Let Me Finish (28 page)

 

I don't know if these lines are on Devereux's tomb, in St. Peter ad Vincula Church, inside the Tower of London, but we can be sure they were in his head just before the executioner took it off, on February 25, 1601. I memorized this yearning prophesy, and used to recite it drunkenly to my roommates late at night, or even to Boston debutantes I was cruising around the dance floor at the Copley Plaza. I told them this would be my epitaph, too, and only a slowly advancing maturity made me accept that I was neither an Elizabethan knight nor a potential friar, and that I would grow old in a time of blank or blah tombstones.

 

I am not a churchgoer or a stone-rubber, but over the years I've logged a surprising number of hours at PèreLachaise, in Paris; at Hollywood, rising sweetly beside the James River in Richmond, Virginia, where the old soldiers' graves, once tended by the Daughters of the Confederacy, were badly in need of mowing; or at Woodlawn Cemetery, a No. 4 Lexington Avenue express subway ride away from me in the Bronx, which offers hilltop stands of enormous trees and a nice range of urban housing, from Jay Gould's massive Grecian temple to Fiorello LaGuardia's wayside nook, which befits his stature better than his grand contributions to our city. I have also called at Hope Cemetery, in Barre, Vermont, where generations of stonecutters from the local granite works have left memorials celebrating their worldly preoccupations—a soccer ball, a racing car, a tilting biplane, and an armchair. Here also is that much-photographed life-sized double bed, wherein a couple sits stiffly up hand in hand above the granite percales, he in his
breakfast wrapper and she in a chaste negligee: a celebration of eternal fidelity barely marred by the fact that the widower (who'd ordered the monument) later married somebody else. Nor can I forget the churchyard gravestone I was guided to in East Haddam, Connecticut—an ancient news extra saying goodbye to a parishioner who walked out into the sunshine after Sunday services a century or two before and was struck dead by the falling clapper of the steeple bell. There's an inexorable secular echo here in the diner who strolled out of Le Pavillon, on East Fifty-seventh Street, after lunch (this was in the sixties), and was terminally conked by a dumbbell accidentally nudged off a high windowsill by a maid of the television celebrity Arlene Francis. No last words were taken from the victim, but Le Pavillon was a five-star eatery, and it's always been my guess that his last nanosecond of consciousness may have produced the thought You should have passed up the profiteroles.

 

Two or three times each summer I pay a call on my own future retirement home, in the Brooklin, Maine, Cemetery. Brooklin, with a population of eight hundred, has ten graveyards, the most beautiful of which, the Naskeag Cemetery, sits across the road from the gemlike Beth Eden Chapel. Most of the others are half-forgotten family plots, containing Babsons and Freetheys who go back to Revolutionary days. The Brooklin Cemetery has a more purposeful, everyday air, and lies in the middle of town, which is to say across Route 175 from the First Baptist Church, and a hundred yards or so north of the Brooklin General Store and the Friend Memorial Library. The front sector, close to the road,
holds the older stones, going back to the late eighteenth century: skinny marble or granite markers now weathered to seagull white. Later graves illustrate current options in the memorial line: pink or oatmeal granites, and thick, low slabs offering smooth façades with roughened tops, like weathered roofing. There are floral and religious motifs, and, just lately, darker blocks faced with what look like color engravings, running to seascapes and lighthouses, beside the names of the departed. Fifteen years ago, Carol and I met here with the friendly cemetery representative (a sign on his pickup truck advertised his other line of work, taxidermy) and for two hundred and twenty dollars signed on for a nice double, close to an oak tree in the northeast corner.

"That's—uh, per year?" I asked.

"No, that's the whole of it," he said.

