The Architecture of Fear (33 page)

"I don't care what you guys say," Kenny tells the other eight members of Gina Callan's family arrayed behind him. "This... this
manikin
isn't my mother!"

"Just who the hell you think it is, then?" white-haired Uncle Sarge Lobrano asks him. "Queen Elizabeth?"

Aunt Dot, Gina's sister, rebukes her husband: "Sergio!"

"This is the wrong woman they got in here! The wrong goddamn woman! My mother was beautiful, and this person—she looks like she's hurting. Still hurting."

"Kenny, it was a painful death," Aunt Dot tries to explain. "Your mama's kidneys failed. She was retaining fluid. That's why her cheeks and jowls are so puffy."

The hostess who ushered Gina's family into the room says, "We did our best. I worked very hard to make her lifelike."

"My mother always wore glasses. We gave 'em to you. What the hell did you do with 'em?"

"Items to help make the likeness true are received at the desk, Mr. Petruzzi," the hostess tells Kenny. "Nobody passed her glasses on to me."

Kenny struggles to free his wallet from the hip pocket of his tent-sized trousers. From the wallet he extracts a photograph. "Didn't you get a picture, then? Here's the way my mother ought to look—beautiful."

He thrusts the photo at the hostess, a smart-looking, fortyish woman wearing slacks and a bulky fishnet sweater. Then, gesturing hugely, he declares again,
"That's
not my mother."

Vince—Uncle Sarge and Aunt Dot's son, a high school football coach in Colorado Springs—takes his cousin's elbow. "Of course that isn't your mother, Kenny. It's only her body. Your mother's real self—her soul—is in heaven."

"I
know
where she is. But she doesn't look like
that."
Kenny flaunts the wallet photo. "This is how she looks, and this is the way I'll always remember her."

"That picture's five years old," Uncle Lyle says. "You can't expect your mother to look today the way she looked five years ago when she was in nearly perfect health."

"I can expect these bums to put the glasses we gave 'em on her, can't I?"

The hostess turns to Uncle Lyle, Gina's brother. "Mr. Sekas, I never received a photo of Mrs. Callan. Or her glasses. They never got to me."

"What you've done here," declares Kenny, "is a disgrace."

The hostess colors. But to preserve her professional dignity, she purses her lips and lowers her head.

Aunt Dot squeezes forward and puts her hand on the edge of the casket. "It's not just the glasses," she tells everyone. "Gina's not wearing earrings. Sis'd never dress up in such lovely clothes without putting on her earrings."

Claudia, Vince's nineteen-year-old sister, seconds her mother: "That's right, Gina isn't Gina without her earrings."

"Gina isn't Gina because these goofballs lost the picture we gave them. And her glasses, too."

"Mr. Petruzzi," the hostess says, the Memory Room seeming to contract about her, "If you gave us a photo and some glasses, we'll find them. But no one passed them on to me, and I had to make do as well as I could without them."

"It wasn't very good, was it?"

"Get this bugger out of here," Uncle Sarge directs Vince and Frank. Frank is Uncle Lyle and Aunt Martha's son, a pharmacist in Kenny's hometown, Gunnison.

Then Sarge turns to the hostess. "Kenny's upset—we're all upset—and you just gotta excuse him, ma'am. He depended like crazy on his mother. Even after he was this big grown man you see hulking here, he couldn't stop grabbing at her apron strings."

Like a couple of tugboats flanking the
Queen Mary,
Vince and Frank take Kenny's arms. Their huge, goggle-eyed cousin does not resist them. Instead he begins to blubber:

"She... she did everything for me. Loaned me money. Bought me clothes. Even if I came home at two in the morning, she'd crawl out of bed to fix me something to eat."

"She was that way to everybody," Claudia assures Kenny.

"And not just simple sandwich stuff, either. Gourmet doings. Omelets. Polenta and gravy. Steak and eggs."

Vince and Frank maneuver their cousin, the adopted son of Gina and the late Ernesto Petruzzi, toward the parlor beyond the Memory Room. Out of the pale of his dead mother's aura.

"She was my intercessor!" Kenny cries over his shoulder. "My champion when nobody else gave a damn!"

***

Alone with the dead woman, the hostess perches near the casket doing some careful repair work on the masklike face of Gina Sekas Petruzzi Callan. In the hermetic, off-white room, she feels again that she is inhabiting the remembered life of the deceased.

Frank Sekas's wife Melinda Jane has gone out into the February cold with Dorothy and Claudia Lobrano to buy some earrings.

