Fit Month for Dying (22 page)

“Oh my! Oh my!” she says, barely above her breath as she lays the box aside. “The twists and turns life takes.”

Danny comes downstairs and takes his place at the table. For once the sadness in his eyes is not at odds with the rest of his features. He makes no cracks about Philomena's unkempt hair, her treasured box of pictures or her strong tea. For her part, she refrains from telling him that his torn T-shirt and rumpled hair remind her of an unmade bed. Greg comes in from the den and offers to butter the toast, which he does with his usual precision. I refrain from asking him to please hurry up because our tea is getting cold. No one remarks that, out of habit, I have set a place for Brendan.

After breakfast, Greg and I get ready to go back to St. John's. It seems as though we have been away a lifetime instead of less than a week. Because we had come to the Cove expecting to return on Sunday afternoon, we are not prepared for a longer stay, although to be sure Greg had to make a hurried trip back to our house to pick up suitable funeral clothes for ourselves and burial clothes for Brendan.

On the drive home, Greg and I come out of our stupor in order to volley blame back and forth at each other across the front seat. And there is plenty of blame to volley. Brendan's joining the Altar Servers' Association is no longer the main point of contention. Neither is his sexual abuse. Now it is his death by gunshot.

“Surely you must realize, Tess, that mere mortals like my mother and me can't possess your psychic attributes,” Greg snaps in response to my accusation that, if he had insisted that Brendan come to church with us, he would still be alive. “Besides, if you knew so much, why didn't you
stay
home with him? But I suppose it wouldn't look very good if the MHA wasn't in church.” He waits for this arrow to meet its target, then adds, “I knew you were just bluffing when you said you were going to stay home with Brendan. That's why I got so mad about your mollycoddling him. I knew you were just trying to force him to go with you for the sake of show.”

Every insult, every charge, every accusation is close enough to the truth to cut to the quick, yet far enough from the truth to force us into a fighting defence. By the time we arrive in St. John's we are barely civil to one another.

Once we get inside the house, however, we pretend that nothing has changed, that the house isn't filled to the rafters with Brendan's absence. We get on with ordinary things. I sort the mail. Greg checks in with his office, then walks to the corner store to pick up milk. When it comes time to go to bed, we both stall, each of us aware that the accusations we had flung at one another in the car have made the queen-size bed far too small to accommodate the two of us.

“I'm going to the office,” Greg says, placing the decision about who will sleep where in my hands. “Work's piled up.”

I offer no protest, even though the very thought of being alone in the house with so much emptiness is enough to make my breath snag in panic. After he leaves, not saying when he will be back, I go upstairs to go to bed. Because Brendan's room is at the top of the stairs, I shut his door as I pass by, closing my eyes tight as I do so. But even with the door shut and my eyes closed, I can still see the yellow Grand Prix racing car models laid out on the table that had been put in his room just to hold them. And I can still see the checkered bedspread hanging unevenly, jibbing out at the bottom like the sail of a ship despite my ritual exhortations for him to straighten it properly. And I can still see the schoolbag with books spilling out of its mouth and the enlarged picture of a speckled trout over the head of his bed, the very first trout he had caught on one of his overnight fishing excursions with Greg.

I walk down the hall to the bathroom, where I shower for a very long time, letting the water gush over me, prolonging the moment when I will have to climb alone into bed. By the time I leave the bathroom, I have decided to forego the marital bedroom in favour of the room we always keep in readiness for Philomena's visits. Without removing my damp terrycloth bathrobe, I fall, physically exhausted and emotionally spent, on top of the green polyester bedspread.

I sleep fitfully throughout the night, several times waking to the sounds of crying, which after only a few dazed moments I realize are coming from my own lips. When day breaks I get up, no longer willing to coax and wheedle myself back to sleep. On the way downstairs, I notice that Brendan's door is open a crack. I go to shut it tight, thinking a draft has blown it open. Greg is sprawled on Brendan's bed, still dressed in suit and tie, the tie hanging slack, the jacket unbuttoned. Even in sleep, it is evident that he, too, spent the night crying.

