The Undertaking (8 page)

B
y mid-summer, the ink on
Nugent v. Nugent
was dry. She got the house and house payments, the car and custody, less of his pension than she had hoped for, and quittance of their marriage bed. He got visitation rights, a schedule of child support payments, most of his dead mother’s furniture back, and boxes of his first
three volumes of poetry, which had suffered some water damage during the pendency of the matter.
“Deal with it,” is what his former spouse told him when he wondered aloud at what had happened to the books. Not mentioned in the court documents, but just as certainly his, were the bitter idioms of pain that began to inform his patois and poetry.

Robin Robertson was preparing clean copy of some
poems he was submitting to the poetry editor of
The New Yorker.
The magazine, which bills itself as “possibly the best magazine in the world” is irrefutably among the best possible magazines for poets to publish in. Of the tens of thousands of poems she is sent every year, the editor will publish a hundred or a hundred and twenty. Poets from all over the English-speaking world have tried to nail
down what it is, apart from excellence, she responds to in a poem. Her tastes are eclectic, international, utterly unpredictable. But to have a poem in
The New Yorker
guarantees an audience beyond the ordinary pale of poetry. In the best of the “little magazines” and literary quarterlies, a poem’s readership is limited to the thousands, or more likely, hundreds of subscribers. But hundreds of
thousands across the civilized planet read
The New Yorker
, as they browse in the waiting rooms of stockbrokers, attorneys, gynecologists, and ad agents. It is seen by anthologists, awards committee members, old flames, and perfect strangers. Its shelf life extends to L.A. and London, Hong Kong and Paris, Sydney and Dublin.

Thus, in preparing his manuscript, little wonder Robin Robertson tinkered
with revisions of “Artichoke.” He changed the last two lines of the first stanza, then changed them back to read “the quick, purpled, beginnings of the male” and replaced the dash after “membrane” with a colon. He wanted, whatever he sent her, to send her excellence.

She took it immediately. She called to thank him for sending it. In due course, a rather generous check came in the mail and page
proofs were faxed to his London office.

“Artichoke” appeared in one of the December issues between Henry Nugent’s forty-seventh birthday and Christmas Day, both
events observed in the company of boxes—books and records not yet unpacked—in the two-bedroom townhouse he had moved into. Whether he or his now distant former wife read “Artichoke” that December cannot be ascertained.

As for Robertson,
celebrating the first of several appearances in
The New Yorker
, he retained a reputable child-minder and took his wife out for Lebanese food at Al Hamra in Shepherd Market, where among the menu items are lamb’s testicles and, of course, artichoke. They did not, as he told it later, have the balls.

T
he normal courtesies of copyright prevent my supplying a full text of the poem: fifty-three words
in all, deftly distributed between two sextets—twelve lines only, halved by a stanza break. But let me hazard, say, the first three lines of the last stanza so that you might get a feel for the spare language, its flavor. “Then the slow hairs of the heart:” the poet records, “the choke that guards its trophy,” and to put a finer point on it he adds, “its vegetable goblet.”

If you hold the page
at arm’s length and squint, it looks like a brief note left on the fridge for a housemate saying what’s for dinner, the children are at their grandmother’s, don’t forget the wine. Or maybe a short list for the market. In a way, it is both. It is an intimate text with plenty of white space and margin. The words are guileless and entirely straightforward in their description of an artichoke being
peeled, readied for human consumption.

It is the poem’s unfailing penchant for whetting the reader’s most private and primary appetites that accounts for its power and, I daresay, its appeal. What is more, this effect upon the reader—the excitement of nerve ends and intentions known only to one’s heart of hearts—is uniform, uninhibited by gender or racial or age predictors. You may try this in
the comfort of your own home. Try it with friends and passersby. They will blush and grin and ask for a copy.

M
y friend and mentor, the poet Henry Nugent, went looking for the geographic cure. Ohio had become too painful. Seeing the boys hurt his heart. And seeing their mother, whom he stilled loved and mistrusted, was too frequent a reminder of what it was he had lost. “Like going to a wake,”
he said, “that’s never over. The dead need to get buried, eventually.” He bought a house. Moved the boxes from the townhouse to the new house, which still didn’t feel like home. The boys came over with videos, slept on futons, ate Chicken McNuggets, tried to cope.

He took a sabbatical leave, asked if he could use my cottage in West Clare, flew to Ireland, where he found it, unremarkable for February,
cold and damp. The answer, he figured, remarkably, was to drive north: Galway, Sligo, Belfast, the ferry to the lake district, then back in late March to West Clare where I saw him briefly. The weather hadn’t much improved.

