10. LIGHT MY FIRE

"If," thought Solitaire, "I can just get through today, then the worst will be over and I shall be all right."

It is daybreak on Sunday morning, the twelfth of April.  Wispy grey curtains of rain swing north out of Mexico and blow across the Sonoran desert.  An unseasonably cold wind, more like February than April, is gusting, whipping up dust devils and clusters of acacia pollen.  Everyone in the Old Pueblo is sneezing, wheezing, dabbing at their eyes, and blowing their noses.  

"Aviva is up and brewing a pot of coffee, but not without the faint whiff of condescension common to the coffee cognoscenti of Seattle.  The two women put on windbreakers and take the dogs out.  To the left of the front door a large hole has been dug and Em's tree stands in it uncertainly, teetering slightly, its  fronds quivering nervously in the wind.  The dogs climb down into the pit, christen the tree, and clamber out.

Zach and his two girls, Lily and Marsha, drive up in their SUV, the interior of which looks, with its mashed juice cartons, gummy bears, Kit Kat wrappers, stray socks, hairbands and last week's classroom "art" smeared with turquoise bubblegum ice cream, pink sprinkles and ketchup, like the inside of a dumpster.

Em’s eldest son, Zach, a good looking fellow who will be fifty on his next birthday, has lately taken to wearing khaki cargo shorts and billowy Hawaiian shirts as though he were about to spin a south seas tale for his shipmates on the fo’c’sle, though his silvery mesh running shoes with the orange day-glo laces are somewhat at odds with his Outcast-of-the-Islands image.  The “Aloha” shirts, which he apparently buys by the gross on e-bay have been embellished with patch pockets, (obligingly custom-sewn by his poker pal, Jenny, a former flower child who learned her trade in a sweat shop in the Haight), in which he carries a half-dozen ballpoint pens the better to network potential poker clients.

“You’re not planning to dress like this for the service, are you?” Solitaire asks edgily.

Zach raises his eyebrows.   “Is there a problem?” 

Like many men in the southwest, Zach’s body is trim except for his gut which he carries before him as though it were a balloon spinnaker about to bear him aloft in a high following wind.  At the moment he is standing flat-footed in a quasi-passive-aggressive stance, a huge yellow hibiscus stretched taut across his belly and several coco-shell buttons tugging combatively at the fabric like puppies with a pull-toy.

Solitaire starts to respond in kind, then reconsiders.  “No problem.”  Zach grins.  Round #1 to him.  She gestures toward the girls.  “What about those ragamuffins?”

“You’ll have to discuss it with them.  I don’t get involved in their fashion choices.”  The girls are five and seven.

Well, did you bring some clothes for them to change into?”

“I told you – I have no idea.”  He walks over to the van, extracts what appear to be some items of wearing apparel, and heads toward the house.

 Aviva and the girls, meanwhile, have taken the dogs for a walk and return just as Nestor the landscaper arrives.

Zach, who emerges from the house after Nestor has cut the sacking from the root ball and wrestled the tree more securely into the soil, is now turned out in chinos, a long-sleeved light blue Oxford shirt of Em’s, and loafers.  High fashion for Tucson.  Like his father, he doesn’t know one end of a spade from the other  (unless it’s a playing card, of course) but that doesn’t prevent him from telling Marsha how to wield a shovel.

A cold drizzle begins to fall.  The air is scented with wet dust and wildflowers.

 Each person takes a quick turn at the shovel, tips in a spade full of dirt, then rushes inside, leaving the rest of the job to Nestor.

The girls sit in the kitchen, shivering over a cup of cocoa, then change into their spangled spandex party dresses and sequined sneakers.  Solitaire thinks back, way back, to her own demurely smocked organdy frocks and patent leather maryjanes.

Everyone is busy.  Around noon, Em's younger son, Benjamin, arrives with his longtime Korean girlfriend, Kiki.  The daughter of a prestigious mathematician in Seoul, Kiki fulfills the family potential by playing tournament poker at various casinos "on the rez" and peddling diamond jewelry to other players on the side.  Everyone’s got a culinary specialty and Kiki’s is a colossal lemon meringue graham cracker crust pie from the Village Inn. 

 Friends, about a dozen, come with assorted food and flowers. Solitaire makes a vague attempt to find platters and vases.  Standing in the middle of the dining room, aimlessly opening and closing cabinet doors, she greets her guests in a quizzical manner that suggests they have come on the wrong day, or, alternatively, that she has never seen them before.  

Aviva, who is setting up a buffet table, puts an arm around Solitaire’s shoulder and leads her out onto the terrace.  The sky has cleared, the sun shines; the big pepper tree sparkles with raindrops.

There is a slight hubbub as a shockingly beautiful young woman slips obtrusively between the guests and, dashing for cover under a market umbrella, huddles in its protective shade.

