Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories (6 page)

It was Harold Keehn who had convinced Clarksville to market wooden caskets, the rich grains, the homey cabinetry warmth of it all. And Harold who came up with the idea of planting trees, saplings only, pennies only by way of expense, in cahoots with the forestry department, for every Clarksville casket sold. The Memory Tree Program had been a huge success. It assuaged the baby boomers’ natural concerns about ecology and conservation and renewable resources. He’d pitched the whole market shift at a sales conference in a presentation he called “Don’t Let Your Business Go Up in Smoke” in which he noted the growing popularity of cremation and the natural consumer preference for boxes that would burn. “Permanence” and “Protection” had given way to “Natural Beauty” and “Sensible Choices.” A woman’s right to choose, thought Harold, applied to the recently widowed as well as the recently impregnated, noting the coincident rise in the abortion and cremation rates. “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” he told his bosses at Clarksville headquarters. “Give them plenty of choices.” They called their cremation catalogue
Options by Clarksville
and filled it with urns and cremation caskets.

Had it not been for the drinking and carousing that every
one knew about but no one mentioned, he might have been given a vice presidency, stock options, an office at headquarters in Indiana. As it was they thanked him for his insights and cut his territory. He didn’t care. Inflation kept his commissions high. He had nothing to save for. His dead daughter’s college fund went into a couple of mutual funds and swelled during the 1990s. He had more than he’d ever need. His place was paid off. After Angela had died, after Helen left, very little mattered until he met Joan at an AA meeting in a church basement in Topinabee.

She had looked to be about the age Angela would have been if she had lived. She always listened to Harold carefully when he talked at the weekly meetings. She nodded and smiled when it came his turn to tell how he was powerless over alcohol and his life had become unmanageable or how he’d come to believe that a power greater than himself could restore him to sanity or the particulars of his searching and fearless moral inventory. She would nod and smile and at the end she would squeeze his hand after the Our Father or the recitation of the Serenity Prayer and give him a hug and tell him, “Easy does it, Harold.” She was so happy, it seemed, so very happy. And whatever calamity or sadness brought her to AA, details of which she shared frankly on occasion, she seemed to inhabit a permanent present tense, free of the past and future, afloat on the moment she occupied. She was pretty and had a graceful body and eyes like the blue of the indigo bunting he had only seen once. When Harold asked her if he could ask her out to dinner, she said she’d rather bring him dinner at home. It was a chicken and rice casserole, and pecan pie for dessert. She stayed that night and the night after that and on the weekend they moved her out of the rooming house in Cheboygan, her entire
estate fitting easily in the trunks of their two cars. There had never been any talk of marriage. They were companions and occasional lovers, generous with each other in ways that were new to Harold. He took her walleye fishing and built fires in the fall and winter. She read to him in bed and cooked him breakfast. He took her on sunset cruises along the lakeshore in an old wooden inboard he bought for such occasions, savoring the changing light and night skies and the silence that would sometimes settle between them. She quit her job at the marina where she did payables and receivables. He did most of his business by phone and fax. They went to dinner in Petoskey and Mackinaw City and Indian River, movies in Gaylord and Cheboygan. She abided his long walks, his long silences, his darker moods. Whenever she touched him, or talked to him, or looked at him, Harold felt alive. And though he never could figure out why she came and stayed—she was twenty-three years younger and might have had a more exciting life—his gratitude was manifest and he treated her accordingly.

He bought a small RV and they would leave just before Memorial Day, driving around the country on no particular schedule, returning after Labor Day when all the summer neighbors had returned to their downstate lives. He kept a list of the place names they had been to. She kept albums full of photos, each of them posing for the other, in front of some diner or park entrance or stop in the road. They had lived together there on the lake for over ten years. The best years of his life, he would always say. The best of hers, she would say in return. Only when her death seemed certain had they agreed to marry so that Harold could be her next of kin. Her family in Lansing was long estranged. None came during her sickness or after she died, though Harold made the requisite
phone calls. Whatever happened between her and her family happened years ago, the detachment having achieved a point, apparently, of no return.

Joan’s cancer took a year and a half from first diagnosis, to the surgery to remove a lung, through the radiation and chemo and eventual reoccurrence—the “irregularity,” they called it when it showed back up—to the morning last winter when, after an awful seizure, because it had grown into her brain, she died with Harold sitting helplessly by.

