Making Toast (3 page)

“Anything you’d like to ask Arthur?” Ms. Carone says to the others.

One girl asks, “Does your superhero tell the truth?”

Arthur thinks and says yes.

“Always?” the girl asks.

Late in February, I have a literary “conversation” with Alice McDermott as part of a series at the 92nd Street Y in New York, in which I ask writers questions about their work. Alice and I sit in chairs angled toward each other on a large stage in an auditorium. Hundreds of people look up at us. Usually, I feel comfortable at such events, more so than in less heightened social situations, because when you’re at the center of a public event, you’re alone. This being my first time in public after Amy’s death, however, I feel tense and out of place. Alice’s gentleness and thoughtfulness put me at ease.

We talk about
After This
, her novel about the Keane family, whose son is killed in Vietnam. The novel centers not on the death, but rather on the family’s grief, which challenges their faith in God. I ask Alice what God has to do with it. Isn’t life just luck, good and bad? She says we have to believe in God’s overarching good will. “Even as we face unbearable sorrow,” she says, “small things happen that make us able to bear it. John and Mary Keane face the greatest tragedy that a couple could face, and yet things happen in their lives that bring them back to moments of joy.” Alice ascribes such moments to God’s benevolence. I cannot tell if she sees that I do not.

Whenever the inspiration strikes, I launch into the “Boppo National Anthem,” which had its debut in Bethesda a couple of years ago and appeared an immediate success due to the composer’s exuberance:

Sometimes, Sammy will change the last line to “I hope he’s not stinky,” indicating that adoption of the anthem will not be universal. When I tell him I plan to teach the anthem to his entire school, he looks terrified. “In real life? But there are five hundred kids in the school!”

“Yes! Think of it!” I tell him. “Five hundred children, all singing ‘Boppo the Great’! You’ll be so proud. And you
do
love that song!”

“I
hate
it!” he says. “I only sing it to make you happy.” I grab him and sing “The Laughing Drum,” another original ditty, to which I play his tummy like a tom-tom, and tickle him silly.

Amy would make up songs for the children, too. She used to sing, or chant:

Carl used to inform her that “you’re so fun” was a poor use of English and suggested that the addition of “much” before “fun” would constitute a grammatical and literary improvement. Amy would let him know how she appreciated his constructive criticism. I thought her song cute, though, as I told her, I felt it lacked the grandeur of an anthem.

Just before Jessie was born, Amy asked Ginny and me and Dee and Howard, what our grandparental names would be. Everyone else chose something sensible. Ginny chose “Mimi,” after her own grandmother. I chose “El Guappo”—the handsome one—the nickname of an ineffective former Red Sox relief pitcher. As a Yankee fan, I appreciated El Guappo’s ineffectiveness. Amy disapproved of the name, but let it slide. Things worked out in her favor. The babies could not pronounce El Guappo, thus Boppo. “Such a sad story,” said Amy. “He thought of himself as the handsome one, but he became a clown.”

Yet the name has advantages. One morning Jessie had Hannah Montana’s “Nobody’s Perfect” cranked up to an obliterating level. “Turn it down, Jess,” I told her. She obliged by grudgingly diminishing the volume one-hundredth of a millimeter. I scowled. She lowered the noise even less. “Turn it down, Jess!” She stomped over to the CD player, turned it off with a dramatic flick of the hand, stormed upstairs, and would not speak to me for much of the rest of the day. She was also grumpy with a playmate. “What’s the matter with you?” I overheard Harris ask her. She said, “I’m mad at Boppo!” How long can one be mad at Boppo?

“Won’t anyone in this family play Twister with me?” Jessie stands before the sectional in the TV room on which Ginny, Harris, and I sit. Ginny and Harris remain mute. “Won’t anyone in this family ever play Twister with me?”—her voice plaintive, her palms turned upward like an evangelical preacher’s. Not a word or gesture from Ginny or Harris. “I’ll play with you, Jess,” I say—forgetting why Twister is called Twister. Harris chuckles malevolently. “Oh thank you, Boppo!” says Jess. “You’re the only one in this whole entire family who ever plays with me!”

