Our disobedience of these instructions went uncharacteristically unremarked. We didn’t go to bed. We weren’t sleeping well anyway, so we made pots of tea, pots of cocoa, bowls of popcorn. We built fires in the big stone fireplace and sat in front of it, drinking, eating, with Jo—who couldn’t seem to break the habit for all her attempts with hypnosis and clinics, elastic bands, special chewing gum—insisting that we go outside occasionally so she could have a cigarette or three. We wrapped ourselves up in sweaters and blankets, gathered up glasses of wine, bottles of beer, and an ashtray, and sat on the porch steps to look at the sky: Orion lounging along the horizon, the moon as it waxed from quarter to full, then waned to three-quarters, the clouds as they sailed across the darkness or spread themselves out like a veil between stars and earth.
We talked about our father. Our childhoods, and our adult lives too, had been dominated by Mumma, but Pops was always there. Quietly there, unimpressively there, profoundly there.
“He was the audience,” Meg suggested. “For all of us, really.”
“No, he was the backdrop, the scenery,” Amy said.
“But not the stage manager, and not the sugar daddy, especially not once inflation hit the trust. It’s lucky her real estate investments exploded,” I reminded them, “or they’d have had to change their lifestyles.”
“He made her really happy,” we agreed. “And it’s not easy to make Mumma happy,” as we all knew.
Jo said, “Tell me…No, I mean, let’s tell one another…I mean, let’s exchange…Pops is dying, we do all know that?”
We did, we understood that we were grieving, and we trusted Jo the therapist to know something we could do to help ourselves grieve well and begin to assimilate our loss. She said, “The best memories of him. I’ll start. One of my best, and there are a lot of good ones, is the way Pops always gave me a book for Christmas. Remember? Even though I was the stupid one.”
“We never thought that. Only you thought that.”
“Me and Mumma,” Jo reminded us. “He still does it, you know? This year it was Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. They’re never new books, they’ve always stood some test of time. And I always read them. Some of them I’ve really liked. They all made me think, and I knew he’d read them himself and liked them, and that was why he gave them to me.”
“He was great when I was divorcing Jack,” Meg remembered. “He said I should do whatever I thought was best for me, for my character, and for my future. That was what he wanted. Then he told me that he trusted me to know what that was. I could count on him, he said. Unlike Mumma. She said that when you made your bed you should lie in it, at least for a year,” Meg concluded, uncharacteristically outspoken.
“Mumma came around,” Amy protested. “It was just because you’re the first.”
“First and only,” Meg reminded us.
“Only because I’ve never gotten married to any of mine,” Jo said.
“Is that a satellite?” I asked, taking my arm out from under the warmth of the blanket to point up into the sky. “It’s too unblinking for a star, don’t you think? Or could it be a planet, do you think?”
“How many years have we sat right here and looked at the stars,” Jo asked, but it wasn’t a question, it was a celebration. “Shall I pick up Mumma or do you want to?” she asked Meg, because I had brought Sarah, who would be awake early, and Amy was due at nine in the city to meet with George and the accountant about Mumma’s taxes, so we two needed as much sleep as we could manage.
“I remember the way, when you were talking to Pops, he would look right at you, look you right in the eye,” I said then. I was thinking of the time I had lunch with him to talk about Nanette, but they didn’t know, then, what I was referring to. “Pops really listened to us,” I said.
“He noticed,” Amy added. “I mean, we heard a lot about how Mumma understood us, and we couldn’t fool her, and that was true, but Pops noticed things. Remember when I won that Rotary Club prize in eighth grade? He wrote me a letter…I still have it, I have it in my safe deposit box, in fact. It was—it is—It’s a wonderful letter for a father to write to a daughter. He said how mysterious I am to him and how proud of me he is. Whereas Mumma,” Amy told us as we all looked up into the midnight sky, knowing that another hour would have to pass before somebody went to make Mumma leave her bedside vigil and get a few hours of sleep. “Mumma said that they gave me the award because I was her daughter.”
“I remember,” Meg said. “I thought it was sort of rotten for her to say that.”
