Bitter in the Mouth (15 page)

I had cut my hair shorter than his ever was, but in an homage to him, I had my bangs cut asymmetrically so that they would hang over one eye. I had on a black suit that I had bought at the Salvation Army. The pants were full and wide-legged, and the little jacket was nipped at the waist, the narrow shoulders peaked. I had on a pair of crimson (for Harvard) pumps that made me a full three inches taller. My lipstick was a shade darker than my shoes. My eyeliner was liquid and its application was Cleopatra-like. In my four years at Yale I had learned many good and useful things. One was that there were different ways to hide. One way was to disappear into a crowd. Counterintuitively, another way was to stand out in a crowd. People saw only your costume and your mask, and they turned a blind eye to all that was underneath.

I had carefully cultivated, by the end of my freshman year, a look that Kelly had dubbed “the love child of Sid Vicious and Katharine Hepburn.” I had sent Kelly an issue of the
Yale Daily News
in which there was a photograph of me smoking a cigarette in front of Sterling Memorial, the main library on campus. The photo accompanied an article about how smoking, despite the known health risks, was still “de rigueur” among the visual-arts and literature majors. It was a slice-of-campus-life piece, the kind of feature article assigned to a freshman to see if the cub reporter could wring some interest out of a banal subject. The reporter opined that perhaps the artsy majors all had a death wish because we knew that we would never find employment upon our graduation. I liked the photograph because I was scowling into the camera and giving the photographer the finger. Before sending the clipping to Kelly, I wrote over the body of the article: “Anti-Smoking Propaganda!!” In response, she sent me the descriptive phrase—love child of Sid Vicious and Katharine Hepburn—that I wasn’t sure was accurate, but I liked the sound of it, the possibilities raised by that particular form of aesthetic miscegenation. I wrote back to Kelly that I would try my best to live up to it. By my senior year, I had succeeded and surpassed both of our expectations.

Another passing cumulus cloud.

I wanted to reassure Baby Harper that
we
hadn’t changed. He and I were family, and nothing I could ever do to myself on the outside would alter that. I wanted him to stop examining me with those blue eyes of his, a bit faded from when I saw them last, and to look around him instead, to take in the other family groups that had gathered in the Pierson courtyard, each with a graduating son or daughter at their nucleus. I had experienced nothing in Boiling Springs that could have prepared me for these offspring. Their prep-school rivalries, their exclusive geographies, their rhythmless dancing, their indifference to the bitter cold, their L.L. Bean duck boots. I could have never disappeared into these people. If I had continued to try, I would have continued to fail.

Seeing my grandmother Iris in her coffin had made me understand that simple truth about myself. Even on the day of her funeral, my grandmother was the family’s truth teller. Iris’s face, too light with powder, wore a rueful expression, probably because the mortician had applied her lipstick a bit unevenly. Iris had pre-chosen, in addition to the magnolias and the caterer from Asheville, a carnation-pink dress, size eight, and ivory gloves with three pearl buttons at the wrists. Her satin pumps were dyed to match her dress. The shoes must have been purchased when she was still fat because her feet, now newly svelte, swam in them. A small clutch purse lay on its side by her gloved left hand. I remembered thinking, What do you need up in Heaven, Iris? A mirror, lipstick, and a twenty?

Iris was ready for Walter Wendell and God, in that order. True to herself to the very end, she had died as she had lived: self-satisfied, if not happy. She was the Queen of Hearts and the rest of us were her Jokers. She had occupied her baby brother’s every thought. A full week after rigor mortis had set in, and wasn’t she still telling him what to do? She had taken the occasion of her funeral to trump her daughter one last time. Lopsided lipstick aside, Iris was a stunner in carnation pink. Her daughter was eclipsed in mourning weeds. Iris was always the sun. In her final hours, she had flared and branded us with the Sallow A. We were all, in her eyes, alone in this world. What she meant was that we should follow her example and make the best of it.

With her lipstick smirk, my grandmother Iris looked amused by but not impressed with the magic trick that I had been attempting since leaving Boiling Springs. The disappearing girl could no longer disappear. The little canary, as she was fond of calling me, was therefore trying to transform herself into a white dove. In the process, I was becoming not invisible but nothing, and even with her eyes closed, Iris knew.

