I wondered in what colored suit they had dressed Arthur, and why I thought it was turquoise when turquoise didn’t make any sense except as a tuxedo to a prom. Was the coffin’s interior turquoise? Should I have looked?
I put the car in the garage and looked instead at what Arthur had touched here where he had lived and worked. Here was an orderly garage glossed in a color called serviceman’s gray that when beaded in water shined. Fivey Farms, hardly a farm, Uncle Billy’s house. Labels taped on everything he owned in Arthur’s unassuming hand — meek loops, short stems, no flourishes. His labels on the light switches dispirited me, their homely thoroughness, and I hesitated to switch on the overhead lights in the greenhouse where Aunt Frances coaxed into frail growth what Arthur then had planted in the garden. The garden just behind the greenhouse sloped toward the raspberry patch and what would be tomatoes and lettuce. Exotic, coddled, fragile fruits, like the fig trees, were covered in carpet; the strawberry beds were blanketed in straw, and only asparagus grew unimpeded by the fluctuating cold. Baskets, shears, twine for tying up — who would do this work now that Arthur was dead?
Aunt Frances at the funeral said, “We’ll have to find someone, but I don’t know how.”
Arthur had said he wanted to see the country, but he had only his Sundays off — and only one vacation in all the years. Totem poles were what he said he best remembered; but the soggy trip explained his understanding of Mother’s need for sunshine: Florida in a box Arthur built for her to lie in. Arthur, on vacation in the north woods, slept fitfully. A week was all it was, and it must have been enough for him; besides, Arthur was needed on the lake. Uncle Billy needed Arthur to settle the groundswork, needed Arthur to negotiate with the quarry and so finish the rock garden; Uncle Billy needed Arthur to make note of the work to be done and to get estimates and to calculate the cost. This is a big place, goddamnit, Uncle Billy was saying. Electricians and tree surgeons, contractors, painters, sailmakers, plumbers — Arthur knew where to find such men, knew them by first name. Some of them, Ray, for instance, Mr. Hornburg and Gassmussen, were like Arthur and volunteered for charitable causes. Arthur liked to play Santa for sick kids, and Arthur must have had more of a life than this, more than just the one I saw in the garage, but I never asked him really.
Oh, all those many ways I didn’t know Arthur!
He must have had a hobby — look at the way he kept the garage! He must have had interests — look … but I didn’t, had never … hopelessly self-involved.
From the lake-facing rooms in Uncle Billy’s house I saw the lawn’s precipitous drop to a shoreline propped with rocks, and I went there and walked around the boathouse snarled with whips of forsythia not yet bloomed. Arthur would have to die in such a month as this when the light hurt, when the pinked bark of bare trees and sodden beds of last year’s leaves, the simple barrenness of things, strained my eyes, and I could make out no shore but fuzzed horizon. Sad or thuggish month March, pricked with deceiving, infant colors: chick-yellow, baby-pink, and quickly fading violet. The forced hyacinth blooms, although fragrant, looked plastic; no wonder then that I saw cheap when I thought of Arthur’s casket, saw turquoise when I put him in a suit.
I walked back to the garage and found the door to his apartment was open — so Aunt Frances had come, I thought. She had neatened his rooms. The mail was unopened and on the table, in her hand, was a list: Goodwill, Gassmussen, sink. I guessed she had been in Arthur’s closet; Aunt Frances had picked out a suit and watered his exhausted plants: on a tiered and tottering stand, African violets, so dusty and rag-eared, they looked to be a hundred … almost as old as Arthur was, Arthur, here from the beginning.
I opened his bed.
The light turned the paper shades into tea-colored parchment, and the heat, not long off, meant the bedroom still had his smell, a close, fruity smell as of a used comb while the rough sheets on his bed were oddly odorless. I shuffled my feet under the covers, then curled and was still and when I woke, I was not so surprised to be in his bed as to remember that Arthur was dead. “When I woke, it was dark; when I woke, the driveway lights goldly framed the shades, halfway soothing.
MOTHER
MOTHER GUESSED SHE MUST have been sitting on the shelly edge of the Pacific, tadpoling in the ocean when Nonna died.
And what had she been doing when my father died? Did she remember, or was it up to me to remake him? I wanted to ask did she know on the instant where she stood that he was dead? “Was she struck in the side as by a sword, was she blinded? Surely she was overcome when she was told, and then when it appeared to be a suicide? What then?
Mother said, “Suicide is Uncle Billy’s story — not mine.”
My father was meant to be on business; a briefcase was found in his car. A briefcase — certainly his — was found open, stuck between the seats, its paper contents in the current, its clasp a flash. She didn’t know how anything looked; she only imagined the car under water and Father’s body, still belted, knocking against the steering wheel in easy, constant motion.
Count the dead, a pile-up in months! A mound, a death mound, the kind Aunt Frances had pointed out when I was a child, and Arthur was driving us to town. Arthur, always obliging and patient, how kind he was to me; he only ever wanted to help me with my math; Arthur only wanted me to try the word problems.
“But not now,” I said to Arthur. “Don’t ask me to do that now.”
I wanted to drive past our house, the first house, mine and my mother’s and father’s. I wanted to dream over it, and, like my mother, see ghosts.
“But we don’t have the time,” and so we came back from town with stapled bags of pills for Nonna. We came back with soggy packages, me calling out to Nonna as I took myself upstairs, “Guess what Mother sent this time!”
Bits of cloth and cowries.
In California, Mother asked me, “What did you do with what I used to send you? Did you wear it?”
In Mother’s stories of those times when we were apart, she was on the beach; she was sad in these stories but brave. She was sick, yet she had checked herself out of that slumberous place where her eyes were always greasy. She had checked herself out of the San — her name — and had left with the fat man, the one she loved best. Two crazies! Mother was thousands of miles away from me — and in love, too, with her fat man — yet she sometimes had to work at being happy. On the holidays she pretended it was any day at all — nothing special — just another island day, a high-July color, unadulterated blues and reds. “I wanted snow!” Mother said, but she pretended she was in the middle of an ordinary, midsummer, gorgeous day, not Christmas. She pretended she didn’t miss me; and besides, she was in love at the time. She was in love in a new way, loving the fat man’s imperfections, the damp white excesses of him — wheezy body parts, bad teeth, bulgy eyes in fervid glaze when he saw her. Close to tears, crying often, the fat man was real, not something she had made up. She could love him, and she did!
But I had heard enough. “Tell me something else!”
In California, Mother made up a new past I didn’t always know about. Once, mucking avocados for a California dip, a woman asked, “Do you have any of your father’s sculpture?”
“I sold it all,” I said, thinking quickly.
The guest said, “You’re sorry, I bet.”
I was sorry he never had been a sculptor, never had been an occupation a person could give details to. My father had worn a suit and dressed for a place I never did see; he swung a briefcase that was ruined with him. As someone once said — maybe even my father—“A man sounds like money when he makes money.” Did his pockets chink? Did he carry more than pencils in his briefcase?