9. HOW IS THIS NIGHT DIFFERENT FROM ALL OTHER NIGHTS?

When Solitaire first encounters this provocative question, a question posed not just once but four times during the Passover Seder, she is instantly electrified by its portentous but mysteriously elusive meaning.  She has been thinking about it ever since.

THE SEDER

Em’s daughter, Aviva, his eldest child, arrives on Thursday, three days after Em’s death.  Solitaire wishes she had come sooner, but Wednesday is Passover and Aviva and her husband, David, both practicing Jews, wish, naturally, to spend the Seder together in Seattle with their two sons. 

Solitaire, too, has a Seder, but it is a very different affair altogether.  In the first place, those present at this dinner – a small gaggle of goyim and non-observant Jews (Em’s sons) – have only the most elementary notion of what to do or eat or say or sing, let alone how to say or sing it in Hebrew, because the paterfamilias, the only knowledgeable Jew in the Tucson branch of Em’s family – namely Em – is now dead.

Em described himself as spiritual but non-religious.  Still, one of his grandfathers had been a Rabbi and both his parents were Russian-Jewish emigrees from stetls in Minsk.  Em had attended Yeshiva in Flatbush, where his mother taught Hebrew.  So he certainly knew the rituals and the language but failed to pass much of it on to his children, a dereliction he acknowledged, but half-heartedly defended.  Where, in a place like Djakarta, he asked, would he find a Rabbi to teach Zach the Hebrew responses with which to make his Bar Mitzvah?  Later, however, he admitted it was lack of conviction, not location, that had deterred him from his paternal duty, a malaise based on an aversion to rules, especially those founded on what he deemed false or outdated premises.    Any form of extremism, especially religiosity, he said, gave him the shudders.

But who does not love Passover?

It is the quintessential Great Escape drama, the nail-biter that has everything:  the unseen but all-powerful Yaweh;  the towering prophet, despotic pharaoh; enslaved Israelites; ten plagues – frogs, blood; boils, lice, locusts, hail, sick cattle, wild beasts, darkness and, finally and most horrendously, the murder of every firstborn child in the land, except for the Israelites whose houses, marked with a bloody X, are “passed over.”

Plague of blood 

As though this weren’t enough, as the song “Dayenu” says, we have Moses (who looks amazingly like Charlton Heston) parting the Red Sea,

drowning Pharaoh’s army, leading his people safely across the Sinai for forty years, keeping them alive on manna,

and keeping them from killing each other with ten rules of social etiquette that preceded Emily Post by over two millennia.



Any feast that celebrates these events had better be worthy of the name – and it is!  The fact that each guest is supposed to quaff four goblets of Manischevitz wine in a “reclining” position adds an undeniable existential edge to the proceedings --actually, anyone who can drink Manischevitz in any position is at risk – though of course, these days, people are far more likely to be reclining with a high-priced, big-bodied cab or Pinot Noir or who knows what or whom.   

Finally, that the hero of the evening should turn out to be a large unleavened, unsalted, tasteless  cracker called a matzah is a stroke of genius that makes this charming and moving celebration truly irresistible.

Solitaire remembers the previous Passover; Em, seriously ill by that time, nevertheless leads the Seder, singing in his weak but still melodious baritone, reading from the Haggadah in fluent Hebrew. 

            “Baruch Atah Adonai Eloheinu melech ha’olam borei pri hagafen…”

       (Blessed are Thou, Adonai our God, Creator of the Universe, Creator of the     Fruit of the Vine…)

It is the muscular, musical language that Em so loves.

    “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning.”

   Zach’s little girls, Lily and Marsha, are wearing their best dresses with pink sashes and their dark eyes are alight with excitement.  Lily finds the Afikoman (a matzah halved and hidden); Marsha, the youngest, reads the answers to the question, "How is this night different from all other nights?"  Solitaire is as let down as ever by the responses, which sound to her as illuminating as a grocery list.
            On all other nights we may eat chametz and matzah, but on this night, only  matzah.

            On all other nights we eat many vegetables, but on this night, only maror.

On all other nights we don’t dip even once, but on this night, we dip once.

On all other nights we eat and drink sitting up or reclining, but on this night, we all recline.

It is a warm night. The dining room windows are open and they can hear the sounds of the palms and the small Laotian temple bells Solitaire and Em acquired on a long-ago visit to Vientiane.  When the children open the door for Elijah the candles flicker in the wind, the flames wavering in the reflection of six silver goblets on the sideboard until, at last, they gutter and go out, and Em, exhausted, goes to bed.

Rising unsteadily on atrophied legs, he proclaims:

“L’Shana Ha’Ba-a B’yerushalayim!”

Next year in Jerusalem!  Perhaps it is true.  Who can say?  Everyone at this table knows that Em’s chair will be empty next year.  Everyone except Em.  And Solitaire.

If that was a sad Seder, this one is disastrous.  No one feels like going through with it, but they do anyway, mostly for the sake of the girls.  By dint of  The 30 Minute Seder, which Solitaire has either uploaded or downloaded from the Internet, they manage to muddle through the evening, but joylessly.

AVIVA

The moment Aviva arrives, Solitaire feels better.  She has an air of calm assurance and generosity of spirit that act as a balm on Solitaire’s troubled soul.  Tall and strong-boned with fair coloring, she has a warm smile and exuberant ash-blonde curls that she vainly attempts to tame with clips and scarves and various sorts of elasticized hair bands. She is a published poet, book critic, and a born organizer.  When Aviva and her family come to visit, she plans their daily itineraries, scheduling every minute as though this were the official visit of a congressional delegation.   Solitaire does not mind.  She sees this as a combination of diplomat's daughter and elder-sister syndrome,  as well as the tactic of a woman who takes seriously the responsibility of steering three large, energetic, willful men through life.  She is a Jewish mother in the best sense of the word.

THE TREE OF UNDYING LOVE

The family has decided to plant a tree for Em.  At a nursery on the eastern edge of town, they drive in a large golf cart past flats of marigolds and periwinkles – the few annuals that will survive the Tucson summer-- through prickly allees of barrel cactus and jumping cholla, gnarly coils of night-blooming cereus, past perfumed acres of candy-colored roses with names like “Peace” and “Tiffany” and “Barbra Streisand” (?), then strike deep into the herbaceous hinterlands, through root-balled and gunny-sacked groves of grapefruit and tangerines, purple shrubs of mountain laurel and Texas Rangers, until at last they reach the trees – dusty gums and ash, mesquite and acacias, peppers and jacarandas, cypress and willow and, yes, here it is – a weeping myrtle, the tree of Aphrodite and an ancient Greek symbol, so Solitaire has read, of eternal love. 

Solitaire has seen these myrtles on the University campus, where they have an impressive collection of old specimen trees.  An Austro-Asian exotic, it towers over its smaller bushier cousin, the bottle brush, its long fronds, tipped with whorls of scarlet flowers, trailing to the ground.  Em’s children buy it as a gift and arrange to have it delivered the following morning.  The tree man drags the myrtle out into the path and ties a “Sold” sign on it.  A gusty wind kicks up as they are leaving; Solitaire looks back as they jolt off in the cart and sees the tree, isolated from its brethren and standing alone, its long fronds drooping, swinging disconsolately in the eddying dust.

