Sourland (27 page)

Adrienne tried not to stare seeing one of the white men close by, slouching on the bench; he had a sharp hawkish face disfigured by an
aggressively ugly tattoo jagged like lightning bolts; his rat-colored hair was pulled back into a tail—a rat-tail? Was this—what was the name—Ezra, Edro?—Edro Hodge?—the person whom Leisha had been desperate to contact? Hodge's eyes were heavy-lidded, drooping; he gave an impression of being oblivious of his surroundings, if not contemptuous. Adrienne slipped past not wanting to attract his attention.

One floor up—two floors?—at last, Probate Court: the Office of the Surrogate.

“Ma'am—here.”

Before Adrienne was allowed into the waiting room of the Office of the Surrogate she was required to show a photo I.D—fumbling for her wallet which contained her driver's license, but where was her wallet?—had someone taken her wallet, in the confusion downstairs?—in a panic locating her U.S. passport in the briefcase at which a woman deputy stared suspiciously—“This
you,
ma'am? Don't look much like
you
.”

The photo was several years old, Adrienne said. Though having to acknowledge that the woman in the photo, lightly smiling, with a smooth, unlined forehead and hopeful eyes, bore little resemblance to the woman she was now.

“This is my name, though—‘Adrienne Myer.' My husband's name is—was—Myer.”

How unconvincing this sounded! The very syllables—
Adrienne Myer
—had become nonsensical, mocking.

For if once she'd been married to a man named
Myer
, the man named
Myer
no longer existed; where did that leave
Adrienne Myer
?

Nonetheless, Adrienne was allowed to take a seat. The air in the waiting room was steam-heated, stale. Here was a vast space larger even than the jurors' assembly room on the lower floor—a high-ceilinged room in sepia tones like an old daguerreotype, with high narrow windows that seemed to look out over nothing—unless the glass had become scummy and opaque with grime. Adrienne was nervously conscious of rows—rows!—of uncomfortable vinyl chairs crowded with people—their expressions ranged from melancholy to exhausted, anxious to
resigned. At the rear of the waiting room the farther wall appeared to have dissolved into sepia shadow—the waiting room stretched on forever. Blindly Adrienne was seated clutching at her things—handbag, briefcase—she'd removed her black cashmere coat in this stifling heat—a glove had fallen to the floor, she retrieved with some effort—she'd been gripping her things so tightly, the bones of her hands ached. She was thinking
All these people have died! So many of us.

But this was wrong of course. Everyone in the waiting room was alive.
She
was alive.

“I am—alive.”

Alive.
It was such a curious boastful word! It was such a
tentative
word, simply to utter it was to invite derision.

She was thinking how, on what was to be the very last day of her husband's life, with no knowledge of what was imminent she and her husband had made plans for his discharge from the hospital in two days. They'd read the
New York Times
together. Tracy had insisted on Adrienne bringing him his laptop and so he'd worked—he was determined to examine the copyedited manuscript of a lengthy article he'd written for the
Journal of 20th-Century European History
—though complaining of his eyes “tearing up” and his vision being “blurred.” He'd eaten the lukewarm lunch, or part of it—until he'd begun to feel nauseated and asked Adrienne to take it away. They'd quarreled—almost—over whether Adrienne should call Tracy's parents, to deflect their coming to visit him—an arduous trip for them, from northern Minnesota—since he was being discharged so soon, and was “recovered, or nearly”—Adrienne had thought that Tracy should see his parents, who were concerned about him; Tracy had thought otherwise, now that he was “feeling fine.” The hospital allowed visitors until 9
P.M
. but Adrienne left at 7
P.M
. since Tracy had become tired suddenly and wanted to sleep—Adrienne was exhausted also—maintaining her cheery hospital manner was a strain, like carrying heavy unwieldy bundles from place to place and nowhere to set them down, until at last you drop them—let them fall—she'd managed to drive home and was in bed by 9:20
P.M
.
and at 12:50
A.M
. she'd been wakened as in a cartoon of crude nightmare cruelty by a ringing phone and in her dazed sleep she'd thought
That is not for me. That is not for me
even as, groping for the phone, she'd known that of course the ringing phone was for her, she'd known that the ringing phone had to be for her and she'd known, or guessed, what the call was.

