HEAD STILL BOWED, I took a last look at Paul and stood without turning, secretly happy to be alive. Yet a moment later I felt guilty and depressed. Certain smiles begin inside—their stirrings are autoerotic, it seems—but the neutral, serious, protective frown that gives nothing away is a social practice learned over years. I composed my mouth into such a frown, then turned and walked back to join my parents, conscious of Messrs. Flanagan and Roberts hovering at doorways or gliding through hallways. Paul’s coffin had plenty of flowers to sweeten it, some on top, some on stands. Twenty feet away, the rows of empty chairs began. All was subdued and tastefully dull, all carpeted and cushioned and curtained and softened, with a touch of wealth and quality—brown, black, and beige. At the back of the room, an accordioned wall could be opened for large wakes, but not for this one. A walk-in closet would have sufficed for this one. At last someone showed up, a cousin I’d nearly forgotten existed. It was almost four o’clock.
It hadn’t occurred to me that relatives would come. I should have known Mom would call them. Most lived near Worcester, or in Maine or New Hampshire, and some I hadn’t seen in decades. Once Hannah and the boys arrived we’d have a respectable handful. Actually, I thought, they should have been here by now. It gave me something to fret about. Meanwhile, at the head of the room, Paul lay there in effigy, claiming his fifteen minutes of fame. If you turned in that room you oriented your body toward his—shoulders perpendicular, shoulders parallel. He was not designed to be forgotten today. We would bury him tomorrow and so bury our sorrow, then resume our lives and forget him.
Spilling forward like a pot of spaghetti, Tobias Roberts approached. He was very tall, six four at least, and rowed with his arms and paddled with his hands like someone in an inner tube strapped down with sacks of ballast. Since guests were now arriving, he suggested that my parents and I arrange ourselves in a reception line, to the Departed’s right. First came Paul, then the table for spiritual bouquets, then at a proper distance Mom and I standing and Dad in his wheelchair. “And could you remind guests to sign the register in the hallway?” he asked.
“Why not bring it in here next to the body?” I suggested. “That way they won’t miss it.”
“Beside the Deceased?” He smiled and shook his head, as if pitying my ignorance.
“Why not?”
“We’ve never done it that way. These people have been to plenty of wakes. It would be unusual.”
What people? I thought. But what I said was, “If they’ve been to lots of wakes, they won’t forget to sign the register.”
“There you go.” He seemed suddenly indifferent. Clearly, this colloquy hadn’t been important. It was something for him to do, as director.
My cousin, a retired schoolteacher from Weymouth, talked with my mother, who was becoming animated. Mom touched her arm, from which Mo’s large purse hung. I caught Mo (for Maureen) sneaking glances at me, next in line, and I felt like a child about to endure the kisses of an aunt who would smell of talcum powder. All of my cousins were older than me, the baby of the family.
Like Paul, Mo had been a sort of recluse. She’d never married and, according to my mother, had once lived alone with three or four dozen cats. About ten years ago she’d gone off for work and left her electric blanket on. The cats piled on the bed, the blanket caught fire, and the house burned down.
I kissed her on the cheek. Hers was coarse with bristles. She asked if my family were coming today.
“On the way,” I said, checking my watch.
“How long a drive is it?”
“Six or seven hours.”
More people walked in, members of my mother’s Women’s Club. Mo pulled up a chair and sat beside my father. Mom, looking flushed, greeted all her friends. Her voice could be heard over everyone else’s. “Where is she?” she shouted, then looked around blushing, hand across her mouth.
To my left, my father and Mo talked softly. Her square face and mannish lips reminded me of my grandmother. Faces are maps not of space but of time, each one imperfect, as though an ideal set of features lived somewhere behind them. Behind Paul, myself, and Mo were my father and his siblings, including Nancy, Mo’s mother. Grandma, whose face now sits above my desk, was the distant continent all our features mapped, yet her face also charted others farther off, ones I’d never know. In the photo I’m looking at as I write this sentence, the map of Grandma’s skin looks frayed and torn, just like my father’s now. Their faces both resemble deflated parachutes that once billowed with time, but not anymore. They couldn’t bear anyone’s weight anymore.
