Clyde’s send-off would be tomorrow afternoon. He and his Bible buddies had apparently planned it. But planned it when?

  Once the ring-seller’s tail fins slid away, I chose to walk around our town alone. I wore a blue windbreaker. I checked the bathroom mirror like some President’s son preparing for his father’s televised funeral cortege.

  When I, counting the last of my chauffeur-salary pocket change, stepped into the dime store, my face caused double takes. So I decided to wander downhill, where Falls’s many black people lived. Nobody’d know me there. I could have the pleasure of being near such folks and their consoling busyness; but I’d go blessedly unrecognized, unpitied.

  A strange haze hung over The Bottom’s chinaberry trees, its rusted tin roofs. Clyde had told me how—lacking good drainage and decent window screens—black people burned rags to discourage huge mosquitoes. My head now drooping forward, Sutie’s undeliverable letter crackling the jacket fabric over my heart, I trudged along. I hurried as with some urgent errand. In Black Town, I felt alive and yet invisible.

  But I soon found myself observed. From many crowded porches. Generations slumped on discarded upholstered furniture. (White people’s old couches went into storage behind the house; black people’s seemed transposed, half proud, onto front porches.) Old folks and infants—abandoned during work hours—babysat each other. My courtly little nods brought me not one greeting. Instead, my platinum presence released darker older people into showing just how tired they were.

  Some folks rolled their eyes; they turned aside, yawned irritated snorts. And I slowly saw they knew exactly who I was. I guessed they’d known—all along—who my Clyde had truly been. They understood everything he’d given up for little Whiteyhead me. They had already heard about his death. And, like Sutie, seemed to blame me. But why?

  He hadn’t even gone into his grave. And yet I—eight—was already down here looking for an entrance! I sought some back door left unfastened, half welcoming. I’d hiked downhill in search of company, music, vowel tones, maybe one warm drink.

  The day before Dad’s funeral, I had faith some circulation system hid in Baby Africa, the quick and secret life of Falls! The choicest currents in our hill town all seemed to beat and lurk today inside those hovels’ smoky parlors.

  But as Negro-owned dogs barked just at me, as blackfolks refused to return my eye-to-eye, I knew finally to stumble silent back uphill. In Colored Town, I seemed viewed, not as the joy of Clyde’s life, but as some pale leech who’d used him up. Someone who’d lured him half uphill—away from Dad’s real duties, his true kin. Not one black citizen smiled my way or asked me in.—Without Clyde, I would never know these folks. Without him, maybe I would never want to!

  I returned to an address and destiny that felt far more coldly random. I opened the door of our rental house. I saw, nailed beside our porch mailbox, a new white wreath of fresh carnations. I leaned nearer. At least I could sniff flowers’ cleanly reassuring scent. Receiving none, I touched blossoms. Dad’s proved celluloid. Maybe leased? Part of a package deal? Some kit provided by your friendly white-man undertaker.

  Fake flowers: that most Caucasian of Caucasian inventions.

  2.

  Clyde’s funeral overenlivened Falls’s Second Baptist True Gospel Tabernacle. Pews of our “church home” were absolutely jammed. More folks stood up in back. Crowds made the tongue-and-groove balcony ominously creak.

  Dad’s ceremony had the tension of a sports event, the macabre citizenly charge peculiar to some public hanging.

  “Never in my forty years …,” our town mortician told me later.

  Mother held my right hand tight all during. Maybe Grace felt frightened at the emotion Clyde M. Delman’s exit inspired in everyone but her. No, wrong—her, too. I knew that. Since we’d got the news, I heard her being sick night after night in our small echoing bathroom. And yet the sight of mourners come off the night shift in their mill clothes, the very working-classness of Dad’s funeral, the way its music rocked—all this seemed to grieve my mom as much as his long blond oak coffin. A vanilla box to hold, I explained to myself, the rarest of white chocolate. What a stupid thought!, but my own just then. I was out of my mind that day. I was a kid, after all. My saliva tasted like canning paraffin. My eyesight fluttered at its outer edges, winglike tugs, little extra jelly tremblings.

