There was no wreath on the door.
I thought at first that someone had made a mistake, perhaps that cockeyed preacher from the Bronx had given me a message intended for a Cadet Taylor or Wylie or some other unlucky bastard, but not for me, Will Tyler, whose mother could surely not be dead, she was only forty-two years old. The brass doorknobs were polished, the twin spruces climbed into the blue stained-glass sky, everything seemed the way it always had. And then the door opened, and I looked at my sister Linda’s face, and knew there had been no mistake. My mother was dead.
They had placed the coffin in the living room, and I thought at once they had put it in the wrong room. It should have been in the kitchen, with the radio going, and with “Just Plain Bill” filling my mother’s calm universe with fictitious turmoil. There were wooden folding chairs arranged in rows before the coffin, and my father sat on one of them beside my Aunt Kate and her Apache husband, Oscar, who looked more and more like an Indian the older he got. There were banks of flowers heaped beside the open coffin; I suddenly wondered if I should have sent some. My father’s eyes were red-rimmed.
I had not yet looked at my mother.
I went to my father, and he embraced me and kissed me on the cheek, and said only, “Will,” and my Aunt Kate turned to Oscar and said, “Oscar, it’s Will,” and Oscar nodded, his seamed and wrinkled face impassive. There were other relatives in the room, they came slowly into focus, my father’s younger brother John, who now lived in Milwaukee, and my mother’s two sisters, who still lived in Freshwater, and cousins I had never seen, hordes of relatives, how had they managed to assemble so quickly? I had the strangest feeling they were all waiting for me to go to the coffin, that this was the part in the movie where someone would turn to someone else and say, “It’s her son,” the way Aunt Kate had said, “Oscar, it’s Will,” and then their eyes would follow me, and they would carefully gauge my reactions when I saw my mother dead, calculating my grief, sympathizing with my loss, and yet somehow detached, as though denying the presence of death by forcing only the immediate family to become its reluctant hosts. Perversely, I would not go to the coffin, not while their eyes were upon me. I saw the question on my father’s face, Aren’t you going to pay your respects, Will? and I ignored it and chatted with my Aunt Clara, who was my mother’s oldest sister, and whose son was with the Marines somewhere in the Pacific. Do you think you’ll be heading out that way, Will? she asked, and I said I didn’t know, I still had almost seven months of training ahead of me, and my aunt said, Maybe it’ll be over before you get there, and I said I certainly hope so, Aunt Clara, not meaning it.
I did not go to the coffin until I was alone in the room.
My sister had made sandwiches and coffee, and everyone had gone into the kitchen, Oscar asking my father if there was anything to drink in the house, the old Injun seeking the white man’s firewater, and my father took him into the dining room where the locked liquor cabinet stood against one wood-paneled wall. I listened to the voices floating through the corridors of the house that could never seem home to me again, drifting toward the kitchen (the image of my mother, head tilted to one side, favoring her good ear as she listened to the radio, peas as green as her eyes tumbling into the sink colander), and I was alone with her, and she was dead.
I knelt by the coffin, and I looked into her face.
And her eyes closed gently by some undertaker’s thumbs were sightless, and I noticed white strands in her golden hair, and I remembered in a painful rush that brought fresh tears to my eyes this gentle woman I had loved so dearly, this humorless country girl who could explode into sudden laughter, this comforting, guiding, devoted woman who had been my mother. I reached out to touch her cold and lifeless hand folded across her bosom, and sobbed my grief against the padded altar railing before the coffin and could think of no prayer to send her out of my heart and out of my mind.
I felt my father’s hand on my shoulder.
He said something to me, and I nodded and turned to him, and held him close as though fearful I would lose him too in the very next moment, held him fiercely and tightly while the voices whispered in the other rooms.
We buried her on Wednesday morning.
I went directly from the cemetery to the Northwestern station on Canal and Madison, and from there by train to the Orchard Place Airport where I hitched a ride on a C-54 going to Montgomery. We developed engine trouble on the way down, and landed for repairs at a small airport someplace in Tennessee. The pilot told us we would not be ready to take off again until eleven that night, and were free to leave the airport if we wanted to. I checked my duffle bag and took a bus into the nearest town.
There was a sense of anonymity in those wartime streets. The sidewalks were sticky with a gelatinous khaki-colored mass that seeped in and out of bars and shops, arcades and luncheonettes, an eyeless seeking protoplasmic ooze that sucked from every Army town in the country whatever juices it possessed. Souvenir shops and shooting galleries, hot-dog stands and honky-tonks, movie theaters and greasy spoons boomed with the coming of the GI dollar, fifty dollars a day once a month for the lowliest buck private, ten million men in khaki searching for pleasure on their hours away from camp. I was grateful for the loss of identity, and resentful when two farmer-type MPs singled me out to ask for my furlough papers. There was nothing in them to indicate that my mother had died. The MPs studied them leisurely, noting when I had left Montgomery and when I was due back, and then the tallest of the pair said, “Okay, soldier,” and I put the folded papers back into the pocket of my blouse, and continued walking up the street.
There were the sounds of approaching night, a tenor saxophone and trumpet in B-flat harmony, a woman’s laughter, wire brushes on a snare drum’s head, a soldier swearing, a bass fiddle pulsing like an exposed heart in a laboratory jar, a piano tinkling with a whorehouse beat, New Orleans twice removed, automobile horns and the clatter of high-heeled pumps ankle-strapped, the shuffle of GI boots along streets already cooling, the amplified blare from a record shop, “It seems to me I’ve heard that song before, It’s from an old, familiar score,” and across the way a sidewalk hawker shouting out the starting time for Stage Door Canteen, which was supposed to be a good movie and which I had not seen. I walked past him resplendent in his blue uniform and gold braid (wondering why he wasn’t in a real uniform) and studied the glossy black-and-white stills in the display cases, and then stood decisionless near the box office, and finally moved on again, merging with the sidewalk soldiers.
I didn’t know what I wanted to do.
Whiskey was scarce as hell, but by asking around, I managed to get onto a GI who had brought a case back with him from a weekend home, and who was selling the stuff at premium prices. I tucked the bottle into the waistband of my trousers, under my blouse, and walked into a little park on the edge of town where a Civil War general spread his quivering buttocks astride a rearing stallion, his sword pointed toward Washington, D.C., no doubt. I found a bench far from the sidewalk noises, uncorked the bottle, and began to drink. I drank steadily and deliberately. In a little while, I began crying.
The girl came lurching out of the darkness, as drunk as I was, as black as the darkness, black skin and black eyes, black chiffon dress tight across small high breasts, stumbled clickingly out of the darkness on high-heeled patent leather pumps, black, as sudden and as shocking as death itself, and stopped before me and put her hands on her hips and squinted me into focus and whispered, “What’s the matter, so’jer?”