Violet, holding a feather duster in one hand, was bending to the baseboard on the landing of the second floor as Peter climbed the stairs. She swung her body up and toward him until she was standing still, the duster held upright like a bouquet. He paused. Their eyes met. Her expression was one of complacent charity; she had taken a candid shot of him and she was sure of its truth. He had been out—astonishingly—with a woman. But he saw a trace of struggle in her smile. He guessed she had been listening, half consciously, for the sounds of his morning presence above her and had not heard them. Anger was not among the emotions she permitted herself. He stood there, seeing the very core of their connection, revealed like the core of a halved apple. Violet, kind, smug, jealous; he, recognizing the jealousy, faintly gratified by it, knowing she would deny to the death that she felt it. Upon her raft of toothpicks Violet sat, proclaiming that the boundless waste upon which she floated was no more than an inlet.
“Ah-ha!” she said brightly, “so there you are!” But he saw at once that she regretted her words. Hastily, she asked, “Is the rain still so heavy? Roger absolutely refused to wear his raincoat to school this morning. Ah—these children! I suppose they must rebel.”
“Good morning, Violet. It’s raining, but the wind has come up. It might blow over later today.”
“You look like you could use a good cup of coffee,” she suggested.
“I could, but I can’t,” he said.
She plucked distractedly at the feathers of the duster. He could see how much she wanted to ask him where he’d been, yet she felt she had no right. She settled for a kind of sporty motherliness.
“You look rather seedy,” she said. “Are you feeling all right?”
“I’m tired. I’ve been up most of the night. I have to go to a funeral today.”
“Oh, dear! Not someone close to you, I hope?”
“No. Only someone I knew. An old lady.”
“Ah, well, then. It’s a natural thing.”
She was palpably relieved. “I’ll tell you all about it later,” he said. “I’ll drop by.”
She stood discreetly aside. He continued up to his floor, wondering if Gina was home frightening her mother with her morose presence. He couldn’t remember if it was a day she went to her university classes.
Clara, her eyes ringed with fatigue, had made him breakfast. Then he had called the hotel. Desmond had answered, saying he had not yet reached the home but intended to call around nine. Peter was thankful for Desmond’s characteristic lack of curiosity. He did not have to produce the excuse that he was calling in order to send flowers to the cemetery. He told Desmond he had seen both the brothers. Desmond did not inquire how they had taken the news. How was Laura? Peter asked. Desmond said she was taking a bath and had had some sleep. She was fine, he said, considering.
Clara had listened, standing around edgily, drinking her coffee as though on the run. He had asked her if she wouldn’t have to phone her office. “You forget,” she had said. “I’ve already taken care of that.”
“Do you want me to go?” he asked. “I can telephone you later as soon as I find out.”
“If you don’t mind,” she had replied. “It’s only that my friend is coming here to pick me up at nine.” She smiled at him suddenly with a certain delicacy. “Then I’d have to explain your being here.”
His avuncular laugh sounded utterly false to him, but he said, “Thank you for even thinking of it.”
He let himself into his apartment. The plant seemed to have dropped another hatful of leaves while he’d been out. His unused bed looked strange to him. He got out of his wrinkled clothes, put on his bathrobe, and called the hotel again. This time Laura answered, and when he heard her voice, his own faltered.
“Laura…how are you? I’m so sorry….”
“Peter, you were a dear to go tramping around all night, getting hold of those two. They’ve just called, one after the other. You must be all in.”
“I’m all right. Are the arrangements all made?”
“The arrangements…yes. Desmond has just been in touch with them. Everything is done. I can’t really chat now, Peter. We have a lot of telephoning to do—cancelling the trip…”
“Where is the funeral to be held?”
“It won’t be a funeral, really. Desmond bought a plot years ago. We had a little trouble, you know. The Long Island cemeteries are all, almost, Israeli territory. But he found one, for the nondenominational dead.” She laughed, waited the space of a breath for his response, and when there was none, she said, “It’s called Mount Laurel Rest, just beyond Queens, I think.”
“This morning?”
“Not so fast,” she said. “Even Desmond can’t work that kind of miracle. It’s at two. Desmond says the home is quite indignant with us. I suppose they think we’re very low class. Officials are always vicious, aren’t they?”
He wanted abruptly to end the conversation. “I’ll let you make your calls then,” he said.
“Peter, we can’t thank you enough,” she said very formally.
He called Clara. Since the funeral was supposed to be somewhere beyond Queens, it might be better if she met him downtown, here in the Village at the garage where he kept his car. He said about 12:30. Perhaps she could get a little more sleep. She didn’t want to sleep, she said, her voice worried.
