The Truth About Death Read Free Page A

be an interesting experience for him, something to remember.”
    “Whoa,” Morris said.
    “At least let me finish the story,” Louisa said. “We had the funeral the next day. Bart took the body to Hope Cemetery in the buggy, and then came back for the family. He let you drive,” she said to Hildi. “I remember. That was the first time you ever drove a horse and buggy. Probably the last time too. That night they got on the train to Kewanee. Bart never charged them.”
    Bart hadn’t charged them for the funeral, and Louisa remembered all the unpaid invoices she’d found in his desk when she’d started doing the books, and she began to cry. She didn’t think she had any tears in her for Bart, not after the last couple of years, but now they began to dribble down her cheeks. Elizabeth brought a box of Kleenex and sat down next to her on the sofa and put her arms around her. After a few minutes she freshened Louisa’s drink and then poured some white wine for herself.
    PART III: ELIZABETH
    Whom would I commission to paint this scene? Elizabeth asked herself. There wasn’t anything especially dramatic or picturesque about it—her mother-in-law’s tears catching the light as she sipped her whiskey, her husband and her daughter standing next to each other in the wide doorway that opened into the upstairs hall, Morris still posing in front of the fireplace, Alexandra patting her husband’s arm before sinking down into Hildi’s place on the sofa, a pair of Waterford tumblers sparkling on a silver tray—so it wouldn’t be Caravaggio orRembrandt. Not Leonardo. It would have to be a Dutch genre painting, a cozy living room with a memento mori—a skull sitting on top of one of the bookcases. Not that this family needed to be reminded of death! They lived and breathed death. At times it was exhilarating. Made Elizabeth think about what she was doing. But it was hard, too. She didn’t want her husband to go on a removal just as she was about to put on the potatoes, didn’t want her daughter to go with him, didn’t like the way that Death trumped everything. There was Gilbert, of course, always ready to step in. Loyal to a fault. But there was something cold about Gilbert. He would never have let the Amish family get away without paying. Simon, like his father, let people get away with it—hard times in Galesburg after the Maytag closing—but at least he wrote the losses off on their taxes.
    Maybe De Kooning, she thought. Wouldn’t that be something!
    Elizabeth had come to Galesburg from Princeton University, where she’d studied iconography with Kurt Weitzmann, and like a lot of new faculty in her cohort, she hadn’t been planning to stay in the Midwest once she’d published her dissertation, hadn’t been planning to marry one of her students, hadn’t been planning to marry a funeral director. But then she’d met Simon, who’d swaggered into her classroom in the Fine Arts Center in his combat fatigues. He’d been twenty-three, older than most of the students, and she’d been twenty-seven, younger than most of the faculty. He was going to school on the GI Bill and working for his father. He’d been a “mortuary specialist” in Vietnam, and he wrote a paper about the failure of Art to stand up to the things he’d seen in the mortuary in Da Nang, in order to erase the images that he couldn’t stop seeing in his dreams. Beauty itself wasimpotent, he argued, and so were the attempts of Art to confront Truth: the Isenheim Altarpiece , Goya’s Third of May , Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà … they couldn’t shock you or numb you like a box of putrid body parts or a face covered with mold and crawling with maggots, the skin slipping off. Day after day. They’d been equipped to process 350 bodies a month, and they were getting almost a hundred a day. It was the only job in the army, he’d told her, that you could quit! But Simon hadn’t quit.
    And she hadn’t quit either, had never lost her faith in the