I ease the door shut and tiptoe downstairs, where I make a breakfast I do not eat, and afterwards I go to my office, where I do not work. In fact, all I do is shut my door, turn off my phone and scour the hours and the minutes for clues I might have missed, clues that, if picked up, might have made a difference: a word said, a look missed, a behaviour gone unnoticed — anything that could have signalled imminent tragedy. But search as I may, I find no portents of impending death, no harbingers of a life about to snuff out. No single crow had flown overhead. No black cat had crossed my path. No picture had fallen off the wall. No sparks in a row had appeared on the underside of the dampers on Philomena's stove to signify a funeral procession. No pot had boiled dry. In short, there had been no warning signs at all.

The days pass, even though neither Greg nor I lift a finger to make them pass. We speak to each other only when it is essential to do so and, even then, only in the briefest of sentences. On Friday morning Greg informs me he is going to the Cove after work, and, on account of the promised snowstorm, he will be staying overnight. He wants to ensure that his mother's porch is being put back on, and he also wants to give Danny money towards the cost of the lumber and supplies, something he had forgotten to do before he left.

He doesn't ask me to go with him, he acts as if he doesn't expect me to go with him, and I interpret this to mean he doesn't want me to go with him. Although I know that staying alone in the house for the weekend will be an agony beyond parallel, I refuse to admit this to him, and when he asks me if I will be okay on my own, I reply, “Fine! Just fine!” His suitcase is splayed open on Brendan's bed, and he is about to toss in a couple of pairs of socks when I add, “Like you said about me closing Brendan's door, it's time I faced reality.” His hand holding the socks falters and hovers over the open suitcase for a moment, but he makes no response.

Over the past week, no matter how many times I have closed Brendan's door, Greg has always opened it wide, and he has never failed to admonish me that I have to face reality, that I must not turn Brendan's room into a crypt. In fact, to make sure this will not happen, he has moved most of his clothes into that room, and he sleeps there every night. He has even moved in a small chest of drawers, which is an inch too long for the wall it stands against. It juts out into the doorway, preventing the door from fully closing.

On Saturday morning when I pass Brendan's bedroom to go downstairs, my eyes fix on the slightly ajar door and then move beyond the door to the corner of the table that holds his model cars. Even this restricted glimpse of his belongings shoots breath-hitching pain through my body, and over breakfast I ponder about which situation would be the least painful: getting glimpses of his room through the partly open door every time I go up or down the hall or, as Greg believes, leaving the door wide open and getting used to seeing it as it is. Neither option, I decide, is bearable. A room emptied of Brendan's belongings appears to be the only answer.

I begin the purge of his bedroom immediately after breakfast. I drive to the grocery store and get cardboard boxes to pack up the stuff in his closets and drawers. I put these packed-to-overflowing boxes in the trunk of my car to take to some charitable organization on Monday morning.

As soon as his personal belongings are out of the way, I start in on the bedroom itself, taking down the curtains, pulling off the bedspread, even steaming off the layers of wallpaper right down to the bare plaster wall. I then drive to the K-Mart and throw things indiscriminately into my cart: a bedspread, window curtains and floor mat, none of which match or blend. When the bedroom is finished, I go to the basement and I strip-search it and then move on to the garage, grabbing up anything even remotely reminiscent of Brendan.

By Sunday afternoon the purge is complete, and when I open Brendan's bedroom door wide, I see a room that is as foreign to me and as uninviting as if it were a display room in a second-hand furniture store.

When Greg returns from the Cove, he comes into the kitchen where I have started to prepare supper. He stands in the doorway, suitcase in one hand, a brown paper bag in the other. He looks awkward, as if he has wandered by mistake into someone else's house and wants to make a quick retreat. When I turn towards him, he hurriedly hands me the paper bag.

“Mom said you might be able to use these. You like jam-jams. She had them frozen, ready for Christmas, but she wants you to enjoy them now.”

Stranded as we both are in this new state of limbo — not lovers, not friends, just two people related by marriage and connected in misery through the memory of a dead son — I feel as awkward and as ill at ease as he does.

“How is she?” I inquire, fiddling with the pot roast I just removed from the oven and relieved to have the subject of Philomena to fall back upon.

“Looks so woebegone,” he says, sounding just as woebegone. “Danny says she doesn't eat enough to keep a sick nun alive. She's just a shell of herself. But she refuses to see a doctor.”

“And the porch?”

“Back on. A beautiful job. Changed the door opening. Switched around the steps. Gives it an entirely different look.”