“Are you afraid?” he asked. “About being there with Laura in the cemetery?”
“Christ, yes!” she said, her voice exploding in his ear. “I hate it! I hate the way I feel about it! Well—I said I would go. So I will. But I don’t know what I’ll do if she throws a fit when she sees me.”
“Bury her!” he said.
Her laugh was troubled, fearful.
“How did you manage it?” she asked. “Talking to her and knowing you’d been to see me, to tell me…. She always catches me out. I’ve never got away with it.”
He didn’t want to talk about how he’d felt, so he lied to Clara. “I didn’t think about it,” he said. “And she’s not my mother.”
He put down the phone and discovered his hands were trembling slightly. He and Clara had become co-conspirators. For Laura, he had always loosened what tenuous bonds held him to other people; his betrayal of them was his gift to her. Yet he rarely spoke of her to others—as though she was a secret, sacred object carried around his neck. She had been for him so singular, so unique, so unmediated, the very stuff of an essential humanness before it was refined and shaped by conciliation. About her, there had been no odor of sanctity, the sickly sweet smell of family life. Now he was conspiring to force it on her at the very brink of her mother’s grave.
He had waked on Clara’s couch with a backache, his head thick with the residue of anxious dreams. What he had said to Clara about Laura’s lawlessness reverberated in his mind as he drank the coffee she prepared for him. What did those words mean? They had been elicited from him at a late hour, spoken in exasperation. They had not given any ultimate definition to his relationship with Laura. But they had exploded it. He knew how transient such dramatic summations could be, surging up with what seems to be all the truth of a thing, falling away as a great wave falls, into the trough of daily life and its unthinking motion.
As he bathed and changed his clothes, as he telephoned his office to say he would not be in that day, and ordered his car from the garage, he was thinking ceaselessly about himself. He could not bear the tremor in his fingers. He found his apartment cramped. It seemed to him that the very simplicity of its furnishings was pretentious. If he secretly accused Violet of claiming everything she owned had fallen from the lap of God, untainted by human commerce, how could he not judge his own pretended simplicity? He remembered Eugenio’s miserable, drab clothes hanging from the metal rack. He stared with disgust at his own navy blue suits. His secretary’s lisping, overly sympathetic voice on the phone implied years of unwarranted and presumptuous leniency toward him. When she said she hoped he’d feel better soon—he had, for some reason, said he had a touch of flu—he thought for a moment with a literally divided consciousness that she’d said she hoped he would feel worse soon.
He drank large quantities of water, no sooner finishing one glass than he felt dry again and went for another.
He would try to work. But when he took hold of a manuscript that was lying on his desk, it slipped from his hand and fell to the floor, its pages scattering all over the rug. He cursed it and himself, and glancing frantically about the walls of his living room as though they were the walls of a cell, his eyes fell upon Hansen’s drawing of himself and Barbara.
She had two grown children now. She was living with her husband in Chicago. Sometimes he ran into people they had both known and they gave him news of her. She had married almost at once after their divorce. When he tried to imagine her, she was always the young woman he had married. But she was almost exactly his age, their birthdays only a month apart. He had forgotten whose came first. What had she been like? “Poor Barby,” Laura called her. Had she been poor Barby? Why had she married him? She had been so sure about wanting a divorce—as he had been. And she had suffered. But she must have known that something hopeless was embedded like a stone at the heart of their marriage. Something about him.
He poured whiskey into a glass and sat down and sipped it slowly, and slowly he began to feel calm. He sat there for a while, then went and picked up the pages of the manuscript, and put them in order. It was still too early to leave for the garage, but he must get out of the apartment. He could stop by the neighborhood bookstore for a while. As he walked downstairs, he heard the sound of Violet’s vacuum cleaner.
In the bookstore, several young clerks were gathered around a workman who was installing a mirror in a corner of a wall. The proprietor, an elderly man with a bramble of beard, his fat torso encased in wine-colored corduroy, said, “Well, Mr. Rice, you see what I have been pushed to do? They’ve been stealing me blind, coming in here and ripping off my stock. God knows the end of all this. There’s more stealing than buying. Now, who’s supposed to watch that mirror all the time?”
Peter looked up into the mirror. “See?” asked the proprietor, “you can see what’s going on in there.” Peter saw himself distorted, tiny, mostly head and gray hair, a glint of eyeglasses.
“I’ll just browse,” he said.
