Up Island (12 page)

“I think I see her all the time, too,” I said. “In crowds. I was walking through Saks yesterday trying to find something black for the service and I saw her so clearly in the handbag department that I started toward her before I remembered.

And I thought she was on the phone this morning. I mean, I know it was Carrie Davies, but it still sounded like Mother.

I’m scared to death I’m going to see her with Daddy and react, and that would just about finish him off. He’s said several times that he can’t see her; that it would be so much better if he could just see her. I think he means in his mind, though.

Not like I’m seeing her. I almost told her in Saks to go mater-ialize to the one who needs her.”

“I think all that’s probably normal,” Livvy said, licking mayonnaise off her fingers. “She’s always been the most powerful person in your world, and all of a sudden she’s not in it anymore. How can you not see her, and dream about her? What I wish you could do is

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dump the guilt. Maybe the Catholics have something; you can just go to confession and get some novenas to say, or whatever they do, and be done with it. What’s it going to take for you?”

“I don’t really feel guilty,” I said. “How come you’re so much smarter than me? Why, if we’re such soul mates, do you know all this stuff and I don’t?”

“Because you’re the one in the middle of it,” she said. “If it was me stewing in all this crap and you outside it, you’d see it, too. You know it as well as I do, you just can’t get to it right now.”

I laughed, a ragged, thin little laugh but a laugh nevertheless, and reached over and hugged her across the waxed paper and potato chips package.

“If I were a lesbian, I’d marry you,” I said.

“If you were a lesbian, you’d be a lot better off right now,”

she said. “Now what can we do about this Oedipal guilt of yours? Wasn’t it Oedipus who killed his mother or something?”

“He killed his father and married his mother,” I said. “I guess matricide by daughter is so bad they don’t even have a myth for it. You think I’m just talking, but I really don’t feel guilty. Maybe I will later, but right now I don’t. I feel terrible for Daddy, and I think I’m going to miss Mother an awful lot when I really take it in, but right now all I feel is tired to death and kind of stunned. And I can’t stop thinking about Tee. I keep waiting for him to come make all this all right. Maybe it’s that I can take in either infidelity or the death of my mother, but I can’t handle both at one time. Nobody was meant to get it all at once like this.”

“Are you kidding? That’s what middle age is,” Livvy said.

“One loss after another. It’s hell. Didn’t anybody ever tell you? And by the way, speaking of

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the devil, have you heard from Tee since your mama died?”

“I called him that morning,” I said. “I did it totally without thinking; I just dialed his office, and when Patty answered, I said, ‘Sweetie, I need to talk to Tee right now,’ as if nothing had happened. I didn’t even identify myself. But she knows my voice, of course; I bet she nearly dropped her teeth.”

“I bet she did,” Livvy agreed. “So what did he say?”

“He wasn’t there. He’d gone on some kind of department retreat or something down at Callaway Gardens. From the way Patty hemmed and hawed, I’d say the Eel Woman went with him, but I didn’t ask.”

Livvy started to laugh.

“Shit,” she said. “Do you know where they’ve gone?

They’ve gone to spend a weekend with that idiot on television who walks on fire, you know the one who’s supposed to motivate people to tap their hidden powers and reach their impossible dreams? The department’s got him down there teaching all the little Chi Phis to walk on fire. I told Caleb I’d build a fire of another kind entirely under him if he went.

He wouldn’t have, anyway. But you can bet Her Eeliness did. She’s probably slithering over hot coals on her belly as we speak. Hope it fries her abs.”

“Oh, God,” I said, and began to laugh, helplessly, along with her. It struck me that for a woman who’d lost a husband and a mother in a matter of days, I was laughing entirely too much. But the alternative was crying, and I simply did not think I could do any more of that.

I was right. Whatever font the tears had flowed from dried up. I cried no more for my mother, or UP ISLAND / 99

indeed for anyone or anything else, for a very long time. I sat through my mother’s funeral between my father and my son, as dry-eyed as a wooden puppet, and probably resembled one. I found it hard to move my arms and legs and head, and stared at the rector of the little Episcopal church where my parents had gone for years, and where Tee and I had married, as if he alone could sustain life and breath in me.