He seemed terribly agitated. He couldn’t sit still. His mission seemed desperate. He was in search of love.

I
n the months since his marriage ended, he’d had plenty of sex.
This is an incumbency known to all of the divorced. Having failed at what is, among other things, a sexual treaty, it is important for men and women alike to demonstrate for anyone who will tolerate it, that It Was Not a Sexual Performance Problem that occasioned the breakup. Thus the comfortable if uninspired sexual patterns of the happily married are replaced by the erotic aerobics of the freshly
unwed. New undergarments are purchased, sit-ups are done. They bathe more eagerly, clip their nails, invest in creams and lotions and emollients. Fresh bed linens, bathrobes, the elements of style and ambience—every encounter is a kind of audition. This is the stuff that memories are made of.

But after a year or so of such encounters, Henry Nugent was hungry for love: that unencumbered approval
by another of your species for your presence in their lives.

When he left me in West Clare, he was heading west. He flew back to Ohio, bought a new car with five speeds and bucket seats, drove westward, north, then west again. In April there were postcards from a college town where he’d been booked to do workshops and a poetry reading. Among the people who stood in line after his reading to have
him sign their copies of
Good Counsel
was a young poet on the creative writing faculty who touched his arm as she thanked him for his poems, especially the one about a night in a hotel room with his sick son in Cleveland.

May and June brought postcards from Idaho and Montana, Oregon and California. “These hills,” he wrote on one, “remind me of Calabria—the sweet foot of Italy—where all beauty
is.” I didn’t know what to make of it.

In July the postcards stopped coming. In mid-August a note came with a snapshot of himself and a striking young woman in a print skirt hugging alongside a river. In the background were mountains. Their bodies had the look of bodies accustomed to one another. The Calabrian references began to make sense.

T
hey had made plans for dinner. The rooms had the
well-worn feel of home to him—shelves full of books, tables piled with correspondences and magazines, postcard likenesses of poets and writers, dead but remembered, thumbtacked to the vertical surfaces. Even the kitchen enjoyed the bookish clutter of a woman who cooked to savor rather than to survive and who read over her dinner. Colanders and beakers of olive oil shared cupboard space with review
copies of new poetry, her own first volume, and well-worn cookbooks with a regional Italian bias.

And on the refrigerator, held there by kitchen magnets, an aging page out of
The New Yorker
with a poem on it.

“H
e’s my friend’s London editor you know.”

“Robertson? Really? It’s a lovely poem.”

Henry considered the penultimate lines of the second stanza: “the meat of it lies, displayed, upended,
al dente;”.

“It was such a gift in the dead of winter,” she said. “When everything is gray and cold and growth seems hopeless.”

“‘The stub-root aching in its oil,’” he read aloud.

He had never been so hungry.

“D
o you like artichoke?” the woman asked.

I
n September a card came that said they’d been married. Henry, approaching his birthday this December, calls to say, “It was all your man
Robertson’s fault, that poem, that ‘Artichoke’.” Over the phone lines I can feel him grinning.

I tell Robin a version of what the old doctor, William Carlos Williams meant when he wrote that men die everyday for what they miss in poetry. I tell him people are born, and reborn, everyday, who owe their very beings to poems.

Some days I’m sure of God, some days I’m not. Most days I side with the
French oddsmaker, Blaise Pascal, whose gambit instructs that it is better to believe in something that isn’t than to disbelieve in something that is. And of all God’s gifts, the best one is language—the power to name and proclaim and identify, to fashion from the noisy void our lexicons for birds of the air, fishes in the seas, what grows in the greensward; and for contempt and affection, pleasure
and pain, beauty and order and their absences. In a world where Someone’s in Charge, all of the endings are not happy ones. Nor is every utterance a benediction. But for every death there’s some redemption; for every loss an Easter out there with our name on it, for every woe, a return to wooing.

In such a world, my friend and mentor, the poet Henry Nugent, the vocabulary of joy restored to his
word horde, writes a poem he entitles “Nines”. It is an epithalamium—an
ancient form, “upon a bridal chamber”—a wedding poem. “The Song of Solomon” is one—“thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant: also our bed is green.” And the ancient Greek Sappho deftly joins references to Hymen, the god of marriage, to those of Ares, the god of war, in her remarkably modern Fragment. There is much coaxing
to “raise the ridge-pole higher, higher” because the husband is “taller by far than a tall man” and the builders are exhorted to “pitch the roof-beam, higher, higher” so that your man can “get it through the door.”

