Then Came Heaven (12 page)

On the morning of Krystyna’s funeral, Irene awakened and sat up in her childhood bed, feeling abject and targeted, as if some preeminent force had it in for her and was showing her how simple it was to remove every vestige of happiness from her life. Across from the foot of the bed a pair of tall, skinny windows nearly touched the white mop-boards. Through them she could see the sun, persimmon orange, nesting above the row of scrub willows clear down beyond the south pasture. How dare the sun shine on the day of Krystyna’s funeral? There should be rain, like there was in Irene’s heart.

She rose with an effort and cocked a hand to her head, where a swift throb reminded her of how much crying she’d done in the last four days. Downstairs her mother was making sounds in the kitchen. Her father, she knew, was out cutting hay, catching a couple good hours before dressing for the funeral: death didn’t halt the seasons, and though the saying had become cliché, it was true that a farmer had to make hay while the sun shone.

Irene shuffled downstairs, where she found her mother taking a cake out of the oven: there would be a dinner after the funeral at the Paderewski Hall with the ladies of the parish providing food, so even in her grief, Mary Pribil, like her husband, felt the demands of life pushing her from behind.

“Mama?” Irene said from the doorway.

Mary straightened with the cake pan in her hand and closed the oven door. She wore rimless eyeglasses over close-set eyes. Her thin gray hair was as short and curly as a Persian lamb coat. The broken collarbone she’d suffered had left her right shoulder sagging lower than her left, like an old, weathered wooden gravemarker that had once been a cross.

She set the cake pan on the cupboard and said, “Mornin’, Reeny.”

To her mother’s back, Irene said, “I’m going to take the old truck and go in early and help Eddie get the girls dressed. Fix their hair the way Krystyna would have liked it, okay?”

Mary refused to turn around. She stood a moment with the butts of her hands resting on the edge of the wooden cabinet. Then she pulled up her apron and used a comer of it to wipe her eyes inside her glasses. “You do what you got to do. It ain’t gonna be an easy day to get through, that’s for sure.”

Irene crossed the kitchen and kissed her mother on the side of her neck, and slipped her arms around Mary’s thick middle and rocked her awhile. Then Mary patted the backs of Irene’s hands and the younger woman left the room.

________

The funeral was scheduled for eleven A.M. It was shortly after nine-thirty when Irene crossed Eddie’s front porch and knocked on the door. Used to be she’d walk right in, because Eddie would be at work and Krystyna would be in the kitchen doing housework or setting somebody’s hair.

Eddie answered the door with shaving cream on one side of his face, dressed in black gabardine trousers and a sleeveless ribbed undershirt with a U-neck.

“Irene,” he said without his customary smile. Though he was a low-key man, he had a shy, lopsided smile with which he usually greeted people. Today he merely spoke her name as a flat, gleeless recognition.

“Hi, Eddie,” she said as he opened the screendoor to let her in. “Sorry I interrupted your shaving.”

He waved off her apology without a word.

“Pretty sad day, isn’t it?” she said when he’d closed the inside door.

“Yuh,” he managed while they both struggled with resurfacing emotions.

They stood in a shallow entry that stretched the width of the living room, separated from it by a wall with an archway flanked by two square white posts on set-in shelves that the children had called parapets, because that’s what the nuns called the ones at school. To the right, against the end wall of the entry, Krystyna’s treadle sewing machine stood with an unfinished project folded up on top of the boxy wooden cover. Off the left end of the entry a stairway led to the second story, from where the children’s voices and running water could be heard.

“I thought I’d come over and fix the girls’ hair and help them get dressed, the way Krystyna would have.”

Eddie took a beat to register what she was offering and to accept the fact that Krystyna was gone and would never fuss over the girls again.

“That’s nice, Irene. I appreciate that.”

“I didn’t think... I mean, I didn’t know if you, how you’d... I mean who’d...”

“It’s okay, Irene, I know what you mean. I hadn’t got around to figuring that out yet, either.”

“Then it’s okay that I came over?”

“Sure. And you’re right. Krystyna would have wanted them to be all dolled up.” He tried for a smile, but 
all dolled up
 was Krystyna’s expression, and the reminder only saddened Eddie and Irene the more.

