Another Broken Wizard (36 page)

“How are you?” she said, offering me a kiss.

“I’m here. I’m breathing. I guess I’m doing pretty well.”

We walked back to Dad’s SUV and got in. Then things got quiet, even standoffish for a long minute. Not knowing what to do, I leaned over to kiss her. She kissed back for a moment, but I pulled away. It seemed that another appetite had failed me.

“So what happened? Whose wake were you at?”

And I told her all of it. There was no way to make the story pretty, to pretend there were any heroes or hope in it. At the end, she took my hand and we sat there.

“You hungry?” she asked after a long time in the quiet.

“I am. I’m starving actually. I didn’t even notice until now.”

“You want to get some Kentucky Fried Chicken and look at the lake?” Olive asked.

We got the chicken and drove to a spot she knew by downtown Natick where you could park and look at the lake. The snow on the frozen lake was untouched, pure and white. The moon shone down so the lake was like a movie screen playing a film about nothing. Every so often, a freight or commuter train would race along the opposite shore, howling like a mythical beast. We ate the chicken and used the bones like spoons to eat the mashed potatoes and gravy. When I cried, Olive didn’t ask why or try to soothe me.

“My father got a new doctor. He wants him to go back into surgery next month,” Olive said into the silence.

I looked at her, then took her greasy hand in my greasy hand and squeezed. The silence came back, better than the consolation either of us could offer. We kissed again, and this time it kept on. We crawled over the seat to the back of the SUV and I tore open her black stockings. We made love among the golf balls, Dunkin Donuts wrappers, old receipts and paper towels. I was aroused in a dire sort of way, defending my beachhead in the world of the living with each thrust, each toothy kiss. It worked a little better than my other attempts at catharsis, which is to say it failed. Afterward, we drove back to the shopping plaza, still quiet, as if the cold night was a church. The sick fathers, the chance meeting, the excitement of touching, the dead friend, the vast uncertainties all did add up to something. And when we kissed good night, it all seemed charged with an unguessable meaning.

But my sense of mystery didn’t make it out of Northborough intact. When I got back, I could hear Dad’s TV, which meant he could hear the door. I walked down the hallway and he looked up at me. The nurse had put a chair by the bed, which made his bedroom feel like a hospital room.

“Hey, how are you?” he asked, muting the TV.

I was getting sick of the question. But I gave it one more hedging, okay-but-not-okay go. I sat down in the chair. He asked about the wake and I told him.

“It’s good that you’re going to the whole thing. I don’t know if it was the war or what it was, but I have a really hard time with that stuff. I’ll go to pay my respects, but I’ll leave as soon as I can. I hate going to those things. When’s the funeral?” he asked.

“Tomorrow. I don’t know if it helps—the funeral, the wake. But it makes more sense than anything else right now.”

“Probably. What do you think of Joyce?”

“She seems a little bitchy, but professional at least. I don’t know. How about you?”

“She keeps the heat up too high. And if you think she’s a bitch, then you should hear her on the phone with her husband. It’s nice to know that someone has it worse than me,” Dad joked.

“Maybe she’ll loosen up after a few days.”

“I hope so. At least she’s a worker. She saw a stain on the sheets and changed them right away. She said it looked like blood. Was that you?”

“No, I’ve been staying on the inflatable bed.”

“I probably just washed it with colors or something. I’m still getting the hang of laundry. Hey, do you think you’ll have time to pick up my prescriptions tomorrow?”

I said I would, said I was tired, said I was glad he was back and said good night. I shut the door behind me so I wouldn’t have to hear too much of his TV and he wouldn’t have to hear too much of mine. On TV, they swore in the new president again and again. Some people were ecstatic. Others weren’t so sure. The Tylenol PM didn’t work so well and it was late by the time the TV stopped registering.

62.

Wednesday, January 21

On burying day, I was up with the sun. Sitting up in bed, I started crying right away, then laughed at myself—old Wake-and-Weep Monaghan. Dad was still sleeping, so I hit the road for some coffee and his pills. The CVS wasn’t far from the McDonald’s, so I stopped for breakfast. I ate a McMuffin and stared at the space where the playground used to be. Now it was just tables bolted to the concrete through the Astroturf. Beyond it, I watched Route 9 through the crotch of a golden arch. The memories were thick and I was anything but alone.

