A Permanent Member of the Family (5 page)

“Please,” she said in a low voice. “Please let me do this.” She pushed back her hood and laid the curved, rubber-tipped ends of the stethoscope over her shoulders and around her neck.

Howard said nothing. He merely nodded, and she placed the tips into her ears and stepped toward him.

“Will you undo your shirt?”

He pulled his flannel shirt loose of his trousers and unbuttoned it all the way down. Why the hell am I letting her do this? I could just refuse and walk away, he thought. “What about my T-shirt?” he asked. “Want me to lift it up?”

“No,” she said firmly. “I don't want to see it.”

The chest piece at the end of the stethoscope was the size and shape of a small biscuit, and swiftly, as if she'd rehearsed, the young woman placed it directly over the incision in Howard's chest. Then she closed her eyes and listened. Tears ran down her cheeks. Howard put his arms around her shoulders and drew her closer to him and felt himself shudder and knew that he was weeping, too. Several moments passed, and then the woman removed the tips of the stethoscope from her ears and pressed the left side of her head against Howard's chest. They stood together for a long time, buffeted by the wind off the harbor, holding each other, listening to Howard's heart.

A light rain had started falling. In the parking lot below, Betty walked around the front of the van, checked her watch, and gazed up at the couple. After a few seconds, she walked back to the driver's side, got into the vehicle and continued to wait.

SNOWBIRDS

Finally, after years of weighing her pros against his cons, Isabel and George Pelham agreed to shut down their home in the upstate hamlet of Keene, New York, and spend the five winter months together in a rented condominium in Miami Beach. The condo was a two-bedroom sparsely furnished unit on the twenty-second floor of a high-rise on Biscayne Bay, away from the hotels and nightlife. If they liked the neighborhood and made some friends, they would become snowbirds. For a year. That was as much as George would agree to.

Then, barely a month into that first winter, at the end of his fourth tennis lesson at the Flamingo Park public courts, George dropped to his knees as if he'd won the final at Wimbledon and died of a heart attack. On the recommendation of the young intern who certified his death, Isabel called O'Dell's Funeral Home and Crematorium from Mount Sinai Medical Center, where the ambulance had delivered George's body. Then she telephoned her best friend, Jane Deane.

Jane was sitting at her desk in her office at High Peaks Country Day School when the call came. She was the guidance counselor at the school and a part-time psychotherapist in a town where, in the absence of full-time jobs, people more often than not had to rely on two part-time jobs, a reliance in Jane's case enforced by her husband Frank's inability to find work of any kind since losing his Adirondack furniture shop six months ago. Her practice was called Peaks & Passes Counseling.

“Jane, George is dead,” Isabel announced. “He's gone. He had a heart attack this morning, playing tennis. George is gone, Jane!”

“Oh, my God! Are you okay, honey? Is anyone there with you?” A tall, slender woman with dark, gray-streaked hair cut short, younger than Isabel by a decade, Jane had worked alongside Isabel and George since graduating college, until three years ago when the older couple retired from teaching, Isabel at sixty taking early retirement and George at seventy taking late. Jane liked George, there was nothing about him not to like, but Isabel she loved the way you love an older, wiser sister.

One of the work-study students, a junior girl in a dark green dirndl and hiking boots, clumped through the open door of Jane's office, laid a packet of file folders on the desk, and when Jane waved her away without making eye contact, clumped out in a pout.

“No, I'm alone. Except for the doctor. I don't really know anyone here yet,” Isabel said and began to cry.

“I'll come down to Florida, Isabel. I'll take an emergency leave from school and fly right down to help you get through this.”

“No, no, you shouldn't do that! I'll be okay. I'll call George's family, his sister and his brothers. They'll come down. Don't you worry about me,” she said and broke off in order to cry again.

“I'll cancel everything and be there by tomorrow afternoon,” Jane declared.

Isabel gulped air between sentences. She said, “It's just so goddam bizarre, you know? For him to die in Florida, when we only just got here! I was hoping he'd love it here. He was having a tennis lesson. How ridiculous is that? What will I do, Jane? I'm all alone here. I feel lost without him!”

Jane assured her that she wasn't alone, that she had many close friends, and she had George's family members from Connecticut and Cooperstown, who would surely be a comfort to her, and she had Jane and Frank, although she didn't mention that Frank had not been especially fond of George, thought him smug and self-righteous, and while he liked Isabel, he considered her to be Jane's friend, not his.

“George's family. Right. They'll probably blame it on me for talking him into coming here in the first place. And they'd be right,” she said and went back to crying.

“Don't say that! He would have had a heart attack shoveling snow, for heaven's sake.”

 

T
WO HOURS LATER,
having selected a simple mahogany urn for George's ashes at O'Dell's Funeral Home and Crematorium on the mainland, Isabel drove their five-year-old Subaru Outback onto the nearby lot of Sunshine Chrysler on Northwest Twelfth and traded it in for a lease on a new dark brown 200S Chrysler convertible.

