The Funeral Makers (21 page)

There was an awkward moment between them, each wondering into which category the other fell.

“I don't know if it's a talent worth having or not,” said Sicily.

“The river sounds like a downpour of rain,” said Pearl.

“We never hear it, we're so used to it.” Sicily took the poker from its niche in the burner and hung it from a nail behind the stove.

“I didn't ever hear it when I lived here,” said Pearl. “Listen! Someone's yelling to us.”

It was Thelma. There was a phone call for Sicily. Pearl closed the door to the summer kitchen. The one leading into the main house had been locked from inside, so the two went around to the back porch and through Marge's back door.

“I heard the news,” Winnie Craft told Sicily. “We're all real sorry for you and yours.”

Sicily thanked her and told her those details of the previous night that did not need to be censored. There was a knock on the front door, and Pearl went to answer it. Sicily tried to say good-bye to Winnie, who was not ready to hang up without a complete rundown. It was the sheriff at the door asking for Marvin Ivy Jr. That much Sicily could hear.

“I suppose you heard the other bad news last night?” asked Winnie, savoring the words.

“No,” said Sicily. “What news?”

“Well, Sicily Lawler, where do you live? In New York? Almost everyone knows by now. Sarah Pinkham just happened to pick up her phone to call Martha Fogarty and she heard the sheriff calling for an ambulance. The wreck was just above Lyman's store so the sheriff was calling from there. Lyman and Sarah is on the same line.”

“What wreck?” asked Sicily.

“The sheriff told them don't hurry. He was good as dead. Ain't that just typical of him, though? A stolen car?”

“Who, Winnie, for God's sake? Don't drag this out any more!”

It was representative of the way Mattagash women delivered bad news, turning the words in their mouths like morsels of food, savoring them, for fear it might be the last meal of their lifetimes.

“Chester Lee Gifford. Dead as a doornail in a stolen car. The sheriff didn't say whose. Sarah's trying to get Lyman on the phone now to find out. But ain't that just the kind of mess you could expect to find one of the Giffords in?”

Sicily heard another receiver being lifted on her party line. “Phones must be going up all over town,” she thought.

“Someone's rubberin', Winnie,” she said. “I'll talk to you later,” and she put the receiver back on its hook.

The sheriff was telling Junior, who was white-faced with fury, that his Packard had been wrecked and was at that moment being towed to Watertown by Bob's Wrecker Service and Car Wash.

“Chester Lee Gifford dead,” Sicily said softly. She felt an instant flash of relief. There would be no gossip about her now. And Amy Joy could grow up safely and slowly. Then guilt washed over her. “That poor man is dead,” she thought.

Reaching for her coat, she came to the living room door. All the Ivys had gathered there to listen to what details the sheriff had to offer them.

“They'll be planning a funeral for the Packard this afternoon,” thought Sicily and, catching Pearl's eye, she motioned with a finger for her sister to come closer.

“I'm just going back home for a minute.”

“It was Chester Lee Gifford,” said Pearl. “He's dead. The sheriff said he had a wad of cash in his pocket and was all packed and heading south when it happened.”

“I'll be back before too long,” said Sicily and left the excited Ivys in a noisy huddle in the living room.

Amy Joy had just taken a hot bath and was still wrapped in a large blue bath towel and sitting on the end of her bed clipping her toenails when Sicily told her. Told her as gently as she could. As gently as one
can
be told, even one so young as Amy Joy, that your lover, the man you wanted,
planned
, to spend the rest of your days with, was no longer among the living. He had disappeared like the white, feathery bristles of a dandelion, had drifted off, had gone back to take root in the earth, to become the earth, so that every stroll taken by a widow through wild hay leaves her feeling as though the man she loved is reaching out with a thousand fingers to stroke her thighs as she walks. Or he's watching her from among the pine boughs in the forest with eyes that belong to the forest as stars to the universe. And the wind is his warm breath and he's alive somewhere, waiting, for old age, or scarlet fever, or a slippery stone along the riverbank, to reunite him with his female soul so that they can run the endless moors together, wild and free. The living, who don't know what answers the dead have learned, are forced to ask the questions over and over: Can he hear me? Is that light blinking in the attic a sign from him? Is hearing this old song a clue? Can he watch me undress? Does he know how quickly my memory of him grows vague?