What we visit here, to be sure, is not just our own plot, now marked off with green metal tabs, but my mother and stepfather's graves, a couple of yards to the east, and also, close at hand, that of my brother Joe, who died in 1997. The oak tree was planted by Andy White when my mother died, in 1977, and it has thrived. Mother, a passionate gardener, would appreciate its flecked shade and those festive three- or four-leaf sprigs that oaks let drop during a windstorm. I think she would also put up with the little memorial piles of stones and mussel shells, faded bunches of wildflowers, or plastic pigs that visiting-pilgrim readers of
Charlotte's Web
or
The Elements of Style
keep putting down in front of Andy's grave, though she'd want them cleared away the next morning. Similar symbols of respect get dropped off at Joe's grave by people who loved his boat designs. What would drive her batty, though, and (if it were possible) would result in a three- or four-page typed letter to me or someone else in the family, laying out this fresh problem—"appalling problem," in her words—and its possible solutions, with afterthoughts scribbled at the end and up the sides of the page in pencil, is the slovenly state of the two stones: hers and Andy's. Sad and bereft after she died, he'd picked a mournful charcoal-gray slate for her marker, which was matched eight years later by his own glum replica next door. The gravestones are mid-sized, with a classic curve along the top and elegant shoulders, but the years have demonstrated that slate—or this slate, at least—ages poorly. A corrective metal sheath or splint now covers the top of both slabs, to check the fine cracks that have appeared along the sides and front. The fading slate, now silvered to a happier tone, has almost smoothed away the names and dates. Soon the Whites' wish for privacy, well known to everyone in town, will be complete.

Mother's gravestone was the first decision of any magnitude Andy had to take on without her. With the help of an art-director friend of mine, Hank Brennan, he settled on a subtle English style called Centaur for her stone's elegant, slightly flared type face—KATHARINE SERGEANT WHITE in three separate lines; then a single small design, more a plus sign than a cross; and then her dates, 1892–1977, below. If, as seems likely, Andy wondered about her reaction, he might almost have heard her response here: "Well, perhaps, but are we sure about the capitals? Do you think of me as a capitals sort of person?"

Design and arrangement had always fallen to her in
their forty-nine-year marriage, and her Olympic-scale worrying would have briskly taken on the darkness of the slate had she still been around. She would have set her mind to finding out everything about the durability and legibility of slate, as against granite and marble and limestone and porphyry: her letter to me would instruct me to consult somebody in
The New Yorker
's checking department about all this, with a backup verifying conversation with Joe Mitchell, who'd written about graveyards so well. There was also the question of site. The spot Andy had picked out was way in the back of the Brooklin Cemetery, close to the woods and so many yards removed from the nearest existing graves that Mother's lone stone, when first put up, reminded me of the mystery slab in "2001: A Space Odyssey." Andy's adjacent 1985 grave and the subsequent natural proliferation of Brooklin deads have done away with this distracting idea. The only provision about her burial that Mother left was that there were to be no prayers or Bible readings of any sort. But if, as seems possible, Mother and Andy did actually talk about the standoffish gravesite at some point, I can unhesitatingly provide her train of thought:
We don't want anyone in town to think that we're snobbish or distant, or that, good heavens, we want to
hide.
We've lived here a long time and we have friends who are buried here, but this is their cemetery, not ours, and we wouldn't want people thinking that we're taking up space in the middle of things because we want to be accepted in ways that we're not—that now we're one of them and not From Away—just because I'm gone. This way we're showing respect. But will they understand?

***

William Maxwell once told me that one of the great mercies we are provided with is that within a few months after someone close to us has died the vision of him in sickness or great age is replaced with a much younger memory of that same parent or husband or friend, now seen at his youthful best. I thanked Maxwell for this wisdom and later passed it on unhesitatingly to others, in letters of condolence, but now I'm not so sure. Most memories of my mother are affectionate and cheerful, but still center on the bottomless worries and overthoughts that descended on her late in her life. And not always so late, come to think of it. Last summer, my nephew Jonathan Stableford, who is now close to sixty, unexpectedly told me about the time he'd competed in a Fourth of July footrace in Brooklin at the age of ten or eleven. Brooklin always puts on a parade up Route 175 on the morning of the Fourth, and later celebrations at the nearby town green, but back then the road that branches off from the Williams General Store toward Naskeag Point would be closed off for athletic events. Jon entered the Boys Twelve-and-Under 100-Yard Dash and won it, collecting a prize of thirty-five cents. He was headed for the candy counter inside Williams' when his grandmother appeared, gave him a congratulatory hug (well, sort of), and put her foot down when she heard the plans for his loot. "This is town money," she explained. "It's not exactly ours. You'll understand this some day." And in no time she'd persuaded him to donate the thirty-five cents to the Library, across the street.