Once he has exhausted the surface conversation about his trip, Greg begins unloading his overnight case. He leaves the kitchen to take the handful of soiled clothing up to the laundry basket in the bathroom, necessitating passing by Brendan's room. In less than a minute he is back downstairs, hurrying past the kitchen, heading for the basement, the bundle of dirty laundry still clutched in his hand. I hear him rummaging in the closets underneath the stairs where Brendan's sports equipment has always been stored. He returns to the kitchen and stares at me wordlessly from the doorway, condemnation heavy in his eyes.

“It had to be done,” I say self-righteously. “
Someone
had to do it!” That he should have been on hand to help me do it is left dangling in the air.

“You cleaned out
everything? Everything?
”

“Like you said, no point in making a crypt out of this house.”

“I said there's no point in making a crypt out of his
room
. He was my son, too. Or did you forget that part, being so caught up in your own self-pity? Anyway, who gave you the right to wipe all traces of him out of my life?”

Despite the heat in the kitchen from the cooking food, I feel chilled to the bone. I force a detached indifference, a cool composure. “It's all in the car,” I say. “Help yourself. Keep what you want to keep. I did what I had to do. You do what you have to do.”

He turns away. “Don't keep supper for me,” he says over his shoulder. “I'm going to the office.”

The door slams shut behind him.

Chapter Ten

By unspoken agreement,
we take turns going out to the Cove on weekends — Greg goes one weekend, I go the next. When I see Philomena after a two-week absence, I am startled at how much ground she has lost. Out of her hearing, Danny tells me she doesn't sleep very much, just catnaps in Hubert's chair during the day and prowls the house at night.

“Why didn't Greg come with you?” she asks as I settle down in the den.

“Too much work to do,” I lie.

“Losing a child can be hard on a marriage. Or it can make it stronger. I ought to know,” she says, not calling me on my lie.

“He blames me for Brendan's death,” I say, deciding to halt the charade, although I do not go so far as to tell her that I have taken up permanent residence in the room we had designated as hers. And I do not tell her that Greg comes home only to sleep and does that in the bedroom that has been thoroughly cleansed of Brendan. For that matter, I do not tell her that each morning the unused master bedroom with its celibate tidiness mocks the well-mannered facade that now passes for our marriage.

“Nonsense, girl!” She pulls her afghan around her legs, her tone reminiscent of an earlier Philomena. “He doesn't blame you. If anything, he blames himself. Or more likely, he thinks you blame him. Men are so full of themselves they think that we think everything is in their power. If something doesn't turn out right, it's because they neglected this or that. Like Hubert when little Bridget died. Thought it was his fault. Thought if he could have afforded a doctor instead of a midwife, the child would have been stronger. But that was nonsense. The child was born too early, and we didn't have them fancy little huts they put them in now. You know what I mean. I can't think of the name.”

“Incubators.”

“Right! That's the name. Incubators. Her death had nothing at all to do with Hube. Or, for that matter, his lack of money, unless perhaps if he had been a millionaire, then we could have flown her to a hospital in Montreal, which might have helped. But how many people are millionaires? He thought I was blaming him for her death when in truth I was just filled up with my own sadness. So instead of having patience with me, he got cranky. If it were now times when couples aren't so steadfast, he probably would have left me.”

She halts her conversation long enough to pull wisps of her untended hair behind her ears and to heel in the footstool. “I 'members this woman from down home. In fact I was thinking about her the other day. Her husband left her after their only child was drowned. Left her for another woman. And the replacement was no oil painting, I can tell you that much. Had a face on her as plain as a Quaker's quilt. And I've seen better bottoms on a dory. But she was Johnnie-on-the-spot with the sympathy and the coddling. That's what he wasn't getting at home.”

She reaches over and presses my arm. “Ferget about who's to blame, girl. There's enough for all of us. As for meself, I wish I had sided with you that Sunday and forced him to come to Mass with us. I'll never live long enough to put that regret behind me.” She pulls more stray strands of hair behind her ears. “Not that I wants to live that long. I've dragged through enough of life as it is.” She hoists herself out of her chair. “Now I'm going upstairs to try and get a wink of sleep. I can't seem to do much of that lately. But you go to bed whenever you wants to.”

