Ghost, p.4
Ghost, page 4
Looking at her now as she slowly sips from her glass, he realizes that he would still do anything to please her.
“You should see your doctor,” he says.
“I don’t need a doctor.”
“Please see your doctor.”
She sighs. “Okay. If you want me to.” She looks at him and smiles. “I really am doing all right. You don’t need to worry about me.” Her eyes move from him to the next room and linger there, as if she is expecting someone. For a few moments they sit again in silence, listening to a radio faintly playing in a neighboring apartment. It is one of the jazz singers from the 1940s, a woman. “Are you happy, darling? I can never tell.”
He hesitates. “I think so.”
“Good.”
He waits for her to ask him something else, something more, but she merely takes another sip of water and closes her eyes.
“Darling, will you bring me my scarf?” she asks, her eyes still closed. “It’s in my closet. My neck is just a little bit cold.”
David goes into his mother’s bedroom, opens her closet door. He finds himself embarrassed by this sudden intimacy—her dresses, her shoes, her nightgowns, her brassieres. Unintentionally, he recalls a recent meeting with a grieving family, the entire family crowded into the arrangement room, the husband, the sister, the brother, the two grown children. Lavinia always looked best in lavender, said the sister. She’s got a lavender cotton dress—that’s what she should wear. No, said the daughter, tears in her eyes. Not cotton. Cotton is too casual. But none of her wool suits look right, said the sister. How do you know what looks right? demanded the daughter.
Standing in the closet, David realizes that he doesn’t know what clothes his mother would want to be buried in. In fact, he doesn’t know whether she would prefer to be buried or cremated. He catches himself. He shouldn’t be thinking such thoughts. And yet it is a practical question. Shouldn’t he ask her? To avoid difficulties in the future? He stands in the closet, his eyes slowly roving over each dress and suit, imagining. He should ask her, Which dress? He finds the scarf she wants, enters the room where she sits, stares at her. “Here, Mother,” he says. “Here’s your scarf.”
A PRISM OF LIGHT JUTS THROUGH THE WINDOW, folds over the open casket, and bends up the opposite wall. In the air, a scent of flowers. It is late afternoon. In a couple of hours, family and friends will gather in the slumber room to view the deceased, but now, at this moment, David sits here alone. He is tired but not overly tired. Some days, he likes to come here before the visitors arrive. His duties are finished until the night viewing, and he could go home and take a shower, but he would rather be here in this quiet, alone with his thoughts. To his surprise, he has begun to appreciate the life of the mortuary. He is beginning to grasp the many different responsibilities, the possibilities, the capacities of human feelings. The presence of death seems to bring about some clarifications, as well as some mysteries. Here, he is always a student.
It is so quiet now that David can hear the clock ticking in Martin’s office. Somewhere, fainter sounds—a flute, wind chimes. Unconsciously, he matches his breathing to the ticking of the clock, a rising and falling, a rising and falling. In a way, it is the quiet rhythm of the mortuary itself, a rising and falling, the unhurried breathing of the mortuary. He leans back in his chair and lets his muscles go slack. He floats on an ocean of liquid lapping, the waves coasting in and the waves coasting out, the slow curl of the waves, rising and falling, rising and falling. Thoughts sprinkle the wave crests like foam, thoughts bubble up in the air and dissolve.
The flowers are star-gazer lilies. He chose them himself. Get something pale, the husband said, without further instructions. Not too many, he added. Ophelia usually buys the flowers, but today she has been occupied with other activities. Just since this morning, some of the flowers have opened, like fragile mouths. He always gets some that are still closed. Bethany used to bring lilies home with her and put them in a vase on the dining table. When she was a little girl, she said, she fantasized that she lived in a jungle of flowers, and she wanted to preserve that memory, the one pleasant memory of her childhood. Bethany’s star-gazer lilies on the dining room table. He stares absently at the casket and wonders whether Bethany still puts lilies on her dining room table, wherever she is. In his next letter to her, he’ll ask about the lilies. He tries different addresses, a stationery shop where she used to work, her father’s company, her old school, her mother, her brother, neither of whom speak to him. Perhaps she receives some of his letters. His letters form a small history of his life. As he looks across the room, he can see the face of the deceased, a faint rosy color even in this half-light. Bethany also liked pale, as he remembers. She avoided bright things. They found an abandoned railroad car, miraculously sitting in an open meadow as if it had been dropped down from outer space, sacks of white flour inside, and she took off her clothes and rubbed her body with the flour until she was completely white. Don’t ever leave me, she said, holding him against her white skin. He never left her, but she left him.
