“So you were just going to sneak away, I guess,” Val said. “Huh? Not a word to anybody. Well hell. Hell of a note.”
Boney got to the study door, taking small uncertain steps. The doorway was not wide enough for all of them to help Boney through it, yet it seemed certain that he would fall over if any of them let go.
“You take his left hand,” Val said to Rosie. “I’ll get past and.”
Maneuvering carefully, movers with an antique, they got him out and into the hall; his throat was full, and his short breaths rattled the phlegm.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Sure,” Val said. “Sure you are.”
The bathroom door was not far now. Each of them was thinking the same thought, what exactly they would do when they got him standing before the toilet (which could be seen now through the open door, aloof and patient), when Boney all at once loosened his grip on them. The urgent tension that alone had held him upright went out of him, his wires cut. He settled backward into their arms with a grateful small exhalation.
Mrs. Pisky, who alone of them had experience of this big moment, this passage, who had experienced several in fact, made an awed moan that Boney Rasmussen didn’t hear. He had not heard much of what had been said to him or in his presence during the interminable length of this day, had not always been sure that the person being talked about so gravely was himself. Anyway he had long forgotten what little he had heard.
Sorry. Sorry. It was because he had had so little time: because his time had been so short. An eyewink between the unrememberable beginning and the oblivion. How could you do anything but begin? How?
Gently he extricated himself from the women, and stood on his own. That had been a mistake, apparently, about needing to go to the bathroom. He didn’t need to after all. He had thought he felt a great need, but he had been wrong.
No, no need.
He looked back once at the three women standing at the study door, puzzled and still, as though they had dropped something and hadn’t yet realized it. Well he would go on. Clearly he was on his own. There was no one who could do this for him, he would have to do it himself, it had been a mistake and an injustice for him to ask and pester others so long and so fruitlessly. Not even Sandy Kraft could acquire it for him, for it was his alone, and therefore his to find.
He saw now (why had it taken him so long to see it?) that the way to proceed was simply to trace the path backward, step by step, just as you must do when you have lost anything; trace the way back until you find it. He would start from the end and go on toward the beginning, and at a turn he would come upon it, just where it ought to be, where he alone could recognize it.
First he would go to Kraft’s house; he would pick up the trail within the book Kraft had left for him (yes, for him, it was quite clear, though he had not wanted to say that aloud, not even in the spaces of his heart); he would trace it backward, to Europe certainly probably, to London, Rome, Vienna. Then to Prague, too.
But Kraft’s first. He knew the way well, had walked there more than once on summer nights like this one, the way illuminated by the moon. He could imagine the lights lit in the windows there, at the end of the drive, near the dark pines; could even see Sandy there within, in his armchair in the lamplight, his sweet trickster’s eyes and smile. O Friend.
He took cap and stick from the hall-tree. The hall was long and strangely huge, and at its end the great door out. He would have to have strength for that. And then the night and the path. But had he forgotten something? Left something behind? It began to seem that indeed there was something left behind forgotten, that tugged at him, retarding his progress, like a child ignored tugging at her father’s pants-leg. What? Something done or undone, which if it weren’t remembered made the whole journey pointless, the reason for setting out, the wallet, the car keys, the ticket, the something.
Though he had ceased to make any progress toward it, the door had grown larger. He had forgotten something back there, he had O God he had: he decided that he had to go back, he had to go back immediately. When he tried to do so, however, he found that he could not turn himself around. He could not even turn his head, not because he lacked the strength but because there was not anything, anything at all, behind him to turn to.
“Once when I was young,” Pierce said to Rose Ryder, “I started a forest fire.”
Below where they were parked, the surface of Nickel Lake was dashed with starlight; many cars were parked around its margins in twos and threes, and families moved down the steep banks through stands of dark fir to reach the shore, passing the little car where Pierce and Rose sat.