“But what about
Dallas
?” I ask. “You always look at
Dallas
. It's coming on in a few minutes.”

Danny, who is sitting in the kitchen, overhears me. Eager for Philomena to show an interest in something, he calls out, “But Mom, you love
Dallas
. You love Bobby Ewing. Why don't you stay up and look at the program with Tess?”

“Because boy, I'm too bloody tired. And besides, I purely hates that J.R. Now Bobby is a different matter. But why would I waste a wink of sleep looking at that scoundrel J.R.?”

There is nothing in this exchange to tell me that this is the last Friday night I will spend in the Cove with Philomena. There are no harbingers. No portents. Greg goes to see her on the weekend of December thirteenth, and on the morning of the sixteenth, Danny calls me at my office to say Philomena died in Hubert's chair in front of the television set, her legs swathed in the afghan. He had tried to get in touch with Greg through his office, but Greg was already in court. He leaves it to me to find him there.

“I feel something terrible about how things came about,” Danny confesses. “She died watching me put up a bloody Christmas tree she didn't want in the house. Overrode her all the way, I did. She said a house of mourning was no place for a sparkly Christmas tree. But I thought the tree would cheer her up, and that's why I put it up early.” He does not wait for praise or blame but rushes on. “And I thought it would do you and Greg good, too, when you came out for Christmas. And Paddy thought the same thing, and he said the earlier we got it up the better, so me and him went up on the back of the Cove and cut down a couple of fir trees yesterday afternoon and dragged them home. One for Paddy. Put ours in the porch overnight to let the limbs thaw out and the snow to melt off. So this morning, somewhere around ten o'clock, right after her breakfast, I started trimming the thing.

“She wasn't mad at me or anything for putting the tree up, even though I had gone against her. In fact, she brought her cup of tea into the den to finish it off while she watched me. She wasn't talking much, but then she hasn't been talking much since” — he hesitates before bringing up another grief — “Well, you know how she pulled into herself after Brendan. But as soon as she sat down she said, right out of nowhere, ‘Poor Rudy died in July. July just past. He was eighty-five.' Then she began to sing ‘Springtime in the Rockies.' So I s'pose it was Rudy Vallee she was talking about. Earlier she had the radio on in the kitchen, so they were probably singing that song and it reminded her. Anyway, she sang the song all the way through. So then I started putting on the silver tinsel, and she said it reminded her of a glitter storm she remembered from when she was young. It had come the last of May. It had rained pure ice and killed the sprouting rose bushes. Then she said ‘Oh my! Oh my! There's nothing as bad as a winter rain on summer bushes.' And that's it. She gives this big sigh and her cup and saucer fall on the floor.”

After I hang up the phone, I call Greg's office, but his secretary informs me, as she already had informed Danny, that he is in court. She lets me speak with Mr. Cadagan and when I explain the reason for my call, he tells me to tell Greg to go on home, not to worry about the office, everything will be looked after.

Although it is snowing heavily and the streets are slippery, I go to the courthouse to waylay Greg on his way back to his office. I catch up with him just as he is coming out the back door on his way to the parking lot. He is loaded down with a briefcase in one hand, file folders in the other and his court robe over his arm.

“What's up?” he asks, in the frightened way a person asks when he senses bad news. “What's wrong?”

“Danny called,” I say as gently as I can. “It's Mrs. Phil.”

He blanches, but his mind grasps at straws. “Oh my God! How bad?”

“She's gone.” To soften the blow, I hurriedly add, “She had a real easy death. Danny said she just slipped away sitting in your dad's chair.”

He sets down his briefcase on the snow-covered step, rearranges his handful of file folders and straightens the robe on his arm. I recognize these actions as his way of staving off tears. But they show up in his voice anyway. “I've got to get back to the office,” he says huskily. “Then I'll head out.”

I tell him about my conversation with Mr. Cadagan. “Everything is looked after. And I packed your suitcase. It's in my car.”

“What about you? Are you coming out now or later?”

“Danny wants us both right away,” I reply. “He sounded frantic. I called the Mounties. The roads are too bad for my little car. It's been snowing out that way all day. I'll have to drive with you. If that's okay. I'll take my car back home.”

“Fine,” he says. “It's fine with me.” I can't read anything in his voice. “No problem. Where's your car?”

