“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 8th 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.
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?
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.
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