The Bishop's Wife (21 page)

“I didn't mean to offend you,” I said. She wasn't like Carrie Helm, I told myself. And Tobias had nothing in common with Jared Helm.

“When I said I felt relief he was gone, it wasn't because of that. He would never have hit me. He wasn't like that.” Anna sat back down, and I could hear her harsh breathing. I had upset her and I shouldn't have done that, not today of all days.

“I know you loved him deeply,” I said neutrally.

“I loved him so much,” she echoed. “I wondered sometimes if he could ever really love me as much as I loved him. And at the end, when he talked about his first wife so often, I thought that was why. I was always second-best in his eyes. The one he lived with because she was dead.” She sounded ashamed.

We are never good enough for those we love, are we? Not in our own eyes. “Did he ever say that to you, Anna?”

“No! Of course he wouldn't. He wasn't cruel.” Her eyes darted toward mine, and then shifted away again.

“Tell me what you know about his first wife,” I said, before I realized that I was asking that more for my own sake than for hers. “Did he talk about her often?” But surely this wouldn't hurt her. It might even help.

At last, her breathing seemed to slow down to normal. “She was very beautiful. Fragile, I think.” She gestured to the half-size china cupboard with its gold-filigreed teacups and plates in pastel colors. “I am much taller than she was.” She looked down at her feet. I realized they were rather large, a size ten or eleven, and her hands matched. Why had I not noticed that before? “Liam says she was like an old-fashioned movie star, so careful about her makeup, her hair, her clothes. I think she spent hours in the morning getting ready for the day, from the stories he tells about sitting and watching her at the bathroom mirror.” Anna wore no more makeup than I did, which was a rarity in Utah these days. Women of every age
here wore makeup, even to the gym.

She shrugged. “I didn't do that, and the boys seemed to like it. I was more rough and tumble with them. But it made me wonder—did Tobias marry me for their sake? Because he thought I would be good for them, and not because he loved me?” She tapped her feet on the floor.

“Even if he did marry you for their sake at first, he certainly loved you later,” I assured her.

“Was it only gratitude, though? You know, I fell in love with the boys the first time I saw them. It was the strangest thing. Before that moment, I had never thought of myself as the motherly sort. At that age, I'd given up having children of my own and I thought I'd reconciled myself to that. But as soon as I saw them, I felt a lurch inside my chest, and I thought I could never let them go.”

Kelly Helm, I thought. Oh, yes. That was how I felt, as well.

Her eyes seemed distant, but not in the unfocused way that had worried me before. “I touched Tomas's little hands, and I felt as if his blood was my blood. And Liam, he tried to kick me at first when I held him up, but I lost hold of him and he slid right underneath me and started to cry. His father was going to shout at him, but I picked him up—his big eight-year-old body—and gave him a kiss on the cheek.” She held her hands to her chest as if little Liam was still nestled there. “He looked like a startled bird, unsure where his nest was. I wondered if he was going to be one of those boys who pretended he didn't want to be cuddled or touched at all. But no, he snuggled right into me, his tears absorbed into my skin. I wanted them. No, it was more than that. I was part of them, and I didn't know why it was true.”

“As if God had meant you to be there for them,” I said, and I knew I was not talking only about her.

“Yes,” said Anna fiercely.

“What was her name?” I asked, just wanting one more bit of information for myself. “Do you know?”

Anna looked at me, a little startled. “Oh. It was Helena. I thought
you knew that.”

I shook my head. “No one ever mentioned it. It was like she was an ideal. Not a real person.” That part was true.

Anna nodded. “It felt like that to me sometimes, too. An impossible ideal. On a pedestal, and she died before she fell off of it.” She stood up and held up a finger. “Just a moment.”

She hurried up the stairs, and when she came back down, she was holding a wedding photo, of Tobias as a very young man and a strikingly beautiful woman at his side, very petite, with long, dark curls and fine features. She was wearing a knee-length wedding dress that hugged her curves and made her look even more like a doll next to tall Tobias. He was holding her in his arms and carrying her as if she weighed nothing.

