A Marriage Made at Woodstock (24 page)

The taxi weaved so in traffic that Frederick thought he might be sick. Herbert had said little during the flight. He was her firstborn, after all. Frederick had always been a bit jealous of that unbreakable bond between Herbert and Thelma Stone. He had even imagined that the two had had a couple of relatively happy breast-feeding years until Frederick came along to create a threesome. The condo looked the same as they had seen it last, pinkish in color and surrounded by planted flowers and shrubs. Frederick paid for the cab as Herbert patted about beneath a pink cement planter for the key.

“Here it is,” he said. “Right where Mr. Regis said it would be.” Frederick was tired from the news and from the trip. He hoped he could find sleep in his mother's condo, a stranger's home. They had discussed it on the plane. They would flip for the guest room, and the loser would sleep on the couch. Neither was ready to sleep in their mother's bed. It was on this bed that the superintendent had found her. “We'll see what it's like,” Herbert had said. “If it doesn't feel right, we'll go to a motel. Mr. Regis is meeting us for breakfast.” Mr. Regis had been appointed executor of the will. Thelma Stone had not trusted either of her sons with such a task.

When they opened the door, the faintest smell of perfume hovered in the air, a scent of lilacs, and Frederick was reminded of his mother's lavender sachets. She had always hung them in closets, stuffed them beneath pillows, put them on laundry shelves, dangled them from nails in the basement. “Why are you trying to make the world smell good?” Dr. Philip Stone would ask his wife. “Because the world stinks,” Thelma Stone had always answered.

“‘When lilacs last in dooryard bloomed,'” Frederick said. Herbert hadn't moved. He stood looking about the room with the face of a child lost in a department store.
What's the matter, little boy? You lose your mother?
Frederick could see a glistening in his brother's eyes. He patted Herbert's arm. Herbert cleared his throat as if to shake off whatever memory was plaguing him.

“What a crazy thing for her to do,” he said, and Frederick nodded. He nodded, but he had been thinking about all kinds of ways to do himself in since Chandra left. Now, faced with the real McCoy, he realized that he'd been only playing martini games with himself. It was 1992, after all. You could buy a book to help you measure out the right pills, remind you to tighten the plastic bag over your head, make the best arrangements for your loved ones. Frederick believed in that book, but obviously his mother didn't. According to Mr. Regis, she had left nothing behind as way of explanation, not even a lavender sachet. But Frederick knew she had said it all the day she held her famous yard sale. “This is a
life
sale,” she'd said

“There are people,” Herbert said now, “a company. They go in after someone has killed themselves and they clean up. You know, so the family doesn't have to. But that's for the messy ones. They're franchising now.”

“At least she left her piece of the world smelling better,” said Frederick. The company was franchising? What was happening to people? Are the unhappy ones born or made? He kicked his foot at a single black shoe, lying on its side by the sofa. There were the usual houseplants, a few books, scattered dog toys. They had agreed to let Mr. Regis's daughter have the poodle. It seemed that Mr. Regis's daughter loved the poodle. The poodle loved Mr. Regis's daughter. A great sin would be committed in separating the two. And the poodle was neither son's idea of inherited treasure.

“It's funny,” said Herbert, “but I thought about Mother a lot after Maggie and I got divorced. I wondered what she was doing, if she ever missed us, the old days, Polly, Dad.” Frederick nodded. “I phoned her once a month, you know.” Frederick nodded again. He did know. He had phoned her himself several days earlier in order to clear up an early mother-son conflict.
The
tonshills
are
masses
of
spongy
lymphoid
tissue
situated
at
the
sides
of
the
throat
, Mr. Bator whispered respectfully. A car pulled up to the condo next door and excited voices rose into the air, car doors slammed, then all was silent.

“I thought those monthly calls depressed you,” Frederick said.

“They did,” said Herbert. “She rarely wanted to talk. She usually answered my questions with a yes or no. Sometimes she just hung up after a few minutes.”

“She was sick,” Frederick reminded him. She
was
sick, tormented by the same dark depression that had lived for so many generations in her family's genetic makeup. But there had been pills to take and she had felt better. At least Mr. Regis said so. When her bothersome sons left her alone, she even found pleasure in walks along the ocean, in her dog, in picture puzzles.