After my grandmother’s funeral, I returned to New Haven and threw out my L.L. Bean and J. Crew catalogs, which from day one had shown up unsolicited in my Yale Station mailbox and promised me insouciant uniformity via a pair of khakis and a sweater set in aubergine. I discarded the string of fake pearls and the mock turtlenecks. I returned to the all-black wardrobe that had served me so well in high school, but this time I wasn’t a blank slate. I constructed a persona out of thrift store clothes ripe with mothballs and disturbed dust. I made liberal use of high-octane drugstore cosmetics, with an eye toward classic Hollywood glamour and the other eye cocked toward London’s Kings Road during its punk heyday. The effect that I achieved was that of a visual expletive, a sartorial expression of the bile, acid, and longing that would have otherwise stayed locked inside of me. I wanted to throw myself, bodily and with great élan, into a nonintersecting orbit, a parallel universe to that of my day-to-day world. I was, in other words, almost nineteen years old and finally forging myself.

“Now where’s your hat, Vista Girl?” my great-uncle asked, after he had fully taken in my graduation day outfit. There was that waver again. Baby Harper sounded a bit hurt not to see the fedora, brown felt with a wide cream band, the “something special” that he had given to me for my first flight. He had handed the hat to me along with a wink, as the final boarding call was announced. At the time, I thought that both the hat and the wink were references to our previous conversations about my imminent, but hopefully not permanent, proximity to God, courtesy of American Airlines. I wouldn’t understand that the wink and the hat meant something else entirely until I saw the album cover for “Come Fly with Me.”

Leo would have the record in his collection, and, like all the objects in his life, it was in mint condition, this one kept free from household dust and oily fingertips by a plastic sleeve. The album art was an illustration in cool, breezy Mediterranean hues, featuring a young, lean Sinatra with a rakish smile on his face. Sinatra had one hand extended to a feminine one (the rest of her body was otherwise out of the picture); Sinatra’s other hand was curled into a hitchhiker’s thumbs up. In the background were white airplanes with jaunty red stripes ready and willing on the tarmac, and overhead there was a clear blue sky. It was a come-hither scene, a seduction involving travel, surely the precursor to the Mile-High Club. I would recognize the hat on Sinatra’s head, a familiar thing that, in my mind, belonged first to my great-uncle Harper. When my great-uncle gave the fedora to me, he said he had bought it back in 1957 and had worn it exactly twice. When I saw Sinatra’s album, I would make sure to check its release date: 1957. I was glad to know that at least on two occasions Baby Harper, at the age of thirty-three, was swank and wildly in style. I liked to imagine him as he must have been in those days. I never liked to imagine why he put the fedora away until he was sixty-two, when he gave it to me along with a wink, this long-held fantasy of flight, the promise of traveling fast and light, the romance that once you landed, you were somewhere.

Perhaps my great-uncle asked me about the fedora because he suddenly felt the distance between Boiling Springs and New Haven. He then leaned in and whispered in my ear, “Thomas would have been so proud of you, little girl.” My great-uncle Harper never called me that. Only Iris called me “little girl,” a term so painfully generic yet sweet and endearing all at once. Hearing it in combination with my father’s given name made me drop my face back into my great-uncle’s lapel. This time his arms quickly wrapped around me, and together we made Pierson, Yale, New Haven, the whole state of Connecticut, disappear.

Graduation was meant to impress upon us our special, lifelong status as Yalies. If the past four years hadn’t accomplished it, then the four days’ worth of university-organized events would certainly inculcate us with pride, a sense of privilege (very different from privilege itself, much like a whiff of scandal or a touch of class), and withering prejudice toward those who had spent their youth and tuition money elsewhere. At least that was what I thought at the time, and I wanted no part in this final indoctrination. A college graduation, like a wedding or a funeral, was a ceremony held in your honor but wasn’t really meant for you. Yale understood this. I, being twenty-one and at the height of my self-centeredness, didn’t. I had scanned the list of concerts, performances, nondenominational services, receptions, speeches, exercises, presentations, baccalaureates, and ceremonies, and then I had discarded the list. I had no intention of sending the schedule to my great-uncle Harper. I knew that he, if given the opportunity, would have wanted to attend them all. He was a man who adored the pomp and many of the circumstances. Though I knew that lately he had been availing himself of only one, a ceremony sad and unsettling to most, but not to Baby Harper.