“I'm right beside you.” I point to the spot in the partially ploughed parking lot where my Honda is parked beside his green Chevrolet. We'll transfer the suitcases to your car and then I'll take the Honda home and drop it off. You meet me there.”

We make the luggage transfer, and we get into our separate cars. “Be careful on Long's Hill,” he warns as he pulls out, leading the way. “Once you start up it, just keep on going, smooth and steady, or you'll never make it.”

Although the highway to the Cove was given a once-over ploughing earlier in the day, snow has drifted in windrows across the road, making the driving treacherous. Greg hunches over the wheel, never taking his eyes from the road. Because as usual the snow is damp, every so often he has to pull over to the side of the highway to remove the buildup of slush from the windshield wipers.

Our conversation is limited to the logistics of burying Philomena. I repeat things that Danny told me when he called, things she had told him a few weeks earlier, things which at the time he had thought were ridiculous and he had told her so, now much to his regret. She told him she wanted to be waked at home, that until she got used to being dead she didn't want to be surrounded by dead strangers. She had come to this conclusion after waking Hubert and Brendan at the funeral parlour and having to leave them alone all night. And she wanted to be buried with a Requiem Mass. She didn't have the frills when she got married, so she wanted the full quintal of fish when she got buried.

I also tell Greg that Paddy Flynn and Frank Clarke are making the arrangements for having the grave dug. They are going to rent a piece of equipment from the town council that can dig into even solidly frozen ground, though the ground on Dickson's Hill isn't solid yet because there has been more snow than frost. Paddy has drawn up a list of pallbearers, men who will be available on Wednesday without having to ask people to take the day off from work, but they are leaving the final say up to him. And I tell him that Philomena even has her waking dress picked out — her wine-coloured wool with the accordion pleats, although the belt is to be left off because, she said, she would feel smothered to death with it, the way it cinches her waist.

Neither Greg nor I mention Brendan or the excruciating pain we know we will feel when we lay Philomena down beside him, his own grave still a fresh hump in the snow, not even having had time to settle. And I do not pass along Danny's joke that we should ask the funeral parlour for a frequent burial discount because of having three funerals in such a short time.

“December's not a fit month for dying,” Greg pronounces after we are back on the road, having pulled off for what must be the tenth time to bang the wipers against the windshield and clear the headlights of caked slush. “At least it's not a fit month for dying in these parts.”

“But what month is?” I ask, recalling other burials, other months. “They've all got their shortcomings, especially in the winter.” After a moment's considering, I allow, however, December has to be the worst month. “With Christmas and all,” I say. And I tell him that if Philomena had been given any say in the matter, she would not have chosen to die in December.

His mouth forms a small, wry smile, the first smile I have seen on his face in many weeks. “I can't imagine Mom not having a say in something that important to her. She always had her say about everything else.”

“That's for sure.” The picture of Philomena arguing with God about a fit month for her to go home forms a smile even on my lips. “If she had any say in the matter, she would have chosen August. The last half of August. She once told me that she loved the last two weeks of August the best of all. Everything has calmed down by then, the temper and frenzy have gone out of the summer, and, she said, you can be lazy without feeling guilty — too late to sow, too soon to reap. And there's less likelihood of rain.

I tell Greg her story about her hoity toity sister, Loretta, who came from Toronto for their mother's funeral. It was in the early sixties, just before resettlement got underway. Mid-June. Raining a continuous pelting rain, and of course it was bitter cold because the icebergs were still in the harbour. Worst of all, as soon as they got to the grave site there was an extra heavy downpour, and Loretta's wool-crepe dress, which according to Philomena was already too short to meet the decency standards of the village, began to shrink even shorter. In fact, by the end of the service you could see the hitching and britching that held up her stockings.

“Hitching and britching?” Greg asks.

“Women wore garter belts at that time,” I explain. “With suspenders to hold up the stockings. And short dresses had just come in style. Philomena said that when Loretta bent over to put a handful of clay into the grave, a highfalutin custom she picked up in Toronto, you could see all the way to New York.”

Greg glances my way and laughs. “Now I remember her telling that story. I had forgotten all about it. What a woman she was for stories.”

We arrive at Philomena's house just as the people from the funeral parlour are lugging a mahogany-coloured casket through the front door and angling it this way and that way so it won't get wedged in the narrow frame.