OLD DEAD HANDS PRAYERED, a draped arrangement of draping skin, a fleshy hem colored to look alive by the gentle mortician, Nonna was in the casket, and I was at her side, yet “the glazing eyes shunned my gaze,” or that was what I was remembering about her as we drove to her interment.
Arthur had driven us—Uncle Billy, Aunt Frances, me—through a gardener’s rain that gullied the tent as we stood at the site, Nonna’s gravesite, brighter greens, June, plate-sized peonies beaten in the downpour, the coffin shiny.
Who can forget? some said. Description of the too long-alive, now dead. The homily for Nonna went on and on, and Arthur had to wait.
Who would have guessed there was so much left to say?
At the Big House everyone I saw chewed with his mouth open. At the Big House Nonna’s lawyer sleeked through the room, nodding at stories, saying, “Yes, she was an amazing woman, yes, indeed.”
Indeed, indeed sounded like my mother when she was being formal, but my mother was not here. Mother was in California, the state she called her home. “I can be a kook and not stand out,” she often repeated when we spoke on the phone.
Uncle Billy had not spoken to Mother in a while, and he excused himself for keeping my mother uninformed, saying, “Your mother would be too upset,”
By the time I told her, Mother said it was too late for her.
“I need weeks to get ready,” Mother said, “and besides Nonna’s been dead for years.”
Aunt Frances said, “Your mother’s not interested in other people anyway,” which wasn’t true, I thought; because Mother wanted to know about Aunt Frances, yes, and Uncle Billy. Mother wanted to know about them especially and asked me, she asked me often now that we spoke any day of the week and not just Sundays—Mother asked me, “How are your aunt and uncle spending their money these days?”
But how would I know? I didn’t live here anymore; I recognized very few faces. Mrs. Greene’s, Mrs. Greene’s daughter, Arthur, of course, the Nordstruckers, Miss Pearl of Miss Pearl’s (still alive!), the Miller sisters, Mr. and Mrs. Vanvogel. Uncle Billy and Aunt Frances moved among these and other friends they said were Nonna’s but who were, in fact, theirs, as who was left alive that Nonna knew?
Death, a death mound, like those lumps in the earth Aunt Frances had pointed to as burial grounds for the Indians. Of course, Indians, Uncle Billy’s found and collected arrowheads from the Potawatomi! Next to the case of sprung-winged bugs and other artifacts. Buckskinned men powwowing lake paths in soft-soled moccasins, they and their squaws and their sick-to-death children were turned into lumps in the earth where Aunt Frances had pointed. Nonna and Nonna’s friends—even the absent O’Boyle—and Arlette and my father were turned into hillocks I drove past, touring the countryside because I couldn’t stay at Uncle Billy’s house watching the people eat with their mouths wide open—no. I didn’t want to talk to Nonna’s lawyer, so I took the second car and drove to where I could sit off the road and smoke.
I smoked and thought of Nonna and how she had outlived my dread of her dying.
I smoked and wondered at how green it was, June, green and cold, a bed of iced lettuce, and in the distance down the hill, the lapis-blue of lakes, one after another, as though the land were a lake and the lakes, blue stone, and skipped. How was it possible to be cheerful, and yet I was; I was oddly gleeful and merrily giant-stepping into my life.
Nonna left me money—thank you, Nonna!—and a large diamond ring and a double strand of pearls. I bought an apartment in a brownstone with most of what she gave me. West Seventy-Six, in the city where sunlight is expensive.