“I've been thinking about the last time we saw her,” Herbert said. Frederick didn't bother to nod this time. How could either he or Herbert forget the Mother's Day visit they had paid Thelma Stone? They hadn't seen her in almost four years. The trip was Herbert's idea. “She'll be glad we came, you wait and see,” he'd told Frederick. Thelma had spent most of the afternoon out on the beach with her poodle, coddling it, allowing it to empty its bladder, to chase a rawhide bone, to bark at the laughing gulls. Her sons had waited inside, watching through the condo's bay window. It was the last time they would see her alive.

“Look at all these pictures,” Herbert said now as they moved forward into the room. Frederick had just noticed them, too, and they overwhelmed him. Everywhere he looked were photos of their dead sister, Polly. Polly on her first bicycle. Polly with her first dog. Polly on the way to her eighth grade prom. Polly about to blow out sixteen candles. Polly as a cheerleader. Polly at her wedding. Polly, Polly, Polly.

“I didn't think they even liked each other,” Frederick said. He heard a crack in his voice.

“Women stick together, even in death,” said Herbert. He put a framed photo of Polly, aged seven or eight and holding a kitten, back onto a shelf. But Frederick was wondering what had happened to all those photos of the male Stones, nearly fifty years of photos.

“There isn't a single picture of any of us men in here,” he said. “None of Father, none of us, none of the uncles, not even of her grandsons. Where could all those photos have gone?”

“She probably piled them on the beach,” Herbert said, rubbing his finger across another dusty frame. Beneath the glass, and as though it were a transparent sepulcher, Polly was holding her baby daughter. “She probably sent a picture out each time a wave came in. We're all gone now. Gone to sea.”

“Let's get a motel room,” Frederick said.

• • •

It would take them two days to make the preparations to bring Thelma Stone back to Maine. On the second day, one of the sunniest that even Florida could conjure up, they watched the coffin being loaded into the stomach of the plane. Frederick had bought sunglasses at an airport shop, rickety things that cost him twenty dollars. Standing there in his shades, with Herbert beside him, two aging men with dark rings of sweat under their arms, Frederick had felt almost foolish, as though he were in a scene from
Casablanca
that had wound up on the cutting-room floor.

“I'm the oldest in the family now,” Herbert said as the empty hearse made a dramatic U-turn away from the plane and sped off. Frederick didn't reply. He wasn't just next in line. He was
the
only
one
in line. He and Herbert shook Mr. Regis's hand in farewell and then went on a desperate search for the nearest bar. Herbert's hands were trembling, and there was still time for a quick shot before the flight.

Just south of Boston they hit a tremendous rainstorm which rocked the plane. Water raced across the windows in quick streaks. Off in the distance, Frederick could see lightning erupt in magnificent veins, all sheer power and force, indifferent as to whether it blew the plane into fragments, indifferent as to whether everyone aboard would die. In the mind of the storm, all the passengers sitting up above in comfortable seats were no different from the passenger who rode below, in the coffin her sons had chosen for her, in her last long sleep. Frederick thought about Chandra, down there on the ground somewhere in Portland, Maine, scurrying about in her new life, unaware that he rode above the clouds in a fury of wind and rain. More turbulence struck the plane and a woman sitting somewhere behind them screamed. Frederick closed his eyes. They would be on the ground in twenty minutes and it would be over. He felt something touching his hand, seeking out his fingers. He opened his eyes and looked down. It was Herbert's hand, his big brother's hand.

“Damn it, Freddy,” Herbert was saying as Frederick grasped the damp hand and squeezed it. “She was only sixty-six years old.”

• • •

When Frederick finally stood before his own door, at the Victorian house on Ellsboro Street, a special letter was waiting for him in his mailbox. He sniffed at it first, wondering if he would smell lilac seeping out from under the flap. It was a business envelope and had Chandra Kimball-Stone's name typed in the return corner. The address she listed was in care of the Portland Law firm of Beal, Vincent, & Farris.
Dear
Frederick
, she began. Well, that was friendly enough. He perused the letter quickly. She had obviously gotten all her linen put away, all her furniture arranged in the proper places, all the souvenir magnets attached to her new refrigerator, because now she was ready for the divorce.
I
hate
to
have
to
do
it
this
way, but I feel that it's best.
Along with her letter Frederick found a document politely referred to as “marital dissolution papers.” He would only have to sign his signature, agreeing to split things fifty-fifty. That sounded fair to him. His overnight bag in one hand, he stuffed the letter into his shirt pocket with the other.