“OMG!” she gasps.  “What’s with this sun?”  This is Belinda, Benjamin’s 23-year-old daughter.   Like her peers, she texts, twitters, tweets and Twilights.  Although not unintelligent, she does not speak in complete compound sentences.  (So what?  Neither did George Bush.)  On the other hand, she is, as they say, so jaw-droppingly gorgeous that if she spoke not a word in any language no one would notice.  In fact, they might prefer it.  In Belinda’s mouth, words seem superfluous, a distracting irritant like spitballs.

Solitaire remembers Belinda as a sweet, sun-tanned little jock who loved to swim all day and throw frisbees for the dogs at her parents’ ranch.  What happened to that little girl?  The sun, great ball of life-sustaining fire, became her enemy.  An apostle for cosmetology, Belinda believes that if her alabaster calves and marmoreal décolletage were to be grazed by a ray of wrinkle-inducing sun she would implode in flames, collapsing in on herself like a White Dwarf;

her velvety brown eyes would grow dim, the luscious scarlet lips blister, her lustrous mane of black hair turn to dandruff and dust.  But here’s the sad rub about Belinda:  this wondrous gift, this miraculous marriage of nature and artifice, is a gift that seems to cause more pain than pleasure; it’s called “Lost Youth” and no one quite knows what to do with it.

Only Solitaire’s mother, Lavinia, once a great beauty herself, seems immune to the numbing aura of unease that Belinda’s beauty engenders.  Now 98, permanently imprisoned in her wheelchair, she lives, as though pre-embalmed, in a realm of eternal hauteur located in a film star stratosphere somewhere between the late Ethel Barrymore and Dame Maggie Smith.

Em, who occasionally grew weary of being press-ganged into his role as reluctant courtier to his very own Queen Mum-in-law, swore that he had actually seen Lavinia languidly raise her forearm, slowly revolve her hand, and give him the Windsor Wave.  Of course, she has also been seen to flip him the Bird, which shows a certain nonagenarian versatility on her part.

Needless to say, Lavinia regards Em’s male progeny as “common” and they in turn  regard her as “bitchy.”  (And that’s putting it nicely.)  So much for familial solace and harmony.

Aviva and Solitaire have prepared a kind of altar-of-remembrance in the library, a selected retrospective of Em memorabilia that includes family snapshots , clippings, photos with heads-of-state and presidents past, published poetry, articles, books, and now, his obituary.   Guests mosey through, gazing and schmoozing, and after making the requisite number of respectful noises they troop into the sitting room, perching on sofas and chairs around the black maw of the fireplace, and Solitaire can’t escape the obvious comparison between this ancient symbol of “hearth and home” and the image of that other fireplace (a recent model of crematorium is actually called a “Hot Hearth”) in Wally’s charnel house across town.

Aviva leads the service (hardly kosher, but who cares?  Not so very long ago she wouldn’t even have been allowed to attend the service, let alone lead it.)  It is sweet, eclectic, somewhat awkward.  A pinch of this, a dash of that.  A little Eliot, a bit of Bach.  A sonnet, a Psalm, a cantata, an elegy, Kaddish, a candle.  The End. 

Much of it is stiffly read, as though they were standing up at a highschool recitation.  Em , who loved the theatre and had done some Shakespeare with Paul Mazursky at Brooklyn College, (his first role, in “Othello,” was as Lodovico, a Venetian nobleman, who, at the very end of the play, utters the immortal line, “Oh bloody period!” thereby cracking up legions of undergraduates) was given to the rueful observation that our parents’ generation was the last American generation to read aloud or to routinely memorize and recite poetry.  What schoolgirl had not read from Willa Cather or recited Amy Lowell’s “Renaissance;” what youth had not known  “Gunga Din” or “The Highwayman?” or some stanzas of “Hiawatha?”  

“By the shores of Gitche Gumee,” runs idly through Solitaire’s mind, “by the shining Big-Sea-Water… dwelt a miner and his daughter, sandals were for –“  Oh for pete’s sake, that’s not it, she’s really losing it…    

And who is she to be critical, anyway?  While others gamely stand up and give it a go, she sits like a stone, not daring to open her mouth to so much as whisper lest her face shatter like a dropped teapot.  Instead, she sits on the sofa, stunned, calcified, bat-ears straining to hear – is it from the netherworld or from just across town? – Em’s well-remembered voice.  If only he were here!  How splendidly he would recite these selections!  With what depth of understanding, with what resonance and elegance of expression!   

            Adonai ro-i, lo ehsar

            Binot deshe yarbitseini,

            Al mei minuhot

            Ynahhateini …

               The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

              He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he

             Leadeth me beside the still waters…

But Em is not there.  He is not there, where he ought to be, because he is in a queue of two or three corpses waiting in plastic-lined particle-board boxes (called “chippies” in the trade) to be “charged” (inserted) on a motorized trolley into a “retort” (a propane-fired industrial furnace lined with heat-resistant refractory bricks) where, at temperatures ranging from 1600-1800° F and in a time span of  less than two hours, her husband’s limbs, flesh, organs – heart, genitals, brain – will be, no, not burned but dissolved, oxidized … vaporized into the atmosphere.