THE HEAVENLY HEIGHTS REVISITED

On the way home Aviva and Solitaire stop at the mortuary to say goodbye to Em.

As they pull up in front, Solitaire recalls a joke she heard on the radio about a sign outside the Agnostics’ Funeral Home which reads:  “Remains to be seen.” 

Wriggles and Mrs. Wriggles are not in evidence, but Wally is expecting them and leads them to a small antechamber off the conference room where Em is waiting for them.   A scarlet blanket is pulled up to the third button of his blue shirt and his arms are folded across his chest.  She would like to know if Em’s nether half is naked beneath the blanket (she still worries that he is cold), but is too timid to ask. 

Em may be just another corpse on a gurney, but to Solitaire he looks like the statue of a knight on a catafalque.  He is beautiful, his aspect youthful, his skin taut, his brow smooth, unworried.  Solitaire knows, because Wally has told her, that unless there is to be a “viewing,” the deceased are not embalmed before burning.  So if it is not embalming fluid or Botox that plumps up his veins and fleshes out his cheeks, then what is it?  Death?  The absence of care,  surcease of pain, the flight of the soul?  Or is it merely the miracle of gravity? 

Aviva bids farewell to her father.  In the final days of his life, she telephoned each evening to read him a poem.  “Goodbye, Daddy,” she says and kisses him on the forehead.  From a chair across the room, Solitaire watches this small tableau.  In profile, Em’s head is like that on a Roman coin.

Then it is her turn.  She bends down to him; his eyelids seem sealed shut – thank God!  Were they not, she would be tempted to look beneath those lids and what she might glimpse there is too terrifying to contemplate.  Close up, she sees that the purplish hematoma on his temple (acquired in hospital when he was dropped on his head by an inept aide) has been cosmeticized and lightly powdered.  His hair is neatly cut and brushed, his mustache trimmed; his cheeks, clean-shaven, are smooth as a baby’s bum.  With tentative fingers, she starts to stroke his cheek, and recoils.  Look at me, he seems to say, but not too closely ... and for God’s sake, don’t touch!  His skin is damp and unresilient with a jaundiced pallor like a pale cheddar overlaid on marble. When she kisses his lips for the last time, they are waxen and oh, so cold.

MELODY and MOJO

It is nearly five o’clock when Solitaire and Aviva return home on that April afternoon; the wind has abated; the late spring air is balmy and the white oleanders and blue plumbago bend in the breeze.  A neighbor, a pretty young woman in her mid-twenties, comes wheeling down her driveway on a bicycle, holding a sturdy, barrel-chested brown dog on a lead.  With a cheery wave, she steps on the pedal and rides off down the street, the dog trotting purposefully along beside her.  What a picture they make!  The girl, so glowing with refulgent good health, cheeks rosy, the short sleeves of her sun dress slipping off her golden shoulders, the skirt gathered up into her lap, exposing a length of calf and sandaled foot, her blonde hair billowing back beneath a wide brimmed straw hat from whose crown a red grosgrain ribbon floats gaily out behind her like a pennant from a spar.

 How Solitaire envies her!  So young, so vibrant, so full of life!  And she, Solitaire, so bereft, so drained, so sated with sickness and death.  How she yearns at that moment to be twenty-five again; to have the chance, with Em, to live life over and to do it right this time; to have life’s promise, with its myriad divergent roads, traveled and untraveled, lying all before them.  How glorious to contemplate!  How splendid!  She is nearly sick with envy of this girl.

But things are rarely what they seem.  As events are later related to her, the young woman, Melody, and her dog, Mojo, have scarcely rounded the corner and disappeared from Solitaire’s view when they encounter an elderly woman and her aged maltese, Carlito, making their way cautiously along the sidewalk.  Mojo, who proves to be not only sturdy and purposeful, but supremely strong and aggressive, wrenches out of his collar, leaps on the maltese and, lifting him in his jaws, mauls him to the point of death.

He is on the verge of breaking Carlito’s neck when Melody succeeds in collaring her dog – a pit bull/boxer mix, as it turns out -- and, jumping back on her bike, drags him up the street.   Well, okay; she has taken the only course open to her at that point, which is to get her dog out of the way – and then, of course, to return to the scene of the mugging and do whatever she can to rectify the situation.  The problem is that Melody does not return, not then or ever. The tale quickly makes its way round Solitaire’s small neighborhood – how Mrs. O’Reilly was left to deal with Carlito, hanging like a bloodied rag in the arms of his mistress, and how a fortuitous passerby drove them to a veterinary clinic where, dozens of stitches and thousands of dollars later, Carlito is patched together and miraculously survives.  A happy ending.  But when Mrs. O’Reilly, encouraged by the neighbors, arrives at Melody’s door to appraise her of the outcome and cost of her dog’s actions, she comes face to face with Melody’s husband (“or whatever”) who tells her to “clear off!”  Intimidated, Mrs. O’Reilly immediately backs down, refusing to press charges or even report the incident.

Solitaire’s heart goes out to the old lady and her little dog.  Still, it must be conceded that oral history is notoriously dodgy and maybe this story, passed along second or third hand, possibly losing or gaining ground with each telling, is in itself false or faulty, or at least unreliable.  Who can say?  Perception is all and, in the long run, perhaps the facts do not matter.

In Solitaire’s inner eye, nothing can ever deface her initial vision of the young beauty and her noble dog … “for ever panting, for ever young.” Like the maidens loth and lovers bold on Keats’s Grecian urn, they will remain as youthfully emblematic as when she first saw them -- forever innocent, forever beautiful, forever cycling, round and round against a cloudless sky, a sky as blue as Em’s shirt, on that perfect April afternoon.

                        “When old age shall this generation waste,

                              Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

                         Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

                        ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all

                              Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’”           

POSTSCRIPT

Solitaire is still thinking about the Seder question:  "How is this night different from all other nights?"

She is sure there must be more to this than meets the eye.  At last, she decides this is a form of Zen Judaism and that the question is in fact a kind of koan – deceptively simple and deeply profound.  She is, however, no closer to the answer.

8. MY LAST DUCHESS

Reader!  Drop everything!  Whatever the hour, whatever your task, whatever your age, inclination, state of grace or race, health or wealth, drop what you’re doing, however worthy (or unworthy), lope, leap, creep or crawl to your laptop, desktop, smart phone, pen and paper, etc.  and write … no, not your “Last Will and Testament” or even your “Living Will.”  Certainly not your “Advance Health Care Directive,” the current robotic medical argot for deathbed instructions which at the crucial moment will be ignored or overridden. No, no, no!  Reader, do something useful for yourself and your survivors.   Write your obituary!

          WHAT HAS BROUGHT SOLITAIRE TO THIS STATE OF MAD EXHORTATION?

