The Undertaker's Daughter (23 page)

My parents always got into at least one fight on vacation.

My mother tried to follow a map. “You’re supposed to turn here to get back to the hotel.”

“No, we turn at the next junction.”

“No, Frank. It says here—”

“I don’t care what it says, I’m turning here.”

We were lost. This made him angry and he took it out on her. He swerved over to the side of the road and slammed on the brakes.

“You drive then, goddamnit! You think you know so much.” He stepped out of the car.

“Frank, get back in the car.”

“No. You drive. Let’s see how long it takes you to get back.”

My mother was always right when it came to directions. She had a head for it. It didn’t take her long to get us back, and no one breathed until we pulled into the hotel’s parking lot.

“I told you.” She couldn’t leave it alone; her voice held a tinge of smugness that she didn’t bother to hide.

He left their hotel room while we were getting ready for bed. A worried look fell upon my mother’s angry face.

“Where’s he going?” I asked.

“I don’t know. To cool off, I guess.” But she sounded unsure.

She sat in their room and waited for him to return. I don’t know what time my father eventually came back.

His sharp tongue and the shard of stubbornness in my mother that wouldn’t be silenced throbbed in the confined spaces of the hotel room and car. They couldn’t hide their disagreements here as they did behind their bedroom door at home.

The next morning both were quiet and barely spoke to each other, but his mood was back to joking around with us, the children. It took a couple of days for my mother to come round and appear normal.

Eventually, a few days into the vacation, the call would come from Jubilee. Someone always died. We packed our suitcases begrudgingly. Seldom would my father leave the funeral arrangements and embalming completely in the hands of staff. More often than not, my father felt he owed it to the family members
with whom he’d cultivated relationships over the years to be present. He’d experienced their displeasure, anger, and even their despair when he was not.

Days after we returned home, Jemma and I climbed up on the sofa beside our father and played with him. While he tried to watch television, we peeled the skin off his head after his sunburn healed. The rest of his body tanned to a deep bronze, but the top of his head where his hair was thinning was all ours. Sometimes we asked about his scar. He often wore pajama bottoms without the top as if he were reclaiming the freedom he found on vacation. He was a tall, well-built man except for his slightly swollen belly, and the scar on his stomach begged our attention. I ran my fingers down his torso from the top of his ribs to his navel, tracing the thick scar usually hidden by his beautiful shirts.

“Show us the trick, Daddy.” Jemma grabbed his lighter and handed it to him.

“Leave your father alone.” Mother was in no mood for tricks.

“Come on, Daddy. Do the trick.”

He opened the lighter and snapped the wheel until the flame grew long. Carefully, he directed the flame to the scar and did not flinch when it made contact. We squealed with delight and marveled that our father could have such a thing on his body that felt no pain.

“Go get the pins, Jemma.”

“No, now you all leave him alone.” My mother looked up angrily from her
Reader’s Digest
.

We giggled and Jemma ran off to find a straight pin.

I slowly stuck the pin in the scar while I kept my eye on him to gauge his reaction. He felt no pain. We thought his whole stomach area was a numb, vast receptacle for anything to which it might be subjected.

“Stop poking him!” my mother insisted. “Your father was in the hospital for weeks because of that wound! Why else do you think he drinks Alka-Seltzer all day long? He was very, very sick! He was in the hospital for weeks and weeks. . . . He only has half a stomach!”

“Stop. You’ll scare them to death,” he said to her. Then, to us: “Your mother’s getting upset. Better put that away. Here, give me back my lighter.”

I took the pin out and waited for our mother to resume reading.

“Now tell us about the war. Tell us about how you got shot,” Jemma whispered to him.

He put the lighter away and stared at the television. “I was in a jeep driving a German prisoner to another location, and he grabbed my gun and shot me in the stomach.”

“That’s it,” our mother said. “Go to bed. Both of you.”

Jemma and I were so caught up in our play that we didn’t notice the change in him, the dark expression, how he clammed up in seconds. To us, my father’s war was just a story covered by a scar, nothing more.

 CHAPTER 9 

“C
ome on, I’ve got something to show you.”

“Where’re we going?”

“Just get in the car.”

My father was a purveyor of surprises. He drove down South Main Street, our end of the street, to Miss Agnes’s office at the end of North Main Street.

“I know we’re not going to visit Miss Agnes,” I said, possibly overconfidently.

“How do you know that?”

“ ’Cause I’m wearing these shorts and Keds. You’d never take me to see her looking like this.”

“That’s right, I never would.”

He parked the car and led me into one of Miss Agnes’s warehouses, a massive barnlike building. He pushed the tall doors open and we entered a gray darkness that only gradually welcomed the natural light. Then my eyes fell on the bags and bags of
fertilizer stacked up, skirting the high ceiling as if Miss Agnes anticipated a flood. I sniffed for a scent from the hundreds of bags, but there was none. The air was cool and the bare concrete floor felt cold beneath my feet. In this building Miss Agnes let my father garage his beloved 1937 Buick Roadmaster. It sat majestically in the corner like a dark knight. Beside the car was a damsel of the water world, a vanilla-colored boat, out of place among the VC Fertilizer bags, but gleaming in the darkness. When I moved closer, I saw that the boat was trimmed with a striking red stripe.

“Are we rich?” I asked.