The following morning, her best friend, Jane, drove from Keene to Albany in her slightly older Subaru Outback, parked the car in the long-term lot and flew to Miami for George Pelham's funeral. She planned on staying with Isabel for three or four days. Maybe a week. As long as it took to console her friend and help her with the logistics of sudden widowhood. The school headmaster, Dr. Costanza, assured Jane that she could spend all of her accumulated sick days if need be. It wasn't as if she had classes to meet. Everyone on the faculty and in town held George and Isabel dearly to their breast, was how Dr. Costanza put it.

Jane found his manner of speaking, like his bow ties and argyle sweater vests, faintly amusing, and sometimes when speaking with him she imitated it. She said she'd reveal her plans to him as soon as they blossomed and revealed themselves to her.

Though Jane's husband, Frank, had never been close to the Pelhams—he was what was called a Keene native; the Pelhams, like his wife, were “from away,” as local people put it—he respected Jane's friendship with Isabel and told her to stay down there in Florida as long as she wanted. He'd be in hunting camp up on Johns Brook with the guys for the next week anyhow. Maybe longer if he didn't kill his deer right off. They could pull in Ryan whatzizname, you know, the Hall kid, to take care of the dogs.

 

W
HEN
I
SABEL ARRIVED
to
meet Jane at the Miami airport in her Chrysler convertible, top down, Jane was thrown off by the warm, welcoming smile on her friend's broad, suntanned face. No grief-stricken tears, no trembling lips. Jane tossed her suitcase onto the backseat, got in and hugged Isabel long and hard, a consoling hug. Isabel was smaller than Jane, trim, and for a woman, especially a woman her age, muscular. She wore a white silk T-shirt and a flouncy pale blue cotton skirt and sandals.

Not exactly funereal, Jane thought. Taking in the new car, she said, “I like the color, Isabel. I bet it's called something like ‘espresso.' Am I right?” Actually, she did like the color and hoped she didn't sound sarcastic.

“Ha! It's called ‘tungsten metallic.' I wanted ‘billet silver metallic,' but this was the only convertible they had on the lot, and I wanted a convertible more. So, listen, do you mind if we pick up George's ashes on the way home? Since we're in Digger O'Dell the Friendly Undertaker's neighborhood.”

Jane said no, she didn't mind. Isabel's jaunty tone confused her. “Is his name really Digger O'Dell?”

Isabel laughed. “No, but he is friendly. Maybe too friendly. I think it's Rick. Ricardo O'Dell. He's Latino, despite the name. Argentine, maybe.”

While she drove she punched a string of numbers into her cell phone. Steering with one hand and holding the phone to her ear with the other, Isabel cut swiftly—expertly, Jane thought, for someone who never drove in traffic like this—through the snarl of cloverleafs and on- and off-ramps that surrounded the airport. In minutes they were up on Route 112 speeding east toward Biscayne Bay.

Isabel pulled into the sunbaked lot next to the large cinder-block cube that O'Dell's Funeral Home shared with a tire store, and parked. She asked Jane if she'd like to come inside with her. “It's kind of creepy,” she said, “but interesting.” Rick O'Dell had told her he'd be with a client in the Comfort Room when she arrived, but he'd leave the urn with her husband's cremains in the reception area. She could simply take them. Nothing to sign.

Jane said sure, she had never been in a crematorium before. She felt rushed by Isabel, pushed into doing something she'd prefer to avoid, but decided to let it go. Isabel was probably experiencing a wave of grief-induced mania. A way of not succumbing to grief itself. Sometimes that happened after the death of a spouse.

They entered a darkened, windowless hallway. There was a plastic folding lawn chair by the door at the far end, and on the chair a small cardboard carton with a yellow Post-it note stuck to it. On the note someone had written
Isabel Pelham
in red Magic Marker ink.

“I'm reasonably certain that the ashes inside that box are George's, not mine,” Isabel said.

“God, I can't tell if you're being morbid or funny.”

“Both.”

“Let's go. This whole thing is freaking me out a little,” Jane said and turned to leave.

“Wait. Check that out.” Beyond the door was a larger room, a showroom of some kind, lit by flickering fluorescent ceiling lights. On a high four-wheeled cart in the middle of the otherwise empty room was a white casket with its lid up. The interior of the casket was lined in rolled and pleated white patent leather. Except for what appeared to be a bowling ball inside an aqua ball bag, the casket was empty. A vacuum cleaner tank and a length of coiled vacuum hose and extension tubes lay on the tile floor beside the cart.

“Check that out. Don't you just love Miami?” Isabel whispered. She pulled her iPhone from her purse and snapped four quick photos of the scene. “It's so fucking surreal here. Everywhere you look. I'm thinking of buying a real camera and taking pictures of everything. Might be a whole new career.” They could hear the muffled voice of a man speaking Spanish in the Comfort Room farther down the hall.

