Love and Sleep (53 page)
"I have to tell you,” Rose said. “I have a date tonight."
"Is this not tonight?” Pierce said.
"I meant later. A late date."
"Oho."
She started her car.
"I'm sorry,” she said.
"No reason to be sorry. Reason to be glad.” It made him, in fact, unreasonably glad. He pictured her, later, in a bar booth, on a dance floor, with an imaginable but unclear other male; he pictured her surprising this man with her restless hotness. And Pierce himself meanwhile home alone, and safe between cool sheets.
Boney Rasmussen hadn't wanted to be buried at all, but if he had to be, he didn't want to be buried in the common cemetery with others around him.
Like a fastidious tourist, Rosie thought, caught on a cheap tour, pretending he's not with these people. She had found and opened an envelope on which Boney had written
In the event of my death
, and she sat at Boney's desk with the brief handwritten sheet of onionskin which it contained. No embalming, no special funerary preparations; no religious service, no priest or preacher. He wanted, it seemed, to go over unattended. And he wanted to be buried on the grounds, in the ground, of his own house, he specified where: a clearing in a little stand of tall pines, amid the rhododendrons. He wanted an obelisk erected over him, which should be made of some soft stone which would begin to crumble in not too many years; and on its base he wanted these words cut:
Et in Arcadia ego.
No name, no date.
Well then why didn't you
say
so, Rosie asked of the paper, the shaky whispered words. Why didn't you
say.
She had already, with Val's and Mrs. Pisky's help, begun the process, set off in the usual way, not knowing how it was done but finding out that everyone else did, the steps were wellworn: the funeral home, the lawyer, the medical examiner, the church. It wasn't, after all, the first time it had ever happened in the world.
She called Allan Butterman, Boney's lawyer and her own.
"It doesn't really matter,” Allan said. “State health regulations say you can't be buried except in a cemetery. You can't get yourself buried in your back yard."
"Health regulations? It's not going to do him any harm."
"
Our
health. The living. Not good to have dead bodies just anywhere."
Hadn't Boney known that? He must have buried or seen buried dozens in his huge life. Maybe he hadn't quite meant this; maybe it was a kind of play, pretending he could have the death he wanted. If he had to have one. She felt a guilty relief that anyway she couldn't do much to get it for him.
"Here's an idea,” said Allan. “Do the usual thing. Follow the rules. Do what he asked as much as possible. Then later the Foundation can put up a memorial. There where he wanted."
"He wanted no funeral though,” she said. “No service.” He lay already on a cool slab at the funeral home; she couldn't prevent that, nor what they had done or would do to him there.
"We'll do the minimum. The Danish Brethren isn't exactly elaborate. And a reception out there."
"Oh yipes,” Rosie said softly. “Oh Allan."
"We'll get you through it,” Allan said. “I'll tell you. It's real usual for people to leave wishes like these. The way they want things done. That can't be followed. Very usual."
Rosie thought about this, or sat anyway with it, envisioning the place in the pines that Boney meant. It was a nice place, she and Sam and he had picnicked there last summer, back when he had seemed so weirdly immortal, as though he had already died and been mummified.
"Okay,” she said.
She called Pierce Moffett next.
"He wanted it on his, his gravestone,” she said. “
Et in Arcadia ego.
It doesn't sound like it would go, if he's not going to be here. Right?"
"It's a Latin motto,” Pierce said. “The ‘et’ means ‘and’ but it might mean ‘also’ or ‘too.’ So it could mean slightly different things. It could be translated
I am in Arcady too
, that is, along with all the beauty and peace. Or it could be translated
I am even in Arcady
, as well as everywhere else."
"What ‘I'?” Rosie asked.
"The ‘I’ speaking,” Pierce said, “is Death."
Rosie felt in her breast and throat an uprush of tears; she wanted not to cry but they were no more to be suppressed than a shiver or a sneeze, and so she let them whelm her. She had not so far wept for Boney, not the night of his death, not the two long days that followed; now all the pity of it, of goddamn death and human impotence, came bowling up her throat.
