Touch of the Clown (16 page)

Early in the morning Livvy comes downstairs and crawls into bed with me.

“I had an accident,” she says. She has managed to get into clean pajamas. Auntie Sophie has left extra underwear and nightclothes in her room.

“Are you okay?” I let her snuggle up to me.

“I want to go home.”

“We can't just yet. Daddy isn't well.”

“Maybe Uncle Hal could take us to see him and Grandma.” She yawns and burrows into my back. We both fall back asleep.

It is Auntie Sophie who wakes us. “There you are, Livvy. It's time to get up, you two sleepy-heads,” she trills. “We've got a big day ahead. The dentist just after lunch for both of you, and Livvy, you have a doctor's appointment at 3:30, and I need to stop at the supermarket. I need whipping cream if I'm going to make Boston cream pie to go with the lamb chops for supper. Harold thought he might have time to go for
me, but the hobby shop called with some pieces for that new line he's building, and when it comes to choosing between grocery shopping and that railway, well… I think we all know who wins out there. Oh, and Barbara, you need to get up right away because Mr. Beresford phoned and said he wanted to drop by and see you around 10:30. Said he wanted to take you out for coffee and, of course, I said I hope you don't mean real coffee, and he said…”

Jim Beresford.

I wait on the front doorstep for him.

“I want to go, too,” Livvy says.

“Well, you can't.”

“Baa!”

“Livvy, dear,” Auntie Sophie calls through an open window. “You come and help me in the garden. We need a couple of new bouquets and you made such lovely ones the other day.”

“Okay.” She hops up and is gone.

I've started
A Tale of Two Cities,
one of the other novels Cosmo gave us the night we toted books from his place.
It was the best of times and the worst of times
…

Jim Beresford waves at me from the window of his car when he pulls up.

“Do you mind getting away for a few minutes?”

“No. I'd like to.”

We drive to one of the coffee shops in Old Strathcona. Along the way he asks me how things are going at the Hetheringtons.

“Fine,” I say.

“They let you go down to the hospital last night by yourself?”

“No.” My face flushes with shame. “They didn't know I went.”

“It's okay,” he says, ordering a cappuccino for himself and hot chocolate for me. I remember Cosmo placing the same order at the Italian center. It seems like a long time ago.

“He meant a lot to you, didn't he? Mr. Farber.”

“Cosmo.”

“Cosmo.”

“I phoned the hospital this morning,” Jim Beresford says. He is looking at his coffee, not at me, as if there are cue cards in his cup for what he has to say. “He died quietly at three o'clock this morning. He'd been fighting AIDS, the doctor said, for over twelve years. He'd had pneumonia several times, but each time…You knew he had AIDS?”

I nod.

I don't want to cry in front of Jim Beresford, so I drink my hot chocolate in slow sips, and hear his quiet, caring voice going on.

Across the street, a sidewalk performer is doing a juggling act on the corner of Whyte and Fourth. He is dressed like a jack in a deck of cards, and the colored balls fly higher and higher. Then, magically, they return to nest in his hands. When he is finished, it seems to me that he bows to us where we sit at the coffee-shop window.

“Barbara?” Jim Beresford is asking me a question.

“There's a juggler out there.”

“Seems to be a street festival going on all summer long in Old Scona.”

Jim spoons up the last of the foam from his cappuccino cup. “So, do you want to give it some thought? About the memorial service, I mean?”

“Memorial service?”

“For Cosmo. I had a little chat with his sister. She's the one who told me you'd been up to see him last night. Actually, she phoned the department and got hold of me, said she'd gone back
to Cosmo's apartment and your name was on a note attached to a box of books or something.”

“Cosmo was giving all of his books that he had when he was a kid to Livvy and me. We were supposed to take them a few at a time, but we only had one chance.”

”A Tale of Two Cities?
I didn't think he'd noticed my book when I got in the car.

“And
Jane Eyre.
Three or four other ones. Livvy makes me read
Winnie-the-Pooh
over and over again. Can Nathan come to the service, too?”

