News from Heaven (11 page)

“He wanted to visit. He talked about it all the time.” Vera sips her coffee, her rings clinking on the china cup. “It was always a question of money.”

“I would have bought him a ticket,” George says.

“He wouldn't have let you. He'd be too ashamed.” Vera hesitates, as though there's more she could say.

“He was always hard up,” George says. “I never understood it. He couldn't seem to get on his feet.”

I gave him money, Joyce thinks. We all did. It's a subject she has never discussed with George or Dorothy, but she knows, suddenly, that this is true. He called at strange hours: though he'd spent fifteen years on the far edge of the country, he paid no attention to the time difference, as though it were an unsubstantiated rumor he didn't quite believe. Loans, he called them, though he was casual about repaying. He was casual in all things. Joyce remembers his shirts always wrinkled, his blond hair shaggy before that look was popular, back when other boys were wearing crew cuts. The scruffiness suited him. He was so good-looking, he'd have seemed almost feminine without a day's growth on his chin.

The coffee finished, George walks Joyce out to the car. Her husband has been alone with the children all day. By now Teddy will be clamoring for his mother.

“Who is she, anyway?” George asks. “His girlfriend?”

“No, I'm sure not,” says Joyce, who isn't at all sure. “A friend, she says. She's the one who found his body.” She hugs her coat around her. “Honestly, Georgie, I don't know who she is.”

“She must have been a knockout in her day.” He fumbles in his pocket for a cigarette. You're smoking again? Joyce wants to say but doesn't. She is trying to be less critical.

“I finally reached Lucy,” she says. “Leonard, actually. They couldn't get a flight out until Tuesday, so I told him not to bother. What would be the point?” Their younger sister is a medical missionary in a remote village in Madagascar. She and her husband run a small hospital, the only nurse and doctor for miles.

“I missed Daddy's funeral,” says George. “I never forgave myself.”

Here we go, Joyce thinks. It's a story she's heard too many times. During the war George served on a minesweeper in the South Pacific. By the time he learned of their father's death, the body was already in the ground.

“I remember his face so clearly,” says George. “More clearly than I remember Mother's, if you want to know the truth.” He exhales in a long stream. “Remember my violin?”

It's another old family story, oft-repeated: the time their father spent his whole paycheck to buy George, then eight years old, a secondhand violin. George's version of the story is tender, sentimental. Their mother, charged with feeding four children on groceries wheedled from the company store, had remembered it less fondly.

“I told Sandy that story,” he says. “When I went out to California that time. And do you know what he said to me?
I don't remember him at all.
That killed me, Joyce.
I don't remember him at all.
”

“Well,” says Joyce, “he was young when Daddy died.”

“He was ten. A ten-year-old remembers.” George flicks away an ash. “I'm telling you, it affected him. He was traumatized by it.” He is a man of certain opinions. In that way he is the exact opposite of Sandy, who believed in nothing at all.

S
he remembers clearly the last time she saw him. They were riding in her car to the airport in Pittsburgh—Sandy behind the wheel, his suitcase in the trunk. His face was pale that morning, a little drawn. He'd had a late night and too many drinks at their nephew's wedding, the reason for this visit. For years he'd seemed preternaturally youthful, but that day she noticed his hairline receding, faint lines at the corners of his eyes. For the first time he looked his age.

At the wedding he'd put on a good show—dancing and joking, charming neighbors he couldn't possibly remember, old miners and miners' widows who still lived on Polish Hill. The Novak boy, gone a decade, had been welcomed like the prodigal son.
He's so handsome
, Joyce was told again and again.
He always had a way about him.
She accepted the compliments graciously, as though she herself had been praised.

His homecoming had been an unqualified success until the final morning, when—despite Dorothy's wheedling, her lectures, and finally her tears—he had refused to join the family at Sunday Mass.
It would be a lie,
he said simply.
I don't believe.

“People like to think there's a plan,” he told Joyce. “Some point to it all.” He changed lanes smoothly, with barely a backward glance. “So they've made up all these elaborate explanations.”

“You don't mean that.”

