THAT SUNDAY MORNING when I told her, “Mrs. Wolff is dead,” my mother groaned, cocked her head, pursed her lips, and said, in a voice barely loud enough to hear, “Che peccato.” The next day she lay in her bed, sick, calling to me in her Death Voice, “Alberto? Albert? Sei tu, Alberto?”
Of course it was me; who else would it be? Not Geordie, my twin, who preaches in Vermont. I stood at her bedroom door, like I’ve always stood there, like I’ve stood there my whole life, helpless. But this time I did something different. “That’s it,” I said, marching over, tearing the bedclothes off her. “I’m taking you to the emergency room. They’ll do a million useless tests; then we’ll go home. Okay?” I felt just like Geordie saying it.
Having piled her into her mint-condition green ’68 Rambler American, I drove my mother to the hospital, where they’re testing her for meningitis.
She doesn’t have meningitis.
So I leave my mother in the hands of experts and go to pick up Lenny Wolff, whose mother is dead. It rains. Lenny’s father, wife, and eight-month-old baby boy huddle in a corner of his childhood living room, surrounded by plastic buckets, Tupperware bowls, and pots catching drops from a leaky roof. Everyone’s saying carefully sentimental things like she’s in a better place now. With his barrel chest, thick neck, and bowed, ruddy head, Mr. Wolff looks like one of the huge red water valves at the reservoir pumping station where he works and where I sometimes visit him. Lenny has a two o’clock appointment with the priest.
“You’re late,” he says first thing when he sees me.
“Sorry,” I say. “It’s raining.” As if he hasn’t noticed.
“I’m on a very tight schedule,” says Father Moynahan, a man with thin blue eyes and thinning hair who speaks in a soft, cautious voice. Everything about the man is cautious, grotesquely moderate. He meets us by the confessional. There’s a wedding in progress, so he doubts there’ll be many “takers.” “They don’t like to come during weddings,” he says.
Lenny stopped believing in God the year we graduated, the same year he quit smoking. Since then he’s been waiting for the Catholic Church to collapse, as if his piety had been the main thing supporting it. Only his mom’s side of the family remains true to Rome; the rest are lapsed, agnostics, Jews, while most of his friends are atheists like me, Geordie, and Clyde. Though she attended Mass every Sunday, Mrs. Wolff always sat in the last pew, alone, like a shy man in a porno theater. Her mouth would open to sing, Lenny once told me, but no sound ever came out. Father Moynahan, who’ll be performing the service, doesn’t seem to remember her.
“Was this by any chance the Mrs. Wolff who lived at the Good Samaritan Nursing Home?” he asks Lenny.
“She lived with my father,” Lenny answers, his brown eyes narrowing to rusty blades.
“I see,” says Father M. “That must be another Mrs. Wolff.”
“Yes, it must,” says Lenny, stabbing him repeatedly.
Why the hell does Lenny want me here? To keep him from punching the priest? Since the day Geordie and I met Lenny, I’ve always been slightly afraid of him. It was Clyde Rawlings who brought us together on the rock at Bennington Pond back when we were still in puberty. The DePoli twins were the only first-generation Americans in this small New England factory town, the only atheists, our dead father a scientist and inventor. We’d learned to hate and fear Catholic boys, pimple-faced, plaid-necktied hooligans who’d beat us up at the bus stop for being “Guineas” and not believing in God. We expected no less of Lenny, who loomed barrel chested and fierce on our rock like Samson over the Philistines. Clyde made introductions. “Lenny Wolff, God-fearing Catholic, meet Albert and Geordie, blaspheming atheists.” My twin and I froze like headlight deer and remained frozen as Lenny smiled and shook hands with us. Still, there was violence in the guy. You could feel it.
“And you say there are to be Jews at the service?” Father Moderation asks, drawing out the word “Jews,” stretching it like taffy.
“My wife among them,” says Lenny.
“You didn’t want a Jewish service?”
“My mother was Catholic.”