Mrs. Myer? Your husband is in critical condition, please come to the hospital immediately.

“Mrs. Myer? Come with me, please.”

Time had passed: an hour? Two hours? Adrienne was being led briskly along a corridor to the Office of the Surrogate. The name on the door was
D. CAPGRASS
. Her heart beat quickly. She'd stood so swiftly, blood had rushed from her head.
Don't let me faint. Not here, not now. Not this weakness, now.
It had become confused in the widow's mind—such fantasies are exacerbated in steam-heated waiting rooms, in hard-backed vinyl chairs—that her obligation in Surrogate Court was an obligation to her deceased husband, and not to herself; it was her husband's estate that was to be deliberated, the estate of which she, the surviving spouse, was the executrix.
If this can be completed. Then
…Adrienne's thoughts trailed off, she had no idea what came beyond
Then
.

Crematorium
is not the polite term.
Funeral home
is the preferred term.

There she'd made arrangements, paid with their joint credit card.

Tracy Emmet Myer
was a co-owner of this card.
Tracy Emmet Myer
was paying for his own cremation.

Ashes to ashes, dusk to dusk.
The nonsense jingle ran through the widow's brain brazen and jeering as the cries of a jaybird in the trees close outside her bedroom windows, that woke her so rudely from her sedative sleep.

“Mrs. Myer. Please will you sign these consent forms”—a middle-aged bald-headed man with eyeglasses that fitted his face crookedly and stitch-like creases in his forehead was addressing her with somber formality. Without hesitating—eagerly—Adrienne signed several documents—“waivers”—without taking time to read them. How she
hoped to placate this frowning gentleman—an officer of the Mercer County Surrogate's court. “And now, you will please provide these required documents, which I hope you've remembered to bring”—frowning as the widow foolishly fumbled removing folders from a briefcase—the deceased husband's birth certificate, and her own birth certificate; their marriage certificate…

Quickly Adrienne handed over the marriage certificate. She could not bear to see what was printed on it and, long ago, gaily and giddily signed by her husband and her.

“And your husband's death certificate, Mrs. Myer?”

Your husband's death certificate.
What an eccentric form of speech—
Your husband's
. As if the deceased husband yet owned “his” death certificate.

Your husband's body. Your husband's remains.

Adrienne fumbled to hand over the odd-sized document. Though it had been newly issued and was scarcely twenty-four hours old yet it was creased and mud-smeared as if someone had stepped on it. Adrienne murmured an apology but Capgrass silenced her with an impatient wave of his fingers.

“This will do, Mrs. Myer. Thank you.”

With a pencil-thin flashlight the Probate Court official examined the death certificate—was this infrared light?—and the ornamental gilt State of New Jersey seal. The document must have been satisfactory since he stamped it with the smaller gilt seal of the Surrogate's Office which bore, for some reason, quaintly and curiously, the just-perceptibly raised figure of a horse's head, or a chess knight in profile.

“Oh—why is that? This seal—why does it have a horse's head on it?” Adrienne laughed nervously.

“It is the Court's seal, Mrs. Myer.” Capgrass paused, as if the widow's question was embarrassing, a violation of protocol. “May I see—? Have you brought—?”

“Of course! Of course.”

As the primary beneficiary and executrix of her late husband's es
tate Adrienne was required to provide photo I.D.s of herself and her husband—she'd brought drivers' licenses, passports—as well as IRS tax returns for the previous year—documents attesting to the fact that she and the deceased
Tracy Emmet Myer
had lived in the same residence in Summit Hill, New Jersey.

To all these items the frowning Capgrass subjected the same assiduous examination, with the pencil-thin light.

“Now, Mrs. Myer: may I see your husband's
Last Will and Testament
.”

