I gave Claire my mother’s ring, a white gold band with the world’s smallest diamond. And her face fell like I’d just broken her heart, but then the smile came — long, trembling. I remember being quiet, staying quiet, waiting for her to speak, but she didn’t. She kept looking from her ringed finger to me — back and forth.
She wore ivory. It took place at Edith’s in a clearing, just before the rosehips and the dunes. It was five thirty and an August storm was rolling north up the coast. I could hear thunder booming from Rhode Island. Edith gave her daughter away. Claire’s veil whipped about her head in the wind. Above us seabirds squawked and flew inland as the clouds rolled out — charcoal and billowy. I looked out at the congregation, my family on one side, hers on the other. We read our vows and we kissed and the clouds burst. After the rain, a double rainbow appeared with one foot in the little guery pond and the other out in Buzzards Bay. In the receiving line people commented — as though their observations were original — on the auspicious beginnings of our union. We shook hands with people. We hugged people. And Claire seemed to be truly happy — raindrops or tears on the end of her swooping nose, unblinking green eyes. Her cheeks were like two suns at magic hour — what the day was fading into. Double rainbows: double rosy suns. Her grandfather was the only one who shot straight.
“I think I gave you silver.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Twelve or sixteen settings. You’ll see soon enough.”
“Thank you, grandpa.”
“You know, he’d said, taking in her cheeks or the rainbows behind. It’s going to be an awfully rough road to hoe.”
Claire read when he died. “Little Gidding”—the fifth movement. She’d announced in the pulpit of the old barn church, and the congregation had smiled and nodded in approval, “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from. .” She read it with lock-jawed precision. I had typed it out for her the night before on bond paper and left it sitting beside her coffee and grapefruit that morning. “Every poem an epitaph. And any action / Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat / Or to an illegible stone: and this is where we start.” When we sang “Jerusalem,” I couldn’t help but think we were each the last of our lines.
Smith Street is empty except for the ghosts and the moon and one woman who walks toward me unaware, phone to her ear, talking loudly. She’s buzzed and mocking someone on the other end about her choice in men. Ten feet away she finally sees me. She readjusts the phone. She smiles. “Hey,” she says, as though we know each other. “Nothing,” she says into the phone. “Just someone outside here. I’m walking home.”
A car passes and Marley floats from the open windows—“No, woman, no cry”—more ghosts. I scroll through things in my head. Memories. Images out of sync with song. “We die with the dying: / See, they depart, and we go with them. / We are born with the dead: / See, they return, and bring us with them.” My father, not dead, but toothless and struggling for language. Struggling, perhaps, even for the force, the feeling, the idea, that drives the word. When her grandfather lay in bed in the ICU dying so far from England, so far from anything that was familiar to him, the last thing he saw was my face. His breaths were slowing. He looked at me. He closed his eyes and clutched the gurney rail as though summoning the strength to battle the guardians of memory. He sang: “In the middle of the ocean there grows a green tree. .” He cried one tear — spare and poignant and easy to miss. He inhaled sharply — a whooshing vortex sound marking his emersion into history — drawing him in as though his words went first, then thought, then memory. The ninety-year stoic, how had he managed to hold on to even that much — weeping — lost nobility or nobility revealed? He died without exhaling.
I remember my mother, not dying, but always — her fear. I remember how lost her up-south drawl sounded. I remember her slaps, ice cubes and liquor, her stories: the orphaned children in Virginia — the half- and quarter-breeds — the unrecognizable human mélange: the line of Ham; the line of Brown. I was the one who’d given Claire the poem, because she didn’t know what to say.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.
And so in blessings, and so in song, and so in bottles and beatings. And so in absence and death, they pass themselves on to me, like they were torches ablaze but now seemingly without heat, without light — perhaps only a history of fire — a symbol of that which was once warm and bright and useful. My mother, ashes in the urn waiting to be spread.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well. .
I think that I would like to leave this world with a song and a tear — that I would’ve held just enough in reserve to still have one of each, that there will be someone there to listen and watch and they in turn will whisper their secret affections — but there’s no way to be noble anymore. Perhaps there never was. “I will be true to the girl who loves me. .” There are echoes of ditties unsung, therefore promises unmade. The green tree. The yew tree. The grassy hills of England. The tarmac of Brooklyn. A concession of love, a casualty of failure, disappearing down the maw of a vacant avenue, reft of language, left with memory. A phantom who leaves no legacy, only haunting, marring who you loved and who once loved you, chilling those you are near. I shudder on the avenue. What if nothing lies beneath my spasm, my stomach’s descent? What if there are no ghosts in Brooklyn, and my love’s cheeks are unspeakable and all gone?
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
The big broken clock hiccups the hour. There’s really no choice in the matter.
I will run.
4
My father had always been a lousy listener; then he started going deaf — just after his first heart attack. It had been mild enough that he’d been able to call a cab to take him to the emergency room. And during his convalescence he’d been torn between dismissing the gravity of his condition and milking it for every drop of sympathy he could get.
He’s always been an odd man. He’s never seemed to possess any discernible rage, only a kind of jazzy melancholy — lighter than the blues. Not daunting or dark: good lounge conversation — his troubles, his travels. And he was good in a lounge conversation — even toned, soft yet resonant, aloof, but not cold — with lots of high-end diction and low-end beer. I’ve always thought of him as Bing Crosby’s public persona on half a Percodan—boo-biddy-doo—breezing through life. Or Nat King Cole, just a little bit high. And it was because he was so smooth that almost everyone forgave him almost everything: the failed business ventures, the lost jobs, his potbelly and skinny legs, his balding and his absence. He was gone. It seemed ridiculous for anyone, his family, my mother, me, to attempt to retrieve him for punishment or salvation.