My grandma has been dead a long time, but I remember her well. Once, when a child, I’d stayed with her for a week, though under exactly what circumstances I still can’t recall. Were my parents on a trip? Working people then did not take long trips. Also, where was Paul? I can remember Grandma’s house outside Worcester, in Wire Valley, remember her pulling me from closet to closet searching for something to occupy my time, a game or a book. She accused my aunt Liddie of stealing her Victrola, but it was right there in the bathroom on its own table. I can remember the town and how, out of boredom, in the middle of July, I found an old American Flyer sled in the barn behind the house and dragged it up Ash Street. Amused neighbors bent down to cute little me as though to a fishbowl and smiled in my face and said, Expecting snow?
But I can’t remember Paul.
He must have been there. He’d been raised by Grandma. He was there when we visited every weekend of my childhood, but in a sense I can’t recall him. I don’t mean to imply he was chained in the attic. He was probably around, trying not to be noticed. In my memory now, his slumped and fading body blends into Grandma’s, as if squatting in her soul, a frog on a chopping block. Their postures were similar. Her ghost imprisons his. Grandma was small and wore wallpaper dresses and blends into the shadows of all our old photos—in the shadows with Paul.
In high school, I was cool. In less than a year I went from an Elvis pompadour to a buzzcut, hooded sweatshirt, chinos, and what we then called desert boots. I habitually spent my weekends with friends drinking pints of Southern Comfort poured into quart bottles of ginger ale, and who in their right mind would give up such a life? That’s why I cringed in the fall of my senior year when Paul made plans to spend the weekend in his microbus, to conduct his oracular ham-radio ceremonies, and my mother insisted he take me with him. Who knew for what reason?—parents too have their secrets—but I had to go along, and Paul had to take me, at least this one weekend.
He was going to New Hampshire, as it turned out, and beside me on Route 3 he hardly said a thing. Having recently bought my first transistor radio—which I hadn’t taken along, since he hated rock ’n’ roll—I asked him the difference between transistors and tubes. I’d spotted a box of tubes in the back, neatly stored on a shelf in the midst of his equipment.
“Well. They’re both something like valves. They filter interference. They pass or block the current depending on, you know. But tubes get wicked hot and burn out like light bulbs and transistors don’t, but they work just as good. They’re small, they don’t break. They last a lot longer. That’s about the size of it.”
I couldn’t think of what to say. “They’re just as good—transistors?”
“Your tubes pretty soon will go the way of the dinosaurs.”
“So transistors are better.”
“Of course they’re better. That’s what I just said.”
In New Hampshire, he parked on top of a hill near an open shelter with barbecue pits, picnic tables, pit toilets, and a wide grassy slope open to the sky. Pine trees and birches surrounded this place, but their tops were all beneath us. No one else was around. It was Friday evening—we’d left just as soon as I arrived home from school. Fishbone clouds turned red in the sky and darkness leaked up from the universe around us while Paul pulled his generator out of the bus and set up his gear. With the bus’s doors open and a Coleman lantern on the ground, he unfolded a card table and erected on its top a small city of equipment, complete with dials, jacks, buttons, switches, green and red lights, meters, and wires. On top of the bus he fixed a tall whip antenna, then sat on a folding aluminum chair, microphone in hand, and launched himself into the airwaves.
Meanwhile, I wandered through the parking lot and searched the picnic shelters and tried out the toilets. Once it was dark, I came back to the bus and sat in the driver’s seat to practice shifting gears. Paul ignored me. Through storms of squeals and hisses, fading in and out, came amplified voices of solitary men, the cowboys of night skies, who sounded as though they were talking into tin cans. Some engaged in conversation with Paul, then faded out, then others took over, but how much of this was by design I couldn’t quite grasp. He jotted down what appeared to be vital statistics in an open notebook. “Read you, EHF,” a voice said. “Still can’t get many local stations on fifteen meters. Guess it goes right over them. Over.”
“Not much QRM on this end,” said Paul. “Your Kenwood’s knocking me out up here. So the rumor of hams in Vermont was true. I have a very solid copy. Over.”
I opened the door and walked into the field. The stars were coming out, a storm of electric popcorn and discord, like the sounds of Paul’s radio—which I couldn’t escape—and like his generator’s blare, both of which, along with the stars, I assume in retrospect were order in disguise. At the far end of the parking lot a few cars pulled in—no doubt teenagers going parking. How I envied them. It would be a cold night, I could tell that already. I’d never seen a sky so shattered by light, so large and overwhelming. Only three feet away, yet it was unreachable. In Boston we never had skies like that, not even while sleeping on neighbors’ flat roofs in the dog days of August, or on City Point Beach. “Anyhow, I wound up with a tech,” I heard. “Do you copy? Over.”
