Ghost, page 9
In the hallway, David goes directly to the sitting parlor, where he’s been visiting with Patrick McConoghy and his family. As the mortuary always does for poor families, it has taken this case pro bono. Pathetically, Patrick keeps repeating his gratitude to David and the rest of the staff. “You are good people.” Patrick is a large man with red hair and freckles, bushy red eyebrows, a gap between his two front teeth. Both daughters have red hair as well. Sitting on the sofa together, the three of them look like a garden of red plants.
Over the years, David has often been a customer at Patrick’s shoe shop but has never engaged in more than two minutes of conversation with the man. In person, Patrick speaks in a quiet, halting voice, but once David heard him and his wife shouting at each other in the back of the shop. Patrick has a famous ability to match faces with shoes. Out of a hundred pairs of refurbished shoes on his rack, he can retrieve the right shoes for each customer without glancing at the tag. Patrick himself wears the shoes his customers have discarded. For today, he’s borrowed shiny black patent-leather shoes, and his curly red hair is neatly trimmed and combed. But his eyes are swollen, and he keeps jabbing at them with the knuckles of his left hand. “Shop’s been closed the last six weeks,” he says to David. “Nothing to be done for it. I had to take care of my Julia.” His breath smells of alcohol.
Two of the women friends talk quietly to the children, paging through a picture book, while the third sits in the wingback and knits. “There’s no sense in this,” the knitting woman says to David. Mille Halliburton is her name, and she’s knitting a sweater for one of the red-headed girls. A strand of saffron-colored thread wanders lazily from her lap to a ball of yarn in her purse. “A woman with two young children, taken away at forty years old,” says Mille. “Can you tell me what meaning there is in that? I don’t understand it. It makes me angry.”
“God knows the meaning of it,” says one of the other women.
“Well, I wish God would tell me,” says Mille. “Because it sure doesn’t make any sense to me. Sometimes I wonder if there even is—”
“Don’t dare say it,” breaks in the other woman. “It’s not for us to figure these things out.”
The younger of the two daughters—she must not be older than four—looks up from her book and tells David that her mother is up in the clouds and that she can see them but they can’t see her. “Can you talk to my wife?” Patrick abruptly asks David. The three women friends exchange glances. Then, one by one, they step out into the hallway, as if they shouldn’t witness this moment of privacy, or perhaps they don’t want to hear whatever lie David is about to tell. Patrick and his two daughters are staring at David. Suddenly the world turns totally silent. Voices stop midsentence. The footsteps in the hallway come to a halt. Even the clock in Martin’s office seems to freeze. In the terrible silence, in the purity, David looks helplessly at Patrick, remembering the sight of Julia McConoghy stretched out on the embalming table. No, he mumbles, he doesn’t think he can. Patrick continues to stare at him, not accepting David’s answer. The two daughters stare at him. He’s fallen through the ice.
“What’s going to happen to those girls?” Martin whispers in the hallway. “Mr. McConoghy can’t possibly take care of those girls.”
“You don’t know that,” says Jenny. “Have you talked to the friends?”
“They live quite a distance, they told me. And they don’t think the girls should be moved. You remember that family two years ago, the three children?”
“We’re doing what we can,” says Jenny, fussing with one of the flower arrangements. “You can’t carry the world on your shoulders, love.”
“I know that Mr. McConoghy can’t take care of those girls,” Martin says, shaking his head. “It breaks my heart to look at those girls. And there’s no family, other than an old uncle.”
David, still shaken from Patrick’s question, stands in the hallway and remembers the face of Julia McConoghy. She was pretty. Once he asked Martin what thoughts went through his head as he “prepared the remains.” Martin replied that he thought only of making the deceased look as good as possible for the grieving family, giving the deceased a natural and peaceful expression that would comfort the family. But what about the face? asked David. The face. There’s a person lying there. What do you think about when you look at the face? Martin shrugged his shoulders. I don’t think about the deceased, he said. I just think about the grieving family and doing my job. David was not satisfied. He wasn’t getting the answers he wanted. You don’t think at all about the person lying there? No. No? You don’t? David became almost angry with Martin. If you’re only thinking about the family, why do you say a prayer at the beginning? My father always said a prayer, replied Martin, and his father always said a prayer. Martin paused for a moment. “I guess I say a prayer because it feels right. The body is a sacred possession the family has entrusted to me.”
