An exact replica of a figment of my imagination: a memoir Page 5

  We didn’t want to go back to Bordeaux after Pudding died, but we had to: the autopsy took three days, and only then could we pick up Pudding’s body, to accompany it to the crematorium. On the way to the morgue we had to stop at a pharmacy so poor Edward could negotiate a tube of hemorrhoid cream for me. (Sometimes, when I think back on those days I forget that I wasn’t just a woman who had lost a child, I had given birth to one, too, and was recovering.) This was the last of Bordeaux. We hated the place. It was ruined for us worse than the rest of France was. Edward had mentioned to his parents that we’d like to spend the summer in North Norfolk, near the sea, and within forty-eight hours they had found a cottage for rent in a small town called Holt. It wasn’t free for three weeks, but it felt like a miracle: we had somewhere to go.

  The morgue was just by the hospital. It felt — well, dead, but dead in an early-morning dentist’s-office way, clean and deserted. The waiting room was large and sparsely furnished, with a coffee vending machine by the plate glass windows at the front and a windowless double door into the back. We rang a bell; a woman came to see what we wanted; we gave the name in its mangled aitchless French version: R-Vay.

  You may see the child again, she said.

  We’d been warned by the funeral director that we’d be asked this. No thank you, we told her.

  Well then, she said. Please wait.

  We sat. It was very sunny out, but the room was so big that the light from all those windows at the front stalled out at the coffee machine. It was in no danger of getting anywhere near us. I remember craning my head to look at the outside. At first there was nothing, and then the most funereal person I have ever seen in my life walked by, a Gallic Boris Karloff. He wore a white dress shirt. His shoulders had a sorrowful hunch. His dark overhanging eyebrows looked carved from granite, like tombstones, monuments to worry. Of course he had something to do with the morgue: he couldn’t have gone into anything but a funerary profession. Maybe this was the family face, and the family business, and who could say whether it was evolution or destiny or an acceptance that one’s face is one’s fortune, or misfortune.

  “That’s the screws,” said Edward.

  “What?”

  “That’s the sound of them screwing the lid down,” and then I could hear the dim sound of a turning power tool. That was good. It meant we didn’t have to wait much longer.

  Of course Boris Karloff turned out to be the hearse driver. I couldn’t understand a single word of his French, he mumbled so apologetically. The hearse was a plainish station wagon. He gave directions to the cemetery. Edward seemed to understand him.

  We followed the car, a threadbare funeral procession. At every rotary the cemetery was marked, but we checked the map anyhow. What could be worse than to lose sight of our boy now?

  In the middle of the cemetery, Boris Karloff pulled up in front of a building that housed both the crematorium and a few chapels for funerals. He shook our hands and directed us inside. The building had the timeless feel of an institutional edifice constructed in good taste, with no heart. It might have been erected in 1952 or 1977 or 2005. The funeral director greeted us. We said our name, we said we were the R-Vays, and he indicated with his hand the direction to walk.

  At every turn of the hallway was a sign with the international line drawing of a martini glass, the kind that indicates airport cocktail lounges, underscored with an arrow, though if you followed them you got only as far as a vending machine for bottled water. There was another funeral going on that day, for a grown-up, and we walked against the current of mourners who seemed to be taking it all very well.

  The director brought us into our chapel.

  I am sorry, he said, for the size of the room, but it is all we have.

  The size of the room was vast, appropriate for the service of someone very famous, or very friendly, or very old, someone who could attract mourner after mourner. Surely they should have put the other funeral here, I thought, but maybe they weighed the possibilities and decided: to put fifty people in a room meant for two hundred is sadder than putting two people there.

  This way, said the funeral director, and he brought us to the front, where the casket had been set on a cabinet. We had seen the casket only in a catalog at the funeral home by the hospital. The director said, I will leave you for a moment.

  “It’s too big,” I said when he’d gone.