“It wasn’t a very big one, but it was a real forest fire. I wasn’t playing with matches or anything like that; I’d been doing my chores, actually. Burning trash. And it started a little brush fire.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I watched it for a long time, and then watched it from the roof of my uncle’s house when it got dark, and watched it turn into a real fire.”
“Yes.”
“They didn’t have the means to fight it, I guess,” Pierce said. “So it just burned out of control.”
“Yes,” she said again. “I know.”
Now and then there came a crackle of class-B fireworks, and distant laughter. Imps moved about the barge on the middle of the lake, you could see the glowing points of the punk they carried. The sheriff, the Sportsmen’s Club. Catcalls for their dilatoriness.
And now at last the first rocket arose from the barge out on the lake, and burst: brilliant dandelion-moon of fire appearing full-blown, then gone, and the big whack of sound reaching them an instant after. “Oooh,” she said.
The next one rose—they didn’t have many, and sent them up at first singly—and they all tilted their heads back to follow its wavering trail upward. Oh! It was one of those that was all noise, the sound reflected back from the surrounding hills shaking the heart.
“Oh,” she said, chuckling with deep delight and wiggling in her seat. “Oh I love those.” She lifted her foot to prop it on the dashboard. “So yes?”
“That’s all,” Pierce said. “I just remembered. Feeling the power of it. On the roof with my cousins.” Discovering how much destructive force there was in the world, pure power, neither good nor bad but only potential, and how easily it could be released.
Another bomb-burst, more complex: a fire-flower first, then sharp reports that generated whizzing devils, then the big bang at the end. Its instant of light revealed the folk in their beach chairs, kids under blankets, girls and boys on the hoods of cars, arms around one another.
“So who were all these cousins?” she asked him.
“My uncle’s children. I was raised by an uncle.”
“Oh.” She waited to see what would become of the next one: it sent a mild scatter of blossoms in many colors. Hiss of the detritus falling into the water. “Aw,” she said tenderly. “No parents?”
“Parents, sure. My mother left my father at one point and went to live with her brother.”
“Sisters? Brothers?”
“No. My cousins were like brothers and sisters. Sort of.”
She sipped beer, they had brought some, but her elation was not due to it. “And what about you?” she said. “Not married. No kids?”
Whack. Double globes, one inside the other, how is it done, gone before you can ponder it. Magia naturalis.
“I have a son,” he said.
She turned to regard him.
“Twelve years old, no thirteen.” Hard to fix an exact birthday, boys varied a lot; he knew just how grown-up he was, but not what age he might have attained. “Robbie,” he said. Small bomb-burst in his own breast to say his name aloud; and he had said it aloud just for that purpose, just to feel it: as they both sat here now to startle and gratify themselves with the release of energy.
“Well how,” she said, but another thud came from the barge; a little reaching missile arose, shedding sparks, and blossomed huge
and gay, and died. Rose’s hand—Pierce noticed it when he looked over at her to share delight with her—was pressed tight between her legs. Loud noises, he thought, some people can’t help peeing.
Smoke from the fireworks made little thunderhead clouds over the lake, only revealed as new bombs went off and stained them with their colors. Laughter across the dark water, and soft moans of awe from the population; all you could see of them now were the points of their cigarettes, ruddy cookfires, the flare of sparklers. Beyond, on the horizon, the real, cold clouds were still white.
“They’re running out,” Rose said. But then the sheriff and his merry men put out their best effort, and a half-dozen rockets arose at once, then a further triplet, coup de théâtre, impossible not to cry aloud at it and its foolish beauty. Then that was all. Silence and odorous smoke drifted over the lake. Already trucks were starting their engines, and the families who had passed them going down to the water passed them departing, carrying their chairs, their sleepy children.
“All over,” he heard a woman near them say to her child. “All over now.”
All over. And perfectly concluded, too, Pierce thought: if what they had really set out to express by gathering the townsfolk and the summer people here in the serene night and firing their lights was not splendor, or exaltation, or American glory, but the opposite, whatever that might be. Transience, maybe; the sweet brevity of life; the poignancy of things that pass away. The Triumph of Time.
