The Bill from My Father (34 page)

I shook her hand, and when I stepped outside, squinting against the sun and the wind, I felt almost ready for the task ahead. Perhaps it had been foolish to take the idea of the unveiling literally, to anticipate lifting some sort of ritual cloth off my father's plaque. Part of me, I suppose, yearned to uncover a mystery at the last minute, a revelation that would enrich or reconfigure what little I knew about him. The plaque held no mystery, in the sense that I'd been forewarned about his epitaph. Yet as always with my father, a mystery remained.

“Who is
they
?” I asked Brian as I climbed back in the car.

“Who is who?”

“On my father's plaque. ‘
They
finally got me.' Who do you think the
they
is?”

He shifted into reverse. “Paranoia was an innate aspect of your father's personality, and it intensified with age. Remember the business with the silver? I'm not sure it's worth interpreting something as illogical as paranoia.”

“Why is it any different from interpreting something as illogical as dreams?”

“I'm not sure dreams should be interpreted either. They're probably just a buildup of random electrochemical sense impressions that are discharged during the REM stages of sleep.”

“That's a romantic way to look at it.”

“It is,” he insisted, “because if dream interpretation is a dead end, then I can skip it and move on to more effective ways of helping my clients.”

I stroked his thigh. “I love you,” I said.

“See,” he said. “Skepticism is very romantic.”

We turned onto Mount Sinai Drive. If there are peak hours at a memorial park, we came early enough to avoid them. We drifted by a parked hearse, the reflection of Brian's Toyota, dark as carbon, creeping along its length. We passed the Court of the Psalms and the Court of the Proverbs, two wings of a mausoleum whose enormous double doors were open to skylit spaces where crypts held the ashes and bits of bone, the grit of cremains. Sealed compartments lined the walls from floor to ceiling, reminding me of the safe deposit boxes at the Oxnard Bank of America.

“I think
they
is a composite character,” I told Brian. “It's Mr. Delaney from the phone company, and it's the gas company's meter reader, and it's all the doctors and nurses and social workers who dared to interfere. It's the people whose offers of help he found demeaning, or people he decided were too inept and insensitive to help him in the right way. He might have thrown Betty and Anna into the
they
for good measure. And maybe even my mother, given how much the two of them fought. And me; I'm a
they,
no doubt about it. When you get right down to it, my father was a
they
magnet. He attracted adversaries real and imagined.”

“They're so close together,” said Brian.

“The real and the imagined?”

“No,” he said, “the graves.”

He was right. The markers we drove by divided the slopes into narrow, alternating strips of green and bronze. Beneath Mount Sinai there existed another, hidden mountain whose contours echoed the landscape all around us except that, instead of a wide morning sky suspended overhead, smothering black soil pressed down on regiments of the dead. As the car climbed higher, we rose not only upon a road, but upon a rotunda of human remains, a subterranean city of
mitered pine and lead casket linings. We rose upon crumbling bolsters of silk upholstery and keepsakes of all kinds—photographs, letters, cameos, and lucky coins—possessions gripped by indifferent hands. On the ridge above us were clustered what the map identified as the Gardens of Tradition, the Gardens of Heritage, the Gardens of People of the Book, interconnected open-air courtyards where meandering walkways and stone benches existed solely for the sake of a reverie whose hush fell on the summit like snow.

Numbers stenciled along the curb indicated the range of “internment spaces” within a particular lot. The family plot turned out to be higher than I remembered. (The memorial park wasn't a place I visited unless I had to; I paid homage by sitting at my desk, where memory and prose led parallel lives.) Once we neared the right section, Brian pulled over to the curb and parked, wrenching the handbrake tight against the incline.

Poised at the perimeter of Moses, each of us held one end of the map to steady it against the wind. We had to look from the hillside to the map and back. With no upright landmarks, it was difficult to find correlations between a page crowded with schematic drawings of coffins and the undulating land in front of us. Once we felt sufficiently oriented, we set off to search in different directions.