“Fairy tales, Joyce. They're nothing but fairy tales.”

She stared at him, appalled. “You don't believe in God? In heaven?” To her it was the essential point: the ultimate reunion with her parents, Rose and Stanley waiting for her on the other side. The alternative—that she would never see them again—was inadmissible, a sorrow she couldn't bear.

“Sorry, doll. Heaven is here on earth.”

They drove awhile in silence.

“So you're an—atheist?” The word felt foreign in her mouth, wicked as an epithet. She knew such people existed but had never met one.
Fairy tales.
Nobody she knew—herself included—would dare say such a thing aloud.

Sandy parked at the terminal and stepped out of the car. With a crooked grin, he handed her the keys. She can see it now, the smile crinkling the corners of his eyes. The memory shatters her.

O
n Monday morning the house smells of pancakes—a weekend treat, usually, but her husband has made an exception. Ed is an early riser, and he and Rebecca have already demolished an entire stack. Joyce has no appetite and neither does Teddy, who is running a temperature. She lay awake half the night, listening to him cough.

She drinks her coffee as she dresses for the funeral. “I hate to leave him,” she says, helping Ed with his tie. Her friend Eleanor Rouse, the school nurse, has offered to sit with the children while she and Ed are at church. Joyce wouldn't—realistically, she couldn't—leave Teddy with anyone else.

“Where are you going?” Rebecca asks.

She stands in the doorway of her parents' bedroom, watching Joyce put on panty hose. On her head is a pink paper cone left over from her birthday. On Saturday morning, in the Hausers' basement rec room, Joyce served ice cream and cake to a dozen second-graders. It seems a long time ago.

“To the funeral home,” she says. “That building I showed you, uptown behind the A&P.”

“The red one,” says Rebecca, adjusting her hat.

“Yes,” Joyce says.

They have discussed the best way to explain Sandy's death to the children. Teddy is too young to ask questions, but Rebecca, who is seven, has been told that her uncle has gone to heaven.

Is that closer than California?
she demanded.

Farther,
said Joyce.

Ed said,
No one knows for sure.

T
he morning is cold and bright. An iridescent grit coats the windshield, the first hard frost. By unspoken agreement, Ed takes the wheel. Though exceptions are made—for disabled veterans, men crippled in mine accidents—it is local custom for the husband to drive.

At the funeral home Ed parks beside the hearse. They are early, a chronic condition in their marriage. Joyce, with her abiding fear of lateness, hustles him out the door with the insistence of a drill sergeant. At church or movies or family gatherings, they are always the first to arrive.

“Sandy's friend,” he says. “The woman from California. She didn't tell you anything?”

“No,” Joyce says. “The autopsy report will take a couple of weeks.”

Ed reaches for her hand, Ed who did not love her brother. Who remembers him as a teenage delinquent, a troublemaker and a truant. Ed, the high school principal, took a personal interest in Sandy Novak. He bent the rules to let the boy graduate—to score points, he later admitted, with Sandy's sister. A week after commencement, Sandy piled into a car with some buddies headed for Cleveland and wasn't seen for many years. That Ed's favor was never acknowledged is a sore point they do not mention. Ed himself spoke of it just once, after one of Sandy's late-night calls.

It was twenty years ago,
Joyce pointed out.
What do you want him to do? Thank you every time he calls?

I want him to make something of his life. I want him to stop disappointing you.

Broken promises, visits canceled for no reason. Ed was too kind to remind her that Sandy had missed their wedding, that George had stepped in at the last minute to give away the bride. That Sandy had refused—twice!—to serve as godfather. Instead, when Rebecca was born, he wired a large sum of money for the baby's college fund. A week later he'd declined to visit, claiming he couldn't afford a plane ticket. Like most of his excuses, it made no sense at all.

T
he family rides in two cars. Joyce's wagon and George's Cadillac line up behind the hearse, leading the slow parade to the church.

The Gospel is a familiar story, the raising of Lazarus, Martha's anguished cry to Jesus:
Lord, if thou hadst been there, my brother would not have died.
Joyce closes her eyes, imagining Sandy beside her, the smile crinkling the corners of his eyes.

