Bereavements (27 page)

One had a porcelain handle: white, with blue cornflowers. It was exactly the kind his (unknown) father had used and which his mother, along with a worn shaving brush, had kept as a treasured memento in a short fat mug made of the same cornflowered porcelain. He remembered it as clearly as his mother’s sweet, constantly-troubled face; carefully placed, always in the same position, atop a lace doily on her bedroom bureau.

Bruno had discarded, thrown out, sold everything when his mother died, even the family bible and two albums of ancient photos his mother had prized, only long afterward regretting he had not kept just a few things to link him with his own past.

Now, seeing the razor, he desired to own it. It might not have belonged to his father, but it served equally well to evoke his memory: rather, his mother’s memory and the memory she possessed of the man she had loved.

The price was only four dollars, something he could certainly afford, but Bruno thanked the shop-keeper and then went outside again to stare at the razor once more through the store’s dusty window, unable to decide.

He bought it, finally. But why the delay? Weren’t his desire and motives simple and pure? Or do “things,” like human beings, have a good and an evil side? Isn’t the crackling fire that warms and delights us at our hearth on a winter’s night, the same fire that bubbled the fat in her flesh, charred the skin from her bones, before Joan, blessedly dead, became a stink of smoke and ashes?

Book V

C
HRISTMAS WAS
near and although the thought was appalling, Mrs. Evans began to plan, if vaguely, what to do.

The previous Christmas she had spent in Palm Beach, alone, and the celebration of the birth of Mary’s son after the death of her own was too much to bear. She had no recollection of what had happened, what she did—probably because she’d drugged herself senseless. Memories were too fresh.

“Time heals all wounds,” Robert had had the astonishing vulgarity to say when he first came to her after Jamie’s death, but there were tears on his face, and he clung to her with a sympathy that was passion.

There are no words for death, anyway. Name them. “I’m ‘sorry’?” How many things one is “sorry” for! —That I spoke to you crossly? —That I missed your party? And, oh, yes, that your son is dead, your life ostensibly over, and that, in the wilderness of your grief, you’ll probably go mad and kill yourself. I’m sorry for that.

Wounds.

Time, for her, had created new ones, not healed the old, and was now adding to those, dilemmas of such magnitude, they were impossible to face: there seemed no solutions other than stasis and paradox.

However, the dailiness of our lives goes relentlessly on, and Mrs. Evans was reminded, not unamused, of a story she’d read many years ago about two golfers who were about midway in their game when a distraught friend rushed up with irrefutable evidence that the world, within hours, was to come to an end. This was indeed shocking and terrible news, “but,” said one golfer to the other, “let’s get on with our game; we may have enough time to finish.”

But with her eyes blind, her ears deaf to the usual joy of the season, what was there to do? She could bear none of it, really; nothing, and so planned no cards, no decorations, not even gifts for the servants. She’d simply give them several hundred dollars each: a check, or perhaps new bills if she could get to a bank or ask her accountant to do so.

And Dori and Rose could take care of all the other nuisance gifts: the mailman, the butcher, the little black boy who ran in from the truck with the daily groceries. Oh! and the man where they garaged the car (she’d heard he had a crippled daughter). And, yes, there was a sprinkling of others: Doris, her manicurist, Howard, that sweet gay boy who did her hair, and George, the charming young man at the bookstore who was always so courteous and helpful—surely some slight remembrance would be appropriate.

Suddenly she thought of Martin and everything stopped. She simply couldn’t give him money, as much as he could probably use it. She was so constantly tucking large bills into his pockets—for restaurants, for taxis, for theater tickets—that money as a gift would be unforgivable. So that was at least one gift that had to be bought. Perhaps she could send Dori to Tiffany’s, but would he know what a (glamorous! decadent!) young man would like? If he didn’t, she would tell him. Better—why not something almost but not quite offensively money?—a gift certificate from one of the men’s shops or department stores. Martin loved clothes, and that way he could be happy and choose exactly what his expensive heart desired.

