Death Benefits (19 page)

Coralee gets up, yanks the pillow away from Mom and smoothes the damp hair away from her face. “You did what was right with as much grace as possible, Nina. Arthur was lucky to have you—both of you. He wasn't an easy man to love. Now, we're all going to be rich— shouldn't we raise a glass to our benefactor?”

Mom nods and gets up and goes to the kitchen. I can hear her getting glasses out of the cupboard, and I think I should help her, but I still can't move. I have an awesome car, a laptop, a trust fund and a bunch of old photo albums. Not to mention the free suits and haircuts. It's unreal.

“I meant what I said,” Coralee says to me. “You have no reason to feel bad. That wasn't what Arthur wanted. He wanted you to enjoy yourself. Get an education. Go to Australia and get to know your cousins.”

Mom comes in carrying three wineglasses, a corkscrew and a bottle of white wine, which she holds out to me. I open the bottle and pour the drinks. We stand and raise our glasses.

“To Arthur,” Mom says, her voice and hands shaking.

“To Arthur,” Coralee and I echo, clinking our glasses against Mom's.

And then I do something I never thought I'd do: I get wasted with an octogenarian. And my mom.

In the days before the wake, I help Mom and Coralee get Arthur's house ready for guests. I set up rented tables and chairs, and lug cases of wine and trays of wineglasses. I vacuum the floors, sweep the deck and scrub the kitchen while Mom and Coralee fuss with flowers and food. There is no agenda, no minister, no master of ceremonies. Mom may say a few words. She may not.

My main contribution to the event is a slide show that I set up on Arthur's—my—MacBook. I buy a cheap scanner with some of the money I earned in the summer and scan almost a hundred photos from Arthur's albums. Then I create a soundtrack, a mix of classical music, show tunes, the Pussycat Dolls and, of course, Louis Armstrong singing “It's a Wonderful World.” Sometimes I wonder if I imagined Arthur croaking “skies of blue,” but I know it happened. I like to think it meant something, that he was telling me he'd had a wonderful life, that he wanted me to enjoy my own “skies of blue,” that he was ready to go. Maybe that's just wishful thinking. Maybe his last words were random and meaningless, but I prefer not to think that.

Coralee helps me identify some of the people in the pictures—friends, musicians, lovers, wives, children. She has an amazing memory for detail, often identifying a person first by an article of clothing—a fur hat, a Cardin coat, a pair of wing-tip shoes; or a place—Paris, New York, London, Toronto; or an object—a car, a fringed lamp, a red velvet chair.

Together we sift through the photos, picking out people, places or things of significance: Arthur and his long-dead siblings; Arthur playing his first cello; Arthur and Lenci in Prague; Arthur and Marta in Toronto, with Coralee in the background in a white nanny's uniform; Arthur and Mom in Paris at a sidewalk café; Arthur in a series of vehicles—the Indian motorcycle, a red MG TC, a silver Austin Healy, a black Jaguar Mark IX, the black T-Bird. What I can't get over is how happy he looks in most of the pictures: his smile is broad and confident; his eyes are fringed with laugh lines. I had looked at the albums before and never noticed how much he seemed to be enjoying himself.

“He looks like a different person.” I point to a picture of Arthur on a teeter-totter with Marta. “I never met
that
guy.”

Coralee gazes at the picture. “I took that. We were in Caracas, of all places. It was one of the few trips we took as a family. We were very happy. These pictures remind me of something I read once: ‘The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.' I can hardly believe we were there, but here's the evidence.”

“So what happened?”

“Nothing. Everything. Loss. Old age. After you hit puberty, it's just one thing after the other until the day you die. You have some good years in your twenties, after you've stopped embarrassing yourself constantly and before your back goes out and your knees start to creak. And those are just the physical things. They say as you get older, your essential nature is revealed. Sort of like a balsamic reduction of the soul.”

“But not everybody ends up like Arthur. You're not like that.”

“Like what?”

“Bitter. Mean. Angry.”

“Thank you, dear. But I have my moments. Doesn't everyone? And wasn't he also generous and funny?”

“I guess,” I mumble, remembering how often he pissed me off, how I resented cleaning up after him, how I coveted his car, how I wanted him to die, how his farts made me laugh, how good he looked in his tux.