“That’s right … that’s right. And your father?”
“What difference does it make?”
Father Moderation smiles. “Well, my son, you see, I need to know, if you’ll pardon the expression, just what sort of group I’m ‘up against.’ Non-Catholics can be, well, impatient with our ways.”
“I can imagine,” says Lenny.
“At least you won’t be preaching to the converted,” I say, trying to lighten things up a little. The priest turns hopeful eyes to me. “What about you? Are you Catholic?”
“Lapsed. Apostate.”
“Oh.” He nods. “I see.”
The priest turns back to Lenny to discuss his role in the eulogy.
“My advice would be keep it short and sweet,” he suggests. “A requiem mass can seem quite lengthy.” Lenny, who played King Arthur in the Immaculate High production of Camelot and now earns pin money clowning for kids at birthday parties, looks bugged. “I think you should leave that up to me, shouldn’t you, Father?” he says, clenching and unclenching his fists. “She is my mother, after all.”
They go over more details, schedules, transportation, parking.
“Well.” Father Moderation stands. “I must check the confessional.”
He shakes hands with us, giving mine a series of soft, gooey squeezes, like he’s milking a cow. As we cross the church parking lot, Lenny’s cheeks burn red while his usually red lips go pale. “I’ll say whatever the hell I want at my mother’s funeral, you Mick pederast son of a bitch,” he grumbles.
“What did you expect?” I say, unlocking Mom’s antique Rambler.
“A little flexibility would’ve been nice.”
“Oh yeah, right, sure,” I say. “A little flexibility. ‘We’d like a little flexibility, let’s go to the Catholic Church.’ Give me a break.”
I turn, hoping to see him smile, but he just sits there in the passenger seat, staring out the windshield, kneading his jaw, flexing his fists.
I drive Lenny home, then head back to the house.
Once there were five of us, Lenny, Clyde, Geordie, Stewart, and myself. All summer long we’d dive and swim in the reservoir, also known as Bennington Pond, kicking and thrashing our way to a tiny island at its center with a thirty-foot ornamental lighthouse. Lenny, best fighter of us all but worst swimmer by far, nearly drowned twice. The first time Geordie saved him; the second time Stewie hauled him up onto the rocks. We got along as much out of inertia as anything, though we did share a pessimism about small-town life and trusted everyone else much, much less than we trusted each other. We also did a fair amount of all-American goofing off, with Lenny usually laughing hardest of all, like the time he did his impression of a guy throwing up, using a lukewarm bowl of Campbell’s cheddar-cheese soup. (We were stoned.)
Stewie was our second-hardest laugher, also our biggest-hearted goofball. To his lasting credit he turned the whole world into a bathroom joke. Unfortunately, the world included motor vehicles. Three days before graduation, he plowed himself and his dad’s Pinto into the town flagpole, which stood at the center of Main Street. We lined up at Stewie’s open coffin, paying respects to the powdered jelly doughnut that had been his face, expecting this, too, to be one of his cruder jokes, though no one laughed, not even Lenny. He and Clyde blubbered magnificently, while I envied them, having failed to shed a tear of my own. Nor did Geordie turn on the waterworks. He looked more bored and angry than weepy. The fact is, the DePoli twins have yet to cry at a funeral. Maybe because we don’t believe in God. Or maybe we don’t believe in death.
Having taken Lenny home and garaged my mother’s creampuff Rambler, I walk back to the hospital, to see how she’s doing. I’ve got nothing better to do, and besides, it’s only three miles, all under a sky stuffed with clouds. Like many hospitals this one is near a cemetery, and I take a shortcut through it. Death may not impress me, but tombstones do: tiny, tidy stone homes for the dead, so neat in their manicured rows. Some aren’t marble or granite, but cast in metal to look like stone. I play a game with myself, guessing from afar which stones are fake, testing for hollowness with my knuckles. A sudden wonder grips me. Is Papa’s tombstone fake? What about my grandmother’s? And Stewie — do Stewie’s bones rest under a phony stone? If so, what of it? Do souls need to live anywhere? Do they care less where they live? Such are the thoughts of minds meandering through cemeteries on cloudy days.