  The organ prelude sounded soggily overfamiliar. Hymns like a row of windowsill pears left ripening in sun too long ever to eat. Mush, but all lined up most beautifully colored. When the sentimental pipe organ left “Old Rugged Cross” and slid oily into a secular “Danny Boy,” Mom groaned loud enough to turn five heads. She hissed my way, “Poor clod. He would, without my help. ‘Danny Boy’! We’re all in so much trouble, son.”

  Her brothers had arrived. They were handsome Nordic men as tall as Clyde. They looked so much like twins you knew they weren’t. Seeming talcummed with Presbyterian rectitude, their sideburns were cut precisely straight. Professional in new black suits, it seemed they’d come not to console their sis but to serve her a summons.

  My lawyer-uncles appeared to disapprove, not only of Clyde’s disreputable lonely death in a motel; they also frowned at Mom herself, their pretty little joyride of a baby sister. But as I sat beside this woman so generally despised, I clutched her palm with both my fists, to comfort. I traced my index fingertip along her endless lifeline, down into her deep, deep pocket of a heartline. I wanted to forgive her. Who else on earth could I forgive? And, sure, I hoped for some vice versa. Far more than Mom, I myself had put him in this box.

  Clyde’s seemed almost a classic Negro funeral. I wondered if others noted this. It worried me in ways that shame me now. If I was ready to admit my dad had been a living black man, then surely having him be just a newly dead one should’ve felt far easier. Right? Well, no. Really openly emotional, the music wasn’t one bit canned; it absolutely swung. It did not know how not to. Both aged lady keyboardists cried; neither woman could quite read her music thanks to running eyes, and so each played by heart. A piano plus an organ and two choirs, Child & Adult. Dad had served as superintendent of the Sunday school here. Everybody loved him. In secret, he’d passed out chewing gum to kids. A saint, he loaned men money and never mentioned repayment, and now he’d died and who would know? Praise God—from Whom all blessings …

  Clyde’s coffin rested open. Mom had asked, would morticians please keep it closed, thanks. But we’d marched in last, the church just mobbed, and there Dad waited face-up. What could we do? Turn tail and run? Rush up and slam it?

  I will spare myself and you the description of how much “Northern European” makeup, how much cake-icing-pink sludge, they’d spackled over that dear jalopy of a face. It was beyond Lon Chaney monster-movie, how white they’d tried to paint him, dead.

  Dad had somehow urged his fellow Bible-givers to handcraft his burial. Maybe he hoped to spare my mom the chore. She would’ve sprung for Psalm 100 and “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” period. No “graveside service,” no nothing. Everybody go home.

  Mom’s lifelong stab at “class” got trounced without these rough men even knowing. Her brothers being present made it all the more embarrassing. Grace’s tribe had been a longtime dynasty of big-jawed, self-satisfied county-seat attorneys. In Castalia, North Carolina, to be “a Meadows” offered large exemptions, ones Mom had maybe traded on, then flaunted from the start.

  For one thing, too many guys spoke. Six, then the class-ring salesman. Each man stood remembering Clyde aloud and at full blast. Mother’s hand tightened over mine at every painful instance of ungrammar. After forty double negatives, my right paw reddened then contracted and soon numbed.

  Orations by Clyde’s fellow Bible-believers first seemed casual, soon impromptu, next disorganized, then collapsing toward the sloppy, sounding finally deranged. Others’ love of him seemed to dawn on them as they described it. The ring salesman now recalled a traffic accident that’d claimed his own beloved eldest child, an adolescent daughter. Mom, panicked, whispered to me, “And what has this to do with the price of tea in China?”

  How the cops’ 3 a.m. phone call felt. How his poor child looked, expired on the operating table. We all waited for his return to Clyde. We craved that. Soon we tilted forward, cheering the salesman home toward his topic—face-up in the box. Maybe Clyde had offered some consoling Bible verse at 4 a.m.? Or flowers, coffee-to-go? Anything! But no. This speech was not about my dad in any way but one: Clyde’s love kept offering others permission. Be yourself, bud. Go for it!

  From beyond the grave, “Museums should be phoned.” “Not our Clyde,” Bible-scatterers addressed a God all the more invisible today.

  These businessmen were too upset to make much sense.