Amy Joy began to weep. The towel undid itself and fell open, exposing her breast. There was a purple mark on it the size of a quarter, like a bruise, or a grape, or a violet flower. Sicily knew it was from Chester Lee and that it was probably all he had left behind him. And when it disappeared, there would be nothing left to show he'd been alive. Except for some papers, maybe, with his name on them, like the ones in Marge's trunk. Or a few pictures that would lie around in boxes until the owners died their own deaths and their souvenirs were thrown away in the rubbish.

Amy Joy had quickly covered herself with the towel, but something about the mark left behind by Chester Lee, above her daughter's beating heart, above the life in Amy Joy's body, as if he would be part of her until it gradually dissolved and he was free to go, left Sicily shaken. She felt tremendous grief for Chester Lee, and her daughter's warm body reminded her that his must be cold, without sound or heat, like the vacant houses in Mattagash during the harvest. And she wished that they could keep the mark where Chester's lips had blossomed alive, nourishing it daily, like a secret garden of their own. But she knew they couldn't. She knew it would slowly fade. Like the river roses, in a few days, a week, it would be past its peak and gone.

“We used to see her go by every day on her way to Watertown to strip. She had her head so high up in the air you'd have swore she was on her way to church. She had that little car loaded down with books, all strewed about the back window. Donnie Henderson saw her go by one day, books flapping in the back of that little red Volkswagen buggy, and he says look, boys, there goes the
hook-mobile
.
He's always quick like that, Donnie is. But I tell you what. If I could have got a little of that action myself and come out clean back at the house, I'd have jumped onto her as quick as a horsefly on a mare with no tail.”

—Bert Fogarty, Lumberman,

and Martha's Husband, 1964

Sarah Pinkham gathered her committee about her on Winnie's front lawn and gave them some last-minute instructions.

“Don't hold up your signs until I tell you,” she said. “Cora, did you get Becky's megaphone?”

“I got it,” said a woman from among the group, “but she wants it back by five o'clock. She's practicing her cheers for when school starts.”

Sarah counted heads. Twelve. Girdy Monihan wasn't there, but Sarah was relieved. Thirteen might bring bad luck. Her mother always used to say, “If your husband has twelve mistresses, he might still come back home. But if he has thirteen, start forwarding his mail. Even decent men have a breaking point.”

“All right now,” she said to the minimob. “We'll go in my car, in Winnie's, and in Martha's. That'll be four to a car and enough room for our signs. Drive right in my dooryard behind me and get out. Don't be afraid. She can't hurt you.”

“Are you sure?” asked Emily Hart.

“What if she has a gun?” asked someone else.

“She's got a gun all right,” Sarah said. “Only she don't fire bullets with it.”

“What if she won't come out?” another voice in the crowd asked.

“She'll come out,” said Sarah, reaching for the megaphone that had been passed forward to her, “or we'll smoke her out.”

“What do we do with her then?” asked Winnie.

“We pack her stuff into that little communist car of hers and wave good-bye,” said Sarah.

The three-car posse rolled quietly through Mattagash toward the Albert Pinkham Family Motel, like the funeral procession of an unpopular relative, and pulled into the driveway. Sarah got out first and motioned for the others to get out. She had planned the day well. Albert had left that morning to drive to Watertown and would not be back until after supper. This was the day when the newly formed Mattagash Historical Society had chosen to meet for the past two months. They had gathered in Winnie's living room to sort over old photos and deeds, drinking coffee and censoring the past people and actions that they felt presented Mattagash in a less than radiant light. What posterity didn't know wouldn't hurt them.

Car doors opened and closed, hats were straightened, dresses smoothed, throats cleared. Sarah moved to the front of the Mattagash Historical Society and held one hand up to speak. At this mistaken clue, signs were hoisted into the air, some spray-painted, others done with nail polish or lipstick or crayons. Wilma Fennelson, who had no children, therefore no crayons, who wore no makeup, therefore no lipstick or nail polish, was nevertheless a good cook, as was any woman worth marrying in Mattagash. Her sign had been done with food coloring and she held it up proudly, a watercolorist at her first exhibit. VIOLET, GO HOME it said in red letters that were done with such a sweet, artistic hand that they might as easily have read HAPPY BIRTHDAY, VIOLET.

Winnie Craft, the most literary of the group, had written a poem: MATTAGASH DON'T NEED THIS TRASH.

Martha, usually the group clown, held a gold spray-painted sign that said NO STRIPTEASE, PLEASE.