This was the single document that most unnerved Adrienne. She'd had difficulty locating it in her husband's surprisingly disorganized filing cabinet and she'd been unable to force herself to read more than a small portion of the opening passage—
I, Tracy E. Myer, a domiciliary of New Jersey, declare this to be my Last Will and Testament, and I revoke all my prior Wills and Codicils…

Nervously she said, “I hope this is complete, Mr. Capgrass. It's all that I could find. I'm not sure what ‘codicil' means. I'm afraid that…”

“Hand it here, please.”

Leafing through the document of about twenty pages Capgrass paused midway.

The expression on his face! Adrienne stared uneasily.

“Mrs. Myer, this is—this is not—this is
irregular
.”

A crude blush rose into the middle-aged official's face. His eyeglasses glittered in alarm. Rudely he pushed the document toward Adrienne—at first she couldn't comprehend what he wanted her to see, what she was looking at—then she realized it was a page, or several pages, of poorly developed photographs of stunted, broken, naked figures—death camp survivors?—manikins, or dolls?

“I don't understand. What is—”

Numbly Adrienne took up the offensive pages, to stare at them. How could this be? What were these ugly obscene images doing in her husband's will? She was sure she'd looked through the will, or at any rate leafed through it—if barely recognizing what she saw, for she'd been upset at the time, very tired, and the densely printed legal passages
had seemed impregnable, taunting. Now she saw that she was staring not at printed passages but at photographs—blurred, not-quite-in-focus photographs as of objects seen underwater—bizarre disfigured manikins, or adult dolls, some of them missing arms, legs—bruised, blood-splattered—several of them hairless, bald—all of them naked—and all of them female.

Adrienne felt a stab of horror, shame. How could this be! How could Tracy Myer who'd been so courteous, so kindly, such a good decent gentlemanly man who'd taken care with every aspect of his work have been, at the same time, so careless, reckless—hiding such obscenities in his study, in his legal files where they would be discovered after his death?

Yet thinking
But they are not real, at least! Not real girls, or women. Real amputees
.

“You may take these back, Mrs. Myer. Please.”

“‘Take them
back
'? They don't belong to me, or to my husband—I'm sure. I've never seen these before…”

Capgrass removed his crooked plastic glasses and polished the lenses vigorously with a strip of chamois. His eyes, exposed, were small, rust-colored and primly disapproving; the crude hot blush had expanded to cover most of his face, and the gleaming-bald dome of his head. Clumsily Adrienne took up the offensive sheets of paper, which were in fact not photographs but Xerox photocopies of photographs, several to a page: not wanting to see she saw nonetheless that the figures were both painfully lifelike and perversely artificial; she had the idea that they were artworks of another era, perhaps “Germanic” maybe it was possible to interpret the reproductions as a historian's assiduous and uncensored research, and not pornography. Adrienne tried to explain that her husband Tracy Myer—Professor Tracy Myer, who'd taught at Princeton for nearly thirty years—had been a
distinguished historian
, his field of specialization was
post–World War I twentieth-century European history
and this included the notorious—decadent—Weimar era. Though deeply embarrassed Adrienne managed to sound convinc
ing: “By accident my husband must have filed these—documents—in the wrong folder. They seem to be ‘art' of some kind—posed manikins or dolls—maybe Surrealist. Or—Dada. Tracy was always fascinated by art—by what art ‘reveals' of the culture that gives rise to it, as well as of the artist. They are not…” Adrienne couldn't bring herself to utter the ugly word
pornography
.

Capgrass interrupted Adrienne to inform her disdainfully that there appeared to be “irregularities” in her husband's will; he'd had time only to peruse the document in a cursory fashion but had noticed that the first codicil hadn't been properly notarized—the notary public had used a seal with what appeared to be several broken letters which undermined the validity of the transaction, should litigants want to take issue.

Litigants!
Adrienne's heart beat in alarm.

“Though it's unambiguous that you've been designated your husband's primary beneficiary, as well as the executrix of his estate, it would appear, from a strictly legal standpoint, that the document is of questionable authenticity. I'm sure that ‘Tracy Emmet Myer' was indeed your husband, and that he has indeed died—but, unfortunately, if there is a pre-existing will, either in your possession or elsewhere, it might take precedent over the one we have here.”