Good-bye and Amen (11 page)

T
here is a cloud of unknowing about Heaven and Hell, apparently. Those forever places, after the spirit work is done. You understand what some of us call karma? The gyre, on which you come around again and again to the same psychic knots or dilemmas you faced before, but always on a different level? So they are the same but changed? Until you learn how to pass through them unscathed?

No?

All right, then. A simpler way of saying it.

No one is “sent” anywhere. You choose. Or find that you have chosen.

There are plenty in Hell, for want of a better word, but they don't know it's Hell. To them, it's just more of what they always chose to believe about how the world works.

 

Josslyn Moss
I know they think I'm a Valley Girl moron. The summer after Jimmy and I were married, I sat through a family dinner where Bobby Assholegate took a quarter out of his pocket, and every time I used the word
like,
he tapped it on the table. What did he think, I didn't notice? He'd be like turned away from me, talking to Monica, and
I'd answer a question and down the table I'd hear that coin click on the table. See? Just telling you that made me say it. Asshole.

 

The Leeway Cottage Guestbook, August 19, 1988 (Laurus's hand)
We're back from Santa Barbara, where Jimmy and his girl were married on the beach at sunset. Jimmy slew the fatted calf for us. Long layover in Chicago on way home, otherwise, everything perfect.

 

Eleanor Applegate
Mother was slipping faster by 1988. I don't know if that was the reason, he was trying to spare her having to organize things, or maybe protecting Josslyn, but Jimmy insisted on giving his whole wedding himself. It was just our family and Josslyn's, but we all stayed at the Santa Barbara Biltmore. It has beautiful flowers and palm trees, and the most heavenly view of the Pacific. The kids adored it.

Mother had bought a new dress for the wedding and a big matching hat, and she looked so pretty. We all had to take our shoes off on the beach and walk on the sand in our stockings to where the chairs were set up. Mother was quite girlish and sweet about it. I was just glad I'd had a pedicure. The service was performed by a friend of Jimmy's who was a Universal Life Church minister. You know, a divinity degree you can buy in the mail.

 

Josslyn Moss
We had it timed perfectly, so that the sun went below the horizon just as we said our vows. Then we all walked back to the hotel by the light of torches and had dinner. We didn't have any attendants because my sister
Melaynie is pretty heavyset, and self-conscious about it; it would have been hard to find matching dresses for her and anybody else. We asked Norman to bless our rings, since we weren't going to have him do the service, since we aren't Christians. But he said he doesn't do cameos. I was afraid he was going to be a prick about it, but he was fine. He didn't wear his collar or anything and he said he liked being able to sit with his wife at a wedding for once. They held hands the whole time.

 

Eleanor Applegate
Josslyn's mother was a hoot. Salt of the earth. She'd been married four times and counting and two of her husbands came to the wedding, Josslyn's father and another one, and it was not the one she was married to at the time! You never knew what was going to come out of her mouth. We sat with her at the dinner and she suddenly said to me, “You know, I was seventeen the first time I got married and when the pastor asked me, ‘Do you take this man,' I fainted!” Then she roared with laughter. She told me she'd made her own wedding dress out of a tablecloth.

She's spent a lot of time in Reno, getting divorces, and over the years worked out a system for playing blackjack. She plays in the middle of the night, when they're training new dealers. “I win a bundle, honey,” she kept saying and then she'd laugh. She was a riot.

 

Josslyn Moss
Every time Mama came back to the table from having a smoke, Mr. Moss would stand up for her. She'd say, “Oh Lars, you don't have to do that.” But he did it anyway. After a while my dad started doing it too. So then Mama would say, “You make me feel like a queen!”

Afterward she said that Laurus was a real gent, real old-school, and that we wouldn't see any more like him. He made her feel honored. I loved him for that. The mother was a different can of beans, but she was pretty careful around me. I gather I missed the worst of her. She was coming down the escalator as I was going up, and she didn't dare be such a bitch any more, if she ever was as bad as they claim she was. That or she forgot what she was so pissed about.

 

Monica Faithful
My stepson Sam came to Jimmy's wedding. He looked amazing. A full beard and big strong shoulders, all grown up. He was living in California; he'd gone out to Cal Poly after high school, and never come back east. Putting some distance between himself and Rachel, was what we thought, but maybe avoiding us too. I was surprised to see that he was close to Jimmy and Josslyn. Jimmy is always surprising you.

 

Josslyn Moss
Jimmy's mom had no interest in my children, that's for sure. I remember once, when Virgil was a baby, we were in Dundee and we wanted to go out to dinner with another couple, friends of Jimmy's. Frannie Ober? She's in Congress. Jimmy asked his parents if we could leave Virgil with them. He was sleeping through the night and everything, I'd put him to bed myself. She said, Oh sure, even though Eleanor and Nika said she never would babysit for
them.

We were down in the driveway when I heard Virgil screaming from the upstairs window. I mean
screaming
. I ran back up the stairs, two at a time. Mrs. Moss was holding Virgie who was red in the face, arching his back he was so
upset. Maybe he felt us leaving; he is quite psychic. Anyway I took him and said to Mrs. Moss I was so sorry, I didn't think he'd wake up, and she said, “Oh, that's all right. I sort of like their little tears. I think they're kind of funny.”

I thought, O-kay, lady. Get the nets…

 

Ah. Where is Sydney?

As I've said, it's hard at first to accept being dead. Much harder for some than for others. For young souls. Those with no recognition, on any level, of having been here before.

Those who have lived well and accepted much tend to slip through easily. Laurus was one of those. They look back at life and say, Well, that was great. What's next? Soon, off they go to the heavenly kaleidoscope.

Or those who have come through gradually. The very old, those who are leaving behind long illness. You've probably seen for yourself, how they drift here, then back, until finally they're so much more here than there that they stay. That's a gentle passage.