After the burial he’d ordered a stone with her name and dates on it—
Joan Winters Keehn
—but he’d never seen it, though he passed the cemetery often enough: he never thought of her as there. But some nights over the past months, he’d go out in the motor home and sit at the table where they’d play gin rummy nights on the road; or he’d crawl into the bed where they had slept in their summer travels, pressed to one another, his right hand cupping her small left breast in their genial embrace. Some nights alone out there in the RV in the driveway, he’d wonder if it was time to take up drink again. So far he hadn’t on the advice that Joan herself had always given out, that there was no sadness that couldn’t be made more miserable by the addition of a Class A depressant. Still, the brand names of whiskeys were beginning to make their way onto the lists of names he kept—Jameson’s, Bushmills, Powers, and Paddy—with the names of birds and the names of caskets, the names of moons and towns and tribes and names of his lost wives.

Harold Keehn could imagine Adam in the garden, that first index finger working overtime, assigning to every new thing he saw, fresh, orderly syllables—aardvark, apple, elephant, waterfall—as if to name it was to know it or own it or anyway to have, if not dominion over it, some consortium with it. He
wondered how it must have been when that first man first whispered “Eve” and the woman turned to look into his eyes.

When Harold found himself at the south edge of Topinabee, the hum of the highway coming through the woods on his left and the moon on the water on his right, he knew he’d walked too far. How had he lost track of it all? And turning back to go the way he’d come, he wondered if there would be enough light left in the day for the way home. Even at his best pace it would take him nearly an hour. Suddenly he was aware of his body and its pains and aches. His knee was grinding, his feet aflame, the small of his back full of crippling twinges. He was fatigued. The air was getting colder now and the wind off the lake increasing. He resolved to keep, in spite of everything, a steady pace.

He’d quit the casket trade at the right time, Harold thought. It was no longer the permanence and protection of the metal ones, or the warmth and natural attractions of the woods. Now it was all gimmicks and knickknacks. Interchangeable corner hardware—tackle boxes for fishermen, plastic mum plants for gardeners, little faux carrots and kitchen utensils for women who cooked, all molded in plastic—How silly, he thought. And “memory drawers”—the little box-within-the-box to put farewell notes and mementos in—smarmy malarkey thought up by “focus groups” and test markets. Back in his day it was the salesman on his rounds that came back with the best ideas. What the public wanted in a casket, Harold had told the honchos at home office, was a way to “get a handle” on it all—a death in the family—the once-in-a-lifetime aspect of it all. Trouble was it was the ultimate one-to-a-customer deal. And hard enough to get folks enthused about even the one.

Now he was aware of the angling lights that lit the way before him. The golden rays of evening washing through the trees on his right and the silver of the moonrise over the lake on his left illumined the track of railway bed before him. It took his breath away, the beauty of it. His chest was heavy. He sighed.

When Joan’s Princess Mahogany was moved last April, from the stone winter vault to the freshly opened grave, the seams of the boards in the casket lid were splitting where the epoxy had dried in the cold interior of the holding tomb. Condensation, desiccation, extremes in freeze and thaw: Even the best of boxes will eventually rot, he thought. Everything in nature disappears. Harley Flick let Harold bury his daughter’s ashes, the half that he had kept in the house these many years, in the room she never came to stay in, in the same new grave as Joan was buried in. He poured his daughter’s ashes over his third wife’s casket where they filled in the open seams in the lid. Then he borrowed Harley’s shovel and filled half the muddy grave himself before Harley finished the job with his John Deere backhoe.

When Harold turned off the rail easement by Larry Ordway’s cross, the dog lay dozing in the road at the bottom of the drive and hardly budged when Harold walked by. He’d let his stick go miles back. Turning down Grace Beach Road, on the last leg of the journey, he looked back and saw the dark shape of the dog behind him. It was not barking or bothered or giving chase, just following him at Harold’s own pace, silhouetted by the last light of the sun behind it. He was aware of his heart racing and his breath laboring and the general ache of his body sharpening and the fatigue of the long walk overtaking him. If the dog attacked he could not fend him off. But the dog
did not attack, only followed Harold home, footsore, winded, aching, spent.