“I have to tell you,” Rose said. “I have a date tonight.”
“Is this not tonight?” Pierce said.
“I meant later. A late date.”
“Oho.”
She started her car.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“No reason to be sorry. Reason to be glad.” It made him, in fact, unreasonably glad. He pictured her, later, in a bar booth, on a dance floor, with an imaginable but unclear other male; he pictured her surprising this man with her restless hotness. And Pierce himself meanwhile home alone, and safe between cool sheets.
III
VALETUDO
ONE
Boney Rasmussen hadn’t wanted to be buried at all, but if he had to be, he didn’t want to be buried in the common cemetery with others around him.
Like a fastidious tourist, Rosie thought, caught on a cheap tour, pretending he’s not with these people. She had found and opened an envelope on which Boney had written In the event of my death, and she sat at Boney’s desk with the brief hand-written sheet of onionskin which it contained. He was not to be cremated, but there was to be no embalming, no special funerary preparations; no religious service, no priest or preacher. He wanted, it seemed, to go over unattended. And he wanted to be buried on the grounds, in the ground, of his own house, he specified where: a clearing in a little stand of tall pines, amid the rhododendrons. He wanted an obelisk erected over him, which should be made of some soft stone which would begin to crumble in not too many years; and on its base he wanted these words cut: Et in Arcadia ego. No name, no date.
Well then why didn’t you say so, Rosie asked of the paper, the shaky whispered words. Why didn’t you say. She had already, with Val’s and Mrs. Pisky’s help, begun the process, set off in the usual way, not knowing how it was done but finding out that everyone else did, the steps were wellworn: the funeral home, the lawyer, the medical examiner, the church. It wasn’t, after all, the first time it had ever happened in the world.
She called Allan Butterman, Boney’s lawyer and her own.
“It doesn’t really matter,” Allan said. “State health regulations say you can’t be buried except in a cemetery. You can’t get yourself buried in your back yard.”
“Health regulations? It’s not going to do him any harm.”
“Our health. The living. Not good to have dead bodies just anywhere.”
Hadn’t Boney known that? He must have buried or seen buried dozens in his huge life. Maybe he hadn’t quite meant this; maybe it was a kind of play, pretending he could have the death he wanted. If he had to have one. She felt a guilty relief that anyway she couldn’t do much to get it for him.
“Here’s an idea,” said Allan. “Do the usual thing. Follow the rules. Do what he asked as much as possible. Then later the Foundation can put up a memorial. There where he wanted.”
“He wanted no funeral though,” she said. “No service.” He lay already on a cool slab at the funeral home; she couldn’t prevent that, nor what they had done or would do to him there.
“We’ll do the minimum. The Danish Brethren isn’t exactly elaborate. And a reception out there.”
“Oh yipes,” Rosie said softly. “Oh Allan.”
“We’ll get you through it,” Allan said. “I’ll tell you. It’s real usual for people to leave wishes like these. The way they want things done. That can’t be followed. Very usual.”
Rosie thought about this, or sat anyway with it, envisioning the place in the pines that Boney meant. It was a nice place, she and Sam and he had picnicked there last summer, back when he had seemed so weirdly immortal, as though he had already died and been mummified.
“Okay,” she said.
She called Pierce Moffett next.
“He wanted it on his, his gravestone,” she said. “Et in Arcadia ego. It doesn’t sound like it would go, if he’s not going to be here. Right?”
“It’s a Latin motto,” Pierce said. “The ‘et’ means ‘and’ but it might mean ‘also’ or ‘too.’ So it could mean slightly different things. It could be translated I too am in Arcady, that is, along with all the beauty and peace. Or it could be translated I am even in Arcady, as well as everywhere else.”
“What ‘I’?” Rosie asked.