“No! No! Not yet,” said Sarah, motioning for the signs to go back down. After a rustling among the biblically strong who were picketing the meek there was a reasonable silence. Sarah cleared her throat. Her idol had always been, would always be, Eleanor Roosevelt. Once, when someone told her there was a great resemblance between herself and the former First Lady, especially around the mouth, Sarah stopped dreading her plainness and vowed to do justice to a woman she resembled, not only in physicalities, but in spirit.

“What we are doing today is historical,” she told the women. “We are cleansing our town for our children and their children. Just like Jesus cleared the temple.” Sarah looked at Winnie and nodded. Winnie took her camera out of her purse and snapped Sarah's picture.

“Hold 'em up NOW!” Sarah said, and signs flew like balloons into the air, some white, some brown, some yellow, integrated signs of all colors and shapes living and waving in harmony. Molly Plunkett's was on gray cardboard that had been the inside of a Tide box. The opposite side read FOR A CLEANER WASH.

Winnie snapped some candid shots of the protestors, then put her camera away.

“We'll go around to her room in single file,” Sarah told her followers. “Then we'll form into three rows of four each, to look like we're more than we are.” She thought suddenly of Jesus dividing the loaves of bread and the fishes to feed the multitude. “Maybe he just lined them up right,” she thought.

Off they went, like a line of chickens behind Sarah Pinkham, around the corner of the Albert Pinkham Family Motel to stand in front of the door to Room 3. The women held their breath. This was it. The time had finally come. It was no longer just idle talk, their mouths full of sandwiches and cake. It was no longer just a few basic tactics jotted down on paper. This was the real McCoy, the first documented confrontation of good versus evil in the history of Mattagash. Who knew what it might lead to? What domino effect could follow their actions that day? Today it was Violet La Forge. Tomorrow it could be the Giffords!

Sarah lifted her sign that said KEEP MATTAGASH CLEAN!—a leftover from the Fourth of July cleanup campaign that had taken place in 1955, its target being the Gifford outhouse. Little Belle had done such a painstaking job in forming each letter and had spent so many hours on the border alone that Sarah always suspected that was when her eye trouble began. What do doctors know? She had kept the artistic sign in case a cleaning campaign should ever arise again. And now one had. She had given Violet La Forge every opportunity to spare herself this kind of disgrace. Violet La Forge had had ample time to throw her things into that hideous little German car and drive off. But what had she done? Had she appreciated the committee's kind gesture? No. She had come to Sarah's door early that morning, clad in her body-hugging leotards, and said, “You won't get rid of me that easily. I'll see you at three o'clock.” Sarah had had to sit down for a few minutes before her breathing became regular again, that's how shocked she was at Violet's insolence. She very nearly began to hyperventilate, which had only occurred once before when she read a magazine article about FDR that said he had a mistress who was with him when he died. She'd been sitting under the hair dryer at Chez Françoise Hairstyles in Watertown when it happened, and Françoise, who was from Quebec, Canada, and spoke little English, had pulled Sarah out from under the dryer and helped her over to the sofa where she collapsed. All Sarah could think of was poor Eleanor. When you wash and iron a man's shirt, you like to think you're the only one who's going to unbutton it. It was all so nasty. Him a cripple and still chasing women. If he had been Sarah's husband, by God, she'd have locked the wheels on that chair of his in a second, president or not. It was nothing more than a little whorehouse on wheels. But Lucy Mercer and Violet La Forge were the only two women unscrupulous enough to cause Sarah Pinkham to hyperventilate.

Violet had until three o'clock to clear out. When Sarah left at noon to go to Winnie's, there was still no evidence of packing. The eviction signs were ready. The historical society was waiting. At two thirty Sarah and Winnie cruised slowly by the motel and saw Violet's car still sitting in the driveway, no suitcases inside, no dresses hanging in the backseat.

“So she's gonna beat it into the ground, is she? She's gonna take it down to the wire?” Sarah asked Winnie. “Well, she's holding a pot full of you-know-what and we're gonna make it stink.”

Now they were huddled strategically before the door that held the little plastic number 3. No one spoke. Finally, Sarah moved forward and, glancing back for assurance, knocked loudly.

“Who is it?” asked a teasing voice from inside. “Is this a knock-knock joke?”