Carl picks me up at the house, and we drive to the Verizon Center in downtown Washington, to watch a Georgetown basketball game. One of the bright spots of our new living arrangement is that Ginny and I get to see more of him, Wendy, and the boys. He tells me that Amy had called Wendy on the Wednesday before she died, and that she had left a long message on their answering machine. “I kept A’s message,” he says. “Would you like to hear it?” I tell him no. “I understand,” he says. “But if you change your mind, let me know. The message is so Amy. She was buying Christmas presents for Andrew and Ryan, but as she was talking, she remembered that they might overhear her message. So she was trying to tell Wendy what the presents were without coming out with it. It’s very funny. Nothing sad. It actually makes me happy to listen to it.” I tell him thanks, but no.

Carl, John, and I had stood together on the deck in Bethesda the day after Amy died, and wept. Arms around one another, we formed a circle, like skydivers, our garments flapping in the wind. I could not recall seeing either of them cry since they were very young. I am not sure they had ever seen me cry, except on sentimental occasions. John’s tears came to rest on his cheeks. He looks a lot like Carl, but his features are sharper. He is dryly funny, like his sister, but his wit is proactive. He has an ear for cultural bullshit, and mimics clichés in a sonorous, mock-serious voice. Ginny and I rely on him for assessments of current movies. Like Carl, he is gracious with others. Like Carl, too, he is zealous about sports and will threaten to annihilate the TV screen whenever there’s a bad call or a bonehead play. The two brothers are very close, as they were with Amy. She was nearly three years younger than Carl and nine years older than John, and her force of character seemed to civilize the two of them. The trouble with a close family is that it suffers closely, too. I stood with my two sons in the cold and put my arms around them, feeling the shoulders of men.

Carl’s boys have been made apprehensive by Amy’s death. Seeing that it is possible to lose a mother, they fret when Wendy is out of the house, asking frequently where she is and when she is returning. They watch at the window. They brood about Amy. Three-year-old Ryan told Carl, “I wish I could jump to the sky.” Ryan is big, born at just under ten pounds and growing at a giant’s rate ever since. He sometimes thinks of himself as a superhero with superheroic powers. “Why do you want to jump to the sky?” Carl asked him. “I’d jump up and grab Aunt Amy and bring her back,” he said.

Neither Wendy nor Amy had sisters, but they found one in each other. It was fun to hear the two of them laugh and conspire. If you were walking behind them, they looked like twins—same height, same build, with their heads tilted toward each other. Wendy favors family over work, as Amy did, and gave up a position as a senior health policy analyst when she had children. She is direct, like Amy, one of those people who answers the question you ask. She also keeps me in line the way Amy did. One summer, she brought me a gift of Trivial Pursuit—the “Know-It-All” edition. Yet the two women were just different enough to make their friendship interesting. In her eulogy, Wendy told a story of Amy’s amused, sardonic reaction to the environmentally pure paper Wendy used in her home. Risa Huber, her sister-in-law, was with them. Risa picked up a sheet of the paper, which disintegrated at the touch. “What’s this?” she asked. “Exactly,” said Amy. When Amy died, Wendy told Carl, “We’re all angry. But no one is angrier than A.”

There are things I don’t want to know and things Ginny doesn’t want to know. The doctors we consulted after Amy’s death differed just enough in their speculations to leave room for anguish. Ginny wants to pursue the question to get to a more definite answer. I have hesitated. I do not wish to hear how extraordinarily rare Amy’s condition was, and how even rarer it is that someone dies from it. One cardiologist I spoke with early on said flat out that however unlikely it is that someone was born with Amy’s heart structure, the anomaly is almost never lethal. To find out, definitively, that Amy’s death was one in a million or a trillion would only deepen my anger.

On the other hand, Ginny declined to view the open casket before the funeral. The funeral director had asked if we’d wanted the casket opened, and, having no practice in such choices, Harris and I said we did—for the pre-service “viewing,” but not for the service itself. Harris, Carl, Wendy, John, and I, and Amy’s and Harris’s friends, the Hales, attended the viewing. Ginny would not. She did not want that to be her last image of Amy. She may have been right. The figure in the casket—her hair done like Amy’s, wearing Amy’s new favorite brown dress and a shawl with tones of brown and red—seemed less our daughter than a semblance. One by one we approached to say our goodbyes. Out of habit, I touched her hair.