“Well, listen, your face is drying. You go back and finish your shave and I’ll go up and help them get dressed and make up their bed, how’s that?”

He nodded despondently and headed upstairs. Halfway to the top he turned and said, “I wanted them to wear those little pink-and-white striped dresses, the last ones Krystyna made for them.”

“Sure, Eddie.”

At the top of the stairs, the hall doubled-back upon itself with a handrail overlooking the steps. The children’s bedroom was situated there, Eddie and Krystyna’s down the hall. One had to walk through Eddie and Krystyna’s room to reach the bathroom. The children came running through their parents’ bedroom, dressed in their cotton underwear. Lucy was squealing, “Daddy, Daddy, look at us!” They had painted their faces with his shaving cream. “We’re going to shave!”

“Auntie Irene is here,” he said. “She’s going to get you dressed and comb your hair real pretty.”

Irene watched the children run to him, bearded in white, their bare heels pounding on the hall runner. He stopped them and turned them by the backs of their heads, pointing them back toward his room. “Now you come back in the bathroom with me and wash that shaving soap off so Auntie Irene can get you dressed.”

They both peered around him, said, “Hi, Auntie Irene,” then he herded them away.

She stood looking after them, filled with a sense of loss complicated by the realization that Krystyna was gone forever and Eddie was no longer married. The smell of his shaving soap lingered in the hall, and in her mind the image of his wiry arms and the hair on his chest behind the strappy undershirt. Through the open door of his room she could see the foot of his bed, still mussed. She had never, in her entire lifetime, had access to the smell of a man’s shaving soap or the appearance of him or his tossed sheets in the morning, other than her father’s and the middle-aged men she’d worked for. She found it dreadful that she should be observing Eddie’s private morning routine at the expense of her sister’s life, even more dreadful to discover that she was enjoying the pseudo-intimacy.

She went into the girls’ room and made up their bed, picked up their dirty socks and pajamas from the floor and opened a tall chest of drawers that held their folded clothes. She and Krystyna had bought the chest at an auction sale when Krystyna was expecting Anne, and had painted it pastel green and put teddy bear decals on the fronts of the drawers. She straightened some stacks of undershirts and underpants and listened to Eddie and the girls. He was the gentlest, most loving father she had ever seen, and she felt she had the capability of being the same kind of mother. How perfect it would be if she could marry him and take care of him and the girls for the rest of her life.

Guilt swept down and smothered the idea. Krystyna wasn’t even buried yet and here she was wishing to step into her place. Was this what was meant by 
coveting
? She promised herself she would go to confession next Saturday and ask absolution from her sin.

She wiped a tear from her eye with a small folded undershirt, looked up and whispered, “Forgive me, Krystyna. I’m so sorry.”

But she loved the children, and loved Eddie, and would fill in for Krystyna in a heartbeat, even if he never loved her back. And how could he love her, a fat, boring, farm woman who had none of Krystyna’s vibrancy or verve?

The children, at least, loved her: of that much she was sure, and that would be enough for her if it ever came to that.

But it wouldn’t, and she must never let Eddie know she’d had such thoughts, especially so soon after Krystyna died.

She dressed the girls in their full-skirted pink dresses with fluffy white petticoats underneath, and wide sashes that tied in the back. She found white anklets and let them buckle on their shiny black patent-leather shoes. Then she took them down to the kitchen and, in turn, stood them on the seat of a kitchen chair next to the sink where Eddie had made built-in cabinets with special triangular-shaped cupboards on either side of the window, with angled doors to make it easy for Krystyna to see the back of her hair when she was setting it and combing it. If Irene had thought of this last night, she would have come over then and set the girls’ hair in pin curls the way Krystyna always did on Saturday night, in preparation for Sunday Mass. Lacking fresh curls, she parted their hair on the side, drew a little tail to the opposite side, secured it with a rubber band, then trimmed it with a wide pink ribbon which she carefully tied in a bow. She knew right where Krystyna kept the ribbons and the rubber bands and combs—all in the kitchen drawer where her other paraphernalia for giving permanents was also kept. The smell in the drawer—of ammonia and wave set and the rubber bands that hung on the permanent rollers, half decomposed from the strong chemicals—brought back so sharp a memory of Krystyna that Irene had to struggle once again to keep from crying.

