Saying Grace (35 page)

“The Breather?”

She nodded. She sat down heavily at the table. The sequence, 258 / Beth Gutcheon

the hang-ups and the clock and the Breather, had upset her. Or the estrangement between her and Henry that upset her all the time these days, like a chronic low-grade fever.

The phone rang again.

“Let me,” said Henry, and he grabbed it. But it wasn’t the Breather; Rue could hear that a voice was speaking on the other end.

Henry listened briefly.

“Not at the moment,” he said. A question on the other end. “Please call tomorrow during business hours.” He hung up. Rue looked at him, questioning.

“Why don’t
I
ever get the Breather? I want to tell him I’ll stuff the phone down his neck.”

“Who
did
you get?”

“Somebody wanting to sell bonds.”

“It’s awfully late isn’t it?”

“Ten of ten.”

Rue thought that was awfully late. The salesmen usually called at dinnertime.

“I’m surprised you told him he could call back.”

Henry always said, Not interested, sorry, and hung up. She thought.

“He won me over by not asking, ‘How are you this evening.’”

He got himself a beer out of the refrigerator. He went to the closet for the broom and dustpan.

“I’ll clean up the glass,” he said.

“Thank you, honey.”

He was in the living room with the broken clock in his hand when the phone rang again. He put the clock on the mantle. Rue had answered the phone; it had rung only once. He was sweeping shards of crystal from the hearth and the hardwood floor beyond, when he heard Rue scream.

G
eorgia had died a few minutes before midnight. She had been hit from behind by a drunk driver, who had dragged the body almost a mile without knowing it. Jonah had gotten part of the license number.

Jonah and Georgia were hitchhiking home from a gig in New Paltz, New York.

“Why the hell were they wearing black?” Henry asked in anguish.

(This was later.) “Why the hell were they hitchhiking?”

He asked that over and over again, as if getting a simple answer to that one question would stop his pain.

“Why the hell were they hitchhiking? If they were stranded, I would have sent them money….”

It was hearing him say that that made Rue feel she would lose her mind from grief.

All she had to do was call, and say Daddy, we don’t have any money, Daddy we can’t get home. And he would have sent them money. He would have. She knew it was true. All Georgia had to do was call. All she had to do was say Daddy. He would have told them to go to a motel. He would have wired them money. He would have gone to get her himself.

All she had to do was call.

Everything was over. Everything they had hoped for her, separately and together. Every joy she had felt, every smile, from the day they brought her home from the hospital, was for nothing. Every grade she had earned, every bite she had eaten, it was all a tease and a shame and a waste. She was gone. It was gone.

They took it differently. Henry raged and drank and broke things.

It was very bad that she had died estranged from him. Rue sat still and wept, with her arms hugged close to her body. The second day, when the kitchen table was covered with food that people had brought, and the people who came to distract and comfort 260 / Beth Gutcheon

them were eating it, Henry came downstairs and marched to Rue, as if there were no one else in the house, and said, “I want all her things out of here. Everything that was hers. Clothes. Books.

Everything. Get it all out of here.” Then he took a bottle of scotch and went upstairs.

Sylvia French and Emily brought boxes. They sat in Georgia’s room. For hours they worked emptying closets, folding clothes, packing them. Rue watched them. Sometimes she would see something that would make her cry out. A blue-jean jacket Georgia wore in fourth grade, with buttons pinned to it. Rue thought it was long gone. She held it in her lap and cried. After a while Sylvia took it from her and packed it. Then she’d stop them and reach out for something else. There was a shirt frayed at the collar that had been Henry’s. Georgia had worn it as a nightshirt. She held it for a while, then let them take it.

Cleaning out the desk was much worse. Georgia’s handwriting.

Georgia’s handwriting at fourteen, at twelve, at five. There were pictures made in kindergarten. There was a stash of notes passed from Georgia to Rochelle to Sasha when they were in eighth grade.

What secrets were there, what jokes? What didn’t she know of her daughter’s secret life?

What life? Who cared? What was the point of knowing your child’s secrets, except to advise, to protect? Rue sobbed till the muscles in her sides ached.

