Time is running out. To read editorials in our local newspaper almost daily proclaiming we are on the brink of disaster when disaster is already upon us, is ironic, to say theleast. And it may well be that something beyond the catastrophe we are presently suffering is looming. Perhaps the rumor that Freising, our twin city in Germany, is likewise in the grip of whatever has assaulted us, is unfounded. But what has taken place under our very noses, to make a grim pun, cannot be explained away or dismissed.
It happened within the past week. A forty-nine year-old old woman, prominent in civic affairs and known to be in excellent health, returned to her home in the West End from Kodiak, Alaska. She’d flown there a couple of months ago, not long before our city had been stricken, to be with her daughter, wife of an army lieutenant, during a difficult pregnancy. The morning after her homecoming as a joyously relieved grandmother, her husband reached over in bed to touch her and found she was lifeless.
With the consent of the husband, CEC demanded an autopsy. Performing it was a West End physician whose professional capacities and personal integrity are beyond question. He it was who completed and signed the Registrar’s Certification of Death. Beneath “Immediate Cause” he wrote unknown.
UNCLE OSCAR’S FUNERAL
Oscar’s funeral did not commence with the word’s first syllable. Located about fifteen miles east of the city from which we live twenty miles west, Beckett’s Funeral Home, advertising itself as “A Garden of Peace and Remembrance,” turned out to be a good-sized, squat, L-shaped building of blood-red bricks and bright white mortar. The macadam parking lot was almost filled, as were the seats in the chapel, situated in the leg of the L. Gwen and I were ushered to a couple of empties in the middle of the next to last row.
The front of the small auditorium looked like a florist’s shop. Somewhere an electronic organ softly was playing a medley of traditional Protestant hymns expressing grief and comfort.
“At least an open coffin’s not on display,” Gwen—my wife and the niece by marriage of Oscar, the corpse—whispered after we’d settled on straight-backed chairs, thinly upholstered, with leather seats. I assumed they were designed to strike a balance between providing too little and too much comfort. I responded with an appropriate, but I’m afraid sacrilegious, “Thank God.”
Shortly after we’d been seated, Gwen’s Aunt Bess, Oscar’s widow, and her daughter Debbie were led to seats in the middle of the front row, directly in front of the low platform on which a lectern stood. Aunt Bess was dressed in a black velvet suit. The hem of the skirt fell well beneath her knees. On her birdlike legs were black stockings. The veil of the black straw hat she had on was folded up so that her face was bared. Truly, she might have served as a mourner in a Civil War film. I was surprised to see how small and bent she was. It seemed she’d been preparing for her husband’s death by growing a widow’s hump I hadn’t noticed even on the most recent of the infrequent visits Gwen and I had made to Aunt Bess’ household.
Though Debbie, Gwen’s cousin, was not tall, she stood a full head above her mother. Debbie was clad in a plain gray gown that fell to her ankles. On the back of her head was a white lace cap. She might have passed as a Quaker of even earlier vintage than her mother.
“Notice that Sarah’s not with them,” I whispered to Gwen.
“I wouldn’t expect her to be,” Gwen whispered back.
“Not even at their father’s funeral?”
Gwen shook her head, expressing either agreement with my implication or disapproval of her absent cousin. Although I scanned the backs of those in the rows in front of us, I couldn’t find anyone who might possibly be Sarah. Of course, I told myself, she could be seated in the row behind us. Or standing at the rear of the seats where, turning, I could see there was an overflow of mourners. For some reason even Gwen didn’t know, her sister cousins hadn’t spoken to each other for some fifteen years. Neither had married, a fact I had no trouble understanding. Debbie, a nurse, lived at home. Where Sarah lived Gwen had never been informed.
Gwen had never felt close to or at all compatible with her cousins or their father, who had died suddenly at eighty-five from a heart attack while running. Still and all, she felt it was necessary for her aunt’s sake that she be present at his funeral. To support my wife I’d permitted her to take me in tow.
