Bereavements (4 page)

She remembered the male nurse, Mr. Carver by name: six-feet-four—how could one forget!—the man’s stone-age face impassive as risen dough as he began to untangle the twisted web of scarlet from Jamie’s frozen, clawed hands.

The two guarded letters were a disappointment and a bore when, at the small antique desk in her bedroom, Mrs. Evans finally got to see what they contained.

Like the first week’s political announcement, presumably both were intended for the previous owner of her post office box. Or maybe not. Either way—

One was a six-page offset “newsletter” to which she was being invited to subscribe. It was called
Swingers All,
and consisted entirely of copy in minute typewriter type published for “singles, couples and groups—hetero, homo or bi” who could and would (and were guaranteed to) find in its many and varied monthly personal advertisements “suitable partners for
good times and lasting relationships.”

Reading it, Mrs. Evans smiled, then laughed a little in enjoyment, appreciating the surreal nature of the series of events, emanating principally from the death of a son, that had placed
Swingers All
in her hands. Truly God knew His irony well—particularly how desperate was her need for a “good time and a
lasting
relationship.”

She troubled to tear the newsletter to confetti for fear one of the servants, Rose most likely, who was Catholic, and so frequently upstairs, would find it.

She then turned to the other letter which, surprisingly, like a Chinese puzzle, contained a second letter, carefully sealed, addressed to no one, simply with the words:
Sexually Oriented Literature.

Again Mrs. Evans laughed, the three words irresistably funny. The envelope was chastely white, the black sharp type a dignified Bodoni.—Forget your sans-serif or anything more modern than 19th Century!

Also, the word “oriented” was so pleasing! She remembered a schoolgirl Latin and the tireless, wry-faced nuns to whom
her
Latin was indeed a heavy cross:
oriens:
the east! Sunrise. Rising!

Alas.

Inside the envelope nothing was rising, or rather risen, except the somewhat extraordinary genitalia in a printed folder of colored pictures of a few naked young men with handsome bodies, entwined more exotically and tenaciously than wisteria, around several equally naked if not exactly risen young women, also beautiful and fine, all displaying with remarkably lusty exuberance, a variety of sexual postures and positions that must have strained an ensemble of sacroiliacs.

The photos were sample “frames” from a full-color, all-new 8mm film which would be sent in a plain package, carefully sealed, for only $29.98. Plus postage. Cash or money order. No COD’s.

Wearily, in the gathering twilight, her pleased moments spent, Mrs. Evans pushed the brochure aside.

Minutes later she burned it, thinking again of Rose who, finding such brazen sexuality in a wastepaper basket, might faint dead away.

As the flame burned inward, she watched the bodies of the handsome, nude young men become as brown as Jamie after a summer’s sun, then twist and curl, blacken fitfully, cracking minutely into flakes of grey dust, some so light they were airborne, moving gently under the insinuation of her slightest breath.

Its frankness she despaired, its audacity admired. But the poor taste of the strange little postcard, its bad taste, was so excessive she was left momentarily helpless: beyond dismay, outrage, offense.

Was she being paid back in kind? What could one expect from an ad as frank, as audacious, and in as poor taste, as bad taste as her own?

She was looking, a week later, at “Angel’s” smudged, atrociously-written, hole-scrubbed message with its wrote
wrot
and its I’m
Im
and its find
fine,
but the more she looked the more inclined she was to see it as ingenuous. If one got beyond its sheer wretchedness, it became extraordinary, hinting at a truth that chilled her.

Im lost. Please fine me . . .

If it came from a child, it was guileless, desperate: a hand above water before drowning.

If it came from an adult, it was sinister.

She couldn’t think of it in the context of an adult—complex beyond conjecture, perhaps insane, or dull-witted. No, it had to be a child. She knew it.
Knew.

Youre loving son. Angel.

The scratched-out but easily read “loving” was perhaps the most disarming note of all, although the diction, the unconscious poetry of it all, as well as the abysmal spelling, touched her too. See how he dared all the outrageous, offensive and probably deeply offending words! But the use of “loving” to a stranger who might never answer, or worse, might not exist at all except as a raving Ophelia, was a considered impossibility, slightly less than artfully crossed out.

Well—

She was an Ophelia herself, of a kind. Ask Dori. Ask Cook. Ask Rose, the “upstairs” maid—an anachronism if there ever was one. Ask Delia, the caretaker’s wife at the Long Island estate. Or ask Jodi, the caretaker himself. Yes, for the finest example of her recent madness, ask Jodi especially, for it was he who, true to his title, took care of Jamie’s tomb.

Tomb, sepulcher, mausoleum, sarcophagus, mosque—call it what you will—nothing could have looked less like architecture for the dead at a cost of more than a million dollars than the faintly off-white, vaguely, just-possibly “pink” marble temple in which
reposed
or was
housed
(one never said
buried)
the body of her son.