I remembered it, too, and remembered that I assumed Mumma was correct and that Amy’s prize was thus not such a big deal, not nearly as big a deal as she wanted to make it. Sitting there, remembering, “I’m sorry,” I said to Amy.
“I figured she was just jealous,” Jo said, “the way mothers can be of daughters, although she’d deny that. Mumma’s got a big streak of center stage, we all know, although she’d deny that too.”
“She doesn’t deny things,” I told my sisters. “She ignores them. Which—I know, Jo—you could argue is a deeper form of denial. But she wasn’t ever jealous about Pops and us. How much we love him. I never thought she was, did you?”
“Pops wasn’t an ordinary man,” Amy assured me, “and she knew that. He was, he is, better than most people and she told me once, she told me she wanted to keep him that way.”
At that, so exactly what Mumma would say, we all burst out laughing. Then we gathered up our glasses and blankets, Jo picked up her cigarettes and ashtray, and we went back into the house.
• • •
If it hadn’t been for what I couldn’t stop knowing was the contents of the coffin, Pops’ funeral would have been a wonderful event. Saint Stephen’s was crowded with family and friends, colleagues, students and former students, and the organist played Bach, the richly complex lines of melody intertwining like our own lives. The day was bright, the coffin plain polished pine, the flowers fresh and abundant, and the eulogies genuine, speaking of Pops as a man who in the course of his seventy-one years had done what was asked of him with a willing spirit, a loving heart, and a querying intelligence. My father. The immediate family followed the coffin out of the church, then in limos out to the cemetery, where final prayers were spoken before it was lowered into the ground, next to Aunt Phyllis. This was the only point at which tears trembled in Mumma’s eyes, and her hand trembled in mine. Then we all returned to the big house, where Uncle Ethan, who had flown in from the West Coast to take up his position as head of the family, had arranged to receive the mourners. Guests filled the downstairs rooms and flowed out onto the sloping lawn, talking about Pops, sadly, but with that many-layered grief that comes at the end of a long, well-lived life, a grief that is in large part a celebration of how a life can be lived.
Most of us wore dark clothing. Mumma wore a bright pink dress, with a full skirt, its lack of printed flowers her only concession to the occasion. She assured us that pink was the Chinese color for funerals. Certainly, standing at the foot of the same curved staircase where decades earlier Grandmother had stood to greet guests at Anne’s rehearsal dinner, Mumma seemed perfectly funereal, solemn and even dignified as she shook hands, kissed cheeks, accepted condolences, repeating over and over, “Yes, he will be missed,” at home, in Wampanoag, at the college, whatever place was appropriate to the particular mourner. She accepted kisses on the cheek, even from Jonquil Cartenbury Heolms, and she stayed the length of Jonquil’s sympathetic outpouring about widows over a certain age being in such a difficult position. Mumma didn’t even round on her. She didn’t show any sign of irritation at all. It was as if she hadn’t grasped the meaning of the words.
Perhaps that was a sign we should have picked up on, but we didn’t. Like the other people gathered at the Howland cottage to remember Pops, we assumed that Mumma was stunned by grief, and by the exhaustion of her long vigil. If she behaved, or responded, distractedly, we could certainly understand that. Two of her daughters were always bes
ide her to welcome guests, to remind her of any names that might have slipped her mind; and in fact one or two of the older men who came had to introduce themselves anyway, saying, “I was in Spencer’s OCS class, he was a good officer,” or, “Spence crewed for me when we were at Choate, he was a fine crew.”
I was standing on Mumma’s left and Meg was on her right, when a tall, silver-haired woman approached, an elegantly turned out, tanned woman of about Mumma’s age, with a long, straight nose and a strong, firm chin, her fingers festooned with diamonds and sapphires, all in old-fashioned settings. She wore full makeup, but of the best kind so that she looked glowingly younger than her years. It took all of us a minute to realize who she was: Abigail Smith. We had seen her photograph, we had seen her on TV accepting Oscars. Abigail Smith was so tall and slender and stylish that compared to her, Mumma looked like some TV sitcom grandmother, plump and plain and more than a little unkempt.