 But wait – not so fast!  Two-thirds of the way through the process, whatever remains of the incinerated corpse is turned, “repositioned,” as Wally puts it, which makes Em sound either like a cruise ship, or an evenly-roasted side of beef.  Solitaire is assiduous in her questioning and Wally forthcoming in his answers, sketching rudimentary graphs and graphics, diagrams of out-take valves, burner placement, and percentages of gaseous compounds.  He points out, thoughtfully, that having two gas burners in the main chamber and an entry burner prevent your body from smoking like a wet log and, moreover, that such terrific heat is guaranteed to re-ignite you if your fire goes out.  But when he gets to the part about the repositioning, he pauses uncomfortably.

“So,” Solitaire insists, “what is it that’s left at that point?”

“Well… the skeleton, mostly.  But sometimes there’s a bit of … other stuff."

"Stuff?"

"You know, this and that.”

This and that.  “Oh God!” Solitaire groans, thinking of this fiery prison, this hermetic chamber of horrors.  “Couldn’t it be done outside?  Don’t you have some sort of crematory garden?”

“Certainly not.”

“We could take him down to the ranch,” Solitaire says.  “We’ve got an old sunken –“ she is about to say “barbeque “ but thinks better of it and substitutes “fire pit” instead.  “The new owners wouldn’t mind and no one else would know.”

“Are you kidding?  It’s totally illegal.  I’d lose my license.”

“I can’t bear it!  It’s all so hideously claustrophobic.”

 “Oh no,” Wally protests.  “There’s a nice little peephole in the retort.  You can even watch the burning if you’d like.  And now we have dual exterior and interior shut-off heat switches, so you can turn the heat off from --"

"You mean ... in case he changes his mind?"

"... plus you can open the door from inside the cremator… 

“In case he’s not dead?”

“Of course he’ll be dead.  He is dead.  And frankly, if you don’t mind my saying so, I don’t think claustrophobia’s going to be an issue with your husband at that point.”

 

By the time they reach the Kaddish, Solitaire is on the verge of somnolence, a state induced partly by the sing-song sound of the ancient Aramaic chant:

           

            Yis’ga’dal v’yis’kadash shmay ra’bbo, bolmo dee’vro           

            chir’usay v’yamlich malchu’say, b’chayayhon…

               

            May the great Name of God be exalted and sanctified,

            Throughout the world, which he has created according to his will...

Her mind strays back to the death of Em’s father, Ezra.  A gentle man who loved music, (“Never underestimate Mozart!” he exhorted Em), he had a powerful torso, strong features and a great leonine head of iron grey hair.  An emigre from Minsk and a sewing machine operator in the Garment District for most of his working life, Ezra walked to his job each morning with his sewing machine slung over his shoulder. 

Em’s mother, who was bi-polar, and his father had long been divorced and it was Ezra’s second wife, Edith, who arranged the service at a temple in the Bronx.  Em and Solitaire, who were in Washington between assignments, drove up in a rental car on a sweltering mid-summer day and the moment they entered the temple Solitaire felt as though she had been transported to another country and that, moreover, her husband had become a complete stranger.   Normally so cool and controlled, he gave vent to a wild dithyrhambic display of grief, wringing his hands and sobbing, chest heaving and tears coursing down his cheeks.   So accustomed was she to the funereal Wasp stiff upper lip that she was astounded, even embarrassed.  She looked around apprehensively at the other mourners and was surprised to see that not a few of them were weeping copiously as well.  They drove to the grave site in a cortege from the funeral home and Em and Solitaire found themselves riding in the same limo with Norma, Em’s former wife.  It was the first encounter between the two women and Solitaire could hardly blame the divorced wife (aka “Victim”) for a certain display of overt hostility towards the new wife (aka “Home-wrecker”). 

To this day, Solitaire can feel the atmosphere crackling inside the limo.  Edith and Em were in the back seat, Norma in the passenger’s seat, and Solitaire on the jump seat, her face a few scant inches from Norma’s nose whenever Norma turned around, which was often because she and Em were having a horrific, ear-singeing argument about their son Zach.  Then a sophomore at a highschool in the Bronx, he had, it transpired, just been accused of selling pot to his classmates.  Em’s reaction was one of disbelief, anger and outrage, all vividly expressed, while at the same time still spasmodically sobbing and groaning and venting his grief for his father.  Solitaire, meanwhile, had her own priorities, which did not include being dissed.  No one, least of all Em, had bothered to introduce Solitaire and Norma to each other and Solitaire finally found this incivility intolerable.

“Excuse me,” she said the next time Norma’s nose swiveled in her direction, “I’d like to introduce myself –“ But that was as far as she got because Norma bored two holes in Solitaire’s head and looking through them, spoke directly to Em.

“I’m sending Zach to live with you in Moscow,” she announced.  Fortunately, the Fates had other plans, but it was a long time before the hackles lay back down on Solitaire’s neck.

Em said Kaddish for Ezra for eleven months and as far as Solitaire knows, he prayed for his father’s soul every day up unto the day of his own death.

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.