I arrive at the hospital midafternoon. It seems hospital beds are scarce this time of year. They’ve got Mother on a gurney in the hall. She puts down her Vanity Fair.
“How are you feeling?”
“Better, tank you.”
(The Death Voice, I’m pleased to report, is gone.)
“How was de funeral?”
“Day after tomorrow,” I tell her. “The wake is tonight.”
She grasps my hand in the busy hospital corridor. “Mi dispiace,” she says. I don’t know if she’s sorry for missing Lenny’s mother’s wake, or for getting sick, or what. “Poor Lenny, he must be upset.”
“Sure,” I say. “He’s very upset.”
What sort of remark is that? “Naturally,” I say. “His mom just died.”
“Hmmm …” I’m supposed to translate this “hmm” into a whole conversation but refuse to do so. Instead I study the manufacturer’s label on the gurney rail. Derwood-Kaiser Medical Supplies, Waterbury, Connecticut.
“When is you brother come?”
“Around dinner time, he said.”
“Dire lui … non preoccuparti. Tell him … not to worry.” She winces.
I pick up the Vanity Fair. Flipping its pages, I come across fat Marlon Brando crying at his son’s murder trial. A pretty nurse takes my mother’s temperature. One-oh-one.
At suppertime, as promised, from St. Albans, Vermont, where he’s a Unitarian minister, Geordie arrives. Unitarians aren’t supposed to believe in God, or maybe they just don’t have to. Anyway, from what I gather my brother does a good job preaching around the Good Lord — like someone eating around the spinach on his plate. He drives an early-model Honda Civic and looks beat up from the trip. He’s been divorced two months, and that shows, too.
“How are you?” I say, lugging his garment bag inside.
He takes a look around, shakes his head. I know what he’s thinking. A: nothing’s changed, and B: what’s my jerk-off twin doing still living here? I want his love for me to overwhelm such thoughts. It doesn’t. Though I’ve always looked up to him, Geordie has never liked me. He considers me an embarrassment, a cheap knockoff of his genuine self, a counterfeit coin with his face on it. He especially resents the fact that I’ve spent the last ten years working at the local bicycle-seat factory. He can’t seem to understand that, despite our looking like each other, it’s my life, that what I do with it is no reflection on him. The reason he’s surprised to see me here is because, last he heard, I’d taken an apartment of my own, on the seedy side of town, by the train tracks, next door to Goose Lumber. Until two weeks ago, that arrangement still held. But I couldn’t take living alone in that place, in a one-room apartment over a family with something like thirty yapping dogs. When the dogs didn’t rattle my brain, the freight trains rattled it. And, to be honest, I didn’t like leaving Mother alone in the house. Which I’m sure helps shore up Geordie’s impression of me as a mammone, which is Italian for “mama’s boy.”
“Where are you sleeping?” His first words to me.
“In the den.” Nonnie’s — our grandmother’s — old room, where we used to watch Hogan’s Heroes reruns. “I can move; I don’t mind.”
He grabs the garment bag from me, drags it upstairs. I consider following him up to our old room, where twin beds and cardboard furniture sag, but it would only annoy him. My following Geordie has always annoyed him. Instead I yell, “Need a hand?”
The sound of unzipping answers. I lean against the balustrade, thinking I’m always at the threshold of things. I want to run up and hug my twin, confide in him about hollow tombstones, ask if he’s brought his bathing suit. “They opened a Boston Rotisserie,” I call up.
Arms crossed, scowling, Geordie appears in gray underwear at the top of the stairs. Legs white, belly sagging, hair, at twenty-eight, thinning and gray at the temples. You’d think he was eight years, not eight minutes, older.