In his, Henry Nugent enunciates first an understandable caution about the public institution of marriage and, finally, his hope that their “forever” lasts at least thirty years and
that the private passions of their wedding night—outside any common law or custom—attend the long nights of their lives together, the math of which he cannot resist calculating in the poem.

There are two stanzas, nine lines each, in loose iambics—the sound of hearts—
daDum, daDum, daDum, daDum, daDum.
Think of Shakespeare: “Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight!/For I ne’er saw true beauty
till this night.”

Perhaps it is this traffic in irony, audibly accomplished, among the numbers and the syllables, where form and function co-conspire toward their common end, that nudges the poetry editor of
The New Yorker
toward the acceptance of Mr. Nugent’s poem. She sends him the check and page proofs and her eminent thanks.

My friend and editor, the poet, Robin Robertson, will grin from
his office in London. A man well versed in the power of language, he will cut the page from the magazine, take it home and affix it to the refrigerator, where it will move his wife of nine years in ways that are none of our business.

In the fullness of time, however, she will make known her special fondness for the shape and sound of it, the courtesies of copyright do not deter me from sharing
here:

Thus we proclaim our fond affirmatives:

I
will, I do, Amen, Here Here, Let’s
eat, drink and be merry.
Marriage is
the public spectacle of private parts:
cheque-books and genitals, housewares, fainthearts,
all doubts becalmed by kissing aunts, a priest’s
safe homily, those tinkling glasses
tightening those ties that truly bind
us together forever, dressed to the nines.

Darling, I reckon
maybe thirty years,
given our ages and expectancies.
Barring the tragic or untimely, say,
ten thousand mornings, ten thousand evenings,
please God, ten thousand moistened nights like this,
when, mindless of these vows, our opposites,
nonetheless, attract. Thus, love’s subtraction:
the timeless from the ordinary times—
nine thousand, nine hundred, ninety-nine.

Write, read, sing, sigh, keep silence, pray, bear thy crosses manfully; eternal life is worthy of all these, and greater combats.

—T
HOMAS À
K
EMPIS

I
t came to me high over California. I was flying across the country to read poems in L.A. I had gigs at the Huntington Library, UCLA, San Bernardino, and Pomona College. And between engagements, four days free to wander at will in Southern
California. It was a beautiful blue end of September, the year I quit drinking and my mother died. Crisp and cloudless, from my window seat the nation’s geography lay below me. The spacious skies, the fruited plane, the purple mountains’ majesty.

I was counting my blessings.

To have such a day for my first transcontinental flight, to have someone else paying for the ticket and the expenses and
to be proffering stipends I’d gladly pay taxes on, to say that I was the poet and I had the poems that people in California were paying to hear—these were good gifts. My mother was dying back in Michigan, of cancer. She had told the oncologists, “Enough, enough.” They had discontinued the chemotherapy. I was running from the implications.

I was scared to death.

From Detroit we first flew over
Lake Michigan then the grainy Midwest and Plains states, then the mountains and valleys of the Great West, and finally the desert west of Vegas and Reno until, in the distance, I could make out the western edges of the San Bernardino Mountains. The Mojave was all dry brown below until, just before the topography began to change from desert to mountain, I saw an irregular rectangle of verdant green.
It was the unspeakable green of Co. Kerry or Virgin Gorda purposely transposed to the desert and foothills. I could only hazard a guess at its size—a couple hundred acres I reckoned, though I had no idea what altitude we were flying at. Had we already begun our final descent? The captain had turned on the seat belt sign. All of our seat backs and tray tables were forward.

“M
ust be a golf course,”
is what I said to myself. I could see geometrically calculated plantings of trees and irregular winding pathways. “Or a cemetery. Hell!” I remember thinking, “This is California, it could be both!”

In the Midwest we think of California as not just another state and time zone but as another state of mind, another zone entirely, having more in common with the Constellation Orion than with Detroit
or Cleveland or Illinois.

And then it came to me, the vision. It
could
be both!

I’ve been working in secret ever since.

It is no especial genius that leads me to the truth that folks in their right minds don’t like funerals. I don’t think we need a special election or one of those CNN polls on this. Most folks would rather shop dry goods or foodstuffs than caskets and burial vaults. Given the
choice, most would choose root canal work over the funeral home. Even that portion of the executive physical where the doctor says, “This may be a little uncomfortable,” beats embalming ninety-nine times out of every hundred in the public races. Random samplings of consumer
preference almost never turn up “weeping and mourning” as things we want to do on our vacations. Do you think a funeral director
could be elected president? Mine was and is and, godhelpus, ever will be The Dismal Trade. We might be trusted (the last ones to let you down my father used to say) or admired (I don’t know how you do it!) or tolerated (well, somebody has to do it) and even loved, though our lovers are often a little suspect (how can you stand to have him touch you after …?). But rare is that man or woman
who looks forward to funerals with anything even approaching gladness, save perhaps those infrequent but cheerful obsequies for IRS agents or telemarketers or a former spouse’s bumptious attorney.