It seemed to Solitaire that Tuesday had been going on for weeks.  It had begun at five o’clock that morning and had not yet, some eighteen hours later, come to a close.  In that telescopic span – and she couldn’t be sure whether time had been foreshortened or elongated -- she had, as she saw it through a prism of tremulous self-pity, been chivied, chastised, queried, castigated, humiliated, humbled, tumbled, put through the wringer, and brought to her knees.

So when, at eleven that night, Solitaire climbed, dog-tired into bed with her dogs and her Mac, not to check her emails or read the Times online, or even to sleep, but to write an obituary for her husband, Em, who had died in the early hours of the previous morning, she felt, frankly, overtaxed.

It was not that she begrudged Em this obituary; quite the contrary.  She wanted above all things to compose the most loving, lucid, elegant and insightful obituary that she could manage and it was this very fear – the fear that under these harried circumstances she would prove insufficient to the task -- that gave rise to her sense of anxiety and frustration.   

There were two other factors at play here:  First, the obituary was, as they say, “time sensitive.”  One could hardly submit an obit to a daily newspaper three months after the subject’s demise, at least not if it was intended as a news item.  She had promised the Washington Post editor that she would email Em’s obit by midnight.  Secondly, an obituary was in effect a mini-bio that required factual accuracy—always shaky terrain for Solitaire --  and even, perhaps, some research.  Also problematical.  If, for example, she did not know her husband’s birth name (admittedly not the norm for most bereaved spouses), how could she be trusted to know something as ancillary as his dates of military service, or, come to think of it, in which branch of the military he had served, or in what year he had entered the Foreign Service? 

As it happened, Solitaire knew, tangentially, that Em had enlisted in the Air Force in preference to being drafted into the Army, because he had once told her, apropos of motion sickness whilst map-reading in a car, that in the Air Force he had signed up for navigational school, but that every time he had gone up on a training flight and looked down at the navigational charts, he had thrown up all over them.

The Air Force was prepared to be patient but, finally, when he had all but depleted their supply of charts, he was transferred to a desk job at Harlingen Air Force Base somewhere deep in the heart of Texas not far from the Mexican border.  She remembered that the base was in Texas and near the Mexican border only because Em mentioned that he had once spent a night in jail for brawling in a bar in Matamoros. Such are the mnemonic devices we deploy.

  Of course, why Em wanted to be a navigator in the first place was quite beyond her, because after three decades of driving with him she knew for a fact that he had no more directional sense than a twirled partridge.  Though he did possess the dubious virtue of consistency.   

Propped against the pillows, Solitaire gazed with blank eyes at her blank screen.  The clock ticked on.  No epiphanies streaked across her blank mind.  Finally, however, this question occurred to her:  

Why hadn’t Em written his own obituary?
 

It wasn’t as though he had lacked the time; death, after all, had not taken him unawares.  Nor had he lacked the skill; he was a brilliant writer with a finely-honed command of language, a man who had spent his entire life mastering the art of expression, the author of numerous articles, essays, communiqués, lectures, fiction, non-fiction and poetry.   

Who better to write his obit?  He would have known his real name; he would have known what rank he attained in the Air Force.  And who better to review and evaluate the salients of his life; which to select, which to discard?  Only two months ago, his noble mind still intact, he could have polished off this assignment in an afternoon, with time to spare.  But, strangely enough, it never occurred to him, let alone to her.  Why “strangely?”  Because for many years Em had been a student and connoisseur of the art of the obituary.

He rarely missed an end-page obituary in the Economist and gave Solitaire tear-sheets of the best of them.  What made them so enjoyable, besides the graceful, expansive writing, was the esoteric choice of subject:  Pattabhi Jois, the Ashtanga yoga guru ... Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered the psychedelic properties of LSD ... Charis Wilson, Edward Weston's beautiful model and lover whose photograph, "Nude," became an icon.

The problem with emulating the Economist was that expansiveness was prohibitively expensive.  What Solitaire soon discovered, to her surprise, was that unless one was a newsworthy personality, obituaries were not only not free, but astonishingly costly and were submitted as though they were classified advertisements.  The New York Times, for example, charged $262.60 for the first four lines (one line consisting of 25 characters, including spaces and punctuation) and $52 for each line thereafter, with 250 lines being the maximum length.  A photograph of the deceased cost $1300.  Even local newspapers, many of which once ran free obits as a service to their readers, now charged as they would for any classified.  The Arizona Daily Star, charged $5.98 per line and $90 for a photograph.

For the survivors, then, the question became:  how to combine brevity with grace, economy with eloquence?  Most private obits did not even try; they limited themselves to a brief, bone-dry recitation of a few pertinent facts and dates dusted off for the perusal of family and friends one last time.

Solitaire was no better.  She would have liked to say something personal about Em -- that two of his favorite films were “The Seventh Seal” and "Tootsie"... that he loved Bellow, Bach, Dylan Thomas, van der Weyden ... that he considered running a form of prayer and ran ten miles a day... but in the end, she did not.

She wrote the skeletal bio -– the facts, the dusty dates -- and obediently hit "send" at five minutes to midnight.  Then she turned out the light and as she lay in bed, waiting for the ambien to kick in, she finally had her sought-for epiphany, and it was this:  a personal obituary should resemble a poem, not a poetic eulogy extolling the virtues of the deceased, but a poem in the sense that it would capture and distill in a few lines the essence of the subject.

The poem that came to mind as she lay drifting into sleep was Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess.  Why she settled on that particular poem, a celebrated tale of Merger and Murder told by the late wife’s husband, she could not say; she knew only that it seemed to exemplify the qualities she sought.

A Renaissance  nobleman (said to be based on Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara), is showing a visitor his renowned art collection, which is housed in his splendid nine-hundred year old palazzo.  Strolling along a gallery, the Duke stops before a covered painting and drawing open the curtain, reveals a startlingly lifelike portrait of a beautiful young woman, who is, he tells his guest, his recently deceased wife.

He points out the “depth and passion” of her expression, which the painter has so cunningly elicited and captured.  Of course, the painter, the Duke observes acerbically, was not the only man to be so favored by his young wife, who indiscriminately cast her smiling glances everywhere.  As the Duke continues, his tone grows increasingly bitter and with each insinuation of her infidelity the reader has a chilling premonition of what is about to befall this lovely, probably quite innocent, young creature so filled with the joy of life.  Here is the Duke’s description of his late Duchess:

                                                                         “She had

             A heart – how shall I say? – too soon made glad,

Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

Sir, ‘twas all one!  My favour at her breast,

The dropping of the daylight in the West,

The bough of cherries some officious fool

Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule

She rode with round the terrace – all and each

Would draw from her alike the approving speech,

Or blush, at least.  She thanked men, -- good! But thanked

Somehow – I know not how – as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody’s gift.  Who’d stoop to blame

This sort of trifling?  Even had you skill

In speech – (which I have not) – to make your will

Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this

Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,

Or there exceed the mark” – and if she let

Herself be lessoned so, not plainly set

Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,

-- E’en then would be some stooping, and I choose

Never to stoop.  Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt

Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

Much the same smile?  This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together.   There she stands

As if alive.”

The guest, it turns out, is an emissary from another nobleman whose young daughter the murderous Duke is now contracting to marry.