Sarah rapped louder, incensed at Violet's flippancy. She felt a difficulty in breathing and asked God to let her hyperventilate later in the privacy of her own home and not during her confrontation with Delilah. Suddenly the door was opened a crack and Sarah looked into one of Violet's eyes. It was a lovely shade of blue, almost violet. Just like the magazines said Elizabeth Taylor's were like. Sarah was taken back at this. She had never known anything personal about Violet the woman before, and now she was looking into the beautiful, almost sad color of her eye, like it was one of the violets that grew on the hillside, knowing it had to be picked sooner or later. Sarah felt suddenly as if she knew Violet La Forge. Or at least knew that Violet was real, no longer the unseen presence at the recent gatherings whose purpose was to decide how to oust her. Violet might have been any woman standing there. Someone's daughter, sister, mother. Sarah was unable to speak. Her mouth opened and nothing came out. “I have seen the enemy and it is I,” she thought.

“Look, Mrs. Pinkham,” Violet said so softly that Sarah had to lean forward to catch the words. “Look, I've got a good-bye present for you,” and she opened the door for Sarah, who gasped to find Violet naked. Behind her, scrambling for his boots, with a blanket wrapped about his waist, was Albert Pinkham, Proprietor. Sarah covered her mouth. She felt the crowd surge forward, pushing for a better look. Rather than let them see this, rather than feel the shame of a woman with a faithless husband, Sarah Pinkham stepped into the den of iniquity and closed the door behind her.

“She tricked me,” Albert said. “I swear to God, Sarrie, this was the only time in all these years. I lost my head. She wrote me a note to come visit her before she left.”

“Seems like everyone's gettin' notes these days,” said Violet, sitting cross-legged in her little rocker and stroking her Raggedy Ann's head.

“She said she was leaving today and I knew you had your meeting at Winnie's. She even said to leave my pickup in Dewey's gravel pit and she'd pick me up in her Volkswagen. She hid my pants. Where are my pants, you bitch?”

Albert could not stop talking for fear Sarah would start. Violet reached inside a packed suitcase and tossed Albert his pants.

“I'm sorry, Albert, that it had to be you. But just once in my life I had to fight back,” Violet said.

Sarah finally spoke, not looking at either Albert or Violet. She was looking at the big Raggedy Ann and thinking about poor little Belle. “The sins of their fathers,” she said.

“Sarrie, as God is my witness.”

“You leave God out of this,” Sarah told her husband. “God had nothing to do with this.”

“Do you want to let the committee in?” Violet asked, hand on the doorknob.

“No,” said Sarah.

“It could have been any one of them out there. Any one of their husbands. It was yours because this was your party.”

“Will you leave now?” Sarah asked and pushed Albert's hand away. Albert, now dressed, sat helplessly on Violet's pink bed and flicked his nail clipper up and down.

“As soon as I can get everything into the car. Take the women away so that Albert can leave.”

Sarah nodded and heard Albert begin to weep. She almost went to him, but knew she couldn't. Knew she would never go to him again. In sickness or in health. For richer or poorer. Until death did them part. Albert Pinkham would simply be the man in her wedding picture.

“She's leaving. She just wants a few more minutes,” Sarah told the group outside.

“We made these signs for nothing?” asked Martha.

“I got this megaphone for nothing?” asked Becky's mother. The group, like bored Romans, had gotten a taste of blood, had built up a curiosity about the lions.

“I guess so,” said Sarah, as the Mattagash Historical Society followed her back to their cars.

On the ride back to Winnie's the women were quiet, sensing a new development in the Violet La Forge scandal. Wilma Fennelson and Martha Fogarty distinctly heard
a
man's
voice. Wilma Fennelson distinctly heard
Albert
Pinkham's
voice. Sarah realized that the women knew already that Albert was inside Violet's room, or they would figure it out. Life in Mattagash had gone, in ten minutes' time, from being enjoyable to being unlivable. That's how things stood in a small town. There were no slopes. Just sudden sharp drops.

Sarah turned her car in Winnie's driveway and waited for her passengers to unboard.

“We'll call you later,” one said to her. “See you soon,” said another, all of them saying something to her with the same tone Sarah had used so often to outcasts that she recognized it for what it meant:
Leave
so
we
can
talk
about
you.

On the drive back to the Albert Pinkham Family Motel, Sarah wanted to laugh out loud at the irony of it all. But instead, she let tears slide down her face.

“There's no starting over in Mattagash,” she thought, “and they never let your children forget, or your grandchildren. You don't get a second chance here.” And she wondered why they had even bothered to form a historical society when the minds in Mattagash were all bulging museums open to the public year-round, and inherited by those not even born.