He laughed. “Hardly.”

He’d bought a speedboat and became a man newly unburdened while at its helm. Lake Herndon was only a short drive from Jubilee, thereby making it a little easier for him to get away for a few hours. He liked to stand while driving it, surveying the lakeside around him, waving to other boaters, nodding his head as if to say, “Good afternoon, fellow boaters.” I have no idea where he found them, but he always wore the most magnificent bathing trunks. The colors were bold and rich and the fabric flapped in the breeze like a flag. When the suits and ties came off, he did casual ridiculously well.

He had a palpable sense of freedom about him when he was on the lake. No one could summon him to an accident, no one could call him to report a death; nothing was in front of him but miles of water, the surrounding trees, and lakeside cabins speckling the hilly shore. My mother drove the boat while he skied. She seemed anxious to achieve the right speed and understand his hand signals. We cheered him on and waited for him to give a signal, or worse, we saw him lose his groove and fall. “He’s going down! He’s going down!” we shouted. It made my mother nervous. She didn’t enjoy being on the lake. Something about the
wind destroying her hair and a worry that she wasn’t pleasing him, and she was always concerned for our safety.

The summer I learned to water-ski, I was graceless. Evelyn pointed and laughed at me as I choked on mouthfuls of lake water. She stewed with boredom each time I fell, a frown of irritation darkening her face when the wooden planks on my feet became entangled and my legs splayed from another failed attempt. I was attracting too much attention for her liking. But my father was patient with me as I struggled to defy the water and rise like the Lady of the Lake to a standing position. The day I finally conquered the feat it gave my confidence such a boost that I considered becoming a professional skier. Why not? I thought. If someone beat me to the title of first female undertaker in Kentucky, then perhaps I would move to Florida and work in the Cypress Gardens water-skiing shows. It was the nearest I had ever come to performing a sport. Here was a solid thing we all had in common; I could now include myself in a family of water-skiers. Oh, happy day. But why didn’t I feel oh, happy day? Something, some gray thought, nagged at me as I floated in the black, opaque water.

It was a muggy August afternoon. The heat had warmed the lake all summer and it felt like bathwater. After a brilliant ride on the smooth surface, my skis hit a patch of rough water and I went down suddenly in a harsh sprawling splash. I treaded water, waiting for the boat to swerve back my way. Evelyn was the human equivalent of the choppy water; her bad moods rose unexpectedly. The sun was hot on my head, but underneath the warm water a sudden cold current shocked my legs. She was like that; at certain moments she appeared warm and sunny on the outside . . . but I knew she was as cold as ice on the inside.

Evelyn became a different person around her friends. Her sullen expressions disappeared and I heard her laughing in her
bedroom when they came to visit. They thought she was a lot of fun, a real life of the party. While she listened to them chatter, her eyes grew wide, her mouth opened into a perfect circle as if she were enraptured; so different from her bored, frowning silences. She was doing that now, laughing in the boat with a friend she had invited along. Two conspirators looking my way.

When I was younger, I attempted to wangle my way into her room to see what she and her friends were doing, but she promptly slammed the door in my face and I heard a subsequent squeal of delight that I had been shut out. I no longer made an effort to be included.

She had a new hairstyle, a kind of semi-shaggy bubble cut. Grabbing hold of a tuft of hair, she furiously teased it with her special teasing comb that if I touched I died. Then she used her fingers to create a curl, which she plastered to the side of her face with Dippity-do and a piece of tape. I always hoped that she’d forget the tape was there and walk out of the funeral home looking ridiculous, but she never did. She combed her hair now as it dried in the lake’s breeze.

Evelyn ignored me in public. Once, I sat at the counter in the drugstore and saw Evelyn sitting in the back with her friends. When I waved, she turned her back on me. I busied myself by watching life pass by the long picture window that ran across the front of the store, until she stomped over to chase me away. My face reddened at her disregard for me, painfully on display for everyone in the store.

Mr. Swann placed a Cherry Coke in front of me. “There you go.” He winked. “That’s on the house, little lady.” Mr. Swann leaned in and explained, “Your daddy, now, he did such a good job on my aunt Myrtle, I just don’t see you ever paying for another soda in here.”

I wondered if that was true. Mr. Swann’s nonchalant way of wiping the counter was deceiving. I observed him observing us. Perhaps his offer of a free drink was a salve to soothe the sting of Evelyn’s brusque treatment of me, which he was sure to have noticed.

It took an extraordinarily long time for me to get the message that we weren’t going to be friends. Whenever I walked into her bedroom, for whatever reason, she shouted at me for trespassing, then held me with one hand and beat my arm with the other. She knew exactly how to hit with her fists to achieve the most pain by making consecutive punches in the same spot until I cried out.

It was hard to understand. Thomas never struck us. Jemma and I never hit each other. We weren’t the kind to go looking for a fight. There was no fighting back with Evelyn; there was only a search for protection, which never arrived. I sometimes felt my mother was completely deflated by Evelyn’s behavior, although she defended her in the wildest circumstances. Evelyn was a storm to be weathered, and her blows and smacks went unpunished. What little my mother meted out to her was not enough to deter her. And as Evelyn grew older, my mother’s attempts lost all potency. Frustration churned in my stomach and I wanted to scream,
“Why can’t you control her?!”