                        

Solitaire had another reason to remember the Duke's city.  One afternoon at the end of August 1997, driving from Ravenna to Verona, she and Em decided to stay overnight in Ferrara.  They strolled along narrow streets held closely in the dark embrace of magnificent stone palaces and the great cathedral, then stopped in a book shop where they bought a small leather-bound selection of Browning’s poems.  Returning to the "Duchessa Isabella" where they were staying, they sat for awhile in the garden sipping an aperitif.

As dusk came on, Solitaire, looking up at the massive stone walls of the town, felt a sense of menace and gloom.  It was after all the city of Savonarola.   She shivered and they went inside to change for dinner.

                                                            

The next morning everything had changed.  Sunlight flooded their pretty room and the French doors were open onto the balcony overlooking the gardens.

 Solitaire sat in an arm chair, paging through the copy of Browning’s poems, and Em lounged on the bed drinking a large cappuccino.  He turned on the television to catch the news, leaving the sound on “mute” while he searched the channels.  Taking advantage of this interval, Solitaire, who hated the damned intrusiveness of the TV, quickly suggested that she read him “My Last Duchess.”    He readily agreed, his eyes swiveling away from the set to watch her as she read.  She had just read the line ”but who passed without much the same smile?”  when she realized that Em was no longer looking at her, but at the television.  She glanced up at him in annoyance and was surprised to see his face contorted in an expression of horrified incredulity. 

“Darling,” she said, “it’s just a poem … a great poem, but still…”

He gestured wordlessly at the television screen behind her and as Solitaire turned to look he switched on the sound and she heard, as they would hear again and again and again that day and in the days to come, that Princess Diana had been killed in a car crash in Paris.  Over the years, the two tales -- that of the Duchess and the Princess -- remained in Solitaire's mind, inextricably intertwined.

            

                                             “Then all smiles stopped together...”

Em’s obituary ran in the Washington Post two days after his death, much abbreviated, and juxtaposed under the photograph of a deceased NBAA basketball player.  Solitaire thought that Em, who loved basketball, would have been amused by that.  But maybe not.

7. NO TIME TO MOURN

“Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

              Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.

  Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

       Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.”

                                        W.H. Auden "Funeral Blues"

The problem with mourning in America, Solitaire thought, was that there was no time to mourn. Not that she wanted to drape herself in black crêpe, draw the curtains against the light, cover the mirrors, and withdraw, psalter in hand, into a life of Jamesian seclusion.  On the contrary, she believed that the Victorian practice of mourning , the brunt of which was born almost entirely by women,  was barbaric.

Pressured by custom (and the garment industry) to purchase entire wardrobes, 19th century women on both sides of the Atlantic clad themselves from head to toe in black underwear, veils, bonnets, fans, gloves, parasols and even black jewellery made of jet or tightly plaited hair.

"Full mourning" was so expensive that only the rich could afford it.  The poor had to improvise as best they could:  men made do with black sleeve or hat bands; women boiled up great vats of black dye in which they immersed their everyday clothes.  Children of every class, even tiny infants, wore black ribbons and sleeve bands; and household pets had mourning collars and leashes.

In Victorian and Edwardian literature, it is hardly possible to find a novel without a woman in mourning. 

In Trollope’s “Palliser” novels, set in the period just after Prince Albert’s death, the rich widow, Madame Max Goesler, wears black for nearly the entire duration of the series, and just as the reader, with a sense of relief, sees her passing from “full” mourning to “half” mourning, donning a gown of merry mauve or grey, damned if the old Duke of Omnium, to whom she is deeply attached, doesn’t pop off, and it’s back to basic black for Mme. Max.  Oh well.  In the end, she gets her guy, Phineas Finn, anyway.

It was war, paradoxically, that killed mourning; there were simply too many dead.  In the United States at the end of the Civil War, there were 600,000 deaths (80,000 widows just in the state of Alabama).  Then came the colossal upheavals of the Great War (16 million dead) and the Russian Civil War in which entire classes were obliterated, and then, a few years later, World War II (70 million dead; 23 mil in the USSR alone).

 Solitaire insists, nevertheless, that there is something to be said for the old-fashioned etiquette of mourning, which is to say that in a world where privacy is routinely invaded and sensibilities ignored, an observance of mourning serves as an outward statement of inner fragility.   In such a world, a week or two of contemplative solitude in which to dwell with her thoughts and memories without having to wrestle with the logistics of widowhood would not go amiss.  She could easily attain this, as Auden suggests, merely by cutting off the phones, but because she has many calls to make and callbacks to receive, and as all of them must be made immediately, or so she is told, to delay would obviously be an irresponsible act of self-indulgent procrastination.  In the back of her mind, moreover, there lurks the caveat that she should be careful what she wishes for; the likelihood is that she will soon enough get all the solitude she desires, and a good deal more, besides.

At seven o'clock on Tuesday, the 8^th of April ’09, a day on which she has already been fiscally catechized and found derelict by Mrs. Ruth Babcock, a State Department FLO (Family Liaison Officer),  Solitaire now sets about to tick off her list of mandatory phone calls which are as long as her proverbial arm:  Social Security; Internal Revenue Service; OFEGLI; tax accountant;  title company; three banks; one mortgage company; car company; car insurance; house insurance; Medicare; secondary health insurance; a dozen credit card companies, stock companies; mutual funds; annuities; and on and on, and the truly astonishing part of all this is that:  she has no money.  Indeed, she has considerably less than no money.   Her heart goes out to the rich, for whom to die must be sheer hell, financially speaking.   Talk about Bleak House!  Solitaire shudders.

At the suggestion of Mrs. Babcock, the first call on her list is to the Office of Retirement at the State Department.  When Solitaire explains to an office underling the reason for her call -- Em’s death and the question of her widow’s pension -- she is put through to a Human Resources Specialist whose name she fails to catch.

“X-Ray, here.”

“Oh!”  Solitaire’s inner GPS goes on tilt.  “Oh… I uh… sorry… I thought…”

“No need to be sorry yet, my dear …” 

A voice of scarcely contained amusement rolls out, echoing in surround sound as if out of the Caves of Marabar, yet more melodic, a velvety base baritone redolent of Armagnac and honey, a swirl of smoke… The single word “dear,” beribboned and adorned with diphthongs, unreels on amber waves of song.

“I just thought … “ she stumbles on, “I mean …is this the office of Human Resources?”

“Well it’s not Radiology, sweetheart,” he chuckles. 

“Why, then, did you pretend it was?” asks Solitaire, slightly nettled.  “I distinctly heard you say, ‘X-ray here.’”

“That’s my name… nickname, actually.  My proper name is ...”

XERXES RAY BROWN

“Good heavens!”

“Exactly.  I can’t go around saying that all day, can I?  It would tie up the phone lines.”

Solitaire explains her predicament, ie she is destitute, has an aged mother to care for, can’t wait three months for the resumption of her income, doesn’t know how she’s going to pay the mortgage, and hopes fervently that Mr.Brown –

“X-Ray”

-- will do all within his power to expedite matters because otherwise ...  she simply doesn’t know what – Her voice cracks and wavers.