Sudden death is hard. Those who show up trailing rage and disappointments find it much harder to let go. Doesn't seem fair, does it? Well, there you go.

 

Monica Faithful
So, the summer of sharing.

Before I answer the question, could I just say this? I
knew
what I had at stake that summer. I needed it to work, more than anyone. I knew that. But your niche in the family ecology is what it is. Your myth about how your family works is hard science, to you. It's not that easy to rebuild your emotional mousetrap just using your brain.

 

Eleanor Applegate
Jimmy and Josslyn wanted to be at Leeway for all of August. I mean, of course. If they're coming all the way from California, of course they'll stay a month, and August is when everyone else will be there.

Back in the fifties, when the wives used to take the children up to Maine for the whole summer, and the husbands came for a week or two when they could, it didn't matter when you were there. Now since no one but teachers can take the whole summer off, everything happens in August. So Monica wanted to be in the house all summer, and Josslyn kind of thought she should have it to herself for August if Monica had July but no one wanted to draw a line in the dirt. There were signs things weren't going to go well.

 

Monica Faithful
Shirley Eaton called me in early June when she went to open the cottage to say the vacuum cleaner had packed up, some squirrels had been living in it. She needed to know what to do. I e-mailed everyone about it. I thought she should get a new machine from Sears. Eleanor didn't care. But Josslyn wanted to get some $700 one from Germany. Why, exactly? This is for a house that gets used two months a year!

 

Josslyn Moss
It's ridiculous. You buy those cheap things, they're always crapping out, and up there, you're going to have to drive twenty-five miles to the repair shop, and twenty-five home, and then do it again when you pick the thing up. You buy the best, it lasts forever. I don't want to spend my vacation driving back and forth getting a crap vacuum cleaner
fixed. Waste of fossil fuel. Global warming, hello? Split three ways it's only a couple hundred bucks each, anyway.

 

Monica Faithful
Of course, I can spend hundreds of dollars on a vacuum cleaner that will be used two months a year. But I choose not to. And it's fifteen miles to Union, not twenty-five.

 

Jimmy Moss
I called Shirley Eaton and told her I'd buy one of those German things myself and ship it to her, but she'd already gone and gotten one at Sears.

 

Eleanor Applegate
Then there was the
Rolling Stone
situation. Charlesie had called Auggie Dodge and told him he was paying for the starboard side of the boat and the Faithfuls were paying for the port. Auggie sent Norman a bill for starting the brightwork and apparently Norman never paid it, so Auggie only did the starboard side. I guess it tickled his funny bone. But it wasn't so funny when Charlesie went up to get the boat rigged for a shakedown cruise, and found that the port side hadn't been scraped or caulked or varnished or anything. It was supposed to be a birthday present, this cruise, since he'd stayed off probation the entire spring and only had one D. We were letting him take his friends out to Roque Island.

 

Auggie Dodge
Charlesie Applegate came in with those friends of his, their faces all full of rings and sprockets and whatnot, like they all fell down in a hardware store. He says, “Auggie, my boat's not on the mooring.” And I
said, “Nossir. I was all ready to put the starboard side out on the mooring when it came to me that port side had to go with it, and the port side might well fill up with water and next thing you know you'd have both sides on the bottom.”

I don't know when we've had so much fun at the yard. There was that boat still in the cradle, with the starboard side all shipshape and Bristol fashion, and the port looking just like she did when we hauled her last September.

 

Norman Faithful
I thought the bill was a joke. Monica never said a thing to me about sharing the boat.

 

Monica Faithful
I told Norman about the boat on the way home from the lottery. I know I did. I know I did because I told him that Charlesie had wanted to take care of the boat himself and he said, God help us. And, I remember that then he talked about that time before we were married, when we sailed out to Beal Island to see the graveyard. He reached over and took my hand. I remember thinking maybe we'd go out there again and it would be nice that the boat was half ours. It's been a long time since we took a whole day and spent it alone together.

 

Norman Faithful
If you knew what I had on my plate, you wouldn't expect a yard bill for half my wife's sailboat to be right at the top of my radar screen.

 

Bobby Applegate
Of course, now we
do
know what he had on his plate…

 

Norman Faithful
In the car going home from Cross Falls she said
something
about the
Rolling Stone
because we talked about that time we sailed to Beal Island and I heard the woman weeping. That's really why I became a priest. I don't know to this day if Nicky understands that. But I know we didn't talk about who owns the damn boat.

I believe we're surrounded by mysteries, you see. There are aspects of Christianity that are obstacles to faith, for most people. The virgin birth is one. The resurrection and ascension. The word in Koiné Greek that we translate as
virgin
means “youth.”
Virgin
is a mistranslation. The resurrection? Some believe that the women outside the tomb saw Jesus' brother James. It was just a mistake, a family resemblance that let them believe in an impossible thing they longed for. How does that change the fact that Jesus was a transcendent teacher? An evolved spiritual being?

The writers of the Gospels lived in a world that thought the sky was a sort of ceiling, as if we all live in a snow globe, and that heaven was above that. They'd never flown above clouds. They had no way to measure how far away the stars are. But their world believed in mystery. They believed in faith itself, do you see? Faith for its own sake. A willingness to live with and believe in what you can't explain or understand. Faith is a muscle. The more you use it the more mysterious and powerful it grows. When I say the creeds, when I say, “I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting,” I'm not saying that I personally, literally, at this moment believe that one day we'll all wake up outside the snow globe and be in our own earthly bodies again after
thousands of years, and dance before the Lord. At this moment, the idea strikes me as disgusting. No, when I say the creeds I'm saying I
belong
to a church, I
belong
to a community of faith that collectively believes what the creeds say.