Authors: Dorothea Benton Frank
At the Cemetery
Y
ea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .
The minister’s voice was a booming gothic drone. Pastor Edwin Anderson, our pastor with the movie-star looks, suffered from the unfortunate delusion that he was Richard Burton. He really did. Today of all days, it seemed he was brushing up to deliver the soliloquy from
Hamlet
. It was ridiculous. On any other occasion I would have been chewing on the insides of my cheeks until I tasted blood. I didn’t dare look at my sister Patti or I’d surely blow my composure. What was the matter with that portion of my brain? Gallows humor? Wait! Did I really say
gallows humor
? Honey, that is the
last
term in the world I should use and that’s for sure. But there it was. Some small twisted secret pocket of my mind, with no permission from me, plucked out the most insensitive detail of this somber and terrible event, made a joke of it, which would surely and extremely inappropriately reduce me to a snickering idiot if I didn’t pay attention to myself. I cleared my throat, hoping it would send a signal to Pastor Anderson to bring it down a notch. He shot me a look and continued channeling Burton. God, he was unbelievably good-looking. Another inappropriate thought. It was true; I was verging on hysteria but who wouldn’t?
The miserable weather just added icing to the unholy dramatic cake of a day. One minute, the skies above New Jersey were dumping snow and in the next, sleet fell like tiny ice picks. I was amazed that the governor had not closed the turnpike and the Garden State Parkway. Everything was a sheet of ice, the temperature around twenty. It was only by God’s holy grace that we had all made it to the cemetery without flying off the highway and into a ditch. I was pretty sure the ditches were filled with mangled bodies.
There were probably only twenty of us huddled under the tent at the gravesite, standing, because the seats of the folding chairs were soaking-wet. We all attributed the sparse turnout to Mother Nature, but to tell you the truth I was in such a fog I barely knew what was going on around me. I could not have cared much less who showed up and who didn’t. Over the last eighteen months, my life had become so isolated and my circle of friends had narrowed to almost no one. And now this.
We had skipped the traditional wake, deciding on a simple graveside service with the most accommodating pastor from our church. I didn’t feel like talking to a lot of people, especially given the circumstances, and Addison was not particularly devout.
“Are you all right, Cate?”
Patti spoke in her normal tone for the hearing-impaired right over the minister, the sleet, the rain, and the wind. Considerations like when to say what and how loud did not occur to Patti. At all or ever. Sometimes that could be humorous, but other times it was unnerving. I was definitely startled by the pitch of her voice. Was I all right? Was I? No. I wasn’t all right and we both knew it. Sisters can read each other’s minds. I just looked at her. Answer this, Patti, I asked her telepathically, how could I
possibly
be all right? We were gathered in the most inclement conditions February in New Jersey could offer to bury Addison, my husband of way too many years.
“I’m okay,” I lied, pushing aside my stupor and trying to gather my thoughts. I stepped forward and put my gloved hand on Addison’s polished casket.
In the last two days, I had relived our entire twenty-six-year marriage, looking for clues for how Addison’s zeal for life had deteriorated and how all the love we had shared over the years had completely and totally become unraveled. In the early days, we were
insane
over each other. I had never met a man like Addison. There I was, playing Cassie in a revival of
A Chorus Line,
when I caught his grin in the footlights. Sure, he was much older (twelve years) than I was, but he swept me right off my feet and then the stage forever, which, oddly enough, I never missed.
I was crazy about him. All I wanted to do was make him happy, and even now I believe that for a long time he had felt the same way. Our eyes were filled with each other and everything we did together seemed so perfect. A simple meal was a royal feast because we shared it. A country club waltz in a crowded room belonged only to us. He was ambitious, funny, charming, and so, so smart. The almost manic exuberance we felt was clear in every single photograph of us, and there were dozens of them from our early years all over our house. But as the children came along, demanding most of my time, he became consumed with business and slowly, slowly my diamond of a marriage began to lose its sparkle. I guess no honeymoon can last forever.
Oh Addison, I thought, how could you do it and
why
did you do it? Other men his age died from heart disease or cancer. But not my Addison. As he did most things, he leaped into projects full-strength and was a mad dog gnawing and growling until his battle was won. He leaped alright, but this time it was from the top of my piano with the extra-heavy-duty extension cord from our Christmas decorations tied around the rafters and his neck. I was the one who found him. I’d never get that vision of him out of my mind if I lived to be one hundred and ten years old.
I was white-hot furious with him for doing this to himself and to us.
Who’s going to walk your daughter down the aisle, Addison?
I strummed my fingers on the top of the casket and began pulling flowers from the blanket of white roses until I had six or eight clenched in my fist. I just needed to pull something apart. I dropped them on the ground and began pounding the casket with my fist. That was when I felt the strong hand of Mark, Patti’s husband, on my arm.
“Come on now, Cate. Come stand by me.”
I backed away from the remains of my husband and let Mark put his arm around my shoulder. Mark was a great human being, even though he could be very cheap, which to my way of thinking was a really terrible and unattractive trait. Still, I considered myself lucky to have him as a brother-in-law, because he was the one who would step forward in a situation like this and take any potential problems in hand. Following his uncle’s lead, my beautiful son Russ moved away from his contentious wife, Alice, and took my hand.
“It’s gonna be okay, Mom. You’ll see.”
“I know,” I said and thought I should be the one reassuring him.
