The
femme arrived from the big city, where she lives, in mid-afternoon, and was aghast upon seeing that grey fiberglass “thing†atop the William Rivers Pitt.
“We hope to do something so as to have the big red light that’s its nose blink,†I told her; “but they’re busy and I’m busy, and so we couldn’t do it today.â€
“You’re making the place look like Coney Island or something,†she fumed.
“But it doesn’t make any difference, madam,†I told her; “I’m fated to be the last inhabitant of this place, as sooner or later it’s to be torn down and the property divided into resort-cabin lots, next year or the year after, or whenever. It’s all going to go anyway, some time.â€
- - - - - - - - - -
We went to the bar in town, for an early supper.
Swede, the cook of Norwegian derivation whose specialty is Italianate cuisine, blinked in surprise when he saw the two of us together, although I had no idea why. We were
always together.
I ordered my usual, the hamburger extremely well-done, pressed down hard on the grill so as to squeeze out every drop of grease, and french fries done on the grill and not in the fryer, with a side-dish of sour cream.
The
femme took her time, finally deciding upon
prosciutto e melone, stracciatella, grissini torinesi, paglia e fieno, spaghetti con la bottarga, cotoletta alla milanese, and for dessert,
torta caprese.
We both had coffee with milk for drinks.
- - - - - - - - - -
“You know,†she said, “I know December’s a rough month for you, with so many memories of bad Decembers past. It seems like every sixth or seventh day of the month, it strikes me that you have yet another unhappy anniversary to note. So much seems to have happened to you, in December.â€
“Yeah,†I said, “but I’m cool, copacetic, with it. All these things were so very long ago, and the only one that still stings is December 21. Other than that, December’s a great month, a wonderful month, a delightful month, a wholly awesome month. I love December.
“Of course, it helps that I’ll never again see a policeman walking up to me, his hat in his hand instead of on his head. One could always see, even from far away, that it was bad news.
“Nobody could simply pick up a telephone and call me, and so of the nine events (not all in December, however), in seven of those cases, it was necessary for a civil authority to deliver the news to me face-to-face, in person.
“But it’s all been so very long ago.â€
Swede came out of the kitchen and over to our table, bearing a large tray he carefully set upon a set of uncollapsed legs, and dispensed the appropriate dishes between the two of us. The
femme’s, he put down with care and attention; mine, he slammed down onto the table so hard the plates rattled.
“I don’t know why he’s like that,†I said to the
femme as Swede returned to the kitchen; “here, I order something that’s easy and quick to fix, while you order things that take time and care and attention, things that are a real pain to put together…..but he treats you like a queen, and me as if I’m some bum who needs thrown out the door.â€
- - - - - - - - - -
“Well, what went through your mind today?†the
femme asked; “today’s one of those anniversaries.â€
Yeah, I admitted; I’d noted it, it being on this day years ago when I was in my early 20s, that my favorite older brother (out of three) had died at home in his sleep of cardiac arrest, being 40 years old.
This had been in Lincoln, and I was the only other member of the family living in that city at the time, all the others and their spouses and children scattered miles away. A deputy sheriff, his hat in his hand rather than on his head, had come to my place and asked that I go over to identify the body.
It’d been a surprise to me; true, he’d been in bad health due to the afflictions and ailments of affluence, the too-easy, too-soft, too-comfortable, too-secure sort of life. He’d turned decadent, a flaming
bon vivant, of sensual rather than spiritual tastes, after our parents had died. He was a high-ranking governmental bureaucrat and a prominent Democrat, having been a hippie earlier.
I’d warned him--and s-o-o-o-o-o-o many times--that when one turns against those values and principles on which one was born and raised, one inevitably turns on oneself, to no happy end.
But who had been I, to advise him?
As the
femme of course knows, my parents, both of them born and raised in Pennsylvania, had married and lived in New York City for several years, during which time they had six children, born close to each other. After which followed a substantial gap, and the family moving to the Sandhills of Nebraska, before I came into being when the parents were middle-aged, and two years after myself, a younger brother.
Nobody takes a “little†brother seriously.
- - - - - - - - - -
“This was the brother,†I explained to the
femme, “--well, the summer I was three years old, my three older brothers and two neighbor boys were playing Monopoly on the front porch of the house next door. Our parents were working at the hospital, and they were in charge of watching my younger brother, then an infant, and myself.