“I'm sorry you never knew him when he was young,” Coralee says.

“Yeah, me too.” I scan a photo of Arthur in his tux, standing next to Fred Astaire at a party; they are surrounded by adoring women in elaborate ball gowns. And suddenly I realize I did know this Arthur, but only in fragments: smiling and laughing with a bevy of women at the gala just before he died, charming the reporter and the photographer at his house, meeting with his lawyer to make sure the people he cared about were taken care of, flirting with Kim, buying me a tux. Fragments of joy encrusted by years of pain and decay. A rotten oyster with a hidden pearl.

Nineteen

T
he wake is subdued, almost genteel. No wailing, gnashing of teeth or rending of garments. I dress up in my tux pants and a white shirt, and Dani and I circulate with trays of food and drinks, making small talk: Didn't he have a long illustrious life? Wasn't I proud to be his grandson? What was going to happen to the house? Apparently it's okay to talk real estate at a wake. Mom and Coralee meet and greet the guests, who exclaim over the view and suck back the free booze. One of the guests is Midge, the reporter who interviewed Arthur before he died. I tell her about transcribing his story onto the Mac and she puts her drink down and pulls me into a corner.

“You're saying you got his whole story—verbatim?”

I nod. “He was in the hospital, bored out of his skull. We'd look at photographs for a while, and then he'd talk while I typed. It seemed to take his mind off things. Like dying.”

“You still have it?”

I nod again. She seems about to ask me another question—she is a reporter after all—then she thinks better of it, pulls a business card out of her purse and tucks it into my shirt pocket.

“Ever since I interviewed your grandfather, I've been thinking about writing a book about him. Now's not the time, but I'd love to talk to you and your mother about it.”

“Sure,” I say. “I saw your article. It was good. Didn't make him into too much of a saint.”

“Well, we both know he wasn't that.” She laughs and heads off to find another drink.

My slide show is a hit, although when the Pussycat Dolls song comes on the soundtrack, you can see people's heads come up, like dogs smelling an intruder. You have no idea, I think. If I decided to speak, what would I say? Arthur loved the Pussycat Dolls. He watched CNN all the time. He loved women and cars. He hated drafts. He never stopped mourning his brother and sister and first wife. He loved his family—even if he didn't show it— and chocolate ice cream. And
café au lait
. He wanted to die long before he did.

I carry my empty tray to the kitchen and sit down at the table, which is covered in platters of sweets: puff pastries, truffles, brownies, lemon bars.

“You okay?” Dani starts loading her empty tray with more sandwiches.

“Yeah, I'm good. Just needed a break.”

She nods and leans down to kiss my cheek before she heads back out to the living room. Her lip gloss smells like ripe strawberries. “I'll cover for you,” she says.

I stay in the kitchen until I hear my mom's voice. “I was going to talk a little bit about Arthur, but then I thought of something better, something that says more about my father than I ever could.” There is a pause as she sits at the piano bench and uncovers the keys. “My father expressed himself best through his music—I guess I've inherited that from him. His old student and friend, Martin Sutherland, is going to help me out.”

I stand in the doorway to the dining room and watch as Martin Sutherland comes into the room carrying Frankie—my grandfather's cello. I recognize Martin from the photo albums—he is the principal cellist of some big symphony orchestra in the States. He sits and tunes the cello, while my mother waits. When he is ready, she announces, “Debussy's Cello Sonata in D Minor.”

It's not a long piece, but by the time they reach the last notes, almost everyone, including me, is sniffling. Mom looks at Martin and shrugs.

“Arthur would hate to see his send-off end on a sad note, don't you think?” she asks.

Martin nods and Coralee gets up to stand by the piano. The three of them launch into a spirited version of Gershwin's “They All Laughed.” By the time they get to “
Ha! Ha! Ha! Who's got the last laugh now
,” most of the guests have dried their tears and joined in.

When all the guests have left, Mom sits down at the piano again. While Lars and Dani and I clean up, Coralee curls up in Arthur's big chair while Mom plays: “Begin the Beguine”; “Some Enchanted Evening”; “Climb Every Mountain”; “Cheek to Cheek”; “Shall We Dance?” Sometimes Coralee warbles along, but most of the time it's just Mom and the piano. “Arthur would have loved this,” I say to Dani as she dries the wineglasses I have washed.

