But two more names will complete this preliminary roster of persons whose love I have lost or whose poison I happily spent my life neutralizing with my unblemished flesh, my regal carriage, my impractical but all the more devoted being. After Fernandez there was Miranda. I hear that name — Miranda, Miranda! — and once again quicken to its false suggestiveness, feel its rhapsody of sound, the several throbs of the vowels, the very music of charity, innocence, obedience, love. For a moment I seem to see both magic island and imaginary girl. But Miranda was the widow’s name — out of what perversity, what improbable desire I am at a loss to say — and no one could have given a more ugly denial to that heartbreaking and softly fluted name than the tall and treacherous woman. Miranda. The widow. In the end I was Miranda’s match; I have had my small victory over Miranda; as father, grandfather, former naval officer and man, I found myself equal to this last indignity; to me her name means only ten months during which I attempted to prolong Cassandra’s life, ten subtle months of my final awakening. Rawboned and handsome woman, unconventional and persistent widow, old antagonist on a black Atlantic island, there she was — my monster, my Miranda, final challenge of our sad society and worthy of all the temperance and courage I could muster. Now I think of her as my black butterfly. And now — obviously — the scars are sweet.
With the mention of my mother’s prosaic name of Mildred I complete my roster, because there is no place here for Tremlow — my devil, Tremlow — or for Mac, the Catholic chaplain who saved my life. No place for them. Not yet. Of course the mere name of my mother has no special connotation, no significance, but the woman herself was the vague consoling spirit behind the terrible seasons of this life when unlikely accidents, tabloid adventures, shocking episodes, surrounded a solitary and wistful heart. Like my father she died when I was young, and I see her with most of her features indistinct. But she too was tall, stoopshouldered, forever smiling a soft questioning smile. I have no recollection of her voice — some short time after my father’s decision in the lavatory she ceased to talk, became permanently mute — and my few visual memories of her are silent and show her only at a great distance off. Wearing her broad-brimmed white hat so immense and limpid it conceals her face and back in waves like tissue paper, she kneels in the garden strip next to the little chipped and tarnished electric sign which is the familiar urban monument of men in my father’s profession and which, in my boyhood, identified our private house as the combined residence and working place of an active small-town mortician. I see my mother kneeling, hidden by the hat, inert and sweet and ghostly in the summer sun. She seems to me to be praying rather than gardening, and my imagination supplies the black trowel untouched by her white-gloved folded hands but stabbed upright, rather, into the earth at her knees. And then, in another fragment of memory, I see her seated in the middle of our lawn on one of my father’s shellacked folding chairs and still dressed in white, still wearing the hat, while he, bareheaded and balding and in shirt sleeves, stands hosing down the long black limousine which was shabby, upholstered in red velvet except for the stiff black patent leather of the driver’s seat, and often smelled of invisible flowers — that worn and comfortable old hearse — when it doubled on Sunday afternoons as our family car. The seated woman, the dripping machine, the man working his wrist in idle circles, this is the vision lying closest to the peaceful center of my childhood. And how much it contains: not only the still day of my youth but also the devotion and modest industry of my parents which gave my early life the proportions of a working fairy tale. For the president of the local bank, an unmarried teacher in the elementary school, two brothers dramatically drowned in a scummy pond at the edge of town, the thin mother of infant twins, three beautiful members of the high school graduating class decapitated in a scarlet coupé, a girl who had sold children’s underwear in the five and dime, in our house all of them appeared, all were attended by my father and my mother as well, she in the parlor, smiling, he in the shop below, since she was always his perfect partner, the mortician’s muse, the woman who more and more grew to resemble a gifted angel in a dreamer’s cemetery as the years passed and the number of our nonreligious ceremonies increased. A few years only — yet all my youth — were marked by the folding and unfolding of the wooden chairs and sudden oil changes in the hearse, until that day my peace and excitement ended and my mother and I were only brief visitors in another undertaker’s home.
At least I was witness to my father’s death, in a sense was the child-accomplice of whatever dark phantom might have been materializing by his side that noon hour he finally locked himself in the hot lavatory — it was a Friday in midsummer — and rushed through the bare essentials of taking his life. Witness and accomplice because I was crouched with my ear to the door and because we talked together, curious but welcome conference between father and son, and because I played my cello to him and later fished from the trembling cupfuls of water in the bottom of the toilet bowl the little unused bullet which was companion to the one he fired. At least I knew it was for my sake, despite his confusion, his anger, his pathetic cries, and received the tangible actuality of his death with shocked happiness, grateful at least for the misguided trust implicit in the real staging of that uncensored scene.
How like my mother, on the other hand, to spare me; to disappear, to vanish, gone without the hard crude accessories of sweating water jug, pulmotor, stretcher, ambulance summoned from the City Hospital; gone without vigil or funeral, without good-bys. I missed her one morning and that was all. It makes little difference now that she died only twenty miles away and in the care of a half brother. It makes no difference to me. Because I missed her, I knew at once what had happened, I was alone, I could do nothing but alternate my days between the lavatory-endless brushing of teeth, plastering down of hair — and the back of the hearse where I instinctively stretched out to await my final vision of that experience denied me in space but not in time.
And in time it came, the moment when at last I sat up like a miniature fat corpse in the back of the solemn old limousine and found the cobwebs, the streaming motes, the worn velvet carpeting and various bits of silver and thin lengths of steel — the casket runners — all turned to dense geometric substances of light-orange, yellow, radiant pink — and in that blaze, and just as I clenched my hands and shut my eyes, knew that my father had begun my knowledge of death as a lurid truth but that my mother had extended it toward the promise of mystery — this at the instant I saw her, saw her, after all, in the vision which no catastrophe of my own has ever destroyed or dimmed.