Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (24 page)

“I’m so sorry, ma’am. But the ceremony is closed-casket. If you’d like, we can arrange for another viewing after the service.” The man’s eyes were small and blue, two more little pills. He’d had to do this before.

“Of course,” Laura said. Her limbs felt heavy. “Irving?”

Her husband was already behind her, moving through the crowd. Josephine had corralled the children in the hallway, out of earshot. No one wanted to see their mother this way. Junior peered through the still-open doorway, his eyes wide and frightened behind his glasses.

“No!” Laura said. She kicked her legs and thrashed her arms, moving everything at once. The Trottman now had her father’s face, and he was moving her quickly toward a door she hadn’t seen before. Of course they had a room for things like this, a room to put people who were being disorderly. Irving shoved her from behind, his small hands firm against her back, and then shut the door after them. Laura sank to her knees on the floor.

“I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “I just wanted to see him. I didn’t think anyone would mind, isn’t that crazy? I just didn’t think anyone would mind.” Irving stood with his back to the door. His own father had died when he was a child, both of his parents gone by the time he turned twenty. She never thought about that—why? It seemed so central to his person now, the idea that he’d been orphaned. The room was small and dark, with two upholstered chairs and a dank, sinking sofa. Laura pulled herself up onto the sofa, panting. Her forehead was damp with sweat. Irving handed her his handkerchief and sat down beside her.

“I know, Lore,” Irving said. He took off his glasses and rubbed them with the hem of his jacket. Irving Green was not supposed to be in a tiny, damp room in northern Wisconsin. He was supposed to be in his office in Los Angeles. Laura tucked herself under her husband’s
arm and closed her eyes. If she waited long enough, the feeling would come back, and she’d be floating again, above it all, connected to her body like a balloon on a string. On the other side of the door, someone began to sing a hymn. Laura hadn’t even remembered to think about God. Her father had been a Lutheran, more or less, from a family who cared about such things, and prayed even on the six days a week they weren’t in church. Laura had left religion in Wisconsin, and was surprised to find it still so healthy and robust in her absence. She pulled herself back up onto her feet and slowly opened the door. Two men and two women were standing beside her father’s casket, each of them plainer and doughier than the last, and the sounds coming out of their mouths made Laura hold her breath. It was a simple song—no more than three or four lines repeated. She stood in the doorway and listened as their harmony floated up over her head to the rafters, where the sound gathered and turned into something else, something she hadn’t known she needed: beauty. Laura took her husband’s hand and walked to the back of the room, where even the people hovering by the door had damp faces.

T
he cemetery was quiet: At Mary’s insistence, only the family was invited, which meant that Laura and her brood outnumbered everyone else. Mary wasn’t interested in seeing any Hollywood lookie-loos, anyone with a notepad or a camera. In addition to Josephine and Mary, one of John’s frail and blue-haired elderly aunties was in attendance, as well as Mary’s bachelor brother, a sturdy chap who’d driven up from Green Bay for the occasion. The girls stuck together as closely as if they were Siamese twins, hanging back toward the edge of the plot. Mary kept turning around to look at them, as though she
thought they might at any moment begin dancing on someone else’s grave, which Clara might very well have done. Junior stood solemnly at his mother’s side, as still as he’d ever been.

The Lutheran priest spoke slowly. John was with Jesus, where he would remain until the second coming of Christ, at which time his good deeds would be recognized, and he would once again return to his body for celestial eternity. Laura held Junior by his shoulders to keep him from squirming around and asking questions. It didn’t matter that she didn’t believe what the priest was saying; her mother did, and Josephine too. Laura had never given more than a moment’s thought to Jesus, not since she was a girl and used to pray for things like ponies and shooting stars as proof of his existence. How they could believe, still, after Hildy and now her father, was beyond Laura’s understanding. Instead, she thought about other things, while the priest’s even voice droned on. She thought about how her father’s voice had always made her feel well looked after, and that without him, she never would have guessed that people could choose to be actors, just like that, as if it were choosing to be a postal clerk or a checkout girl at the grocery store. Laura thought that her father would have been pleased to see her back on Door County soil, and she was sorry not to have come back sooner. The priest said something about Jesus rising again, and Florence made a zipping sound with her tongue, and then crossed her braids in front of her mouth like a horse’s bit, a nervous habit. It was like nothing her daughters had ever heard—no one in the movies talked about religion. The movies
were
their religion, the whole town’s. Laura wasn’t sorry for the choices she’d made, for moving so far away. There were pieces of her father that she would always have with her, pieces that couldn’t be taken away. They were in Clara’s curvy charm and Florence’s quick mouth. They were in Junior’s concentration, his devotion. Laura raised a
gloved hand to her face and wiped away tears as they fell. Junior leaned back against her legs, and Laura loved him so much, her whole family so much, that she could hardly stand.

