Happiness of Fish (28 page)

“Oh, I don't mind singing,” Dr. Wallace says. He seems to imply that he's been asked to do worse.

They settle on the “Twenty-Third Psalm” as very suitable. It's just as well, because Gerry can't think of many other hymn titles.

“If we've got the numbers,” Dr. Wallace says, showing him out and shaking hands again. “I'll see you tomorrow a little before two.”

When Gerry gets back to the retirement home Vivian has been busy. She's given away garbage bags of clothes to the home. Through Lawyer Bob, she's called a rep from a moving company for a quote on shipping the few good bits of furniture. The room is dotted with piles of stuff with sticky notes saying “ship.”

The home sends up a plate of sandwiches and a pot of coffee. “Her board was paid for,” says the girl who brings it.

When Gerry and Vivian go back to the motel that evening, there is a message from Duane and Gretchen.

“You don't want to see the kids tonight, do you?” Viv asks. “This is about you, this trip.”

“I don't mind,” Gerry says.

“We'll call them later,” Vivian says. “We'll see them tomorrow anyway. I'll call after we have dinner. We'll say we came in late.”

That's what they do, pleading non-existent get-togethers with long-lost Adamson relatives. In fact they go to a cozy Italian restaurant and are tucked up in bed watching a rerun of
A Night to Remember
on TV when Viv finally does call.

They fall asleep before the lovable old couple decided to stay together and drown and the ship's orchestra plays “Nearer My God to Thee.”

Gerry wakes early on the day of the funeral. Vivian hardly stirs as he gets up, showers and dresses.

“I'm going out for a bit,” he says. “I'll bring you a coffee when I come back.”

Gerry steps out into the frosted parking lot. The motel has buildings down both sides of its parking lot. The shadows are still long on his side and the frost on the cars is heavy. However, across the lot, a golden light is working its way down the walls and across the pavement as the sun gets higher. Gerry breathes deeply, feeling the cold air in his nose.

A good day to be alive
, he thinks, on this funeral day.

Gerry takes himself for a walk the way he'd walk a senile but sedate dog. He cuts out the back exit of the motel lot and wanders in residential streets, following his nose. Each intersection is a mental toss of the coin to pick the direction. The neighbourhood he walks through is brick and stone with big trees. It seems to be settling into the ground, like logs and stones into moss. Gerry realizes he misses the brazen clapboard of Newfoundland, ducked-down in the valleys or daring the wind to knock it into the sea or blow it across the bogs and barrens.

Gerry makes a zigzag progress in a big loop and eventually finds himself in a strip mall just down the street from the motel. He finds a barber shop open early and pops in for a trim. The shop is called Vito's. According to the name on his smock, the barber who cuts Gerry's hair is Vito himself. There is another barber in the shop, and he and Vito bicker like an old couple. Gerry gathers that the other barber is Vito's brother-in-law. He is reminded of his regular barber shop in the mall at home. The walls are covered with pictures of soccer teams and Grand Prix racing cars.

“Is there going to be any hockey or what?” Vito asks.

“I don't know. Are they even talking?” Gerry doesn't follow hockey but apparently he doesn't need to. Vito simply pulls isolated questions off the front page of the paper. It's like striking single notes of a xylophone.

“How about that fire in Vanier?”

With his hair cut and beard trimmed, Gerry drops into a doughnut shop next door to Vito's. It's a non-chain doughnut shop, an independent with some variety in its coffee. Gerry buys a French roast and a croissant. Spreading butter and jam on the croissant, he's surprised at how
composed he feels. He feels benign, ready to be pleased by little things like strawberry jam. He orders a second croissant and takes Vivian a couple of cranberry muffins and a coffee when he returns to the motel.

The funeral is set for two o'clock and Gerry has arranged for only an hour of what Underhill's calls “visitation.” Gerry and Vivian get dressed and meet Duane, Gretchen and the kids at a nearby mall where Gerry has spotted a restaurant with a lunchtime salad bar.

“They can graze,” Gerry tells Viv, as they dress in their room.

“So should we,” Viv says. “Pizza and muffins! This skirt is bar-tight.”

They fill a corner booth in the restaurant which is big and bland.

A “family” restaurant, Gerry thinks. Well, for what it's worth, we're a family. That's why we're here.