She stops drying and comes around to stand beside me at the sink. “No he wouldn't,” she says. “Are you on crack? He'd say, ‘What the hell's that goddamn racket? Get me some ice cream, boy, and turn on the tv.'” She giggles and puts her arms around my waist. As we sway together to “Let's Face the Music and Dance,” I lift a soapy wineglass in a toast. “Here's to you, you old prick.”

“That's more like it,” says Dani.

Before Coralee goes back to Toronto, she helps us go through Arthur's things. His room is the worst— beautiful “bespoke” pinstriped suits with giant shoulder pads and nipped waists, ancient cracked two-tone Italian leather shoes, cashmere sweaters with frayed cuffs, unopened packages of black Jockey underpants, dozens of stained ties, a box of cufflinks, a drawer full of stockpiled drugs, a bag of quarters. I keep his new shoes, which fit me perfectly; his tux, which does not; and a set of ruby cufflinks. The rest goes into the garbage or to a consignment store, along with most of the furniture. Arthur's desk and chair go downstairs into what will be Mom's office. The piano goes into the living room to make room for our dining-room table and chairs. The old
TV
with the stick remote goes into my room. We have the carpets washed, and Lars paints every room except mine. I want to leave it alone for a while before I cover the dingy beige paint.

The day before Coralee leaves, we scatter the ashes. Mom has done a lot of research on the web as to the best way to dispose of ashes. It's illegal, so we can't just stand around the way they do in the movies, flinging handfuls of ash into the air. For one thing, we might get arrested. For another, human ash isn't soft and uniform, like baby powder or flour. It's gritty and kinda chunky. I know this because I stuck my hand into his ashes after we brought them home. I also put some ashes in a jam jar and hid it in my room. Just a toe's worth, I swear. Later Mom tells me that she has done the same thing, but on a slightly grander scale: she used a pickle jar. Anyway, if you don't want ashes up your nose and in your eyes, and you're near a large body of water, apparently the best thing to do is to put the ashes in a plastic bag, submerge the bag and open it under water. The ashes will disperse gently into the water as you say your fond farewells. At least, that's the general idea.

Mom double-bags Arthur's cremains in two plastic grocery bags, even though she thinks plastic grocery bags are evil. I point out that since we are basically polluting the ocean, using a couple of plastic bags hardly seems criminal by comparison. She glares at me and says, “Thanks for that. Makes me feel so much better.”

We get to Cattle Point in the late afternoon. It's windy and cold and gray. No Japanese dog-walkers, no elderly couples on the benches, no kids making out in cars. So far so good. Mom has done reconnaissance and picked the ideal spot, somewhere the tides will whisk Arthur away into the channel. We pick our way over the rocks to the edge of the water, Coralee holding my arm. At the last minute, Mom seems a bit confused about the exact spot, but she finally points to a place where there is a bit of an eddy by the shore.

“There,” she says. “You ready?”

I nod and kneel beside the water, the plastic bags in my hand.

“Make sure you get them under the water before you open them,” Mom says.

“I know, Mom,” I say. “You told me.”

“Does anybody want to say anything?” Mom asks.

“Too bloody cold,” Coralee says, her teeth chattering.

Mom nods. “Go ahead, Royce.”

My hands are numb, but I manage to submerge the bags in the freezing water and untie the knot. Nothing happens. I rustle the bags a bit under the water and suddenly all the ashes come out in a single gray blob, which sits just under the surface, unmoving. We all stare at it.

“It's looks like when you add flour to water to make gravy,” Coralee finally says. “Just needs a bit of a stir, Royce.”

“A bit of a stir?” I say. “What am I supposed to stir it with?”

We look around, but the shore is bare of sticks and there are no trees nearby. I roll up my sleeve and plunge my hand into the ball of ash, which clings to my skin, coating me with a fine, gritty film. I sweep my arm back and forth through the blob, but even when it's broken up a bit, the mass doesn't move away from the shore. It just sits, reproachfully, as Coralee flings some red tulips on top of it.