the first to start because Mammy urged them on. It’s what Alice wants to see, she said. The poor creature.

AND one, two, three, they cried, flapping their elbows, and hammering their feet. Men trooped to the floor to join them, and soon Father Hegarty himself, who was well oiled by now, was spinning in circles like a whirling dervish. Molly couldn’t see too well over all the bobbing heads, but she was sure she saw Alice tapping her foot.

When the cock crowed, stars blinked in a mauve sky, and it was well time to close the lid on Fergal Duffy by now. And Molly and Bridie ran to the casket, curious as to why they heard gasps, sighs, and a shock of exclamations.
God almighty!
Would ye take a look at that?
Dead as a doorknob Fergal might well have been, but a grin as wide as a tooth comb had taken form on his face.

More like an expression of sheer mockery, according to Alice. And so far, no one had caught even a spark of rage in her eyes. But now they rolled, and her nostrils flared, and her face simmered and came to a boil, and she yelled,
Go n-ithe an cat thú, Fergus Duffy! Is go n-ithe an diabhal an cat!
And then may ye all rot together!

And Alice took it upon herself to holler with joy, for the bastard was dead! And wasn’t she as free as a lark now?

It took her long enough to realize that, said Ethan Fitton.

Close the lid, Gyles Pelly! everyone cried. And when the last nail was driven home, Alice called for the Mullans to play a reel, and lines formed, and hands clapped, and an arch of arms spread well into the yard. Alice skipped down the middle, and she twisted and kicked, keeping with the rhythm and the pattern of beats, and in perfect time with those close behind her.

The music came to an end, and Alice stood panting, and wanting more.

It’s not right
, Old Mary Godfrey muttered.
It’s just not right
. First the priest and now the wife. Dear Mother of God, what is the world coming to?

And Alice flung back her head, and laughed, showing an arc of white teeth.

She’ll be dancing on his grave tomorrow, sneered Old Mary Godfrey.

“And did she?” asks Oona.

“To this day, her ghost can be seen dancing in the cemetery,” says Molly. “But only if there are stars blinking in a mauve sky.”

I pour my grandmother a third cup of tea.

A small payment indeed, for such a grand performance.

“What’s to be afraid of?” Al says. “I don’t remember where I came from, and I’m just going back to the same place.” He seems quite cheerful about this.

We’re having lunch at the Belmont Brewery, overlooking the beach on a beautiful Southern California day, and he’s drinking a beer. Usually we’re talking about politics, but today we’re discussing death.

“And remember, no funeral. I have it all planned.” He takes out his wallet and pulls a card from it. “Neptune Society. They take care of the whole thing. See the number on it? It’s a pre-plan.”

I look at the card. Frankly, I find it a little creepy. My father did the same thing. He visited the local East Hampton funeral home and had a long discussion with the director about how exactly he wanted them to handle it all when he died.

“And I’ve paid to have my ashes taken to sea,” Al says.

“I’ll go on the boat,” I say.

“Oh, no, you won’t.”

“Of course I will. We’ll have a service. The whole family.” I can envision grandchildren tossing flowers into the water, the grown-ups telling loving and funny anecdotes about Al, perhaps holding flutes of champagne.

“There will be no service.” He pats my hand. “I’m Jewish, but not religious.”

“We’ll call it a memorial.”

“No, nothing. Gone is gone. Nobody’s going on the boat.”

“Maybe I really want to go.”

“Nope.” He offers me a sip of his beer. “No tubes, remember that. No machines.”

Finally I promise, no tubes, no machines, and no memorial at sea.

When my mother first moved into The Breakers, a retirement hotel in Long Beach, California, I read about Al in the hotel newsletter; his wife had just died, and he didn’t want any visitors or anyone trying to talk to him. A few weeks later he resurfaced, appearing at meals and, to my utter shock, my mother—a widow who had been married to my father for fifty-five years—was giving him the eye.

“He’s attractive, isn’t he?” she said as we had lunch one day and he strode into the dining room wearing tennis clothes. He was attractive—he was in his late seventies then, five years younger than she was, tall, lean, and athletic. But this was my mother. She already had another guy courting her that she barely tolerated because he was a Republican and too conservative. Then one day, Al (who turned out to be a liberal Democrat) heard my mother playing the piano—something by Mozart—in the lobby of The Breakers, and next thing I knew they were a couple. “I thought my life was over,” he would tell me later. “But there she was, so beautiful and playing the piano!”

Al also played the piano, old tunes from the forties by ear. My mother began to give him piano lessons, teaching him to read music. They took long walks, held hands, laughed a lot, read the paper together every morning, and had martinis together every night. Then a year or so after moving into The Breakers, my mother suddenly decided she was too young to be living in a retirement hotel—my mother, the queen of denial. She was in her mid-eighties and had heart problems, but in spite of myself, I admired her determination as she packed up everything, including her piano, and moved ten miles north into her own apartment in Palos Verdes. Al drove up for lunch a few times a week, and she’d cook elaborate meals for him. Did he spend the night? I wondered but never asked.

She eventually realized she really couldn’t live on her own any longer, so a few months later everything got packed up again, and she and her piano returned to The Breakers. This time she moved into an apartment right down the hall from Al. In spite of her health, she practiced the piano constantly (up to six hours a day), gave recitals, and loved her new apartment. This was really the happiest I’d ever seen my mother. She was mellowing in old age. Al adored her. He gave her the diamond rings that had belonged to his wife.