The elegant woman reached out a manicured hand, to take Mumma’s, and followed it with another manicured hand, putting all of the rings on display. “How long has it been?” she asked, in a voice that had no interest in the answer to her question. “Rida, isn’t it? Yes, Rida. I had meetings in the city, New York, that is, and I couldn’t miss Spencer Howland’s funeral. Not if I was on the same coast.”
They stood looking at each other, Mumma looking up, waiting, Abigail Smith looking around. “I’m here for him,” Abigail Smith announced, freeing Mumma’s hands.
I was amazed. Pops the Don Juan, the ladykiller? Or was he just the one that got away and therefore the one that couldn’t be forgotten?
“Because I loved him,” Abigail Smith said.
“No you didn’t,” Mumma told her.
The tall woman glanced briefly at Mumma, then dismissed her and looked around, raising her hand. “Ethan, is that you?” Uncle Ethan was passing nearby with two drinks, probably both for himself. “Is it really you? Ethan Howland all grown up?” He stopped, puzzled. Abigail Smith smiled and reached a beringed hand out to him.
“If you had,” Mumma continued, “you would never have left. Like Sonia in War and Peace, you’d have stayed near him, even if he was married to someone else. Have you read War and Peace yet?”
“It’s Abigail Smith,” she re-introduced herself to Ethan. “I know I’ve changed, but you remember me, don’t you? And I hear you’re on the West Coast now. Why have you never let me know?”
“Well, well,” Uncle Ethan said, slithering an arm around her waist. “You haven’t changed a bit since the time when you were the girl of my dreams. And those were quite some dreams, I can promise you,” he said, pulling her toward him, carrying her away beside him. Over the years, Uncle Ethan had gone thick in the waist and ruddy in the nose. His wife of the time, his fourth by our reckoning, although we might have missed one, had stayed home, pleading a flu that none of us believed in. Probably she thought that at his older brother’s funeral there wouldn’t be anybody for Ethan to be tempted by, but she underestimated him.
At the end of the long afternoon, we all stood together, Pops’ immediate family, to thank people for coming to his funeral. We placed ourselves just inside the front door through which all those years ago Mumma had first made her entry into this house, and this family, with Pops at her side and Meg in her arms.
The order of their going from funerals is well established. First to leave are the guests, and then the family has a quiet hour together, siblings, grandchildren, cousins. The hard liquor is brought out and people sit down to eat. They discuss the service, they discuss the previous generation of parents, and sometimes settle family business, such as the divided responsibility for and occupancy of a summer cottage. Every now and then, somebody looks up to remark, “This is a sad occasion, isn’t it?” and the group will discuss, again, the way death took this particular family member and recall the deaths of others. Then, after another hour, either the larger, more distantly connected family will depart, leaving the immediate family to their sharper grief, or, as in this case, the immediate family being guests, they too take their departure, together this time, not in limousines but in the cars they came in.
George and I took Mumma home, and Meg rode with us; Liam took our older girls and their own boys, as well as Jo and Milton, in the Caravan. Amy and Wilfred had Sarah with them, because her Kelly was so good with Sarah.
In the car, Mumma sat in the front seat with George while Meg and I occupied the rear. Mumma never rode in the back seat. If she wasn’t the driver, she was the primary passenger; that was as low as she could put herself in any hierarchy. “Well,” Mumma said, without turning around. “That’s over with.”
I leaned forward to tell her, “I thought your dress was perfect. You looked”—I pictured it, Mumma greeting guests at Pops’ funeral—“beautiful.”
Mumma snorted. “Now you admit it. Life’s too short to be stingy with compliments,” she advised me.
I reached forward to put a hand on her shoulder. “But what do you mean, over with? What’s over with?”
“That funeral, mostly, but—Oh, all of it, the going to the hospital, reading to him and we got barely three-quarters of the way through, you know. What was the name of that woman?” She looked impatiently at George. “You know who I mean. She’s slipped my mind.”
“Abigail,” I suggested.
“No, in the book.”
“Natasha?” George offered.
“No, the other woman.”
“Sonia,” I said, thinking that was the connection, but George, more in tune, said, “Hélène.”
“Yes, that’s her, with her white shoulders,” Mumma said, contented.