Pitying her aunt Bess, who we agreed deserved a better spouse and daughters than she had, Gwen and I had dutifully made visits to the Stulls’ split-level home, exactly the kind I’d imagined that until his retirement in his late seventies Oscar had constructed and sold. My surmise that, although they’d received a number of invitations, the Stulls had not once visited us was that, without ever having seen it, they suspected our dwelling was a house of sin and corruption, with only secular paintings, prints and drawings, perhaps dancers, even nudes adorning the walls and non-religious books and periodicals lying on tabletops. From their perspective, of course they had our number.
Gwen’s distaste for her cousins went back to childhood visits her parents had made to her mother’s sister. Although Gwen had never told her mother or father, who had no religious affiliation or convictions, whenever she’d been sent off to play with Debbie, who was exactly her age, and Sarah, two years older, “play” had consisted of inquisition, humiliation, reproach, and even threat.
“Are you saved?” “How old were you when you were baptized?” “Don’t you go to Sunday school?” “ Is Gwen a name in the Bible, like ours?” “Does your father say a blessing before meals?” “Do you memorize a verse of Scripture every day?” “Do you kneel and say prayers before getting into bed?” “Do you want to be a missionary when you grow up?” And the sockdolager— “If you should die before you wake, Satan to Hell your soul will take, unless you’re saved… you know that, don’t you?”
In defending herself against such bullying, Gwen told monstrous lies, consisting of vague scraps of Protestant beliefs and practices she’d picked up from neighborhood and school friends who had attended mainline Protestant churches. Such answers never satisfied her cousins, who grilled her with the same questions whenever they “played” together. The day she’d revealed to me that what she’d suffered from the tongues of her cousins still brought a sour taste into her mouth just to think of them, let alone to visit the Stulls’ household even with Sarah gone, I’d named Aunt Bess’ daughters Goneril and Regan.
I too had been in the crosshairs of a Stull, who until he “was called home” had continued to fire away at me whenever we’d make discourtesy that amounted to crude rudeness and, even worse, raw sexism. Gwen took his boorishness in stride. I, as his sole target, came to understand where the genes and behavioral model that had caused her cousins to bully and abuse her as a child had come from.
The ammunition Oscar had pumped into me was of two kinds—athletic and military. The former was fired at me less frequently and did less damage—his prowess as an athlete in high school, scoring the winning basket, hitting the winning home run, catching the winning pass. Whether these stories, told visit after visit, were strict truths, “stretchers,” imaginings, or outright lies, I couldn’t decide.
Much more offensive were his heroics during WWII. How the 40mm antiaircraft battery he was a member of had hit a bomber he called a “Betty” at Iwo Jima and when two “Japs” had bailed out, had “used the little devils for target practice” as they floated down beneath their parachutes, “scattering “pieces of their cowardly guts all over the Pacific,” the “Sea of Peace.” How he and his comrades in arms had cheered, backslapped, even hugged on deck the morning they heard on the PA system that a bomb as powerful as 20,000 tons of TNT had been dropped on the city of Hiroshima, which he’d never heard of until it had become world famous. How a flotilla of battleships, of which his was one, had each rained sixteen-inch shells from nine turrets all night long, first on Hokkaido, then on Honshu, to show the Nips and our own “air boys” what the old battlewagon Navy was still
capable of, a demonstration that was given just before the Japs surrendered “because they had nothing left to fight with.” Although I too was defenseless, there was no truce or cessation of attack on me.
In fact, the vigor and compulsion with which these war stories were directed at me made me suspect that I was being chastised for not having killed or been killed, or at least wounded, by “gooks” in Viet Nam or Iraq. In fact, it even crossed my mind that Oscar blamed his daughters for not coming out males who could perform heroic feats on the court, diamond, gridiron, as well as on the sea, in the air, or on the battlefield.