I groaned and laughed when I heard this tale, which so perfectly summed up Mother's noble sense of duty and her terrible—no, appalling—judgment about kids. For her a
fistful of candy never had a chance against the complicated right thing. She loved us all, anxiously and bemusedly, but forgot to hand out kisses because we were great runners or really good-looking or the smartest kid on the block. Stuff like that went without saying, only she never said it.

Nancy Franklin, in a remarkable piece about my mother in
The New Yorker
in 1995 (she'd never met her), wrote, "It's funny; as an editor she was maternal but as a mother she was editorial." This made me laugh, not cry, and it has come to me over time that my own way of loving her was often simply to try to cheer her up. Despite Maxwell, I don't envision her much at a younger best—slim and stylish at lunch with me in Schrafft's, around the corner from her office, in 1928, say—but instead find her sitting at the head of the dining-room table in North Brooklin, in her seventies, with her elbow on the table and her head wearily resting in one hand while she eats. Andy is at the other end, and Carol and John Henry and I—or maybe this is earlier, with my two daughters there, instead—in our usual places. Callie and Alice, burnished with their sailing suntans, are wearing skirts instead of shorts, for Grandma. It's our customary last dinner together before we Angells head back to New York at the end of another vacation. Andy's martinis have brushed aside the sad import of the occasion for the moment, and he is regaling us with the latest neurotic doings of his Norfolk terrier Jones. Late-August sunlight falls into the room, competing with the table candles, and the usual homemade mint sauce and homemade piccalilli are in their usual silver dishes. Mother smiles and sighs and picks at her
roast potato, and, watching her, I try to imagine which of her immediate deep concerns is topmost at the moment: whether the blue Chinese willow-pattern vegetable dish on the mantel behind her should be left to Alice, as written on her current and endlessly rewritten twelve-page adjunct-to-her-will list, or, for some complex reason, to Callie or perhaps to another granddaughter altogether, Kitty Stableford; how many of her nine grandchildren attended or ever will attend a school or college where they would get to learn their way around not just
Middlemarch
but
Cranford,
too; why the cosmos, some blossoms of which are in the arrangement she's put together this afternoon in the copper vase in the far-left corner of the living room, has been looking so leggy of late and whether the northwest bed, where the cosmos are, doesn't need a wholesale cleanout and replanting this fall; whether Jean Stafford, the widow of Joe Liebling, was drunk again when she called last night or in the grip of something more dire; whether Edith Candage, in the kitchen, has remembered to get the dessert Floating Island egg white whipped to a proper firmness; whether poor Catherine Allen's failing eyesight will keep her from laundering and ironing these organdy curtains, come spring, and, if not, who in the world can be found to replace her; whether Joe, away at the moment on a cruise east to the Bras d'Or in his cutter
Northern Crown,
may encounter the tropical depression in the Caribbean mentioned on the radio tonight, on his way home; whether Roger, never as lean as his father Ernest, hasn't picked up a bit of weight over this vacation with too much beer and too many lobsters
and may be overloading his heart; why Ernest made me carry that enormous frying pan around my neck on our 1915 honeymoon camping trip, and so perhaps beginning the back troubles that have been killing me ever since; whether Vladimir Nabokov doesn't still have a couple of pieces of short fiction in him for the magazine, and whether the current fiction department is still regularly in touch with him and Vera, and how long has it been since I've had a letter, one of those "V.N." specials, from him; who that new person in checking is who last week crazily circled a phrase of Andy's on a galley and wrote "zeugma?" in the margin; whether Milton Greenstein will call us back tomorrow about the estimated September tax figures we've mailed him, and about Shawn's concerns about the paperback of the appalling Gill book; and isn't it time for seconds? She puts down her fork and lights up a filtered Benson & Hedges.

What can I say? Looking at Mother, I suddenly remember the line "In the absence of faith, indecision is the mind's great stay against death," which I've happened upon again just lately in some book. It's by a French writer, Benjamin Constant, and now I suddenly want to relay it to her, here at the dinner table, because it so perfectly applies to her. But then I think better of it. Mother doesn't talk about death or really think about it, ever, and it won't exactly make her laugh in the first place. So I turn and say, "Did you hear about Carol's idea for a name for our house here, out on the point? The kind of thing we'd put on the side of our station wagon, if we had a station wagon?"