On the day of the memorial service, Jim Beresford takes time off work to pick up Nathan and me and take us. Auntie Sophie has whisked Livvy away to a shopping mall to look at going-back-to-school clothes. There is a little part of me that thinks maybe Livvy should be coming, too, but then I think the memories she has of Cosmo have way more meaning to her than what people will be saying about him at the service. When I told her that Cosmo had died at the hospital, she went off by herself for awhile and wouldn't talk to anyone. Since then, she seems to ask questions about him and what happens
when people die three or four times a day.

“Is he seeing Mama?”

“I don't know, Livvy.” I seem to always be searching for words. “Some people think that when you die, your spirit stays around for awhile, sort of checking things out.” I read this once in a magazine at the library. Some people who had been dead for a minute or two had risen above their bodies and had been able to watch everything that was going on. “Maybe Cosmo is watching us right now. I think he'd want us to remember the good times we had with him.”

“Maybe he's remembering the bike accident.”

“Maybe. Was that a good time? You did a lot of crying.”

“I remember sherbet. That was a good time, wasn't it, Barbara?”

“Do you want me to go to the memorial service with you, honey?” Auntie Sophie asked. “Sometimes it just helps to have someone with you.” I didn't want to hurt her feelings, but I definitely did not want Auntie Sophie sitting beside me. That's when I suggested it would be nice if she could get Livvy off somewhere for a couple of hours.

“Jim Beresford says he'll stay with me and drive me home after.”

Nathan is waiting on his front step, smoking a cigarette. In the daylight, I see his yard is filled with stuff that looks like it wouldn't quite fit in the stucco townhouse. A freezer, a cabinet-TV with a cracked screen, an armchair. Nathan butts out his cigarette. He's wearing a white shirt and a bolo tie.

“H-How do you like the lawn ornaments?” he says, squeezing himself into the back seat of Jim Beresford's compact.

“Better than plastic pink flamingoes,” Jim says, introducing himself. “You were in Cosmo's workshop, too? Did they end up canceling it?”

“NNo. Cosmo's friend JJanice Jellicoe is doing it. She says call her J. J. She's supposed to be there today. At the service.”

Jim Beresford and Nathan chat about the class as we drive to the Unitarian Church, but I catch Nathan's eye in the rear-view mirror. We have only talked on the phone a couple of times since Nathan took the bus home with me the night Cosmo died. I'm glad I'm wearing Mama's pink skirt and beads that I wore over to Cosmo's when Livvy and I visited him and he gave us gingerbread.
They hadn't been in the box of things Jim Beresford brought with him the day he delivered Livvy to the Hetheringtons, so he visited Daddy at the treatment center and got the key. I went with him over to the house.

It was strange going into the house with no one there. Just the noise of the fridge running, but the television silent, and everything left just as if we'd all been suddenly sucked up into a spaceship by aliens.

Grandma's cigarette butts in her ashtray, a bone china cup and a teapot on her TV tray, an empty sherry bottle on the floor by the sofa, a half-eaten package of potato chips, some videos on the end table,
Titanic
on the top of the pile.

“These need to go back to the video store,” I told Jim.

I made another box of my things and Livvy's from the upstairs bedrooms, taking down the photos from my room and tucking those on top.

“You look great, Barbara,” Nathan whispers to me in the parking lot at the Unitarian Church. “Pretty skirt.”

“It was Mama's,” I say. “You look good, too. I like your tie.”

“Uncle T-Ted's,” Nathan grins.

The church is filled. I recognize some of the kids from the workshop.

Jessica-Marie in her lumberjack shirt and overalls. The boy with the ponytail is wearing a velvet vest embroidered with flowers and bees and butterflies. He and Nathan say, “Hey, man,” to each other.

At Mama's funeral, I remember, a minister did just about all of the things there were to do, but here a lot of different people get up to talk.

“ThThat's J. J.,” Nathan nudges me when a young woman with a tangle of red curls, a Barbra Streisand kind of nose and a wide friendly mouth takes her turn at the front. She smiles and nods at everyone, stops for a second and roots in her pockets for something, pulls out a red clown nose and puts it on. A titter ripples through the room.