“That is how they looked on their wedding day.” Anna seemed wistful; it wasn't quite full-blown jealousy, but there was a trace of it.

“Did he keep this photograph of her up in your bedroom?” I asked. I was standing now, and I thought again of Jared Helm, and his reminders to Carrie that she wasn't the woman he wanted her to be. Did this photograph serve the same purpose for Anna?

But she shook her head. “It was in his drawer. He didn't want me to know it was there, I think. He never showed it to me. And he always put away his own clothes. But I found it one day, and I put it back right where it had been.”

So, it wasn't the same. “Did he have other photos of her?” I asked.

Anna shook her head again. “There was a family album, but he must have gone through it. I never saw another photo of Helena in the house.”

That seemed odd. “What did he do with them?”

“I don't know. I only know they were gone. The boys asked him about the photos once, but he said he didn't remember what had happened to them. I think he did it for them, because it was easier for them not to be reminded of what they had lost.”

Or easier for him? I handed the photograph back.

“Did you ever have the feeling that Tobias felt guilty about his wife's death?” I asked. The question felt wrong as I asked it, but I couldn't suppress my curiosity.

But if Anna felt the same, she didn't mention it. “Guilty? No, not really. He always spoke of her death as a terrible tragedy, but he didn't blame himself, if that's what you think. At least, I never heard him say anything that would make me think so until this last week.”

“And what did he say then?”

“It was only a passing comment. He said that he wished she had been able to see all of this, everything he had. It was a proud moment for him. He felt his life was full.”

I let go of my questions about Helena Torstensen with a soft sigh. I had already pushed too far there. I checked my watch. It was getting close to the time we needed to leave. “Where is Tobias to be buried, then?” I asked.

“At the Draper City Cemetery. He bought a double plot some years ago. I think it's a little morbid, knowing there's a place waiting for me.”

“I don't think it's morbid at all,” I said. I had my own plot waiting for me in the same cemetery, right next to Kurt's. The baby had hardly taken up any space at all, and they had put her in Kurt's plot. Why his and not mine? I never knew the answer to that, and at the time, I hadn't been in any state to ask.

“Tobias said it was comforting, knowing where he would end up, and that I wouldn't have to worry about the money. He had it all paid for in advance. My funeral, too, when that happens. He used to imagine us having a double funeral together, but obviously, that's not the way it turned out.”

A double funeral? “But you've years left to live,” I said. She was only just past sixty. She could remarry, have a whole new life. Just because Tobias's heart had given out didn't mean Anna had to think of herself as nearly dead.

“I suppose so,” said Anna. “I don't know what to do with the
house, or the garden. I can't bear the thought of turning it all back to lawn, but I can't take care of it the way he did, either.”

Anna was staring at the door, but she wasn't making a move to leave. Should I mention the time? No. She knew. Let her do this at her own pace. This was a difficult moment for her, becoming a widow.

I tried for something less sad. “He loved his tools and his garden, didn't he?”

Anna let out a small laugh. “He did at that. He kept a brand new hammer by his bedside, do you know that? I used to wonder if he got up in the middle of the night and worked on projects inside the house, but the hammer was never used. It looked as new the day he died as when we were first married.”

“He had a hammer by the bed when you were married?” I said, feeling the hairs rise on the back of my scalp.

“The boys kept stuffed animals by their beds when they were younger. And Tobias had that hammer,” said Anna. “I used to think he needed it for the same comfort that they did.”

“Where is it now?”

“Still there, probably,” said Anna.

“You should put it back in the shed,” I said, the words sounding like they had been spoken by someone else. “With the other tools.”

“I will, eventually.”

I walked to the door, opened it and stepped outside. “Are you ready to go?” I asked, hearing the brusqueness in my voice.