Harold slumped on the bottom step of his front porch, watching the last light pour out of the day and the moonlight widening over the flat surface of water and the darkness tightening all around him. He avoided the impulse to name some stars that appeared in the firmament, or to name some fish swimming unseen in the dark waters, or whatever living things moved in the woods. He wouldn’t be going to Topinabee. He didn’t want a drink. He wouldn’t build a fire tonight. In his flesh he felt entirely quenched. It was enough to let his vision blur watching the water and the moon and to find Larry Ordway’s dog, if Larry was Ordway’s name at all, curled beside him free of menace, watching nothing happen, thinking nothing of substance, void of memory or purpose or expectation. Neither the names of breeds nor the names of dogs nor the names of their owners troubled him anymore. The dog kept watch all night and did not howl at the rising or the falling moon.

A
ISLING PREFERRED FRENCH
press coffee, pinhead oat meal, cymbidium orchids, and Mahler adagiettos. She loved the tiny courtesies—the door held open, handwritten thank-you notes, engraved invitations, a man who rose when she left the table—a thing Nigel had always done. She found an attention to detail assuring: the pilots’ crisp epaulets, the fashionable scarves of the stewardesses. The way Delibes’
Flower Duet
was played during the boarding process, to calm the possibly anxious passengers, the little packet with the toothpaste and toothbrush and blindfold and booties, the blanket wrapped in plastic, the headphones, the manifest efficiency of the cabin crew dispensing preflight orange juices, their starched white cotton shirts and blouses. British Air seemed, like all things British, more civilized somehow than the American carriers. Aisling wondered if her sense of it was defensible.

She settled into seat 51H of the nethermost World Trav
eler section of the plane with the certain knowledge that even here, in steerage, she would be treated with the same dignity as the balding men and their trophy wives, already on their second cocktails in first class with their personal TVs and cushy quarters.

Bigger seats for bigger asses, is what she thought, a little startled by her sudden hostility but pleased to think that they had to pay so much more for the same time in the air, the same travel, more or less the same amenities. Oh, they might get better movies, real silverware, more legroom, and, of course, first on, first off boarding and deplaning privileges. But at the end of the day they would still be asses—big, fat, balding asses whose wives only traveled with them for the shopping ops, the change of scenery, and the chance of meeting someone really interesting. She rubbed her right temple where a headache was forming. Aisling could identify in herself more sudden shifts in temper lately and a low-grade, ever-present contempt for white males past a certain age—older men with money and position, confidence and self possession. Was it age or the early onset of something? Perhaps a product of her education—postfeminist, postmodern. That she had been briefly married to a man of this description; that she was the daughter of just such a man—these were among the exceptions that proved the rule. No need for the perfect to upbraid the good, she told herself. Even if asses, men could be of use.

Aisling was privately pleased with the size of her own ass, its shape and contour, tiny really for a woman at forty and still very firm. An occasionally vegetarian youth, a whole-foods adulthood, the eschewing of red meats in favor of fish, the odd bit of free-range chicken, no sugars or breads or potatoes, plenty of greens and roughage, brown rice, and regular exercise—jogging
as a girl, long walks as a woman—neither the sedentary habits of an academic life, the shape-shifting perils of pregnancy, nor the occasional binges of chocolate and cheeses or some finer wine; and yes, she would have to confess, every now and then a Big Mac and fries, just for the decadence of it. No conspiracy of age or maternity or indulgence had added more than a dozen pounds in two dozen years to the body she had as a girl of sixteen. “A small package,” is what Nigel had called her during their courtship, when he couldn’t get enough of her. “A small package in a large world,” he would whisper in the voice he had wooed her in. There had been a lovely imbalance to their lovemaking. He was always so grateful, so full of praise, naming her specific parts and his reverence for them. It was his age. They’d married when she wasn’t yet thirty and he was just gone sixty. She’d been his student, then his assistant, then his lover, then his wife, then his widow. Now she was his bibliographer and minder of his reputation. She had his letters and notebooks, his unpublished poems and variorums. And, though her thick black hair was graying, though her dark brown eyes appeared too often tired, and she read with bifocals now, she remained a woman with good skin, a girlish figure in which she took, seeing so many women of her age gone bulky, a secret pride and quiet pleasure. Age was irreversible. But if she was not voluptuous as a girl, she neither sagged as a woman. If her breasts were small—“fried eggs,” her father called them, inappropriately, in her teens—they defied now the pendulous gravity of larger, fleshier, fatter bodies. She had, despite the baby and her age, the bosom of a woman half her age. She looked good in no bra or a Wonderbra, pantsuits or little black dresses, vintage lingerie or plaid pajamas. And she knew men noticed her, and that her figure quickened in them, if not desire, then admiration, even appreciation.