“There, there,” X-Ray intones soothingly  -- and one can not know the true meaning of “soothing” until X-Ray has crooned "there, there" directly into one's Blackberry and thence into one's vestibular canal.  “Not to worry, my dear – I shall send off a packet to you this very day by overnight post and you will have it before noon tomorrow mountain standard time.  In the meantime, you will be gathering together the relevant documents that will be needed to process your pension and ..."  Her eyes glaze over as the words glide and bob along mesmerically, reminding her for some reason of the music for the departure scene in Cosí fan Tutte when the young men sail away to a bogus “war”and the women wave from the pier, and one can hear in Mozart’s divine score the waves lapping at the ship’s prow as the wind fills the sails and the barque slides out to sea.

When Solitaire signs off with X-Ray, she feels overcome with fatigue.  She lies down on the sofa, lays a cool compress on her brow and closes her eyes.  But her mind is hedge-hopping in a labyrinth of lost records, a maze of missing, misplaced deeds of land sales and purchases, of stock transactions, records of Em's military service, commissions and de-commissions, and awards, degrees of education, certificates of death, marriage, birth, the absence of which question the veracity of her very existence.  Does she exist?  Can she prove it? 

The short answer is:  no.  When Mrs. Ruth Babcock, the FLO from the State Department tells Solitaire that she must produce birth certificates for herself and her late husband and Solitaire replies that this is highly problematical, Mrs. Babcock predicts that this will prove to be a major hurdle in the expeditious processing of Solitaire's pension.  She suggests, hilariously, that Solitaire go to her banker without delay and check the contents of her safety deposit box (!)

Solitaire's own birth certificate is a non-starter.  A dubious document signed by some colonial sub-official in a backwater in The Philippine Islands, it was carried about by Solitaire through countless peregrinations over land and sea, more as an amusing souvenir than as a serious proof of citizenship (which was then British in any case, like that of her father), until, when she married Em and went off to join him in Saigon in 1973, she consigned the certificate, in the bowels of an old Chinese camphor-wood chest, to the care of the U.S. State Department, which, three years later, regretfully informed her that the chest was irretrievably lost.

Em's birth certificate is another matter entirely.  For one thing, it exists.  But where?  In an effort to be helpful, Em's daughter, Aviva, has called the appropriate office in the borough of Brooklyn to obtain a copy.  She immediately runs into a bureaucratic dead end because, it seems, Em,  at the age of eighteen, legally changed his first name.  But from what?  Em's parents are dead; neither his first wife nor any of his three children has a clue what his registered birth name might have been.  Furthermore, the clerk will speak to no one except the surviving spouse.  So Solitaire now calls this clerk, who upon receiving her request, immediately responds with the gentle charm for which Brooklyn is justly famed.

"Oh yeah?  So how do I know youse is da spouse?"

She gives him Em's name, date of birth and Social Security number, as well as her own.  He then puts her on hold and returns several light years later.

"I got a birth certificate here wit dat date and last name," he says, "but da foist name ain't da same."

"Same?  Same as what?"

"As de uddah foist name."

"Well, what foist -- first name does it give?"

"Hey, you tell me, lady! Ya tink I'm stoopid or what?"

In the dim recesses of her mind, Solitaire recalls that Em, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants from Minsk, once told her in passing that his mother had originally named him "Marnín," which in Hebrew means "singer of songs."  So now she ventures a guess.

"Marnín?"

There is a pause while her wily adversary takes this in.  "Yeah... dat's one of dem."

"One of what?"

"One of da two!"


"Two?"


"Yeah -- two foist names!"


 "Which one?"

"Dat's fuh me to know and you to find out," he brays.

"And just how do I do that?"

"What am I running here -- da Bureau of Missin' Poissons?  Ya calls da court what issued da decree signed by da judge what changed da foist name of yuh late -- rest his soul -- alleged spouse."

"Would you mind repeating that?"

"Say listen, sister, just how dumb are youse anyways?"

"Dumb enough to be talking to you -- you damned jackass!"  She slams the phone into its cradle -- she keeps a landline specifically for this purpose -- and then bangs her head, once again, on the kitchen table.  She is sure that the stress she has endured in the course of this day has caused twelve different kinds of incurable cancer.

The following morning, the postman arrives with an express packet.  True to his word, Mr. Brown has put together a folder containing a multiple-page questionaire to be filled out by the relevant applicant for federal pension funds.  Solitaire studies the contents of the folder and finds that it contains three arresting items.

1) a calling card on which is embossed in gold the State Department eagle, beneath which is printed:
                                                   "Xerxes Ray Brown  (X-Ray)"
As she peers at it, she can't help but wonder what George Kennan would have made of it.

2) In the interstices between each tissue-thin sheet of "hard copy" is attached something as rare and wondrous as the Dead Sea Scrolls, and almost as old -- sheets of carbon paper!  Solitaire remembers that when they were in Saigon and Moscow in the 'seventies, Em used to hand his secretary some pages of hand-writen scrawl and tell her to transcribe it and "put it on green," or some such thing, each of the eight color-coded copies being destined for a different department.  She imagines, therefore, that she is meant to roll these pages into the carriage of an old Underwood and type (type!) up this application in quadruplicate sets.  And she thinks that if anyone has questions about what's wrong with America's foreign policy, they need look no further than this document for the answer.

3) Finally, the document itself is totally incomprehensible.  No matter how she twists and turns it, holds it up to the light, peers through it and pores over it, she cannot find one single question that applies to her.  After hours of vainly attempting to complete the questionaire, Solitaire comes to the reluctant conclusion that the document is an application for early retirement by Federal Railway workers.

She is saddened by X-Ray's mistake; he wanted so much to help her.  She now realizes with regret that a man named Xerxes can never live up to his billing ("Xerxes the Great") and is therefore doomed to fail.  What can his mother have been thinking, to undermine her son in this fashion?    

Who was Xerxes, anyway?

Xerxes the Great, King of Kings, was the Shah of Persia from 486 - 465 BC when, at the age of 54, he was assassinated by the Commander of the Royal Bodyguard and one of his eunuchs.  (Don't ask, don't tell.)  Solitaire, however, prefers to remember him as he is depicted, usually by a mezzo-soprano in a trouser role, in one of Georg Friederich Handel's most delicious baroque operas, "Serse," or "Xerxes."


As the opera opens, the eponymous hero, clad in a golden breast plate and an adorable mini-skirt constructed of what appear to be gilded vertical Venetian blinds, his glossy black curls topped with the sort of be-jewelled up-swept hat that used to be favored by the old dowager Queen Mary, widow of King George V, is drooping languidly, and in attitudes of obvious love-sickness, in the vicinity of a beautiful weeping fig tree in his Persian garden.  Xerxes then commences to sing an aria, one of the most sublime love songs ever written, to his beloved, who turns out to be ... the tree!

Sad to say, this aria, "Ombra, mai fu," often referred to on the recital circuit as "Handel's Largo," has since been serially murdered by legions of after-dinner parlor sopranos, and Solitaire herself sometimes sings it off key to her dog, Fu.

