Dry Your Smile (53 page)

“Time is not the point. I've known Julian for years, before the Venice period. Since we were in that women's group. Even then, there was—an electricity between us. I set some of her poems to music, did you know that? I understand her so
deeply
, Celia. Then again, I wonder if I understand her at all …”

Iliana gazed absently through the café windows fogged with condensation from a January frost outside on the rue Cujas. Celia lit a Gauloise, watching how her friend's hand unconsciously tapped a syncopated rhythm on the marble-topped table.

“You know, you
want
to get on with your life, Iliana,” she mused. “Part of you is conducting the new piece even when you don't know you're doing it.”

Iliana gave Celia a sharp glance, then looked down at her own hand. She withdrew the hand to her lap.

“
Sí
. But even the new piece leads back to her.”

“Why? Because you began it during—”

“Because it is dedicated to her mother. Her mother's name was Hope. She died—oh, two years ago last October. My god, is it that long? Twenty … seven months.”

Celia pushed up the sleeves of her oversize sweater and leaned forward with new interest. “I didn't know that about the piece. I thought ‘Réquiem para la Esperanza' meant—”

“‘Requiem for Hope' in general? I suppose you could say that, too. No more hope. For love. For politics. For going home. But it also is a requiem for a real woman. And her daughter.”

“Ah,” her friend exhaled, mulling this bit of fresh information. “So your Julian … That explains something about your Julian.”

“What?” Iliana asked listlessly. “That she became a mourner?”

“Death changes people. Especially the death of a mother.”

“Yes. I've thought that. Much. Strange, I even find myself imagining that the mother died in childbirth.” She signaled to the waiter for another drink. “I don't mean literally, of course; I mean that when she actually did die, that's when Juliana finally was born.”

“That happens to all of us, one way or another, when a parent dies, no?”

“But more so to Julian.” Iliana warmed to her subject, and Celia noticed, as she noticed how Iliana absent-mindedly fingered the small gold pendant—a circle with a cross beneath—that hung on a gold chain around her neck. Let her talk it out, Celia thought, the way we used to harangue the subject of home for months on end when we first went into exile. Let her get all of it out. Then she can walk away from it. Celia probed accordingly,

“Why more so Julian?”

“Julian was obsessed with her mother. And the death was an ugly one, long years of sickness. The death vigil itself seemed endless. I know, I was with her. But also … Julian was an actress and—”

“I thought you told me she was a writer.”

“She is. But she was once an actress, and she—I think she needs an audience to do her best, excel herself. She needs to be watched, applauded. For much of her life, Hope was that audience.”

“Then
you
became it,” Celia interjected, trying to edge Iliana into her perception of what ought to be her friend's self-perception.

Iliana shrugged again. “If so, I couldn't help it. It was quite a spectacle to watch, Celia, I assure you. From the very beginning. But especially when the mother died. Julian hadn't slept for days. I never saw anyone so near to a total breakdown. After the mother was pronounced dead, she insisted on sitting alone with the body. She stayed in the room a long while. Finally she let me take her back to my flat. In the taxi going down to the Village, she was … translucent with an almost unearthly energy. I held her hand. She let me, but looked out the window at the morning—it was her forty-second birthday, Celia. She let me get her into a warm bath, and into bed. She wouldn't take a pill or eat anything. She was so
calm.
”

Celia shook her head sadly. “Poor
gringas
. They don't know how to mourn. They hide it all inside.”

“No, not her. It was something else. She was in the grasp of—I don't know. She must have woken after only a few hours. I didn't hear her, I who always sensed the second she stirred in bed. I only know that when I woke she was in the livingroom, fully dressed, already on the telephone, making the first calls.” It did not escape Celia how Iliana's face livened with recollection. “She called her mother's attorneys, she called the Jewish cemetery where her mother had bought a plot, she called the rabbi.”

“Ah,” Celia put in, “they are Jews.”

“Julian isn't. Well, by birth, yes. But she's an agnostic. With a Catholic sensibility. She's … I don't know what Julian is. Perhaps she's a witch.”