At least he knew, she thought, he really did know, he wasn't crazy; for here he was admitting it, saying uncle. She couldn't stop weeping, and she couldn't hang up on Pierce, and so wept into the phone absurdly while Pierce listened and waited. O Boney: the opponent he had kept on struggling with so hopelessly had at length just inveigled him into his arms as a mother will a rebellious child, and hushed him.
"Sorry, sorry,” she said at last, a squeak, all she could manage. “Okay. So. I guess we'll think of something else."
"I'll think too,” Pierce said.
"Will you come? To the funeral I mean? Day after tomorrow."
"I'll come,” he said.
She hung up, still wiping her eyes with her sleeve; and then she remembered Sam, who was sitting at Rosie's own old desk (a card table really, piled with Rosie's unfinished Foundation work, for whom now if for anyone would she finish it?) and coloring.
Just as it retreated back inside Sam's body, Rosie saw her daughter's soul, which had been out drinking in her mother's tears. Sam had seen her mother in tears on the phone often enough, too often, Rosie thought.
"I was just sad about Boney,” she said.
"I'm not so sad now,” Sam said. “Because he's not here to see."
"Yes,” Rosie said. “Well. That makes a lot of sense, hon."
"Was Pierce crying too?"
"No.” She got up, so much to do. “Listen I have to go get some things upstairs, can you stay here, will you..."
But Sam was already by her side, and Rosie thought: Let her come. She was his friend too.
"Are we going up to Boney's room?” Sam asked in some awe as they climbed the big front double staircase.
"Yep."
The funeral director had given her a list of things to bring down for the laying-out of Boney, which included a suit and a shirt and tie (but why, Rosie asked, if he's to be shut up in his box? And saw that it was as much for the director's sake as for hers or Boney's, standards to maintain). Underwear too, for heaven's sake, and socks, but not shoes.
His dentures. Weird that we go to the grave not only in our flesh but with its history too, all the accidents it's had, all the work done on it. Our pierced ears and unremovable wedding-bands, the fillings and bridges in our mouths, pins in our broken bones. Do they bury you, she wondered, with your wooden leg, your hearing aid? Flesh of your flesh by then. Why not your glasses too?
Boney's room, which neither of them had entered before, which both had peeked into, though, to see the big bed with the green velvet spread, the ancient leather slippers poking out from beneath it; the big wooden mirrored wall of closets. On his bedside table the book he had been reading when last he slept here, turned facedown at the place he had stopped.
Ill Met by Moonlight
by Fellowes Kraft, a book of ghost stories.
Sam with reverent curiosity began opening the closet doors. The closets were surprisingly full, considering how limited had been the wardrobe Boney usually wore. Never threw away anything.
"Look,” Sam said, pulling out a pair of white and tan shoes. “With nails.” In wonder she touched the spikes. Rosie tried to imagine a golf-playing Boney in some other decade.
There should be a crowd of descendants to do this for him, she thought; Allan said that in New York there was an aged nephew or cousin twice removed, but otherwise no one.
No one but Val.
The old bastard. Really. What an awful thing to do, enough to keep him out of heaven if there was one.
Angry at herself for being angry with him, she thought of her own father, who also snuck off, got away with it too, so that he could never be called on it, never called; waiting now for her in the future. That anyway was what Mike had always suggested: her father waiting for her to reach him, to work through her feelings, like jungle undergrowth. What would she say to him then? Mike thought he knew (she would finally admit to her love, her anger), but she did not.
Down there at the end, at the last turn of the plot, all the lost and absconded fathers waiting. Rosie's own. And Boney. Pierce's, who had been found again after years and years, apparently, and not on bad terms with his son now, she thought; and still. Kraft never mentioned his father in his memoir: lost too. She felt a clear pattern knitting itself together in the world around her, the world of lives within which she lived: a pattern like an idea for a painting,
The Lost Fathers
, a pattern that had lain all around her for a long time but which she hadn't noticed till now. A plague of dead estranged absent ignorant refusing fathers.
Was that because of the curse the world labored under? Or was that the spell itself? If it was, how was she supposed to fix it, find everyone's father for them?
She awoke then, as from a little sleep, returned to where she stood before Boney's suits, marveling at what she had just thought, which evanesced as soon as she rethought it, bearing away with it its dream-darkness.