  “I know,” said Edward, looking at the room yawning out behind us. It upset him. “If I were my father, I’d complain — ”

  But I’d meant the casket. A brass plate had been fixed to the top: Pudding Harvey, 2006. I wondered how caskets came. I mean how they were sized. We’d chosen the cheapest casket, the cheapest urn. Now we touched the wood very tentatively. What age was this meant for? For a child, surely, not a baby, and it made me sad that he, who had so little to his name, was lying inside such a big, empty, dark space. I didn’t like to think of where he was in there, at the top, at the bottom, but I wondered. It should have fit him.

  It would be burned too, of course, with the brass plate.

  Again we had to nod at a French stranger and say, Yes, that’s fine, you may carry him away now. The cremation itself would take some time. We sat outside at a distance from the building and smoked cigarettes. After a while we realized we were sitting in the patch of land reserved for the scattering of remains, and we moved. At another time in our lives we might have been horrified. Now we just slapped the dust off the seat of our pants and moved on.

  Who would scatter ashes here? The lazy? The unambitious? You stumble from the crematorium, and say, Well, here’s as good a place as any? We were having Pudding cremated because we wanted to take him out of France, and it was easier to do so in an urn than in a coffin, and we didn’t know where we’d bury him. My father had suggested the graveyard outside the church at the bottom of Edward’s parents’ driveway, where we’d been married, but when I thought about it I didn’t want to feel sad every time we drove past. We’d scatter them somewhere beautiful, once we’d come up with the right place. Surely that was the point of cremation: you could take your beloved anywhere, let him rest anywhere, not just walk out the door and chuck. I didn’t understand.

  Maybe you just couldn’t afford a burial: the embalming, the plot, the stone.

  Maybe you just wanted to be done with the whole sad business, you’d attended to your dying relative for months or years, or you’d had a long life with him, too long, in fact. You wanted to fling your sorrow over your shoulder and never look back.

  We didn’t want to get it over with; it would take months for us to scatter his ashes. For now we found some clean grass and sat and smoked and flicked those lighter ashes into the air. After half an hour, we walked back in. The funeral director demonstrated our new possessions: the ashes, which were inside an urn with another plaque underneath that said Pudding Harvey, Bordeaux, 2006, which slipped into an innocuous blue nylon bag, and a certificate explaining to suspicious customs agents what the substance was. We thanked him.

  “I want to pry that plaque off with a knife,” said Edward as we left. “I don’t want the word Bordeaux anywhere near him.”

  We got in a car and headed for the rocade, the highway that girdled the city, for the last time in our lives.

  When I was a teenager in Boston, a man on the subway handed me a card printed with tiny pictures of hands spelling out the alphabet in sign language. I AM DEAF, said the card. You were supposed to give the man some money in exchange.

  I have thought of that card ever since, during difficult times, mine or someone else’s: surely when tragedy has struck you dumb, you should be given a stack of cards that explain it for you. When Pudding died, I wanted my stack. I still want it. My first child was stillborn, it would say on the front. It remains the hardest thing for me to explain, even now, or maybe I mean especially now — now that his death feels like a non sequitur. My first child was stillborn. I want people to know but I don’t want to say it aloud. People don’t like
to hear it but I think they might not mind reading it on a card.

  I could have taken my cards, translated into French, to the stores of Duras, where the baker, the butcher, the dry cleaner, the grocery store ladies, had seen me growing bigger and bigger over the months: I couldn’t bear the idea of them seeing me deflated and asking after the baby. “Voilà,” I’d say, and hand over a card. I could have given a card to the imperious man at immigration in Portsmouth who almost denied me entry into England. To the waiter at the curry house that summer who was always mean to us. To the receptionist at the ob-gyn practice in Saratoga Springs at my first visit. To the nurses who asked me why I was scheduled for such close prenatal monitoring.

  To every single person who noticed I was pregnant the second time, and said, “Congratulations! Is this your first?”

  To every person who peeks into the stroller now and says the same thing.

  Every day of my life, I think, I’ll meet someone and be struck dumb, and all I’ll have to do is reach in my pocket.