All the other mourners—Uncle Sergio, Cousin Vincent, Uncle Lyle, Aunt Martha, Cousin Frank, and the distraught Kenny—have retired to the parlor, where they sit on lumpy divans or pace the worn carpet. A peculiar odor of lilies, nostalgia, and embalming fluid permeates the Memory Room.

It seems to the hostess that her subject is listening intently to her family's muted conversation.

Sergio Lobrano is saying, "It doesn't have to be open-casket, Kenny. You know that, don't you?"

"Aunt Dot wants it open."

"Now, look, let's get this straight. Your aunt's not bossing this business, and I don't want you saying afterwards that it was open-casket because that's how Aunt Dot wanted it, and your mother didn't look like herself, and blah blah blah."

"Uncle Sergio, I'm not—"

"'Cause that'd be a cheap trick, Kenny. It wouldn't be fair to your Aunt Dot and it wouldn't be fair to yourself."

"Wait a minute," Uncle Lyle objects, and Aunt Martha chimes in, "Sarge, you haven't given Kenny a chance to—"

"I don't want him blaming his aunt for making a mockery of his mother at her own funeral, that's all."

Kenny's high-pitched, indignant voice startles the hostess: "I love my Aunt Dot, Uncle Sergio! I'd never do anything to hurt her—any more'n I'd ever do anything to hurt my own mother. So what the hell're you talking here?"

"Well, I—" his uncle begins, audibly abashed.

"You didn't let me finish. I'm only saying that whatever aunt Dot wants,
I
want. And if we both want it, how could I ever trash her for something I've okayed myself?"

"Yeah," Sarge feebly confesses. "That's different."

"You didn't let me finish."

"Kenny, I'm sorry."

"It's okay," Kenny says. "Just don't try to tell me I'd ever do somethin' to hurt Aunt Dot."

"I won't. Believe me, I won't."

Conversation lapses, and the hostess, studying Kenny's photo of his mother, makes an unobtrusive adjustment to the lines bracketing Gina Callan's mouth. A familiar claustrophobia menaces her.

Then she hears Vince say, "I wouldn't want some stranger trying to get my body presentable."

"Shhh," Aunt Martha tells him. "Not so loud."

"I want to be cremated. I want my ashes scattered on the wind over the Great Sand Dunes National Monument. It's in my will."

Sarge makes a disgusted noise.

"Can you do that?" Kenny asks. "Can you have your ashes thrown out on federal land like that?"

"Who's going to stop you?" says Vince. "You just get somebody who's willing to go out there and do it."

"It won't be me or your mother," Sarge says. "What the hell's a punk like you doing with a will?"

"Be proud of him, Sarge," Martha says. "All most young people think about today is new cars or their next skiing trip."

"Not our Vince. He thinks about becoming a pollutant in some goddamn government showcase for sand."

"What's wrong with that?" Frank asks. "I'd like to be cremated myself. Dead's dead, and it's a helluva lot cheaper than a fancy-pants show like this."

In the ever-contracting Memory Room, the hostess imagines Frank rolling his eyes at the parlor's cut-glass chandelier.

"Gina wanted a Catholic funeral," Lyle intones. "Which is why we're doing our best to give her one. Her marrying Wesley Callan, a joker with two divorces, didn't make it all that damn easy to set up, either. I had to talk to half a dozen different priests before Father McFahey agreed to it."

"And that silly fart Callan isn't even coming," Sarge grouses.

"Are you sure?" Martha asks. "I told him over the phone he'd live to regret not coming up here."

Kenny says, "Yeah, well, he told
me
he wasn't going to listen to a bunch of R.C. mumbo-jumbo. He and his holier-than-everybody cronies in Gunnison's gonna put on some sort of memorial service of their own."

"Mumbo-jumbo?" Martha says.

"Yeah, 'mumbo-jumbo.' So I said, 'You've got your own sort of mumbo-jumbo to listen to, don't you, Wes?'"

Sarge laughs. "What'd he say to that, Kenny?"

"He didn't like it. But if you treat people lousy, it stands to reason you're gonna get treated lousy back."

"Those goddamn Jehovah's Witnesses drive me bats," Frank says. "'Live Forever on Paradise Earth.' 'Blessed Are the One Hundred and Forty-Four Thousand.' 'Jesus Is Actually the Archangel Michael in Disguise.' Etcetera, etcetera. Aunt Gina was a saint to put up with three years of that malarky. A bona fide saint."

"And beautiful," Kenny murmurs. "Always beautiful."

"Wes may be a Witness," Martha declares, "but when he tucks it in, they'll cremate him—hear that, Vince?—and put his ashes in a jar and stick him on a shelf right across from Gina's vault in the Tower of Memories."

