The Truth About Death (33 page)

“Only a few embers were glowing in the dark when the
dancers, released at last from the spell of the music, looked round at one another, astonished at the fullness of their hearts, while above them, turning on the silent axletree of Heaven, Boötes the herdsman followed his flocks across the pastures of the sky.”
Enough, enough
. Julian looked around him at the circle of listeners.

Sara was the first to break the silence. “Is that all?”

“That’s all.”

The doctor stepped forward.

“She’s asleep,” said Julian. “What do we do now?”

Father Neumiller offered the flask, nearly empty, to the doctor. “Have a drink of this.”

“Thanks.”

The doctor finished the brandy. He pointed the hypodermic into the air and squeezed firmly. A fine spray hung in the light for a moment over the lamp, like the Milky Way, and then went out.

“Amen,” said the priest.

“Papa?”

“Yes?”

“What about Duva?”

“Oh for heaven’s sake.”

“It’s just a story, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s just a story.”

POCKETS OF SILENCE

Shortly before she died my mother made a tape for us, several tapes. She had some things she wanted to say, big things, little things. It was kind of a mystery. I mean, I don’t think she had any big secret sins to confess—her sins always rose to the surface right away—so what could she possibly have to say that she hadn’t said, or couldn’t say to our faces? After all, we weren’t one of those families that couldn’t talk to each other or express our emotions. If anything, we were at the other end of the spectrum.

“I just want to be able to say things as they occur to me. I don’t want to have to call you. So many things come to me during the day, and at night too, especially at night; so many happy memories—some unhappy ones too—but mostly happy. I want you to have a record of that. So many things to say to each one of you, and all of you.”

So Papa set up a tape recorder by the bed. An amateur musician, he had lots of recording equipment and made quite a production out of it.

“Why don’t you just get me one of those little cassette
recorders?” Mama asked; but Papa had to do things in a big way. He set up his four-track tape recorder on the stand next to the bed where Mama kept her medication. He bought two new low-impedance microphones and tried out every possible permutation of microphone locations and settings on the tape recorder. It was his way of working off some of his frustration.

“Testing, one two three four testing. Now
you
do it.”

But Mama didn’t want to do it. “I feel like I’m onstage, on the radio.” One mike was on a boom that swung over the bed. “I want this to be private.”

“Testing, one two three four testing.”

And the tape recorder would repeat, “Testing, one two three four testing.”

The finishing touch was a remote punch in/out switch that Mama could keep on the bed beside her so she wouldn’t have to twist around to start and stop the recorder. All she had to do was punch a button.

“I’ve always wanted one of these anyway,” Papa said. “That’s how professionals correct their mistakes. If you’ve got a sour note, you just play along with the tape, and when you get to the sour note, you punch in and then out and it records right over it.”

Once Papa had everything in place Mama felt better. She had an object in her life, what remained of it. A mission. Something to be accomplished. Something that could not have been accomplished under any other circumstances: the recording of a happy and productive and sometimes turbulent life under the pressure of death. Death was a lens that would reveal things as they really were: what was important would assume its true importance; what was unimportant would recede into the shadows.

Mama kept the tapes right on the bed. She didn’t want us to listen to them while she was still alive. But during the long summer afternoons we could hear the tape recorder clicking on and off. Sometimes, if I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I’d hear the familiar click and put my ear to her door, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying, only the faint murmur of her weakened voice.

She filled up half a dozen seven-inch tapes. Seven hours. And when she’d said what she had to say, she stopped talking. A week later she died, and ever since her death the house has seemed strangely silent, even when Papa was playing his guitar and we were all singing.