The drive back to the house was silent. Even Clara kept her mouth shut. The plan was to return to the house, stay the night, and drive back to the airport first thing in the morning. Mary would not be sorry to see them go, but Josephine seemed fond at least of Florence and Junior, whose quiet demeanors she found more relatable.

T
hey returned home to find a small colony of covered platters and Tupperware containers waiting on the front step. It reminded Laura of the morning after her Academy Award win, when the living room was filled with congratulatory flowers, a proper swarm, a thought she kept to herself. Everyone had come and left food, enough for the family to eat for a week or more. Laura and the girls helped pick up the dishes and carry them indoors. At Josephine’s insistence, Mary went upstairs to bed.

“What
is
this?” Florence had peeled back a corner of aluminum foil and was peering at a brownish stew.

“It’s hotdish,” Josephine said, bustling in and taking the heavy tray out of Florence’s reluctant grip.

“Oh,” Florence said, and gripped her elbows. There was no such thing as hotdish in California, and Florence seemed unconvinced that she wasn’t peeking into a casserole filled with poison. “I think I’ll go back to the cabin.”

“Go ahead,” Laura said. “Clara, you go too. We’ll finish up.”

The girls didn’t have to be told twice, and banged out the kitchen door. Laura watched them through the screen door, Florence’s sharp elbows waving in and out as she hurried to keep up with her sister.
Irving and Junior were in the yard, conducting some sort of experiment on one of the trees. It was strange to see Irving so far outside of the studio’s walls—in all the years they’d been together, Laura had never seen her husband interact with nature for so long. He was probably thinking about ways to suspend trees from an unseen sky, about backdrops of orchards and creaking wooden barns painted red.

“Are you just going to stand there?” Josephine held the front door open with her bottom, and reached down to pick up another plate of food—cookies.

“Yes, sorry, I mean no,” Laura said, hurrying back. She squeezed through the open door and picked up a bowl with each hand. It took several trips to bring everything inside, and when they were through, the kitchen table and cooking island were both covered. Laura leaned against the stove while Josephine began to peek under each sheet of foil to see what needed to be refrigerated.

“It’s so strange to be back.”

“Yeah?” Josephine said, not really listening. She was arranging the dishes by size, sliding them onto the already crowded racks of the refrigerator.

“I wish Hildy was here,” Laura said.

Josephine stopped what she was doing, with one hand on the refrigerator door handle, her face pointed away from her sister. “Sure you do,” she said, and let the door close with a quiet thunk.

“I don’t know how you can be in this house so much,” Laura said, “and not think about her all the time. Every day. I think about her every day, and I’m on the other side of the country.”

“Did it ever occur to you that it might be
because
you’re so far away?” Josephine spun around. Her face was taut and hard.

Laura stared down at her fingernails. They were painted a pale pink, almost so pale that they hardly looked painted at all. She wore her wedding band and a diamond ring Irving had given her after
Junior was born. She wished she’d left the diamond at home. “I miss her, Josie.”

“Of course you do,” Josephine said. She began to rub her hips, exactly the way their mother did, with her fingers on the front side of her body and her thumbs poking into her back. Laura wondered how much she would have absorbed if she had never left, if their mother would have loved her more. “You were so young, you didn’t really know her at all.”

Laura was sure she had heard her sister wrong. “You can’t mean that.”

“You were a kid, Laura, only a little bit older than Junior. How much do you think he understands of the world?” Josephine put her hand over her eyes. “All I mean is, Hildy wasn’t perfect. She wasn’t perfect, okay?”

Laura pushed herself away from the stove and walked the width of the room until she was staring out the front door. Their rented car was sitting in the drive, just waiting to be driven away. “I know that,” she said. “I knew everything.”

“What did you know?” It was a real question. Josephine was testing her, and Laura didn’t want to fail.

“About Cliff,” Laura said. “I knew about Cliff.”

“Oh,” Josephine said. “And?”

“We were very much alike,” Laura said, not wanting to hear anything else that Josephine had to say. There was nothing she didn’t know about her sister, and she resented the implication. No one had loved Hildy more; that was a fact. Josephine was on the very edges of Laura’s memories from her childhood, a peripheral figure, whereas Hildy was the absolute center. Behind her, Laura heard Josephine move back into action, shifting the dishes so that they would be out of the way when their mother decided to come downstairs. Laura stayed put until she heard Josephine’s heavy feet walk out of the room.

T
hat night, Irving curled his body along the far edge of their bed. The girls were jittery but fine, content in their own private cabin; Mary fed them buttery potatoes and corn, and Laura watched Florence demolish two whole ears, so grateful to finally be fed something she recognized. Though Laura wanted to stay longer, to just sit in the house, Irving had to get back to work, and the children had to get back to school. They were leaving for California in the morning, first thing. Laura scootched her body closer to her husband’s, but he shrugged her off.