On the new fiction stand, he saw three novels from his own publishing house. One was by the Japanese writer. On the back was a large photograph of her wearing a kimono. She was looking directly into the camera, directly at him. He had paid scant attention to the picture when it was on his desk. Now he stared at it. All that was enigmatic about her had been wiped out by the camera. She was simply Oriental. When she came to see him the first time, she had been wearing a gray suit, a bag slung over her shoulder. It was ridiculous and wasteful of him to buy the novel, but he intended to, to give it to Clara.
The proprietor glanced down at it. “Things are bad all over, aren’t they, Mr. Rice. You got to go out and buy your own books now?”
Peter said, “I wanted to see how it felt to be a customer. Don’t put it in a bag.”
He found Clara waiting for him on the sidewalk in front of the entrance to the garage. She was wearing a dark brown suit and a white raincoat.
“Is it a long way?” she asked.
“Not in distance, but maybe in traffic.”
An attendant drove out the car and handed him his keys.
“Will it take long to get there?” she asked.
“It depends,” he said. “You can’t predict traffic anymore. Here’s a book for you.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Isn’t this the woman you were speaking about at dinner last night?” He nodded. “How foreign the Japanese are,” she remarked. “More foreign than anyone. She’s very pretty.”
“The salesmen didn’t think so. They didn’t care for the book either.”
“I’ve got two left-handed gloves,” she said. “I grabbed them up without looking.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I’d feel better if I was entirely covered,” she said. “Are you supposed to wear a hat to a funeral?”
“I don’t think anyone cares these days.”
“God! I wish the rain would stop!”
They drove through the streets of lower Broadway, Clara talking of the lofts some of her friends had been digging out of the entrails of old warehouses or abandoned factories, he noting the variety and costly breed of dogs being walked by young couples on the narrow streets, where windows thick with dust and walls painted the dead green or gray of prisons seemed never to have been touched with sunlight. It was not so much a conversation as a sustaining of sound. Each was apprehensive, but Peter felt abashed too, humbled by daylight and weariness, the illumination, the purpose of the night now dwindled down.
Soon, they both grew silent. After they crossed the Williamsburg bridge, they made better time. There wasn’t much traffic after all. As they neared an underpass, Clara said, “Look! Up there!”
On the bridge above, Peter glimpsed a number of bearded men walking, their large, black, flat-crowned hats all seeming to slant in the same direction.
“Hasidim,” he said.
“How amazing they look!” she said. “Like creatures from a fairy tale.”
“Do you know anything about them?” he asked.
“No. Just that they’re a Jewish sect, aren’t they? But it’s like an omen, seeing them like that.”
He glanced over at her. She looked absorbed, faintly gratified. He thought, she’s still young enough to find a promise in diversity, to claim the promise for her own life.
“Did it go all right this morning?” he asked. “With your friend?”
She replied somewhat defensively. “He’s very conventional. For a moment there, I wanted to tell him I’d go with him anyhow. He would have been shocked.” She paused, then said, “It’s odd to think that if I had gone with him, I wouldn’t have told him about Alma’s death. I would have kept it to myself…the way Laura did.”
At the mention of her mother’s name, Peter felt a thrust of fear.
“This will change things between you and Laura, won’t it?” she asked, speaking quickly and without emphasis as though disposing of something that had little meaning for her but might if she thought about it.
“Yes,” he replied bleakly.
“For me, too,” she remarked. “Although I can’t think how things can change between us. I don’t know what there is to change.”
By the time they reached the filigreed gates of Mount Laurel Rest Cemetery, the rain was falling in gusts. Above them, the sky seethed and rolled with thick gray clouds. The wind which had arisen blew their coats against them, blew across the fields of tombs around them, stirring the stiff clumps of plastic flowers that were set in front of some of the graves, their piercing reds and greens and blues like something acid on the tongue.
Peter left the car in a circular parking space from which graveled paths led to one section or another of the Mount, a barely perceptible rise in which young trees, their limbs black in the rain, seemed to have been stuck in the earth carelessly, like pitchforks.
A few hundred yards away, they saw two men talking, standing by a heap of freshly excavated soil. They began to walk toward them. Peter took off his glasses; they were too wet to see through. Clara buttoned her coat. Peter approached the two men. “Yeah,” one said, in answer to Peter’s question. He gestured toward the hole. “That’s Maldonada. They’re due along now.”
Nearby stood a family sepulcher, its massive door open. One of the gravediggers gestured toward it. “You can go in there and get out of the rain,” he said.
Clara looked reluctant. “Come on,” Peter said. “We might as well.”
They ducked beneath the low portal. The floor was earth. Shovels, pails, and a large wooden box were neatly placed against one wall. They sat down on a narrow stone ledge behind which rose three tiers of coffins. Shortly, the two gravediggers came to stand just inside the entrance. They muttered to each other, ignoring Peter and Clara.