We hike in the woods behind the house. Nonnie, my father’s mother, was a big believer in wolves. She’d swallowed whole the legend of Romulus and Remus, those twins who, suckled by a she-wolf, went on to found Rome. I’ve always been fascinated by wolf stories. White Fang. The Jungle Book. Peter and the Wolf. Werewolves. I daydreamed that, like Kipling’s Mowgli, I’d been raised by wolves. They could have done no worse.
Geordie walks ahead of me, gathering plastic hand-grenades and other relics of childhood warfare, tossing them over his shoulder, hitting me in the face. He pulls branches out of his way and releases them in time to whack my forehead. I don’t even say ouch.
In her room, on the folding table next to her portable electric stove, Nonnie kept a bronze miniature statue of Romulus and Remus straddled by the she-wolf. She’d point to the twins one by one saying, “Questo e Alberto; e quello li, Geordie.” Tucked away in the rear of the house, Nonnie’s room was a museum of smells. Mothballs, soy sauce, lavender, iodine — odors that conjured past lives and dreams of ancient, far-off places, crumbling cities beyond time’s greedy grasp. After Papa died (a funeral I hardly remember), Mother treated Nonnie like a prisoner, condemning her to her tiny room and getting furious when she’d step out of her cell to use the bathroom, pasting her with ripe-tomato Italian epithets.
Nonnie’s world crawled with wolves. She saw them everywhere, in her imagination, in her dreams, slinking across the backyard terrace at night, eyes burning yellow as the petals of the forsythia bush Papa planted just before he died. Their den (Nonnie claimed) was the abandoned guest cottage behind our house. Geordie and I head there now, walking on dirt-and-leaf-covered flagstones through a raspberry patch, prickers clawing at skin and clothes. Nonnie said the wolves lived in the crawl space under the floor and came out only at night. Being six years old and knowing her window faced the woods, Geordie and I believed her. Anyway, who were we to argue with our grandmother, who was ninety, spoke a dozen languages (none English), and made the best fried spaghetti in the world?
At the cottage’s empty doorway Geordie kicks through a pile of dead leaves. The floorboards are rotted; the sky pours through a yawning gap in the roof. Kids have been here, punching holes in Homisote walls, scrawling their names in pitch. If a family of wolves ever lived here, they’ve moved on.
Geordie unzips his fly, pisses into a tangle of venetian blinds. Geordie has always gotten a kick out of me watching him pee. He’d stand at the edge of our driveway, his golden effluence arching into milkweed and bulrushes. I’d stand beside him, hoping to see my own urine arch triumphantly next to his, only to see it trickle away languidly.
“I’m leaving the Barn,” he announces, still pissing, his broad back to me. The Barn is the Unitarian Church, only they don’t call it a church. I’m stunned — not so much by the news, but because when Geordie speaks to me, it’s always a bit stunning.
“Why, Geordie? What happened?”
He shrugs. It’s just like Geordie to throw a bomb like that and follow it up with a shrug. I don’t press him, knowing if I do he’ll just clam up more. He wants the information to work on me, like paint remover. He zips his fly, packing his penis away like a travel accessory. He smiles, pleased that I’m not saying anything. I’m learning. “Poor Mrs. Wolff,” he says, smiling.
“Yeah,” I say. “Poor Mrs. Wolff.”
Nonnie died at ninety-six. I was twelve. And though I didn’t cry when told or at her funeral, still, Nonnie’s death shook me. I knew she was really gone when Mother reclaimed her room and painted it a resolutely cheerful shade of yellow, the new-paint smell murdering all those other smells I’d loved.
Now it’s Mrs. Wolff’s turn to be the powdered doughnut. Dressed in sports coats and ties, Geordie and I greet the survivors: Lenny and his wife, Elaine; Mr. Wolff. I’ve never seen Mr. Wolff in a suit. Until now I’ve only seen him in the stained T-shirt and green work pants he wears to the pump house. “Good to see ya,” he says, hugging me (though built like a bear, Mr. Wolff is not the hugging type). I hug Lenny, then Elaine. Already I’m tired of hugging people. We get in line to look at the corpse, then take our places among the respectful. Next to me sits a girl with long brown eyelashes and cherry lips like Lenny’s. I wonder two things: first, is she related to him? and second, is it okay to think about sex with your best friend’s relative at his mother’s wake? I spend the next few minutes searching for appropriate feelings, but it’s like looking for aspirin in a dark medicine chest.