“Hasta la vista, O woman of my dreams,” he mumbled as he let himself into the darkened house.

The funeral services could have been mistaken for a golf foursome, so tiny was the gathering. Along with Frederick and Herbert were the priest and old Mrs. Cary, who had lived next to the family Stone all those years of their growing up.

“I still use that lovely silver tea service I got from your mother's yard sale,” Mrs. Cary said. She had puffed her way up the grassy hill to Thelma Stone's grave site. Frederick had thought Mrs. Cary might also be among the dead, but he had looked in the phone book anyway, and there she was. He decided it was only fitting to let her know about Thelma Stone. After all, they had been friends for years. In fact, she had been Thelma Stone's
only
friend. He was glad he had called and to see her in attendance. Her son, Mrs. Cary announced with pride, was waiting for her in a car by the front gate.

Then Maggie Stone appeared, creating a fivesome. She looked good for a woman who spent every hour of her day harassing Herbert, plotting outrages against him. At least this was Herbert's assessment of how Maggie passed her time. She gave Frederick a quick hug, which surprised him. “Maggie never liked you,” Herbert had told him weeks earlier. She had cut her hair short and now it was frosted a soft blond. She wore a neat cotton suit, the skirt quite short, at least for Maggie. She looked darn good, just as Chandra had looked good. Was this what a few weeks away from Stone men could do for one's constitution?

“Is Chandra coming?” Maggie asked, and Frederick shook his head. He had for a fleeting moment considered phoning Lillian and asking that she pass the news of his mother's death on to her daughter. But he had changed his mind. And he doubted that Chandra read the Portland obituaries these days. She was too busy reading marriage dissolution papers.

“Freddy's gonna say a few words,” Herbert told the priest who had come at Herbert's bidding. Thelma Stone had been a Catholic the last time anyone could remember her going to church. The priest nodded. He appeared relieved. It was the first time Frederick had heard anything about his delivering a eulogy.

“Herb,” he said. “I didn't prepare anything.”

“That's okay,” said Herbert. “Just wing it.” It was their mother's funeral.
Wing
it?

“But what should I say?” Frederick asked. “Why didn't you tell me about this earlier?”

“Just say a poem,” said Herbert. Frederick stared at his brother. He had a sudden urge to push Herbert into the gaping grave before them and cover him up with six feet of dirt. He would make sure that his cell phone did not get buried with him. He imagined irritating, late-night phone calls from Herbert.
You
better
get
down
here, Freddy. This place is crawling with nubility.

“That's so like him,” Maggie leaned toward Frederick and whispered. “I know, believe me.”

Frederick looked down at the coffin before him. What could he say? “This is a life sale?” The aroma of the flowers sent over by Herbert's clinic rose up to meet him and he imagined the smell of lilac. Could he say, “She was one who tried to make the world smell better because the world stinks”? He ran through the index file in his head of poems he had loved. This was not a time for Yeats's shuddering wall, so he decided upon something from the early work, although he could not remember the title or the entire poem. He remembered only the refrain, and that became his mother's eulogy.

“‘Come away, O human child,'” Frederick said, “‘to the waters and the wild, with a fairy hand in hand, for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.'”

His legs swayed beneath him and he felt as though he were standing on stilts. He heard Herbert sob and then Maggie consoling her ex-husband. He wished he had called Chandra. But how could he have known it would be this difficult? How could he have known he was still not ready to let his mother go, this sleepy woman who wanted nothing more than that her sons be seen, not heard, and preferably neither. Now Maggie was comforting him, her hand warm on his arm, the soft, sweet touch of a woman. He had missed this nurturing element which Chandra had once provided, even if it was only to allow him, in bed, to hold her sleeping body. This kind of nourishment couldn't be supplied by Doris Bowen's touch, or her money, or her cool white pants that never seemed to dirty. Frederick took Maggie's hand in his. He brought it up to his face and held its warmth against his cheek as though the hand were a pulsating bird. He saw tears rush into Maggie Stone's eyes.