What’s worse, all the advertising in the world won’t ever make it an expandable market. Mention of our ample parking, clearance prices on bronze and copper, easy credit terms, readiness to serve twenty-four
hours a day does little to quicken in any consumer an appetite for funerals in the way that, say, our taste for fast food can be incited to riot by talk of “two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onion on a sesame seed bun.” How many of us don’t salivate, Pavlovian, when someone hums the tune that says, “You deserve a break today”? A drop in the prime rate will send
shoppers out in search of the “big ticket” items—homes, cars, and pleasure craft—but never funerals. Chesty teenagers with good muscle tone dressed in their underwear and come-hither looks can sell us more Chevys than we need, more perfume than we need, more Marlboros than we need, more cruises, more computers, more exercise equipment; more and better, and fewer and better and new and improved and
faster and cheaper and sexier and bigger and smaller; but the one funeral per customer rule has held for millennia, and we don’t really need a study to show us that for most folks even the one and only is the one too many.

Thus we regard funerals and the ones who direct them with the same grim ambivalence as those who deliver us of hemorrhoids
and boils and bowel impactions—
Thanks
, we wince or
grin at the offer,
but no thanks
!

T
here are some exceptions to this quite ponderable truth.

As always, the anomalies prove the rule.

Poets, for example, will almost always regard any opportunity to dress up and hold forth in elegiac style as permissible improvement on their usual solitude. If free drink and a buffet featuring Swedish meatballs are figured in the bargain, so much the better.
A reviewer of mine quite rightly calls poets the taxidermists of literature, wanting to freeze things in time, always inventing dead aunts and uncles to eulogize in verse. He is right about this. A good laugh, a good cry, a good bowel movement are all the same fellow to those who otherwise spend their days rummaging in the word horde for something to say, or raiding the warehouses of experience
for something worth saying something about. And memorable speech like memorable verse calls out for its inscription into stone. Poets know that funerals and gravesides put them in the neighborhood of the memorable. The ears are cocked for answers to the eternal adverbs, the overwhelming questions. “And may these characters remain,” we plead with Yeats, in his permanent phrase, “when all is ruin once
again.”

And there are elements of the reverend clergy who have come to the enlightenment that, better than baptisms or marriages, funerals press the noses of the faithful against the windows of their faith. Vision and insight are often coincidental with demise. Death is the moment when the chips are down. That moment of truth when the truth that we die makes relevant the claims of our prophets
and apostles. Faith is not required to sing in the choir, for bake sales or building drives; to usher or deacon or elder or priest. Faith is for the time of our dying and the time of the dying of the ones we love. Those parsons and pastors who are most successful—those
who have learned to “minister”—are those who allow their faithful flocks to grieve like humans while believing like Jews or Christians
or Muslims or Buddhists or variants of these compatible themes. They affirm the need to weep and dance, to blaspheme and embrace the tenets of our faiths, to upbraid our gods and to thank them.

Uncles find nickels behind our ears. Magicians pulls rabbits from out of hats. Any good talker can preach pie in the sky or break out the warm fuzzies when the time is right. But only by faith do the dead
arise and walk among us or speak to us in our soul’s dark nights.

So rabbi and preacher, pooh-bah and high priest do well to understand the deadly pretext of their vocation. But for our mortality there’d be no need for churches, mosques, temples, or synagogues. Those clerics who regard funerals as so much fuss and bother, a waste of time better spent in prayer, a waste of money better spent on
stained glass or bell towers, should not wonder for whom the bell tolls. They may have heard the call but they’ve missed the point. The afterlife begins to make the most sense
after life
—when someone we love is dead on the premises. The
bon vivant
abob in his hot tub needs heaven like another belly button. Faith is for the heartbroken, the embittered, the doubting, and the dead. And funerals are
the venues at which such folks gather. Some among the clergy have learned to like it. Thus they present themselves at funerals with a good cheer and an unambiguous sympathy that would seem like duplicity in anyone other than a person of faith. I count among the great blessings of my calling that I have known men and women of such bold faith, such powerful witness, that they stand upright between
the dead and the living and say, “Behold I tell you a mystery….”