It was over three years before we worked up the courage to listen to the tapes, which had been stored on a shelf in the dining room closet next to the Waterford crystal that we never used anymore. When I say “courage” I don’t mean that we were afraid of what we might hear; I mean we were afraid we wouldn’t be able to bear it, especially during the holidays. But we’d had a wonderful Christmas, and we were feeling strong. Papa had suffered some business losses, but things were looking up; I was a senior at Kenwood High School and would be following my sisters to the U of C, which everyone said was just as good as Harvard and (more important) close to home. Molly was in graduate school at the University of Michigan, Mama’s alma mater. Meg had married and was expecting, and her husband, Dan, was just perfect. Handsome, romantic, practical, talented. Papa had been teaching him to play the harmonica and he learned so quickly that they’d made a tape together—Papa on the guitar, Dan on the harp, Meg and Molly singing the blues songs that had embarrassed us as children, and that still embarrassed me:

Mr. Jelly Roll Baker

let me be your slave

when Gabriel blows his trumpet

you know I’ll rise from my grave

for some of your jelly

some of your good jelly roll

you know it’s doin’ me good

way down deep in my soul.

It was New Year’s Day. Meg and Dan would be driving back to Milwaukee that afternoon. Molly would be at home with Papa and me for another couple of days before going back to school. It just seemed like the right time, and I don’t think anyone was surprised when Meg brought one of the tapes into the living room, holding it tight against her big swelling belly.

Papa got up and without a word began to thread the tape; Meg poked a couple sticks of kindling under the smoldering logs in the fireplace and then sat down next to Dan at the piano and filled up the silence with a chorus of “Fum, Fum, Fum,” Mama’s favorite carol:
A venti-cinq de dicembre, fum fum fum
. Molly and I were sitting at opposite ends of the couch, the bottoms of our bare feet pressed together.

Papa switched on the tape recorder and there was a moment of silence so intense that the dogs, snoozing in front of the fire, perked up their ears. (If Mama had been there she’d have made them lie down on their own rug under the piano.) Papa hurried across the room and into his chair.

I suppose we each brought different questions to that moment, even Dan, who had never met Mama, but who’d heard enough about her, and maybe we
were
in fact a little apprehensive. What was going to emerge as truly important? What was going to recede into the shadows?

I didn’t know what the others were thinking, but I was wondering about the Italian novelist—a visiting writer at the University—that Mama’d had an affair with.
I
knew that Mama had misbehaved, but no one had ever explained to me exactly what had happened, and I was still curious because I couldn’t fit it into the picture I had of our family. Papa and Mama had had plenty of differences, which they never bothered to conceal from us; but on the whole our family life had been shaped by the love they’d felt for each other and expressed, physically, all the time. Neither one had been able to walk by the other without giving a little pat on the backside, and they had always taken naps when they couldn’t possibly have been tired. So where did Alessandro Postiglione fit into the picture? Was he one of those things that was going to assume its true importance? Or was he going to recede into the shadows? I didn’t know why it seemed so important; but it did.

We waited, and then waited some more. Papa got out of his chair and made some adjustments. Still no sound. He ran the tape forward for a few seconds and tried again. Still nothing. The big reels turned in silence. Papa ran the tape forward again. Nothing. He turned it over and tried the other side. Still nothing. Meg got up and brought the rest of the tapes from the dining room closet. They were all clearly labeled:
HELEN’S TAPE-AUGUST 15–16, 1968
.
HELEN’S TAPE-AUGUST 17–18, 1968
.
HELEN’S TAPE-AUGUST 19–22, 1968
. And so on. Papa tried one after another, but there was no sound.

I’d never seen Papa—or any adult for that matter—really lose control before. It didn’t happen all at once, but you could hear it coming. He spent the rest of the day at the tape recorder,
trying this and then that. If you’ve ever hooked up a sophisticated stereo system you’ll know that in cases like this there’s usually some button that needs to be pushed, or a knob that needs to be turned, or a patch cord that’s plugged into the wrong hole. It’s as simple as that. But Papa exhausted all the possibilities. The rest of us, sitting in the kitchen, could hear him cursing softly, nonstop. Occasionally there was a blast of sound as he tried some other tape, or turned on the tuner, but he couldn’t coax any sound out of Mama’s tapes, and finally he cracked. He didn’t break anything; he just started screaming—shouting, swearing as loud as he could—and then he started to cry, really cry, huge rattling sobs as he stumbled up the stairs.

