It’s his seventieth birthday. Actually, last Tuesday was but not everybody could get off from school or work. Eva flew in from one state, Olivia from another, they picked up their mother and drove to the cemetery. Olivia’s infant daughter is with them. They called Jerry and he said he’d meet them. “Bring the prayer book,” Olivia said. They stand in front of the grave. Jerry says the prayer book was in his coat pocket but must have fallen out along the way and shows them the hole. He brought three very large black umbrellas, “cemetery umbrellas, which I’ve collected from some of the fancier funerals I’ve gone to recently, though I think two of those they wanted them back,” and distributed them. “I wish you all had got to know my other brother and my sister,” he says. “I know this is an odd way to start, especially in this weather when you almost wish you were inside your family mausoleum. But we don’t meet much and I never feel enough’s been said or felt about them in front of other people so I thought I’d give them a little due before I forget to. Really sweet people, and talented, sensitive. Readers they both were; advanced thinkers for their ages. Possibly I’m exaggerating for Vera, for she was always so handicapped from such an early age that sometimes she couldn’t even turn a simple page. I forget if she even liked to have books read to her. I know a pile of them piled up as gifts for her. If she did like to be read to I’m afraid we were all probably usually too busy to except my mother. I wince now when I think of the things we gave her to entertain herself. Leather lacing, for instance, to make scissors holders and coin purses and things for keys. Then she gave one of them to you or you asked for one or were asked by your mother to ask for one or for her to make you one and you said ‘Great work, great.’ But what they both could’ve amounted to we don’t even have to say. Anybody could see that for Vera in her preschool photographs before she first took sick. So alert, open eyed. Also in the last ones when she was around postgraduate age, though why we took them I don’t know, when she was on crutches, then crutches and neck and back braces because she had so little bone back there to hold up her neck, I think it was. Then bedridden, bed sores, eighty pounds, next week it’s seventy-five. She seemed like a big empty piñata whenever I picked her up so my mother could change the bed under her or get the potty out without spilling when it got too filled or stuck. I guess we took the photographs because she was smiling, and who’d want to do anything but encourage that? And also that she thought she looked, all in black and black eyeliner and much brushed and I think dampened-down hair covering her forehead and cheeks and some of her eyes and certainly the front and back neck scars — these pictures when she was on crutches — kind of chic, street-smart and exotic. In one bed photograph, which my mother I just remember kept forever on the pegboard above her own dresser, she had her hand up holding an exercise bar, was in a wrinkled hospital gown, though this was at home, and by ‘wrinkled’ I’m not making any criticism of my mother, but the same eyes, look, hair, big clearheaded smile. Black stockings too with the crutches to give her atrophied legs a fuller look, I suppose. And black sunglasses sometimes both in her photographs on crutches and in bed, maybe to make her look sultrier but I think just as much to hide these very dark circles around, by this time, her crossed eyes. Anybody here feel I’m talking on too long or I’ m depressing you or your feet are getting soaked, though those umbrellas should be stopping that, let me know or maybe just go back to the cars. No apologies needed. I’d like to stay and finish. So, it was enough to kill you, those two. That they died, in their late, for him, to mid-twenties for her, and then when Howard went it was like being slowly tortured before you were slowly killed. Scratch that. Too literary and not even accurate as a comparison. Whenever I try those I flop. Vera had the tougher of the two lives. I’m talking about her and Alex, and I promise to be quicker and less winding. No childhood almost, while he of course had much more than that. He went to regular school, college, worked as a newsman, saw lots of the world, was starting to be a serious creative person, was once even engaged, I think. Anyway, he knew women, had jobs, got drunk, moved around. She died much too early, which I can say despite all her ordeals and such for twenty years, which might’ve made me say ‘Come and get me already.’ Even cripples and people confined to hospital beds can find companionship and marry and have children if it’s not with someone who’s permanently bedridden too. Possibly I’m wrong there, meaning they can, though no doubt with help. I’ve an image of her on the floor once, or maybe this was Howard’s or Alex’s memory and whichever one told me it told me it a few times. Must be, since I would’ve been too old to have the reaction I’m now going to convey. And I suddenly remember something which did indicate she was thinking ‘Come and get me already,’ or at least once, but it’s not what I’m going to say right now. She was on her back and banging the dining room floor hysterically with her heels and hands and shrieking that gives you temporary deafness and her hoarseness. ‘Shut up,’ Alex or Howard said, ‘I can’t think’ or ‘do my schoolwork’ or something. I don’t remember the last part, just the ‘shut up.’ And my mother said to him that it was only a tantrum, let her have it, she deserves it, something like that, and no doubt comforted her, but I think Vera continued to bang and cry. She did this a few times, supposedly, none, I can remember, when I was around, and one time did much worse, which is the time I meant about ‘Come and get me already’ Years later, when she was thirteen or fourteen — I was away but Alex or Howard sent me the newspaper clipping — she tried to jump off our apartment building roof and a fireman swung around in a sling and grabbed her. That was the newspaper shot I got, but with the story all wrong. In it they said she was ten, up till then a cheerful neighborly girl, with no seeming meaning to kill herself, and so on. But I’m trying to illustrate something here. Bring it out. What? That the tantrum — that’s right — also the suicide try, of course — was because, as my mother explained to Alex or Howard that time, she was so sick of being sick and having no life and going to the hospital every three years or so to be operated on and coming back months later sometimes looking and feeling worse than when she left and being a half-inch to an inch shorter each time and not smarter, her brains drugged duller, scars here and everywhere, a tracheotomy tube in her at home that would last like the last one lasted for months and then left with the tube hole that never seemed to close. It was so ugly. A hole, in your throat, which you always walked around with; just awful. I could barely look at it and for the most part she didn’t cover it with anything like a Band-Aid, and I don’t even know if she was supposed to. She was sensitive to its looks, you could see that, her eyes always following your eyes and going downcast when you took a squint at it, but maybe she was told to keep it exposed so it could heal faster. My mother, by the way, used to clean the gook out of the tube, and with hydrogen peroxide, I think, dab around the hole. She called it the worst job of her life, suctioning it, and not just because it was her daughter. Gagging work, she said. So, compared to Vera — compared to my mother, even, and that job, besides losing a few kids — we’ve all lived richly, even Alex. Scratch that too. Too sermony, that ‘because of this we should feel that’ and so on. But I should move on before you all drown while you’re dying of boredom. I think I’ve already said that in almost the same way, today or some day close. I think I’ve already said almost everything a few times or at least twice. I’m not complaining, just saying, but every statement and phrase of mine, including this last one, is beginning to sound too familiar. Anyway, I suppose you know — I know Denise does — how your father felt when Alex disappeared so unexpectedly…. No, that’s not the way to start it — so formal — and I can’t even talk anymore. It’s not that I’m choked up. I actually am, but it’s mostly that I’m too tired. I’m in good shape for my age, even if that’s not saying much. But this day’s been too tough for me, driving here from who knows where, and I better remember later if I want to get home, and just getting my mind set for it. It isn’t easy being the oldest child and then the only survivor and also seeing the place where I’ll probably be dropped into shortly, even if it’s beside them and even if I think later my wife and later still maybe one of my kids will be beside or near me, which doesn’t help much to think about either. So, the end. Thank you for coming, and just ‘God love you’ to all our relations in the graves here — don’t know how else to put it — Momma, Dad and the rest of you, which I think we can say amen to to clinch it, OK?” “Amen,” they all say and he says “If you’ll still excuse me, I think I’ll drive home rather than to whatever you’ve planned to do,” and folds up his umbrella, goes to his car in the rain without responding to two of them saying “I’ll drive you,” gets in, doesn’t turn to or look back at them though they’re all waving and saying good-bye, and drives off.