Patrick McConoghy, his two daughters, and their three friends are gathering their coats. It’s time to get into the cars and to leave for the cemetery. No, they’ll go in their own car, thank you. David looks out the window. It is so dark in the rain that he can barely see the cars waiting on the street. He glances at the handwritten poem Patrick has asked him to read at the grave site. In dreaming, we journey to distant blue shores. He recites the line softly and hears his mother’s voice instead. His mother read poems to him before bed, after reading a story to Lauren. Why she read stories to Lauren and poems to him he never knew, another of his mother’s mysteries. He in his bed and she in the corner chair with the single lamp glowing above her head like a halo. Wordsworth. Dickinson. Coleridge. More than once she read to him The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It was one of her favorites, and he would occasionally come upon her in the little hallway between the bedrooms, when she thought she was alone, and find her reciting the lines to herself. She said that you could tell a poet’s style from one line, and style was everything. Neither of his parents was cultured, but his mother liked poetry. To mark the poems she wanted to read, she used little scraps of paper torn from old phone books. The sounds of the words calmed him, but their meanings stirred him and made him want to leave their small house and go to far places. It was a strange sensation that he can still remember, the being calmed and stirred at the same time in different parts of his body. When his mother turned out the light, he would still be stirred and awake, imagining, and he would listen to her footsteps going down the hallway. Even her footsteps weren’t like the footsteps of other people. She seemed to glide when she walked. It was part of her grace. She was never completely attached to anything. She rarely kissed him good night. He can see her as clearly as if she were sitting five feet from him now—his young, glamorous mother with the halo of light above her head, her hair its rich brown natural color, on her left hand the wedding ring that she stopped wearing the week after his father died, the jade necklace around her neck. Until this moment, he had completely forgotten that jade necklace. She hasn’t worn it for thirty years, and yet he sees it now around her neck as she sits in the corner chair and reads to him, her voice calming and stirring.
SOME OF THE FILES, FROM THE MORE illustrious families, bulge with newspaper clippings—business promotions, garden parties, honors and awards, photos, children’s achievements in athletic competitions, wedding announcements. Others contain only the single page of notes from the initial interview. “Father and two children together in one plot/mother with her own family.” The skinny folders sometimes get lost. Folders get lodged within other folders, folders get misfiled, folders slip down to the bottom of the drawer. Lives are shuffled like playing cards. At Jenny’s request, David has been going through the preplanned funeral files, weeding out the extraneous material. “Martin clips everything,” she said this morning in that mildly disapproving tone she uses when referring to Martin’s excesses. It should all be scanned and digitized anyway. David sits at Martin’s desk, in Martin’s chair, late in the evening, a pile of folders nearby. He glances sleepily at the glass paperweight that belonged to Martin’s father, the photograph of Martin and his father and grandfather at some country inn, a well-used book titled Stamps of the World. Breathing deeply to stay awake, he reads the first paragraph of each clipping to see if it should stay in the folder or be tossed. But how to know? Sometimes families ask for the most random thing to be included in the obituary, a vague memory of some event or accomplishment, and it can be found or not found only in the folder. In one photograph, a boy, now in his fifties, grins at the camera during a high school football game.
The boy reminds David of Bartley Ryan, who was always handsome and blond until he lost his hair—David is still astonished by how much Bartley has changed, seeing him just a month or two ago, weeping without embarrassment and making his ugly comments about Bethany. And Bartley has just called about the newspaper article that appeared last week, the second one, this time containing a twisted statement from David. The reporter, the same who had done the first story, apparently energized by the public enthusiasm for the topic, followed him one evening to Ellen’s apartment. Do you deny that you saw a ghost? she asked. I never said it was a ghost, David blurted in frustration. “It?” That was all he needed to say. “It” was certainly something. “It” was not nothing. “It” was a subject that commanded a verb. Whereupon the newspaper considered the sighting “confirmed by the original source.” “Mr. David Kurzweil, a respected former bank employee with advanced education, did not deny that he witnessed a supernatural event on April 23. Whether ghost, spiritual messenger, or energy aura, this newspaper will not speculate.” As further support for the veracity of the sighting, the newspaper went on to describe the venerable history of the mortuary itself. A day later, a remarkable image appeared in the paper. Somehow, a photographer had gotten into the slumber room and taken a picture. Martin and Jenny had been turning down all requests for photographs, but an outsider could have posed as a grieving family member and hidden a small camera. The published photo showed a faint haze hovering in midair.
The business of the mortuary, which for three quarters of a century was a meandering stream, has turned into a small flood. Families who have buried their loved ones with other funeral homes for generations are now calling Martin’s establishment for appointments. People want to sit for an hour in the slumber room, to meet David and plead with him. They want him to talk to their dead relatives. They want him to describe the nature of the other side. I can’t help you, David says over and over. I wish I could help you. The grieving families don’t accept his denials. “We just want to know if Mother is okay,” a man implored David yesterday in the arrangement room. “Don’t, Paul,” said the wife. “You’re embarrassing me. Your mother is dead.”
Martin has grudgingly lifted his moratorium. Anybody can talk to whomever. Including Ophelia. Go ahead, blab away. Just don’t tell me about it, he says. I don’t understand the world anymore. “Well, you should understand one thing,” says Jenny. “We’re doing a firesale business.” If this continues, she adds, we’ll finally be able to refurbish the furniture. We can buy a new hearse. We can put new tiles in the bathroom. But I don’t want new tiles in the bathroom, Martin says. They are tiles my mother got for us and I love those tiles. They’re ugly, says Jenny. Your mother had horrible taste. Admit it. And what a lovely article in the paper about the funeral home. Very respectful. “People had no idea it had been in one family for four generations,” says Jenny. “What do you think, love? Don’t say you aren’t pleased.” Martin won’t comment, but he’s not discouraging the increase in business.
