3

Do You Believe in Rock and Roll?

The wake at the funeral home in Osterville was a muddle, tragedy and farce combined; all the distant relations meeting after a long time and making jokes in the form of greetings, remarking on how fat or how thin or how bald we had become. We were children again whenever we met, which was seldom—we hated and mocked all our cousins, saw them as the savages we could not admit to being ourselves. And the pieties about Dad. Then tears. Then they just hung around and leafed through the albums of snapshots that cousins had brought: children’s marriages, grandchildren, vacations, pets and gardens, and pictures of prized possessions, cars and houses, the sort of ritual objects that boastful tribesmen would haul out at a clan feast. “His name is Chanler! That’s Chad! She’s Tyler! This is Blair!”

“Remember Jake?”

“How could I forget Jake and the cup!”

Young Jake who, as a reckless tot, had once eaten a Styrofoam cup, ran and hid.

Mother sat near the casket, enthroned as it were, receiving people, who paid their respects—and they too seemed like emissaries from other tribes, the big families who were our relations, several of them even bigger than ours. The look on Mother’s face I recognized from the hospital: exalted, somewhat crazed, with a serpent’s glittering stare. She sat upright, weirdly energized by the whole business.

More rituals, the funeral mass at the church, the platitudes, the handling of the shiny coffin, the sprinkling of holy water on its lid, the processions and prayers, all of it looking eerily superstitious to me, for I kept thinking of naked, gaudily painted people in New Guinea doing similar things, preparing the corpse of an elder and calling upon the gods to protect him and to hurry his soul into the next world. All this while, Mother was the single surviving dignitary, bestowing a kiss on the polished lid of the coffin and walking past the banks of flowers with a slight and smiling hauteur.

We drove to the cemetery in a long line of cars behind the hearse. Mother was in back seat of the lead car between Franny and Rose, Fred at the wheel, Gilbert next to him. Hubby and his family were in the following car, with Floyd and me, the flawed divorced sons, behind them.

I asked Floyd about the meal I had missed at the restaurant, when I had snuck out to be with Father.

“I didn’t stay,” he said. “I went for a walk. So did Hubby, but in a different direction. It was just Ma and the others, I guess. I wrote a poem about it.”

“I think Ma was pissed off that I didn’t stay. Like it was a test of loyalty.”

Floyd wasn’t listening. He said, “This is uncanny,” and turned the radio up. It was “American Pie.”

“Remember Granma’s funeral?” Floyd said, and he laughed and shook his head.

One of the footnotes to our family history was that during the funeral procession to Grandma’s burial, our cousin Allie, a goofball, had the radio on, and that same song was playing. He sang along with it, drumming on the steering wheel with his grease monkey’s fingers, following Grandma’s hearse. None of us ever remarked on it as an insult to the dead woman, only as an extemporized piece of hilarity. Drove my Chevy to the levee . . . At the cemetery, we plodded past gravestones to the hole of Father’s freshly dug grave. What seemed like a diverse community of many mourners was a procession of mostly members of our own family—spouses, ex-spouses, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. The rest were distant relations. Hardly any were friends, for my parents were at the age when most of their friends were either dead or too ill to show up.

Perhaps this is the place to stress that a big family, like ours in Mother Land, does not welcome friends, and has no room for strangers; it is acutely uncomfortable when either friends or strangers penetrate the privacy of the household and become witnesses and listeners, privy to outbursts and secrets. Even outsiders who are frank admirers are kept at a distance—especially them, for there is much that must be withheld from them in order to keep their admiration intact. In the same way, a savage tribe is not just suspicious of strangers but overtly hostile. We were cruel to each other, but we were much crueler toward outsiders. Mother Land had that, and more, in common with Albania at its most Maoist, when it was closed to the world. You don’t betray the tribe.

As Mother emphasized in her gossip, spouses were outsiders and all of them were mocked, always behind their backs. It could be awkward when one of them caused trouble, but it was worse for them when they tried to be generous—offered presents, cooked a meal, paid for something. “Imagine, forking out good money for this!” The present was laughable, the meal was a joke, and if they could so easily afford to pay for something, where was the sacrifice? But a dark angry spouse might inspire a measure of respect, if the person was strong, and especially so if the person was a crazy threat, because fear was all that mattered to us. At best, spouses were tolerated, but none of them inspired warmth.

At the time of Father’s funeral, neither Floyd nor I was married, and our ex-spouses and my children were not present. I tried to imagine what my family whispered about my two wives, but I knew I would never succeed in capturing the malice; I would underestimate it, and no one would tell me to my face. In both cases, after we split up, they went far away from me and my big family. Perhaps they had always suspected that they were unwelcome, and maybe they also knew how they had been satirized.

The priest stood in the wind, his cloak billowing as he declaimed his lines. What he said seemed more like a formula of recited verses than sincere prayers. “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes”—we had all heard them before, and now it was Father’s turn. Much of what the priest said was drowned out by the traffic beyond the cemetery wall.

Floyd wagged his head. “Remember, Grandma used to dig dandelions here?”

Not Grandma Justus, but Mother’s mother, a frugal Italian, from another big, disorderly family. She dug the dandelions as if they were a delicacy that ignorant people spurned, and dignified them by calling them by their Italian name, soffione; she used them in salad and soup. A cemetery was a good place to gather them, because of the wall and the gates that kept dogs out.

Floyd was reminiscing, but he could easily have been trying to make me laugh. Getting someone to laugh at a funeral was one of the skills we had acquired as altar boys. Even Father’s funeral was not so solemn an event that we wouldn’t try to raise a laugh somehow.

