The Truth About Death (9 page)

Simon sat in the office for a while, but he couldn’t get comfortable in his oak chair, one that tilted. One arm kept coming loose. He adjusted the chair in his mind and tried to adjust his mind too—or rather to let his mind adjust itself—to settle down. It was like waiting for the waves to stop up at the cottage on Lake Michigan, where they vacationed every year. But of course the waves just keep on coming.

The last image he had of her was from the veranda at the back of the house: She’s getting into her mother’s little yellow Mazda. Wearing jeans and a silk blouse. She turns and waves, eager to move on to the next thing. Elizabeth will take her to the airport in Peoria. Simon is preparing for a funeral and can’t go with them. He looks out the window now, but there’s no one there. The little Mazda is out of the way, in the big garage. Gilbert is backing out the hearse.

Simon’s training prevented him from bursting into tears.
He continued to stare out the window. November. They needed rain. There hadn’t been enough snow cover the previous winter and the summer had been dry.

He climbed the stairs to the belvedere. He could hear Elizabeth in her study on the third floor. Bart’s Smith & Wesson was in a desk drawer. He took it out and put it on the table. The center of the town was to the west. He could see the courthouse and the bell tower on the college’s Old Main, and the top of Central Congo—the Congregational Church.

He sat in his lopsided armchair and looked at the pictures, Elizabeth’s prints. A Rembrandt etching had been replaced by Braque’s
Woman with a Guitar
; Picasso’s
Aubade
by Raphael’s portrait of Castiglione. All clearly labeled with dates. When he heard her footsteps on the stairs coming up after him, he put the gun back in the drawer, but then she turned and went back down the stairs. She was as mysterious as the pictures. She’d been ready to leave him at one point, and at that point, he wouldn’t have minded. But that was long ago now. That was ancient history, but he could remember, and the memories were no longer painful. They had weathered this storm, and others too. That was part of the fabric now, like the pattern in the Oriental rug she’d put on the floor for him—a dark red ground covered with leaves and small flowers in different colors: blue, gold, navy, green, tan. His brother-in-law had brought it back from Oman. Simon could see into the past but not into the future, not even five minutes into the future. He was lost in a fog. He had no compass. It was chilly in the belvedere, but he didn’t turn on the little space heater. He was accustomed to entering into the grief of others without breaking down. This life had been hard for Elizabeth too and was still hard. She wanted him to sell, but he couldn’t do it.

He looked at the pictures. He liked them, most of them, but they didn’t speak to him, didn’t move him deeply. He couldn’t see what she saw. She’d taught him to pay attention to surfaces and not search for deeper meanings, but he couldn’t help himself. He tried to look through them to the life behind life, the death behind death. She kept changing them, two or three new ones every week. A Van Gogh self-portrait had replaced Georgia O’Keeffe’s
Iris.
She’d taught him to say “Van
GAWCHH
” rather than “Van
GO
.” Van Gawchh was clearly unhappy, about to dissolve into the whirling blue chaos behind him. No wonder he’d committed suicide. Next to Van Gawchh was Francis Bacon’s portrait of his lover, George Dyer. Dyer had committed suicide too. The man in the painting was certainly a mess—composed of splashes of paint, with an accident report at his feet, his body crushed, his face cut in half in the mirror, the man thrown from his chair but still sitting on it.

Simon took the pistol out of the drawer. He put the tip of the barrel in his mouth and closed his lips around it. Relief was possible. Let things take their own course, shape themselves without him. Just a squeeze. He could taste the gun’s metal—like the color gray—the bullet in the chamber like a vitamin. But before he pulled the hammer back, he remembered he needed to leave a note for Elizabeth. He knew the importance of notes. He’d handled too many suicides. He put the gun down and started to write with a fountain pen. He wanted Elizabeth to be happy, or be as happy as possible. She could sell out to Service Corporation. Gilbert could stay on as manager. Then he started to write down all the things that would have to be done. He went down to his office and checked the computer for the e-mail from the consulate in Rome. It hadn’t arrived yet. He’d have to explain that too.
Elizabeth knew his password, could handle the transition. She was a good manager. And she spoke Italian. She could deal with the Italian undertaker. She knew the business. He could hear her in the kitchen. He left his note on his desk and went into the kitchen, where she was making tea.