When I was four or five, Mom worked Saturday afternoons at a travel agency in the Filenes at the Worcester Galleria. And Dad would drive me out to that same McDonald’s in Westborough, then to his old friend’s butcher shop across from the WPI football field. We did it every weekend. Dad scared me when I was a kid—being huge and short-tempered. But those afternoons were a window into his mystery. In Worcester, Dad always ran into people who I’d never seen or heard of before. But I could feel the history hidden in their handshakes.

The CVS had just opened when I arrived. Exhaustion and a fundamental reluctance showed on the face of the pharmacist when I showed him the prescriptions, Dad’s insurance card and my driver’s license. He hesitated and went to the back. The place was big. I strolled the aisles and picked up magazines and snacks for Dad. The pharmacist had the pills ready when I got back to the counter.

Back at the apartment, I looked at Joyce’s long, coldly polite letter and decided the rest of the stuff on her list could wait a day. I dressed in the same clothes I’d worn the day before and flipped through the TV’s many bad choices until I heard Joyce’s keys in the door. She was in jeans and a green fleece with a hospital logo on it. She looked raw, freckly and stippled, as if she’d applied the opposite of makeup to come over. She was unpleasantly surprised to see me. Apartments always become smaller as the winter goes on, but Dad’s would always be too small for three adults. I told her Dad was sleeping and that I’d gotten his pills from the pharmacy. She reminded me that I had failed to go grocery shopping. I said I had to go to a funeral. She asked what Dad was going to eat. I slapped a twenty on the kitchen counter and said to get delivery. She said I couldn’t keep doing that. I said I’d be at a funeral all day and walked out, dramatically, without my coat. I hurried across the frozen puddles and crunching scree of the parking lot to Dad’s SUV.

The sky over Route 9 was clear but not bright. The sun was still low behind me. I past the Econo Lodge and the sports bar, always under new management, perched at the intersection of Route 20. It was too early for the funeral. But a sense—that something was almost over—propelled me. I was nearing the end of this first, blistering and unhinging portion of grief. I pressed the gas pedal.

I malingered in the late rush-hour traffic on Shrewsbury Street, pausing at the traffic light by the Wonder Bar. I thought of how Joe laughed at the predicament he’d put himself in. I could still hear his loud, machine-gun laugh and thought of his peculiar, intense optimism. The optimism was for small things—that the night ahead wouldn’t be boring, that he could find some excitement and satisfaction in what seemed to everyone else to be just passing the time.

Something was coming loose. Joe’s laugh was doing it. And he had laughed in every dour face, every shabby fate that wagged at him from the steel desks, the fake-velvet seats of Oldsmobiles, the bolted down Dunkin Donuts’ tables and the dirty plastic cash registers. I limped to the next red light, by the Boulevard Diner. I stared it down as if it could be intimidated. I stared until my eyes became blurry with tears and a Toyota behind me honked. Driving under I-290 and around the rotary by the train station, something did come loose. The staccato bellow of Joe’s peculiar and belligerent joy rang in my ears and I had to pull over. That laugh. It was Joe winning his momentary victories over boredom, and then over the embarrassing and dangerous means at his disposal to fight boredom.

Circling past the refurbished train station, I found a place to stop. It was the parking lot of a vacuum cleaner repair shop that had been gutted and refurbished to sell wine and gourmet foods. In low, subdued spasms, I puked up a prominent piece of the cinderblock. Leaning over the steering wheel, with the traffic jostling past me, I remembered meeting Joe in the fifth grade. We were paler and hairless, our fingers always sweaty. We had both discerned that the world, though huge and mysterious, was largely unfriendly, and wanted us mainly to go where it sent us, and to be quiet about it. I remember by the lockers, Joe sold me a truly awful Atari game, called Haunted House. Later that week, I told him it was a crappy game and I wanted my money back. He said I just wasn’t playing it right. That was the beginning of it. We got older and figured out more of the little mysteries. The world got smaller and sometimes seemed, in fits of hubris, to be downright small. But we shared the same basic suspicion of it, and made our very separate peaces. Well, cease-fires only last so long. And now Joe was dead.