"But what about me?" Kenny asks. "Where am I gonna go? They saved no place for me, Aunt Martha."

Kenny's complaint reduces everyone else to silence.

***

In the Memory Room, the hostess makes a tiny incision in Gina's neck, swabs the vulcanized flesh around it, and seals the cut with a special mortician's adhesive. It seems to her that, now, she and her subject are straining hard enough to hear the snow whirl out of the overcast. It clings to their turn-of-the-century building like Colorado cotton, rectangles of frozen flannel.

The door opens, and a teenage girl comes into the room with a small manila folder and a leather glasses case.

"I found these things upstairs," she says, giving them to the woman on the stool.

"Wonderful."

"What's wrong, Mrs. Dennis?"

"They'd've been a lot of help yesterday." Mrs. Dennis, the hostess, opens the envelope, removes the glossy photo, and tilts it to compare its likeness to the face undergoing renovation.

"But I wasn't here yesterday. I couldn't—"

"Never mind, Heather. Get on back upstairs."

The girl hesitates, collects herself, and leaves, going through the smoke-filled parlor past Kenny Petruzzi, the Sekases, and the Lobranos. Mrs. Dennis gets only a glimpse of the family before the door drifts shut again and she must return her attentions to the dead woman in the casket.

—Forgive my Kenny, the corpse implores her. Ernesto and I spoiled him when he was little.

He isn't little now, Mrs. Dennis rejoins.

—His thoughtless behavior isn't really his fault. He never learned any responsibility.

Why the hell didn't he?

—I couldn't have children so we adopted. We were so glad to get Kenny that we went overboard to prove it. Ernesto gave him a diamond ring when he was six. He lost it the next day.

Mrs. Dennis merely stares at the dead woman.

—Kenny was the only thing Wes and I ever argued about, Gina Callan continues. Except for Wes's new religion.

Aloud, Mrs. Dennis says, "Same old story. Child won't accept original parent's choice of stand-in spouse."

—It wasn't that, the corpse informs her. Kenny was almost thirty when Wes and I married. Ernesto'd been dead since Kenny was nine, and Kenny
liked
Wes. Or he did before the Witnesses got to him.

Then I had it backward, thinks Mrs. Dennis, still working on her subject's throat: It was Wes who didn't like Kenny.

—Wes liked him as a person, only he couldn't put up with him being so flighty. When we got married, Kenny was just back from Vietnam. His wife had run out on him while he was over there, and he didn't want to do nothing but play the dogs in Colorado Springs and Pueblo.

And Wes didn't approve of gambling?

—Oh, before he got converted, Wes'd play the dogs, too. It was Kenny's losing and borrowing money that drove him buggy.

But Wes loaned him money, anyway? Betting money?

—No, I loaned Kenny the money. Sometimes I just handed it to him. Sometimes he'd ask me for something to pawn. Jewelry, maybe, or silverware, and I'd give it to him so he could play his "system" and try to win back what he'd already lost.

Thinks Mrs. Dennis, No wonder Wes went buggy, Mrs. Callan. You were feeding Kenny's habit.

—It
was
a habit. A habit and an obsession. He had computer printouts and three-by-five cards about them damn dogs all over our house in Gunnison. His room downstairs... it looked the way an embassy looks when they have to shred their files. He was working out his "system"—A system to make him rich.

And you fell for that?

—Well, sometimes, just occasionally, he'd win. When he did, he wouldn't think to pay us back for staking him. But he'd go out and buy me a color TV set or Wes some expensive hunting equipment. That'd stick him in a hole deeper than his evening's winnings, and Wes'd start ranting about Kenny being a numbskull and a moocher and a baby. A three-hundred-pound baby.

Painstakingly relining Gina Callan's eyes, Mrs. Dennis murmurs, "Seems like an accurate character assessment to me."

—No, wait. A month before I went into Fitzsimmons, he quit the dogs cold. Stopped going to the track. Wouldn't let his old betting buddies talk him into giving it another go. Even Wes was impressed. Even Wes.

Observes the hostess, But Wes isn't here.

—That's because my family's Catholic, and I wanted to be put to rest like a Catholic, and being a Witness has made it impossible for Wes to think about my religion without getting angry. It's got nothing to do with Kenny.

Except Kenny's Catholic, too. And hates your husband for his pious intolerance. And resents him for not being here.

—Kenny's
not
Catholic. After Wes and I married, he quit us. Now he's a Unitarian or something. Kenny hates the Catholics for refusing to let me take communion because I fell in love with and actually married a guy who'd been married twice already.