The Man in the Window (2 page)

Today beneath the horse chestnut tree the angel appeared to have more substance, a physicality it had not possessed before—gained, perhaps, from stolen raspberries. Atlas turned to see if Gracie was nearby, but she was still in the front yard mulching the tulip bed. He opened his mouth to call to her, but then shut it again. For all he knew, the angel had the nerves of a cat and might be scared off by the least little thing.

The angel, whose face Atlas could not discern, stood beside the tree. A bright wedge of summer sunlight touched its wings, and the angel lifted them slightly, flexing, taking in the warmth. Atlas began to walk the length of the backyard toward the horse chestnut tree. He kept his hand extended before him, ready to greet the angel as he might a guest at his weekly Rotary Club luncheon.

The thoughts that came to him were ordinary and peaceful, and for a moment he forgot about the angel waiting for him down at the bottom of his yard. The grass needs cutting, he thought, maybe I’ll do it before I take my nap this afternoon. The hedge has filled in well. I should water the zinnias. He paused, then turned and took it all in, his house and yard, the sense of Gracie, busy in the tulip bed, close to him. He brought his hand
to his chest and touched it lightly there, mistaking a tingling in his heart for pleasure.

When Atlas turned again, his hand out and ready, he had reached the angel. The angel’s head was bent; he was looking down. At his shoes, thought Atlas. I know those shoes, and as Atlas brought his eyes slowly up again, he recognized the pants too, and the shirt. They were his clothes, old and familiar, the most comfortable he owned. Now the angel lifted his face, and revealed himself with a slight smile. Atlas saw that the face also was old and familiar, that it was his own. The angel took Atlas’s outstretched hand, and they stood together for a long moment beneath the cool shade of the tree.

Atlas looked into the angel’s eyes, eyes he had always known, and said, “This isn’t so bad, is it?”

No, said the angel, not moving his lips or making a sound, it’s not so bad. Beneath the angel’s feet the grass remained undisturbed, as before, but it bent and flattened as Atlas dropped first to his knees, then face forward down into the green.

Coming around the side of the house with a wheelbarrow full of weeds, Gracie watched it happen. She saw Atlas place one hand over his heart and the other straight out in front of him as if he was reaching for something.

“Atlas,” she called, and began to hurry, then run to him, her white hair flying. “Atlas!”

When he fell to the grass, she knew, even before she reached him, that he was dead.

“Damn you, Atlas,” she whispered fiercely, as she drew him to her. She held him, her white hair dropping forward, mingling with his. Somewhere above her came a fluttering of wings and a rising.

CHAPTER TWO

T
HE UNDERTAKER
, Jim Rose, son of Big Bill Rose, founder and owner of Rose’s Funeral Home, the only funeral home in Waverly, Pennsylvania, didn’t appear to understand what Gracie was saying.

“Mrs. Malone,” he said, in a voice modulated by eight hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of concern and accommodation—eight hundred and fifty dollars being the price of the cheapest of the cheap coffins, the one Gracie wanted, and a funeral with a minimum of fixings. “Mrs. Malone, if you don’t feel you have a suit appropriate for Mr. Malone, Rose’s can arrange—”

“My husband, I guarantee you, Mr. Rose, does not wish to travel through eternity in a necktie and a pair of shiny shoes pressing on his bunions.”

Louis Malone, Gracie’s thirty-two-year-old son, sat at the top of the stairs listening to his mother and Jim Rose.

Gracie held out a flannel work shirt, a pair of corduroys thin at the knees, gray cotton socks, and an old pair of Hush Puppies. Atlas’s favorite clothes.

Jim Rose still declined to take them. “Mrs. Malone, really. I just don’t feel this is, well… I don’t feel we’d be doing our job. It’s just not professionally acceptable.”

Louis coughed. He knew his mother had been given her opening.

“Professionally acceptable,” mused Gracie, her hand smoothing back and forth over the flannel shirt. “You have standards, after all.”

“Yes ma’am,” said Jim Rose. “Of course.” He tried a smile.

“Big Bill’s standards. Of course.”

The smile began to disappear back into Jim Rose’s face. “My father’s standards, yes.”

“Now tell me, Mr. Rose, are those the standards he had prior to the unfortunate incident of the ice, or the new standards that followed the unfortunate incident of the ice?”