It was a late afternoon, like this one, when with a clatter of chairs he sat down at the end of the table, wedged between people he didn’t know, and first met her, introduced by Harry. All friends of Harry. Not one of them past the age of twenty-two. And himself, in his infinite possibilities. Twenty-two! How delicious! With life stretching out to the galaxies, the tinkle of beer glasses on the table, slices of pizza and sandwiches, telephone numbers passed around on folded slips of paper. She was a bird, a sparrow, light in the air, fascinating and beautiful when she perched near his chair for a few moments. She thought him handsome and brilliant and sad, she said later. After the others had left, they stood together on the sidewalk, not quite touching, and felt that something momentous had happened. When he told her his father was gone, tears came to her eyes.
Already, the angles have changed. The prism of sunlight has broadened and slipped over the casket, sweeping across the folded hands. David can see the hands, right over left. To him, the hands are even more expressive than the mouth. He has suggested to Martin that they consult the family on how to position the hands, but Martin says that there are certain decisions the family shouldn’t make, decisions they don’t want to make. Clothes, the family can choose, but not how to fold the hands. Martin ponders these things. He lives with Jenny in the back of the mortuary and rarely leaves the premises. According to Jenny, Martin has an inexplicable fear of people and places he doesn’t know. When Jenny is away on one of her birding excursions, Martin sends Robert or Ophelia to do his shopping and collect his medicines. For the outside funeral services, he appoints Jenny as his representative. Martin and Jenny have no children. From time to time, David has visited Martin’s apartment in the back, suprisingly ramshackled and cluttered for someone as meticulous as Martin. The tables are covered with stamps from all over the world, Martin’s hobby. Through his stamps, he travels the planet. He can tell you when a particular stamp was issued, the language and currency of the country, the type of government. Some of the stamps are quite rare, and he carefully lifts them with his forceps. The stamps are beautiful and delicate, like the poetry of William Blake. Raising them to the light, Martin holds forth on countries and governments and his political philosophy. He announces that he is an antinationalist, that much of the world’s problems have been caused by geographical boundaries between countries. He favors not only disarming the world but also eliminating national boundaries. Cultures should mingle, he says. People should mingle. After his lectures, he carefully puts away the stamps in semitransparent cellophane wrappers, dimming their colors. The stamps leave sticky patches on the tables where the glue has come off.
The waves coast in and the waves coast out. David has taken off his shoes. He breathes in and breathes out, matching his breath to the tick of the clock. At this moment, he is possibly alone in the building. Martin and Jenny would be resting in their rooms. When the family and friends arrive, they will stay half an hour. A few people will linger longer, after the casket is closed. Coffee and doughnuts are served in the next room. Sometimes the visitors talk about small things the deceased did, or particular words spoken. Particular days. How does one measure a life? Is it the few moments in which decisive events happpen, or is it the slow drip of years? What will be remembered about himself, he wonders, and who will remember it? She was completely white, except for the pink of her mouth and the two pink tips of her nipples, and she held him against her white body. She was a goddess. Even then, years before they parted, she felt that he didn’t desire her enough. We are living like an old married couple, she said. I don’t want to be old. I want passion. I want you to crush me. You’re the only woman in my life, he answered. That’s not what I mean, she said. She was born into money, and David always felt that her parents looked down on him. When he had dinner at their home, they served him premium wines and then smiled at him as if he could not possibly appreciate what he had drunk. In return, he brought them cheap wines, which they never opened. After dinner, he would go on about the vintages and bouquets of his cheap unopened wines. David is training to work in a bank, Bethany said to her parents. Why? Bethany’s mother asked. Her father kept pushing him to take a position in his insurance company, but David would rather be destitute than trapped under Frank’s thumb. Frank pushed and pushed, with that condescending smile, and David pushed back. During the entire decade of their marriage, Frank sent a large check to his daughter each month, larger than David’s salary, as if to say that David was financially inconsequential. Whenever Frank called their house, he immediately asked to speak to Bethany. Why don’t you say something to him? David asked Bethany—he treats me like garbage. I can’t, said Bethany. He’s my father. He’s an asshole, said David. Please don’t talk about my father like that, she answered.
He hated it that she said they were living like an old married couple. He should have been more unpredictable. But he is not now what he was. If she were here at this moment, he would crush her, he would envelop her. She might be remarried. She might have children. He would envelop her.
