Yet the day had been frightening.
He shuddered with the memory even now, but at the same time he felt his fear did not concern anything that had happened on the day of the wake, but instead something that had happened much later on, when it was warm, yes, the summer, yes, Di Palermo’s grocery store, Apartment 4A, 2117 Riverside Drive, no!
His mind clamped shut.
He retreated gracelessly, backing away from the second memory because there was horror implicit in it. Deliberately, he sought the comparative safety of the first memory, even though he knew the two were linked and that one owed its existence to the other. And then, like a faintly rattling warning wind, came the chilling knowledge that memory upon memory upon memory were inextricably linked, horror upon horror were waiting to emerge from the shadowed corners of his mind to force a confrontation, and the knowledge routed him completely.
Where’s Grace? he wondered, and he looked again toward the steps of the school, not seeing her, but focusing his attention steadily on the steps anyway, knowing she would arrive soon. The delaying tactic did not work. His mind drifted back again to that day of his grandfather’s wake in Harlem, but now the memory seemed less frightening than before, so that he concluded it was an absolutely safe memory; it was only the other memories he had to watch out for. He sought the memory of the wake almost eagerly now, nudging it into his mind, while all the time the warning continued to rattle, the warning that told him once he opened the floodgates there would be no stopping the rush of memory — he would be trapped in a thundering cascade; he would drown.
He had walked from the funeral home with his cousin Mandy. She was three months older than he, and she was not wearing her stupid cheerleader’s sweater for a change, but was wearing instead a simple black dress. They walked the streets of Harlem with a total ease, because they had both been born into its poverty and its filth, and even though they were now clean-washed residents of the Bronx, the residue stuck to their bones like part of their flesh. The flowershop was on Third Avenue and 116th Street, across the way from the Cosmo Theater, which his mother had often taken him to when he was a boy. They went into the shop to price a floral wreath for their dead grandfather because they both felt they were old enough now to express their own sympathy, even though Mandy had told him in utmost secrecy that she had never been overly fond of the old man, a confession Buddwing accepted with a feeling of resentful anger.
He had never made a large purchase in his life before, and he knew that he would have to borrow money from his mother in order to meet his half of the obligation. There were a great many floral wreaths in the shop. The woman who waited on them wore a green apron with pins stuck all along the straps, and she was very patient in helping them to decide. They eliminated wreath after wreath, until finally there were only two wreaths to choose from. One of them cost seventy-five dollars. The other cost fifty.
“I think we should take the fifty-dollar one,” Mandy said.
Buddwing shook his head. “No. Let’s take the seventy-five-dollar one.”
“It’s too expensive,” Mandy said.
“It’s for Grandpa,” Buddwing answered.
“It’s still too expensive.”
The woman with the green apron said, “The fifty-dollar wreath is very nice.”
“Yes, but this is for our grandfather, you see,” Buddwing said.
“Yes, I understand,” the woman said. “But the fifty-dollar wreath is very nice.”
“I think we should take the more expensive one,” he said to Mandy.
“That would cost us thirty-seven-fifty apiece,” Mandy said. “That’s really too much money.”
“I think the fifty-dollar wreath would make a nice remembrance,” the woman in the green apron said.
“It’s, you see, he’s our grandfather,” Buddwing said lamely, and the shop went still.
“Would there be a ribbon on the fifty-dollar one?” Mandy asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“Could it say ‘In Loving Memory’?”
“Yes, if you like.”
“That would be nice,” Mandy said, turning to Buddwing. “I think that would be nice, don’t you?”
“The same kind of ribbon that’s on the other one?” Buddwing asked.
“Yes, the same ribbon,” the woman said. “It’s really a very nice wreath, you know.”
“It’s just that fifty dollars seems so... cheap,” Buddwing said.
“Oh, no,” the woman said, looking offended. “Fifty dollars is a nice price to spend for a wreath. Oh, no, it’s not cheap at all.”
“He used to make all my clothes, you see,” he said, and the woman looked at him blankly. “My grandfather.”
“Come on, we have to decide,” Mandy said.
“It’ll look very lovely with the ribbon on it,” the woman said.
“The red ribbon? Is that what you’ll use?” Buddwing asked.
“Yes, if you like.”
“I think the red is good, don’t you, Mandy?”
“Yes. Yes, I think it’ll look nice with the red.”
“And would you deliver it to the funeral parlor?” Buddwing asked.
“Yes, we certainly will,” the woman replied.
“Fifty dollars, you know, it seems...”
“We’ll take the fifty-dollar one,” Mandy said. “With the red ribbon saying ‘In Loving Memory.’” She paused and looked at Buddwing. “Okay?” she asked.
“Well, okay,” Buddwing said.
“Sure, it’s good enough,” Mandy said.
They told the woman in the green apron they would be back in a few minutes with the money, and that meanwhile she should attach the red ribbon to the fifty-dollar wreath. Then they walked out of the flowershop and back to the funeral parlor. His mother wanted to give him the twenty-five dollars as a gift, but Buddwing insisted that it be a loan, and he told her he would take a job that summer to earn the money to pay her back. When the wreath arrived later that afternoon, all the relatives clucked their tongues and wagged their heads in appreciation, and said, “Ahh, look, the kids bought him flowers.” Buddwing felt oddly guilty.
He continued to wonder about that day long after they had buried his grandfather in the hard winter earth, long after spring had come and summer was near. In idle moments, he would reconstruct the conversation in that flowershop, and the words that resounded most clearly in his mind were the ones Mandy had delivered just before they had left: “Sure, it’s good enough.”
Good enough for what? he wondered. Good enough for the old man who inconsiderately died when I loved him so much? Good enough for the old man who welcomed me to his shop every afternoon, “Come in, you must be frozen. Annie, make him some nice hot chocolate”? Good enough for what, Mandy? Oh God, why hadn’t he argued more vehemently, why hadn’t he convinced her that fifty dollars wasn’t enough, that the extra twenty-five dollars was only a way of saying, “Grandpa, I really loved you, not fifty dollars’ worth, not even seventy-five dollars’ worth, but the world, Grandpa, I loved you the world”? Why hadn’t he convinced her?
The job he took that summer was a constant reminder of his grandfather, even before
No, he thought.
No, there’s no sense going over all this; there really isn’t. I took the job, I paid her back the lousy twenty-five dollars!
He tried to make his mind go blank, the way Jesse had taught him to do aboard the Fancher during the war, a prerequisite for self-hypnotism. Before you could learn to hypnotize others, Jesse had said, you had to learn how to hypnotize yourself. He thought of snow, of whiteness, emptiness, open space, nothing, and then wondered what was keeping Grace, and then forced Grace out of his mind; the trick was to make the mind entirely blank, to push out any thought, even a random thought, to sit in unblinking blankness, to think of nothing but peace, nothing but emptiness, nothing, nothing at all.