Then Clyde arrives, looking like hell in a seersucker suit. Clyde was always the tallest of us. Now he’s the baldest, gauntest, and most successful, with his own video company in Boston. Clyde’s latest project: a documentary about the Wright Brothers, narrated by former game-show panelist Orson Bean. When Clyde’s done hugging people, I say, “Did you bring your bathing suit?” It’s code, our private joke, our secret handshake. Man, he looks awful. “How goes it?” I ask, as if it’s not painfully obvious.
“Fine,” says Clyde, “thanks to an array of pharmaceutical products. Still working at Corbinger’s?” Corbinger’s: the bicycle-seat factory. At one point, five of us worked there. I stayed.
“I quit,” I tell him. “Last week.”
“No shit?” says Clyde.
“Honestly,” I say, “ever since they stopped making banana seats my heart hasn’t been in it. I just passed my civil service exam. I’m going to work for the P.O.” P.O.: that’s shorthand for “post office.” Somehow it’s easier to get out that way.
Like Geordie, Clyde’s been through a nasty divorce. The day the papers came through he passed the world’s largest kidney stone, his “piece of the rock,” he called it. Now he’s got a duodenal ulcer, some strange intestinal malady, plus bursitis in both elbows and a bone spur on his left foot. He walks with a cane and wears a special orthopedic shoe: thick, soft, black, a far cry from the brown wing tip on his other foot.
“How’s the stiff looking?” he asks.
“Stiff,” I say, shrugging. “There are some pretty good-looking nonstiffs here, though.” I nod toward the dark-lashed girl. Clyde looks, nods in turn, smiles. All the chronic illnesses in the world wouldn’t keep him from admiring a pretty face. When the young lady catches his look, he wiggles his fingers at her.
“So,” I ask, “did you bring your bathing suit, or what?”
Clyde closes his eyes and bows his head like he’s about to own up to something embarrassing. For a second I’m afraid he’s going to say, “Al, those days are over for me,” or something heartbreaking. Instead he pops up his head, screws up his face, and says, “But of course!”
We gather on a ramp behind the funeral home. Still raining. Water surrounds us, dripping from eaves, gurgling in gutters, splashing into puddles. Lenny lights a cigar. “I can deal with a half hour of just about anything,” he says.
Clyde, who never smoked, snatches the cigar, takes a drag. Soon we’re all smoking the same cigar. For a second I’m confused, thinking it’s Stewie’s wake all over again, that the past five years never happened.
“It’s all shit and roses.” Geordie’s ministerial voice upstages the rain.
“Is that what you preach to your congregation?” says Lenny. “‘It’s all shit and roses, amen’?”
“We don’t say, ‘Amen.’ I did it once; people got upset. We Unitarians are extremely protective of our secularism.”
“But,” says Lenny, “you don’t mind having your noses rubbed in roses and shit?”
“That’s right,” says Geordie. “Shoot the messenger.”
“As for me,” says Clyde, changing the subject, “I’m just waiting for life to be perfect so I can go about my business.” He breaks into a soft-shoe, but the bone spur waylays him.
Mr. Wolff steps out the back door, sees us all floating in cigar smoke, shakes his big head, and ducks inside.
“Back to the salt mines,” says Lenny, flicking the cigar over a dripping hedge and then going back in.
It’s strange, but over Bennington Pond and nowhere else there’s a break in the clouds. Sunlight spills onto the water, leaving the rest of the world in sullied darkness. A sunbeam singles out the red door of the pumping station on the far shore, beyond the island with the lighthouse. Normally, even on rainy days, the red door is ajar. But Mr. Wolff mourns.