“A witch.” Celia couldn't help herself. “This tragedy has its farcical moments, Iliana.”

“Doesn't all tragedy have elements of farce? Certainly this one did. I never will forget Julian looking up at me—pale face stripped of everything but discipline—saying, ‘I hadn't thought of that. The hospital says I need a funeral director. They want to know about … disposal of the body. How could I have overlooked that?'”

“I fail to see that particular farce,” Celia muttered wryly, thinking her comment safe from Iliana's preoccupied attention. But Iliana did hear.

“Farce,” she responded, “because I, of all people, could cast that part for Julian's production.”

“Production?”

The waiter put down a glass in front of Iliana. She sniffed it, puzzled.

“What is this? Sherry? My
god
.” She hailed him again. “Take this away, please, it's the wrong order. I
loathe
sherry. Bring me another campari and soda? Yes, production,” she continued to Celia. “A funeral is a ritual, after all, and all rituals are acts of theater. I knew that whatever Julian staged for her mother would be unique and dramatic. But even Julian had overlooked one detail: a funeral director.”

“Please. Don't tell me you took on the job for her,” Celia growled.

“No. But I had an old friend, from my youthful days the first time I lived in New York. She owned a funeral home;
she
was a funeral director—a woman.”

“A lover?” Celia inquired, impervious to constraints of politesse in a friendship so old as this.

“Sí”.
Iliana stirred her new drink sheepishly. “But only a brief, light-hearted—”

“—from the old days, aha, when Ilianita was playing Cherubino to all the pretty ladies? I remember
very
well.” Celia arched her eyebrows in a mute reminder to Iliana of their own period as lovers, an intermezzo of eroticism in a lifelong duet of friendship.

Iliana retorted with injured dignity, “And what good has it done me, I ask you, to grow serious and fall so deeply in love
now?
Look what misery it brings!”

“
I
never advised you to fall into a grand passion. And with a Yankee Jewish witch!
I
never—”

Iliana gave her head a little shake, to dispel this mood and permit a return to the comfort of her reminiscences. “Anyway. As I was saying. So I remembered Jessica Maruzzo. I thought to myself, Santa María! The heavens have a patient and morbid sense of humor! Jessica was the only child of a man who owned a funeral home in New York's Little Italy. She had demanded to work in the family business—and she had inherited it. We hadn't been close for years, but being a good Italian, she always kept track of me to send Christmas cards. She and her lover—a mortician—had come to Venice once on holiday while I lived there, and stayed with me. So I rang her up. She was delighted to be of help.”

Celia grinned. “Ah,
hija mia,
” she laughed, “how we do keep reappearing! And how convenient it is! You remember our old joke? That there are really only six lesbian women in the world and the rest—”

“—is done with mirrors? Yes,” Iliana laughed back, lending them both a moment's respite in the pleasure of younger selves. “Well, there she was. Jessica—one of Les Six. Ready for anything—which turned out to be a macabre and humorous chain of events. I brought her together with Julian. Julian told Jess she wished to strike a balance between what might have pleased her mother on the one hand, and her own antipathy to formal religious services on the other. She said she already had found a liberal woman rabbi—”

“I didn't know they let women—”

“—and a woman cantor for the memorial service, but that the rabbi was having difficulty convincing the Orthodox Jewish cemetery that a woman could perform the burial. To compound this, Jess had never in her life arranged anything except Italian Catholic funerals. But she was game to learn.”

“This could have been a movie, Iliana,” Celia giggled, “a co-production between Pasolini and Jerry Lewis.”

“With the women's dialogue by Von Trotta. But wait. The best is to come. Jess discovers that a special washing of the body has to take place, not by her own employees, but by Jewish women recommended by the Orthodox cemetery, women whose job it is to perform this washing as a particular religious act. The additional catch is that no Orthodox cemetery will receive a body in any way ‘desecrated.' Jess pulls me aside in panic, whispering frantically, ‘The eyes! What about the eyes, then?' ‘What about them?' I whisper back, just as frantically and not even sure why.”