Fairy tales.

To her surprise, the church is crowded. Sandy was gone twenty years, but Bakerton has not forgotten. Afterward, on the church steps, she is waylaid, questioned, hugged. Sandy was popular in school, she is told, a clown and a cutup. Everyone liked him, the girls especially. They can't believe he is gone.

Again and again she answers the question: “Heart failure. It was very sudden.”

The story is her invention. Certainly it is kinder than the truth, welcome as a rodent:
He swallowed a bottle of pills. He took his own life.
Like all the best lies, it contains a grain of truth. What is despair, really, but a failure of heart?

T
he funeral luncheon is held at Dorothy's house. Again Joyce and Ed are the first to arrive. She gives the kitchen a lick and a promise, washes the breakfast dishes floating in the sink. The donated casseroles will be served buffet-style, the usual hodgepodge of mismatched food: trays of cold cuts, stuffed cabbage, a lasagna, cakes and pies. A few neighbors—the Poblocki twins, Chuck Lubicki—will arrive with bottles or six-packs, the custom on Polish Hill.

From the window she sees George's Cadillac park on the street. He opens the passenger door and Vera Gold steps out, nearly his height in her towering heels. That morning every head turned in her direction as she swept into the church. Her black dress is suitable for a nightclub, cut low in front, showing deep cleavage. “Sandy's friend from California,” Joyce explained a dozen times, fighting an urge she has felt her whole life: to protect Sandy, his reputation, her family's. It is a habit she will never break.

The guests arrive in waves. She welcomes neighbors and distant cousins, Ed's colleagues from the high school. “Heart failure. It was very sudden.” The lie is smooth in her mouth, blameless white, lustrous as a pearl.

She agrees that the service was lovely, that Sandy is in a better place now. She accepts condolences and prayers. It is her role, always: the public face of the family. Dorothy, whose backwardness is known and accepted, busies herself in the kitchen. George is nowhere to be found.

“Have you seen him?” Joyce whispers to Ed.

“Back porch,” he says.

Joyce slips into the dining room and glances out the window. George is standing on the porch with Vera and several neighbors—a Stusick, a Lubicki, both Poblockis—in a cloud of cigarette smoke. Joyce feels a flash of irritation and then gratitude. Her brother is performing a useful service, as practical as dishwashing, by keeping Vera occupied.

“Joyce.”

She turns. It takes her a moment to place Dick Devlin, bald now, one of Sandy's buddies from high school. After graduation the two shared, along with Dick's brother, an apartment in Cleveland, where they'd been hired at Fisher Body. Eventually the Devlin boys returned to Bakerton, married and raised families; and Sandy moved further and further west.

Dick bends to kiss her cheek. “Joyce, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry now that I lost touch with him. I had no idea he was in such bad shape.”

Joyce feels her heart working. “What do you mean?”

Dick looks down into his feet. “To—do what he did. He must have been in a bad way.”

She glances over her shoulder into the crowded parlor. “Who told you that?” she says in a low voice.

“Vera. His girlfriend.”

Joyce's face heats. She thinks of Vera in the car, her chin trembling as she studied the house.
Polish Hill. I've always wanted to see it.
Vera, ten years older than Sandy, fifteen maybe, holding court on the back porch, dressed like a cocktail waitress and surrounded by men.

“Who told you she was his girlfriend?”

Dick shrugs, coloring. “I just assumed. He always had girlfriends. And she's, you know, his type.”

This is news to Joyce, who met none of these girlfriends. Sandy never mentioned any, and she never asked.

“Anyways, I'm sorry.” Dick hesitates, groping for words. “Sandy wasn't like the rest of us. He did whatever the hell he wanted. We were just working stiffs.”

Joyce feels her eyes tear.

“We had some times out in Cleveland,” says Dick. “I never had a better time in my life.”

A
s a child Sandy slept in the back bedroom, small and square, its only window overlooking the woods. Joyce closes the door behind her and stretches out on the narrow bed. “Where are you?” she whispers. “Why did you go?”