“Want a cup?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, sitting down. He waited for her to pour the tea. Two white porcelain cups. From the college food service. They seemed to accumulate.

“Sit down,” he said. “Some bad news.”

“You’ve been crying,” she said, looking at his face.

The cup rattled on the saucer when she put it down in front of him, and he knew that a new life was about to begin. Another new life. But not entirely new. He still had to take the Connolly funeral. Gilbert had put on the Bob Dylan album. He could hear, faintly,
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.
“Corrina, Corrina, where you been so long?” He could hear Gilbert downstairs with the family. The guest book. The supply of tissues. He needed to check the body one last time. Adjust the hands.

There were no direct flights from Chicago to Rome in November. They had to change planes in New York. On the flight Simon and Elizabeth were not always in sync. Normal mental function alternated with grief and tears. The flight attendants brought packets of Kleenex. They took turns crying, softly, discreetly. The plane climbed over a storm; Simon could see flashes of lightning below them, fierce and beautiful, and wouldn’t have minded if the plane had gone down over the Atlantic, and he didn’t like keeping his seat belt fastened.

This was grief from the inside. What defenses did Simon
have? He held Elizabeth’s hand. Interrogated it.
What will become of us now?
he asked her hand. His own advice, the advice he gave to people in great distress—take it one day at a time; write down your feelings in a journal; take care of yourself physically; get plenty of sleep—was good advice, but he didn’t think it applied in his case. He thought of a line from Thomas Malory’s
Morte d’Arthur
, which he’d read in a “boy’s” version.
The Boy’s King Arthur.
He thought, at the time, that the “boys” were the Knights of the Round Table, and he imagined that he was one of them, but then at the end it all comes apart: “Comfort thyself,” the king says to Sir Bedivere, “and do as well as thou mayest, for in me is no trust for to trust in.”

Elizabeth was asleep.

At the hotel—Hotel Antico Borgo in Trastevere—Elizabeth lay down on the double bed. She was the one who knew Italian, but she was going to stay and make phone contact with Simon’s mother and with Hildi’s brother, who were coming the next day. Simon took a taxi to the American consulate on Via Vittorio Veneto. He had trouble getting past security and had to leave his cell phone in a locker, and then he had a lot of paperwork to deal with. He knew the drill, but in reverse. He spoke not with the person who had called him on the phone but with a young woman, not much older than Hildi. She could not recommend anyone in particular, she said, but she steered him to a funeral director in Trastevere, not too far from the hotel.

The undertaker—Simon preferred the old word, at least in the privacy of his own mind—picked him up at the consulate. He wore a dark suit; his shirt was open at the collar; he had a
GPS
in the car but didn’t look at it; he drove sensibly and didn’t try to get Simon to talk.

“This is it,” he said. “It” was an office. The sign over the door said
IMPRESA FUNEBRE
. Inside, the office was furnished with catalogs from which you could chose a hearse, a casket, flowers, and wreaths. Whatever you wanted.

Simon sat at a desk across from the undertaker, whose name was Guido. Simon understood that the man had to maintain a certain tone. You don’t want your undertaker breaking down in tears for the same reason you don’t want a bomber pilot to burst into tears as he releases his load of bombs. Or maybe you do.

There were lots of decisions to be made: cremation or burial or shipping the body home? Burial in an Italian cemetery? Guido could arrange whatever Simon wanted.

Simon hadn’t thought it through. He was nervous, upset, bewildered by the catalogs, too many choices. And at the same time he experienced what he thought of as a kind of priestly fellowship, or undertaker fellowship—two men who understood and appreciated each other’s work.

The
impresario
—Guido Fioravanti—reached across his desk and touched him, surprising him. He spoke pretty good English.

“This is it?” Simon asked.

Guido explained. There were no funeral homes in Italy, as in the United States. Well, maybe four or five. Guido was interested in Simon’s business. The problem in Italy was space. There was no room. No parking. Embalming was not done, though it could be, but probably only if the body was going to be shipped back to the United States. Then it would have to be specially embalmed.

Simon wanted to talk to Elizabeth but couldn’t reach her on her cell phone. She was talking to Louisa or to Jack. Coordinating.

A requiem mass? Probably not.

Cremation? Probably. But some kind of service? It was hard to know what to do.