She sat up straight in 51H, tucked the pillow and the blanket on one side of her, the canvas bag with her American publisher’s logo on it, full of magazines, hand cream, bottled water, and travel essentials on the other side of her. She still had plenty of room for comfort—a small package, flying steerage from London to Detroit on British Airways Flight 202 on the last leg of six weeks of literary duties—a professor and poet of note, a person of substance and discernment, trusted and tenured, who though seated in the back of the plane was nonetheless flying on someone else’s dime. She prayed for a vacant spot between her and the red-haired woman, twenty years her senior, applying her makeup in the window seat.

She could have flown as easily in the front as in the back. Money was never the issue with her. She was—though few of her colleagues or students knew it—the daughter of one of Detroit’s first families. Her father had made a fortune in auto parts and owned a share of one of the professional sports teams. He’d established a trust fund in Aisling’s name before she’d started grade school. She’d had access to it since she was twenty-one. She could have drawn on those resources, or on the not-inconsiderable accounts of her late husband. She’d recently sold some of his papers to the university archivist for enough to remodel their bungalow in Burns Park—one of Ann Arbor’s respectable neighborhoods. It had more advanced degrees per capita than even the wealthier exurbs. And she was as well paid as anyone on the English faculty. Still, both the front of the bus and the back had their special privileges and the idea that she traveled for free was more appealing than the idea that she traveled in style.

She watched as other passengers boarded the plane and for a moment wondered if these might be the people she’d be
dying with. Might some malfunction or shoe bomber or flock of seabirds bring the plane down over the Atlantic? Or some small outpost in Scotland—everyone blown to bits in the carnage? The whiff of disaster and mortality was agitating and she searched in her purse for her medication and something a colleague had given her for airsickness. She pressed on the point of the pain in her temple, rubbed her eyes. She wondered if she could get a drink.

She smiled at the cabin steward, a young Indian or Pakistani, passing out pamphlets. He was so pretty. Olive-skinned, dark-eyed, twenty-something, slightly built but muscular. His crisp white short-sleeved shirt with the epaulets, the blue tie. He must be gay, she thought. “The best ones always are. Then she scolded herself for thinking such thoughts—right out of a sitcom or chick flick. But they
are!
she thought, and scolded herself again. She could see that he paid attention to his body hair and the press of his trousers. But if he weren’t, she wondered, which of her parts would his hands first go to—breasts or cheekbone, buttocks or genitalia? Or might he, as Nigel had, trace the slow curve of her eyebrow with his index finger? She did not scold herself for such thoughts, but regretted nonetheless the absence of answers. She sighed, resigned to the prospect that that part of her life was over.

Aisling read the
Menu and Destination Guide
he’d given her. How very helpful, such a nice touch. Like flying in a café instead of a bus. Dinner would be a choice of “Southwestern-Style Chicken Breast with Sweet Corn Salsa and Rice” or “Prosciutto and Ricotta Cheese Lasagna on a Bed of Spinach.” There would be wines and cheeses and a sweet. Detroit’s average July/August temperature was 24 degrees centigrade, the booklet helpfully informed. There was a quick conversion guide:
C × 2
+ 30 = F
. Hotter than either Ireland or England had been and nearly twice as much summer rainfall as the British Isles. The packet included a map of Michigan and the city of Detroit and its environs. Familiarity indeed breeds contempt, she thought. She remembered the packet on the flight coming over, six weeks before. How she had savored the shape of the names:
Marylebone, Bloomsbury, Holborn, Strand, Soho, The City,
and
Mayfair—
she loved the contorted streetscape and the wide slice of the Thames through the middle and she had squinted to look at the names of the bridges:
Lambeth, Westminster, Waterloo
. She’d looked at the space between Theobalds Road and Guilford Street, bordered on the west by Southampton Row and, on the east, by Gray’s Inn Road, in Holborn, where her friend Vanessa lived in Orde Hall Street and where she’d stayed while in London before she and Vanessa took the train from Paddington to Exeter for their duties in Devon. It was Vanessa who had put her name in for the Arvon Foundation course, as someone who would make an excellent co-tutor.