A man who sings love songs to a tree is bound to charm the socks off Solitaire, but is he, she wonders, the person to solve a problem about one's pension?  Possibly not. 

6. QUO VADIS, CALPURNIA?

In truth, did anyone care what happened to Julius Caesar’s old lady?  Did anyone even ask her that question?  Did anyone stop and put a friendly hand on the widow’s shoulder and say to her, “Calpurnia, old thing, what’s to become of you?  Whither goest?”  

On the 14^th of March in 44 BC, Calpurnia had a premonitory dream that her husband would be assassinated the following day on the steps of the Senate.  She attempted to dissuade Caesar from going to the Senate, but her warnings were dismissed by her husband, not to mention his duplicitous staff and future assassins, as the foolish pratings of a pseudo-seer and addled conspiracy theorist.  Vindicated in spades, Calpurnia might have derived a modicum of satisfaction from the knowledge that had Caesar listened to her he might have lived to see another day, though probably not much more than that, as things were going.  Keeping her wits about her, she gathered up Caesar’s papers and the famous will, turned them over to Marc Antony who, following his inflammatory speech, decamped, rushing off to let loose the dogs of war and leaving poor Calpurnia to fend for herself.  Or so Solitaire suspects. 

  

Childless, over the hill, the object of much sexual mockery at the hands of Caesar’s latest mistress, the widow was probably bundled off to some remote old ladies’ home in the Appenines where she perhaps sat in the loggia of an evening tiresomely telling and re-telling her attendants and superannuated soul sisters that “If only Julius had heeded my warnings he’d be alive this very day… but, of course, he never listened to a word I said.”

There are two questions a widow asks herself upon the death of her husband:

one, what’s to become of me?  And, two, how much money do I have?

Actually, the questions should be asked in reverse order because obviously the answer to the second will largely determine the answer to the first.  Essentially, they are one and the same question.

On the second morning after Em’s death, Solitaire receives an early morning phone call from a pleasantly solicitous woman by the name of Mrs. Ruth Babcock, who is calling on behalf of the Family Liaison Office at the State Department to help steer Solitaire through the logistical and financial procedures entailed in the loss of a spouse.  As soon as she opens her mouth, Solitaire can tell that Mrs. Babcock is a very nice woman who not only lives in a different time zone from Solitaire, but in a different time warp.

“You are aware, I suppose” Mrs. Babcock says gently, “that your husband’s pension will be reduced by about half;  are you also aware that the pension will be frozen for a brief period while the new amount is calibrated?”

Alarm bells sound, but not too loudly, for Solitaire thinks that with a good high-speed computer this recalibration should take approximately two minutes or less. “How brief a period are you talking about?"

“Probably not more than two months.”

Solitaire gasps, “Two months!”

Mrs. Babcock is sympathetic.  “It is rather a long time.  But you know … it’s the bureaucracy… “  Her voice trails off.

Into the dumbfounded silence at Solitaire’s end of the line, Mrs. Babcock states that the April pension, which has already been received, must be returned to the State Department, which will then pro-rate what is owed her from the 1^st to the 6^th, the date of her husband’s death.  The remainder will be paid to her at the recalibrated rate some months hence.  In effect, she will have no income for three months.

“Have you any idea what that new rate might be?” Solitaire asks.  “Just a ballpark figure?”

“I don’t think I can tell you that,” Mrs. Babcock replies.  “These numbers are so variable.  You should call the Office of Retirement at the Department and they’ll help you.  They’ll send you a packet of forms to fill out.  And you’ll have to send them several documents:  your spouse’s death certificate and birth certificate, as well as your marriage certificate.  Here’s the phone number.”

Mrs. Babcock asks if her husband had taken out any life insurance.  Her tone is rhetorical, almost embarrassed, as if even to ask such a foolish question of someone of Solitaire’s standing, a respected member of the State Department family, the wife of a retired ambassador, were a damnable insult.

No, Solitaire confesses, no life insurance.  She recalls various discussions of the life insurance question with Em at several stages in their lives, she repeatedly dismissing it as a jinx … a juju … tantamount to casting a hex against oneself … and he mildly protesting that it was irresponsible, but eventually concurring.  They had, they agreed, more uses for the money then than later.

The last time the subject of life insurance had come up, she had retorted with spirit, “I refuse to bet against you!”  Em looked thoughtful, as if he were on the point of remonstrating with her idiotic logic, but then let it go.  “Apres moi le deluge,”  he said with a wry smile, and she had laughed.

“Well… “ says Mrs. Babcock, “there’s bound to be some group insurance, but it won’t be much.  You’ll have to contact FEGLI – Federal Employees Group Life Insurance.”

Solitaire, of course, has no knowledge of any acronymic entity called FEGLI, but she is given a number to call.

What about long-term care?  Do they have that?  No.

There is a short pause in this exchange during which Mrs. Babcock is almost certainly contemplating the financial shambles of this woman’s life.  It is hardly the first time she has dealt with fiscally ignorant, confused, stony-broke widows.  Indeed, there is a whole section of FLO devoted to the care of these exigent women and their families. Nevertheless, she is clearly taken by surprise in this case.  But Mrs. Babcock has one last arrow in her quiver and she uses it now.   “Well,” she concludes – and Solitaire can hear her smiling brightly – “I should say that this would be an excellent time to put your savings to good use.” 

“Our savings… ” Solitaire mumbles, “yes, of course … a very good time.”  Can Mrs. Babcock possibly believe, she wonders, given the mass of evidence leading to the exactly opposite conclusion, that Solitaire has savings – savings! – on which to fall back? 

She snaps her cellphone shut, lays her head face down on the kitchen table and tries to breathe.  She smacks her forehead – just between the eyebrows over the bridge of her nose – lightly, but not too lightly – on the edge.  She does this several times, each time a little harder, then pauses.  Unless she intends to do herself in, she has no wish to crack her skull or break her nose.  She tries yoga breathing – in for four, hold for seven, out for eight.  Maybe she's not doing it right. The panic continues to rise.  What’s to become of her?  How will she pay her mortgage?  Her colossal credit card bills?  Her taxes, which are due in exactly one week?  Her blood is pumping, swarming up her arteries with the fury of rampaging vandals; the beat of her heart quickens, growing louder, thudding like the tramp of advancing boots.  Her vision clouds, her throat constricts – she’s well on her way to a full-blown panic attack.

Her dog Fu pads over and lightly licks her ankle.  She looks down; he looks up.  His eyes are large for his size, slightly protuberant in the way of Shih-tzus, small black reflecting pools.  They hold eye contact for a moment, then she reaches down and scratches him behind his ear.  She feels her blood begin to back down, boots receding, invaders retreating.  Her breathing slows; the tsunami of panic sweeps past.

Solitaire would like to think that her dog’s ankle-lick is the kiss of consolation, but she knows that in fact he’s reminding her that it’s time for breakfast and a walk.  He loves her because when he looks at her he sees an oversized, ambulating Milkbone.