I walked with my mother from the car to the front door. On the occasion of her widowhood, Mumma wanted to enter the house Pops had bought for her through the front door. She moved up the walk slowly, reluctant, I thought—and who could blame her?—to assume this new role. To become a widow. She and I fell back, letting the others get ahead, Jo and Milton following George in solemn procession, some sad variation on a bridal party. I put my arm around my mother’s shoulders. Since having children of my own, I had grown bold about touching my mother, and comfortable too, even wrapping my arms around her to hug her in excitement, or sadness, or sometimes simple fondness. With my arm around her and her head close to my ear, Mumma said, “She was there.”
“Abigail Smith? I know. Do you think Pops would have enjoyed that?”
“Your father would have been unhappy with all of it, all of this…this ceremony,” Mumma answered impatiently. “It’s what he’d have wanted, though. A Howland funeral. But I didn’t mean the old girlfriend. I meant the new one. The Boston one.”
I made my face expressionless.
Mumma ignored my silence. “I thought someone should know that I knew,” she said.
“Did Pops tell—?”
“No, of course not. He—There was no sex,” my mother informed me. “If there had been, I’d have known. I wouldn’t have stood for that.”
“Oh,” I said. I had to say something and Oh was all I could think of. Mumma was waiting for me to say something more, so I said it again. “Oh.”
“I recognized her right away today, not that I ever saw her in person at the time, or any photograph either,” Mumma told me. “Your father wasn’t the kind of man to make a Freudian slip like a photograph. But when she said, ‘I knew Spencer years ago, in Cambridge. He was a wonderful man,’ I could tell. She’d been really in love with him. Well, I’m not surprised. She’s married now, she was wearing a ring, but I don’t think she could have been, then. Your father wouldn’t want to be a home wrecker.”
“You knew and never said anything?” I wondered.
“Of course not. What do you think? He didn’t want me to know, for one thing. And he was an honorable man. If he knew I knew, he would have thought he had to do something and I knew he didn’t want to do that.”
By that time, slowly as we were moving, we had entered the hallway and Amy was calling ou
t from the kitchen that she had coffee brewing. Mumma let George take her coat, then settled herself at the head of the dining room table. Sarah came up and was allowed onto her lap, allowed to feed herself sugar by the spoonful and that day I didn’t say anything about my authority being undermined. It was my father’s funeral. Also, I was stupefied.
My first reaction was to berate myself: I knew nothing about my parents’ marriage, I understood nothing. Then I realized: I was still learning about it and couldn’t, in any case, expect to really understand it. Other people’s relationships are always a conversation held in a foreign language, I know that. All you can do is grasp the occasional word or phrase, as much of it as you can if it’s a language you’re trying to learn. I thought: Mumma knew all along. I should have guessed.
“What’s so funny?” George asked, passing me a mug of coffee with lots of milk and sugar, the way I like it in the afternoon.
“Tell you later,” I promised.
Then Mumma started telling us what was what, moving on in her life. “I don’t want you girls giving me a funeral like that one. I want a Quaker funeral.”
“But you’re not a Quaker,” Jo protested. “You can’t just get a Quaker funeral, like a rental car.”
“I’ve read about them,” Mumma insisted.
“We should talk about this later, Mrs. R,” Wilfred said. Mumma’s sons-in-law, and sons-in-law-equivalents, had always been told to call her Mrs. R, because she wasn’t their mother and frankly—with a smile, and a glance from those eyes under their thick dark eyebrows—she didn’t want to be. “You’re young yet,” Wilfred continued. “We’ve got lots of time to worry about your funeral.”
“Which reminds me of another thing,” Mumma said. “One of you should be living near me now. Now I’m alone.”
She looked around at her four daughters and we looked around at one another, alarmed and a little anxious.
“Someone who has a flexible career. Someone whose husband wants to go into private practice anyway. I mean Beth,” she announced. “The schools are good enough out here, and it’s a better place to raise children. I don’t mean live with me,” she clarified, looking right at me, as if she could read my mind, as if she was reading my mind right then. “And there is nothing to get all weepy about. It’s not so great, living in the city,” she told me. “I’ve done it. I know.”