Dressing Up for the Carnival (24 page)

And his tall and by now greatly withered body was laid out on the bare floor of the coffin without a stitch to conceal his nakedness and not even a blanket or sheet for comfort’s sake. This was not his request, but my grandmother’s, grimly decreed when the family gathered to discuss the “arrangements.” She insisted it would have been what he wanted, and since the coffin was to be closed, what difference did it make. She also insisted that Mrs. Kate Hammond be barred from the funeral.

“It is impossible to bar anyone from a public funeral,” my father insisted.

“Then she is not to be invited to stay for coffee afterward,” my grandmother said. “She will probably come anyway, but she is not to be explicitly invited.” She said this sternly, punitively it seemed to her family, in an attempt to outflank her dead husband, but by then all of us had learned to shrink from the anger that deformed her last years.

Her own death, pneumonia, occurred a mere eighteen months after my grandfather’s. She too had specified in her will a plain pine box, with the additional written request that her body be put to rest unclothed and that the coffin be left open at the funeral.

It was as though she had hungered for this lewd indiscretion, as though some large smoldering ugliness had offered itself to her in her last days and she had been unable to resist. That’s what I thought at the time.

Now I think of that final gesture differently. (Needless to say, the family did
not
honor her final request, the pine coffin, yes, and yes to the naked body, but the lid was firmly closed.) It seems to me now that an offering was made on her part, heartbreaking in its impropriety and wish for amends. This desire perhaps had acquired a grotesque life of its own, with a vividness that could find no form of expression in the scanable universe. “The unclothed body,” she might have said, pouring into that vessel of a word a metaphorical cleansing, “is all we’re allowed to take away with us.”

The rest must have fallen away in the same moment she wrote down the words of her will: the draperies, the coverings, the fringe and feathers, the wrappings, the linings, the stuffings and stitching. Good-bye, she must have said to what couldn’t be helped. Good-bye to the circular life of shame and its infinite regress.

She must have thought she could get everything back by a single act of acquiescence. In the next world, just a breath away, the two of them would greet each other rapturously. Their revealed limbs would flash among the bright vegetation, at home in the green-clothed world, and embracing each other without restraint.

She would have forgotten that nature’s substance is gnarled and knotted in its grain, so that no absolutely straight thing can come of it. They should have understood that all along, those two. It might have become one of their perishable secrets, part of the bliss they would one day gladly surrender.