Next to Love (39 page)

AUGUST 1964

T
HE EARLY-MORNING SKY STRETCHES LIKE A SOILED GRAY SHEET
beyond the window, but even the oppressive weather cannot sour Babe’s spirits. Her optimism feels indecent. She should not be cheerful on the day of a funeral, but she cannot help herself. Maybe the cliché is true. That is why it’s a cliché. Time heals. She is glad Jack insisted on bringing his father’s body home. They will lay more than Pete to rest today.

When she comes downstairs, she finds Claude sitting at the table with a mug of coffee and the morning paper. His cotton robe has fallen open. He is wearing nothing under it. Neither of them sleeps in anything. His penis lies innocent and defenseless. She wonders if it’s the male mindset. If she were sitting exposed at the kitchen table, she would know it.

The sight of him distracts her, so her eyes take a moment to focus on the newspaper. She can read the headline from halfway across the room.

TWO TORPEDO VESSELS
BELIEVED SUNK IN
GULF OF TONKIN

She will not let the news intrude. She flees to the quotidian.

“I left your navy-blue suit in the bathroom,” she says, as she goes to the refrigerator to take out the orange juice, butter, and jam. “The steam from the shower will get rid of the wrinkles. I hope. I forgot to take it to the cleaner.”

He does not ask her why she is worrying about a wrinkled suit when they are going to a funeral. He knows the defense of the everyday.

THE FOG HAS NOT
burned off by the time they reach the cemetery. It hangs like a curtain from the sky and steams up from the ground. At Charlie’s reburial, the weather jeered at them. At King’s funeral, it assaulted them. Now it is in cahoots with them. A soft landing, a misty fade-out.

Several cars are parked along the narrow dirt road that runs beside the graveyard. Grace, Morris, and Amy sit in one of them, the engine still running to keep the air conditioner going.

Claude turns off the ignition. His car has no air-conditioning. Babe watches as Amy opens the door and climbs out of the backseat. She is wearing dark glasses, though the sun does not pierce the murky sky. Her long print dress makes her look as if she has just climbed down from a covered wagon. Babe can imagine how the outfit goes over with Grace. But the dress is the least of it. Eleven months after Amy went through with the big wedding, she walked out of the marriage. Her mother was heartbroken.

“At least she was the one who left,” Grace said to Millie and Babe after the divorce. Her face brightened. “Come to think of it, she’s always the one who leaves. Eddie Montrose; that boy from Harvard her freshman year; the one from Dartmouth she almost got pinned to; the French professor, and I don’t have to tell you he had me worried.”

Babe thought, but did not say, because she did not want to undermine whatever consolation Grace could find, that perhaps Amy leaves first so she cannot be left.

Amy makes her way through the gate into the cemetery, the thin cotton dress swaying as she walks. Charlie’s grave is three rows in. She stands at the foot of it, studying the headstone, though there is little enough to read. She looks from the headstone to the grave. It is covered with deep-green ivy—no rusty dying leaves, no errant outgrowths. Grace pays to have the grave tended. She also drives out weekly to see that she is getting her money’s worth. King taught her that much. Amy screws up her face as if she is trying to concentrate. Babe watches her and knows she is struggling to conjure a father out of the morning mist.

Grace gets out of the car, walks through the gate, and crosses to stand beside her daughter. At first, Babe thinks from the way Amy lists that she is going to walk away, but she doesn’t. They stand at Charlie’s grave, not touching but bound.

The others begin getting out of their cars. Millie, Al, and the two girls; Morris; Pete’s parents and Mac; Babe and Claude. They straggle through the gate.

The open grave lies two rows over from Charlie’s. Suspended above it, the coffin gleams in the milky morning. They arrange themselves around it. Mrs. Swallow is flanked by her husband and remaining son. Mac stands rubbing one wrist with the thumb of his other hand. His expression is distracted, the gesture unconscious. The scar has begun to fade. Babe senses that, though with the exception of the few times she has run into him on the street when he has come home to visit his parents, she seldom sees him anymore. He stopped accepting their invitations around the time King Gooding died, and gradually they stopped asking him. A few years ago, she heard he was going to marry, but no report of a wedding followed the rumor.

Naomi has come too. She stands beside her son, who has traveled up from New York for the funeral. He was a baby when Pete died, but there is a connection among Amy, Jack, and Frankie. When their fathers went off to fight, some of them to die, and their mothers sought the comfort their children did not yet know how to give, the children found solace among themselves. They still do. Though they rarely see one another, they stay in touch.

Naomi’s face is solemn, but the way she clings to Frankie’s arm gives her away. She is hanging on the future. A few months ago, Frankie graduated from law school.

Morris comes up the gravel walk, stops beside Grace, and puts his hand on her elbow, as husbands do to wives at gravesides. For a moment, she looks as if she is going to take a step away, but she remains where she is.

Millie and Al stand beside the open grave. As Millie reaches to draw in the two girls, her heel sinks into the soft earth, and she goes over on one ankle. Al grabs her arm to steady her.

She is wearing a black linen suit and a black pillbox hat. She reminds Babe of someone, but it takes a moment to figure out who. Millie is dressed like Jackie Kennedy at JFK’s funeral the previous November, except that she is not wearing a mantilla. Millie would not wear a mantilla—it is too Catholic—but the impression is pure Jackie. Babe does not want to make too much of it. Half the women in America are trying to look like Jackie Kennedy. But she cannot get over the feeling that there is more to it than that. Millie gave in to Jack about bringing the body home, but she will not risk falling into that abyss of loss again. She has agreed to grieve for Pete, but she will make her grief public, national, historic. Anything but personal.

The minister takes his place beside them. Al says something to him, and he steps back. Jack is still missing.

