The Truth About Death (2 page)

“And ‘financial exploitation of elderly persons,’ ” Louisa said. “I sent you that article, didn’t I? Bart said the charges were all nonsense, but he’s been denounced by the Church too. Every Sunday Father Cochrane has something to say about him and his fake abbey. We’ve all been warned. Catholics are not supposed to have anything to do with him.”

“Bart didn’t make a new will, did he?” Morris asked.

“You can relax, Morris. He wanted to, but he couldn’t do it. Everything’s in both our names. I wouldn’t sign the papers. Arthur—that’s our lawyer—told Bart he was crazy, but Bart wouldn’t listen to him, so Arthur drew up some phony papers, but I wouldn’t even sign
phony
papers. You should have heard him.”

“The lawyer?”

“No. Bart.”

“Louisa,” Morris said, “you shouldn’t have to deal with this. Let Simon handle it. He’s the funeral director.”

“But I’m the widow,” she said, “and the will was just the tip of the iceberg.” She looked around at her family. “I’m going to help myself to some old Bushmills. Why is everyone so quiet anyway? You’re waiting for me to cast the first stone. Well, consider it cast. Now it’s somebody else’s turn. Don’t stand on ceremony.
Nil nisi bonum
doesn’t apply today. I need to sit down.” Elizabeth stood up to make a place for her mother-in-law.

They all started casting stones at the dead man in the downstairs refrigerator: the drinking, the bullying, the abuse, the anger, the threats, the crazy political e-mails:
Why is it that “American” and “Republican” both end in “I can,” but “Democrats” ends in “rats”?

“
The American Way of Death
,” Louisa said. “Bart was never the same after they reissued that book. And then when he got the cancer and the doctors told him there was nothing they could do, he tried to bribe Father Cochrane to promise him a miracle, and then he threatened him, and when that didn’t work he finally went to see that fake priest.”

“Hardening of the arteries,” Simon said. “You lose some mental functioning. Maybe Alzheimer’s.”

“It was the opposite of Alzheimer’s,” Louisa said. “He started remembering things he should have forgotten years ago: old grudges, old arguments. And he never forgave a thing, or if he had, then later he’d take back his forgiveness.”

“Neural plasticity,” Morris said. “Be interesting to see if he had an enlarged hippocampus like a London cabdriver.” Morris surveyed his audience and started to explain: “Because they have to remember so many street addresses. Their hippocampi become enlarged.”

“He unforgave people?” Alexandra interrupted, rubbing sleep out of her eyes as she entered the room. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

“Bart could do anything,” Louisa said. “He could unforgive you for things you did forty years ago.” She was thinking of her Italian professor at the college. Love had lifted her up like a big wave and had left her stranded on the shore. Where Bart had been waiting for her. Her professor Gianluigi Bevilacqua
had gone back to Rome after he’d been kicked out of the college, and she’d never seen him again. Bart, who’d met Louisa through Father Arnie at the Newman Center, had been so much in love with her at the time that Gianluigi Bevilacqua hadn’t mattered; but forty years later it had mattered, and he’d sat in his Barcalounger in front of the
TV
and had called her a whore and accused her of running around. Sometimes he hadn’t let her stay in the room with him to watch
Seinfeld
.

Louisa lifted the tumbler of Bushmills to her lips and swallowed. “I think I’ll go to Rome,” she said. “Hildi can come with me.”

“Rome?” Hildi asked.

“Bart promised to take me, but he was always too busy. People kept dying.”

“Why Rome?”

Louisa emptied her glass and sucked on an ice cube, thinking. “I want to see all the Caravaggios.”

“Rome’s the right place,” Elizabeth said. “But I never knew you were keen on Caravaggio.”

In fact Louisa wasn’t particularly keen on Caravaggio, but she was reading a mystery novel set in Rome, in which the detective has to analyze some of Caravaggio’s paintings in order to solve the crime, and she’d just said the first thing that popped into her head. She didn’t want to mention Gianluigi Bevilacqua, and she couldn’t remember the name of the mystery novel; so she said, “You lectured on Caravaggio in your art history survey.” Elizabeth was an art historian. Louisa had sat in on her introductory course at the college. “I want to see
The Calling of Saint Matthew.
What would it be like to be
called
like that? There you are in a gambling den with a bunch of lowlifes and this strange figure comes. ‘Follow me …’ ”

“It’s in the French church,” Elizabeth said. “San Luigi dei Francesi. And it’s a customhouse, not a gambling den. Caravaggios can be very intimidating, you know.”