After breakfast, she takes the dogs to the small neighborhood park; it is a simple rectangle, two blocks long and a block wide, blessed with the shade of palms, sycamores, mesquites and towering eucalyptus trees that shed their bark in long concave coppery strips.  As a rule, the only people there at seven o’clock in the morning are other dog owners – a group that meets daily to let their black and yellow labs run; a woman with two fat pugs; a man with a compulsive ball-fetching mutt.  The usual.  She is surprised, therefore, to see two homeless people who have apparently been sleeping there overnight.  A square of black plastic is spread on the grass beneath tall Mexican fan palms.  Two figures are asleep beneath a ragged dark grey army blanket, a broken folding umbrella propped open beside their heads as a sun shade.  They have, however, miscalculated the position of the rising sun.  Well up by now, the light strikes the craggy fingers of the Catalinas, slides down the arroyos, hop-scotches across red tile roofs, bumps over the patchy grass of the park, and alights, despite the propped-up parasol, onto the tops of the two sleeping heads.

“Goddamn sun!”  A woman with blue-black skin and a huge coif of coiled, oiled Depp-like dreadlocks flings off the blanket, sits up, frowns down at her still-sleeping mate and rises stiffly, the chunky embodiment of a disgruntled sleeper awakened betimes.

She accosts Solitaire. “What’re you looking at?”

Silently, Solitaire walks on with the dogs.  The woman, clad in what looks like Army-Navy surplus and boots, heads for an oversize squat blue drinking fountain used mostly by thirsty pooches, immerses her head under it and shakes it vigorously.  She strolls to a nearby trashcan, but then spots Solitaire and tacks over to her.

“Say,” she says agreeably enough, “you wouldn’t happen to have some spare cash, would you?  I’d sure like to get some coffee and a comb.”

“A comb?”  Solitaire looks at this Gorgon hair and is so awed at the sheer enormity of the task that she can’t even form a conception of it.

“Yeah, you like to comb your hair, don’t you?” 

Thinking of her own lank locks, slack in the zero-humidity Arizona ozone, Solitaire nods wordlessly.  She says she’s sorry, but she has no money with her.  The woman shrugs philosophically … and they part.   When Solitaire gets to her car she looks back and sees the woman rooting through the trash barrel.  She is appalled.  Actually, she is picturing herself – mortgage unpaid, foreclosed upon, homeless, crushed by debt, credit cards snatched from her, not enough money to purchase a comb for her lifeless hair, let alone Clarins moisturizer for her tinder-dry skin – and is on the point of driving home to search for cash when she looks in the glove box et voila! finds a dollar bill.  Overjoyed, she drives over to where the woman is still pawing around in the trash barrel (mostly a trove of dog turds), jumps out of her car and sprints over, the dollar clutched in her fist.

“Here,” says Lady Bountiful, thrusting it at her exultantly, “it’s all I could find, but you could at least get a coffee.”

The woman examines the bill.  “Not at Starbucks,” she says.

5. SHOPPING AROUND

At  two o’clock in the afternoon, approximately twelve hours after Em’s death, Solitaire and her stepson Zach drive to the Heavenly Heights Mortuary and Old Pueblo Crematorium.  It is in the center of town, a modest, Spanish-style building set back from the street with a bit of grass and geraniums and three sago palms guarding the entry.

“I think we should shop around a bit,” Zach says as they pull up in front.  “I know a guy who says he can do it for half-price.”

 Zach always knows “a guy”—usually it’s a chap named Lester --  who knows another guy who’ll do it for half price.   “It,” which Solitaire had formerly regarded as an inherently innocuous two-letter objective pronoun, has evolved into a kind of “Lester’s List” of cosmic proportions that encompasses anything life can conceivably throw your way:  cut-rate circumcisions, bank heists, church socials, Mexican dentures, bar-mitzvahs, refrigerator repairs, revolutions, firing squads, tuxedo rentals,

gun-running, body-part implants and/or reductions, fake passports  

(ditto visas and green cards), prom parties, quinceañeras (with or without mariachis), prayer retreats (with or without fasting),  matricides,  hot watches, nose jobs, Jimmy Choo knock-offs and – it should go without saying – burials and cremations.

"Did Lester pick up a cheap crematorium at a yard sale," Solitaire asks, "or did it fall off the back of a truck?'

“He knows a guy who’s a major share-holder in an international chain of funeral homes.  They deal in quantity so they can afford –“

                                                                                                            
“International?  You mean like…  across the line?”

“Well, yeah… I guess so.  They’ve also got a fleet of hearses, so transport’s not a problem.”

“I don’t think your Dad wants to be cremated in Ciudad Juarez.  The Department of State has it on their no-go list.  Besides, we don’t even know what the price is yet.”

“Lester says he can beat any price.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” says Solitaire.

“I just don’t want to see you get manipulated or pushed around by one of these slick Six-Feet-Under types.  Obviously they’ve got some kind of deal going with that hospice outfit.”  

“That’s possible,” Solitaire concedes.  “On the other hand, they’re providing a service that’s a convenience to all parties.  I mean, where would we stow your Dad while we’re – quote -- shopping around? “

“Don’t you have an extra fridge in the store room?”

“It’s a side-by-side.”

“We can stand him up.  It’s only for a day or so.”

Solitaire rests her head against the seat-back.  Somehow, she’s wound up in a David Lynch movie and she’s wondering when it will end.

“Kidding,” Zach grins.  He pats her on the shoulder, “Just trying to make you laugh.”

“I know,” she sighs.  “It’s okay.”

“Remember,” Zach says as they walk from the car, “these guys are piranhas -- they’ll nibble you to death – five hundred here, five thousand there -- before you know it you’ve bought Dad a marble mausoleum for a hundred thou.  So my advice is –- keep your business wits about you.”

“My what?”  Solitaire, who on her best day has less business sense than her  Shih-Tzus, has been suffering severe sleep deprivation for weeks and now has a bad case of brain-fog.

“Maybe I could offer him a few poker lessons in exchange for –“

“Oh, please …”                                           

A professional poker player, Zach plays mainly online, but also teaches classes and gives private tutorials.  His nom de jeu is “Poker Moses.”  His business card, recently designed, shows a stone tablet with the Ten Commandments of Poker (each one bulleted) and a long, gnarled finger sternly pointing at one of the bullets. 

His brother Benjamin, who deals poker at a casino near Three Points, closely scrutinizes the card.  “Is that meant to be an index finger or a middle finger?”

“That’s the stupidest question I ever heard,” Zack replies.

“Not at all.  It’s basic Byzantine iconography – if it’s the index finger, Moses is pointing the way, saying ‘Thou shalt raise!’  If it’s the middle finger, he’s flipping the bird, ie, ‘Thou shalt not!’   A huge difference, injunction-wise.”

  Solitaire, herself, thinks it looks as though Moses is pressing an elevator button.

THE MOM-AND-POP MORTUARY

Entering the den of piranhas, Zach and Solitaire are immediately set upon by a cocker spaniel so brimming with the joy of puppyhood that he just can’t stop wriggling.

“Wriggles!”  From somewhere within, the voice of God (a female here) commands, “Sit!”  The dog tries desperately to obey but can’t quite manage it and his bottom goes on wagging in a kind of rear windshield-wiper action.