As we sat in the bare-walled, bookless living room before lunch or dinner, Oscar would fix his agate eye on me and continue the bombardment until Aunt Bess would announce it was time to reassemble at the dining room table. Once we were seated, only the command “all heads bowed and eyes closed” (given even when his stay-at-home daughter Debbie was a grown woman, invariably followed by the utterance of thanks “to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ for the food of which we are about to partake, for the nourishment of our bodies and the strengthening of our souls”) interrupted the telling of the many-times-told tales. Gwen, I noticed, like me refused to obey the command from second-class petty officer Stull. After a brief silence their eyelids were lifted and the bombardment recommenced.
Oscar, spinning yarns in his native vernacular, was no Joseph Conrad, telling tales in his second language. But his compulsion to narrate and insistence that I must hear, his way of transfixing me with his agate eyes, along with his blatant moralizing, brought to my mind one dinner hour when he was in medias res, not Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but Coleridge’s narrator, the Ancient Mariner. Although they were both mariners and compulsive tellers of their own tales, Oscar had not a shred of the Mariner’s self-indictment or contrition. Still, I named Oscar the Ancient Mariner.
Appropriate as it was while we were sitting in the mortuary, waiting for the funeral service to begin, to engage in a rehearsal of Gwen’s and my relationship with her aunt’s family, and to recall how, like Adam and Prospero, I had usurped the privilege of naming, it would be hypocritical to try to convince myself that I was grieving over the death of petty officer second class Oscar Stull.
The review was brought to an end by the presiding minister—clergyman doesn’t seem to be quite the appropriate word for him—as he bestrode the platform and planted himself among the tropical jungle of flowers behind the lectern. He was a middle-aged man with shaggy gray hair and a melancholy air. The black serge suit he was wearing was so ill-fitting—the cuffs of his trousers looked as if he couldn’t avoid stepping on them while the cuffs of the coat sleeves covered his hands to the knuckles—it seemed to be a hand-me-down from a much taller man or else a purchase from a hardware store that sold general merchandise.
To the accompaniment of an upright piano played by a gray frizzy-haired woman, who inserted keyboard-length runs between stanzas, we were asked to join in the singing of two hymns whose words struck me as being somewhat contradictory. The first expressed joy at the prospect of crossing to “Beulah Land”; the second lamented what “Adam’s curse had visited upon us.” Also seemingly in conflict to me was the minister’s eulogy, praising “our deceased brother for his willingness to fight and if called upon to die for his country,” and his celebration of his virtues as a “devout Christian, a man known for his kindness and gentle ways—the devoted husband of his helpmeet, and the devout father of two daughters he’d raised in the faith.” At this point I found myself assailed by doubts that the good man had more than a passing acquaintance with Oscar and the Stull family.
The Scripture we were asked to give our attention to as he read was the rather predictable consolation uttered by the Preacher and recorded in the book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 3: “To everything there is a season…a time to be born and a time to die…a time to kill and a time to heal.” From there we leaped to the Epistle of St. Paul (whom he referred to as Paul, as if the saint were his next-door neighbor or a fellow Rotarian) to the Romans: “For the wrath of God is revealed from Heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.” Then after a generously overweight soprano rendered in a voice with a constant tremolo, all four stanzas of “Abide with Me,” the service closed with the minister’s pronouncing a benediction that urged us to “fight the good fight and depart in peace.”
The service, which I’m certain provided consolation for Aunt Bess but struck me even of its kind as being nothing short of dreadful, having ended, hymn tunes at low volume from an electronic organ again flowed over us. After having searched the chapel for the instrument in vain during the service, I had concluded there was no organ. The hymn melodies were canned.
