On what would have been his sixtieth birthday Denise and the two girls go to his grave. He once said he wouldn’t mind being buried, if it was no trouble, near the cottage they summered at in Maine, his mother wanted him buried in Long Island between the grave of one of her children and the cenotaph of another, Denise went along with her because she was so insistent or emotional or something about it—“Last thing for the little time I’ve left I’ll ever ask of you,” that sort of thing — that Denise couldn’t resist and also because of the cost of a burial plot anywhere and maintaining it and the ticklishness of finding one in that Maine town which would admit a summer renter and one, counting the four summers Denise went there alone or with lovers, of only eleven years, who was also Jewish. They meet, without planning it, his brother there. He came with a prayer book, covers his head with his hand and reads the mourner’s prayer in phonetical Hebrew and then says “Maybe, as long as we’re all here, we should say something about Howard, even Eva. How we felt and have been feeling since and so on — you know, about him, theoretically reaching sixty, or just anything. Like to be first, Denise?” “You wouldn’t want to?” “I don’t know what to say yet, if I’m going to say anything but ‘Continue to read I mean rest in peace, if you are, my brother,’ and I thought I’d be polite. Please, you were the person closest to him ever, but if you don’t want to and everyone thinks it’s a bad idea…” “All I can say—” She turns to the grave. “All I can say is that—” “And about him being sixty, maybe that’s ridiculous. But say what you want. Please.” “All I can say is that I loved him — you, darling — very much, and still miss you and think you would have — no, he, him, he would have, because it’s so silly. I don’t believe in spirits or that he’s here in any immaterial way like that. Maybe that’s not the right word, or right word when employed like that, but this is where we plopped him, so fine, period. I’m sorry, sweethearts,” to the girls. “I don’t mean to scare you. Maybe your father’s spirit is here. I’m not saying I know one way or the other, or definitively. It would be nice to think he’s here in some way, or maybe not, for him — unrest. Anyway,” to the grave, “I think he would have wanted me to go on the way I had and approved of most of what I did. If you’re here and it’s true, my old darling, or just that you agree with me for the most part, knock twice or do something earthshaking to let us know, if it’s all right with the higher or lower authorities, if there are those too — With little major disruptive mourning at first, little to none thereafter, lots of sad semisleepless nights throughout it, taking over things as well as I feel I did.” “You did. Don’t let anybody say anything if anyone did,” Jerry says. “Nobody did that I know.” “Good. They were right. You had it tough and did a great job. And sorry for interrupting. Go on, if you’re not finished — please.” “Taking over the householding and child rearing and moneymaking and such completely — well, not completely. When I remarried two years later and for the months I knew him before, I got plenty of help from Eric. But also that: that he would have wanted me to remarry and so quickly, just so I’d get some help and wouldn’t be lonely, and also have another child, since a third’s what Howard and I had wanted and begun working on, and what else? Getting rid of all his manuscripts, unpublished and pubbed. I mustn’t forget that, since it seemed as important to him as almost anything for me to take care of if he suddenly died and was his written and several times his spoken wish. ‘If I die but before then can’t tend to this myself, after the craziness is over and everything’s clearer, out all these go,’ which he left in a letter envelope marked ‘Incalculably urgent’ and pasted on the inside manuscript cabinet door. ‘And don’t waste your time burning them or tearing them up. Green or black trash bags and probably the three-ply leaf kind; and all in one Wednesday or Saturday pickup and without telling anyone what’s inside.’ Actually, I shouldn’t lie here. Olivia’s giving me looks as if I’m lying, so I won’t. I did, after the postfunereal craziness and in a period of clarity, send a number of those manuscripts to publishers and parts of them to magazines, saying these were the last works of my recently deceased husband, hoping that might give them a sentimental and for the publisher a promotional edge, but they were just as swiftly returned as they had been before. Only after they’d been turned down four or five times each did I get rid of them. I did keep a few to remind myself of him whenever I wanted to — manuscripts that were clearly about his life with me and his work and also the girls and us. But after a year or so I forgot about or misplaced them, though I know I didn’t dispose of them, and now I haven’t a clue where those remaining manuscripts are. Probably with the note he left on the cabinet door and that folder I kept with all the new rejections of his work and the list of what manuscript went where and when. Maybe, if his spirit’s here and wants to tap for something it or he deems important, it can tap for that — once for whether I should try to find the manuscripts and send them out again, for maybe the promotional edge is even greater now — the widow who finds her husband’s lost manuscripts after almost ten years — or two, to find them and put them in the next trash pickup — OK, enough, and everyone here should know that when I said I had plenty of semisenseless nights after he died, or however I put it, I meant that for a couple of weeks I felt I could have killed myself if I’d had the easy means and no kiddies and cat — that that’s how, well, that that’s just how, well, just end of graveside chat, and I’ve gone on so queerly long. Olivia?” “I miss him too much to say anything.” “So say nothing,” Jerry says. “Nothing’s fine sometimes.” “I also wouldn’t know what to say. I’m too young to say anything that intelligent or right or unembarrassing. Or maybe I’m just intelligent enough not to say anything that young and innocently wrong and so not very embarrassing, or not for so long. Something, though, but you know.” “So what have I been saying?” Jerry says. “Really, my little olive, probably my idea wasn’t that smart a one for you kids. What do you think, Denise — should we put a closure on it for now?” “I think if they want to say something at his grave, now’s a good opportunity. Nobody but you has been out here for years. And as a family we haven’t been here since the stone was put up, and even then, Eva wasn’t with us. But it’s up to Olivia.” “I’m so unhappy,” Olivia says, “that if I did say anything — but I’m already crying while I’m saying this, which was what I was about to say — I’d cry.” “Honestly, I don’t see the point to this anymore,” Jerry says. “The point,” Denise says, “is that if it’s simply a big quick emotional hurt that can get somewhere nothing else has been able to, all the better for her while we’re here and he’s there, spirit or spiritless. Tell a story then or an anecdote of you and your father, or anything.” “Or nothing. Excuse me again, Denise, but as I said before,” to Olivia, “nothing’s OK too, and at times can be perfect.” “Jell-O,” Olivia says. “OK, Jell-O. What?” “Just Jell-O. Something that happened. It just popped into my head. Not a real standout memory or one that’s going to do anything moving to me. But it’s as good as any between us, and it was so like him, I think. It typified.” “Tell it, I never heard it,” Eva says. “Now I think I forgot it.” “Come on!” “I was around five and it was a Sunday. It had to be a Sunday since that’s what he was talking about. And I couldn’t have been more than five years and seven months, since that’s what I was when he died. And it was about Jell-O because of what comes next. I was sick and he was going food-shopping and Mother asked him to bring back, guess. It was all I could digest, etcetera, except maybe applesauce, which I don’t think we ever ran out of, even on the road, for fifteen years.” “Jell-O was just about the only liquid you’d take when you were very ill,” Denise says. “So. When he came back he was talking in this funny ethnic accent he always seemed to come back with from this particular market because of the people who shopped and worked there, he said.” “Baltimore-Jewish,” Denise says; “you can say it.” “He always caught it like a cold, he said — in fact, the ‘Jewish flu’ he called it, and then in that accent — I can’t do it, so I won’t even try, or I’ll sound silly. Vs for Ws and so on and lots of