The Undertaker's Daughter (25 page)

O
nce, years later, in a few candid moments on the telephone, my mother spoke to me for the first time about that painful episode.

“What happened when it all began again in Jubilee?” I asked. I heard her sigh, but she reached back in her memory, and the decades that had passed since the scandal seemed to evaporate after my question.

“I’d already made up my mind that I was not going to give him a divorce. I went to see Viv’s mother. I told her she was going to have to do something about her daughter. I’ll tell you, what happened next that made me so mad I don’t have any use for that man to this day. All that going on, and the preacher, it was Brother Norris at the time, came to
me
and said, “If you want to move back to Lanesboro, I’ll see that you get help to move and we’ll get you back over there.”

“Why was the preacher even discussing this with you?”

“I don’t know. But do you know what I told him? I told him I’m not going anywhere . . . if anybody leaves, Frank will. And I’ve never had any use for that preacher since.”

“Was Daddy planning to run off with Viv?”

“No. Not that I know of. I guess he could have after she moved to Louisville, if he’d wanted to. But he didn’t, so I don’t think he planned to. She might have thought he was going to.”

That is exactly what Viv thought, until her mother disillusioned her.

Viv’s mother knew that Jubilee was not big enough to carry the weight of Lily Tate’s wrath and the profusion of gossip that erupted. Nor could she save her daughter’s reputation, except by encouraging her to leave town.

“Was it strange and uncomfortable for you when Viv eventually moved back to Jubilee?” I asked my mother.

“Yes, it was for a long time. I didn’t see her that much though.”

“Did Daddy ever say anything about her being back in Jubilee?”

“No. I’ve often wondered how she feels when she sees me. I’ve often wondered that.”

“When you run into each other in the grocery store, do you speak?”

“Oh, yeah, she just acts like nothing ever happened. I want to say something ugly to her, but I don’t.”

“What did your friends say about it?”

“No one ever mentioned it or said anything to me about it. Not until after it was all over, and the only person that I can think of who ever mentioned it was Mary Alice Timmons. She said she didn’t see
how in the world
I did what I did.”

“Meaning . . . what?”

“Well, just, you know. I guess she thought I stayed calm and, you know, worked through it all, I guess.”

“Did you stay calm?”

“Oh, gosh, I don’t know. I imagine I blew up a time or two all right.”

“What did you say to Mary Alice?”

“I told her I just did what I thought I had to do.” My mother paused. “You can do a lot of things when you have to. I heard people say, right in front of me, and I don’t know whether they just weren’t thinking or whether they didn’t know about it, but they would talk about someone running around on someone and say, ‘If that was my husband, I couldn’t put up with that. One of us would have to leave.’ And I wanted to tell them that they don’t know what they would do. You don’t know what you’d do in any situation until you go through it yourself.”

After I put the phone down, for the first time in the years and the distance that had passed between my mother and me, the penny dropped. How selfish my father had been, how hurtful, how careless . . . the deceit and embarrassment he foisted upon my mother would have been crushing. Yet, the scandal had already been buried, if not forgotten, and Jubilee had once again moved on. I don’t know why it took me so long to imagine her misery.

T
he caring, hardworking undertaker of my childhood was still there, but he existed alongside the new stranger that he had become to me. My first instinct was not to blame him or judge him, perhaps because I was on the verge of becoming like him. As I first began to leave my childhood behind, though my life with the dead would remain a constant, I slowly ventured toward the forbidden. I would soon take risks to that end, just as he had.

 CHAPTER 10 

T
he tastes of the people of Jubilee had changed. In the late 1960s the final image of their mothers and wives lying in pastel negligees didn’t sit well anymore. The Shroud Lady caught on quickly and designed backless, matronly dresses with Peter Pan collars in staid colors. But this new look was a flash in the pan—what severed the relationship between the Shroud Lady and my father was an act of patent disloyalty that he couldn’t forgive. Alfred Deboe buried one of her relatives. My father hit the roof. She told him that she wasn’t to blame; it was a family decision. Unsympathetic, it was simple to him: Why should he give his business to her if she took hers to the competition? But in the end, it was an elderly widow who drove the Shroud Lady out of business when she told my father she wanted to be buried in her own clothes.

Now, for the first time, family members came to make arrangements carrying the deceased’s clothing for use in burial.
My father never knew what kind of garment crisis would be thrust upon him. He turned to my mother for help. He thought she knew more about how female clothing should fit and welcomed her feminine touch.

When my mother entered the embalming room, my father had already washed the body a second time and dressed the deceased woman in her underwear. Usually the family brought underclothes: a bra, a slip, underwear, and stockings. But sometimes they couldn’t afford a new set and were embarrassed to bring in the old, frayed, and stained pieces. My father discreetly told them not to worry, that he would take care of it, then sent my mother out to purchase whatever was needed.

