“Father, you are probably the last old man in America to take to a deathbed.”
“Touché, Brew. He’s got you there, Noel,” Mother said.
“Thank you, Mother, but all I intended was to point out that obsolescence runs in our family. I am the earth, water, fire and air heir. Let the neon, tin and tungsten scions prepare themselves for the newfangled. I have pride and I have honor. My word is my bond and I’ll marry a virgin. And I agree with you, Father, about the sanctity of the deathbed, though I shall continue, out of chivalry and delicacy, to maintain the imposture that this…these”—I took in the twin beds—“is…are…not that…those.”
“You’re marvelous, Brewster. I…”
“Is something wrong, Father?”
“I…we…your mother and I…”
“Father?”
“I love you, Son.”
“I love you, sir,” I told him. I turned to Mother. She had opened one eye again. It was wet and darting from one side to the other like an eye in REM sleep. I understood that she was trying to choose my real image from the two that stood before her. In a moment her eye had decided. It stared off, focused about four yards to my right. I smiled to reassure her that she had chosen correctly and edged slowly to my right, an Indian in reverse, unhiding, trying to appear in her line of sight like a magician’s volunteer in an illusion. “And all I have to say to you, you great silly, is that if you’re not out of bed soon I’ll not answer for your zinnias and foxgloves. I noticed when the taxi brought me up the drive that Franklin, as usual, has managed to make a botch of the front beds.”
“Franklin is old, Son,” Mother said. “He isn’t well.”
“Franklin’s a rogue, Mother. I don’t know why you encourage him. I’m certain he’s going to try to trade Mrs. Lucas the three hundred feet of lovely rubber garden hose I brought him for her Scotch cooler so that he can have a place to hide his liquor.”
Mother closed her eye; Father grinned. I wrung out Father’s hundred-dollar bill and handed it back to him. Excusing myself, I promised to return when they had rested. “Brr,” Father said.
“Were you speaking to me, Father?”
“It’s the chill again,” he said.
I went to my room, called up their doctors and had long, discouraging talks with them. Then I phoned some specialist friends of mine at Mass General and a good man at Barnes in St. Louis and got some additional opinions. I asked about Franklin, too.
I kept the vigil. It was awful, but satisfying, too, in a way. It lasted five weeks and in that time we had truth and we had banter, and right up to the end each of us was able to tell the difference. Only once, a few days after Mother’s death (her vision returned at the end: “I can see, Brewster,” she said, “I can see far and I can see straight.” These were not her last words; I’ll not tell you her last words, for they were meant only for Father and myself, though I have written them down elsewhere to preserve for my children should I ever have them) did Father’s spirits flag. He had gotten up from his bed to attend the funeral — through a signal courtesy to an out-of-stater, the Governor of Massachusetts permitted Mother to be buried on Copp’s Hill Burying Ground near the Old North Church in Boston — and we had just returned to the house. Mrs. Lucas and Franklin were weeping, and I helped Father upstairs and back into his deathbed. He was too weak to put his pajamas on. “You know, Brew,” he said, “I sure wish you hadn’t thrown that d____d pistol into the ocean.”
“Oh Father,” I said, “never mind. Tomorrow when you’re stronger we’ll go to town and buy a fresh brace and stroll the woods and shoot the birds from their trees just as we used to.”
He was dead in his own tree a few days later. I sensed it coming and had moved into the room with him, where I lay next to him all night in the twin bed, only Grandmother Newpert’s nightstand between us, Mother’s effects — the lovely old apothecary bottles and her drinking glass and medicine spoons — having been cleared away. I was awake the entire night, hanging on his broken breath and old man’s groans like a detective in films on the croaks of a victim. I listened for a message from the coma and tried to parse delirium as if it were only a sort of French. Shall a man of honor and pride still searching for himself in his late thirties deny the sibyl in a goner’s gasps? (I even asked one or two questions, pressing him in his terminal pain, pursuing him through the mazes of his dissolution, his deathbed my Ouija board.)
Then, once, just before dawn, a bird twittered in the garden and Father came out of it. For fifteen minutes he talked sense, speaking rapidly and with an astonishing cogency that was more mysterious somehow than all his moans and nightmares. He spoke of ways to expedite the probating of the two wills, of flaws in the nature of his estate, instructing me where to consolidate and where to trim. He told me the names of what lawyers to trust, which brokers to fire. In five minutes he laid down principles which would guarantee our fortune for a hundred years. Then, at the end, there was something personal, but after what had gone before, I thought it a touch lame, like a P.S. inquiring about your family’s health at the end of a business letter. He wished me well and hoped I would find some nice girl, settle down, and raise fine children. I was to give them his love.
I thought this was the end, but in a few moments he came round again.
“Franklin is a rogue,” he said. “For many years now he and Mrs. Lucas have been carrying on an affair below stairs. That time during the war when Mrs. Lucas was supposed to have gone to stay with her sister in Delaware she really went away to have Franklin’s child. The scoundrel refused to marry her and would have had money from us to abort the poor thing. It was Mrs. Lucas who wouldn’t hear of it, but the baby died anyway. Mrs. Lucas loves him. It’s for her sake we never let him go when he screwed up in the garden.”
Those were Father’s last words. Then he beckoned me to rise from my bed and approach him. He put out his right hand. I shook it and he died. The hundred-dollar bill he always held came off in my palm when the final paroxysm splayed his fingers.
The grief of the rich is clubby, expensive. (I don’t mean my grief. My grief was a long gloom, persistent as grudge.) We are born weekenders anyway, but in death we are particularly good to each other, traveling thousands of miles to funerals, flying up from Rio or jamming the oceanic cables with our expensive consolation. (Those wires from the President to the important bereaved — that’s our style, too.) We say it with flowers, wreaths, memorial libraries, offering the wing of a hospital as casually as someone else a chicken leg at a picnic. And why not? There aren’t that many of us — never mind that there are a thousand who can buy and sell me. Scarcer we are than the Eskimaux, vanishing Americans who got rich slow.
So I did not wonder at the crowds who turned up at Mother’s funeral and then went away the long distances only to return a few days later for Father’s. Or at the clothes. Couturiers of Paris and London and New York — those three splendid cities, listed always together and making a sound on the page like a label on scent — taxed to the breaking point to come up with dresses in death’s delicious high fashion, the rich taking big casualties that season, two new mourning originals in less than two weeks and the fitter in fits. The men splendid in their decent dark. Suits cunningly not black, off black, proper, the longitudes of their decency in their wiry pinstripes, a gent’s torso bound up in vest and crisscrossed by watch chains and Phi Beta Kappa keys in the innocent para-militarism of the civilian respectable, men somehow more vital at the graveside in the burdensome clothes than in Bermudas on beaches or dinner jackets in hotel suites with cocktails in their hands, the band playing on the beach below and the telephone ringing.