“Forgive me,” Frederick whispered. He could see by Maggie's face that she was puzzled. “For all those years of ignoring you.” He remembered family gatherings when he may not have spoken more than a single word to her, a quick hello. He had never imagined that she possessed a mind he could find interesting. Now he saw in the cut of her hair, the style of the new cotton suit, a woman determined to change old patterns and get on with the new. He saw someone
strong
, and strong is what he himself wanted so desperately to be.

“Let's go for coffee,” Maggie said. Herbert had dried his eyes on the tissue she had given him and was now staring off at other graves, other human children who have gone to the waters and the wild.

“You two go,” Frederick said. “I have to clean the attic today.”

He watched as they weaved their way among the gravestones, the priest in the lead and old Mrs. Cary bringing up the rear, their four heads disappearing finally below the horizon of headstone and hill. Vanishing, it seemed, into the very earth. On the opposite edge of the cemetery, a blue pickup sat waiting, sunlight glinting from its rearview mirror. Frederick could see cigarette smoke wafting from a side glass. The grave diggers were waiting for him to leave so that they could finish their job. He looked down at the huge hole near his feet, a bigger hole than she would ever need, the casket towering above it.

“Come away, O human child,” Frederick said again. He kicked his toe at the ridge of the grave and a small rivulet of ground and pebbles rolled down into it. “For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.”

• • •

He had left the grave site and was almost home when another wave, a swell of loneliness, gripped him. He felt left out, abandoned, the way he had felt for every football game that Portland High ever played, with guys like Richard Hamel sweating and virile and envied in their grass-soiled uniforms, the cheerleaders going wild, their hormones tossing them farther into the air than they'd ever imagined, pure leaps and bounds of estrogen. And afterward, at the local diner, the jukebox would bleat out songs like “This Diamond Ring” by Gary Lewis & the Playboys, or “It Hurts to Be in Love” by Gene Pitney, or “Yesterday” by the Beatles, or “The House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals. And it was all so wonderful because it
did
, it did
hurt
to be in love with Leslie Ann Doody, the head cheerleader. It hurt like hell to watch Richard Hamel leaning against the jukebox like some soldier home from the war, still in his battle-soiled uniform, the protective cup beneath his pants subtly suggesting to the giggling cheerleaders who had gathered around him that the greatest mystery of their lives was still to unfold. As Frederick and the other Portland High
Bugle
staff sat in one of the less popular booths, the booths farthest from the jukebox and nearest the restrooms smelling of pee, he would find himself hypnotized by the display of Richard Hamel's engorged protective cup, those secretive laurels of war hiding beneath it, that special equipment that had outfitted Richard for the rigors of combat, yet had given Frederick Stone the kind of prowess it would take to edit the Portland High
Bugle
, to write unfinished love poems for Leslie Ann. “Son, you just don't have the balls for this kind of sport,” the coach had pulled him off the field to say. “You don't have the killer instinct. Why don't you write for the school paper? Join the glee club?” With a different mechanism in their genes, in their very Fruit of the Looms, Frederick and the other bugle boys had watched the athletes from their booth with its cracked red Naugahyde. They had ogled the luscious cheerleaders and had assured themselves that they didn't care a whit because the day would come when they would be publishers of magazines, famous poets and novelists, world-class journalists. And where would the Richard Hamels be? Where, pray tell, would the Richard Hamels be?

At the traffic light on Harrison Street, the very place where he had chased after his wife, Frederick turned the car around. Gulls rose and fell over the turquoise waters of the bay. Sailboats were busy sailing. Tourists blended into the stretch of beach. A whole world was taking place without him. He drove back toward the cemetery and his mother's fresh grave. When he arrived at the gate, he saw their heads bobbing up and down like birds feeding. He heard the crisp bite of their spades shoveling earth. They were no older than he, Frederick decided, maybe even younger. Had these two men dreamed, once, from a cracked Naugahyde booth, that they would head major newspapers, would write the best war novel, would have only the loveliest of women strung upon their arms? Surely they hadn't longed, as children, to grow toward the day when they would bury the dead for the living. Had Burke and Hare been Irish schoolboys who dreamed of growing up to supply medical schools with murdered corpses? Where did a person's dream twist and coil backward on them? Where did a dream go wrong?