“Yeah, I read you,” said Paul. “Sometimes I wonder how I ever made it. Band right now seems to be slipping. You didn’t tell me your rig. Over.”
“Still read you. Band won’t hold much longer. HR Heath, HW 101 and full wave. Delta loop. Sounds like your XYL’s making french fries. Could be that generator. Anyhoo, congrats on your General ticket, Paul. I tried last year but missed the code pretty bad. Far as I can see, that’s a relic of the past. Who needs it anymore, I say. Over.”
“I read you on that. But suppose they drop the Big One. Over.”
“No need, no need. We’re all radio active. Over.”
“Har har har-dy har har. I’ll tell that one to all my friends in Boston. Have to drive back Sunday, over.”
“Hey, I might join you, my friend. Any jobs down that way? I’m close to busted. Can’t feed catfish dogfood no more. Over to you.”
“Much QRM on this end. Have to 73 soon. Please QSL. Over.”
“Did you copy my address? Still read me? Over.”
“Barely. Yes I did. These small towns up here—I know what you mean. I’m on a kick I call WATWOS, Work All Towns Without Sidewalks. Anyway, Clyde, you take care of yourself. Enjoyed the QSO and the jokes. Keep up the good work. Hope we can do it again the near future. I sure do enjoy chewing the rag. God bless. Over and out.”
This last part was rattled off quickly, by rote. It was how he ended all his transmissions. Sometime later the moon rose, and sometime after that I retrieved my sleeping bag from the bus and found the very highest spot of the hill and threw the bag on the grass and crawled inside with my clothes on, and fell asleep on my back in the glow of the universe.
We pan-fried bacon and eggs the next day. Then Paul took off and left me there to mind his stuff. We’d slept until noon, and it was almost dark again by the time he returned, with burgers and hot dogs wrapped in greasy newspaper, and with a present for me. He held out a large paper bag. Said he’d driven all the way to Nashua to find it, knew a hobby shop there. I took the bag and looked inside. A telescope. Gee. I didn’t know what to say. He’d never given me anything before, except the usual twenty dollars at Christmas. “Hey, thanks,” I said.
He almost looked embarrassed. “I saw you out there looking at the stars.” It hadn’t seemed to me he’d even known I’d come along, let alone where I was. He stood there with a squeamish smile, mouth firmly closed, then turned around to refill his generator with gas from a container, leaving me to myself.
I felt strange about this telescope. It looked pretty expensive. Instinctively I knew that a gift like this wouldn’t let me dislike him as much as I wanted to. And suddenly I saw a new side to Paul. He was naturally disdainful toward inferiors like me, his kid brother, but obsequious to superiors—his whole manner expressed it. So he gave gifts gruffly, having no other way to show his need to be liked. He never seemed to know what to say to me, as I didn’t to him, and our conversations quickly petered out, unlike those he conducted on his ham radio. The message was clear: forget about me, enjoy the telescope instead. I willingly did. I assumed that’s the way a gift should operate; it should erase the giver.
Later, I saw him hunched at his table in the light from the lantern, attached to his machinery by straps and wires like Mary Shelley’s monster—or, I mused, like my mother in her beauty parlor. When I was a child and Mom got her hair done, I waited in a back room doing jigsaw puzzles. That night, instead, I examined the moon, looking through my telescope at its jigsaw shadows. The sound of Paul’s equipment and of his transmissions had become a white noise rebounding off the moon—perfect silence, in a sense. The moon looked to me then like a flat communion wafer being nibbled on by mice. But I’ve since learned what the moon really is. It’s where the dead go to live their porous lives, lives through which experience blows like the dust in ghost towns.
By consulting the instruction book and charts, I managed to locate a tiny image of Saturn. The telescope had a short tripod, and I had to bend down to look up through it. For relief, I stood straight and surveyed the sky with naked eye. I felt ridiculously happy, beyond all measure—thanks to Paul, I realized. Back and forth I went, bending down to the telescope, standing erect, expecting something extraordinary to happen—a flying saucer to zoom past, and a parachute to bloom from it. The universe revealed its hidden architecture, its anatomy, its secret insides. Yet I’d never felt more outside in my life, never more thrust up into the sky, on a promontory of Earth. Once, as I was emerging from the telescope, a shooting star chalked its line across the sky, and it stayed there awhile, written on the blackness like a photoelectric impression on a retina. I still wonder what I saw, the thing itself or its ghost.
At last Hannah and our boys showed up, the kids looking around and blinking in that room and generally disoriented like people gone snow-blind. They’d been driving for six hours, which rubberizes equilibrium, but also the boys had never been to a wake. Paul’s death is what blinded them. They couldn’t see to see.
