The Confessions of Frances Godwin (12 page)

“I don’t care what you told Jack, you can tell him to cancel.”

“But Frances .
.
. Why?”

“Because Jack Banks is a Republican and Frank Steckley’s a Democrat. Paul wouldn’t want to be buried by a Republican. Besides, Frank’s son is one of my best students.”

“But I already told—”

“Do I have to call him myself?”

“Of course not. It’s just that .
.
.”

“Call him now. I don’t want their van showing up here. Call him from your place. I’d like to be alone for a few minutes.”

“I know this is a difficult time—”

“Out, Lois. Please. I have some things to say to Paul, and I’d just as soon you weren’t fluttering around here.”

“I was just trying to help.”

“You’ve been very helpful, Lois. Now just go.”

Alone with Paul (and Camilla) it wasn’t fear I felt. It was anger. I couldn’t shut it off, and I said some hard things.

“Oh, Paul Paul Paul,” I said, running my hand over the stubble on his cheek. “We made a mess of things, didn’t we. We squandered our last months together, and now it’s too late to make things right. It didn’t have to end like this. The doctors gave you a year. Gave us a year. We had that year together. One year. Our last year. Twelve months. Three hundred sixty-five days, more or less. Time to slow down, time to sit quietly and not trouble the universe, time to let go. Ah, Paul, maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about now, but I know this: we squandered it, half of it. We wasted it. We flushed it down the toilet. You didn’t go gentle into that good night. You went cursing and bitching and blaming me for everything. It didn’t have to be that way. I did the best I could. But you were angry the whole time. I sold the house because I had to. What else could I have done? You couldn’t manage the stairs any longer. At the loft we’ve got an elevator. I had to sell most of the books, too, half of them. What did you want me to do? There was no room. I got five thousand dollars from that dealer in Springfield. It’s a lovely apartment with great high ceilings, but all you’ve done is bitch about your books and about the piano, and about the noise the trains make. Galesburg is a railroad town, for Christ’s sake. Maybe it was hardening of the arteries. That’s what Dr. Franklin said. He thought you might be bi-polar, wanted to put you on lithium, but you wouldn’t do it. You never played the piano anymore anyway, and Stella didn’t have a place for it. The Yamaha piano is perfectly nice. You didn’t have to cover your ears every time I played. And you couldn’t let up about Stella, could you, just because she wanted you to let Jimmy drive the stupid car.

“And Lois was here. ‘I didn’t want to call you at school,’ she says, and she reaches over and touches your shoulder. You were wearing your new Egyptian cotton pajamas from Hammacher Schlemmer. ‘I cleaned him up,’ she says. ‘There wasn’t much. He’s hardly eaten anything in the last few days. I’ll take care of everything.’

“Think of that, Paul. Lois was the last person to wipe your ass. Lois the grief counselor. Now she’s dating Jack Banks.
Dating!
Think of it. And all of a sudden she’s an expert on death: ‘I’ll take care of everything.’

“‘Then I want you to call Steckley and Son,’ I told her.”

“‘Steckley and Son?’ she said. ‘I’ve already called Jack. As soon as they get the death certificate they’ll do the removal.’ ‘The ‘removal,’ I said. ‘That’s what they call it,’ she said. ‘Call them back,’ I said. ‘Tell them Steckley and Son are going to handle the arrangements.’

“I wish you could have seen the expression on her face: ‘But why?’ she kept asking. ‘I already told Jack—Mr. Banks—’ You’d think she was working on commission.”

I could almost feel Paul’s presence, palpable in the bedroom. I lay down beside him and started to run my hands over him, over what was left of him. He was like a spring that has lost its resilience.

