A guy wearing a black suit and a professional mourner’s face hurried up to her. “Are you here for the Smith funeral?”
Smith funeral? His father’s last name was Tesla.
“I’m here for Mr. George Tesla. Am I in the right place?” Vivian asked.
“Of course. Mr. Tesla is descended from the Smiths, so he will be buried in their crypt. It dates back to 1836.” He gestured to a white plaque resting on grass in front of a stone block wall. “So few families have kept up the tradition. It’s an honor to be able to lay someone to rest here today.”
As Vivian moved closer, Joe saw the name SMITH engraved on the marble plaque. But his father wasn’t a SMITH. He was descended from Nikola Tesla. The Teslas had lived in Croatia, not New York. Nikola Tesla himself hadn’t immigrated to the United States until 1884 (cyan, purple, purple, green). This couldn’t be the right place. Maybe his father was a Smith on his mother’s side, although Joe was pretty sure his grandmother’s maiden name was Morris.
He wanted to ask Vivian to double check, but he didn’t want to make his presence known and maybe get her kicked out. She turned in a slow, unobtrusive circle, clearly trying to show him the full scene. Two older men in black suits stood near the plaque. They must be his father’s chess club — professors who had visited his father in the home. One had removed his suit coat and hung it over his arm, but the other seemed more concerned with propriety than comfort, even on such a hot day.
From his father’s emails, Joe knew more than he wanted to about both men. One was a brilliant mathematician who had never achieved the recognition Joe’s father thought he deserved. The other one might have had an affair with Joe’s mother, or at least his father had hinted at it. In a movie, one of them would have murdered his father, but they hadn’t.
Ever wary, Joe had asked his lawyer, Mr. Rossi, to hire a medical examiner to review the autopsy performed on his father’s body. The second doctor concurred that his father had died of a heart attack. He was eighty-two years old and had suffered two previous heart attacks. The medical examiner had tested his father’s tissues for poisons, and every test that had come back so far was negative. He was an old man who had died of natural causes, like the original report said. Joe was still glad he’d double checked.
The camera moved past the professors to settle on a woman who had just arrived. She held a simple black box and wore a black dress, a wide-brimmed black hat, and a dotted veil that looked like something Marlene Dietrich would have worn. Even though his mother hadn’t performed for decades, she walked with the graceful step of a young dancer, each movement elegant and choreographed. She looked the part of the grieving widow, even though she had divorced Joe’s father twenty years before.
Vivian must have recognized her, because she kept the camera pointed there. His mother looked from side to side, as if searching for someone in the small group of mourners. Her veil fluttered in the breeze.
Guilt rose up in Joe. She was looking for him, her only child. She expected him to be at his father’s funeral, and he wasn’t. The man she had raised wouldn’t have shamed her by missing such an important event. He would have paid his respects. But he hadn’t.
She pulled the simple black box closer to her chest. The box’s ebony surface gleamed in the sun. That box contained his father’s ashes. Joe swallowed the lump in his throat. After he’d received the phone call from his mother telling him that his father was dead, he’d arranged the funeral and picked out the box to hold his father’s ashes, but he hadn’t really accepted that the man was dead until he saw the box in his mother’s arms.
Edison dropped his warm head in Joe’s lap. He stroked the dog’s ears, and Edison wagged his tail — one solid thump (cyan). Joe took a careful breath, held it, and let it out. His father was gone. There would be no reconciliation for them now. Joe had had very good reasons to cut his father out of his life, but looking at the black box made it all so very final.
A man took his mother’s arm. He looked about fifty, ten or so years younger than she, and handsome in a craggy thirties movie star way. Vivian caught the man’s solicitous face in profile, and Joe was struck by how much the man looked like a younger version of his father.
Joe had no doubt this man and his mother were romantically involved. Men had always flocked to his mother.
The camera stayed on her as she stepped across the grass. The chess players watched her advance, both smiling a greeting as if they knew her. Had his mother and father stayed in touch till the end, so much so that she knew his friends?
They’d separated when Joe was ten, and he and his mother had moved around with the circus while his father returned to New York, teaching statistics at New York University, and forgetting Christmases and Joe’s birthdays.
Vivian moved the camera to show a priest walking behind his mother. The man looked fresh out of missionary school. His fresh-scrubbed face was pink, and his priest’s collar looked too tight. He clutched a Bible and marched with the determined steps of an African explorer about to set off into the jungle. Joe bet it was his first funeral.
The priest nodded to his mother, then to Vivian, as did the chess club, even though they didn’t know who Vivian was. Joe’s mother, however, gave her such a knowing glance that he inched back in his flimsy hotel chair. His mother pressed two (blue) fingers to her lips and dropped them to her side. That was the secret “I love you” sign she and Joe had invented when he was a kid. He hadn’t seen it in years, but he instinctively made it back, even though she couldn’t see him.
The priest lined his mother, her paramour, and the retired professors in front of the wall. Vivian fell in last. A giant arrangement of flowers Joe had selected online stood on an easel next to his mother like a proxy for her son. It wasn’t enough, of course — she needed a flesh-and-blood son to hold her hand — but it was the best he could do right now.
Words were intoned, but Vivian’s microphone picked up mostly wind and the faint drone of traffic. It didn’t matter anyway. The priest hadn’t known his father, so what could he say that Joe needed to hear?
He closed his eyes and prayed for his father. He prayed death had brought his father peace from the demons that had haunted him. He hadn’t been an easy man, and there must have been reasons.
But even now Joe couldn’t forgive him everything. The demons that his father had set upon Joe would be with him always. As they say, we carry the dead with us.
When he opened his eyes again, the priest had finished. His mother lifted the urn to hip height and slid it into an empty niche in the stone wall. Her lips moved as if she whispered something, but he couldn’t make out the words. He turned the volume up to full, but heard only the murmur of traffic and the slamming of a faraway door.
Chapter 5
Vivian hated funerals. She’d attended plenty back in the service, and they’d never offered her comfort or closure. They made her angry that everyone was boxed up in the same generic ritual, just like their bodies were boxed up in wooden caskets. When she died, she wanted to have her ashes scattered out the back of an airplane. Then the mourners could parachute after and go have a beer when they landed — adrenaline and alcohol would be a good send-off.
If her mother outlived her, though, Vivian knew she’d insist on this kind of awkward service, where everyone felt compelled to make up something nice, maybe toss in a joke, and cry. At Vivian’s funeral, Lucy would feel guilty because she let her big sister fall off some indoor climbing wall and die and sad because she’d inherited Vivian’s shoes. Vivian’s shoes were too boring for Lucy. She suppressed a smile.