Vanessa had been to Ann Arbor the year before to do a reading and to lecture on Modern British Poets. Aisling had liked her immediately, her poems, her no-nonsense style in workshops and lectures, and her rich midlife sexuality. “Why is it,” she had asked Aisling at the reception following her triumphant reading in the Rackham Amphitheater, “visiting male poets get offers of sex from the graduate students, and visiting women get unsolicited manuscripts?” There’d been a little scandalous buzz about Vanessa and one of the first-year M.F.A. fictionists with whom she had left the reception, arm in arm.

Aisling had invited her to lunch the next day. They had traded books, email addresses, gossip about other poets. They had stayed in touch.

Once the Arvon Foundation had invited Aisling to England, it was easy enough to find other programs willing to host her. She’d read and presented a paper at the Yeats Summer School, lectured at Queens and Cheltenham.

Her colleagues at the university, stuck with their lackluster summer stints at literary summer camps and writers’ colonies, could not fail to be impressed by Aisling’s summer duties in the British Isles. She had sent them postcards of Totleigh Barton—a two-story manse from the twelfth century covered with thatch, surrounded by outbuildings and the green Devon countryside or of Yeats’s grave at Drumcliff, or of Pre-Raphaelites from the Tate Gallery.

In Aisling’s department at the university, most of the men angled for Bread Loaf in Vermont, famous for its flings, or maybe a stint at Yaddo or MacDowell Colony or Sewanee, or a summer term at a nicely situated private college. Only the elders in her department expected to cross the Atlantic on the strength of their work. Some, of course, had been to European conferences in their specialties—Renaissance Writers or Women’s Studies or Translations of Modern Russian Writers. But they were scholars on scholarly business—may as well, thought Aisling, have been bankers or ophthalmologists. Aisling traveled as artist and academic, poet and scholar, maker of beauty and witness to it.

Whatever claims to fame her colleagues had, they would have to admit that she had developed an international standing, however modest. Two slim volumes from a respectable university press in America and now the promise of a book on the shelves in Britain and Ireland. She would add it all to the personal page on the faculty website the university maintained.

She had been flown and housed and fed and paid and pub
licly feted for her time and talents. She had slipped the dull gravity of the everyday schedule and ordinary geography and been borne aloft, by the power of words she had written in private, published in fetching if fairly limited editions, and she was now being returned home from the ancient outposts of the English-speaking world.

“Please fasten your seat belt, madam.”

The pretty Indian or Pakistani was leaning across her, bringing her seat back and tray table to their full upright position. He had one hand on the button on the armrest at her side, the other behind her, moving the headrest forward. She could smell his soap and talcum powder. Something from Harrods or Jermyn Street.

“May I get a drink?”

“We’re about to take off.”

“All the more reason,” she smiled at him.

“Once we’re airborne, I’ll be back around, madam.”

Eye candy, Aisling thought to herself, and scolded herself for thinking it. He must be gay. She scolded herself again.

The plane was speeding down the runway. Aisling closed her eyes and wondered if the pills were working. Though she wasn’t sure of God anymore, she was praying for safety and deliverance. She did not want to die with these people. The whining children two rows ahead of her, the school soccer team at the head of her section, the redheaded woman applying awful lipstick beside her—what if these were her neighbors in death? She had much more living to do.

Suddenly the thought of returning to university in a couple of weeks, the return to the dull routines of the classroom and committee work, the needs of students and colleagues, the pressures of performance—it was all more than disturbing to
her. She was sure it was the source of what was now a splitting headache, the stiffness in her shoulders, a panic taking shape. Whether it was this or the sudden press of mortality that air travel always stirred in her—as the jet raced down the runway toward its takeoff—she resolved to extend her summer travels. She was not yet ready to go home to Burns Park to wait out the remainder of August sweltering in town, preparing syllabuses and lecture notes. No, she would make for someplace without duties or details, social or literary obligations; someplace where she could let herself be pampered and excessive, waited on and catered to, where she could read for pleasure, sleep at all hours, bask in the absence of obligations; where she might restore herself after long travel and hard labor in distant places, before returning to the daily grind of the fall semester. A fortnight of utter self-indulgence, ease, and tranquillity, she thought, just what she needed. This craving for freedom, release, forgetfulness, she would indulge it. She could not only afford it, she thought, she could not afford not to do it—the better for her students in the long run, to restore herself before pouring herself out in service of their needs. Better to return to her office in Angell Hall, to the eventual committee meetings and faculty teas, looking as well rested as she was well traveled. The headaches and insomnia that seemed now her ever-present scourges might be mended by two weeks of ease.