Mrs Wriggles, a handsome streaky-blonde woman in a tailored V-necked dress, proffers her condolences and informs them that her husband, Wally, will appear momentarily.  She then offers them a seat, a cup of coffee, and a spectacular glimpse of alpine cleavage as she scoops up the still-undulating “Wriggles,” tucks him under her arm, and disappears into an office.

“Well,” says Zach judiciously, his eyes tracking the disappearing backsides of Wriggles and his mistress, “this seems like an okay sort of place.”

“I thought you wanted to shop around,” Solitaire says.

“I’ve got a gut instinct for these things,” Zach says, his hands tracing mystical circles in the air, “and the fong shoo is right.  Besides,” he smiles,  “a good pair beats a couple of ducks almost any day.”

Solitaire, a pushover for dogs, agrees that the fung shwei feels right, and that so far she likes the Wriggles family.

And so this decision, like so many of life’s major decisions, is arrived at in the usual objectively analytical, rational and businesslike fashion. 

Waiting for Wally, Solitaire thinks back some twenty years, when she attended to the crematory arrangements of a much-loved great Aunt in Carmel-by-the-Sea.  The mortuary, in Monterey, was dark in décor, heavy on crucifixes, somber in tone, and Victorian in its implicit threat of a hideous Hereafter:  were you really going to Heaven, or might you be cast out --and down – into That Other Place?  Might you be impaled for Eternity on the devil’s toasting fork?  Might you, at the very least, find yourself lingering overlong in that dreary old holding pattern called Purgatory?  The undertaker himself, gloomy and cadaverous (what else) in a three-piece black suit, was straight out of Dickens.  Emerging shakily from the shadows into the sunlight, Solitaire shuddered, as, presumably, she was meant to do. 

Goodbye to all that!  

The Heavenly Heights Mortuary and Old Pueblo Crematorium is propelled by an entirely different philosophy, one that is essentially secular and christian with a small “c,” and anyone who books passage to the Next World through their good offices need have no fears about the fires of Hell, not if the Ullmers, which turns out to be their family name, have anything to say about it.

Their gentle, cheerful optimism about your Loved One’s long range future is clearly reflected in their pristine pastel decorating scheme:  the cherry-pink and Wedgewood blue paintings of sylvan landscapes, the baby blue brocade wing back chairs, the blue and white cabbage-rose slipcovered sofa, the vases of fabricated pink roses and blue hydrangeas, the little porcelaine dishes of cellophane-wrapped peppermint candies, the hint of rose-scented freshener in the air-conditioned room.  The sole concession made to an unpredictable and potentially uncontrollable grief is the bouquet of pastel boutique Kleenex boxes reassuringly placed on every shining, dust-free surface.

When Wally appears, Solitaire, who had paid scant attention to him earlier that morning, observes that he, like his establishment, is freshly-scented and dust-free.  Trim, fit and boyish in a light blue polo shirt and crisply pressed chinos, he leads them down the hall to the conference room.  Along the way, he tells them a bit about himself – that his family is from the Midwest, that they moved to Arizona to escape the harsh winters and to indulge their love of the outdoors … hiking, swimming, tennis … and that his two girls are heavily into gymnastics.     

“How did you get into the mortuary business?” Zach asks.

“Purely by accident.  When I was in college I took a summer job as an apprentice at a mortuary and I liked it.  I thought, ‘Hey, this is something I can really do!’  I’ve been doing it ever since and it’s given me a great sense of satisfaction to make a fair living and help people, too. "

“I guess the work’s steady,” Zach says.

Wally smiles. “Yeah … death and taxes."  He shrugs.  "Steady, not too stressful.  I like to hold cremations to about four a week.”  He turns quickly to Solitaire.  “Sorry, didn’t mean to be insensitive.”

“No problem.”  She smiles.  She’s back in that David Lynch movie, wondering how to get out.

The conference room is the business heart of the establishment.  The lighting is subdued and the items on display are spotlighted.  One wall is lined with casket samples, just the ends, which stick out of the wall like ornate, brass-handled filing cabinets. The samples are offered in a prism of muted colours from dove grey and azure to oxblood and malachite, and range in price from $385 to $13,000.  They look built-to last, able to withstand every underground assault from earthworms to earthquakes, and every test of time right up to, and possibly through, the Resurrection.  A claustrophobe’s ultimate nightmare. 

Two other walls are lined with urns of every shape, size and price ($40 to $3,000) for containing the ashes, or what are referred to in the trade as “cremains:” memorial boxes of carved wood or etched bronze, cloisonne and celadon ginger jars, brass bookends for couples.  On the bottom shelf, not illuminated, is a sturdy rectangular box in basic black plastic, standing upright; this is the box in which Em, unless Solitaire orders something different, will be returned to her.

They sit down at the conference table.  Wally hands them each a manila folder with price sheets and information about assorted funeral and cremation packages, as well as official state permits and death certificates.  He tells Solitaire that he can’t cremate her husband until he has an official permit, which he doesn’t expect to come through until Friday – this is now Monday – and therefore her husband will probably not be cremated until sometime over the weekend. 

“Where is he?” Solitaire asks.

“What?  Well, he’s here,” Wally says, “under refrigeration.”

“Is he in one of those pull-out steel drawers?”

“You mean like those morgue shots they show on TV?  No, we don’t use those anymore.  It’s more like a refrigerated …um…”

Solitaire glances at Zach; he looks stricken, as though his father’s death has only just hit home.  She realizes suddenly how selfish she has been, how her relentless need-to-know, her desire to immerse herself in Em’s body and soul before he goes up in smoke has desensitized her to the pain of his children, especially Zach who has tried so hard, in his quirky way, to help her.    

“Zach,” she says, and he starts, “perhaps you and Wally could discuss the various options.”

“The basic cremation package,” Wally says to Zach, “is $1495, which includes transport of the remains, refrigeration, obituary notices, guest registry, acknowledgment cards, services of the staff, cremation with a memorial service in our chapel, plus an optional $150 honorarium for clergy and $150 for a reception with cookies and –“

"Wally," Zach interrupts him, “we've pretty much decided to have our own memorial service and reception at home.”

In the end, they order the “Direct Cremation” package ($800), which includes transport, five days refrigeration, on-site cremation, basic particle-board container and plastic urn, plus $25 for the permit and ten copies of the death certificate at $15 per copy.  The total comes to $975 plus 8.1% state sales tax.  Solitaire hands over her American Express card and hopes it won’t be rejected.

“I think that’s a fair price,” Zach says when Wally leaves the room, “I doubt Lester could have done much better, frankly.”

"Probably not," Solitaire agrees.

She thinks of Em lying nearby in his sky-blue shirt, locked in a refrigerated unit, some sort of steel vault, and she wonders if Em is sharing it or if he is alone in the dark.  She stares at the painting on the wall; another of those pastel landscapes, this one of waterfalls and a meandering river, a flower-strewn path winding beneath a blossoming jacaranda, and the whole arched over by, yes, a rainbow.  And she wonders why this painting is here and what it has to do with Em lying in the dark in a refrigerated locker in nothing but his sky-blue shirt.