The first time my mother helped my father dress a female corpse, she seriously thought that the poor woman’s bones might snap in two. The stiffness was breathtaking and startled her. And the body was much heavier than she’d imagined. It was all queer and awkward. She was unprepared for how cold the corpse felt. It was one thing to touch a dead hand as I had, another to handle the entire body as she did. My father was always there to help; it took at least two people to dress a body. He positioned and then held up the woman’s torso while my mother pulled the dress or blouse over her head. Buttons and zips were fiddly and time-consuming, and my mother had to maneuver carefully around the body and my father.

A surprising number of people stored special clothes before they died to be used for their burial. They harbored suits and dresses and lingerie in their closets and cedar chests for years. This was hugely problematic for an undertaker. The clothes represented the deceased when they were thinner, when the clothing was in style, when the fabric was new and not faded or delicately disintegrating. The relatives, in their grief, were adamant that
their mother be buried in the dress that had been hanging in her closet for ten to twenty years and would not be reasoned with.

The families never knew it, but my father took scissors to the backs of hundreds of dresses and men’s suit jackets. My mother then either sewed a few stitches into the back of the garment to make it appear tidy, or more often, she tucked the fabric around the back of the torso.

My father preferred long sleeves on the women, especially on those who’d been ill for a long time. It was hard to explain to a family what dead arms looked like, how they took the attention away from the face and the overall image. They stood out like separate entities, even after they’d been made up to match the color of the face and hands.

If ill-fitting dresses and blouses weren’t difficult enough, the shoe issue would raise its ugly head. There was absolutely no reason to be buried in shoes, but many people requested it. My father tried to explain—delicately—that the shoes would probably no longer fit. No matter how sensitive and subtle he was, sometimes an irate and hysterical person would complain, “I’m paying almost five thousand dollars for this funeral, and that means I’m paying for the right for my husband to wear shoes. So put the damn shoes on his feet, and if they don’t fit, put the damn shoes at the bottom of the casket right next to his damn feet. All right?”

Hair, hair, and more hair. Lord! Southerners are particular about their hair.

Women became excruciatingly specific about how they wanted their hair to look when they were viewed.

Mrs. Dover used to grab me whenever she spotted me downtown. “I told your daddy about my curlicues, will you remind him for me?”

I nodded. “Sure thing, Mrs. Dover. Curlicues. Got it.”

When I returned home, I asked my father about Mrs. Dover’s spectacular request. He laughed and imitated her: “I want these two curlicues right here, do you see?” She’d pointed to the right and then to the left of her forehead. “I want them in place when people view me. Now, Frank, I don’t care how much hairspray your girl has to use. And I think you better make a note of it.”

There were others:

“I don’t want Janice to do my hair; she never gives it enough lift. If Mildred can’t get there, then don’t bury me until she can.”

“Frank, could you make sure my mother gets her blue rinse?”

And another:

“Mr. Mayfield, I’ve been thinking about Leonard and his hair for burial.”

“Why goodness, Tandy, is Leonard ill?”

“Oh, no, no, Nothing like that. I’m just thinking out loud here. . . . Leonard has a haircut every third Thursday of the month. You’ll need to work around that, ’cause if he dies on the Wednesday of his haircut week, you’ll have to get Carl to cut his hair. He’s quite particular about his haircuts; no one but Carl has cut his hair since he was a young man.”

Leonard’s wife seemed oblivious to the fact that Carl could barely see anymore to cut anyone’s hair and was likely to die before Leonard.

With all the new requests and demands, sometimes it just didn’t work out the way people wanted. Mildred or the family’s chosen beautician might not be able to attend to the deceased for a dozen reasons. And at times the family’s budget was so tight that in lieu of paying Mildred my father called upon my mother. I found this hilarious. The last time my mother actually washed and set her own hair must have been during the war. But
she rallied and picked up a few tips from Mildred and rose to the occasion like the Southern beauty-parlor-going professional she was.

“We never do the back of the head,” Mildred once told her. “There’s no need, ’cause her head is just lying there on that pillow and no one will ever see it. Just a waste of hairspray, really.”

“Now, Mildred,” my mother said. “You can skip the back of every woman’s head in this county, but I want you to do the back of mine when I die. I will not have the back of my hair not done up right.”

No one ever complained about my mother’s hairstyling talent, or lack of it, and most family members were unaware that she had stepped in and helped. She was always in the background, loyal to my father and his work. She remained aligned with the social mores of the day and resisted any urge to behave otherwise. He was her life.

People continued to demand burial quirks. As I sat in the office one day, a man opened the door, stuck his head in, and with a wide smile said, “Howdy, Frank. Now don’t forget, I want you to put a can of beer in my pocket.”