The hike to our rock coats our shoes with mud. We take them off, jam them into a crag, and strip down, except Lenny, who carries his baby son in a papoose sling and thumbs a Bible, searching for a passage to read at his mother’s funeral. The joke about bathing suits is we don’t wear any. Clyde’s dick hangs long and red and is his point of greatest health. Geordie’s is shrunken and shriveled, his least healthy part. We have twin dicks.
“Roses and shit!” I cry, tearing a hole in green water. It’s late May, and the water is icy still. My testicles retreat into my guts. I feel immortal, twenty-eight years old, but who’s counting? My body is twelve, the same age it was when we first started coming here. Freestyle, I head for the lighthouse. I used to be able to swim back and forth two, three, four times. Halfway there I’m winded, treading water. Geordie catches up with me, doing a backstroke, his feet kicking up plumes of sun-spackled water, spouting up into shafts of sunlight, spewing mouthfuls. Then along comes Clyde, doing a scissor kick–sidestroke. Back on the rock Lenny thumbs through Proverbs and bounces his kid, who keeps crying. The cries carry all the way across the lake, to the stone lighthouse, beyond, to the pumping station, reverberating off the red door to begin their journey back as an echo. To our surprise, the island has only been slightly polluted. Cans and bottles wink back the sun’s rays; Geordie gathers them up, muttering. Clyde climbs the rusty lighthouse ladder and stands behind the topside railing, sunlight daubing his furry parts. His ailing flesh paints a pink rainbow as he dives. I imagine his symptoms leeching into the reservoir, sending dozens of unwatched pumping-station meter needles flying into the red zone.
“Christ,” says Geordie, shaking a banana slug from a Budweiser can. The slug clings to his arm like a hypodermic.
I turn a few somersaults, then surface to inspect the island. More beer cans and bottles, what’s left of a campfire, a defunct rubber, and a few hefty turds, origin unknown. My hypothesis: wolf shit. It seems unlikely, I know, but Nonnie’s family of wolves had to go somewhere. Why not this pleasant little island, where no one can harass them save a few old high school chums who don’t even know if they’re still friends?
“Albert, Geordie — check this out!”
Clyde points down from the lighthouse. “There — in the shallows!”
The carcass of a dead snapping turtle, tangled in fishing line, its head the size of my foot. Flies spin around it.
“Imagine if that bit your dick off?” observes Clyde.
“Fucking fishermen,” says Geordie. “They must’ve killed it and left it there. Bastards.”
I say, “Maybe the wolves got it.”
Geordie spins around. “What?”
“The wolves,” I say. “Maybe it was the wolves.”
Back on the rock, Geordie stacks cans and bottles and wanders off who knows where. Lenny asks me and Clyde to take his kid for a while. He straps the papoose sling on Clyde’s back and slips the baby inside. “Get the little bastard out of my sight,” he stage-whispers, then forces a laugh, ruining the joke. He needs to concentrate on Bible verses.
Me and Clyde joke about taking the kid “for a ride.” We say it like Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar. Meanwhile, the kid — who looks like Eddie G. — makes gooey faces. For a while everything’s fine. Then the kid starts crying again. His cries echo across Bennington Pond. He cries like he’s being tortured. Clyde tries making gooey faces back at him, but it’s no use. “Let him cry,” I say. “It’ll do him good.” His screams fill the woods, bounce off the clouds. Suddenly Lenny comes charging down the path. “Are you out of your fucking minds?” he says. “What the fuck’s the matter with you? Don’t you hear him crying? How can you be so goddamn stupid?”
“What should we have done?” says Clyde.
“You should have brought him back to me, that’s what!” says Lenny, his hands curling into fists. He squeezes them open and shut as if squeezing a pair of rubber balls. For a second I’m afraid. He takes the baby back; the baby stops crying. Clyde looks my way, shrugs.
