The Fates Will Find Their Way (11 page)

16

M
r. Lindell died. It’s perverse of course, but we were giddy with the news that the funeral would be in our town and not in the desert, in Arizona, where he died. The obituary was a thing of beauty. The kind of thing that receives attention that the deceased never received while living. We read it, then we read it again. We studied it. We looked for signs. We picked up the phone, we put the receiver back in its cradle. We looked for indications of ourselves in it, acknowledgments that we, too, had been part of his life.

On Friday evening, June 16, at home and surrounded by his family, Herbert Hugh Lindell, age 67, quietly lost his year-long battle with pancreatic cancer.  Born in Brunswick, Georgia, raised in Atlanta, Herbert lived with his daughter, Sissy, in Arizona, where he peacefully died.

Though never one to seek out compliments or gestures of praise, I think he would not object to my relating that he was a stalwart and loyal friend, a true connoisseur of ethnic foods, a word savant, an honest lawyer, objective arbitrator, geopolitical maven, and splendid husband and father.

In the words of his grandchildren, he was an all-right dude, a man among men.  He will be sorely missed by his daughter, by his sister Nancy of Marietta, Ga., and by his many and adoring grandchildren.

An open ceremony will be held in Herbert’s honor, as requested, in the mid-Atlantic.

The sudden, unexpected use of the first-person haunted us. The obituary was Sissy’s handiwork; there was no doubt about that. And her simple use of the word
I
brought her voice, her body, her sheer strange existence back to us completely. But what caught us, what held us, what truly, truly disturbed us, was the inexplicable and undeniable absence of Nora Lindell from her father’s obituary.

Sitting at our various kitchen tables that Sunday morning—our wives washing the baby in the sink or peeling potatoes for the dinner they’d been planning or sleeping in above us for the first time all week—we reread the obituary that had made its way from Arizona and wondered (even if only for a half second) whether we’d dreamed Nora Lindell into existence.

It was our mothers who broke the spell. One telephone number at a time, the phone tree was resurrected. Mrs. Zblowski called Mrs. Boyd, who called Mrs. Epstein. And our mothers, in turn, called us, dutiful as ever to the prescription of the passage of information.

“Did you see?” they asked.

“See what?” we might have said, determined as ever to feign indifference.

“The paper,” they said, impatient and unbelieving, the click of their nails audible as they struck one by one on their own kitchen tables. “Mr. Lindell.”

“Oh, that,” we might have said, our wives furrowing their brows, wondering the reason for that Sunday’s particular interruption. Perhaps we rolled our eyes at them or shook our heads. Perhaps we made chatty hands at them, suggesting our mothers’ unwillingness to stop talking. Perhaps, but what we did not do was let on, was let slip, let show our absolute concentration on that obituary, its content, and whatever new information our mothers might have called to divulge.

Our backs turned now towards our wives, we moved away from them, towards the foyer or the den or the basement even, and continued our conversation. “I saw it, sure, but I haven’t had a chance to read it,” we might have offered. “Did it say what he died of?”

“Does it matter?” they said, their age so much more present to them, so much more real. “Are you telling me you didn’t notice that they left Nora completely out of it? Left her out of it like she never even lived? It’s a shame is what it is. And bad form.”

“I suppose now you aren’t so keen on moving to Arizona.”

“I never said anything about Arizona. Who wants to live in Arizona?” our mothers said.

“Will you go to the funeral?” we said, our heartbeats racing themselves, each beat trying to surpass the one before it.

“Well, it would be wrong to slight Mr. Lindell just because Sissy slighted Nora, wouldn’t it?”

“Maybe it wasn’t Sissy. Maybe it was the paper,” we said. “Maybe it was one of those form obituaries.”

“Ha!” they said, indignant as ever, then hung up the phone to begin work on their own obituaries, page-long affairs that left nothing out, got everything straight. Children in general couldn’t be counted on, and we specifically had no doubt failed them completely.

But one by one they called us back, quieter now perhaps, the recounting of their own lives having softened the vitriol: “Pick me up at ten. It’s rude to be late to a funeral.”

