Reunion (14 page)

That was it. Lifted arms, clasped-together hands like a triumphant gladiator, sat back down next to his wife, this successfully sexed-up frizzy blonde, although maybe, just maybe, Buzz thought, the whole cosmetic job might have been done just for tonight, like little seraph Baumgarden had something big to prove to the old gang, a subterranean, hidden need to show these fuckers that he was more than any of them, bunch of fucking dumb fucks, Buzzy could practically read Curt's thoughts/feelings, What the fuck did I ever come to this fucking pitiful thing for in the first place?!?!

Fat Franny, kind of the organizer of the whole affair up at the mike now.

“Well, I'm glad as many of you came as did. I mean The Dead couldn't come, and The Missing are really missing. Like Collete Goldstein. Not a hint about her,” Buzz really curious about her, in spite of her name he had never even thought of her as Jewish until he'd converted to Judaism himself and started hearing all these stories about crypto-, hidden-, white-washed,
‘converted' Jews who had renounced Judaism and passed over quietly into the Christian Camp, “but it's hard to understand someone like Mary Hartz who [a twist of surprisingly corrosive bitterness] just couldn't manage to catch a cab and drive out here, like we were on the other side of the world or something,” Buzz remembering Mary Hartz very vividly, tiny and blonde and asthmatic, all kind of old and rachitic, fragile, and that was when she was fourteen, “and Jerry Coolidge was having, if you'll pardon the term, prostate surgery, this weekend but he sends his best to everyone, and … ”

“What about you? Tell us about yourself!” screamed Mary Alice, Lloyd simply sitting back and silently looking skyward, Buzz wondering and what if I had married Mary Alice and we had had dozens of grandchildren, would it be some sort of happy extended WOMB or like being buried in a noisy TOMB or …

“Well, there isn't much to tell. After I finished at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows, I went to Misercordia High [Malinche giving Buzz a big puzzled-amused look? Miser-who? These were words she'd never, ever heard before] and then into the Mater Dolorosa Nursing School at the Mater Dolorosa County Hospital … and I've been there ever since, can retire whenever I like, but … Mom died last year after a rather long and painful fight with Parkinson's Disease, bowel cancer, diabetes, Sjogren's Syndrome, Manheimer's Disease, gout, Grauman's Disease and chronic hiccups, and I live with my sister Maureen who has most of the above too, which keeps me busy evenings and most nights. And that's about it. I read a lot, mostly nursing journals and I love football, but just watch the games on TV. Maureen
can't really go out of the house after the end of, say, August, until late spring. In fact the whole house is kind of a giant hothouse. Except for my own little basement room, which I keep, if I may use the word, kind of ‘normal,' stopping, some faint applause, everyone mainly depressed, Buzzy supposed. He certainly was. Even the way she looked, not so much the solidity of the fat, so that she looked like a big solid refrigerator, but the expressionless face and big searchlight glasses, Little Orphan Annie expressionless eyes, like Doom Incarnate, something almost extraterrestrial about her, and whatever planet she was from was a place where you'd never want to even see a National Geographic special on, Depression Island some place out there in the middle of the extra-galactic sea, but then perking up a little, “Mary Alice, how about you, babe?”

“Babe?!?” said Mary Alice, hopping to her feet. Fat she may have been, but seemed to have the energy of an atomic furnace. It wore Buzz out just watching her, “OK,” squirming her way out behind the whole row where Ellen was sitting, pushing Ellen's chair as she went by, practically knocking Ellen's face into her plate, Ellen coming back with a quick “Pardon you!” Mary Alice full of little “sorry, sorry, sorry's,” but pushing right along, these nicely enormous breasts and Rubenesque curves, like that girl that Vassar girl Buzz had picked up in Paris when he was twenty who looked like close to zero boring with her clothes on, but nude suddenly became Le Sacre du Printemps, primordial, primal, flaming deserts and ancient sacrifice. Mary Alice with the microphone stand solidly between her breasts, “Well …” triggering all sorts of squeals and echoes from the mike, O'Toole quickly on the job, moving it back a little,
“You're overwhelming it,” MaryAlice all bouncy and smiley, “Well … I've been gloriously happily married for umpteen years, have seven children and twenty-three grandchildren, fourteen boys and nine girls, and I know all their birthdates and everything about them that there is to know, and they all, down to the very last one, live within five miles of our place, and we're in constant touch and I think that's what it's all about. That's all there is. That's what the good nuns always said [Fred making his way back in now looking totally caved in, washed out, like a World War I crater-scarred battlefield, filmed in funereal black and white, collapsing into his chair, “What's going on?” Ellen answering “Listen and you'll find out.”], IT'S ALL WHAT THE GOOD LORD SAID, INCREASE AND MULTIPLY. And you know how many regrets that I've done it exactly the way I have? None. The good nuns were right, and I thank God for the orientation that I got from Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows … ”