Names and sentiments that had been illegible from the distance now clarified underfoot. Despite my urgency about observing the ritual on time, I have to admit that, step by step, inundated by the names of strangers—Hershel, Shirley, Boris, Estelle—I almost lost sight of the reason we'd come in the first place. Brian began to call out phrases with which the dead had memorialized themselves, or that their loved ones had chosen to remember them by. “Beautiful soul,” he shouted. “Source of love.” His lips moved, and then his voice, carried off course by the wind, would reach me after the briefest delay, like a warm belated breath. As he moved farther and farther away, I took his lead and read aloud. “Always with us.” “Full of life.” These declarations belonged to the earth and the air as much as—no, more than—to us. In this way we ranged over graves.

I couldn't help but notice that I took pains to step over the
plaques, whereas Brian felt no compunction about stepping right on top of them, as if they'd been set there to pave his way. He might have done this in defiance of graveyard piety, or else tramping on the dead didn't strike him as taboo. In either case, his heedlessness, our call-and-response, the sun boring down on our balding heads—all this was exhilarating, and since exhilaration was the last thing I expected to feel that day, it was completely in keeping with my father, which is to say consistent with his unpredictability.

It had been more than a decade since the editor from New York had called to ask if I'd consider writing a book about my father, and my stockpile of biographical facts was as meager now as it had been then. His last breath carried him beyond comprehension in a way more literal, more definitive, than I could have imagined during his lifetime. I hadn't been able to find any mention of him in historical records or data banks, hadn't been able to locate a single one of his relatives or friends to press for information. Now that he was gone, our family name was untraceable, along with whatever legacy came with it.

My knowledge of my father had always been confined to what I'd experienced in his presence, including the flood of hunches and deductions that his smallest gesture—lifting an eyebrow, folding his arms—set off within me. I don't think I would have been nearly as alert to the minutiae of his behavior had there been more information, more clues to choose from. So this limitation also defined him, gave him outlines. For however long I remained capable of recall, he'd fit within my memory like a man within his skin. For the moment, this was knowledge enough.

I bent over to examine a few plaques. Each bore its lament in raised letters. Each was framed with beveled edges. I straightened up when I heard Brian shouting in the distance. He waved his arm to hail me over, his clothes rippling in gusts of wind.

And there it was, the family plot—my parents, my brothers, the allotments of land they'd vanished into. A row of tarnished rectangles gleamed dully in the sun. As terse as the epitaphs were, I couldn't take them in all at once. I started with Ron's on the far end.
My brother's marker was cool to the touch, conducting the temperature of the soil below. I ran my hand across the Braille of his name, but instead of apprehending the man to whom the name referred, what I read was something like the darkness at the heart of a cave, or the mineral bitterness of water dredged from a stone well. His red hair, the cramped hand holding a paintbrush, the senses that wrestled scale and perspective: particulars dimmed, obstructed by the dense metal of the epitaph itself. And so it went on down the line.
Loving Brother … Devoted Mother … Beloved Son
. With all due respect to those who chose them, these were ready-made phrases, sentiments expressed in a banal graveyard jargon, platitudes stamped across the landscape.

I mourned for language as well as family. Only painstaking phrases could restore the dead—not to life, but to the living. Only through certain arrangements of words could one envision departed people instead of their leaden commemorations lying at one's feet. How a writer can revive the world through language had been as unshakable a preoccupation, and as much of a conundrum, as the man whose plaque I'd come to unveil. For the first time in years, I thought I'd give that book another try.

At last we reached my father's grave. I stared down, weary at first, then stunned by what I saw. Brian noticed the discrepancy first. “It's not
they,
” he said faintly.

I knew exactly what he was referring to, the word (and world) of difference between what we'd thought my father's epitaph said and what it really did. Yet so untrusting was I of my own eyes that I heard myself ask, “What does it say?”

“‘You,' ”
said Brian. “‘
You
finally got me.' ”

“You?”

Brian began to laugh, a little crazily, I thought, for a psychotherapist. “It's not you personally, if that's what you're worried about.”

“I wasn't until you mentioned it!”

He squeezed my shoulder, sparking an audible shock of static. “Really, it's not.”

“I think
you
is God.”