Meg and Dan left for Milwaukee at about three. Dan had to go back to work the next morning. Molly and I emptied the dishwasher and filled it again and washed the dishes that wouldn’t fit in the second load. We put the turkey carcass in the stockpot and covered it with water. Molly scrubbed down the butcher’s table with bleach, the way Mama used to do, while I put the spices back in alphabetical order. And then we took all the jars and lids out of the closet in the butler’s pantry and matched them up. It was like trying to match up socks; there were a lot of odd jars and a lot of odd lids left over.

Finally, when there was nothing more to be done, we went upstairs. I’d never been afraid to approach my father before, even when he was angry. But I was afraid now, afraid of what we’d find. We tiptoed through Mama’s study and pushed open the bedroom door. Papa was lying facedown on the bed. The late-afternoon sun, caught by the beveled edges of small windowpanes, covered the bed with tiny rainbows. Papa’s pale hair—once carrot red—was flecked with light.

Papa always slept on his stomach so I thought he might be asleep, but when Molly tiptoed around the bed, he looked up at her.

“Papa? Are you all right?”

I could see him shake his head: no.

He kept the register closed, and the bedroom was very cold. Molly turned back the comforter and crawled in next to Papa. I did the same on the other side. There were still two comforters on the bed; I pulled the second one over me, and we lay like that while the sun went down, watching the little rainbows gradually grow together and then fade away completely.

About four or five times a year Ann Landers prints a letter from someone advising readers to tell their loved ones that they love them—before it’s too late. Whenever I read one of those letters I think of Mama and her tapes. But the analogy is imperfect; the moral is not the same. Mama
was
trying to tell us.

But then what
is
the moral?

Check
all
your equipment? Well, of course. The problem, it turned out, was with the new remote punch in/out switch, which had been activating the tape recorder without engaging the recording heads. Papa hadn’t used it in the three years since Mama’s death, so he’d never discovered that it hadn’t been working properly. He sent the tapes to the Ampex Laboratory in Schenectady, New York, to have them analyzed on the off chance that a weak signal had gotten through, but there was nothing to be recovered. The tapes were virginal.

So, by all means, check all your equipment. Yes. But that’s a moral for the head, not the heart. What can I say about the heart?

I suppose the real question is: Why does it matter so intensely? What could Mama have said that would have altered the course of our lives?

I think about this question a lot—not all the time, but often enough—without coming any closer to an answer. All I know is that my life is filled with little pockets of silence. When I put a record on the turntable, for example, there’s a little interval—between the time the needle touches down on the record and the time the music actually starts—during which my heart refuses to beat. All I know is that between the rings of the telephone, between the touch of a button and the sound of the radio coming on, between the dimming of the lights at the cinema and the start of the film, between the lightning and the thunder, between the shout and the echo, between the lifting of a baton and the opening bars of a symphony, between the dropping of a stone and the plunk that comes back from the bottom of a well, between the ringing of the doorbell and the barking of the dogs I sometimes catch myself, involuntarily, listening for the sound of my mother’s voice, still waiting for the tape to begin.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my first three readers for their continued support and encouragement: Virginia (my wife); Henry Dunow (my agent), and Nancy Miller (my editor). And I’d like to thank Gleni Bartels (my production editor) for stitching these stories together.

Special thanks to the following for helping me to expand my frame of reference to include: New York City (John Sheedy and Marilyn Webb), Vietnam (Richard Stout), embalming (Christopher Hroziencik), museum exhibits (Sheri Lindquist), cartooning (Bob Mankoff), French food (Anne Steinbeck), all things Italian (Vincenzina Cipriani, Janet Smith, and Rita Severi), the Guardia Medica in Rome (Marina Frontani), Stearmans in Italy (Piero Angiolillo), and Texas avocados (Noe Torres and Medardo Riojas).