She nodded and we drove toward the mortuary while I tried to convince myself that no man would have kept a hammer by his bed in order to make sure that he could kill his wife when he decided it was time for them to die together.

A woman in a pencil skirt with her hair up in a severe knot showed us the way to the back of the mortuary, past the viewing rooms with chairs set up in neat rows, to a room where Tobias's body lay on a metal table.

“Oh!” said Anna, and she stepped back at the sight of him.

I stood behind her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Are you all right?”

The woman who had brought us here had already disappeared.

“Yes. It just gave me such a start. I thought for a moment—” She shook her head. “It's like him, and not like him at the same time. How very strange.” She stepped closer to the body and looked it over carefully without touching it. There was a white sheet over the chest and the lower half of the body.

I was carrying the grey temple bag Anna had given me at the house. Inside it were all the things we would need for this; I had checked before we left. The smell was strongly floral.

Anna pulled the sheet down a little. “His scar there,” she said, pointing to a spot on his lower stomach.

I glanced at it and saw a long, puckered scar. “Do you know how he got it?” I asked.

Anna shook her head, then let out a long sigh. “We should get started,” she said.

They had asked us to be finished by one o'clock so that they could make sure the body was transported to the chapel by two, when the funeral was supposed to start.

I put the temple bag on a chair near the body, opened the zipper and pulled out the garments. They were snowy white and soft cotton. Brand new, most likely, and not the threadbare, greying kind Kurt tended to wear, no matter how many times I suggested gently to him that it was time to buy new ones. Kurt seemed to think garments lasted forever, as if that were some kind of bonus blessing for those who wore them regularly and served God in them.

“Top first?” said Anna practically.

I bunched the top up around the neck and she lifted up Tobias's head as we pulled the fabric over it. Then it was my turn to lift up his arms. They felt so heavy and limp that I had a momentary flashback to my daughter's birth/death. They had handed her to me as soon as she was born, as they would have handed me a live child. She was small, but she felt heavy because she was not moving. Her limbs had felt like rubbery weights and her skin tone had been dark. I remember her fingernails in particular, and how dead and black they looked.

I got one of Tobias's arms through an armhole, then the other. Anna tugged down the shirt over Tobias's stomach. I had to help her lift his body so we could smooth down the back. I was breathing heavily with effort, but I nodded, glad we'd managed it by ourselves.

Anna got out the bottoms and pulled off the sheet that covered his lower half. I was happy to discover it wasn't embarrassing at all to see Tobias nude. It wasn't him anymore. It was just a shape of human flesh.

Anna wiped at her sweat and then we pulled the bottoms up to meet the top. Somehow that felt like half the battle. Tobias looked more himself now. She tucked the top in all around the waist.

I glanced at the nearly invisible white thread embroidery, a reminder of specific promises in the temple to follow God. There
were three marks, two on the top and one on one leg. People make fun of Mormons' special underwear, and I could see why, although the underwear itself isn't so strange—there are new styles every few years to keep up with the expectations of each generation. We don't wear the ankle- and wrist-length garments our great-grandparents wore, and we don't have slits in the back for bathroom stops the way our parents and grandparents did.

There are stories about the mystical power of garments to keep people safe. I had heard about a man who was caught in a house fire. He went to the hospital to be treated and when they cut off his clothes, they found his skin under his garments untouched. There is a specific promise in the temple that protection to various body parts would be offered to those who keep their promises, signified by the marks in the garments. I had always believed it was a metaphorical protection, rather than a physical one. But who am I to tell other people their faith is wrong and foolish? If I believe in God even a little, I've already passed into the area of the unscientific.

I got out the rest of the clothes. We put on the white shirt, Anna carefully smoothing out the collar and buttoning each of the tiny buttons, even the ones on the wrist. We put on the white slacks, white socks and slippers. And then at last, the final temple garments: the green apron, white robe, hat, and sash.

When it was finished, Anna and I both leaned over the table and caught our breath.