And both of them quite similar to the cloud that shortly took shape in the car: driving away, after a considerable silence and a minute or two of checking recently done fingernails, putting down her hands and saying in some exasperation, “What do you want, Bob?”
“Want?” I said.
“Just tell me. I wasn’t born yesterday.”
I finally said, “Well,—”
“Do you want to go to the movies? Do you want to disco? Do you want to come up for a game of backgammon? Do you want to go to bed with me? Just tell me.”
I usually have words (if out-of-date) but they all seemed to have scattered. I used the pause to reach for the gearshift, then changed for raising the headlights to bright then back to dim. She said, “You go beating all around Robin Hood’s barn and I don’t know what you want.”
I didn’t care to say that Robin Hood’s barn was just what we did like to beat around in my day, that without the barn we thought it wasn’t much of a game. Truth to tell, the offhand fare she laid out reminded me too much of the broiled chicken livers the woman had tried to order, too much of a cheeseburger-to-go instead of a banquet, and I said I had an early dentist appointment and had to drive back tonight. I took her home and she kissed me quickly in a kindly but somewhat patronizing way and ran to her door—forgetting the manuscript, as I had.
I mailed it the next morning from a small-town P.O. I passed with a weatherbeaten flag limp on its staff, feeling as superseded as my skates, as obscurely bruised as if I had tried to use them—or rented a modern pair and attempted to “get the flow.”
A beautiful day for a funeral, Saturday—funerals. Clearing after a quick April–May rain that left roads and sidewalks running with yellow pollen-water; baby redbirds in a sasanqua near the walk-in gate, squealing at a pitch just inside the range of hearing, a fine engraver’s line; a chinaberry tree in bloom by the wall, purple flowers, purple perfume drifting on air puffs; ten-inch candles on the pines.
And everybody there. Cars parked outside at the curbs as far as you could see, all kinds of cars, from garage-pampered shining new to weather-worn ancient matte, summing up the stories of the owners’ varied hassles with indifferent Fortune; kisses, hugs, handshakes among those who had missed each other in the crowded church, wrist-waves, slaps on backs, now and then introductions between kin who hadn’t seen one another in so long (or didn’t know if they had) that they couldn’t place the strange masks Time had hooked over their ears. Uncle Otis was there, empty left sleeve neatly in coat pocket; Uncle Brownell and the Judge of course. Cousin Angela was there with two tall daughters, all three a little to one side in the shade of a black umbrella (Angela choosing the shade, possibly, on the memory of having been charged, years ago, with hiring somebody for $5,000 to “hit” her husband of twenty-four years—Uncle Deke, in a far corner under a blue-gray stone—and been set free after a mistrial, I don’t know the details).
A reunion such as I wouldn’t have believed possible in our centrifugal family (embracing even more, indeed, than I was aware of at the moment); all kinds of dress, from the latest that Atlanta and our Malls had to offer to choices off the racks at Sears and J. C. Penney, to say nothing of mothballed trunks in attics. Mrs. Eastman and Sister, hostesses, in something dark and svelte from Chicago or the Coast, explaining right and left to kin people who didn’t know what she was talking about, had never seen her or Sister before, had never heard of Eastman or his “Dad” but were there because they had been invited or were ancient enough to enjoy the Funeral Notices every morning in the spirit of sergeants calling the roll to find out who was still present: her youngest, Denver (“he was started in Denver”—snapping back some local chins), left behind in Seattle with his grandmother, had come down with something that alarmed Eastman (“Easty’s quite alarmable, you know, and Denver the apple of his eye”) and he had rushed home yesterday straight from the crematory, sending her and Sister to represent the Bohlens—explaining their presence in her strange voice the way a return address on an envelope will alert or reassure the addressee. Rubber-tipped walking sticks, umbrellas, caps, bare heads, hats, one bowler (Judge Fluther’s, perhaps his father’s).—What with the surroundings, the acre of horizontal and upright family stones, I felt as if I were a part of our own Telfair enclave on the Final Day, some of us rising from obscurity as others were entering it, a movie theater at a break, some entering, some leaving, some still inside, which group one belonged to often hardly indicated by pallor.
Lucinda was there with a woman I thought I had seen before but couldn’t place (common enough puzzle in our farflung family), both of them standing bugeyed by Uncle Nolan, up from Pelican Key with Mrs. Littleberry on his way to Cape Canaveral, as I found out, moving closer to get an idea of what Lucinda was hearing, or thought she was, his words going eagerly into his vision-dream-nightmare of the night before:
“… the Voice said he needed my help. I said, ‘Why me? You need somebody young. I’m going on ninety.’ He said, ‘You’re reliable, Nolan, that’s why. You belong to the days when to have a mortgage on your house was like having piles; you didn’t talk about it. Now everybody’s got a mortgage, and bellyaching the Government won’t pay the interest.’
