The Undertaker's Daughter (40 page)

“Well, that was really an upper,” my sister said as I drove.

“What?”

“That play. A bunch of people in a graveyard.”

“The play was about their lives, not their deaths.”

“Yeah, but that song you sang. I was . . . I couldn’t hold it back. When you sang those words, ‘He’s gone, he’s gone away,’ I’ll never forget that. I lost it. How did you do it? How could you sing that without breaking down?”

“I was acting, Jemma, it wasn’t real.”

Acting was the only thing that kept me sane that summer. Immersed in the summer theater program, I fell into the rhythm created by each production. We became an intimate family that discovered each other’s characters’ lives as we rehearsed night
after night. After rehearsals our late-night dinners were rich with theater talk and evenings faded with bottles of wine at someone’s apartment. It felt grown-up and artsy, and after each production ended we began the same rituals with a new play and a new family of performers and production staff. I was so engrossed with the work the world and all of the dead of Jubilee could have dropped away and I would not have known.

M
y father was in the intensive care unit. We took up our usual seats in the waiting room, a room in which we’d spent many nights trying to doze in its uncomfortable chairs. I’d lost track of how many days he’d been there—long enough for us to become intimately familiar with the cafeteria, hallways, and elevators.

The next morning we began the familiar routine. Ten minutes each hour would be divided between the three of us. My mother took six minutes and Jemma and I had two each. The ICU was full of hospital beds with no uniformity. Machines were everywhere keeping people alive. I maneuvered between the chaos of the machines and the beds to reach my father. Everything was bright—the lights, the sheets, the walls, all were glowing, permeating the room. Yet with all the clear, clean brilliance, life here seemed dark and won by narrow margins.

My father was awake. He couldn’t move for all of the equipment, the needles in his arms, the tube in his mouth, and his face was almost completely covered with an oxygen mask. The bed, normally raised up, was almost flat, and in that position he looked like a constrained mental patient. His hand was all that was left free to hold. His eyes told me he wanted to say something and I could sense his frustration. This was no way to die.

I looked up at the infernal clock; I had a few seconds left. He looked at me again with either fear or fight in his eyes; I don’t know, maybe both. I bent down to him and whispered in his ear, “Everything is going to be all right.”

He made eye contact with me, then slowly moved his head to say no.
No, it won’t.

So much was unsaid between us, and I did not see how we would find a way through it. One tear slid down his face. Just one. I had never before seen my father cry.

Later that morning Jemma and I were on our way to the cafeteria when one of the ICU doctors walked briskly toward us. He didn’t bother to pause, but kept walking as he looked ahead of him. To the air he announced, “Your father’s finally died.”

Jemma and I looked at each other, turned on our heels, and almost ran down the hall to beat the doctor to the waiting room. We couldn’t allow this man in his perfectly pressed white coat with his heartless attitude to approach our mother on his own. We skidded into the waiting room with the doctor on our trail. My mother was talking to a friend and stopped in midsentence when she saw the three of us.

“He’s gone,” the doctor said.

My mother opened her pocketbook, fumbled through her change purse, and presented us with two dimes. “Call your brother,” she said to me. “Call Evelyn,” she said to Jemma.

We nodded and immediately went back to the hallway.

Jemma stopped before we reached the telephones. “I’m not calling Evelyn. You call for me. I can’t do it. I’ll call Thomas.”

Then we exchanged dimes, as if hers were contaminated.

When we returned to the waiting room, my father’s surgeon was speaking with my mother, his hand on her shoulder. His golfer’s tan glared above his expensively tailored three-piece suit, and
the dazzle from his shiny gold watch nearly blinded us. A gold bracelet on the other wrist tipped over the taste boundary for me, and I wondered what my father would have made of it.

“We’d like to do an autopsy. We’d just like to make sure for you.”

My mother, still seated, looked up at him and shook her head. “I’m sorry. I can’t. I promised Frank.”

The surgeon wanted to confirm that my father had died of pancreatic cancer. There had been no way to tell for certain that the small organ hidden behind the liver was cancerous.

In his working life my father had seen dozens of bodies cut open and crudely stitched back together. He’d witnessed autopsies in which the facial skin was pulled back and then sewn onto the neck with thick, black stitches. Many years ago he’d told my mother, “When I die, don’t let them do that to me. I want you to promise me that you won’t let them do that to me.” Even though my father had taken out a “cancer insurance policy,” my mother would not let them perform an autopsy, which was the only way to claim the insurance.