He wanted to marry her, but she thought she was too old to get married again. “Darling,” she said to me one night at dinner, “if I were in my seventies, I might consider it, but good God, I’ll be ninety in four years.” However, she kept advising me to remarry. She wanted my boyfriend for a son-in-law; I wanted hers for a stepfather.

Al’s marriage, childless, had been a long and happy one. He and his wife had both worked. He had been in the army and then for years drove a cab in San Francisco, a job he had loved. He also loved to tell stories of those days—being held at gunpoint, the vast array of characters he’d had as fares—and his very favorite story, the time he drove Edward Kennedy to the San Francisco airport. His only living blood relative now was his cousin George, a professor at Berkeley. “The smart one in the family,” Al would say, laughing.

My mother’s heart got weaker. Then she had to have a walker, and visiting nurses came every morning. When her breathing became difficult, Al would spend the night in the chair next to her bed, watching over her. One day when I arrived and a nurse was there, my mother whispered for me to get Al’s diamond rings out of her jewelry box.

When I got them for her, she slipped them on her fingers. “I don’t want them to think I’m easy,” she said.

“Who?” I asked.

“The nurses—they know he spends the night.”

A few months later, when she was dying, Al walked the hospital hallways with me, holding my hand. He was with her when she died one early dawn, just before my brother and I got to the hospital.

My mother had never mentioned death; she could not, would not discuss it. She refused to acknowledge that she would ever die. So there was not only grief that morning, but also confusion. “Now what?” said my brother.

I hadn’t a clue; she’d conned us all into thinking she’d live
forever. How do you prepare for this? Does everyone, if they haven’t been given clear instructions, get caught in the middle of shock, loss, and grief, trying to figure out the practical details? I thought of my father at the funeral home making arrangements, and Al with his prepaid plan—oh, not creepy at all, but thoughtful! But no, not my mother. I was suddenly furious at her. Always in denial, right up to the end.

I told my brother that cremation certainly seemed the simpler, more practical option. Thinking we were going to have to go coffin shopping, he breathed a sigh of relief. We looked up cremation services in the Yellow Pages at the nurse’s station, found a company, and went to their nearby office that morning.

The woman in the office annoyed me right off the bat. Her hair was sprayed and teased, she was wearing a suit, and she assumed my brother was in complete charge and directed her entire speech to him. When she got to the part about the “cremains” being ready by the end of the week, I made little humming sounds so I wouldn’t break into hysterical hoots of laughter. Her euphemism sounded like something horrible that could go wrong with a damp basement.
Ashes
was such a fine, straightforward word; why couldn’t she just say that the fucking
ashes
would be ready to pick up in three days? (How good it felt to be so angry! It filled me up, left no room for grief.)

I thought of my father leaving instructions not only with the funeral home but also for distributing his ashes. “Find someone with a fishing boat, and take my ashes out to sea,” he’d told me once as he drank a large bourbon on the rocks and pointed to the ocean—which is exactly what my brother
and I did, grateful for such clear directions. It would be eight years before I finally figured out what to do with my mother’s cremains.

In the months after my mother’s death, I’d visit Al, he’d play the piano for me, and I’d cry. He wouldn’t say anything or attempt to make me feel better. He’d just play those old tunes from the forties and let me sit there and cry.

He had become an integral part of my family by then, and when I finally married my boyfriend and my family grew even larger, this man who had never had children of his own now had, in addition to my two daughters and their husbands, my three stepchildren and their spouses and partners. With the arrival of my grandchildren, Al became a great-grandfather. For a decade we visited regularly.

I loved talking to him about my mother; he gave me a side of her I didn’t really know. Though sometimes it went beyond what I wanted to know. “She was a passionate woman,” he said once. I covered my ears, and he laughed.

When he gave up his car, I’d drive down to see him and we’d have our lunches sitting in the sun overlooking the beach, always at the same restaurant. Eventually he began to grow frail in spite of his vigorous exercise program; he was almost ninety before he gave up biking and using a rowing machine, but his mind stayed sharp and involved in the news and the stock market.

I’d been traveling a lot one summer. When I got home, I called Al to confirm a long-standing lunch date we had,
and he sounded distant. He didn’t feel up to going out, he told me. I made another date for the following week and he said, “Sure.”

“I’ll call you and confirm,” I said.

“Sure,” he repeated.

My feelings were hurt. I thought he’d be happy to have me back. Was I being intrusive? Did he want to be alone?

A few days later, I got a call from the nurse at The Breakers. Al was dizzy and had fallen on the street. His arm was bleeding and he needed to go to the VA hospital. I told her I’d be right down and jumped in my car.

In the month I’d been gone, Al had transformed into a fragile old man, fearful and forgetful. He seemed to recognize me, though, and smiled. I got him in the car, and he asked me where we were going. “The VA hospital,” I said. “You’re going to see a doctor.”

“Good.” He gazed out the window. A minute later he asked, “Where are we going?” For the whole drive to the hospital he asked that question over and over, and I’d answer over and over.

To make the hospital paperwork easier, I told the VA that I was his stepdaughter. As we waited to be seen in the emergency room, he began to relax and grow less frightened; he finally realized he was indeed at the hospital. We went in to see the doctor. Though Al had a deep gash on his arm, there were no broken bones, and his sense of humor was still intact. When the doctor asked him how old he was, Al said, “106.”