We sat waiting. While I was more than ready to head for home, I knew that Gwen, as part of the family, wanted to embrace and condole with Aunt Bess, to show our supportive presence by appearing at the customary viewing, and then to join the procession of cars to the cemetery. The protocol being observed, we were aware, was that no one was to leave the chapel before the immediate family, that is, Aunt Bess and Debbie, would plod out. As I sat waiting, I couldn’t keep myself from musing over what I‘d just experienced. Unable to charge myself with self-righteousness, simply because I hadn’t a grain of righteousness in me, I had to own up to my mean-spiritedness. Who was I, in my third marriage after two miserable failures (for which, to be honest, I bore at least an equal share of blame), to pass judgment on the religion Aunt Bess turned to for support and comfort in her time of need? And so far as her daughters were concerned, who was I, a single child, who had neither sired nor raised a child of my own, to condemn them for their bigotry and abuse of my wife when they were children or to assess the responsibility for their estrangement as grown sisters? As I saw Debbie finally rise and help her mother to her feet, I felt sufficiently self-chastened and humbled to vow I’d endure, if not embrace, whatever lay ahead with all the charity and grace I could muster. Little did I know my resolution was to have me headed in a direction it would be impossible for me to follow.
Taking her daughter’s arm, Aunt Bess shuffled up the side aisle. Giving her time and distance, the mourners, starting with those in the front row, rose and followed at a respectful distance. Gwen and I were among the last to join the procession. From my vantage point I could see those ahead of us making a ninety-degree turn as they left the chapel, then disappear into the foot of the L of the mortuary. As Gwen prepared her-self for what lay ahead, unaware of my self-reproof and new determination, she whispered, “My BMW against your Honda it’s open.” Rather than accept her bet, I nodded agreement.
It was slow going. By the time we’d turned the corner and were in view of the catafalque, most of those who had been in the rows in front of us had paid their respects to the dead, as well as to Aunt Bess and Debbie, planted at the head of the coffin, and were on their way to the parking lot. The lining of the gaping lid on the mahogany casket was white silk.
A woman posted at the foot of the coffin, six or seven feet from Aunt Bess and Debbie, caught my eye. If wife and daughter of the corpse were costumed quaintly, at least it was with an antique appropriateness. Not so the outrageously got-up woman whom I’d spotted. Her brilliant red hair was beehive-bouffant. In the rather dim light of the place of viewing, which contrasted with the brilliant spotlight illuminating Oscar, her lipstick and cheeks gleamed crimson. Matching, was a dress, with generous décolletage, that fell in flounces well above her knees. Her stockings were the only appropriate color in her ensemble, though their propriety was compromised—no it was rendered imperceptible—by the spike-heeled, gleaming black leather shoes the stockings descended into. So astonished was I to be gazing, if not at a woman of the night or a streetwalker, then at a date-for-hire or a barfly—in such a place at such a time on such an occasion.
“See the lady in red,” I muttered to Gwen as we poked along toward Aunt Bess and Debbie. “Looks to be a bit off her beat, doesn’t sh
e? Is it possible that the sly old Ancient Mariner…?”
“Shhh,” Gwen advised, although we still were not close enough to the casket for Aunt Bess or Debbie to overhear my low-pitched voice. Then she whispered, “That’s Sarah.”
The shock of this recognition, made by a cousin who surely knew her kin, made me gasp, “Who?” To myself I said “Goneril!”
Gwen nodded confirmation just as we became the next to pay our respects to wife, one daughter, and the dead corpse. Before Gwen could approach Aunt Bess, Debbie had flung her gray-clad arms around Gwen’s neck, as if they’d been loving sisters rather than distant cousins. “Oh Gwen,” she sobbed on Gwen’s throat, “he’s gone!”
Gwen bore the burst of emotion tactfully, neither backing off into silent rejection nor clasping and crying out platitudes of comfort. Admirably standing her ground, she murmured, “You have my sympathy.”
Before the demonstration of grief had ended, the few remaining mourners behind Gwen and me, bypassing the two women locked in a one-sided embrace, had uttered their condolences to Aunt Bess and said their good-byes to the departed Oscar.
“I’m so glad you and…” groping for my name, then going on “…and your husband came,” Aunt Bess declared. While her voice quavered, it had a convincing sincerity. Although the rims of her eyes, behind thick lenses, were red, she wasn’t shedding tears. “And Oscar I’m sure would be pleased. He was always fond of both of you, you know. I shouldn’t say ‘would be,’ because where he is now I’m sure he does know.” Aunt Bess was a genuine eighty-some-year-old nineteenth-century literalist.