“I said, ‘Never mind all that, what’s on your mind?’ but he went right on complaining. ‘What’s the matter with you people? You’ve got the Pill, you’ve got cocaine, heroin. Cunts are a dime a dozen—’
“I said, ‘Please! There are ladies present—’
“‘And are you happy?’ says he. ‘Happy? Everybody goes round saying, “Poor me, I’m depressed, give me another mouthful of those tablets.” What do you call a good time, Nolan? You can commit any sort of fancy crime you please, and do you get trashed like any other rotten egg? My friend, you get a free waterproof dormitory, board, lodging, clean clothes, a typewriter for your book, paints for your pictures, everybody outside working like crazy to pay you $20,000 a year in welfare while you get your Master’s—’”
“I said, ‘Never mind all that, what sort of help from me are you talking about?’
“He said, ‘Good, Nolan. You’re on the ball, I like that. First thing you do is get the hell up there to Cape Canaveral, I’ll brief you on the details when you get there. You see what they’re trying to do, Nolan, you’re sharp enough to see that.’
“I said, Of course I saw. ‘They’re setting up a space shuttle to go out there and come back.’
“He said, ‘For God’s sake, Nolan, were you born this morning! They’re getting ready to load up with a hundred million test-tube babies and pull out. They’re going to blow it all to hell just for the hell of it, which is fine with me but I don’t want them dumping all these halfwit babies round the galaxy and starting up the same old mess they’re running away from. I’ll give you the details later. All right, you say what’s in it for you? Good. That’s fair enough. How would you feel about five hundred?’
“I said, ‘Five hundred dollars? I couldn’t do it for that.’
“‘Dollars! I’m talking about five hundred years, Nolan, five hundred more years—I’m not counting the hundred you’ve just about used up—strong, in good health, in your own body so you know where everything is, more girls than you can shake a stick at and a good stick to shake at them—’”
“I said, ‘Hold on there now! If they’re going to blow it all to hell in a few years what happens to the rest of the five hundred you’d owe me?’
“He said, ‘All right, Nolan. I can fix that. I didn’t think you’d see it was a bad nickel …’”
Lucinda saying, “Go on, Nolan, go on. Will you be taking the job?” (scenting a gilt-edged manuscript I don’t doubt), Nolan having broken off at catching a whiff of cigar smoke as Bivins walked in the gate as if “bad nickel” had been his cue, the smoke in a way piping him aboard—arriving appropriately under a cloud and posting himself indifferently on the fringes of the gathering (as he certainly should have, given his status). I left Mrs. Littleberry steering Nolan away from Lucinda’s importunities, Bivins’s arrival fundamentally a relief to me, suggesting that somehow the argument with Uncle Brownell had been resolved, the legal threat been somehow “vacated.”
If there were any raised eyebrows as to the way Mr. Grimes was handling things I didn’t see them, there or at the church—nods and smiles and finger-waves from pew to pew, the whole ceremony in somewhat the class of a theater production which you attended because you had been handed free tickets though you had never heard of the star. Not very different from a publisher’s party I once went to for one of their authors who had hit a big book-club, everybody chattering at a third-martini rate except the “honoree” a quiet young man with a pinkish nose as if from too close contact with the roller of his typewriter; nobody seemed to know he had come, or was expected, by himself against a high view of the City.
Not so much jubilation at the graveside of course but apparently as much indifference to the grave as the others to the guest of honor. Nobody seemed to take any more notice of the grave than one would question the lavishness of the buffet at a wedding breakfast, not tuned to the burial of ashes in our family and having complete faith in Mr. Grimes; the reunion of what Eastman called The Clan was the center of our awareness, old suspicions and jealousies and animosities all laid aside (if they had ever existed), no shortage of tears and dabbling handkerchiefs—which Eastman might have ascribed to memories of “Dad”—but all of it with a warm overcoating of pleasure at conciliation and reconciliation, of the simple and primitive joyousness of reunion, of a sort of brief reinforcement of your hoping you were not down here alone, though at heart you still suspected you were.