Come on, which of these. It didn't matter at all, she should just reach in and take one, but the fact that it didn't matter at all kept her from choosing. A summer seersucker? Something dark and respectful of death's dominion? Once when she was young, an avid reader of all kinds of fictions, she had determined to her own satisfaction that ghosts are not alive for themselves, but are only creations of the persons who see them: and that was because of the clothes they wear. Where did they get them, the tattered wedding gowns, the top hats, rotted cerements, suits of armor? Were you supposed to believe the clothes were ghosts too?
She shuddered hugely in the heat, plunged her arm in among the empty male forms, which wavered, upset, at her intrusion, and abstracted one. Brown. Fine.
"Fine,” Sam said gaily, enjoying this. “Now what else."
"Socks, shirt, undies."
"Okay. Can I pick out the socks?"
"Okay.” Good Lord, as ready to play the game of death and burial as she was any other. But the choosing wasn't much fun, for though Boney had many pairs of socks, all rolled into neat rolls, every single pair was black.
The Danish Brethren share a plain white wooden church building on a knoll high up in Blackbury Jambs with another small denomination, neither of them having members enough to support a church of its own. Since the Danish Brethren (among other theological and liturgical oddities) holds its weekly divine service not on Sunday but on Saturday evening, the arrangement could be worked out.
Despite all Rosie's efforts to meet Boney's wishes and make little of the event, the church was going to be full. Boney had lived here and in Cascadia since the previous century, Allan Butterman reminded her; a lot of people knew him. She had filled the altar with flowers, refusing the funeral parlor's offer of wreaths and sprays of gladiolus ("sadiolus” she called them, and Sam laughed) and cutting instead her own armfuls of phlox and day lilies and sweet william at Arcady, stuffing the funeral director's vases with them not very professionally, scattering leaves and petals underfoot where they were crushed into the waxed wood and purplish rug.
Pierce inhaled the violent perfume. He had walked up from his building on Maple Street, arriving too early, entering the austere space with a sense at once of pleasure and transgression (a sin, in his childhood, to attend services in the churches of schismatics); he had taken a rear pew. Boney in his box of wood lay in the aisle.
Rosie at the front of the church turned and saw him (he wouldn't have guessed from where he sat that the woman in the dark suit and hat was she). She slipped from her pew and came down the side aisle to him.
"Pierce.” She sat to whisper to him. “Listen, I know this is a little funny. But can I ask you a favor.” There was no response he could make to that, and he waited for her to continue. “See the guy in the front row on the right? The sort of stooped one? That's Boney's cousin."
"Ah."
"He was supposed to be a whatsit, who carries the. The coffin. Casket. Pallbearer. Only now he just told me he can't. His back or something. So I wondered if you."
A small wave of resistant horror came over Pierce, and passed. He hadn't been asked to help carry his uncle Sam, and couldn't remember now why he hadn't. “Um,” he said. “There's nobody else to do it, family, friends? I mean I'd be happy to, but. I hardly knew him."
"All dead,” Rosie said. She looked up then, and Pierce saw her go pale a little, a thing he didn't often actually see people do; he turned. Val was coming uncertainly up the center aisle. She turned in at Pierce's pew with something like relief
Not all dead, Rosie thought. “Listen,” she said. “Val.” Val wore a darkly dramatic swathe of a dress, not black when you looked closely but iridescent and many-colored like a grackle's plumage. And she wore dark glasses. A movie star incognito. “Do you want to help carry him?"
Val answered nothing. It took Rosie a moment to see that she had not understood and that behind the dark glasses was trying to make sense of Rosie's weird challenge.
"Be a pallbearer, I mean,” Rosie said. “You know."
"Christ no,” Val said.
"Sure, okay,” Rosie said, and touched her shoulder. “Come on, Pierce.” She took his hand, and Pierce slipped from his pew; she led him up the side aisle to sit by her, not releasing his hand but gripping it with a pressure strangely intense.
The service was as spare as the church; the minister too, a woman in a dark suit not unlike Rosie's, scrubbed cheeks and gray ash-blond hair, whose eyes and mouth were good-natured; when she rose at the service's beginning to say that the deceased had requested no eulogy or sermon and that his wishes would be respected here, she did it as gravely and eloquently as though it had been a eulogy. Then she opened her book.