Hannah, as always, looked fresh and beautiful in that room of sugared death. We kissed. She stepped back and peered into my face. I felt people watching. “You okay?” she asked.
I nodded.
I’d been watching our sons and had one of those moments of frozen terror far worse than reflecting on one’s own mortality—instead, it was a zero-at-the-bone sense of my children’s mortality. They were living—they would die. Life itself was the reason. Once you taste the fruit, you’re doomed. But the fruit was life itself.
I felt divided from them; the feeling, after all, was mine, not theirs, and it seemed that if I brushed up against them they’d become it, as in a game of tag. To keep my distance was my sacrifice, I thought, as though I were offering my mortality for theirs. Paul, I realized, had never had such feelings, being childless. Did it make him more free or the opposite, more trapped?
Other cultures have stories to tell their children, not so much to help them make sense of mortality as to accustom them to its mystery. Here’s one: Old Man has just created you from lumps of mud.
“When I was a lump of mud, was I alive then?” you ask him.
“No,” says Old Man, “you were not alive.”
“Then what do you call that state I was in then?”
“It is called death. When you are not alive, you are dead.”
“Will I be alive always?”
Old Man doesn’t answer. He’s obviously thinking. “That hadn’t occurred to me. Let’s decide it right now. Here’s a buffalo chip. Throw it in the river. If it floats, then you’ll die and come back to life four days later.”
“No,” you say, “not a buffalo chip. The water will dissolve it.” You feel very crafty. “Let’s try this stone instead. If it floats, I’ll live forever. If it sinks, I’ll die.”
Bad choice. You throw the stone in. It sinks. Well, after all, you’re just a few hours old, you don’t know anything yet. Old Man shakes his head. “Now nothing can be done about it. Now people will die.”
So death was a poor choice made out of ignorance, according to this Blackfeet Indian story. It doesn’t seem fair. But of course that’s the point. How else do we account for the unaccountable?
The Shoshone also tell a story about death. Wolf and Coyote were creating the Shoshone, and Wolf said they shall not die. No, said Coyote, everything dies. Okay, said Wolf, there will be two deaths. After somebody dies, then he’ll die again.
“No,” said Coyote, the realist. “After somebody dies, he should stay that way.”
“Okay,” said Wolf. “It will be that way.”
Not long after that, Coyote’s son was sick and drew close to death. “I’ve changed my mind, Wolf,” Coyote told his older brother. “I agree with what you said. We should have two deaths. That’s a good idea.”
“Don’t be so stupid,” said Wolf.
“Please change the rule.” Coyote was weeping. “I didn’t think my son would die right away.”
“No, don’t be foolish,” said the resolute Wolf. “Once we make a rule we have to keep it.”
The rule of all rules, then, is rules can’t be broken. Rules like that are laws, and all laws pass through death, like water passing through a charcoal filter.
The smooth-tongued snake said to the first woman, “Did God really mean you can’t eat from any tree?”
“Just the tree in the middle of the garden,” she answered.
“What on earth for?”
“You can’t eat it, you can’t touch it,” said Hava, the woman—in other versions, Eve. “If you do, death will touch you.”
“Nonsense,” said the snake. “Death will not touch you. God knows if you eat it your eyes will fall open and you will be like gods, knowing good from bad.”
So she ate the fruit, and gave it to her husband, and he ate some too, and as a result pain entered the world, also copulation, difficulty in birth, farming—and death. “Dust you are, to dust return.”
In all these stories, the line between knowledge and ignorance appears impossible to cross. How can we who die know about a time when death didn’t exist, though we brought it on ourselves? We can’t go back to what we never knew, since knowledge is one result of our act. Adam and Eve knew what they’d done only in the light of its consequence—death.
So death is the thing we look out of, not at. And knowledge of death is like a heavy chunk of lead in the center of our dreams.
None of these stories are satisfactory. They don’t give us what we want. Parents want for their children—and so for themselves—individual immortality, the survival of a separate identity and consciousness. It’s not enough to say, with Walt Whitman, that “the smallest sprout shows there is really no death,” or with Lucretius or Giordano Bruno that we change our aspect, even disperse throughout the universe, but the atoms live on. We want to be translated to a higher spiritual plane with our unique selves intact. We want peace and well-being, tunnels and white lights, reunions with loved ones—all those things reported in near-death experiences. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, after having spoken to more than a thousand people who had had such experiences, declared that she “knows for a fact there is life after death.” Philippe Aries, on the other hand, calls death “a biological transition without significance.”
