Finally, when there was nothing more to be done, we went upstairs. I’d never been afraid to approach my father before, even when he was angry. But I was afraid now, afraid of what we’d find. We tiptoed through Mama’s study and pushed open the bedroom door. Papa was lying facedown on the bed. The late-afternoon sun, caught by the beveled edges of small windowpanes, covered the bed with tiny rainbows. Papa’s pale hair—once carrot red—was flecked with light.
Papa always slept on his stomach so I thought he might be asleep, but when Molly tiptoed around the bed, he looked up at her.
“Papa? Are you all right?”
I could see him shake his head: no.
He kept the register closed, and the bedroom was very cold. Molly turned back the comforter and crawled in next to Papa. I did the same on the other side. There were still two comforters on the bed; I pulled the second one over me, and we lay like that while the sun went down, watching the little rainbows gradually grow together and then fade away completely.
About four or five times a year Ann Landers prints a letter from someone advising readers to tell their loved ones that they love them—before it’s too late. Whenever I read one of those letters I think of Mama and her tapes. But the analogy is imperfect; the moral is not the same. Mama was trying to tell us.
But then what is the moral?
Check all your equipment? Well, of course. The problem, it turned out, was with the new remote punch in/out switch, which had been activating the tape recorder without engaging the recording heads. Papa hadn’t used it in the three years since Mama’s death, so he’d never discovered that it hadn’t been working properly. He sent the tapes to the Ampex Laboratory in Schenectady, New York, to have them analyzed on the off chance that a weak signal had gotten through, but there was nothing to be recovered. The tapes were virginal.
So, by all means, check all your equipment. Yes. But that’s a moral for the head, not the heart. What can I say about the heart?
I suppose the real question is: Why does it matter so intensely? What could Mama have said that would have altered the course of our lives?
I think about this question a lot—not all the time, but often enough—without coming any closer to an answer. All I know is that my life is filled with little pockets of silence. When I put a record on the turntable, for example, there’s a little interval—between the time the needle touches down on the record and the time the music actually starts—during which my heart refuses to beat. All I know is that between the rings of the telephone, between the touch of a button and the sound of the radio coming on, between the dimming of the lights at the cinema and the start of the film, between the lightning and the thunder, between the shout and the echo, between the lifting of a baton and the opening bars of a symphony, between the dropping of a stone and the plunk that comes back from the bottom of a well, between the ringing of the doorbell and the barking of the dogs I sometimes catch myself, involuntarily, listening for the sound of my mother’s voice, still waiting for the tape to begin.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my first three readers for their continued support and encouragement: Virginia (my wife); Henry Dunow (my agent), and Nancy Miller (my editor). And I’d like to thank Gleni Bartels (my production editor) for stitching these stories together.
Special thanks to the following for helping me to expand my frame of reference to include: New York City (John Sheedy and Marilyn Webb), Vietnam (Richard Stout), embalming (Christopher Hroziencik), museum exhibits (Sheri Lindquist), cartooning (Bob Mankoff), French food (Anne Steinbeck), all things Italian (Vincenzina Cipriani, Janet Smith, and Rita Severi), the Guardia Medica in Rome (Marina Frontani), Stearmans in Italy (Piero Angiolillo), and Texas avocados (Noe Torres and Medardo Riojas).
And to the following for supplying just the right words when I needed them: Susan Erickson, “Renaissance angels balancing effortlessly on stepping-stone clouds” (p. 136)—adapted from “Angels Italiano” (The Art of Departure, Egress Studio Press, Bellingham, WA 2003); Michel McFee, “How hard to take the trail as it comes” (p. 105)—from “Plain Air” (Plain Air, University Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL 1983); and Peter Burian, translation of Leopardi’s “Il passero solitario” (p. 53).
PUBLICATION INFORMATION:
Published stories included in The Truth About Death and Other Stories:
“THE REMOVAL,” Printers Row Fiction (April, 2016).
“A Christmas Letter,” Ploughshares (Spring 2014), 112–133. Selected for online publication by Electric Literature’s “Recommended Reading,” http://recommendedreading.tumblr.com/.
“FOR SALE,” Black Warrior Review 23 (Spring/Summer 1997), 1–13.
“I Speak a Little French,” Crazyhorse 43 (Winter 1992), 82–91.
“Pockets of Silence,” The Chicago Tribune, Magazine Section, 29 January 1989, 18–20. Later incorporated into The Sixteen Pleasures (1994).
“Snapshots of Aphrodite,” StoryQuarterly 38 (2002), 478–488.
“The Mountain of Lights,” The California Quarterly 21 (1982), 93–112. Reprinted in Best Short Stories from the California Quarterly, 1971–1985.
“The Second Coming,” Mississippi Valley Review 23 (Fall 1992), 63–79.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Robert Hellenga was educated at the University of Michigan, the Queen’s University of Belfast, and Princeton University. He is a professor emeritus at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and the author of the novels The Confessions of Frances Godwin, Snakewoman of Little Egypt, The Sixteen Pleasures, The Fall of a Sparrow, Blues Lessons, Philosophy Made Simple, and The Italian Lover. He lives in Galesburg, Illinois.
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First published 2016
© Robert Hellenga 2016
“Tell all the truth but tell it slant” by Emily Dickinson reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON: VARIORUM EDITION, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson.
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-63286-291-4
ePub: 978-1-63286-292-1
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA.
Hellenga, Robert, 1941–
[Short stories. Selections]
The truth about death : and other stories / by Robert Hellenga.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-1-63286-291-4 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-63286-292-1 (ePub)
I. Title.
PS3558.E4753A6 2016
813’.54—dc23
2015031690
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Robert Hellenga, The Truth About Death
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