When the service was over, my muscles were sore.

I had not been in the church in a long time; Tee and I had always attended the larger and grander cathedral of St. Philip, in Buckhead, where his family had been communicants and benefactors for generations. I liked this little stone church.

Its low, beamed ceilings felt enclosing and comforting, and its simple stained-glass windows, with reds and amethysts prevailing, made the interior seem awash in rosy light. Often, in the cathedral, I had the urge to look over my shoulder, to press myself into the ends of pews and the recesses of walls, to feel ridiculously as if I had come to church in my underwear, or forgotten my shoes. I often thought of
Murder in
the Cathedral
when I entered. But on the day of my mother’s funeral, I felt again the sense of protection and enclosure that little St. Margaret’s had always given me, and was grateful to slide into it as if into sleep.

It was very crowded. My mother was, by that time, a local legend, often referred to as “a civic treasure.” Three generations of Atlantans had seen her perform, or had studied with her, and it seemed to me that most of them were in the congregation that day. The story that she had died dancing had gotten out, and both the television and news media had picked up on it, closing their brief, sound-bitten eulogies with
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inanities such as, “True to form, she died dancing” and “Like the trouper she was, she died with her dancing shoes on.”

None, of course, mentioned that it could be termed a case of death by daughter. Only Kevin had done that, and he only once.

He sat on the other side of my father in the first row of pews and cried soundlessly for his mother, Sally sniffling beside him. Because he was a rising anchor in Washington and considered one of their own, the local media all ran at least one shot of Kevin, his clever, handsome face blurred with grief and his head bowed, coming out of the church.

Behind him in one or two of the shots, I looked severe and forbidding in my new Saks black, almost Medea-like. The new haircut made me someone even I hardly recognized; it was like looking at an actress impersonating me. I had my head tipped forward so that the smooth wings of hair obscured my face, but you could still tell that it was immobile, frozen. In contrast, Kevin looked vulnerable and very human, infinitely appealing. The brief television clips looked subtly wrong, skewed; it should have been I who wept for my mother, Kevin who was stalwart. Atlanta was still the Deep South, however far in spirit we believed we had left it behind.

In the traditional South, women wept and men for-bore.

It was a morning funeral, for the day was very hot, and Arlington Cemetery, where Mother and Daddy had their plots, broiled gently under the punishing fist of the sun. There were few family members, for the Bells did not have much family, but many others came: old friends from Peachtree Hills, friends of mine and Tee’s, Daddy’s lodge members, many fans of my mother. At the edge of the circle, aloof and regal in

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white linen that somehow looked more correct than the surrounding sea of black, Charlotte Redwine stood. I had not seen her at the church, nor at Patterson’s in the days before, but she had sent a basket of delicacies and wine from her favored caterer, and an armful of flowers from her garden, to the house via Marcus, her driver, and had enclosed a note to me pledging her continuing support.

“Your darling mother, I always so admired her style and spirit,” she wrote. “You must, if you can, think of me as your mother now.”

She did not mention Tee. He was not at the church, nor at the cemetery. It would have been appalling taste if he had been, I suppose, but the only loss I truly felt on that hot, numbed day was that of Tee’s tall body by my side. That side felt naked.

Everyone told me later what a lovely funeral and a somehow joyous graveside ceremony it was, and almost everyone mentioned the ducks. Arlington is full of little lakes and ponds, and over the years people have relocated their Easter ducklings there, so that nowadays the background accompaniment to any interment is a raucous, peevish honking. Canadian geese on their way north or south stop off to join the remittance ducks, too, and sometimes the minister or whoever is handling the interment is forced to stop and wait until a particular gaggle of ducks and geese works out a honking dispute. Everyone always smiles and looks at each other, as if to say, “Life goes on, after all. Wouldn’t he/she have loved it?” The ducks added a rowdy carnival note to the going out of my mother, and it seemed to please everyone but Kevin.