He had intended to sit in his car and watch, maybe even listen to the sounds of gravel being flung onto the casket, but he found himself graveside. Not even he knew anymore what he might do. Life had become one big mystery. The workers didn't hear him approaching, his footfalls lost upon the soft padding of graveyard grass.

“I only paid eight hundred bucks for it,” one was saying, his words punctuated with a jab of the spade. “All it needs is a good tune-up.”

“It'd look real good with chrome wheels,” the other said. Frederick stood behind them, peering into what was left of the hole. The mixed aroma of fresh gladioli, of fresh earth, of fresh summer air was almost invigorating to him. Only bits of the casket could still be seen, a gray wood peeping through the earth here and there. When they turned and saw him standing there, the shovelers stopped their work instantly. They leaned on their shovels, uneasy looks on their faces, men who expected to be caught for things they'd done years ago, jailed for childhood misdemeanors. Such is the terror of the underclass.

“We was told to finish up here,” the one wearing a Red Sox cap said apologetically. Frederick wanted to put them at ease, to be friends with the men who had not only dug his mother's grave, but were now filling it up. He looked from one to the other. What could he say to them?
Come
away, O human child
? Or
How
about
those
Red
Sox, huh?
He needn't tell these men that the world's more full of weeping than governments can understand. He needn't tell these men anything. He merely nodded. Then he reached a hand out, offering to shake, but the hatless man misread his intent. The hatless man, instead of shaking, passed Frederick his spade.

“Are you sure, man?” he asked Frederick.

For a second Frederick considered handing the spade back. But in his hands, it felt powerful. Just in gripping its handle, he felt he understood what his ancestors had probably learned about a hard day's work. Sometimes, it was good for the soul.
The
mattock
was
a
primary
agricultural
tool
for
Neolithic
and
ancient
peoples
around
the
world
, Mr. Bator reminded him.
It
was
used
for
the
loosening
of
soil.
Frederick nodded a thank-you to the hatless man. Men were meant to work with their hands, to use them in some kind of labor. Now he was no longer a bystander in his mother's death. He was included. He would not need to sit in the Naugahyde front seat of his car, as though it were a smelly booth at the diner, and watch this turn of events. He would participate.

He took off his suit jacket and tossed it onto the grass beside a flower arrangement.
Dearest
Friend
, the banner read. It must have come from old Mrs. Cary. Frederick was glad that Mrs. Cary had grabbed up the silver tea service from the yard sale. What good was a silver tea service in the wash of a lifetime? He had read about Anglo-Saxon tribes who took all the belongings of a dead man, seized them from his widow, and piled them on the outskirts of town. Then the men mounted their horses and raced toward the booty, the winner taking all. That had been a kind of primitive yard sale, that dispersal of a man's life. Frederick understood, now, his mother's statement. “This is a life sale.” Sometimes the two were interchangeable.

The hatless man sat back on the little hillside, wiped his brow, and then popped a cigarette out of its packet. He lit up. Smoke curled into the blue air, a sweet soft smell of tobacco, the way it must have smelled to those first settlers of Virginia when tobacco was still an agreeable thing. With each spadeful of earth that he lifted up, Frederick offered a silent mantra, a litany of good-byes to his mother. The man in the Red Sox cap went back to work, his spade biting the loose ground next to Frederick's, the
splat
of his earth sounding in harmony behind Frederick's own
splat
on the coffin's lid. They labored side by side, two sweating men. Two men getting a job done. Frederick wished that he was bilingual enough to speak the Language of the Male. They could chat about chrome wheels, and tune-ups, and the Red Sox. Could the three of them sit together over Budweisers like men do in those beer commercials and toss back a cold one? Frederick could see himself peering into the black eye of the camera:
You
know
what
I
like
to
do
once
I've buried my mother?
he'd ask, and then the sound of a beer top popping, a slow fizzing noise.
I
like
to
sit
back
and
enjoy
a
cold
Bud
with
my
fellow
grave
diggers.