When Rex and Fount arrived in Greenville to take my father’s body back to Jubilee, they tried to convince her to let the doctors perform the autopsy.

“We say things today, Lily Tate, but we don’t know how they’re going to pan out in the future. There won’t be any other way to prove that he had pancreatic cancer,” Rex told her.

“I’m sorry, Rex. You may be right, but I can’t.”

The death certificate read “pancreatitis” as the cause of death. My father was fifty-two years old.

I left the room to get some air and ran into Fount in the hall. He looked as if he’d kill for a Pall Mall. The crumpled red pack bulged out of his shirt pocket.

“Looks like there aren’t going to be any more scars on my father, Fount. Just that one big one from the war.”

“Aw, Missy”—he sometimes called me that—“you don’t need to think about that right now.”

“Did he ever tell you how he got that scar?”

“Oh, sure. It was right after the war ended. He was still over there, part of the MP. He was walking around on patrol and a German soldier got him.”

“On patrol? Not guarding a building? And not in a jeep?”

“No. No jeep. And I don’t know anything about a building.”

A weariness settled in as I prepared for the drive back to Jubilee with Jemma. I sat for a moment with my head in my hands and asked myself what kind of secrets my father had just taken with him.

T
he daughter of a woman who had committed suicide stood at the front door of the funeral home one dismal autumn morning. I was a child when I stood at the door behind my mother on that rainy day. The girl stood in the rain, her hair dripping, her clothes soaked, and pounded on the door seeking entry to the funeral home before opening hours. The woebegone girl, with fresh misery on her face, thrust a gold necklace at my mother when she answered the door.

The girl raised her voice above the rain, which was beating down harder and heavier. “Please, please put this on my mother.”

The mother had drowned herself in a large pond, and now the daughter stood like the ghost of her, pale and sodden. The necklace hung from her hands, the only bright and shiny thing to be seen this gray morning. At that moment, the necklace was more
important to her than anything else in the world. The relief on the girl’s face when my mother took the necklace from her helped us believe that the daughter would survive her grief.

The living are often concerned with what material thing the dead should take with them and often feel compelled to consign something of value to the coffin. I became quite worried about what kinds of objects were buried with the dead and barraged my father with questions: “Will that man be buried with his wedding ring?” “What will happen to that woman’s brooch?” “What does a child take with them?”

My father answered with a calm certainty, “Mostly, what the dead take with them are their secrets.”

 CHAPTER 18 

R
ex and Fount removed my father’s body from the hospital and drove back to Jubilee. By the time they reached the funeral home, a small band of men had gathered to help. After the handshakes and comments about the occasion, Fount and Rex assumed their professional roles and kicked the well-intentioned men out of the funeral home. Rex knew it was his job and his alone to embalm the man he had loved as much as his own father. Fount helped him move their friend to the embalming table.

My father lay under the white sheet in the presence of two men who knew a few of his secrets. These men had covered for him when he slipped away on one of his trysts. How many times had they been ready with an excuse, a story for my mother? How many of his gin bottles had they secreted away? But now was not the time to speak of flaws, or insatiable appetites.

“Fount, do you remember one day when you and Frank were
messin’ around with the water hose? I was standing at the door of the funeral home, listening for the phones, and you and Frank started wrestling with the hose,” Rex remembered.

“Yeah, we were acting silly.” Fount wasn’t one for oratory.

“Frank grabbed the hose from you and sprayed you with it. Then he took off with it, ran the length of the hose. It snapped on him and he fell to the ground. When he got up and brushed himself off, I’ll be damned if he had only a small grass stain on his shirt pocket, about the size of a quarter. If it had been us who’d fallen, we would’ve ripped the knees out of our pants, scuffed our shoes, and had bloody noses. But Frank got up and laughed. He had the most infectious laugh. . . . I’ll leave you here, Fount, so you can have your time alone with him.”

Later, Rex went back into the embalming room and asked Fount to leave. Then he shut the door and locked it. He told Fount and the other employees who’d shown up to leave him the hell alone and he’d be fine. Before he began, he thought back to what his former boss, partner, and friend would have wanted. “He would want me to come in and flip that switch, put my professional hat on, and do what I had to do, to the best of my ability, regardless of who it was.”