“You might think this is for comic effect,” she tells us, “but Cosmo, very aware of the Jimmy Durante protuberance midway between my eyes and my mouth, always said this was a cosmetic improvement for me. And, Cosmo, I do want to look as cosmetically perfect as possible for you today.”

Cloud has slipped in late and sits beside us.
Her hair is strawberry-colored today, and she's wearing something that looks like a black cock-tail dress along with logger's boots.

“Cosmo never thought of himself as a brave person,” J. J. continues, “but, like many people living with AIDS, he had the courage to look at the future, to sense and prepare for closure. Most of you know that he lost his longtime companion, Roberto, five years ago, and I know he believed that what lay ahead was a step toward a reunion with the person he loved most in the world. He didn't talk about it as a possibility, but a certainty.”

Across the aisle and a couple of rows down, I see Cosmo's sister. She is wearing a deep sea-green suit, her movie-star hair falling like Marilyn Monroe's to the collar. Cosmo's color– green. I can see only the side of her face, but the weariness from the hospital seems to be gone from it. She watches J. J. with a half-smile on her lips. An older woman sits beside her, cheeks moist with tears. Cosmo's mother?

“Cosmo and I used to talk about his funeral,” J. J. is saying. “I guess he was always fascinated by the reasons people choose to get together. ‘Yeah,' he would say in that terrible imitation of
the Dead End Kids lingo that he would use when he was trying to make you laugh instead of cry. ‘I tink a funereal ain't such a bad idea. People can get together and do a little remembering, a little eating, a little crying, listen to a little music, and–who knows–maybe a couple of people who don't even know each other might fall in love. Dat would be kinda nice, eh?'”

Nathan squeezes my hand.

“Cosmo was not a perfect person. You only had to listen to his Dead End Kids impression to know that, but God, he was pretty close to it.” J.J. pauses and she bows her head for a moment, as if she is gathering her strength. “He had the gift that only certain special people have, an ability to change us in ways that we would never have thought possible.”

As I watch J.J., I feel as if Cosmo is some-where close by. I feel like a spotlight might suddenly come on and pick him out of the dark and he'll turn and look at all of us with a little look of surprise and a tip of the head. Maybe he will pluck a rose out of nowhere and he'll hold it out toward us. A gift.

Thank you, I want to say. I think of the cup of tea on the watermelon placemat on Cosmo's
kitchen table. Thank you for the magic and the tea and being there for Livvy and me. Thank you for
Jane Eyre
and gingerbread.

Someone has taken J. J.'s place at the front of the auditorium. A young man with no hair, a shy smile, and a guitar. He begins to sing, so softly the words seem like something written on tissue paper. It is the song that the lady with the sad, gravelly voice sang on Cosmo's CD.
God Bless the Child.
As he sings, his voice gets louder and fills the church, but at the end, his voice falls again to a near whisper:
“God bless the child that's got his own. That's got his own.”

It is what Cosmo told us at the start of the clown workshop. Get your own. Make your own. Find something to hold onto.

When the service is over, Jim and Nathan and I go to say hello to Cosmo's sister.

Annette introduces their mother to us. I notice a trace of Cosmo's grin in her wide smile. “It's nice to meet some of Cosmo's students,” she says. “He worked with so many over the years.”

“Barbara was a neighbor, too, I think,” says Annette. “He left a box of stuff for you and your little sister. He had packages of things for about
twenty different people in his closets, all labeled, with little notes. I thought you might be here today so I put your box of stuff in the trunk of my car.”

“Do you want to open it now?” Jim Beresford says when he hefts the box out of her trunk. “Feels like it's filled with bricks.”

“No, I think I'll wait.” I want to be by myself when I open it.

There is only Uncle Hal at home when I am dropped back at the house.

“Why don't you give me a hand putting together this station house for my new line?” he calls out to me from across the basement, where he stands like a giant in the middle of a maze of miniature trains. “I could use some help.”

“Sure,” I say. “In a little while if that's okay. I've got just a little headache and I thought I might lie down for a half hour or so.”

“Good idea. Nip it in the bud. You want an aspirin? I'm sure we've got aspirins around here somewhere.”