“The ‘I’ speaking,” Pierce said, “is Death.”
Rosie felt in her breast and throat an uprush of tears; she wanted not to cry but they were no more to be suppressed than a shiver or a sneeze, and so she let them whelm her. She had not so far wept for Boney, not the night of his death, not the two long days that followed; now all the pity of it, of goddamn death and human impotence, came bowling up her throat.
At least he knew, she thought, he really did know, he wasn’t crazy; for here he was admitting it, saying uncle. She couldn’t stop weeping, and she couldn’t hang up on Pierce, and so wept into the phone absurdly while Pierce listened and waited. O Boney: the opponent he had kept on struggling with so hopelessly had at length just inveigled him into his arms as a mother will a rebellious child, and hushed him.
“Sorry, sorry,” she said at last, a squeak, all she could manage. “Okay. So. I guess we’ll think of something else.”
“I’ll think too,” Pierce said.
“Will you come? To the funeral I mean? Day after tomorrow.”
“I’ll come,” he said.
She hung up, still wiping her eyes with her sleeve; and then she remembered Sam, who was sitting at Rosie’s own old desk (a card table really, piled with Rosie’s unfinished Foundation work, for whom now if for anyone would she finish it?) and coloring.
Just as it retreated back inside Sam’s body, Rosie saw her daughter’s soul, which had been out drinking in her mother’s tears. Sam had seen her mother in tears on the phone often enough, too often, Rosie thought.
“I was just sad about Boney,” she said.
“I’m not so sad now,” Sam said. “Because he’s not here to see.”
“Yes,” Rosie said. “Well. That makes a lot of sense, hon.”
“Was Pierce crying too?”
“No.” She got up, so much to do. “Listen I have to go get some things upstairs, can you stay here, will you …”
But Sam was already by her side, and Rosie thought: Let her come. She was his friend too.
“Are we going up to Boney’s room?” Sam asked in some awe as they climbed the big front double staircase.
“Yep.”
The funeral director had given her a list of things to bring down for the laying-out of Boney, which included a suit and
a shirt and tie (but why, Rosie asked, if he’s to be shut up in his box? And saw that it was as much for the director’s sake as for hers or Boney’s, standards to maintain). Underwear too, for heaven’s sake, and socks, but not shoes.
His dentures. Weird that we go to the grave not only in our flesh but with its history too, all the accidents it’s had, all the work done on it. Our pierced ears and unremovable wedding-bands, the fillings and bridges in our mouths, pins in our broken bones. Do they bury you, she wondered, with your wooden leg, your hearing aid? Flesh of your flesh by then. Why not your glasses too?
Boney’s room, which neither of them had entered before, which both had peeked into, though, to see the big bed with the green velvet spread, the ancient leather slippers poking out from beneath it; the big wooden mirrored wall of closets. On his bedside table the book he had been reading when last he slept here, turned facedown at the place he had stopped. Ill Met by Moonlight, a book of ghost stories by Fellowes Kraft.
Sam with reverent curiosity began opening the closet doors. The closets were surprisingly full, considering how limited had been the wardrobe Boney usually wore. Never threw away anything.
“Look,” Sam said, pulling out a pair of white and tan shoes. “With nails.” In wonder she touched the spikes. Rosie tried to imagine a golf-playing Boney in some other decade. There should be a crowd of descendants to do this for him, she thought; Allan said that in New York there was an aged nephew or cousin twice removed, but otherwise as far as she could tell there was no one. No one but Val.
The old bastard. Really. What an awful thing to do, enough to keep him out of heaven if there was one.
Angry at herself for being angry with him, she thought of her own father, who also snuck off, got away with it too, so that he could never be called on it, never called; waiting now for her in the future. That anyway was what Mike had always suggested: her father waiting for her to reach him, to work through her feelings, like jungle undergrowth. What would she say to him then? Mike thought he knew (she would finally admit to her love, her anger), but she did not.