Vivian makes a fuss over Joshua and Natalie while Duane and Gretchen commiserate with Gerry. “We're very sorry about your mom,” Duane says, shaking Gerry's hand. “She's in a better place.”

Gretchen just mutely hugs him with a slightly noble air, as though she's curing a leper by the laying-on of hands. She seems sadder than is appropriate for the funeral of a woman she barely knew.

At least she's not singing, Gerry thinks. Mute grief is okay.

Vivian announces she's going to do the salad bar and sweeps the kids ahead of her.

Gerry orders a club sandwich. When he's been on the road, working, he has always said that the club sandwich is the ultimate food refuge. When you can't face any more restaurant selections, the club has a taste of homemade. He's usually found that he shifts to the club-sandwich diet after about two weeks of travel. It hits him that it feels like a long time since he left St. John's.

The hour of “visitation” at Underhill's strikes Gerry as being like the beginning of some politically incorrect joke where half a dozen stereotypes have an unlikely encounter in a bar or lifeboat or public washroom: A Scotsman and a rabbi and a kangaroo go into this Turkish bath...

People from various compartments of his life gather in the dim, flower-scented room and Gerry trots about introducing them.

His Aunt Carmen is there, slim, white-haired and wearing a dark blue suit and small, neat hat. She carries a cane now, the thin metallic kind that drugstores sell. She wears thick glasses and leans on the arm of her husband, Gerry's Uncle Charles, a tall, slightly stooped man in a blue blazer. They're in their eighties now. Gerry remembers his father always referred to them as “the kids.”

There are half a dozen cousins and spouses. He's kept track of some, but with others, he tries to match the solemnly smiling, almost shy faces with wedding groups from forty years ago.

Doc and Mort arrive together. Doc wears a thick tweed jacket and a tie with khaki pants and scuffed suede shoes. Mort runs to a black suit and narrow, shiny shoes. A few minutes later they are joined by Lawyer Bob and his wife Mavis. They greet Gerry and Vivian and the kids, then work the room, nodding, shaking hands and taking unofficial charge of Aunt Carmen and Uncle George. In his estate-law practice, Bob must get to a lot of funerals. Gerry is silently grateful as Bob and Mavis help stir the mix.

There are a few elderly former neighbours and some oddities. A former hair-dresser rolls in on an electric invalid scooter, accompanied by her granddaughter who drove her to the funeral.

“Your mother was always one of my regulars,” she says. “She always took care of herself.”

The widow of Gerry's former scoutmaster appears. She was in his mother's church group.

“We always did the scout father-and-son banquets together,” she tells Vivian. Fifty years ago she'd lived down the street from Bob's parents. Bob greets her, and he and Mavis add her to their little herd of elderly guests who'd rather be sitting down.

Gerry and Vivian move from cluster to cluster of guests, occasionally keeping tabs on Gretchen and Duane. They seem a bit distant, put-off by the funeral being held in Underhill's chapel rather than a church.

Gerry finds himself seething that they are looking askance at what passes for reverence in his generation. Shag ya! he thinks. Drive into a pole going home and I'll rent a gay disco to wake you in.

Finally, Frank Underhill and Dr. Wallace appear.

“We ought to be going in now.”

An organist is playing behind a carved screen as they move across a hall and into the chapel. It doesn't sound electric. Dr. Wallace was right. Underhill's organ is good.

Dr. Wallace is good himself. He tells the congregation to sit and takes them through the order of service like someone quieting a large animal. Sometimes he speaks softly and intimately. Other times he seems to thump chummily on some collective back, talking about Gerry's mother. He calls her “Kit” when he talks about her.

Listening to him, Gerry realizes that the little minister had read his silences well yesterday. The reporter in him warms to the job of interviewing Wallace had done with him.

Dr. Wallace looks at them confidingly. “I asked Gerry yesterday if he thought we should sing a hymn. He said yes, if we had enough people. I think we've got enough, don't you, Gerry?” Gerry nods. They do have the numbers and the Underhill's businesslike organist carries them along.

“The Lord's my shepherd...”

To the other side of Vivian he hears Gretchen slip half a beat out in front, used to bouncier church music than the Presbyterian rumble that Gerry grew up with.

“In pastures green, he leadeth me, the quiet waters by...”