“So why didn't the good nuns increase and multiply too? What were they, the exception to the rule?” shouted Freddy, kind of all slurred together and garbled now, like overcooked Lo Mein.

Everyone hissing and booing. Mary Alice shusshing them.

“No, he's got a point. What I think is that eventually we'll have a married sisterate and a married priesthood. Like the Jews.”

“The Jews don't have nuns,” Buzzy murmurring under his breath.

“A lot she knows about Jews!” Fred murmured back.

“That's it!” said Ellen, up like an arrow, speeding toward the door.

“See, see, this is what I have to put up with all the time. Prima donna bullshit!” said Fred, kind of ambling after her, slow motionish, the way cold honey pours.

“Let me go talk to her,” Buzz said to Malinche, following Fred.

“I hope I haven't caused any uproars or anything, but I do follow the Catholic press, and let me tell you, Vatican II was just the beginning of radical (in a good sense) change … ”

A round of cheers and applause. Just a little overdone. Just on the edge of ridicule.

Ellen already in the cloakroom, putting on her coat.

“Come on, El,” said Freddy, “I'm sorry, OK, we're both, all, every last one of us, SORRY, fucking SORRY, SORRY, SORRY … you don't have to go off your fucking godddamned ROCKER!”

“I just wish old rocking chair would get me. I'd like to be OLD somewhere where it's lights out at nine and someone else makes all the meals and I don't have to listen to bullshit full time,” Ellen angry, but on the edge of dissolving into tears, “Why can't things just be nice. Chamomile lotion and cotton lace, instead of buzz saws and jackhammers … ?”

“Come on, El, you've gotta admit the whole thing kind of invites satire,” said Fred, trying a little verbal chamomile lotion of his own.

“I know … but then it makes my whole life look like …” breaking down entirely now, crying, coat and little wool cap on, “it makes my whole life look like a big joke,” sitting down on the floor in the back of the cloakroom, head back against the wall,
this kind of pitiful almost-old-old lady, “like I didn't have a real life at all, but just a joke life … ”

Fred crawling into the corner with her, comforting her.

“Come on, El, if you wanna go, fine, but I'm just afraid that afterwards you'll regret it and that it'll be irreversible and,” explaining to Buzz, “It's a thing we talk about a lot … you know, the sense of being totally obliterated. I think when all your parents are dead, all the old aunts and uncles, they're so gone, wiped out … like wiping a blackboard clean with a wet rag … and you're next in line, and … ”