  This book, I am just thinking now, is that card.

  When I called my friend Ann the first time after Pudding died, she immediately asked what she could do, and then did everything, and then kept asking, and she sent out an e-mail to tell people I hadn’t told that was so beautiful — though I have never read it — that I got the most beautiful condolence notes in response. Wendy burst into hysterical tears at the sound of my voice and asked me questions until I’d told the whole story. “Was he a beautiful baby?” she wanted to know, and I wondered how she knew to ask: she was the only one who did. Margi said, “Oh, Elizabeth, please know that if any of us could absorb your pain for you, we would,” and then laughed at all my dark jokes. Bruce, remembering something just as terrible that had happened to him decades before, wrote, “There is no way for such an event to leave you who you are.” Patti, who has seen as much sorrow as anyone I know, was an extraordinary combination of complete sympathy and complete comprehension. My brother said, at the end of a long conversation, “Well, I guess as a family we’ve been pretty lucky that we haven’t had something awful happen before.” My sister-in-law Catherine texted, Poor poor darling you.

  Somehow every one of these things happened at exactly the right time for me. This is why you need everyone you know after a disaster, because there is not one right response. It’s what paralyzes people around the grief-stricken, of course, the idea that there are right things to say and wrong things and it’s better to say nothing than something clumsy.

  I needed all of it, direct comfort, hearsay grief. Edward’s great friend Claudia’s husband, Arno, a stage manager and perhaps the calmest man I’ve ever met, burst into tears on the phone when Edward called, and when Ann called my friends Jonathan and Lib, Jonathan did, too. “Oh,” Ann said to me, “to hear that big man cry.” I couldn’t have borne listening myself, to him or Arno, but to know that they did — it felt as though they had taken part of the weeping weight from my shoulders. Of course I cried an awful lot, but I also regretted every stupid time I’d ever cried in my life before over nothing, days as a teenager I’d wept myself sick and couldn’t exactly remember why, when I should have saved up. Now, in Tipperary and near Harvard Square, big men were crying for us. Before this I’d imagined that professional mourners, people hired to cry at funerals, were always little old ethnic grandmothers, maybe because the first funeral I’d been to was for a fifth-grade classmate named Paula Leone, and her Italian aunts had howled at the graveside.

  “They shouldn’t be old women,” I told Edward in Bordeaux. “They should be big men, a whole line of them, crying.”

  Idon’t know what to say, people wrote, or, Words fail.

  What amazed me about all the notes I got — mostly through e-mail, because who knew how to find me? — was how people did know what to say, how words didn’t fail. Even the words words fail comforted me. Before Pudding died, I’d thought condolence notes were simply small bits of old-fashioned etiquette, important but universally acknowledged as inadequate gestures. Now they felt like oxygen, and only now do I fully understand why: to know that other people were sad made Pudding more real. My friend Rob e-mailed me first, a beautiful and straightforward vow to do anything he could to help me. Some people apologized for sending sympathy through the ether; some overnighted notes; it made no difference to me. I read them, and reread them. They made me cry, which helped. They moved me, that is to say, they felt physical, they budged me from the sodden self-disintegrating lump I otherwise was. As I was going mad from grief, the worst of it was that sometimes I believed I was making it all up. Here was some proof that I wasn’t.

  One day Ann wrote to say that people, even people who didn’t know me, had asked what they could do for me.

  “They could write,” I told her. I considered this a sign of my essential mental health, that I could both think of something that would make me feel better and ask for it.

  The English Department head at Skidmore, Linda Simon, was one of the people who’d asked, and soon enough my e-mail box filled up with messages from my future colleagues. I’d met some but not others, and every single message meant the world. One, from a famous writer who taught in the department, was so eloquent that it inspired in me the only moment of true denial I remember from that terrible time: I thought, I’ll save this, and show it to Pudding when he’s older: it’ll really mean something to him.