On her signature cream-colored stationery, David’s mother has written a cryptic response to his request to talk to her. “I’m not in a good state of mind for you to visit at the moment.”
Gallison, Gallois, Garrity, Girabaldi, Grady. David trudges on, barely through the G’s, with a hundred or more folders to go and so many new people calling up for appointments and it now being nearly midnight. His hands are smudged from the newspaper print. Martin’s desk. He once sat at the desk of his father. It had a big ledger book, where the accounts were kept, and he imagined how nice it would be to write all of those numbers in their neat boxes. The telephone rings. A silence at the other end. “Shaw Funeral Home,” David says. He can hear someone breathing. “Yes, what is it?” He waits for a few moments, then hangs up.
He is lost in the M’s the next day, somewhere near Montegut, when Ellen calls.
“Guess where I am,” she says.
“I can’t guess. Aren’t you on your lunch break?”
“Yes, I am. And I’m sitting on the bed in room three-seventeen of the hotel on the east side of town. I’ve rented it for the day. And…let me see what else. I’m not wearing any clothes. I thought you might like to come over.”
He pauses, trying to imagine her there. He knows the hotel. “I’ll have to tell Martin something to get away.”
“Tell him anything. Just come. Room three-seventeen.”
“I got that.”
He hurries down the street. He can hardly wait to see the maroon awning of the hotel, the large terra-cotta pots on the curb. In the lobby, people lounge about, waiting for lunch. There, past the front desk, he spots the staircase, and, without looking at anyone, bounds up the carpeted stairs.
He knocks.
“Is it you?”
“Yes.”
Invisibly, the door opens. Ellen appears from behind the door, naked, and rubs her body against him. She watches as he undresses. “Mr. Kurzweil, you shouldn’t meet strange women in their hotel rooms in the middle of the day.”
“Only this once,” he says, grinning.
“We don’t have much time.” She pushes him to the floor, on his back, and straddles him. “Isn’t this better than whatever you were doing in the mortuary?”
“Much better,” he says. He can’t remember what he was doing, what he was worrying about. Her silky dark hair sweeps across his chest, her nipples. The world has shrunk to this room, this small area of rug on the floor. As she begins to sway back and forth, a patch of light comes through the shutters and falls across her shoulders.
He sees blood and sits up. “You’re having your period.”
“I am. But it’s a light day. Is it a problem?”
“We’ve never made love when you were having your period.”
“But I want to. I want to now.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Does my blood bother you?”
“I just wasn’t expecting it.”
“I want you to know everything about my body.” She goes to the bathroom and gets a towel and puts it beneath them, and she is delicate even doing this common thing, she is a sculpture of ivory, touched with the dark triangle of her pubic hair. When she sits astride him again, she massages his penis, splotchy with her blood, and puts him inside of her.
“Oh,” she moans. “That’s what I wanted, Mr. Kurzweil.”
“Happy to oblige, Ms. Merriwether.”
“Doesn’t it feel good to you?” she gasps. “Like this? With my blood?”
“Yes, it does.”
“Say it again.”
“Yes, it does. Yes.” She is right. He wants this, he wants all of her.
A SCREECH OF TIRES. Martin, who ventured out this morning to be fitted for a much-needed new suit, comes bolting through the front door and throws his coat to the floor, dashes into the first room he sees, which happens to be the visitors’ washroom, and locks the door behind him.
“We’d better send for Jenny,” says Ophelia.
“It’s me,” Jenny says softly through the locked washroom door. There’s no answer. “Martin, are you in there?” She knocks on the door and waits. “Just say something if you’re in there.”
“Yes,” comes Martin’s voice.
“It’s okay,” says Jenny. “You’re back now. You’re safe.”
Martin says nothing.
“You stay in there as long as you want,” says Jenny.
Alarmed, David stands in the hallway with Robert and Ophelia. “Is there anything we can do to help?” he whispers. Jenny shakes her head no.
“Call a doctor,” Martin says. “I’m having a heart attack.”
“You’re not having a heart attack, love,” Jenny says to the door. She brings a chair into the hallway and sits down next to the washroom. “He just needs some time by himself,” she whispers.
“Are you still out there?” comes Martin’s voice.
“Yes, I’m right here,” says Jenny.
“Poor Martin,” whispers Opheila. “Something wicked must have happened to him when he was little.”
“Nothing that he’s told me,” whispers Jenny. “I know that he had some problems with his older brother years ago. But I don’t think that’s it. He just doesn’t like new people or places.”
“It’s really weird,” says Ophelia. “He never gets like this with the grieving families. There’s tons of new people.”