He glared, as if he would like to wring sixty-odd necks. For my part, I struggled so hard with the illicit,
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unseemly laughter that my face was red and sweating when finally we left the undertakers to their task and walked with my father back up the hill to the car. Even Daddy smiled.

“Gave her a real five-star sendoff, didn’t they?” he whispered to me.

I came as close to weeping then as I ever would for my mother, except in a time and place still far distant.

We went back to my house, where Lilly and the caterers were putting the finishing touches on the tasteful little buffet lunch for family and friends that custom here dictates. Daddy had asked me to host it; he said that he could no more imagine having my mother’s final festivities in the cramped condo than he could have downtown in Centennial Park. The right place would have been the old house in Peachtree Hills, where what he calls our real life was largely conducted, but that was impossible, of course. A computer salesman and his family lived there now. So I agreed, and bestirred myself with Lilly to put the house to rights and polish silver and order flowers and drag the old ivory damask that had been Tee’s grandmother’s out of the cedar chest. It was not lost on me that if my mother had not died, my house very well might soon have slept indefinitely beneath a coverlet of dust and lightlessness.

“It looks real pretty, baby,” Daddy said when we came in from the searing brightness of the day. “Your mother would like this very much.”

And it did look pretty, but I somehow doubted that my mother would have liked it at all. All told, I thought she might well have preferred Centennial Park, thronged with the thousands of people who had admired and applauded her over the years.

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I am always surprised by how much I enjoy after-funeral affairs. There is sorrow, of course, the degree depending on how large a displacement the deceased will leave in the air of the various worlds represented at the feast, but it is seemly sorrow, and serves to leaven the yeasts of both hilarity and malice. There will be laughter, but it will be the laughter of loving recollection. There may be tears, but they will be the gentle tears of nostalgia and fondness. No one will vilify the absent honoree or any of the present mourners. Maybe later, after the guests have gone on to wherever they go after consuming the funeral meats, but not in the very house of mourning itself. Everyone knows everyone else almost by definition, and they are all on their best behavior, which is seldom the case when the group gathers elsewhere. There are hugs, cheek and lip kisses, comradely back claps and bi-ceps punches, compliments and confidences.

Carrie Davies once said wistfully, at the funeral of the first of our group to die, that none of us had behaved this sweetly toward each other since the Chi Phi formal our senior year.

She was right. I enjoyed my mother’s funeral so much that I forgot for long stretches of time why we were gathered, and when I remembered, it seemed simply absurd that the gathering was about her death.

Her life, though, that was another matter. She was fully as present as any one of us: The talk was all of her, and her place in each of our firmaments. She might have been out in the kitchen. Surely in a moment she would sweep into the room in one of her absurd hats and kiss cheeks and pat sleeves, and her laugh would tinkle into the waiting air, and life would swirl on around her as it always had. I have
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never felt, before or since, quite the perfect, uncomplicated tenderness that I felt for my mother on the day that we buried her.

No one spoke of Tee, or the affair, or what I would be doing next, or what he would. They would the minute they were out the door, I believe, but not here, not on this day.

Tee was, for the first time in his life, not a part of one of our gatherings. Wine and Bloody Marys flowed without his making them, shrimp salad and cheese biscuits and strawber-ries were eaten without his sharing them, toasts were made to which he did not raise his glass. It was, I suppose, my first party on my own in this house, and thanks to my mother, it was a roaring success. Tee should have been by my side; of course he should have. But his absence left no bruises. I was surprised at the grace of my solo effort.

Even my father felt its benison. He had a rare-for-him Bloody Mary, and smiled often and genuinely at his and Mother’s last mutual guests, and once or twice I heard him laugh aloud. It did not seem strange. This final postgame party was a time and place unto itself. Only later does the real world resume itself. Then was when I would worry about my father. Then was the time in his life that would, if anything could, simply defeat him. I smiled at him and laughed with him and resolutely refused to think of what might happen to him when we closed the door on our last guests. It did not even occur to me to wonder what might happen to me.