Knowledge is shared culture. Our shared culture, however, has been Balkanized by the authority that our shared culture gives to personal experience. I for one have had no experience of immortality. So I’m a skeptic. But if others have had personal experiences of leaving their bodies and meeting dead relatives and entering the light, who am I to be skeptical? Aren’t all claims to knowledge equally valid?
So our knowledge swings wildly, in this stage of world culture, back and forth between skepticism and credulity. We are skeptical about things we haven’t experienced, yet we examine the experiences of others with a hunger for truth inherited from the time when shared knowledge meant survival.
I stood there in that funeral home watching my sons gaze into Paul’s casket, and thought that maybe we ask the wrong questions. Not why do we die, but why do we live? Would my sons waste their lives? Have I wasted mine? Perhaps the wish to live forever is just a desperate hope that a life not be wasted. The Sibyl of Cumae wished for immortality, but neglected to ask Apollo for youth to go along with it. So she aged and shriveled up and still didn’t die, and was hung in a cage as small and dried out as a withered cicada, and when children said, “Sibyl, what do you want?” she replied, “I want to die.”
Cain was also cursed, in some versions of his story, with the inability to die, as was Pontius Pilate’s porter, named Cartaphilus, who, when Jesus was dragged out of court, struck him on the back and said, “Go faster, Jesus, why do you linger?” In this account (by Matthew Paris, in the thirteenth century) Jesus answered, “I indeed am going, but you shall tarry till I come”—meaning, this loudmouth would wander the earth until the Second Coming. In some accounts, Cartaphilus changed his name to Joseph, but in all he became the Wandering Jew.
Vampires too are unable to die yet famously long to. Their attachment to life becomes a helpless addiction, for which we pity and admire them and drive stakes through their hearts. The latter activity is akin to tricking thieves by slashing their purses.
In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift describes a race of immortals called the Struldbruggs, the most opinionated, short-tempered, greedy, morose, self-centered, garrulous, and cold-hearted humans poor Gulliver’s ever met. “Whenever they see a funeral, they lament and repine that others are gone to a harbour of rest, to which they themselves never can hope to arrive.” At the age of ninety, they lose their teeth and hair, yet still live on, although dead to the law. Their heirs have already claimed their estates, so they exist on charity. They still contract diseases, but must continue living in order to fully experience their afflictions—as my father does now. They forget the names of things. “The language of this country being always upon the flux,” and the Struldbruggs clinging to its dead versions, they can’t talk with each other or with mortals except by means of a few vague words. “They were the most mortifying sight I ever beheld,” Gulliver tells us, in Swift’s ironic pun.
Yet, like Gulliver, they still cling to life, and as his Luggnaggian interlocutor says, any mortal with one foot in the grave holds back the other as long as he can. No wonder immortality is not knowledge but conviction, not faith but a demand. “I believe it, uncle, believe it fervently, passionately,” says Sonya in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. As Paul West, speaking for his mother, puts it, “No sensible world . . . offers approximations to an ideal that cannot exist.” And as the old crone Sesame Weichbrodt insists at the end of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, we will see them again, all those loved ones who have died. “If only it were so,” replies Frau Permaneder, who began the novel as the irrepressible little Antonie. At which the hunchback Sesame stands on her tiptoes, all forty-eight inches of her, raps the table with her fist, and shouts in defiance, “It is so!”—the same words I wanted to scream at my boys as they walked back from Paul’s casket.
It is so!
But I didn’t.
One friend of my brother did show up at the wake, and this made my mother happy. She introduced him as Woody, one of Paul’s fellow hams. He was thoughtful and soft-spoken and held my mother’s hand between both of his, but when she left us alone, all he did was ask me questions. He was curious about Paul’s ham equipment—what would I do with that? As it turned out, Woody lived in Haverhill, not far from Paul’s house. What would happen to the house? he wanted to know. Would I put it on the market? I told him I’d only driven by it once—it looked in pretty bad shape. That’s okay, he said. I’m real handy with a hammer. You could save a lot of hassle by selling it yourself. What price were you thinking?
No idea, I said. I’ll have to have it appraised.
How about we meet? You can show me the place.
I felt ill at ease. This friend, it appeared, had turned out to be a carrion eater, but he looked like a nice guy: beaming face, yellow mustache. I told him I’d be back in a few weeks to go through my brother’s house, and would give him a call.