“
What
about them?” Celia demanded, completely caught up now in the plot.

“Julian had donated her mother's eyes to an eye bank.”

Celia made a face of disgust. “Holy saints. How barbaric.”

“Well … that's what I thought at first, but … you don't understand. In any event, Jess came all unstrung. ‘Dammit, Iliana, don't you understand?' she hisses at me. ‘When these Orthodox women perform the washing ritual, they might see the eyes are gone! What'll I do?' I say, ‘Can't you just—close the lids?'
Holá
, was she furious.
‘Shit
, Iliana, don't you think I
thought
of that?' she snarls. ‘It'll still
show
.' She tells me she doesn't want to go into the gory details of her job, that it always puts people off, even old lovers. That's why Jess is so happy with Muffle, I think. They can work
together
, since Muffie's a mortician cosmetologist.”

“I suppose,” Celia analyzed, surrendering to a totally irreverent mirth, “that they can talk shop together in the evenings. This is priceless.”

“So I say to Jess, ‘Well, can't Muffie come up with a solution? I mean, what do you do, stuff something under the lids or what?' Jess fixes me with the stare Mother Superior Teresa used to reserve for you and me when we were in first grade. ‘Never mind,' she declares haughtily, ‘I should never have mentioned it. Muffie and I will solve it. And don't tell The Daughter.'”

“Oh! Have you noticed? All funeral directors refer to the survivors as if they were archetypes. The Daughter. The Widow. The Family.
Priceless,
” Celia repeated.

“But of course I did tell The Daughter,” Iliana persisted, “since I was after all The Lover of The Daughter. And The Daughter—a thespian, I tell you, as much as a mourner—was content to let Muffie and Jess solve it together. Which they must have done, because we heard no story of the ritual-washwomen running screaming out of the Little Italy mortuary, crying to the world that a sacrilegious robbing of corneas had taken place. So Jess proceeded proudly with what she called her “first full feminist funeral.”

“Omigod,” Celia chortled, “now we have to add in Ingmar Bergman.”

“Jess had never met a woman rabbi. Julian's rabbi, just out of the rabbinate school, had never met a woman funeral director. Neither one had ever performed a ceremony in which only women were present—
and
which took place in an Orthodox cemetery, which had never experienced any of the above either. Jess was used to the elaborate caskets and dress of her Italian Catholic clients, but she managed within twenty-four hours to find the required plain pine coffin with a Star of David on top, just as she managed to locate the proper homespun cloth for the ritual shroud.”

Celia wrinkled her nose. “Boring. Latins do it better.”

“Don't be such a bigot. Everything was simple. Understated. We assembled, two cars filled with an all-female—they call it minyan—the minimum number of mourners, ten, by Jewish law, I learned. You can't imagine the faces of some of Julian's friends—from this publishing house she worked with—who were among the group. They got out of the car, expecting a woman rabbi perhaps but not one in pants. And surely not expecting a woman funeral director to greet them. With great solemnity, in a full cutaway.”

A shadow came over Iliana's face as she pursued her memory of the scene. She stared again out the clouded café window as if seeing the cemetery on a Paris street. “Julian let me take her arm as we stepped toward the grave, but then she disengaged herself and stood alone.” Iliana fell silent and Celia waited, sensitive to the change of mood. “Then, as Julian might say, good theater would have it that there comes a moment when the intermission of comic relief falls away and grief is left center-stage, alone. Julian had memorized the Kaddish. She has a low, full voice—a rich mezzo if she were a singer—and she intoned the chant together with the thinner, clear soprano of the young rabbi, a female duet in the bleak October wind. Each of us, according to Jewish ritual, then threw a handful of earth on the coffin as it was being lowered—Julian last of all, with both hands. Then she unwrapped the bundle she had with her, and out slashed against the grey autumn sky a dazzle of white lilacs, like a great pearl bird. She lifted the loose sheaf up against her breast, stepped to the edge of the open grave, and flung her arms wide so the lilacs descended, wingspread, into the earth.”

Iliana paused again. Again Celia waited.