  And in the end, only that made sense. Finally, I felt my father’s presence, forgiving, sleepy, half amused, seated right beside us; Clyde nodding at their every crude confession, at each man’s listed grief. From here, I could see one of my actual dead dad’s shoe soles, tipped against white satin; a metal tap nailed near its toe “to save on shoe leather, bud.” And yet I seemed to also feel him slouched here in the pew beside me. One bony arm proved fully long enough to reach well past me, curl around, and include Mom within Dad’s pterodactyl form of a lank angel embrace.

  This hug seemed so firm, I remember thinking, “Good, must mean his bone has healed.” (Morticians had, for purposes of sparing his best suit, simply snipped the cast right off that mending arm.)

  • • •

  Soon as Amen ended it, black people and white people I’d never seen, having cried unto coughing, left without addressing Mom. Everybody whispered about her. Strangers openly pointed at us here alone on Clyde’s front row. No eulogy mentioned Mother once. All praise sloshed instead toward me, “his little fellow missionary.” I felt unconsoled, bitter. I felt a Clyde-like lack of vanity. I felt, in fact, so old.

  Black members of Dad’s Bible Club sat, for the first time ever, right alongside mourning white members. (By whose order? By some unexpected provision of Dad’s will?)

  Janine, genius waitress from The American Grill, sent one hundred decrusted sandwiches to our home for whatever reception might happen afterward. White bread, deprived of brown crust, looked nude. Nobody came. Leaving direct from the cemetery, Mom’s brothers drove right back to Castalia.

  Three hours after the service, Colonel Begonia knocked at our front door. A yellow taxi waited. God knows what it cost him or how he reached us from Edenton, half a state away. He lifted toward Mom one pot, his “best boy” beefsteak begonia.

  Colonel said he’d come to deliver it/him personally. Mom didn’t understand why, on leaving (carrying five pounds of sandwiches we pressed on him), the old crew-cut gent cried like some unwed mother exiting an orphanage.

  “Goodbye,” Colonel told the plant comically healthy. “Be a good boy.—Semper fi,” he called.

  Five days later—his begonia underwatered then oversoaked and already going crispy from its outside in—I boarded the train to military school.

  2. NEW TESTAMENT

  Return

  … he appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat, and upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not … that he was risen.

  Mark 16:14

  When I was thirty, I returned to Falls. One of those class reunions you dread attending. You force yourself and, afterward, can’t believe you nearly missed it. Why? Because of stupid vanity over hair loss or your recent job performance, just hating to explain all that.

  Since Mom shipped me off to that stern Anglican military academy. I couldn’t have named five people from my third-grade class. The Worst Possible Sunday had made of me a nomad like that pitiable jokester, the shirt-selling Clyde M. Delman, Sr.

  Odd, in a gym still draped with twisted midnight-blue crepe paper, the very second that my former grammar-school chums stepped up to me, adults now—widened, sobered, overly painted, and sometimes genuinely improved—I somehow spoke their names aloud: “Jennifer,” “Walter,” “By God, if it’s not ole ‘Mutt.’”—Like some irregular Latin declension I’d memorized once if perfectly at age eight, these monikers hopped easily free of me. So did deep old fondnesses for them.

  My shock at catching Mom under Doc Dix, the added penalty of losing Dad a week and one day later, all that had thrown a shadow Bible-black over each previous local joy. Our old school gym still vaguely smelled of pubescent sweatsocks and radiator-scorching. With its rafters echoing a young young band’s startling New Age arrangement of our old “Blue Moon” (itself a revival), I danced. I danced with several different, kind, remembered women.

  I held, in turn, the class secretary, our girl math-genius (tragically still no further advanced than chief teller at Falls’s major bank). Such “nice girls” had become even decenter women. They admitted having always wanted to tell me how sorry they’d been. About what I’d endured and seen while in third grade. “Whatever you did see,” one half-whispered to my neck, still sexily begging for details already twenty-two years old.

  Friends swore they’d heard about my recent progress way up north. They claimed to know how hard I’d worked at prep school once shipped away unfairly and in such a hush-hush hurry. “We did wonder, all those years ago, what really happened to you, Meadows. First Reading Circle was never the same after you left. You were always so … prepared. We all felt a little scared of you, you know? You kept so quiet but certainly smiled a lot. You seemed drowsy half the time. And we girls all wanted hair your color!”