The small, exquisitely-designed and structured building, eclectic but more Eastern than Greek was, at least in spirit, a miniature Taj Mahal. Indeed, it was conceived and executed only after Mrs. Evans had flown the young and slightly bewildered architect straight to Agra that he might absorb, be touched by, acquire something of the quintessential inspiration that had fired the Mongol emperor’s morbid passion.

Shah Jahan’s ghost must have taken a hand, for stone by loving stone, a battery of gifted builders, artisans and technicians with an unlimited budget created, within three months, a work of singular beauty: enduring homage to a dead prince.

Any car passing the Harrington-Smith Evans estate on its way to or from the nearby town of Harper’s Gate, must, of necessity, round the top of a hill, and if one is not speeding or cares to stop, he can see at an angle over the tops of the fir trees, glowing as if an eternal sun were warming it, the strange and beautiful “Tomb of Harper’s Gate.”

Several respected townspeople, passersby on a moonlit night, have reported reliably to have seen a misty figure gliding about.

Spectral at a distance, those with a romantic turn of mind were convinced it was the ghost of the dead boy. Others, practical and “realistic,” decided it was the already legendary Mrs. Evans, haunting the night in a white and flowing robe, mad, or drunk with grief, still mourning, as she would perhaps forever, the death of her fabled son.

Two or three imaginative local children who managed to scale the immense stone wall and intricate barbed wire that bordered the endless acres of the estate, revealed darkly that the ground surrounding the tomb was
mined,
though apparently nobody had exploded.

Later, several older children, cunning, more inclined toward science fiction, were prepared to swear, even on the most ancient of bibles, that there was a mysterious electric (one said “magnetic”)
field force
which actually “seized” any approaching foreign body (such as a nosey child), literally
flinging
it back and away with a stunning if not deadly ferocity.

Naturally, all this was nonsense.

The only protection provided the building to keep it from vandalism or, more likely, graffiti, aside from the wall and wire, was aging, back-bent, poor old Jodi who made his frequent rounds, circling the tomb, its quiet pools, its formal beds of flowers, with the timed regularity of a bank’s most concientious guard or watchman.

Also, if one could actually get
to
the tomb, hoping to gain entrance, possibly see the body which, gossip had it, had been embalmed in an extraordinary way, it was quite impossible. The windows were heavily barred, and the door, immensely thick, of elaborately carved bronze, had no hinges, employed no key.

Jodi, in fact, had only a hazy idea how it opened, though Dori had explained in some detail that it was operated by a complicated dual device, both voice-activated and photo-electric, whatever that meant.

All Jodi was able, or perhaps cared to understand was that whenever Mrs. Evans wished to go in (though he had never seen her do so, for she apparently confined her visits to odd hours of the night) she said a “secret” word (or words) and made several carefully timed “passes” or gestures about or near the door, breaking various circuits, whereupon the great bronze slab, looking much like Rodin’s
Door to Hell,
began to move in its mysterious sesame-silent journey upward.

One thing more. The body.

Even before it cooled and to prevent instantly a single molecule’s decay, Mrs. Evans had had it frozen.

She could have kept it that way and so assured its immortality, but the method—machines, mechanical supervision, care—reeked of the repellent science fiction preoccupations of the day: it lacked beauty, grace, drama, symmetry, a mannered style, the poetry of death, and, of course, would be altogether incommensurate with the anticipated tomb which, within months, was well on its way to completion.

Somewhere—perhaps in the Vatican, those boxed tiers of graves that lined the walls of the catacombs, opening like bureau drawers, in which flowers were said never to die, and popes and saints (it was claimed) resisted the “ravages of time”; or even, by chance, in the great Museum of Cairo, where some ancient Pharaoh as preoccupied with death as she had left his secrets, she would, through her deputized emissaries, find her answer.

But no.

Oddly, or perhaps not oddly at all (shouldn’t she have known instantly where to go?!) the answer came from California—Los Angeles, to be exact—and consisted of two words:
desert honey.

So, in a coffin of seamless crystal glass, the bottom edge embedded and sealed in a translucent slab of “gold” from which a subtle light flooded, the body of Jamie de Vinaz Rojas (his last name belonging to the first of her husbands) was suspended, naked—his only adornment the initialed ring he loved so well—in pure sterile honey, so perfectly saturated and removed from air, from oxygen, that the flesh of the boy would remain as it was, unchanged, unchanging, presumably “forever.”

One small imperfection: a bubble of air, like the tiniest seed pearl, as gleaming, as opalescent, had been inadvertently sealed in the coffin. It remained isolated, unmoving, in the upper lefthand corner; then, months after the interment, began to move subtly, almost imperceptibly: to float, in an unpredictable journey through its dense, liquid environment.

Why it moved, what it might do, no one, not even the Los Angeles mortician who came east to inspect it and “explain” could say. What caused it? Only guesses were in order: surely a vibration of some sort. A ground tremor (an earthquake in Japan or Tibet!), an eruption of the sun, the pull of the moon in an excess of tides, a passing meteorite. Perhaps the tomb itself, “settling,” shifting its tremendous marble weight a fraction of a fraction of a millionth of an inch . . .