Before they could pursue the subject of Caravaggio, the phone rang. They stopped talking and listened while Simon took the call in the hallway. Anders Johansen had died. Simon would have to go out on a removal.

“Johansen,” Louisa said before Simon was even off the phone. “He’s prepaid. He’s one of the last prepaids I handled before they started putting everything on the computer.”

“Isn’t he the one who sold Grandpa Bart the horses?” Hildi asked. “Stormy and Salty? For the Amish funeral?” And the conversation took a sudden turn.

“You couldn’t have been more than seven years old,” Louisa said to Hildi, counting backward on her fingers.

What had happened was that an Amish family had been stranded in Galesburg. The husband had died on the train—a massive heart attack—between Burlington and Galesburg, and the train crew had put him in the baggage car. They’d wanted the body off the train at the next stop.

“He’d been ostracized,” Louisa said, “and they were on their way from somewhere in Iowa to Kewanee, where they had family. Shunning, they called it. No one would talk to any of them. The whole family. It was okay for them to take the train, but not to ride in a motorcar, so Bart borrowed a horse from Anders Johansen. Anders hitched it up to an old buggy and Bart drove it into town.”

“It was Salty,” Hildi said.

“That was right after Van Gogh’s
Irises
sold for fifty million dollars,” Elizabeth said.

“Yeah,” Morris said. “Right after the stock market collapsed.”

Salty was a small-boned, flat-footed Tennessee Walker. Bart had bought her after the Amish funeral, and then Hildi’d thought she’d be lonely, so she talked her grandfather into buying the second horse, Stormy, a broken-down quarter horse. He’d made a paddock in the lot in back, which had since been turned into a parking lot, and when the city had sent him a notice that he couldn’t keep horses in town, he’d said it was part of the business, that he needed the horses for Amish funerals. So he’d been granted a variance.

“It was sad,” Louisa said. “Bart and a couple of the conductors got the body into the buggy and Bart brought it back here, and then he went back to the station to get the rest of the family, a wife and two little girls. He brought
them
back here too. They didn’t have anyplace else to go. I fixed sandwiches, and we all ate in the kitchen, and they slept on the floor up in Simon’s tower. They held themselves together.”

“The Amish don’t make a big fuss about death,” Simon said. He was standing in the doorway. “It was like a Jewish funeral. Plain box. No embalming.”

“They must feel something.”

“Yes, but it’s different. We’re all trying to
find
ourselves,” Simon said. “The Amish are trying to
lose
themselves.”

“I’m coming with you,” Hildi said, struggling to get up off the sofa.

“Don’t be silly,” Elizabeth said. She turned to Simon. “Can’t you call Gilbert? He could take Henry with him.” Henry operated the crematory and sometimes worked as a greeter. But Simon shook his head. “Or wait for Able to get here.” Able, Simon’s younger brother, was a funeral director in Kewanee.

“He won’t be here till eight o’clock,” Simon said.

“Or take Morris,” she said. “It might be an interesting experience for him, something to remember.”

“Whoa,” Morris said.

“At least let me finish the story,” Louisa said. “We had the funeral the next day. Bart took the body to Hope Cemetery in the buggy, and then came back for the family. He let you drive,” she said to Hildi. “I remember. That was the first time you ever drove a horse and buggy. Probably the last time too. That night they got on the train to Kewanee. Bart never charged them.”

Bart hadn’t charged them for the funeral, and Louisa remembered all the unpaid invoices she’d found in his desk when she’d started doing the books, and she began to cry. She didn’t think she had any tears in her for Bart, not after the last couple of years, but now they began to dribble down her cheeks. Elizabeth brought a box of Kleenex and sat down next to her on the sofa and put her arms around her. After a few minutes she freshened Louisa’s drink and then poured some white wine for herself.