The girls were all dressed and combed when Eddie came downstairs in his black suit, a crisply ironed white shirt (Krystyna had always taken such pains with his shirts) and striped tie, wearing his Knights of Columbus pin in his lapel. He reached the doorway just as one of his brothers rang the first bell at St. Joseph’s, a reminder that in thirty minutes Krystyna’s funeral Mass would begin. The sight of Eddie sent a billow of longing through Irene, a visceral reaction that rolled along and lifted in much the same manner as the wind over a field of tall, green grain. As with the grain when the wind has passed, she stood straight and waiting, hiding what lay underneath.

“Well, I guess it’s time to go,” Eddie said.

“I guess so.”

“Guess we can walk over to the funeral home.”

“I g... guess so.”

“Folks’ll be getting there by now.”

She simply could not speak anymore, didn’t know how he could.

“The girls look...” He had to stop and compose himself before going on. His voice got even quieter. “Girls look nice, Irene.”

She touched them on the backs of their heads. “Go see your daddy,” she whispered.

They crossed the kitchen solemnly and took their daddy’s hands, and he thought that without those two small hands in his he might have sunk to the floor and refused to leave the house, refused to walk down the sidewalk and cross Main Street and see that precious face lying in the casket and watch the metal lid close over it forever.

But he did it, did what he must, clutching those two small hands and listening to the pat-a-pat of their patent leathers on the sidewalk while Irene followed behind. Reaching Main Street, he found that townspeople were funneling toward Iten & Heid’s Funeral Home from all directions. Relatives, friends; by foot, by car; so many that the funeral home was packed and some had to pay their respects from the sidewalk outside.

What Eddie had faced the day of Krystyna’s death he faced again, renewed weeping with each loved one he embraced, especially all four parents, and the sisters and brothers of both sides. In the end the decision about letting Anne and Lucy view Krystyna was decided when the girls balked and pulled away. They were beginning to cry when he left them with Irene at the rear of the funeral home and took his place up front. Father Kuzdek said prayers and performed the closing of the casket, replete with the sprinkling of holy water and the spreading of incense. The pallbearers bore the casket out to the hearse, and the lengthy procession of mourners walked the block and a half to St. Joseph’s, Eddie once again holding his children’s hands.

At eleven o’clock, when he climbed the church steps and followed the casket through the vestibule, he saw that it was his older brother Clayton ringing the bells today. 
Bless you, Clayton, pulling on those ropes with tears streaming down your face, bless you and all my brothers for all you’re doing to see me through this. What would I do without you? 
All three bells pealed overhead, filling the vestibule with so much sound it reverberated inside Eddie’s head as the children looked up at him and pressed close to his sides.

________

Inside the church, in the fourth and fifth rows, Sister Regina waited with her pupils. They sat and fidgeted. She knelt and prayed. There had been no eight o’clock Mass this morning. Instead, the entire student body was attending the Requiem Mass, and the children’s choir would be singing.

It had been a terribly distressing morning for Sister Regina. When she’d tried opening the school day with a prayer, her voice had broken and she’d had to press her folded fingertips against her lips and begin again. She’d tried to concentrate on her teaching, but Anne and Lucy’s empty seats stopped her eyes each time she scanned the room, and time and again she’d had to turn away from the children to hide the tears she couldn’t stop from forming. She’d tried not to wish the school building had a clock in every room (her vow of poverty dictated that she be content with what she had) but after her fifth trip into the hall to check the clock out there, she’d begun accusing the parish board of miserliness rather than expedience in deciding the building needed only one clock in the gymnasium.

She’d been guilty of long stretches of preoccupation this morning and had been standing at the schoolroom window when the first bell rang half an hour ago, standing there staring out, filled with grief and imagining the Olczak family gathering at the funeral home, wishing she could be there with them, to comfort the children and draw comfort from them. There it was, that old self-indulgence again.