  Nearly nuzzling my slow-dance partners, I admitted how, boarded at a first-rank second-tier military school, I had truly thrown myself at studies. Nothing else to do, I went at Latin and then Greek as if I were some regular kid rabid for sports trivia or car statistics. To these women, dancing warm and ample in my arms, I let myself admit how surprisingly well I was actually doing, considering the early trouble. Still a bachelor, yeah. But I’d just met a beauty, a very witty skinny woman named Bethany. I was already an associate professor in far-off New England. If forced, I mentioned my two—and only—books. (One, that international blockbuster The Relationship Between the Published and Original Versions of Cicero’s Speeches. My second is Questions of Authenticity in Seneca’s Plays. And, as of the present writing, the film rights to both remain available!)

  This far south, even if my tweeds felt somewhat costumey, they comforted like a flimsy sort of armor, the uniform of choice. I was so aware of being back in Dad’s chosen town. I imagined phoning him to meet me for a drink. I guessed how happy my return, my small-time ivory-tower career would’ve made the Itinerant King of “Swank” Cufflinks.

  I had driven south along the superseded U.S. 301; this road once offered the feeder stream to many of our sleeker Bible-clients. Headed toward Falls, I pictured coming upon some old motel; those few rooms that didn’t leak would now be rented by the month to squads of Mexican workers. But I might find, in weeds behind the place, a letter “T” still pressed there, fine white quartz crisscrossing Trixie’s grave.

  I discovered that Janine’s American Bar and Grill was now the Hello Deli and Sushi Bar. (Who says there’s been no progress in our national culture?) Brave, I now aimed my Hertz car past our old rental home. The property was rendered far more desirable by trees full-grown, fresh yellow paint, and some young couple’s new petunia-spilling windowboxes. Beside the drive, a tricycle with a pink seat, new plastic streamers windblown on its handlebars.

  During my reunion weekend, I was spared deciding if I should bother visiting my mom.—Veterinarian Dix (no surprise) had chosen not to marry a young widow suddenly too visible, controversial; everybody knew he’d never desert his wife of two decades. Everyone but poor Mom. She waited around for two whole years, that sure he’d change his mind. He did not “call” again. Her little Meadows had fixed that but good! Shunned, even in her favorite hangout, the Falls Public Library, Grace finally moved to Boca Raton. For many subsequent seasons, Mom worked there as “hostess” for an eating place she seemed to assume most everybody civilized must know; her postcards called it “The exclusive ‘Thunderbird Supper Club.’”—Right.

  The two-star T-bird must’ve enjoyed a clientele made up exclusively of prosperous, erotically driven, short-lived, lonely widowers. At its entrance find Gracie Delman smiling, fully made up, wearing drop earrings and a long dress, greeting gents fondly, inventing nicknames for pet regulars. (It was a trick I had learned early from Janine. I knew how well it’d worked on me at six. I’ve since tried it on my sad-sack freshmen.) Mom, in turn, married four of these old fortune-packing seabirds. And she always invited my latest girlfriend and me south to attend her latest surprisingly elaborate nuptials.

  Two of her husbands had been named Buck. Then she’d upped and remarried Buck #1. Even for a scholar with a fairly good memory, I found my mother’s complete moniker was getting hard to track. At the edge of her most recent engraved wedding invitation, Grace had jotted in the red fountain-pen ink she now affected, “Meadows? I plan wearing white this time. Can you believe it! But Buck #2 insists. Am I crazy, honey? Do you mind much?”

  I did not. Nor did I ever attend.

  At least she’d improved her situation financially. Look on the bright side: Maybe Grace could now afford sending some little kid through boarding school. Still pissed? Me? I’d once asked her why my trust fund had faltered after that first year of education elsewhere. Why had she forced the boarding school to set me working at age nine? My chore? Twice weekly, all Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, shining huge old silver lacrosse trophies, nut dishes for the Parents’ Day she attended once with “a new friend.” Mother answered, “Honey, what was I supposed to do, sell jewelry at Woolworth’s?”

  Well … now you mention it …