“Wait till you see it lit,” Peter said.
“If you put it up I’ll have it taken down as soon as you leave,” Sarah said.
“And if you do that,” said Peter, “I shall come home with a club and break every piece of your beloved pottery glassware, and bric-a-brac. Believe me, Sarah, I am serious.”
“You’re a villain,” she said, and she walked into the hallway and up the front stairs.
“Don’t mind,” Molly said. “I’ll take care of her.” And she walked to Peter and kissed his cheek, studied the chandelier which with his right arm Peter still held half aloft. She touched the shining chrome rims around the bottom of the globes, touched the ball-shaped switches under each globe.
“Isn’t it beautiful,” said Molly.
“It’s all of that,” Peter said. “It will give us pleasure. It will banish our shame at being the leftover household. It will put a sheen on your beautiful hair, my sweet sister, and it will satisfy my craving to be done with gloom and come home to respectable radiance.”
I looked at the light around me for the first time in my life. Never had I considered it a topic worth conflict, or enthusiasm. Light was; and that was that. What more could you ask of it? It was bright or it was dim. You saw in it or you didn’t see. If you didn’t then it was dark. But now came revelation: that there were gradations, brightness to be measured not only in volume but in value. More brightness was better. Amazing.
The doorbell sounded, a pull-bell ding-dong. Molly answered the bell and accepted from the delivery man a small basket of white and purple flowers, brought them to the back parlor, and set them atop the player piano (which had replaced the Chickering upright that Julia Phelan played until she died; and music in this house died with her until Peter exchanged the Chickering for the player and bought piano rolls of the same songs Julia had played since they were children together).
“I know they’re from Mame Bayly,” Molly said. “She’s always the first flowers at every wake, always a day early. By the time we get to the cemetery they’ll be brown and wilted.”
The electrician had decided that the emergency installation of the chandeliers could be done only by running wire along the ceiling and through the outer wall to the nearest power pole and Peter said fine, run it anyplace you like, just get the power in here; and took off his coat and hat at last, and with his own tool chest began undoing the gasolier and capping the pipe that carried its gas. Since the death of his father Peter had been the master mechanic of the family, even in absentia, consulted via telephone on every plumbing and structural crisis, consulted when the back porch railing fell off, consulted on retarring the roof and on installing storm windows when the price of gas escalated in 1921.
I explored the downstairs rooms, finding photographs of my father when he was a youth (wearing a high collar and a short tie; he never dressed like that anymore), and photos of the women I’d just seen, but as girls in bathing suits (with their mother, was it? mother in black long-sleeved high-necked beachwear that came to her shoetop), and I saw a cut-glass dish full of apples and oranges and grapes on the dining-room table and a photo of twenty men posing beside a locomotive, and over the piano a photo of a woman who looked like the beautiful Molly but more beautiful still, and younger, with her hair parted in the middle, and when Peter saw me looking at it he said, “That’s my sister Julia, Orse,” and he whispered in my ear, “Don’t tell anybody, but she was my love, my favorite,” and he said Julia had played the piano. He opened the seat of the piano bench and took out a scroll of paper titled “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree.”
“She played this one all the time. We both loved it.”
He opened a sliding door on the piano’s upright front and inserted the roll, then sat at the piano and pumped its two pedals with his feet, and the roll moved as I watched with wonderment. Paper that makes music? Then Peter stood up and sat me in his place and told me to put my feet on the pedals and press, first left, then right, and I did and saw the paper move, and then I heard music, saw the keys on the piano depress themselves, and I said, “It’s magic!”
“Not quite,” said Peter, and I kept pumping and then my feet weakened, as did the song, and Peter said, “Faster, kid, keep a steady rhythm,” and after a while the jerkiness went out of the song and out of my feet and the piano made beautiful music again and Peter sang along.
I can hear the dull buzz of the bee
In the blossom that you gave to me,
With a heart that is true,
I’ll be waiting for you
In the shade of the old apple tree.
“Are you insane? Are you out of your mind?”
It was Sarah, back with her black mood, black skirt, fierce voice, and I stopped my feet and Peter said, “For chrissake, Sarah, I’m invoking Julia. Don’t you think she has a right to be here today? Are you going to keep this wake all to yourself?” And Sarah again could not answer, and fled to the kitchen, slamming the door behind her.
“Continue, Orse,” Peter said, and, as I moved my feet, music again rose in the rooms where light and death were on the way. The phone rang in the back parlor and Molly came down the stairs two at a time to answer it, then reported to all auditors that it was Ben Owens, the undertaker, and that he’d be here within the hour; which meant that Mama Kathryn would be returning to the front parlor to be observed in her death rigors, powdered and coiffed as she rarely had been in life; and to me it meant a question mark, for this was my entrance into the world of death.
Again the doorbell sounded and I placed myself in the angular hallway that ran from front door to back parlor, hiding behind wicker filigree decked with clusters of china, people in breeches and wigs and hoopskirts, and dogs and cats with flat bottoms, and then I saw a man with a happy and perfectly round face beneath a bald dome take a cigar out of his mouth and say to Peter, “I got your mother here.”
And Peter said, “Bring her in, she’s welcome,” and from the smiles that followed this exchange and from all the smiles and music and ongoing electrification, I would take home from this day my first impression of death: that it was an occasion for music, levity, light, and love.
“How’ve you been, Ben?” Peter asked.
“If I was any better,” said Ben, looking for a place to rid himself of the half-inch ash on his cigar, “I’d call the doctor to find out what ailed me.”
“In the window,” Peter said. And Ben swung his portly self toward the street and motioned to the four men standing at the back end of the hearse, and home came Kathryn Phelan, her last visitation in the flesh. Just ahead of her came another man with the catafalque, a four-wheeled accordionesque platform which stretched to meet the space, and upon which Kathryn and her mahogany coffin came to rest, the coffin’s closed cover gleaming in the sunlight (no electricity yet).
The onlookers now included Ben Owens, Molly, Sarah, Peter, me, and the electrician, who was on a ladder in the middle of the room installing the Claire chandelier, and who said, “Do you want this thing workin’ tonight?” and Peter said, “We do,” and the electrician said, “Well, then, I ain’t movin’ off a here,” and Peter said, “There’s no reason you should. Make yourself at home up there,” and so they moved the coffin around his ladder and the advent of the light proceeded as planned.
The family then retreated to the back parlor as Peter closed the sliding doors between the two parlors and waved a go-ahead sign to Ben Owens. And then the tableau that I would carry with me created itself: Peter sitting at the piano, Sarah standing by the kitchen door off the back parlor with folded arms, Molly settling into the armless horsehair ladies’ chair beside the piano and staring at Peter as he pumped up the music. I, sensing tension and trying desperately to make myself disappear, retreated to a far corner of the back parlor where I could observe the expanse of tradition and sibling relationships manifested in objects and body postures, and listen to love manifested in music, and perceive, I knew not how, the ineffable element that seeped under the closed parlor doors when the coffin was opened; all this fixing forever in me the image of life extended beyond death, and fixing too the precise moment of the advent of the light.