All the way back to the car Lenny clenches and unclenches his fists. He still hasn’t found a Bible passage. Geordie, back from his wandering, has entered one of his monklike silences. For the next hour he won’t say a word; he’ll just look preoccupied, like St. Augustine on a bad day. Clyde keeps shrugging his all-purpose shrug. The silence nags me. It ages me. I run my fingers along my hairline. We’re twenty-eight, all of us, going on middle-aged, going on dead. I swear I can’t take this shit anymore, all these funerals and babies. I prefer to live in a war-torn city, in a country where they kill you for talking. I want to crash-land a spy plane somewhere in the Sahara, ride crowded trains full of people burning with dysentery, be nursed by a she-wolf, found Rome. Is that asking too much? Instead I’m coasting along on my last paycheck from Corbinger’s, looking forward to twenty years of carting mail through rain, snow, sleet, dark of night, etcetera.
At Boston Rotisserie, Lenny and I stand in line while Clyde waits in the Rambler. Geordie has gone to bring our mother home from the hospital. Why I have no idea, but it’s always me Lenny wants with him, whether to bring home chicken or keep him from punching priests. While waiting I notice this item in the local free paper:
WOLF REPORTED AT TOWN RESERVOIR
The Barnum Police Dept. has reported sightings by local residents of a wolf in the woods surrounding the town reservoir, in the area adjacent to the old Bennington property. Authorities have not been able to verify the reports, though Canine Patrol Sergeant Vincent Pomerance believes the animal in question may be a misidentified German shepherd or other wolflike stray dog.
Back at the Wolff home, which seems doomed with Mrs. Wolff gone, Mr. W. has reverted to his T-shirt and green work pants. His asthma is acting up. He makes locomotive-like sounds while shoveling mashed potatoes into his mouth. The rain has stopped. Still, water drips into Tupperware pails, as if a cloud rents space in the attic. Every five minutes or so Mr. Wolff breaks with a choking sound. Though he doesn’t say so, I know he wishes we’d all get the hell out of here.
Back home that same evening, I give leftover mashed potatoes to my mother, who claims she hasn’t eaten a thing since I brought her to the hospital yesterday. She sits up in bed.
“How was de funeral?” she wants to know.
“Tomorrow,” I say. “The funeral’s tomorrow. Today was the wake.”
Geordie, having excavated his old co2 pellet gun, stands in the dusky backyard shooting beer cans, planting his feet and squinting like Clint Eastwood. I wonder how his congregation would feel if they knew their minister was a closet assassin.
“Geordie?” I come up behind him. He turns with the gun propped on his shoulder a la 007. He’s got this cold look in his eyes. I swear he saves up all his meanness for trips home. “Did you say hello to Mom?”
He goes on shooting.
“You didn’t, did you?”
He feeds another co2 cartridge into the gun. “Let me tell you something about our dear old habitually dying mother,” he says. “To her way of thinking,” he aims at my face, turns me into a beer can, “there are two types of people in this world. Thieves —” he fires into the aluminum siding, “— and Sufferers. You’re either one —” he shoots a window, the same window Nonnie used to see wolves through, “— or the other.” The window now has a small glass asshole in it. “To be a good person, according to Mom, is to be a Sufferer, since one can hardly imagine a Heaven of Thieves, but one can easily imagine a Heaven of Sufferers. Follow me, little brother?”
I hate it when he calls me that. I’d hate it if I were his little brother. I nod.
“To enter the Kingdom of Heaven, one must be pitiable. The more pitiable, the better. The pope honors his most industrious Sufferers with sainthood.” He loads the damn gun again. “And so, via mysterious fever and migraine, Mother groans her way to paradise.” Another pellet fired; another glass asshole. Geordie takes pot shots: at a downspout, at the barbecue pit, at the bench of a collapsed swing set.
I ask, “Where do the Thieves come in?”
“The Thieves are everywhere,” says Geordie. “Take Mrs. Wolff, rest her soul. She turns out to be a Master Thief, stealing the suffering right out from under Mother’s nose. Mom doesn’t know what hit her. I bet she’s been lying in bed for days. Hasn’t she? Hasn’t she?” He looks at me.