O
f course we attended. How could we not? We urged our mothers towards the front rows of the church, but they demurred, insisting on sitting in the back, with their friends, out of the way of the family. One by one they broke away from us and we were left with each other, too timid now without the excuse of our mothers to make our way forward. We crowded together in the rear of the church, on the side opposite our mothers. We were a strange-looking group of thirty-three-year-old men—strange because we seemed more like children, like boys in suits for the first time. We’d forgotten our manners. (Mrs. Dinnerman would have said we’d forgotten our mannerisms.) We’d also forgotten our posture, forgotten everything our mothers had been teaching us for years. Someone picked his nose—Danny Hatchet? Another snorted—was that Paul Epstein? Who can remember? But probably it was Paul Epstein. He was always somewhat crass. He couldn’t help it; the nerves brought it out of him. Put him in a room with the principal and he’d burp uncontrollably. It was always misunderstood. Misunderstood for deliberate rudeness instead of unavoidable anxiousness.

Drew Price leaned over and whispered, “Is that ‘Pancho and Lefty’ they’re playing? I swear the organist is playing ‘Pancho and Lefty.’ ” We ignored him, though we’d been wondering the same thing. His insistence, though, seemed proof enough that we were wrong. When had Drew Price been right about anything—the driver of the Catalina, the true identity of his birth father? When?

Winston Rutherford was the one who first noticed the two redheads in the front row. “Holy shit,” he said. “Holy fucking shit. It’s them. It’s Nora’s daughters.” If Jack Boyd had been at the funeral, he might have been able to confirm or deny whether these were the girls he’d seen at the airport in Phoenix, but he wasn’t there. We were on our own to decide.

Sissy emerged from a side room before we could argue with Winston’s assessment of the situation. She was dressed in black—black slacks, black turtleneck, black gloves. At her side was another girl, this one tiny and tan and without a brilliant mess of red hair. Sissy was everything we expected her to be—tall, slim, regal. Maternal and yet nothing like our mothers, nothing like the wives with whom we’d had and were having children of our own.

When they sat, it was a spectacle. Not just because they were the bereaved, but because of the way they were lined up, from biggest to smallest—just the backs of them visible, three redheads starting with Sissy, ending with the fourth, with that strange, small brunette girl. The whole lot of them cried, carried on in that way that only young girls can carry on. They wrung their hands. They held each other. They leaned into each other’s shoulders and howled delicately, wetly.

Sissy, on the other hand, was reserved. Occasionally she put her arm around the one sitting closest, or leaned forward to touch the knee of the small girl sitting a few places away. But mostly she sat straight, looked forward, and waited.

A
t some point someone noticed the large Mexican man sitting at the far end of Sissy’s pew. He was closer to our mothers’ age than to ours. He did not cry, though he appeared uneasy. Once or twice he made eye contact with us and immediately looked away. Mostly he kept his eyes trained on the girls in his row, the girls sitting next to Sissy. It seemed he’d taken a spot both close to and far from them, as if he needed the distance in order to protect them. He looked occasionally at the doors behind us, as though hoping someone might enter.

Winston Rutherford said it was obviously the smallest girl’s father. We laughed at him.

“Yeah, but who’s the mother? Nora or Sissy?” we asked.

“Don’t be stupid,” he said. “She looks just like Sissy, but with a hint of South of the Border thrown in.” We took another look at the strange little girl with coloring all her own. Then we looked at Sissy. Then we looked at the Mexican.

“Sissy would have sex with that guy?” we said. “He’s twice her age.”

“She had sex with Danny, didn’t she?” Winston said. We looked away, unimpressed. “The backseat of your dad’s Nissan, right, Danny?”

Danny said, “Fuck you,” under his breath. Then added, as if not sure where the true insult lay, “It’s
my
Nissan now, dipshit.” Someone’s mother coughed from the aisle across the way.

“Anyway, that was—what?—eight years ago? Christmas, Thanksgiving?” said Paul Epstein. “Danny wouldn’t have a shot at her now.”

“Fuck you, Epstein,” said Danny. “You couldn’t even get her in high school.”

“Eight years,” said Epstein. “How old do you think that little one up there is?”

“I said shut up,” said Danny.

Tommy Bowles, always somewhat apologetic, probably as a result of the rumors about his brother and Sarah Jeffreys and the backseat of that Dodge he refused to drive, said, “It’s a funeral, guys. Give it a rest.” And for a moment we remembered ourselves and our ages and our wives and our own children to whom we would go home afterwards and try to set examples for.