Louis shifted on the stair and laughed softly. The unfortunate incident of the ice had been one of Atlas’s favorite stories. In fact, everybody in Waverly had enjoyed it for over forty years. Everybody, that is, except the perpetrator and those related to him.

During World War II, Big Bill Rose came up with an idea, or scheme as Atlas would call it whenever he told his version of the story, that was patriotic, enterprising, and good for an easy buck. When he got caught, Big Bill emphasized the patriotic part, and his accusers emphasized the buck part.

Big Bill’s was one of the last funeral homes in that part of Pennsylvania that still used ice instead of mechanical refrigeration to maintain the loved one until interment—or, as Atlas put it in his version, to keep the corpses cold and the stink down before planting them, getting his words out quick before Gracie could reach across the dinner table to slap his arm. Wasting so much good, usable ice after each burial had always pained Big Bill. When World War II came along and conservation and thrift became every good citizen’s duty, a light bulb clicked on in the dim attic of Big Bill’s brain. Without offering too many details as to the origins of the ice, Big Bill approached his sister, Edith, who ran a little catering business out of her own kitchen, with a plan that, as he would later explain to his accusers, “was first and foremost, and originally intended, to ease the burdens of our fighting boys overseas.” This was not what he had told Edith. He referred to his “surplus of ice” and a small deal that would be mutually beneficial to them both—whenever Edith was in need of ice for one of her grander events, such as the Waverly Firemen’s Ball or the Kiwanis’s annual chicken barbecue, Big Bill would supply her at half price. His yearly revenue, for the one
year he derived income before his scheme collapsed, came to six dollars and twenty-three cents—an amount, Atlas would say in his version of the story, that even in those days was still a pissy handful of change (Gracie would not even bother to slap at him at this point, he’d used so much dirty talk).

Big Bill’s twice-used ice operation might have flourished had Lucy Jameson not ordered a Pepsi-Cola with “lots of ice” at her wedding reception at Waverly Lodge, catered by Edith Rose, in the hot summer of 1943. To his credit, and as he repeatedly explained to his accusers, Big Bill always rinsed his ice, “carefully,” he said. Of course “carefully” meant one thing to his accusers and something else again to Big Bill, who rinsed, carefully, making real sure he didn’t melt his profits down the drain—a drain that in this case was located in the center of Big Bill’s aging porcelain embalming table. Lucy, impelled by the heat of the day and the anticipated heat of her impending honeymoon encounter, had drained her Pepsi-Cola (chilled with carefully rinsed ice) in one great swallow. When she finished, she continued to hold her tilted glass to her lips. An array of looks flashed across her face, all partially concealed by her upended glass. Surprise. Confusion. And then, slowly, a sort of giddiness. For there, in the bottom of the glass that Lucy still pressed up into her face, came a glint of frozen gold from among the silver chips of ice. A ring, a man’s wedding band. Lucy was pleased. She looked shyly at her new husband, Albert Jameson, who stood at her side. She had no idea Al was capable of play, that he was such a trickster, and this odd little game came as something of a relief to her. But when she looked down at Al’s left hand and saw his wedding band firmly in place on his finger, her giddy feeling returned to one of confusion.

Al, who was not playful, stared disapprovingly at his new wife as she poured the glass of ice into the palm of her hand, and frowned deeper still when she handed him, embedded in a large chip, the wedding ring. Looking very glum, as if he thought the ring was a mysterious suitor’s challenge to his claim
on Lucy, Al cracked the ice chip on the end of the refreshment table. The noise captured the attention of all the wedding guests who were not already staring at the strange behavior of the bride and groom.

Al held the ring up and turned it in the sun. “Well, sweet Jesus,” he said. The wedding guests pressed closer. Al read out loud the inscription on the inside of the ring. “Norman Keeston. May 10, 1886.”

May 10, 1886, was the date of Norman Keeston’s wedding day. The date of Norman’s demise was just three days ago, and his preservation on ice and subsequent burial yesterday morning was courtesy of Rose’s Funeral Home, Bill Rose, director. Lucy fainted right then and there and was immediately attended to by her bridesmaids and all the other women present except for Edith Rose, who remained standing behind the refreshment table beside her ice chest. All the men gathered around Al with one exception, Big Bill Rose, who slipped quietly away to his Studebaker, and sped off for the safety of his funeral home.