Our heads were down. We were praying, or pretending to. Floyd was humming and murmuring, This’ll be the day that I die. Yes, he was trying to get me to laugh by reminding me of “American Pie.” I glanced sideways and saw that Mother’s face wore an expression I had never seen before. Her pious posture, head bowed, shoulders rounded, was that of a mourner, yet her face startled me. The haughty look was gone, so were the glittering snake eyes. Hers was a look of relief, of weird jubilation, almost rapture, like someone who has survived an ordeal—weary yet triumphant, full of life and strength.

Father’s coffin was not lowered. It remained covered with a velvet cloth. Dropping it into the hole while we watched was probably considered too dramatic and depressing—indelicate, anyway.

A last prayer by the priest, who I noticed kept mispronouncing Father’s name—did this invalidate the prayer?—and we filed back to our cars.

Most accounts of family funerals end here—are in fact an ending. But walking away and leaving Father behind was a beginning, and it began right away, before we left the cemetery.

Mother had been walking slowly toward the parking lot between Franny and Rose, looking small and propped up by her two daughters, whose faces, exaggeratedly solemn, shook with each step, altering their expressions.

“Take your time, Mumma,” they were saying.

“I got such a lot of guidance this morning talking to Angela. ‘Be strong, Ma,’ she said. You know how she is.”

Seeing me about to join this recession from the grave, Mother turned, broke away from the girls, and looked herself again, fairly large and confident. She approached me, squeezed my hands hard.

“I want you to get married. Find someone nice. I want you to do it for me. Will you do that?”

She had that same deranged look in her eyes as when, in the hospital corridor, she had demanded that Father be taken off the ventilator and said, “Don’t you see this is for the best?”

I didn’t know what to say. She had power. The death of her husband—of Father—had energized her. The king was dead, and she, as queen, was absolute monarch of the realm. She was eighty-three but in every sense a new life was beginning for her—what would become a long one, too, eventful enough to fill a book.

“Maybe we should have a little get-together,” Hubby said.

We were standing in the cemetery’s parking lot. Spouses and children stayed a little way off, with the wincing looks of wary people expecting to be abused.

“Dad would have wanted it—something like a family dinner, like the other night,” Hubby said.

“I don’t think he would have wanted that,” Rose said. “He hated restaurants. He always said they were a waste of money.”

“You had your chance and you blew it,” Franny said. “You walked out of the restaurant the other night. So did Floyd. So did JP. So what’s the point?”

“It’s up to Ma,” Fred said.

We looked at her; for an instant she didn’t look strong anymore. She made a theatrical gesture, touching her gloved hand to her forehead, and said, “I’ve got a splitting headache.”

Franny and Rose rushed to assist her. Gilbert carried her purse. Fred fussed.

The rest of us went our separate ways. In the car, Floyd said, “Fred’s such an asshole. ‘It’s up to Ma.’”

I called Mother that night, but she did not answer the phone, Franny did.

“She’s tired,” Franny said. “Rose and I are staying here a few more days to look after her. She’s had an awful shock. Her nerves are shot.”

Shawk . . . shawt, the accent of Mother Land. But it seemed to me that she’d had no shock at all, just a great reward, of health and strength, a renewed vigor and confidence. She had been proud at the wake, queenly at the cemetery, surrounded by her big family. Her look of power, the triumph of the survivor, had filled me with apprehension.

 

I called her the next day and she said she was feeling better, with Franny and Rose staying with her. Their presence seemed odd, for both of them had jobs teaching school, which they were obviously neglecting.

Some days later, when she was alone, she called me back: “I’m sending you a little something. There was money left over from Dad’s funeral expenses.”

Mother paid a neighbor to clean out Dad’s shed, where the tools had been. The garage, too. All of Dad’s accumulated possessions were junked. The paint cans, the jars of nails, the rope, the coils of wire, the rusty screwdrivers, the ball of string, the stack of folded brown grocery bags. The yellowed newspaper clippings went. They had been nailed to the wall, and some of them were very old: one said WAR IS OVER, another said PEACE AT LAST, the Boston papers from 1945. Some were newspaper pictures of us. Floyd shooting a basket in a high school gym. Fred bundled up in a hockey uniform, his stick poised, pretending to slap a puck. Me holding a trophy from the science fair. Hubby in a group of serious-faced Boy Scouts en route to a jamboree. Clipped-out mentions of events, such as band concerts and ball games. Others were snapshots. Of Franny and her terrified prom date. Of Franny when she was a nun, draped in her penguin outfit. Of Rose, a pretty child in a white dress, hands folded: first communion. Of Gilbert smiling across the bridge of his violin. Several were attempts at family photos, but they were amateurish and awkward—there were too many of us, the camera was cheap, we looked like a discontented mob.

Father’s woodstove was ripped out of the living room. He had kept it burning until the night he was taken to the hospital. No one wanted the old stove. When it was moved, ashes spilled out, and the gray dust powdering the floor was a grotesque reminder of him.

“He never did clean it out thoroughly,” Mother said.

I went back to the cemetery about a month later. Father’s grave looked new and colorless. I planted some geraniums in front of it and a small pointed juniper on either side. I told Mother this.

She smiled in pity, as she always did when I made a blunder. She said, “He’s not there, you know.”

She sent me a check for five hundred dollars. I did not want it, and yet I did not know what to do with it, for the dark secret of receiving money from Mother so confused me I kept it to myself.

Franny and Rose were busier than ever. On their way to Mother’s, they stopped off to see me sometimes, bringing me candy and donuts, the sorts of things they imagined everyone ate.

“We see her every Sunday,” Franny said one day. Rose just smiled. They settled into the cushions of my furniture. I was fascinated by the way these chairs announced the danger of weight in the twang of their springs. “We know how busy you are. You don’t have to come if you don’t want.”

Soon after that, each of them bought a new car.

“Mumma likes visits,” Rose said. “You know how she is.”

I said I did, but did I? Nothing was simple in Mother Land.