“I have no memory of the event, but sometime in mid-morning, another kid came running up the street and onto the porch, breathlessly announcing, ‘[franksolich]‘s been run over by a car, and he’s laying there, all mashed up, squishing and squirming like a frog that’s been stepped on.’
“My two other older brothers and the two neighbor kids got up, to run over and look, but this brother stayed seated on the porch. ‘You leave, you lose your turn,’ he told the others.
“’He’ll get over it.’
“After which they all sat down, but only for a few seconds, and then everybody got up to go and see, but by that time I’d already been borne away.
“Our last conversation, maybe a couple of weeks before he died, I was griping about something, and he interrupted, ‘I’ve watched you all your life; I think I’ve seen you more than anybody else ever has.
“’There
is no force, human or otherwise, that can do you any harm; you’ve been through things that would injure or even kill others--and has--coming out whole and unscathed. There
is nothing that can destroy you; you’re indefatigable.
“’Quit whining; the
only thing that can destroy you is…..yourself. Nothing, nobody, else can.’
“I think he may have been referring to my drinking, but at any rate, I quit that five months after he died.â€
- - - - - - - - - -
“Anyway,†I continued, “I rushed to his place and identified the body. I knelt on the floor beside it--he’d apparently been meaning to turn off the lights of the Christmas tree before going to bed, when it happened--shut the eyes, kissed the forehead, and covered the face.
“Before getting up, I meant to send him to God, ‘Now Thou dost dismiss Thy servant, O Lord, according to Thy word in peace; because my eyes have seen Thy salvation, which Thou hast prepared before the face of all peoples: a light to the revelation of the Gentiles, and the glory of Thy people Israel’--something I’d learned in speech therapy, and can recite from memory even today.
“But being nervous, what came out instead was ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One’--something else I’d learned from speech therapy a few years before.
“So I sent him away as a Jew rather than a Roman Catholic, but it was okay, because God has a sense of humor.
“Then I walked around the place, opening wide all the windows on all four sides. This was about eight o’clock in the morning, and it was heavily snowing. It wasn’t cold--maybe about 28, 29 degrees, and there wasn’t any wind, just lots and lots of snow cascading down.
“It was weird, being so Christmas-y--the snow, the tree in the living room with the blinking multi-colored lights still on, the wrapping paper, the presents wrapped and unwrapped, and all this other festive regalia…..and a sheet-covered body in the middle of the living room floor.
“I took whatever bottles of prescription drugs I saw laying around, and flushed the contents down the commode. I was surprised they let me do that, because this after all was a death under investigation, but they did; no one made a step to stop me.
“After that, I went into the bedroom and sat on the side of the bed, asking, ‘Okay, what next? What do you want me to do?’ and lit a cigarette. My brother had loathed and detested my smoking as much as my drinking, and here I was, smoking in his bedroom.
“What they wanted me to do, since I seemed so composed--their words, not mine--was hang around, to answer questions. To stay right there with them, until this was resolved. It was obviously a clear-cut case of cardiac arrest, but as it’d happened at home outside the presence of any known witnesses, a lot of things had to be checked out.
“And here it was, the Monday after Thanksgiving; there were a lot of people they couldn’t get a hold of, plus that the city was all but closed down because of the snow.
“So I stayed until the end, leaving mountains of half-smoked cigarettes all over the place.â€
- - - - - - - - - -
“When the undertaker came to remove the body about four in the afternoon, all the ‘t’s have been crossed and the ‘i’s dotted now, there arose the matter of clothing for the body; he couldn’t after all be buried in his underwear.
“I opened the door to the closet in the bedroom, finding much to my startlement that it contained only…..his baseball uniform. I wasn’t familiar with his place, and didn’t know where else to look, and so this would have to do.
“But no big deal, I thought; the body had deteriorated substantially the past several hours, and I thought it’d have to be a closed-casket funeral, so nobody’d see what he was wearing anyway.
“I’d greatly underestimated the skills of the embalmist, and the body was put on full display, in his baseball uniform. Many said they thought it was so cool, doing that, because baseball had been a big part of his life; I didn’t bother telling them it hadn’t been done on purpose, only because of desperate necessity.
“Some days later, when my last surviving brother arrived, he and I went through the place, to see what was where, and he opened a closet in another bedroom, showing a whole long row of suits and other clothes.
“He’d always thought of his ‘little’ brother as less than competent, and asked me how I could’ve possibly missed all this stuff.
“I reminded him that our late brother had lived a life vastly upscaler than my own, and that it’d never occurred to me that one would have clothes in more than one closet.â€
to be continued