“My daughter was planning to go into business with me,” Simon said. “But Rome was too much for her. Rome and an Italian boyfriend.”

“Yes,” Guido said. “He’s a doctor. He’s been calling the consulate. I have his number. You could call him now, but it’s probably better to wait.”

“Hildi was full of ideas,” Simon said. “She wanted funerals that tell the truth. Not a bunch of fairy tales.”

“I understand exactly what you mean. But what is this truth? If you throw out the fairy tales, what have you got?”

They put their heads together but couldn’t come up with anything beyond the shared conviction that
something
mattered, and that it was hard to say good-bye, and that you shouldn’t have to do it alone. Beyond that, they could not go.

There were two hospitals facing each other on the Isola Tiberina. A Jewish hospital (Ospedale Israelitico) next to a large church in a piazza on the east side of the island, which was at a much lower level than the street they were standing on, and Ospedale Fatebenefratelli, which means “Do-Good Brothers Hospital,” to the west. Hildi’s body was in the morgue in the basement of the latter. Guido knocked on an unmarked door at the edge of the piazza, and they were admitted.

The body was in a walk-in cooler on a gurney. Simon was hoping for a mistake. But it was Hildi. A policeman was present for the official identification.

“Mi dispiace per la vostra perdita,”
he said, and Guido translated: “He’s sorry for your loss.”

Had the man been watching
Law & Order
? Better than “God called her home,” or “She’s in a better place” or “She’s gone to glory.”

“Your wife is here?” the policeman asked.

“At the hotel.”

“Other children?”

“My son and my mother are coming tomorrow. They’ll be coming on the same flight. Chicago to Frankfurt, and then to Rome.”

“And your daughter? She was studying here?”

“Working for a consortium of American colleges and universities in Rome. She was helping edit their newsletter. She had an Italian boyfriend. A doctor.”

“Yes. Francesco Tonarelli.”

They wheeled the gurney out of the cooler. The body was covered with a sheet. They weren’t the only ones in the morgue, the
obitorio.
Simon could hear sounds of weeping coming from behind the kind of curtains that are used to separate patients in a hospital room. And he could smell citrus: someone was eating a clementine.

They backed the gurney up to a sink. Guido filled the sink with warm water and added a few drops of lavender oil. Guido had brought a linen sheet and some light cosmetics. Simon had brought the dress that Elizabeth, just as they were leaving for the airport, had stuffed in a plastic grocery bag.

Simon remembered his first corpse. His first cadaver. Remembered helping his father. He was twelve years old. And he remembered his first cadaver in the morgue in Da Nang, and later at the Wisconsin Institute of Mortuary Science up in Milwaukee, where, because of his previous experience, he’d gotten his embalmer’s license in only one year.

Simon held Hildi’s hand while Guido kept a gentle pressure
on the eyes till they stayed closed, and then he sutured the mouth shut. Rigor had passed and the body was limp. There was a kind of truth in this. She was not a sleeping princess. She was already starting to dissolve.

“No fairy tales for us,” Guido said, as if reading Simon’s thoughts. Simon helped him turn the body and replace the bottom sheet, but he looked away as Guido closed the orifices with cotton balls.

“I’ve always been a Roman Catholic,” Simon said. “I’m still a
BCL
. A Big Catholic Layman. I give a lot of money to the church. I always used to think that one day I’d sit down with all the great books—you know what I mean: the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, all the great books I’d never read—and sort everything out. I thought my wife could help me, and I thought that if I could just find the right metaphor—the journey, the awakening, the peaceful sleep …”

Guido shook his head. “Death breaks the back of metaphor. When my wife died, I didn’t want a metaphor. I didn’t want people to say ‘She’s in a better place’ or ‘She’s at peace’ or ‘She lived a good life.’ I just wanted to make the pain go away. Her
salma
, her corpse. It was an inconvenience. Everything. No fairy tales for me, I told myself. I went to see a psychiatrist. This isn’t done in Italy. I mean, there’s a stigma. He gave me some pills. As if I was sick. The pills helped, but I stopped taking them. I woke up. It wasn’t right. Treating this pain, this grief, like a sickness, something to be cured. That’s what’s happening now. I don’t mean here, with you and me right now, but today. Grief is becoming an illness, a medical condition, something to be cured. Maybe that’s the new paradigm. Maybe we don’t need grief anymore.”