“That would be Digger O'Dell, the Friendly Undertaker. Comforting some poor widow in the Comfort Room with his hand on her knee. Or maybe they're in the crematorium. I wonder where that is. Probably the basement.”

She made a move to enter the showroom, but Jane grabbed her sleeve and stopped her. Jane said, “Jesus, Isabel, let's go now. You've got what we came for.”

Isabel lifted the small cardboard box from the chair and opened it. Inside was a polished mahogany container the approximate size and shape of an old-fashioned milk bottle. “Like it?”

“The urn? Yes, it's . . . tasteful.”

Isabel held the container by the neck and examined it slowly. “Hard to imagine all of George coming down to just this. Ashes to ashes, I suppose. He was such a big man, over two hundred pounds. Reduced to a pint or so of ashes. ‘Cremains.' Want to take a look?” she said and started to unscrew the black plastic top.

“Jesus, no! Not here. C'mon, Isabel, let's just go now!” Jane said and walked quickly down the hallway to the door, opened it and stepped into the blinding sunlight.

 

L
IKE A
R
EALTOR TRYING
to sell her the apartment, Isabel took Jane on what she called The Tour, first the condo and then the public areas of the building, and Jane learned that her newly widowed friend was planning to live alone in Miami Beach in the high-rise condominium on Sunset Harbour Drive with spectacular views of Biscayne Bay and the downtown Miami skyline across the bay. There was a pool in the building and a health club. An attractive marble-floored lobby with an attendant on duty day and night and twenty-four-hour camera surveillance. Isabel demonstrated how from her glass-walled aerie she could watch the glittering cruise ships glide silently out to sea. She could look down from the terrace and observe the seagulls and pelicans from above. She could spy with binoculars on lovers and smugglers and partygoers in their yachts moored at the yacht club adjacent to her building. Which was how she spoke of it, Jane noticed, as
her
building. Previously in their weekly phone conversations she had called it
our
building.

There was something weird going on with Isabel, Jane thought. She was not prepared for her friend's sprightliness or her suddenly fortified willfulness and new enthusiasms. This was not the Isabel she had known for more than half a lifetime, the woman she had come here to console.

Isabel said, “I love that there are so many blacks in the building and that most people in the city speak Spanish. I never realized how sick I was of being surrounded by people who look and sound just like me. I'm going to learn Spanish,” she said. “You hear a lot of Haitian Creole, too. I'm becoming a permanent legal resident of Florida,” she added. “I'd rather vote here where my vote counts, rather than in New York where I'm just another liberal Democrat. I made an appointment this morning online to get my Florida driver's license.”

“Will you live here year-round?”

“I'll probably use the Keene house in the summer months. At least for now.”

“I thought you and George planned on eventually moving into that Christian retirement community, the one down in Saratoga Springs. What's it called, Harmony Hills?” They were Episcopalians, the Pelhams, not really churchy, but believers. And do-gooders, as Frank called them. At least George was. For years he had spent his summer vacations building houses for Habitat for Humanity. Isabel was sort of a New Age Christian, Jane thought. Isabel and George were more conventionally religious than Jane, who described herself as a Buddhist, and her husband, Frank, who'd been raised Catholic but pointedly claimed to be an agnostic, as if it were a religion.

Isabel said, “God, no. That place was always George's idea. Not mine. He turned seventy-three last June and planned to check into Harmony Hills before he turned seventy-five. While he could still enjoy it, he used to say.”

Jane knew all this, but had never done the math. “Wow. If he'd lived, you'd only be, what, sixty-four? Awfully young to be living in an old-age home, Isabel.”

“No kidding. We had a crisis coming down the road like a sixteen-wheeler. It's not really an old-age home, though. It's called an ‘adult community,' with an assisted-living facility and a nursing home attached, so as your body and mind deteriorate you get shuttled from one stage to the next without having to leave the premises until you're dead. So, yeah. Close call.”

 

T
HE FUNERAL SERVICE
was
held at All Souls Episcopal Church with a small group in attendance. The urn holding George's ashes was placed on a pedestal in the nave with George's Yale class of 1962 yearbook photograph beside it. George's tennis coach was present, along with the rental agent for their condo and six or eight acquaintances from the building, retired northerners, couples they had intended to get to know better but hadn't quite got around to yet. Otherwise the congregation was made up of George's three siblings and a sprinkling of their spouses, children and grandchildren. And Jane, of course, who sat in the front pew next to Isabel throughout the brief service, after having declined the priest's invitation to say a few words about George, share a few memories, tell a personal anecdote about George's lifelong love of the Adirondack Mountains, which the priest mistakenly called the Appalachian Mountains. Jane was slightly phobic about public speaking. One of George's younger brothers spoke of George's love of the Adirondacks, and one of his nephews reminded the gathering of George's willingness to write recommendation letters to Groton, his alma mater, whenever a male Pelham applied for admission.