March 24, 2020

A Stranger's Grave

          Our plot was past where the macadam turned into two dirt ruts. My grandmother pulled off onto a grassy spot between two septuagenarian maples, leaving the Buick staring ahead at the frightening concrete reservoir my grandmother told me never to climb.
          Obscuring the sky, its dome rose like a cracked concrete circus tent at the southeast corner of the cemetery. Nearby, empty paper maiche baskets the color of brains were piled like fallen soldiers on the ground.
          In her dark Wayfarers, my grandmother attended the graves, bending sadly. 
          Although not architectural, our markerZeck, Fogle, Seaks—was a good size, and we had a nice population scattered in the plot. This added to the pleasure of my summers with my grandmother and her two sisters: we had a big house, a huge yard with every kind of fruit tree, a grape arbor and a fish pond, and a painted wooden glider with a canvas top that looked like a carriage from Oklahoma! On summer nights I pushed back and forth with my Aunt Ada as we watched lightning bugs. My family was not merely known but respected in the town.
          For three months out of an otherwise long, desperately unhappy year, I was the center of attention.
          Under the hot sun, my 10-year-old head cast a strong shadow on a marker that was familiar to me but unknown just the same. The stone had two lines: a name, CHARLES E. SEAKS, and, below that, a year of death, 1918. But both were too low on the polished face of the granite. A first line had been inscribed above the name, then—evidently—scratched or blasted away.
          At 10, I wasn't really dwelling on the fact that it had said Husband. But on this day, while my grandmother was looking down at another stone, her back turned to me, I asked.
          She must have turned around. I don't really remember where her voice was coming from. But she said "Charlie was my first husband, Billy."
          Above, one of the old maples shimmered in a brief wind.


* * *

          At 73, any worldliness my grandmother might have enjoyed had been set aside. She was still mourning the death of my father—her sometimes brilliant, profoundly bipolar only child—at age 33 ("The same age as Christ," she reminded everyone). Grief was in the air. There were Bible readings around the kitchen table at 5:00 every evening, and before bed we knelt—together—to recite the Lord's Prayer and the Nicene Creed. From the bedroom across the hall, Aunt Ada's voice quietly joined ours.
          My family's stories were carefully handed down to me, heavily edited.
          Once, while she was dusting the stairway banister, my grandmother responded to one of my questions about my father by saying "Billy, do you know what a homosexual is?" I dodged out of the topic, and she never finished.
          Sometimes I would stand behind her chair and brush her hair. She'd let me cover her cheeks with rouge and draw lipstick on her as she tried not to laugh. 
          I think I wanted to see them as they had been—before their peep-toe platform pumps and crocodile handbags started their long sleep in crowded bedroom closets of old coats and fox fur collars with little heads and jewel eyes. Stacked on shelves were hat boxes the size of breakfast tables and shoe boxes with names like Air Step and Caressa. On the dressing table mirror were hat pins with milky pearl ends and beveled glass atomizers. 
          Inside my grandmother's music case I had seen some of the old lithograph Verdi and Schubert song scores signed "Effie Seaks," but I still wasn't letting myself think about that. Besides, all her calfskin luggage on the attic was marked "EMF." She was the proudest—and, likely, the best—Fogle there was.  The thought of my grandfather as a consolation—rather than a manifest destiny, a (necessarily) reproductive calling, an only love—seemed selfish, and a bit sneaky.
          Not much more was ever said about Charlie Seaksthat summer or for the rest of my childhood. The marriage had lasted only a year. He was a nice guy—a description that seemed platitudinous and dismissive compared to what she said about my grandfather; thus I wasn't bothered by thoughts of my grandmother as experienced in anything other than baking or as a sort of layman physician—"Nurse Enquirer" as my grandfather called her because of her habit of reading the medical column of the Philadelphia Enquirer. 
          In fact, it wasn't too long ago that I realized Charlie Seaks had died, at age 34, in the 1918 influenza pandemic.
          Lately, my thoughts return to that cemetery often.