Harris buys Sammy a punching bag, an Everlast heavy bag, which hangs on chains from the ceiling in the playroom. When Sammy isn’t using it, I do.

Ginny and I met in junior high school, and have known each other for more than fifty years. Laughing noisily with my friends, I looked up from my desk and saw the new girl, the first elegant thirteen-year-old since the British monarchs. Yet she has remained something of a mystery to me. She is without vanity. When I ask her about this, she says simply, “I was lucky to be born with a beautiful face.” What might sound outrageous or wishful thinking in someone else seems a factual self-assessment.

She does have a beautiful face, the kind movie directors of the 1930s and 1940s might have looked for. It is not the siren’s beautiful face, or the ingénue’s; it is the face of intelligent virtue into which you read qualities such as competence, endurance, and acceptance of one’s lot, along with a veiled sexiness—the face of the good wife and mother. Claudette Colbert had such a face, as did Joan Fontaine and Irene Dunne. Ginny is more beautiful than all of them. She acknowledges her looks as a way of dismissing their importance. Vanity is inapplicable to her life.

She has never had a lift or a tuck or a Botox treatment. “My hair and my nails,” she says. “I’m vain about them”—meaning she has them done when she has the time. The subject of self-indulgence comes up with us these days because it is out of the question. Before Amy died, the big decision of our day was where to have lunch. “Our friends live by choice,” she says. “What choice do I have?” The question is asked with a kind of satisfaction, in spite of the horror that occasioned it.

“I think my whole life has led up to this moment,” she tells me. “When Carl was born, I felt I was coming into my own, to be a mother. It’s what I love to do. I know who I am.” Her motherly decisions are without premeditation, like an athlete’s. When Bubbies starts school, she will take him every day, and not relegate that duty to Ligaya, because she knows that as able as Ligaya is, Mimi will be as close to a mother as Bubbies, Jessie, and Sammy will have from now on. “I’m comfortable doing this,” she says. “And neither of us would have been able to pull it off if we hadn’t been around a lot before Amy died.”

There are outlets for her. She writes poems from time to time, and takes photographs. She founded a book club with Meredith Brokaw, consisting of some twenty remarkable women who have kept in constant touch since Amy’s death. At a surprise birthday party for Ginny, their toasts were funny and touching, yet all of a piece—tributes to her selflessness. She maintains such friends because, like Amy, she listens to them. If someone tells her something, good or bad, she never tries to top it with a story of her own in those pointless competitions many people enter into, but rather concentrates on the person who seeks her attention. I had always thought of selflessness as a characteristic one learns and adopts, but in Ginny it seems like part of her genetic information. And now, in sorrow, she is in her element. “I am leading Amy’s life,” she says in despair yet comfort, too. After forty-six years of marriage, due to the most painful of reasons, I am getting to know my wife.

Back in Quogue, I meet with Kevin Stakey, the contractor Ginny and I hired to turn the garage into a playhouse for the grandchildren. We wanted a place where they could paint, work with clay, race cars, transform Transformers, and fight over card games like Uno and War. The plans were made in the late summer, with Amy, Harris, Carl, Wendy, and John involved. After Amy died, creating the playhouse became therapy for me. I hoped she would approve. It was my way of bringing her back to life. Because I could not understand why she died, I sought to make other things less confusing. I cleaned out junk-closets, gave order to a chaotic shelf of CDs, and cleared an ivy-choked area of the yard.

Kevin is in his late forties and built like a substantial piece of rope, the kind that ties ships to piers. He has a large head and a mustache and a beard on his chin, thick as a shoe brush. Shorter than I, at about five-foot, nine inches, he is twice as wide. When we shake hands, mine disappears in his. He took the news about Amy as if he had known her. I tell him that, because of our changed circumstances, I will not be around that much. He will have to make many decisions about the playhouse on his own.

“No problem,” he says.