In any case Mr. Grimes’s Number-One gray hearse eased through the drive-in gate as silently as a Coast Guard Cutter coming alongside and Mr. Grimes’s young men rolled in the coffin and after suitable words by the Rector managed triggers and switches and lowered the coffin into the ground, the thoughts and eyes of many, if not all, already turning westward toward the Country Club and the “simple luncheon immediately following the ceremonies” to which Mrs. Eastman, in whispers, had invited everyone—everyone, it seemed, but Mr. Grimes (which rather offended Uncle Brownell who had drilled for three years to the hearty pounding of young Sam’s drum in their early days at Frederick Academy).
Perhaps Mrs. Eastman hadn’t seen him, off to one side, blending with the trunk of the chinaberry but as watchful of the proceedings as a football coach on the sidelines or a butler in the dining room of what we used to call “a great house.” Not as young as he was, as we tend to say in the South, even today showing a certain respect for old people, for age, whether we really feel that way or not. Maybe we are more used to old people than Northerners are, see more of them, with our sunshine and flowers and things they like (as Doshia told a woman on a north-south plane who was being critical, “I don’t see anybody retiring to live in Buffalo and Minneapolis, ma’am—the “ma’am” meant as a sort of barb on the needle making it harder to get out). We sometimes refer to a man as “old” but we are more likely to say “well, he’s getting along” (the “well” suggesting reluctance to accuse), or sometimes “getting old” as if for the time being he hadn’t got there. But we are even more likely to scratch out “old” altogether and say he is “not as young as he was,” often adding a “you know” at the end, softening it still further.
For Mr. Grimes “not as young as he was, you know” seems about right; years ago at Mamie’s funeral his young men somehow drove off from The Homestead without him and he apologetically murmured to the Judge, Could he ride to the cemetery with him? “Certainly, Mr. Sam. Get in.” “Some people are squeamish about riding with the undertaker, Judge.” “Hop in, Mr. Sam.” And Mr. Grimes hopped in; he wouldn’t hop in today, I imagine, but fold in his left leg ahead of him and, pushing with his stick, ease in his broad bottom and finally, as if he had all but forgotten it, the newly-shined rubber-heeled high black shoe on his right.
Not as young as he was, and a little foggier. Standing there out of the way almost hidden by the tree, as alone when I first saw him as on the day his young men left him at the curb; then when I looked again, not alone but talking discreetly to nobody else than Miss Becky Farmer.
Who picked her way through the outskirts of the throng and said, “Sam gave me a ride in from the airport,” (“Sam,” if you please), “I was about to catch the bus,” taking no notice of my big-eyed surprise and my uncomfortable feeling—if it showed, and it probably did—of being again at the wheel of a Porsche 911 Carrera that I didn’t understand. “I just heard yesterday through a man in Wilkes City, Bob, of a distributor in New York State who handles small presses. Here’s his name and phone, if you can read my writing,” giving me her business card with pencil marks on the back.
She had been in Wilkes City for Mr. Sanders and caught a Miami plane that let her off at Fredericksville at 9:53 (or some split second). “I wanted you to have this information, Bob. And I wanted to tell you too, Fisherman came in, Johnny’s working on it now—23 pica line, 36 lines to a page. He says it’s not about a fisherman.”
I said I didn’t say it was, and she said, “You said in a way it was.”
I said, “In a way it is,” and she struck me lightly on the forearm, laughing like a quick flutter among the chinaberry flowers and said, “You’re quaint, Bob!” then lowering her voice at the turn of family heads to say, “I phoned the Press from the airport. No answer.”
I said the switchboard operators had probably left early, Saturday and the boss gone to a funeral.
“I missed the first bus, phoning, was waiting for the second when Sam asked if he could give us a lift to town.”
“Us?”
“I wasn’t going to tell you this, Bob, but after all, maybe it’s important. The woman next to me on the plane out of Wilkes City said she was on her way from Indianapolis to Fredericksville for the funeral of a ‘dear Uncle Nolan.’ I thought you said Dad’s name was ‘Bohlen,’ and I wondered if somebody had got the names mixed up, Long Distance and all that—no business of mine though. Then I mentioned I was in printing and we were manufacturing a book for a man in Fredericksville. She gave me a funny look and asked what his name was and I said, Robert Otis.
“Bob, she jumped half out of her pants. I reached for the cup to help her but she pushed it away to pound on the seat back and say she knew it, she knew it. In a minute she said to the window all full of clouds, ‘I knew the son-of-a-bitch would get a book out of it!’ I said, ‘You know the son-of-a-bitch?’ and she said, ‘No, I was only married to him for five years. Does he call me Cathy in the book?’