He told Millie he would meet them at the cemetery. He also said he had a surprise. Millie is sure it is a girl. She is always sure it’s a girl.

“At Pete’s reburial?” Babe asked when Millie told her the day before.

“That just shows how serious it is. He wants her here for this.”

The minister looks at his watch. Mac stares at the suspended coffin. Mr. Swallow moves his hat from one hand to the other and back. He is the only man with a hat. Since the late president took the oath of office bareheaded on a frigid January day, only old men wear hats. They are a nation of old men who wear hats and hatless young men dying before their time. The thought, Babe knows, is a little wild. She is on edge. She is eager to get this over with. They all are.

Beside her, Claude puts his hand in his pocket, then takes it out. He no longer tries to hide it. She no longer notices the missing fingers.

A car pulls up. They turn as a single entity. A man and woman get out, but the woman is old, and the man is not Jack. He is carrying flowers for someone else’s grave.

The minister looks at his watch again. The others look at one another or away. They cannot be annoyed at Jack. Jack is why they are here.

“I hope nothing’s wrong,” Grace says in an undertone.

“He probably hit traffic,” Al murmurs.

“Where is he coming from?” the minister asks.

“College,” Al says. “New Hampshire.”

Another car pulls up. There is only one person in it. Through the windshield, Babe recognizes the shape of Jack’s head and the width of his shoulders. During the war, she used to say she could never be a plane spotter, because she could not tell the silhouette of one plane from another, but Claude insisted all she had to do was pay attention. You know it’s me coming down the street from a block away, he said, just by the shape of my body and the way I move. If you get to know the different planes, you’ll be able to recognize them too. It was a man’s argument, off the mark for a woman. She has no interest in the shape of planes. She cares about the contours of people.

Jack gets out of the car. From where they are standing, only his head is visible. The car hides his body. He bends and reaches back in the car. Through the window, Babe sees him pick up something off the seat, but she cannot tell what it is. He straightens, closes the door, and lifts the hand that is holding the object. He puts on the hat. Her breath catches in her chest. She does not have to be trained to spot military silhouettes to recognize the service cap.

He starts toward the gate. He is a moving image, coming more sharply into focus with each step. The peak of the hat casts a shadow over the top half of his face, like a masked bandit stealing his own future. The fitted green jacket stiffens the easy sway of his shoulders. The collar of the khaki shirt and the dark tie seem to be strangling him. The heavy black shoes transform his customary lope into a march. No, the shoes do not do that;
they
have done that. Millie with her secrets; the movies with their ersatz heroism; the comic books with their bang, boom, swat, splat; Claude with his missing fingers that take on an aura of mysterious glamour, because he never talks about how he lost them but everyone wonders and imagines and admires; herself with her shameful nostalgia for a life lived with her heart in her mouth, but lived.

He is standing in front of them now. The morning mist is starting to burn off. A streak of sunlight sears a hole in the soiled white sky, hits the infantry insignia on his collar, and glances off it like quicksilver.

“Oh, shit,” Amy murmurs.

THE COFFIN WITH
what is left of Pete’s body disappears into the grave and hits the ground with the same dull thud Babe remembers from the other funerals, but now there is a difference, because now no one knows what to say. It is too late for condolences for Pete; too soon—never, they pray—for Jack. They climb back into their cars for the drive to Millie and Al’s.

As Claude pulls up in front of the house, Babe notices Grace and Amy standing in the driveway. They are cantilevered toward each other, and she does not have to hear them to know they are arguing. They face off, a long-haired, bizarrely dressed waif against a meticulously turned-out woman in a buttoned-up linen suit and straw hat. A girl who has left a trail of men in her wake against a one-man woman who has never forgiven her second husband for—for what? Babe wonders. For marrying her? A daughter struggling and afraid to break free of her mother against a mother desperate to hold on to her daughter. Amy has worked so hard to be the opposite of Grace that she has ended up her mirror image, left to right, right to left, but identical.

Babe goes into the house and heads for the kitchen to see if Millie needs help. She is standing at the counter, frozen in place. Only the tears streaming down her face move.

“Just don’t tell me I brought it on myself,” she says when she sees Babe.

“I wasn’t going to.”

Grace appears at the back door in time to hear the exchange. “You did what you thought was best.” Her voice is gentle, though her face is still flushed from the argument with Amy.

“You both did,” Babe tells them.

Millie takes a handkerchief from the pocket of her black suit and mops her eyes. “Go into the living room. Please. I’ll be all right in a minute.”

Grace catches Babe’s eye and nods toward the door.

Babe is surprised. She thought Millie wanted both of them to go inside, but now she understands. She means Babe, the wife who has never been a widow, the woman who is childless but has never had a child break her heart. The lucky one, they think, should go away and leave the two of them to their grief.

She turns and starts through the dining room. Beyond the French doors, a swirl of tie-dyed color and a stain of dark green that almost fades into the trees catch her eye. Jack and Amy are sitting at the round wrought-iron table. A fine rain, more like a mist, has begun to fall, but the big umbrella over the table shelters them. What do they say to each other, these two children who have grown up on rumors of the fathers they never knew?

As she stands watching them, she senses Al crossing behind her. He goes into the kitchen, and a moment later Grace comes out. Even she, who shares the heartache of lost husbands and damaged children, cannot console Millie now. But Babe hears the rise and fall of Al’s voice in the kitchen and Millie’s answering it in a practiced duet, and recognizes not a song of solace—if anything happens to Jack, there will be no solace—but the refrain of Millie’s fierce will.

Grace goes past Babe to the other set of French doors, opens them, and steps out into the garden. She stands hesitant, her body leaning almost imperceptibly toward her daughter, then away. Amy goes on talking to Jack. Her mother might as well be invisible.