It was raining when they got to the Protestant Cemetery. Mr. Columbo handed out a few black umbrellas and the pilgrims stood around in the walled graveyard under the cypress trees. Music played softly over loudspeakers in the trees, the Pachelbel “Canon” and then “Ave Maria.” Gravel walks radiated from the entrance, following along boxwood hedges, laurel and oleander. Crosses and upright tablets marked the graves, swathed in green. Signs pointed the way to the tombs of Keats and Shelley. Off to the left was dense vegetation, vines and shrubs overgrown, but most of the plots were neatly set in low stone walls like plant frames. There were a few aboveground crypts but mostly the dead lay in the earth and let nature take its course. One large cypress leaned seriously to one side, loose dirt around its roots, the casualty of a storm, and it looked likely to fall and maybe spring a corpse or two into the air like tiddlywinks.
Flat slabs of granite lay over the tombs. Some upright columns with busts atop them. A Celtic cross. A manly angel stood on a pedestal, a loose drape hung from his belt and covered his manhood, and nearby a female angel lay facedown on a gravestone, weeping inconsolably for an Evelyn Story (1882–1919) who lay moldering in the dirt below.
“If you had to die, this’d be the place to be buried,” said Clint. “I’ll bet my kids would visit my grave more often if it were in Rome than if it were back there where it’s going to be.”
Keats’s marker said:
This grave contains all that was mortal, of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET, Who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart, at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.
Poor Keats, consumed by self-pity as he lay coughing his heart out, imagining his Fanny in the arms of another, pretty sure that the “Ode to Melancholy” was not a big hit.
The usual inscriptions (Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy. Qui riposa in pace). Englishmen from Somerset and Swansea. A Norwegian who died May 19, 1944. James of Charleston, South Carolina, died in 1844 at age seventy. An Ursula Dimpflmeier, 1920–1973. Fifty-three, same age as Margie. An orange tabby cat leaped from stone to stone and Margie’s eye followed it as it landed on a large marble tablet:
Requiescat in Pace
Sacred to the memory of
AUGUST NORLANDER
Of Minnesota
Pause here a moment, all ye who read
The writing on this fine erection
Which honors a most generous deed
By a fighting man of great affection
Who enriched Rome by his own seed
And now awaits the Resurrection.
“Did you know he was here?” said Daryl. “Did we make that trip out to Anzio for nothing?”
“I thought he was here but his brother thought he was out there,” said Margie. “So we had to eliminate one before establishing the other.”
Eloise said she was confused. Why would they bury him here and not in a military cemetery? Wally was confused too and hoped somebody would clear this up. “Was it because Gussie was not a Catholic?” Margie shook her head.
Carl got out the plastic engraving of Gussie. “Look. When you tilt it, he smiles,” he said. He showed them and sure enough, Gussie put his head back and grinned. At the bottom it said, OFFICIAL. DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF IMPRISONMENT. The adhesive was supposed to bond plastic to any stone surface, but Carl wasn’t sure that the plastic engraving of Gussie would stick to the stone, seeing as it was so wet. Evelyn thought the stone was so beautiful, it would be a shame to deface it with a piece of plastic.
“We promised,” said Margie. “That was the whole deal.”
They looked at the stone from all angles.
“That’s an odd inscription,” said Clint. “The part about erection and the donation of seed?”
“Maybe it’s about seed corn,” said Margie. “I’ll ask around.”
“Stick the picture on it,” she told Carl. He got out the adhesive tubes and squirted a line of pink gel on the stone above the requiescat and let it sit for a moment, then squirted a thin spray of clear liquid onto the pink. It sizzled. He pulled the plastic engraving of Gussie out of his pocket and pressed it onto the adhesive and pushed.
A man in a blue suit came running out of the cemetery office, yelling at them. The pilgrims shrank back. “Do not deface the monument,” he yelled. “Or I’ll call the police.”
“We aren’t defacing it, we are refacing it,” said Margie.
He pointed at the plastic. “That was not there before.”
Margie stepped up and poked him in the chest. “That is an American war hero who died in the fight to save Rome from the Nazis. You remove that and you insult me, you insult General Eisenhower, you insult Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra, you insult Barack Obama.”
The man stepped back. He looked around at Marilyn and Daryl, Clint, Irene, Carl, Wally, Evelyn, Eloise, and then his glance landed on Father Wilmer. The man bowed slightly. He said, “Father, don’t let them do bad here.” Father Wilmer nodded to him. The man marched back to the office. He locked the door. Twice.
“Is it tight?” said Daryl, reaching for the plastic. Margie grabbed his arm. “Don’t touch it.” And she took Carl’s camera and snapped two, four, six, seven shots of it. It looked okay. From a certain angle. A short person would walk in here someday, a boy of ten or eleven, and look at the picture and rise up on his tiptoes and Gussie would smile at him. And the boy would keep this a secret until one day he’d show it to a girl. Look. A dead man smiling at us. A joke on a tombstone. Amid all the drippiness, an American grins and winks.
As they stood in the rain, a procession came through the gate, led by a man playing a violin, playing very badly, a woman holding an umbrella over him and six men carrying a coffin on their shoulders, followed by a priest and four mourners. They bore their burden toward the old Roman wall at the back of the cemetery where two gravediggers stood beside an open tomb. The marble cover had been removed and stood against the wall. It said GENNARO.
Margie led the pilgrims up the path behind the mourners. All four were women dressed in black, three wearing long black scarves and Maria wearing her black wool cap.
The pallbearers laid the coffin down beside the crypt, on the wet grass, and stepped back. Margie stood, hands clasped, as the priest intoned a prayer. When he finished, he stepped back and Maria stepped up and said,
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And Heaven in a Flower,
Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
Every Morn and every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight
Man was made for Joy and Woe;
Thro’ the World we safely go.
The pallbearers stepped up and gripped the handles and hoisted the coffin up high and over the open crypt and then gingerly lowered it, bending down, and it came to rest, Margie thought, rather unevenly, as if it had been placed in on top of someone else’s bones. The mourners then took handfuls of dirt from a blue plastic bucket and tossed them in and a few yellow blossoms, and the gravediggers and the pallbearers took hold of the marble slab and lifted it up to shoulder height and carried it to the crypt and set it down with a great dull thud.
Maria turned and smiled at them. “I wanted them to be in the same tomb together, like Romeo and Juliet, but the cemetery wouldn’t allow it. Anyway, they’re close enough, they can whisper to each other at night.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” said Eloise.
“It’s all right. She was anxious to go. She had been thinking about him a good deal lately.” She turned to look at the crypt and then suddenly turned back to Margie. “Would you have lunch with me?” she said. “And we can look at that apartment.”
“Should I bring my husband?”
Maria frowned. “No. Why would you? Men don’t know what we want. We have to figure it out and tell them.”