“I’ve never been inside one of these things,” she whispered.
“It’s shelter,” he said.
“I wasn’t objecting. You could even say it’s cozy.”
Peter smiled. “You could,” he agreed.
“I’m really scared,” she said. He touched her hand.
One of the gravediggers turned to them. “Your party is here,” he informed them, then he and the other man went outside and walked away to stand some distance from the open grave. Peter got up at once and walked out just as Carlos arrived at the entrance to the sepulcher.
“Peter! You came!” he exclaimed. Peter said nothing. Carlos peered inside to where Clara was still sitting, huddled, on the ledge. He stared at her for a long moment, then went on. In another minute, Desmond walked by, his arm around Laura, then Eugenio.
Clara went out. The branches of the trees were whipping back and forth in the wind. Some men, beetlelike in their black clothes, were carrying a coffin up the path toward her. She went to stand at the gravesite next to Peter. At that moment, Laura, with a look of revulsion, drew her foot off the carpet of false grass which had been thrown over the raw earth on the edge of the hole. Then she looked up and saw Clara and Peter standing together. Clara wanted to shriek.
But Laura said nothing, and her face was empty of all expression. She hardly seemed alive.
On either side of her stood Desmond and Carlos. A few feet away, Eugenio stared at the ground, his hands clasped in front of him, a plastic transparent cover on his hat. Carlos wore his beret. But Laura’s head was bare and her hair, darkened by the wet, was plastered to her cheeks and forehead.
The coffin was placed in a metal cradle. The men from the funeral home stood back, their heads bowed.
There was no sound except the rain falling on gravel and earth. Everyone was waiting. Then Desmond whispered something to Carlos. “I don’t know, really,” Carlos said loudly.
Desmond stooped quickly and scooped up a handful of earth and threw it on the coffin. The funeral home men seemed to spring forward at once. The ropes that held the coffin were loosened and paid out, and the coffin dropped heavily downward.
Peter, half blind without his eyeglasses, looked across at Laura. Her eyes met his briefly; her glance passed over him. He might have been invisible.
In the box, nearly at the bottom of the grave now, was an old woman Peter had hardly known. Her three elderly children seemed to lean forward as though they too were drawn down toward what remained of their mother, a woman from a different time he would never know anything about. All around him, the gray pastures of the dead for an instant seemed to reverberate with the lost energies of unknown lives, and Peter felt the crushing weight, the sheer effort of a single human life to complete its course.
A few feet away from him stood Clara. She was staring at the ground. He could not imagine what she was thinking, why she had given in to him and come to this place, what she sensed, if she sensed anything, of the significance of her standing there with the others. And if her presence had no significance for her, then what did it matter that she was there? Had it really been for her that he had been so insistent?
The gravediggers were looking now with open calculation at the group around the grave. He looked once more at Laura. How shrunken she seemed! How miserably wet she looked! How like her not to have worn some covering for her head! He strained to see the young girl who had, so long ago, smiled at him in that disordered, lovely room on a spring morning.
Then, suddenly, she looked straight at him. Although her features were indistinct to him, he felt the force of Laura’s whole self gathered up into that forward thrust of her head toward him, and he was shaken out of his perpetual effort to recollect her as he had first seen her.
“What you’ve done is nothing…nothing!” she said.
Desmond put his arm around her, gathering her up and pressing her against himself, and began to lead her down the path to the limousine that waited below in the parking space. Behind them, the two brothers followed. Peter turned to Clara. She was staring at him fixedly; he did not know whether she had heard Laura’s actual words or not, but she must have caught the sound of that voice coming toward him like a squall moving swiftly across water.
The rain was slackening. He thought he smelled lilac. But it couldn’t be lilac yet, not till late April. He watched Laura bend and get into the car, then Desmond, then Carlos. Eugenio sat in the front with the driver.
The gravediggers were walking toward the grave, their shovels ready. He stood another minute, aware of Clara’s questioning glance.
“Wait!” he wanted to cry to Clara, to the gravediggers. “Wait! It’s not nothing…I’ve almost got hold of it!”
But all that came to him was the fragment of a memory that like a dream faded even as he struggled to hold it—another spring morning when he was twelve years old, when he’d awakened in his bed by the window and seen, freshly fallen, the last thin snow of the year, heard, below in the kitchen, the voices of his mother and his sisters as they went about making breakfast, known the cat and dog had been let out because he saw their paw marks braiding the snow, and felt that that day, he only wanted to be good.