PART III: ELIZABETH

Whom would I commission to paint this scene?
Elizabeth asked herself. There wasn’t anything especially dramatic or picturesque about it—her mother-in-law’s tears catching the light as she sipped her whiskey, her husband and her daughter standing next to each other in the wide doorway that opened into the upstairs hall, Morris still posing in front of the fireplace, Alexandra patting her husband’s arm before sinking down into Hildi’s place on the sofa, a pair of Waterford tumblers sparkling on a silver tray—so it wouldn’t be Caravaggio or
Rembrandt. Not Leonardo. It would have to be a Dutch genre painting, a cozy living room with a memento mori—a skull sitting on top of one of the bookcases. Not that this family needed to be reminded of death! They lived and breathed death. At times it was exhilarating. Made Elizabeth think about what she was doing. But it was hard, too. She didn’t want her husband to go on a removal just as she was about to put on the potatoes, didn’t want her daughter to go with him, didn’t like the way that Death trumped everything. There was Gilbert, of course, always ready to step in. Loyal to a fault. But there was something cold about Gilbert. He would never have let the Amish family get away without paying. Simon, like his father, let people get away with it—hard times in Galesburg after the Maytag closing—but at least he wrote the losses off on their taxes.

Maybe De Kooning,
she thought.
Wouldn’t that be something!

Elizabeth had come to Galesburg from Princeton University, where she’d studied iconography with Kurt Weitzmann, and like a lot of new faculty in her cohort, she hadn’t been planning to stay in the Midwest once she’d published her dissertation, hadn’t been planning to marry one of her students, hadn’t been planning to marry a funeral director. But then she’d met Simon, who’d swaggered into her classroom in the Fine Arts Center in his combat fatigues. He’d been twenty-three, older than most of the students, and she’d been twenty-seven, younger than most of the faculty. He was going to school on the
GI
Bill and working for his father. He’d been a “mortuary specialist” in Vietnam, and he wrote a paper about the failure of Art to stand up to the things he’d seen in the mortuary in Da Nang, in order to erase the images that he couldn’t stop seeing in his dreams. Beauty itself was
impotent, he argued, and so were the attempts of Art to confront Truth: the
Isenheim Altarpiece
, Goya’s
Third of May
, Michelangelo’s
Rondanini Pietà
… they couldn’t shock you or numb you like a box of putrid body parts or a face covered with mold and crawling with maggots, the skin slipping off. Day after day. They’d been equipped to process 350 bodies a month, and they were getting almost a hundred a day. It was the only job in the army, he’d told her, that you could quit! But Simon hadn’t quit.

And she hadn’t quit either, had never lost her faith in the healing power of great art, and years later she’d decorated his hideaway up in the octagonal tower, which she called a belvedere, with good quality prints—Lascaux, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Monet, Renoir, Pollock, De Kooning, and even a painting done by an elephant—so Simon would have something beautiful to look at when he wanted to get away from his work. She’d wanted him to see what she saw when she looked at Rembrandt’s
Side of Beef
or Pollock’s
Alchemy
, or a still life by Morandi, and she had wanted him to learn from Chardin to see the beauty all around us, to feel the emotional impact of colored pigments.

She’d stopped short of framing them, but she had labeled each one with the painter’s name and dates. There wasn’t much wall space, just room for twenty-four prints, in columns of three, between the eight pairs of high windows.

Now she was fifty-six years old, still attractive. One of her colleagues, a man Elizabeth had always admired, had propositioned her only last week. She hadn’t been tempted. She and Simon had been lucky in love. And lucky in their vocations. She was preparing a paper on a series of odd figures—figures that didn’t belong—in medieval and early Renaissance iconography, and would be presenting her paper at the
CAA
conference at
New York University in the spring. And Simon—well, people kept dying. The phone kept ringing. And like Hermes, the Greek god of transitions and boundaries, Simon kept on conducting the souls of the dead from this world to the next.

She had a pork roast in the oven. All she needed to do was boil some baby potatoes and make a salad. Without Simon and Hildi there’d be nine—she counted on her fingers—including the kids. Eleven, if Simon’s brother Able and his wife, Marilyn, showed up.

There’d be enough left over for sandwiches tomorrow. Elizabeth and Simon’s son, Jack, and Jack’s wife, Sally, would be coming from New York in the morning. They were going to rent a car at the airport in Peoria. She went upstairs to speak to Hildi.

PART IV: HILDI

Hildi was looking out her bedroom window, trying to picture the parking lot as a paddock, trying to remember Salty and Stormy, when her mother snapped a picture with a new digital camera. When Hildi heard the camera click, she turned around and smiled. She’d been rummaging through a suitcase, which was open on the bed, looking for something to wear on the removal.