The owner-director of the Cecil T. Brandon Home of Eternal Rest was so impressed, nay, “overwhelmed,” after seeing photographs of Iris’s funeral that he asked my great-uncle Harper to become the home’s official bereavement photographer, part of an ongoing effort to provide a truly full-service funereal experience. When Baby Harper had telephoned me with the news, he spoke at an even faster pace than usual. His words were tumbling, doing somersaults and cartwheels, out of his mouth. His becoming a bereavement photographer was a fine example of how we sometimes didn’t know what our dreams were until they came true. Baby Harper, retired from his job at the library, was already spending his days scanning the obituaries. He was immersing himself in his second favorite hobby, acquiring antiques from widowers. The offer that Cecil, or Mister T, as everyone else called him, made was irresistible to my great-uncle. To be paid to take photographs was, according to Baby Harper, like being paid to scratch an itch. And, of course, working for the Home of Eternal Rest also meant that my great-uncle would be notified, even before the Shelby
Star’s
obit writer, of Cleveland County’s latest expiry. Mister T’s was the funeral home of choice for the county for reasons that were unclear to me. Out of habit, perhaps. Mister T’s was where my father was laid to Eternal Rest. Then Iris. Maybe the last thing that families and friends needed at a time of loss was to get lost on the way to the funeral home. I had told Baby Harper my theory, and he said it was a fine one. He said that he would suggest to Cecil that he use “You already know where we’re located!” as the home’s new slogan. I laughed out loud. On the other end of the telephone line, a single hiccup.

I knew that Baby Harper didn’t need to be paid to attend funerals. He found them to be ideal social gatherings. His reasons were manifold. He liked it when folks got dressed up. Even on the hottest day in August no one would wear short sleeves or a miniskirt to a funeral. He also thought that most people looked more natural—“more like their everyday selves”—when they were photographed crying or on the verge of tears. He was, in addition, drawn to the inherent drama of funerals. They were occasions for solemnity but also fraught with the possibilities of fainting spells, exhortations to the Lord, and even the occasional bouts of coffin-clinging (a performance of love enacted only by widows, as men were socialized from birth to let go). I never thought it contradictory that the man who taught me how to do the Watusi, arms swinging, hips thrusting, hair flying, would find pleasure inside of a funeral home. Joy and grief were physical in nature, and Baby Harper was a man capable of appreciating both.

My great-uncle Harper found his new employer as attractive as his offer of employment. The clearest signal was “Cecil.” From the first conversation that we had about him, Baby Harper never called him anything else. When I was growing up, I knew that Baby Harper liked men. That was never a mystery to me. My great-uncle always sat up a little straighter, sometimes touched the back of his neck, often let out a long breath whenever we saw a handsome man on television, but I didn’t really notice until I began behaving the same way. I registered his desire for male members of the species at the same time that I registered my own desire for them.

I was thirteen when my great-uncle and I watched the film
Giant
together. It was a long and revealing Saturday afternoon in front of the television set. Elizabeth Taylor? We barely noticed. My great-uncle was slumped in a wingback chair, nursing an iced sweet tea. I was sprawled on the divan, picking at the frayed cuticles around my fingernails, trying to tune out the words coming from the television. Rock Hudson? Baby Harper put his iced sweet tea down on the coffee table. (Now
that
was a mystery to me: Why was this piece of furniture so beverage-specific?) I sat up, adjusting my T-shirt and shorts as if Rock Hudson could see that they were twisted and wrinkled. James Dean? My great-uncle was pitched forward in his chair. I slid off the divan and onto the floor in order to be closer to the television screen. Baby Harper and I were unified, dancing without moving a muscle, with our eyes wide open.