T
he Mexican’s name was Mundo. “The world,” he said, and sculpted his hands around an imaginary planet. “That is me,” he said with a smile. He was a short man, but large, like a barrel.

We all shook his hand. He could have lifted any one of us clear off the ground. We were standing in the parking lot, reluctant to go home, reluctant to leave without talking to Sissy, reluctant to relieve our wives from the chore of babysitting.

“You knew Mr. Lindell?” asked Drew Price. Sometimes you just wanted to punch Drew, he could be so daft.

The Mexican ignored him. It’s possible he didn’t hear him correctly. “Sissy wants what Sissy gets,” he said. “And so I am here. And because Herbert was a very good man.” We nodded, not knowing where to go with the conversation.

“You’ve met Mundo, then,” Sissy said. She’d sneaked up on us somehow. We’d all been waiting for the moment when she would acknowledge us, but we were completely unprepared when she finally did. “We wouldn’t have made it this last year without Mundo. More of a nurse than any one of those idiot hospice workers. A confessional of a man. I swear, just looking at him makes me feel like I’m being hugged.” She said these things to Mundo, not to us. It felt like we were spying. Still, we didn’t look away.

Mundo smiled. “Confessional. I do not know about this.” He winked at Sissy. “But the cook, the gardener, the caretaker,” he said quietly. “Whatever you want. That is me. The world at my fingers.” Again he shaped an imaginary planet with his hands. Sissy held out hers and he kissed them. Then he took her face in his giant’s hands and kissed her forehead. We watched. It seemed not right that we were there, that they were doing this in front of us. Danny Hatchet blushed. Mundo lowered his head and shuffled away in the direction of those three little girls. “He was very fond of my father,” said Sissy. “They played chess. Well, checkers, but my father insisted it was chess. I think he worried we wouldn’t respect him—Mundo or my father—if we knew they were playing checkers. But we’ve all grown very attached. We don’t go anywhere without him anymore.”

She watched us watch him. She watched us watch the girls around him. We’d been reduced to our seventh-grade selves. Unable to speak. Waiting to be called upon. Teased. Anything. Waiting for the girl to talk to us.

“The biggest—that one in the purple dress, who obviously matches the one with the ponytail, though they’re not identical—is Lucy, after my mom.” We nodded. It was like a scene from
The
Sound of Music
, only this was a comedy or a satire, though which we couldn’t tell. Sissy was deadpan, and yet it seemed she was mocking us even as she introduced the children.

“Lucy’s twin is Ivy. Family names. Try not to wince, Paul, it’s not polite.” It would have been impossible not to wonder just then, if only for a moment, whether or not Sissy was remembering the terrible name Paul called her that one year of high school, after her publicized tryst with Kevin Thorpe in the Jeffreys’ mudroom.

We watched the girls as Sissy spoke, unwilling to look at her directly, frightened to memorize her face too perfectly, though more likely simply unwilling to have our fantasies disagreed with, repudiated. The girls, in turn, ignored us. They were focused more now on each other and their dresses. One of the twins straightened the hem of the smaller one. That one, in turn, brushed off an eyelash from the other twin’s cheeks. They were not unlike monkeys or a pack of wild ponies. They seemed completely foreign, completely different from the tamed children we had at home.

“The brunette is called Nora,” Sissy said, regaining our attention, though not our eye contact. For a moment we looked at the tiny, tan Nora in front of us, the one least like the Nora we had known. One by one, perhaps mere seconds apart, we looked at the swarthy-skinned Danny Hatchet and again remembered his story of the pool hall and tequila and his father’s Nissan (his now!) with Sissy Lindell in the backseat. We tried the math in our heads, convinced one minute that it was possible, convinced the next that it wasn’t. Eight years. Was she too old to be the outcome of their brief liaison? It was too hard to tell. Her size was misleading. But to ask Danny was unthinkable, especially at a funeral. This much of our mothers’ influence managed to stay with us that day.

“How long are you in town?” It was Winston Rutherford who’d managed to come up with a complete sentence.

“Outcome unclear,” said Ivy, one of the twins—perhaps on the cusp of adolescence, perhaps barely pre-pubescent—who’d suddenly taken up protective residence at Sissy’s side. Sissy put her arm around the girl in a tight sort of way, as if to silence and not to comfort.