When all the clothes and notebooks and papers and snapshots and cartoons and ribbons and pins were put away, Emily and Sylvia asked again.

Get rid of them, Rue said. Burn them, send them to the dump, give them to Goodwill. All right, they said. And the boxes disappeared.

And when a day later, she couldn’t stop crying, because she needed to hold her child and there was nothing of her left, they brought the boxes back.

The police were sorry they hadn’t called earlier. Georgia’s wallet had been lost when she was dragged, and for an hour, Jonah couldn’t remember where they lived. Had she suffered? They didn’t know exactly what had killed her, or how fast. An autopsy would show.

But had she suffered? Had she died in terror?

Saying Grace / 261

Yes, the police guessed, since Henry insisted. They would surmise she had.

No need for an autopsy. They certainly didn’t want to see her.

Her ashes would be sent home, in a box marked Hum Rem, for human remains. The funeral home suggested Federal Express.

Henry wanted the drunk driver. He wanted to bash the driver’s head against a pavement till it shattered like an egg, to scoop the brains out and grind his shoes in them. He wanted to crush the driver the way you kill the snail you find on the green leaf-blade of a daffodil. Crunch of shell, slime smear of body. The police hadn’t found him yet. They had a partial tag; they were trying.

Why had they been hitchhiking? Henry asked the police, during that first long night. The police didn’t know. The boy, Jonah, had $200 in cash in his pocket. They’d been paid for the gig. If they found Georgia’s wallet, they would send it. They’d send somebody out to look when it was light.

How did they know what time it was when she was struck? They didn’t, exactly. The boy, Jonah, running after the car in the dark, screaming, had heard a church bell ring before he got to the body.

Yes, she was dead at that time. Definitively.

The boy wanted to know if he could keep Georgia’s guitar.

T
heir priest, a small round-faced man named Tom Ware, came to bring them comfort and to plan the funeral. This was the last week in February. Rue and Henry thanked him for coming and gave him some sherry. He saw that they looked unearthly pale, as if neither had slept in weeks. He noticed too that they sat on opposite sides of the living room. That they addressed him, but not each other. That they avoided eye contact. Mourning sometimes had that effect. Of shutting people off from each other, each in his own private oubliette full of grief. It was one of its horrors.

“The Twenty-third Psalm,” said Henry. “And ‘Oh God Our Help in Ages Past,’” and he bit his lip. In tears again. “Sufficient Is Thine Arm Alone, and Our Defense Is Sure,” they had sung side by side, he in his strong bass, Georgia with her shimmering, confident alto.

Sufficient for what? Defense of whom?

Tom brought out his prayer book. “You’ll be wanting the Funeral Rite? Or would you like to compose something? It may be that Georgia’s friends would like to help plan a remembrance.”

“No funeral,” said Rue. “She said she wouldn’t want it.”

Both men turned to look at her.

“Don’t you remember?” She turned to Henry. “She said it over and over. She didn’t believe in organized religion.”

“But she came to church with you,” said Father Tom.

“That was because she loved us. And to sing. She was clear about this. We listened to her opinion. We understood it. We can’t just ignore her.”

“But Rue,” said Tom Ware, looking uncomfortable in his collar.

“Funerals are for the living. It will be a comfort to you, and to Henry….” Henry was staring at her.

“I know,” she said, starting to cry. “It would be a great comfort.

But it wasn’t my life, and it isn’t my death, it’s hers. She didn’t want it. We can’t break faith with her just because she’s dead.”

Saying Grace / 263

The minister looked at Henry. He was looking steadily at Rue, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

Finally he said to her, “She’s gone, Rue.”

She looked back at him, or toward him. She looked as if she wasn’t seeing anything. Finally, she shrugged, and whispered, “A conscience is worth a thousand witnesses.”

S
ylvia French and Rachel Klein took turns answering the phone, since Rue couldn’t and Henry wouldn’t. Georgia’s friends, and Henry’s, and Rue’s, called incessantly to know when and where the service would be. Over and over, Sylvia or Rachel would explain.