But I
had
reassured him and Sara, my daughter. I had told them at least one hundred times in the last forty-eight hours that we would get through this together and everything would be all right. Talk about self-delusion? I didn’t believe that any more than they did. Together was over. We would get through the
funeral
together. But then they would go back to their lives and resume them, maimed a bit, sad for a while, but they had lives and careers that waited for them. Well, to be honest, Russ had a satisfying job teaching and coaching high school basketball. But my daughter, Sara, did not. Sara was my soufflé, soft in the center but always in danger of falling if the temperature wasn’t perfect. Even though we resembled each other—petite, dark-haired, blue-eyed—I was much stronger than she was. Still, she was on her own in California and reasonably solvent.
Anyway, at that moment, I had lost my rudder, because life without Addison wasn’t a life I could simply pick up and navigate without missing a beat. You see, I lived in a world of
his
making, not mine. Everything, every single material thing we owned was a product of Addison’s image of himself, how he thought he should live and how he wanted to be perceived by the outside world. The wine cellar, the cars, the art collection, the antiques—he had scoured auction houses and galleries, collecting and amassing that which was worthy of a financial czar. And the house? It was one of the largest homes in Alpine, located in the fourth most expensive zip code in America, roughly ten times the house that would have satisfied me but Addison wanted it all. He wanted just a mere glimpse of our home to make his investors, partners, and his enemies weak in the knees. And it did.
Every now and then I would moan a little with him in private, that I’d surely prefer a simpler life, one that (until I found Albertina, that is) was not so burdened with bickering staff who chipped your crystal, cleaned your silver with steel wool, and used
Shout!
on your vegetable-dyed antique rugs from Agra. Never mind the unending stream of workmen that came with the constant repairs and upkeep a large home required. Too often my days were defined by waiting for someone to show up to do something the right way, because Addison held me responsible for every last detail of our life outside of his business. Sometimes, no, a lot of the time, I felt more like a building superintendent than the beloved wife of a successful man. There were times—often, in fact—when I was merely the director and producer for the domestic theater of his life, and I knew it with certainty when he would rate my performance after a holiday or a dinner party for clients.
“The centerpieces looked cheap, Cate,” he might say. Or, “The meat was overcooked. Shoe leather.” Or, “Your staff didn’t show well tonight, Cate. Service stunk. I thought you knew how important this dinner was to me.”
It was never, “Gosh, honey, you went to so much trouble! I’m a lucky man! Thanks so much!”
He was so self-absorbed and pressured with work that days would pass without him saying anything particularly personal or pleasant to me, or without even making eye contact. I knew he was preoccupied because he was extremely worried about his investments, but still, his freezing-cold attitude chipped away at whatever affection I felt for him and I felt more and more detached from him. But I was grateful to God to have my children and I gave them everything there was in my heart. I had Patti. And Mark.
It didn’t pay to moan about life in the gilded cage. Not a single member of the human race would have felt sorry for me for one second. Especially Addison. His familiar bark went like this: “Look, Cate. I work like an eff-ing
animal,
putting in
crazy
hours, dealing with more stress than the GD eff-ing president himself. So? When I come home I want to look around and believe, somehow believe, even if it’s just for five minutes, that it was all worth the sacrifice! Why is that so eff-ing hard for you to understand?”
Nice, right? My neck got hot even then, remembering how terrible he made me feel. How low. How insignificant. The belittling, the judging, and then the terrible silences that followed.
Addison became possessed by the decadent spirits of his own desire. If he wanted to get in his Lamborghini and run it, he did. If he wanted to open a five-hundred-dollar bottle of wine and drink it with microwave popcorn, he did. Many afternoons I would find him downing an old Bordeaux while he watched the Golf Channel ad nauseam on our home theater screen that rivaled an IMAX. Once he paid to play with Tiger Woods to raise money for some charitable cause he could not have cared less about just so he could tell that story over and over as though he was Tiger’s best friend. He stored a set of custom Majestic golf clubs in ten different locations from St. Andrews to Pebble Beach so he didn’t have to say, “Gee, I wish I’d brought my clubs.” He kept his G 550 at the ready, in case he wanted to fly to Vegas with a few of his partners or friends and hear Barry Manilow sing or watch Siegfried and Roy play with their big cats. Sick.
I hated all his toys because they represented just how horribly shallow he could be. We could’ve done so much good with all that money. If I wanted to support something like the library or the children’s schools, he refused, saying he only wanted to give money to things that would thrill
him
. And he also never missed an opportunity to remind me that he earned the money, not me. He could and would do as he wanted.
He wanted, he wanted, he wanted . . . well, the wanting was at an end because the greedy, covetous, acquisitive son of a bitch was dead. Did he run around? Probably, but I never really knew for sure. That didn’t mean I didn’t have some very real suspicions.
In the last few years, it came to a point where Addison barely resembled the wonderful extraordinary man I had married. How, I wondered, had I managed all those years to keep my mountain of frustrations and deep disappointments out of the conversation with my children? It was either a miraculous accomplishment of mine or massive denial on their part that they merely viewed him as a well-meaning, very distracted man who was sometimes a difficult and demanding grump. I mean, they had their criticisms of him. When Russ was a teenager, he thought he worked way too much and would shrug his shoulders in disappointment when his father missed a basketball game. Russ was the captain of his team and had gone to the College of Charleston on a full ride, which was a point of pride for him to say he didn’t owe that part of his education to his father. And Sara? She didn’t fare as well. Sara suffered horribly from Addison’s lack of attention and spent her high school years dating the wrong boys, getting her heart broken all the time. College had not been a lot better for her socially and so she turned to acting in theater, where she could express herself.
But when they heard the news about their father’s death, they both swore that they adored him and they were honestly devastated to learn that he was dead.