“You could still say hello.”
He loads bullets. “Have you ever tried to have a sincere conversation with her?” He shakes his head. “It’s not possible. Our mother doesn’t speak English. Or Italian. She speaks Innuendo.”
“So what?” I get up the balls to say. “So what if she’s like she is? What difference does it make? She’s our mother. Get over it, already.”
Geordie smiles. It’s the first time he’s smiled at me during this visit. “Why should I get over it,” he says handing me the warm loaded gun, “when I’ve got my brother to do it for me?”
Families are strange things, especially when they’re not really families but just odd mixtures of people living under the same roof. Still, it worries me to think I may never cry over my own mother’s death, that at her funeral I might just stand there, dry eyed, not feeling a thing. Already I hadn’t cried at my father’s funeral, or Nonnie’s, or Stewie’s. And I’m sure not going to cry at Mrs. Wolff’s. When will I cry? When do I get to join the great parade of Sufferers?
The day of the funeral it rains. We stand, umbrellas touching (except Geordie, who either forgot his or likes getting soaked). I see Mr. Wolff, a fire hydrant heaving under a yellow sou’wester. I watch Lenny clench and unclench his fists as Elaine holds their baby. I see Clyde leaning on his cane in soggy seersucker. I hear the priest, Father Moynahan, droning under an umbrella that protects him as much from divine inspiration as from bad weather. I try to cry, but it’s like trying to pass the world’s biggest kidney stone. I want to cry for Mrs. Wolff and her fist-clenching son. I want to cry for Clyde and his various ailments. I want to bawl my brains out for Mr. Wolff and his leaky roof, for bedridden mothers and bitter twin brothers, for Nonnie and fried spaghetti, for hollow tombstones and the rotting corpses of snapping turtles. But mostly I want to cry for the family of wolves that once lived under the guest cottage but never will again.
Suddenly Geordie takes my umbrella, folds it up. Rainwater sluices down my face, tickles my eyelashes. He grabs my hand, gripping it hard, squeezing to crush bone. Soon I’m crying real tears. Finally, he lets go. I look up and see him wet faced, his eyes on the casket going down.
I’d hoped we’d go back to Bennington’s for another swim, but it rains. Anyway, it seems we’ve had enough of water and one another. The four of us say good-bye, hug, and that’s that. Later, as I fold his shirts and watch him pack, Geordie doesn’t say a word. He packs the co2 cartridge gun, tucking it under socks and underwear. Our mother, still in bed, calls to him. We stand at her doorway, just like old times.
“How was de funeral?” The Death Voice is back.
“Fine,” says Geordie.
“I should have been there. Ebene, sarebbe stato meglio fossi morta io. Hai capito?” Geordie and I look at each other.
“We understand, Mom,” he says, going to and kissing her on the forehead, looking up at me deadpan while doing so. “Don’t we?”
Weeks later I’m visiting Mr. Wolff at the pump house.
“C’mere,” he says. “Want you to see something.”
A hundred yards behind the pumping station is the town dog pound. Mr. Wolff knocks. Canine Patrol Sergeant Pomerance answers. He leads us into the kennel where, in the last cage, a wolf whimpers, a gray female with a white snout. Her teats sag on stained concrete.
“Caught it on the far side of the reservoir,” Sergeant Pomerance explains. “Must be sick or dying. Possibly rabid. Didn’t even growl.”
I gaze into the wolf’s eyes — seeping, yellow, cataracted — glowing with primeval forest light. “What are you gonna do with her?” I ask.
“She’s endangered, so we can’t destroy her,” says Pomerance. “I’ll find a zoo or someplace. Meanwhile, though, I’m not gonna argue with her.”
He and Mr. Wolff repair into Sergeant Pomerance’s front office to sip bourbon-laced tea. I wait for them to go, then press my nose through chain links. “Yeah, yeah,” I say, getting licked. “It’s okay, it’s okay …”