The real grief came later. That night. After the removal. Camilla had barked furiously at Frank Steckley and his assistant, and I’d had to put her leash on and keep her in the living room while they wrapped up the body and carried it down to the van. I told them they could use the elevator, but they wrapped Paul up in some kind of contraption and slid him down the stairs. I followed the van to the funeral home. After making the arrangements for cremation; after buying a burial plot in Hope Cemetery, one that was big enough to hold two urns; after gathering some material for the obituary—all in one afternoon—I walked through the apartment touching things: Paul’s toothbrush, his books, a copy of the National Endowment for the Humanities application that was still on his desk
.

In the evening Father Viglietti from Saint Clement’s came over and sat with me for a while. He didn’t come at me with promises and assurances about God’s plan. He wasn’t that kind of priest. He just let me cry. He brought a bottle of good wine, which we drank as we ate the cold chicken and salad that Lois had brought over earlier.

My friendship with Father Viglietti was based on Latin, and on our work together, and on the shared conviction that, appearances to the contrary, life was not meaningless, though his conviction took a more highly articulated shape than mine, one shaped by the church year and by something more mysterious. He was a religious priest and answered to the provincial of the Clementine order, not to the arch-conservative Bishop of Peoria, and while this created a certain amount of friction, it also gave him a certain amount of freedom.

We usually spoke Latin to each other, but that night we spoke English.

“Tell me about Paul’s death,” he said. I told him about Lois, and he laughed.

“I think you could call it a good death.”

“Not good for me,” I said.

“It’s Faulkner’s birthday today,” he said.

“So?” I said. “Faulkner? It was Paul who loved Faulkner. I loved Hemingway.”

“How’s the Catullus coming?”

I’d been working, off and on for years, on a translation of Catullus. I shrugged. “Slowly.”

‘You should get back to it,” he said.

“Something to do now that I’m a widow? I gave them
‘Passer, deliciae’
this morning,” I said. “Now it seems like it was weeks ago. And Jason Steckley asked if she was letting the bird nibble on her clitoris.”

“That must have livened things up.”

“It stopped everybody cold.”

“Frances, I’m going to take your classes for the rest of the week.”

“You can do that?”

“It’s a done deal.”

“I mean take time off.”

“I can do whatever I want.”

“You don’t have to ask the bishop?”

“I answer to the provincial, not the bishop.”

“Of course,” I said. “Are you up for the Battle of Cannae in Roman Civ.? Second Punic War. Not the
decisive
battle, but the most interesting, the one where Hannibal ties brush to the horns of the oxen, sets the brush on fire, and stampedes the oxen through the Roman camp?”

“We’ll get through it,” he said.

I opened my Oxford Catullus. Well worn. Number five. “
‘Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus.’
Let us live, Lesbia, and love.
The students are supposed to translate the whole thing for tomorrow. Make them conjugate
vivamus
and
amemus
out loud,”
I said. “And they probably won’t recognize
assis
as the genitive.”

“The ‘genitive of price or value,’” he said.

“Very good, Father,” I said. “It’s too sad, isn’t it.
Soles occidere.
The sun sets every evening and comes up again in the morning, but once our sun sets, it’ll never rise again. Paul’s sun won’t be coming up in the morning.”

“I want you to remember something, Frances. If your life isn’t meaningful right now, it’s not going to become meaningful by being prolonged forever.”

“Then what’s the point of heaven?” I said.

“I said ‘if your life isn’t meaningful
right now
,’” he said.

“Nothing means anything right now,” I said.

“If nothing means anything,” he said, “you wouldn’t be grieving. Do you remember the would-be disciple who wants to follow Christ, but he wants to bury his father first?”

“Let the dead bury the dead,” I said.

“Right. But why such a harsh rejoinder?”

“I’m sure it’s a metaphor for getting your affairs in order.”

“Of course it is,” he said, “but getting your affairs in order and burying your father are two different orders of magnitude.”

“Maybe Our Lord just wanted to make himself disagreeable. That’s not surprising.”

Father Viglietti laughed. “‘Our Lord,’” he agreed, “could be very disagreeable. But in this case I think he recognized that the man was at a crucial point and wanted to shock him. The man was at the threshold of a new and abundant life. We all reach this point. We have to go forward or go back.”