He tries to remember what she took when she left that last time. By then, she was so bored that nothing seemed to matter. She had worked at one job after another—a bookstore, a lawyer’s office, a hospital, a stationery shop—each as far from her father as she could get. He should have been more unpredictable; he was like one of her boring jobs. He never knew what she wanted. What did she take that last day? You keep the house, she said, and the furniture. I don’t want it, he said—you paid for it. I’m leaving, she said. I don’t need any of that stuff. Within a month, he sold the house and the furniture and sent the money to her parents. What did she take? She took her clothes. She took her omelet pan. She took a photograph of them soon after they had first met, standing on a wooden dock out on the lake. I’ll keep this, she said. I want to remember the way that you looked at me that day. Please, he said, I’ll do whatever you want. You were so sweet, she said, looking at the photograph. You’re still sweet. I still love you. Then why are you leaving? he asked. I’ll keep this photograph, she said, and she placed it inside a book with her clothes. She also took one of his sweaters. When they went walking on cool days, she often wore one of his sweaters. Leaves fell into her hair, and she would put them one by one into her pocket. She was perfection, everything. She held his hand, said hello to people they passed on the street. You are becoming very dignified, like your mother, she said to him, stabbing a knife into him. Didn’t she know? He should have made love to her in the railroad car, when her body was white with the flour. That was the moment.
Leaves fell into her hair. Leaves fall on the grounds of the mortuary and are gathered up in white bedsheets. Martin himself burns the leaves in the back, next to the overturned carriage with the weeds growing up all around it. A small pleasure, he says. On some Mondays, slow days, David helps Martin burn the leaves, the smoke turning and shifting about their heads with the wind. Martin reminisces about his childhood growing up in the funeral home, his grandmother’s insistence on warm milk every night before bed, soured with a few drops of lemon juice, his father’s picture of Thomas Edison tacked to his office door, the goat that they kept on a ten-foot chain in the backyard and who periodically slipped off its chain and came wandering into the building. On one occasion, the goat accidentally ate a freshly inked burial certificate, delaying the burial of an elderly gentleman whose body then sat in the basement for three days. The disappointment and loneliness because Martin’s friends, and later his would-be paramours, were frightened to come to his house—the Double-Deckered Spook House, they called it. Often, he played alone in his room. At times he was angry at his father for bringing him into the world in a funeral home, but it was hardly his father’s fault, because he had been brought into the world in a funeral home by his father, and back to the great-grandfather who had started it, unwittingly, wanting only to make a living. All in all, it’s been an interesting life, says Martin with a sigh. I wouldn’t want it any different. This is a personal business, he says. This business is a matter of listening. The grieving families will tell you what they need. The Italians are emotional, the Germans are stoic. Some people want to joke with you. Others want no joking at all. So. Are you attached? Attached? A woman. You know. I was just wondering if you had a…girlfriend. Yes, David says. Ellen. She works at the library. I hope you don’t mind my poking into your business, says Martin, laughing, his shirttails hopelessly loose from his pants and flapping about his waist. I know that people have lives outside, and I was just wondering, hoping that you had someone. You should bring your Ellen here. I’d like to meet her. Next weekend, we’ll have you and Ellen to dinner. Jenny will cook her grilled trout. Looking away, David feels oddly conscious that he may have revealed something of himself that he shouldn’t have. He wants to confide in Martin. There’s a dearness and comfort in Martin’s attention. Is this what it feels like, he thinks, to talk truly with Martin? But…He glances at Martin, as he happily gathers the leaves and takes a contented breath of the leaf smoke, and wonders if Martin simply acts interested in everyone. He wants to trust Martin, and he pictures the four of them, Ellen and himself and Martin and Jenny, at Martin’s table…Leaves. The smell of lilies hovers in the air.
There is a dampness too, a blend of lily and fresh rain. The odor of rain that evening he went to the concert with Ellen. Rain on her face, on her bare arms. Even with her hair matted against her forehead, she was beautiful. Somehow, the wetness only emphasized her fragility. It’s fun to get dressed up, she said, turning all the way around to look at the other concertgoers. Umbrellas clattered to the floor. Above them, in the gold balconies, people streamed into their chairs like a flock of birds swooping into a tree. She leaned up, a full head shorter than he, and kissed him. I adore Schubert, she said. Especially his lieder. What a good idea you had for tonight. It was your idea, said David. She laughed. I was afraid you might take me to that Wagner concert. What’s wrong with Wagner? he asked. Oh, I like Wagner too, she said, but his music is pretentious. Look, she said, nodding toward a couple taking their seats in the next row. She must be twenty years younger than he, don’t you think? And that dress she’s got on. She’s falling out on top. She might be his daughter, he said. Not a chance, Ellen said. Look at the way he’s touching her. At intermission, Ellen wouldn’t get out of her seat. Can we just sit for a while, she said, with her head on his shoulder. I feel like I’m soaring. I feel like he sees into my heart. He must have been in love when he wrote those pieces. He was in love with poetry, said David. It was a great time for German poetry. That wouldn’t be enough, she said. There had to have been a woman. Schubert would have been in love with you, he said, and he buried his face in her hair and breathed in the sweet damp.