From a couple of rows back, Gerry thinks he can hear Mort and Doc. They used to sing this psalm, drunk, rolling home from Hull in Doc's father's car.

“...and my cup o-o-overflows.”

The hymn rolls to its end. The “amen” is pronounced the way Gerry remembers it from childhood church services. It's a drawn out mooing, almost plaintive
aw-men
, not
eh-men
.

Aw shucks, aw heck, aw-men, Gerry thinks. Beside him, Vivian sniffs. He looks at her and squeezes her hand and she smiles tightly. Then Dr. Wallace is standing in the aisle by the head of the casket. His arm is raised in benediction. The service is over. Duane and Gretchen look as if they want to complain about being short-changed.

“Ten minutes,” Vivian says. “That's long enough.”

Gerry is nervous driving behind the hearse to Cedar Glen Cemetery. He's afraid if he gets separated in traffic he won't be able to find the cemetery. The old roads that he remembers leading to it are submerged in new six-lanes. He vaguely recalls that you used to turn left at a frozen custard stand and go on past a big white barn, the first sign of the country on that edge of town.

The hearse has a flashing purple light that gives it a sort of U.F.O. air. Gerry hugs its bumper as they drive the slow lane of the Queensway. They get off the divided highway and onto smaller streets. He heaves a sigh of relief as they slide through on the yellow light at an intersection, sticking together.

Cedar Glen Cemetery does, in fact, have cedars. Gerry and Vivian drive slowly through dark clumps of them, interspersed with autumn-gaunt hardwoods on cemetery roads that regress from pavement to grass and gravel ruts like a country lane. The heater has been on in the car. Now Gerry finds he's too warm and rolls down the window. There's a country smell of wet leaves. They go to an old part of the cemetery. Most of these plots with their heavy, respectable monuments were filled long ago and haven't been touched in years. Ornamental planting has overgrown and softened the lines of obelisks and fat granite and marble dominoes. This section has a settled, natural look, with the stones seeming to emerge like some geological outcropping.

“This is beautiful,” Vivian says. “It looks so old.”

The mourners have thinned out here in the cemetery. Most of the frail elderly and the car-less have skipped the long haul to shiver on the edge of town in a fall afternoon. Cars crunch to a stop on the gravel path. Bob and Mavis, Doc and Mort have come. The rest are family. Cousins and their spouses get out of warm cars, button their coats and pick their way across the damp grass.

One is Barbara, the daughter of Gerry's Aunt Carmen. She's a slim, blonde woman who, Gerry figures, must be sixty-one or -two. He remembers when she was a cheerleader for one of the new high schools on the edge of town. She'd have been in her last year of high school and Gerry was in tenth grade. Barbara comes up and puts a hand on his sleeve.

“Mom and Dad have gone to my place,” she says. “It's too cold for her, and, with her eyes, she's scared of walking on uneven ground.”

“I'm just glad she could get to the funeral,” Gerry says. “I know she's waiting to go in for treatment.”

“Look,” Barbara says. “I want you guys to come over to our place after. We never see you. I think you were only to the house once with your mom.”

“If you're sure it's no trouble, Barb,” Gerry says. Barbara pats his arm and goes off to invite other people.

Underhill's has made a slight professional miscalculation. When Gerry made the funeral arrangements, he was unsure how many healthy family members he could muster to be pallbearers. He asked Frank Underhill to provide some. Frank produced four nondescript but respectable-looking, elderly, middle-aged men, and at the funeral home, with the coffin on a trolley, they had performed fine. Now, however, they're finding the walk from the hearse to the grave heavy going.

“That little fat fellow's going to have a heart attack,” Vivian says.

Barbara's husband Peter and a couple of other male cousins seem to agree. They and Gerry edge the suffering pallbearer aside and take the handles of the casket alongside the other Underhill bearers. They carry the casket to where Dr. Wallace waits by the open grave.

Gerry hears but doesn't hear the words of the committal. He hears crows, calling to each other from somewhere in the Cedar Glen cedars. He smells the damp earth and the nearby presence of the cedars. He's trying to recall the last thing he said to his mother that she might have understood. If he doesn't count having to explain Gretchen and Duane crooning at her bedside, he has to go back to short, wandering phone calls that had become shorter and more wandering in the past few weeks. If he doesn't count phone calls, he's back to his last words of his visit last winter, when she got confused and thought she was going with him.