“Do you think I’ve reached that point, Father?”

“Frances, I do.”

“It doesn’t feel like it. I mean it doesn’t feel like I’m at the threshold of a new and abundant life.”

“Of course not,” he said. “It never does.”

That night I took Camilla out, but instead of walking her along the tracks down to Berrien Street and then over to Prairie, I stopped in the little park by the depot and let her off the leash—for the first time. I didn’t know if she’d run away or not, but I was going to find out. If she wanted to run off, I thought, I’d let her go. If she wanted to stay, she’d come back. She ran off toward the depot, stuck her nose in a garbage can, headed for the tracks, then turned around and ran like the wind, ran as if she hadn’t run in ages, and she hadn’t. She ran to the edge of the park, Seminary Street, then back to the depot, then in a circle along the parking lot, down to the Girl Scout garden on the edge of Mulberry, past the car rental place, then completed the circle and repeated it three or four times—I lost count—before coming back to me and flopping herself down. I was crying without knowing it. I buried my face in her neck, dried my tears, and we walked home off leash. “Cammy,” I said, “you’re a good dog. You know that? You’re a very good dog,
canis optima.
”

And she
was
a good dog. She sat with me while I sorted Paul’s clothes out and put them in banker’s boxes for the Salvation Army. I wasn’t going to be one of those widows who kept sniffing their husbands’ clothes for a year or two. The only thing I couldn’t part with was Paul’s “Italian” suit, which as far as I know is still hanging in the very back of our closet, though it’s become invisible. Paul, I believe, was cremated in his pajamas. That doesn’t seem quite right, but I can’t really remember. It all happened off stage. And she sat with me while I sorted through Paul’s papers, which also went into banker’s boxes. And she stood next to me at the semiprivate commitment ceremony in Hope Cemetery, while two of Paul’s colleagues read, as per Paul’s request, Browning’s “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church,” and Yeats’s “Long-Legged Fly.” And at the apartment afterward, where everyone came for drinks, she was a good hostess. Greeting everyone. Mingling with the guests. Making everyone comfortable.

Stella was not at the service. How much can you forgive? How many times? And the worst thing was: No one asked about her. Men and women who’d known her since she was a baby. Not a word. And I understood this. There’s enough grief, they were thinking, without mentioning Stella’s absence. But it was embarrassing.

6

Milwaukee (February–March 1997)

Stella called at the beginning of February. I hadn’t had any contact with her since she’d driven off in Jimmy’s truck in June. I hadn’t been able to reach her to tell her that her father had died, had been reduced to ashes, which had been buried in Hope Cemetery. And I could hardly contain my anger. It was the only feeling I could grab onto to steady myself. “Your father died and you couldn’t give me a call? You couldn’t pick up the phone?”

“Ma,” she said, “I’m sorry. It’s just .
.
.”

“I called Jimmy’s uncle and asked him to give you the message. Did he tell you? Did he tell you that Pa was dead? He told me to leave a message at TruckStopUSA in Ottawa. I called and talked to the manager. She said she’d give you the message.”

“Ma,” she said, “I’m sorry.”

“I found out your schedule, sort of. I drove up to TruckStopUSA on Christmas Day because I thought I could catch you. I ate Christmas dinner with the manager, Ruthy, the one with the long red hair. I didn’t realize she’s your pal. Turkey breast and mashed potatoes and gravy. You know what she told me? She told me Jimmy wants you to get a boob job, she told me he wants you to get stitched up tighter. Down there, you know.”

“Ma, Jimmy’s none of your business.”

Stella and Jimmy were hauling produce for Jimmy’s uncle and Stella wanted me to invest in a truck, a White Freightliner Century, she explained, with a small box sleeper, 470 horsepower, dual 150-gallon tanks, all aluminum wheels, engine brake, and more than a million miles on the odometer. Most of this was lost on me, except the million miles on the odometer. A million miles. That was like a light year, beyond comprehension.