Wiping the spit from my mouth and the tears off my cheeks with the back of my hand, I took some deep breaths. The wave receded. I made it to the funeral home in time to join the procession to the church on June Street. We drove slowly, with our headlights on, across the city. The funeral was across town, in a modern Catholic church, a triangle done in that yellow-brown institutional brick, with a simple cross on top. The parking lot was mostly full when we arrived. I shook hands, hugged, and shared my head-shaking, clueless grief with the people crowded in front of the church. The sense—that something was nearly over—made me a loiterer on the cold church steps. Joe’s family made their way past in a protective formation around Justine, who was wearing sunglasses. I nodded to her but she didn’t notice. Then Emily and Jeff showed up. Jeff was wearing a black trench coat with a black sweatshirt and black jeans. His eyes were wide and jumpy. Emily was wearing a dark-gray pantsuit.

“Hey guys. Thanks for coming.”

Emily pursed her lips as though I’d said something absurd.

“No problem, man” Jeff said, lowering his head and looking solemnly at me.

“Hey, are you going to the cemetery after?”

“I didn’t know if we should or not,” Emily said.

“I’d like it if you did. You can ride with me if you want.”

“Okay, sure,” Emily said, looking at Jeff, who was nodding in a rhythm that had escaped the cadence of the conversation.

“Oh, I got you a present, do you want it now?” Jeff asked, jumping into the conversation from left field.

“Maybe after the Mass.”

“Okay.”

“What are you guys doing afterwards?” I asked, surprised by the high pitch of my voice.

Marissa passed me with Kyle, Fin, her enormous Italian boyfriend and Mike. She said she’d hold me a seat close to the front as she passed. I made plans with Emily and Jeff to go to the cemetery and then to get something to eat. Marissa waved to me from the fourth row when I entered the church. I kneeled and crossed myself, then walked down the aisle. In front of me was Joe’s extended family, distant uncles and aunts, adopted and natural cousins, along with family friends who felt they were entitled or needed enough to sit up close. I wasn’t the only one who wanted to be at the white hot center of the pain. A strange competition was afoot.

The church filled up. Except for his sworn enemies, almost everyone who knew Joe loved him. His ashes sat on a cart on the crimson high-traffic carpet at the head of the aisle, in front of the marble stairs that led to the altar. His urn was green marble, just larger than a shoebox. I imagined Joe—all six foot two of him, condensed to be buried. I thought of who he was—now condensed into anecdotes, to be buried in memory. It was all happening too fast. The priest began to say the Mass. Marissa periodically clutched my hand and I clutched back. I looked around at all the people, crying or staring dumbly into the front of the room. The Crucifix above the altar was one of those sterile, modern jobs—all pale wood and clean lines. The face of Christ was drawn and tranquil.

The priest obviously didn’t know Joe and repeated what he’d heard from the family with full attribution. Claire gave a eulogy that praised Joe the precocious child, and condemned Joe the alcoholic. After Communion, I prayed without aim, mouthing the words
Oh God
over and over, with no other praise or pleas for Him. The Mass resumed with the Ave Maria, whose opening notes rose like the sun cracking the line of the horizon. A massive sob rose with it and seized my chest and throat. When it passed, I realized the Mass was nearing its end. For the first time in my life, I wished that a Mass would be longer. Even in remembering, I find myself reaching out for some remembered detail to slow down the narrative. But I mostly remember looking down at my hands, my lap and my shoes.

Too soon, too fast, the priest told us to go in peace.

Emily and Jeff and I got into Dad’s SUV and followed in the procession out the west side of Worcester, up Airport Hill, and out of town, into the woods, into Paxton, whose town common was anchored by an obelisk to its war dead. We didn’t talk much on the drive over there. The Veterans cemetery was where they were going to bury Joe. It was a humble place. Its large monuments commemorated the wars and the branches of the armed forces. The men and women and their families received small brass plaques in the lawn. Whoever ran the place had cleared the snow off the ground around the grave and dug a hole. A backhoe was parked behind a massive granite star that honored the men and women who served in the Navy during World War Two, including Joe’s grandfather. We packed into the semicircle carved into the snow. Sobs erupted around the circle.