The next “cloud on the horizon” was Bruno, her
Little Crocodile!
She had neglected him so! Rose had told her—with a clear, warning look of “watch out!” in her eyes—that he had telephoned
seventeen
times in the last several weeks. But how could she return his calls when he hadn’t a phone? Well, she would arrange to see him soon, squeeze an hour or so out of one day. In the meantime, she’d be sure to send him something: perhaps Dori could deliver it himself some evening—which would be a nice touch, more intimate than UPS, and compensate for all his calls. She might send several things: a poinsettia, a bottle of good brandy, a huge basket with a bright red bow filled with candies, jellies, cheeses and fruits (to satisfy that very large sweet tooth she knew he had!).

And that would be it.

Christmas.

Except for Angel. He had been first in her mind but she’d saved thinking about him for last because he was the most important, and—more than in her mind alone—he was also, much more than she wanted, now in her heart.

She wondered if he’d ever known a truly happy Christmas, a fine one, a beautiful one? What would this one be like for him? — his mother dead and his brutal, alcoholic father likely drunk, every ready with a coarse or obscene word, and a hand, perhaps even a belt, to strike him. So she believed. There seemed no other way to account for the boy’s obvious dread of the man, though Angel denied the beatings, and affirmed that his father “loved” him. What kind of love was that?

Of any bruise on his body, those she could see—he’d say, “I got it in a street fight.” But no; that blue stain on his throat (curious and frightening though she didn’t quite know why), the (sometimes) scratches or welts on cheek or arm, the bruised mouth: these were the signs, the marks of his father’s (drunken) hate, his brutal raging. Indeed, that broken front tooth wasn’t from a water fountain—another youth viciously pushing his head down! Any story would have been more convincing than that!

Who had broken his tooth? Why Aurelio, of course. Aurelio Rivera. His father.

Not a fountain, but a fist.

But about Christmas. And Angel . . .

Hadn’t the day its
true
meaning through the eyes of a child? Adults
for
adults, only went through the motions. The way children played “house” so adults “played” Christmas. The way to live it as an adult was to live it vicariously. Could she do that? Could she live it through Angel? With effort, she could try.

So she changed her mind. There would be a Christmas, this year after all: with a huge tree, the best, Douglas fir, the day before in New York, and perhaps midnight mass with Angel by her side. She longed for a whiff of that marvelous Catholic incense (or was it Good Friday or Easter that they used it?). She might even go up to the altar rail (if Angel did) for the taste of that curious little wafer on the tongue; then, afterward, after church, a small supper. Just she and the boy. She wanted to watch those shining eyes, the mouth falling open at the sight of countless gifts, all in white tissue tied with white satin ribbon, piled so high under the tree he’d have to wade through them knee-deep as he would into mountains of wind-drifted snow.

That would be Christmas Eve.

Christmas Day they’d rise in the darkness, sullen with sleep, and make Dori fly through the icy dawn to Long Island. She’d phone Delia well in advance to have a tree there, too, and just a few extra presents: maybe skiis and a sled. There were marvelous hills, and if God were truly good, as everyone claimed, He’d send them a gift of snow.

The Village has a reputation for housing any number of freaks. But these are the normal kind: deviations of mind, not body, expressing their symptoms in behavior and dress considered bizarre by the constant rash of morbid tourists who need to be confirmed in the misconception that any departure from their comfortable, statistical norm is, if not the patent hand of the devil, at least his blurred fingerprint.

True, the widespread confusion of sex in this area—always a wonderfully laughable and entertaining subject (was that a boy or a girl!?)—contributes to the prevailing notion that something is not quite right in this best of all possible worlds; still, without the confusion, how is one to know that
(here but for the grace of God go I?

Only living saints, if there are any, and a few peculiar “therapists” seem to know the truth:
there
I
go.

In view of this, usually only the physical freak is noticed by the people who count: the police.

So, a tiny man with a stunted wing, haunting the dark streets about and around the Harrington-Smith Evans home at all hours of the night (though he clung to the shadows and was more often invisible than not) was something not to be neglected.