In twos and threes, Georgia’s classmates would arrive at the door, dressed as if for church or graduation. They had never paid a sympathy call before. They would be shown into the den where Henry and Rue sat, writing answers to stacks of notes and letters of condol-ence. Henry would stare at them, as if trying to forgive them for being alive. Sometimes they asked for information about the death; sometimes they said how sorry they were. Sometimes they said how much they would miss her and that they would never, ever forget her, which Henry and Rue knew was a lie.

She’ll fade from your lives and you won’t even notice it, Rue thought. Whereas I pray for nothing except a moment when I forget her, and I don’t get one, not one moment of oblivion.

“Did you hear about the clock?” Henry would suddenly ask, and the young people would shake their heads, no. Obsessively he would repeat this queer mystery, as if retelling it would reveal its meaning.

The young people, who had come wanting to comfort, or be comforted, found that neither of these things could be done and found themselves trapped in a room where they understood how terrible that was.

“Thank you for coming,” Rue would say, rising, to tell them that this was how they got out of it. They would leap to their feet and be gone. While they were there Rue felt she wanted only for them to go, and when they were gone, things seemed worse than before.

Neither Henry nor Rue could think what to do with the ashes.

They had always had one theory about burial; you should be somewhere where your grandchildren can come to remember you, Saying Grace / 265

because you’re part of who they are. What did that mean for Georgia?

One night, Henry and Rue sat in the living room. The night was very still. They stared, each at something that was going on inside themselves. Rue was listening to a silence so profound that it seemed she could hear her own eardrums roar, as a seashell does when you hold it to your ear.

There was a knock at the door. Neither of them moved, for a moment. Then Henry heaved himself up and went to open it.

In the hall, Rue could hear a young voice speak softly to Henry.

She heard part of a sentence that had her name in it. She got up and went to the door.

From the top of the rise where the road wound down toward their house, there was flowing a silent stream of Georgia’s friends. They were carrying lighted candles, and the candles lit their faces. There were the musicians, some in rags and patches, some with pins in their clothes and spikes in their hair. There were many from Georgia’s high school class and many Rue and Henry had never seen before. Most of the girls from Rue’s current eighth grade were there.

They flowed down the hill and up the walk to the door, where they pooled and eddied into a pond, surrounding the doorway where Rue and Henry stood.

Rue stood in the doorway, her hands clasped before her, looking from face to face. Then, in the middle of the throng, Georgia began to sing
Panis Angelicus
.

Henry sank against the door frame, hands in his pockets, and cried. Rue stood as she was, like an icon, frozen. She couldn’t see who carried the tape player. Many of the young faces looking back were now weeping. Rue was absolutely back in the moment, holding Georgia’s mangy fur coat, feeling tears of love and pride in her eyes, seeing before her the little figure in the huge gray sweater. The singing ended. The tape had recorded a long crash of applause, but an unseen hand in the middle of the group clicked it off. The silence was enormous, though broken by sniffing and quiet crying. Then at the back, the first ones turned to go. The river re-formed and moved off up the hill. Slowly they walked into the night, taking the light with them.

266 / Beth Gutcheon

Henry stood looking at Rue. She looked back, but felt like flinching. If he had been yelling at her, she couldn’t have felt his grief and need more deeply. He seemed to be saying, “I cannot bear this.
They
can’t bear this. You and your promises, you and your principles.”

He walked rapidly past her into the house, into the den where the brown plastic canister holding Georgia’s ashes sat on a table. Rue followed him as he took the box and marched past her into the garden.

He opened the box and stood looking at what was inside. He kept staring at it, as if in surprise, as if trying to understand what it had to do with Georgia.

He stood under the night sky holding the box with both hands, breathing deeply. Then he said, firmly and clearly, as if to an unseen assembly,

“
All praise to thee, my God this night
For all the blessings of the light

Keep me, oh keep me, King of kings

Beneath thine own almighty wings
.”

Then, without looking at Rue, he upturned the box, and poured out the ashes onto the soil beneath the roses.

Much later that night, Rue couldn’t stop thinking of Georgia alone outside as it started to rain.