  People speak of losing friends when someone dear to them dies, but we were lucky. I lost only one friend, and possibly she doesn’t even know it yet, and probably I’d lost her long before. Her mother had died when this friend was a teenager, her father died when she was in her thirties. Frankly, I’d been good to her after her father’s death, though by the time Pudding died we were no longer as close as we’d been. One of my best friends called to tell her my bad news and then e-mailed to say that he had done so.

  I waited to hear from her. And waited.

  It took three months. That would have been all right if she’d said, I didn’t know what to say, or I’m sorry, I’ve been trying to find the words.

  “I was hoping to speak to you,” she wrote, “or be able to send a paper letter, but I don’t have a number or address for you, and I simply couldn’t wait any longer.”

  It’s hard to explain the rage I felt at reading this, at her attempt to turn her silence into something noble, when all of my other friends had turned themselves inside out to help me months before. The entire note was full of platitudes. “Losing a child is the worst pain one can experience, I think,” she wrote, and I hated her for that I think, as though she wanted to make it seem as though my pain was her original thought, a theory she’d honed in social work school. Even now I realize how petty I’m being, how the only problem was that she’d waited too long to write the note. Her shock and sympathy were no longer fresh, and her language reflected that. But my grief was still fresh, grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving, and the distance between what I felt and what she wrote infuriated me.

  She’s written to me since. I have never written back.

  Oh, Elizabeth,” my friend Lib wrote, “these past ten months did happen, Pudding did happen, we won’t forget him. He’s part of our family, one of those cousins or great-aunts that not everyone has met but is still part of the whole damn sweet sad picture.”

  My friend Lib is a baby freak. I hadn’t realized that before, though we’ve known each other for twenty years now, ever since we were little library workers together at the Newton Free Library in Newton, Massachusetts. All through my pregnancy with Pudding, she hovered over me through the phone wires, asking questions and giving sound advice on matters ranging from education to what sort of underpants one might need postpartum. Edward and I stay with Lib and Jonathan and their daughters, Sophie and Nora, when we’re in Boston: it’s a sweet house full of snacks and nice girls and good books, and we’d been looking forward to introducing Pudding to it.

  Lib e-mailed me all
the time, after Pudding died. We spoke for hours on the phone, too, but the phone conversations have gone wherever conversations go, up in a mist of white wine, and the French sun, and the smoke off a ferry headed to England, and the English seaside. She was not normally a writer of e-mails — her daughters were eleven and five, and the computer was on the third floor of their house — but she wrote to me then. She still writes to me about Pudding. She misses him like a person too, I think.

  I want to explain to her daughters what their mother did for me. I think in some ways she saved my life.

  But I can’t explain, I can only give examples.

  She wrote, “We spent the evening with Adam, all crying softly into his birthday bourbon, it may not be strictly Kubler-Ross but hell we really don’t have a vocabulary for this kind of loss. I think I’ll take Nora’s lead on this one. When she learned that Pudding died she clamped her hands over her ears, stamped her feet and yelled no more people dying. Now, she carries him around and sleeps with him, his name is Owen Alexander Green and she says Elizabeth and Edward don’t have to worry because she is taking care of him. Nora’s world is a beautiful place.”

  She wrote, “I woke up today thinking of you. It’s Mother’s Day, Elizabeth. Of course I’m thinking of how I desperately wish circumstances were different. But I’m also thinking about how connected we all are, all us mothers. The old ones, the new ones, the sad, the crazy, Natalie, Cornelia and we Elizabeths. I’m thinking I feel very close to you, to Pudding, to your grief and to mine. I looked forward to seeing his face, the combining of you two dear people. The image I hold of him now is of a chubby baby at the water in his mother’s arms, she’s trying to get him to touch the water but he pulls up his little fat legs, retracts them in an ‘I’d rather not’ sort of a way. Deborah, my midwife friend, says that of the women she’s known whose babies have died, of course all of them wish life had unfolded differently, but none wished that they hadn’t carried, loved, and birthed those children. Those are some amazing mothers. You are one amazing mother. I love you very much this day.”