“Probably.”

“How could both of us remember it wrong? Did that woman misinform us?”

“Ms. Hirsch was a micromanager. Her type wouldn't make that kind of mistake. I think I thought it was
they
because, after we met with her, you said she said it was
they
.”

“But when I said she said it was
they,
you didn't contradict me.”

We stared at the plaque, as if its message might change yet again.

I wondered if my father had given a great deal of thought to this epitaph. Had he considered other punch lines?
I forgot my hat. Where's the flashlight?
It took discernment to choose a single sentence that would allow him to thumb his nose at piety—in the most inappropriate context, no less—while at the same time admitting that his adversary (that would be
you
) had finally outwitted him in the long skirmish to stay alive. My father's death was a laying down of arms. Once he surrendered himself he surrendered utterly and forever, a defeat he'd put off only after testing every means of resistance he had within him, every form of avoidance, trickery, and physical force, until the Powers That Be bore down upon him from utility companies, collection agencies, and social service organizations, until God Himself eventually caught up, my father having given Him a run for His money.
You
or
they
. God or man. It's the same either way. It's both ways at once. It's a masterpiece of paradox.

I pointed to a patch of grass beside my father. “That gap must be mine,” I told Brian. “It doesn't look like I'd fit.”

“You will,” he said.

I swung around to face him. “Are you this blunt with your clients?”

“Yes,” he said. “What will your plaque say?”

“I want to be cremated. Maybe I could sell my plot to these people on the left.”

“Seriously, what would it say?”

When I was young, before any of my brothers died, death seemed very far away—another country—which allowed me to be as melodramatic about it as I pleased. I wrote poems clogged with
overwrought sentiments about death. With what adolescent stamina I could daydream about the huge crowd of mourners at my funeral, or imagine the amazing things I might say with my last breath, provided I died in such a way that allowed me the time and presence of mind to say something memorable while someone was there to write it down. Now that I was in my forties, the idea of drumming up a quote for my headstone seemed too great a concession to death, the inevitability of which I found more difficult to grasp than ever, except in tiny disheartening doses. The memorial park blazed with midday sun, and I realized that I'd miss the light if I were dead, though I'd possess no sentience with which to miss it.

“Ms. Hirsch was right,” I told Brian. “It's hard to plan your last words in advance.”

Gary had said, “Turn off the TV.” He cursed the used-car salesman who straddled a bristling camel and rode it across the lot. Gary had had enough absurd splendor. He turned to Sharleen, beside him in bed. “Now I've seen it all,” he said. Ron sank to his knees as he climbed the stairs. Nancy, on the floor below, heard only an “Oh” as his head came to rest on the upstairs landing. His unseeing eyes remained wide open as heat slowly leaked from his hands and feet. Bob lay strapped in an ambulance, red light spinning beyond the window. “Please,” he said through a bubble of blood, and my father asked the paramedics not to use the siren, afraid the noise might frighten his son. Bob died exactly as he'd lived: quietly gliding through city streets. My mother swallowed her heart medication. “See you in the morning,” she said, and my father nodded absently. She cinched her bathrobe and shuffled off to bed without any idea that this night was her last. She reclaimed each morning like a watch from a pawnshop. Why would tomorrow be any different? Only the names of the days were different. Otherwise they were hard to tell apart.

It was getting late. I had a class to teach that afternoon. Brian had clients. “So?” I said, and we walked into the wind. If all the last words that have ever been spoken were uttered at once, they'd gust past us and fan out across Burbank and Studio City, sweeping smog
over the ridge of the San Gabriel Mountains, stripping every cloud from the sky. Before us was the view my mother had hoped the family plot would have, and I took it in as we neared the car. Stretching from one end of the valley to the other were movie studios, apartment houses, multilevel parking structures, hospitals, and retirement villages, most of them new. The Golden State Freeway had been repaved, and if the snarled traffic ever eased up, commuters would sail to their destinations with the frictionless speed of a dream. From this height, I saw the slopes of the memorial park descend to the valley floor below and level out, the city its continuation, scoured by a wind that took history with it.