T
here are those, too, who are ethnically predisposed in favor of funerals, who recognize among the black drapes and dirges
an emotionally potent and spiritually stimulating intersection of the living and the dead. In death and its rituals, they see the leveled playing field so elusive in life. Whether we bury our dead in Wilbert
Vaults, leave them in trees to be eaten by birds, burn them or beam them into space; whether choir or cantor, piper or jazz band, casket or coffin or winding sheet, ours is the species that keeps track of our dead and knows that we are always outnumbered by them. Thus immigrant Irish, Jews of the diaspora, Black North Americans, refugees and exiles and prisoners of all persuasions, demonstrate,
under the scrutiny of demographers and sociologists, a high tolerance, almost an appetite, for the rites and ceremonies connected to death.

Furthermore, this approval seems predicated on one or more of the following variables: the food, the drink, the music, the shame and guilt, the kisses of aunts and distant cousins, the exultation, the outfits, the heart’s hunger for all homecomings.

T
he other exception to the general abhorrence of funerals is, of course, types of my own stripe whose lives and livelihoods depend on them. What sounds downright oxymoronic to most of the subspecies—a
good
funeral—is, among undertakers, a typical idiom. And though I’ll grant some are pulled into the undertaking by big cars and black suits and rumors of riches, the attrition rate is high among those
who do not like what they are doing. Unless the novice mortician finds satisfaction in helping others at a time of need, or “serving the living by caring for the dead” as one of our slogans goes, he or she will never stick it. Unless, of course, they make a pile of money early on. But most of us who can afford to send our kids to the orthodontist but not to boarding school, who are tied to our
brick and mortar and cash-flow worries, who live with the business phone next to our beds, whose dinners and intimacies are always being interrupted by the needs of others,
would not do so unless there were satisfactions beyond the fee schedule. Most of the known world could not be paid enough to embalm a neighbor on Christmas or stand with an old widower at his wife’s open casket or talk with
a leukemic mother about her fears for her children about to be motherless. The ones who last in this work are the ones who believe what they do is not only good for the business and the bottom line, but good, after everything, for the species.

A man that I work with named Wesley Rice once spent all of one day and all night carefully piecing together the parts of a girl’s cranium. She’d been murdered
by a madman with a baseball bat after he’d abducted and raped her. The morning of the day it all happened she’d left for school dressed for picture day—a schoolgirl dressed to the nines, waving at her mother, ready for the photographer. The picture was never taken. She was abducted from the bus stop and found a day later in a stand of trees just off the road a township south of here. After
he’d raped her and strangled her and stabbed her, he beat her head with a baseball bat, which was found beside the child’s body. The details were reported dispassionately in the local media along with the speculations as to which of the wounds was the fatal one—the choking, the knife, or the baseball bat. No doubt these speculations were the focus of the double postmortem the medical examiner performed
on her body before signing the death certificate
Multiple Injuries.
Most embalmers, faced with what Wesley Rice was faced with after he’d opened the pouch from the morgue, would have simply said “closed casket,” treated the remains enough to control the odor, zipped the pouch, and gone home for cocktails. It would have been easier. The pay was the same. Instead, he started working. Eighteen hours
later the girl’s mother, who had pleaded to see her, saw her. She was dead, to be sure, and damaged; but her face was hers again, not the madman’s version. The hair was hers, not his. The body was hers, not his. Wesley Rice had not raised her from the dead nor hidden the hard facts, but he
had retrieved her death from the one who had killed her. He had closed her eyes, her mouth. He’d washed her
wounds, sutured her lacerations, pieced her beaten skull together, stitched the incisions from the autopsy, cleaned the dirt from under her fingernails, scrubbed the fingerprint ink from her fingertips, washed her hair, dressed her in jeans and a blue turtleneck, and laid her in a casket beside which her mother stood for two days and sobbed as if something had been pulled from her by force. It
was the same when her pastor stood with her and told her “God weeps with you.” And the same when they buried the body in the ground. It was then and always will be awful, horrible, unappeasably sad. But the outrage, the horror, the heartbreak belonged, not to the murderer or the media or the morgue, each of whom had staked their claims to it. It belonged to the girl and to her mother. Wesley had given
them the body back. “Barbaric” is what Jessica Mitford called this “fussing over the dead body.” I say the monster with the baseball bat was barbaric. What Wesley Rice did was a kindness. And, to the extent that it is easier to grieve the loss that we see, than the one we imagine or read about in papers or hear of on the evening news, it was what we undertakers call a good funeral.