It didn’t take long for the men to deduce the chain of events that placed Norman Keeston’s wedding ring in the bottom of Lucy Jameson’s glass of Pepsi-Cola. First, they ruled out that Norman’s ring came out of the Pepsi, because it was too large to pass through the opening of the glass bottle. Then Al remembered that it had been half-frozen in a piece of ice, and all the men turned their eyes toward Edith Rose. Her brother’s name emerged unbidden from her lips. “Bill,” she said. “I got that ice from my brother Bill.”

It took less than five seconds for the wedding guests to understand the implications of ice from brother Bill. A great gasp went up from the crowd, particularly and especially from those whose drinks were cooled with Big Bill ice. At this point in his telling of the story, Atlas would make awful spitting and throat-clearing noises, imitating the guests, then grin at Gracie and Louis.

Weakness of the flesh had been the culprit. Poor Norman Keeston’s finger, already contracted with age, contracted further still as he reposed upon a bed of ice on the embalming table. When Big Bill and his assistant had transferred Norman to the dressing table the morning of the funeral, Norman’s ring slid off and disappeared among a thousand frosty chips, all bound for the Jameson wedding.

But for a timely catastrophe, that would have ended the career of Big Bill as Waverly’s sole funeral director. Sergeant Marple of the Waverly police brought the news, pushing his way through the crowd of men who’d driven to Rose’s Funeral Home, until he reached Frank Pearly, his chief. Chief Pearly was trying to keep Al Jameson from strangling Big Bill. Sergeant Marple’s news made the men go slack. The Mader twins and Stu Kipner had drowned in Waverly Lake after their boat capsized. No one spoke until Big Bill cleared his throat and uttered the words that saved his career.

“Neighbors. I’m sorry for the unfortunate incident of the ice. Please bring those boys to me and I will attend to their funeral needs at no cost to their families.” His voice caught a little on the “no cost” part, but he managed to get the words out. The wedding crowd nodded their silent approval and then made their way to their cars.

Al Jameson was the last to go. He hesitated in the doorway, turned, looked Big Bill in the eye, then tossed him Norman’s wedding ring. His curse echoed in the funeral parlor as if from the walls of an Egyptian tomb. “May you choke on this ring, you greedy bastard.”

For seventy-five cents, his profit from the Keeston/Jameson ice deal, a profit he didn’t even have in his pocket because his sister Edith had yet to pay him, and probably never would, Big Bill got stuck for three free funerals, was shamed before his community, and cursed by an enraged groom. All in all, not a very good day for the funeral industry in Waverly.

Even though he couldn’t see them, Louis knew from the silence downstairs that his mother and Jim Rose were reliving the unfortunate incident of the ice. Gracie’s eyes had softened, then closed for a long moment as she remembered Atlas telling the story year after year at the dinner table. His details were the details she remembered, even though she had actually been at the Jameson wedding and he had been away at basic training at Fort Jackson. He’d gleaned his story from the stories of others until he formed a version that was his own. “You should have seen Lucy Jameson’s face,” he’d say, and Gracie would say, “I was there, Atlas, I did see it.” “But no,” Atlas would say, “you should have
seen
it.” And somehow it got to be, from the sheer force of joy he derived from the telling of it, that she saw Lucy or Al or Big Bill or Sergeant Marple the way he saw them, as characters in a wonderful fiction that was true. These people, whom she encountered every day on the streets of Waverly, were elevated by Atlas’s recounting of their lives, taking on proportions they did not necessarily possess.

Of course it was unkind of Gracie to use the unfortunate incident of the ice on Jim Rose, Louis knew. Jim Rose probably looked very grim. Perhaps now he would strike back at Gracie through some little unkindness of his own. Do something, say, to Atlas, humiliate the corpse by burying him with no pants on or with his finger up his nose. But Gracie had not said it, Louis was sure, simply to put Jim Rose in his place. Gracie was a brand-new widow, and the power of her grief, of her missing of Atlas, may have moved her to this exchange with Jim Rose, so that the mentioning of Big Bill and the ice could become inevitable, so that then she could recall a specific moment that was Atlas, could recall him telling his story, and recall further the twenty or thirty times in twenty or thirty ways that Atlas had told the story, and in the specificity of all those moments Gracie would have him again. He would not have left her as he did beneath the horse chestnut tree.