Fred sitting down next to her, his head against the wall too, tears in his eyes, starting to ‘dissolve' too, Buzz feeling it spread across himself too, another fifty years and they'd all be a hundred and fourteen, only does anyone survive to a hundred and fourteen? Imagine a class-reunion of ONE. And fifty years went like a flash, another fifty more and they would have been a hundred and sixty four, and going back the other way, all of them born in nineteen thirty-one or thirty-two, the Great Depression still hanging on, still eight years away from World War II, Truman, Eisenhower, Bikini, Hiroshima, the blue tattoos and the death-camps. It was like Civil War veterans, exactly their age, sixty-four, getting together in 1929 in some fancy hotel in Miami Beach, where have all the flowers gone, long time passing, where have all the flowers gone, long time ago, Buzz suddenly flooded with waves of memories of the Sixties which were already thirty years ago, going to Love-in's and Be-in's in Golden Gate Park, everyone flowered and flowing, long gowns and hair, and you were always going around and “visiting” people, it was all one big migrant “pack,” talk about Mystical
Body, the Mystical Body of The Weed, the Seed of ecumenical-forever Oneness, so many casualties already, Wantling and Levy and Dorrance, Sidney Bernard, Menke Katz, John Gill, Eubanks, Lawson … like he knew more Dead than Living, and that was just thirty years, another thirty years and they'd all be gone, it wouldn't take fifty. When he'd get together with the old Hippy-Yippy gang it was like a travelling Old People's Home. Getting down on the floor with Ellen and Fred, crawling into the back of the cloakroom, head up against the wall, both of them making room for him in the middle, putting his arms around the two of them and just letting it come out, bawling like he hadn't bawled for years, ever since he'd visited his grandmother just before she'd died, and just seeing her old and crippled and helpless and just half there was like seeing a painting of his own life, the two of them one, whatever happened to her also happened (would happen) to him … wiped out … Jesus … that's what it was … you were wiped out … and no one seemed to know just how precious this fragile NOW was … like it should be expanded and glorified, gilded and bejeweled, monumentalized, preserved … instead of degenerating into a series of jibes and wisecracks, Vatican III, IV … ten thousand … the Council of Nice, the Council of Trent, he forgot, which one they had declared the Immaculate Conception at … and now they'd gotten rid of Limbo … in Time making declarations about Eternity …

Malinche appearing at the cloakroom door.

“What is going on? You want I should call 911?” she asked, Freddy cynically, at the same time affectionately, correcting her, “Not ‘You want I should.' Maybe ‘You want me to …”'

Malinche turning, an abrupt, graceful little pirouette, forever telling Buzz that if she had been born in, as she put it, “the West,” she probably would have gone into ballet and/or modern dance instead of Medicine.

“You'd better stop her!” said Fred trying to get up, something “snapping,” like the crack of a whip, and he slumped back down with a “Oh, shit, there goes one of the goddamned straps on my leg, I'm going to need big help now! I've got spares at home, but—”

“So I help you or stop her?” asked Buzz.

“Oh, God, I can just see us spending the night in jail!” said Ellen, quick to her feet, all slim and adroit, like a straight razor cutting down through a block of Monterrey Jack, going after Malinche.

“I really should have just stayed home. I mean it's not my grammar school class, I really can't ‘feel' for these people …” said Fred.

“Neither can I. Most of them. We were all just jelly beans in the same jar, pigs in the same pig pen, sheep in the same …” started Buzz.

“Yeah, yeah, I get the idea. You love metaphor, don't you?”

“What else is there? Prisoners in the same … ”

Fred, in a sudden escape-impulse, almost managing to get up, pushing like an inch-worm against the cloakroom wall, then almost crashing down again, but Buzz grabbing on to his arm.

“Maybe we should just go. This ‘testimonial' crap could go on forever.”

“I'll second that.”

Fred holding on to Buzz's shoulder, limping out of the cloakroom.

“Once thing I've noticed, I've developed a lot of agility in my other leg,” said Fred, as Malinche and Ellen came back down the hall.

“My god,” said Ellen, “you look like an old Matthew Brady daguerreotype … ”

“Da guerro …? Something to do with the war?” asked Malinche.

“Not bad,” said Ellen, amazed at Malinche's sheer Will, “Brady was a photographer during the Civil War.”

“Civil war?”

“North versus South. Damned Yankees—that's us!—and all that,” Ellen shifting back to her slightly patronizing, amused stance toward Malinche, “it was the name of a certain kind of photograph, not really ‘da guerre,' ‘of the war,' but named after a man called Daguerre. Like Bougainvillea … ”

“Christ!” said Fred, if not in obvious pain, certainly in radical ‘discomfort,' “everything turns into a goddamned lecture. I could just see you on the Final Day as the mountains dissolve and the seas engulf us, talking about the difference between pistils and pistols,” amusing himself, starting to laugh, almost disengaging himself from Buzz's grip.

“You want to just slip out, disappear?” said Ellen gleefully, “kind of like FOREVER?!?!?”

“We could!” said Buzz.

“It wouldn't be right,” said Malinche, “we have to make the goodbyes.”

Fred about to start correcting Malinche again but then his face going blank, let it be, let it be, let it be …

“OK, so let's face um,” said Fred, and back in they went, no more speeches, in fact dinner over, a few people lingering at their tables over apple pie, but most of them just standing talking.