Marcia Talley - Dead Man Dancing

We hadn’t owned a cat for years, not since Emily left home and Marmalade, age twenty, died. I couldn’t see any reason not to, so I agreed to host the cat temporarily. ‘I’ll have to ask Paul, but I think he’ll be OK with it.’

Eva hugged me. ‘Thank you, friend!’ She closed the door and locked it, leaving the window cracked as before. I was grateful that the day had dawned cloudy and cool, so there was no danger of little Bella What’s-her-Name overheating while we attended Jay’s funeral service.

Inside the church a few minutes later, the organ prelude had already begun, a ponderous and solemn hymn that I didn’t recognize. On the left-hand side of the aisle, about halfway down, I could see Emily discreetly waving. Eva and I hurried past the photographs of Jay that were on display at the back of the sanctuary, accepted a program from a young second cousin, blue-suited, scrubbed and polished within an inch of his young life, and slid into the wooden pew next to my daughter.

I leaned across Emily to plant a kiss on Chloe’s cheek, gave one to Emily, too, then sat back to examine the program: Mass of the Resurrection for Jerome I. Giannotti, 1958-2008 . So, Jay had been fifty. He looked much younger. Centered on the program cover, in full color, was a picture of Jay taken at the same event as the 18 x 24 I’d recently seen in Kay’s dining room. In this pose, however, Kay was facing away from the camera, while Jay looked over her shoulder, smiling directly into the lens.

Sadly, what was left of that gorgeous man lay in a polished rosewood coffin, sitting on a bier just in front of the altar, surrounded by flowers.

I pulled a handful of tissues out of my purse. I was going to need them.

‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ played softly as the sanctuary gradually filled up around us. Hutch arrived, pushing Ruth in a wheelchair, her leg extended stiffly in front of her. Although I caught their eye and waved them forward, they took an easier route and sat in the back. When Daddy and Neelie arrived, they took the pew immediately behind us, sliding all the way over to the wooden divider to make room for Alicia and Chance when they arrived. I caught sight of Tom and Laurie, sitting together near a bas relief plaque depicting the seventh station of the cross and waved. Melanie I didn’t see anywhere.

A mystery tune segued into the more familiar ‘Morning Has Broken’, and then it was time for the opening hymn. We stood, and the congregation managed – just – to muddle through the next hymn:

Be not afraid.

I go before you always.

Come follow me,

And I will give you rest.

‘I’m not familiar with this hymn,’ I whispered to Eva somewhere in the middle of the verse about raging waters and burning flames. ‘It’s not very singable.’

‘Another legacy of the Folk Mass debacle,’ she whispered back. ‘Some of that St Louis Jesuit crap, written by priests whose mothers were struck in the head with guitars while pregnant with them.’ She raised her eyes to the blue, star-studded sanctuary ceiling and added, ‘May God forgive me for saying so.’

I missed the next half stanza while biting my tongue and concentrating on the stained glass windows in order to keep from laughing.

During the eulogies, I located Shirley and Link sitting with Tessa in a pew near the front, and a block of graying heads that I suspected belonged to the Swing and Sway Seniors since I’d seen their Ford Econovan parked outside. By mid-service I was intimately familiar with the backs of several hundred heads of people I didn’t know, but no Melanie.

Before I knew it, the priest was holding up the host and saying, ‘This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world…’ and we were responding, ‘Lord I am not worthy to receive you…’ and I’d still not located her.

‘Have you seen Melanie?’ I asked Eva as members of the congregation began filing up to the altar rail to receive communion.

‘Is she Catholic?’

‘I’m pretty sure. Of the evangelical persuasion.’

‘If she’s a faithful Catholic, she’ll go up to receive. Keep watching.’

We sang the communion hymn ‘I am the Bread of Life’, repeating the refrain ‘I will raise them up’ so many times I thought I would scream, and still no Melanie.

Not at the rosary service.

Not at the funeral.

I was getting seriously worried.

The Mass ended, we were directed to go in peace, and the congregation recessed silently while a soloist sang the Prayer of St Francis of Asissi, ‘Make Me an Instrument of Peace’, in Spanish, in a clear, high soprano voice that tore at my heart.

Rather than following my family and friends out of the sanctuary, I loitered at the back, listening, all the while studying the photographs of Jay, silently mourning the man who, against all odds, had taught my lead-footed husband how to waltz.

Oh, Señor, hazme un instrumento de Tu Paz…

Porque es:

Dando, que se recibe;

Perdonando, que se es perdonado;

Muriendo, que se resucita a la

Vida Eterna.

It’d been years since I took Spanish, but with what I knew of French, I translated the words silently as she sang:

Lord, make me an instrument of peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love.

Where there is injury, pardon.

Where there is discord, vision.

Where there is doubt, faith.

Where there is despair, hope.

Where there is darkness, light.

Where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master,

Grant that I may not so much seek to be

Consoled as to console;

To be understood as to understand;

To be loved, as to love;

For it is in giving that we receive,

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

One day, I thought as I stood there quietly sobbing, we’ll all be gone and forgotten. The HIA monogram on my towels faded, their edges frayed, the terrycloth cut up into squares for polishing whatever passes for cars by then.

As the last notes of the song died away, I was startled out of my reverie by a voice behind me. ‘He was the love of my life, you know.’

I turned to find Kay regarding me with puffy, red-rimmed eyes. Behind her stood a priest. With a light touch of her hand on his surplice, she indicated that he should go ahead without her.

‘The pictures you selected are wonderful,’ I said after the priest had disappeared through the doors that led to the narthex.

A corner of her mouth twitched. ‘Lorraine went a bit overboard, so I had to pare it down a bit from what you saw at the house the other day, but I think it’s representative, don’t you?’

I scanned the photographs, a dozen or so, that were arranged on the table just as they had been at Kramer’s the night before. As then, there were none that featured little Lorraine. Once again, I wondered if Kay had noticed Lorraine’s resemblance to Tessa or if, as Paul kept suggesting, my overactive imagination was running away with me.

I blew my nose, carefully considering my answer. ‘I didn’t know Jay as a youth, so it’d be hard to say, but seeing him looking so happy in these pictures makes me wish I did, and feel even sadder that such a promising career was cut short.’

‘He set his goals very high,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I thought he’d bitten off more than he could chew.’

I froze. Was she talking about Jay’s plan to franchise J & K? His crushing workload? His personal life?

While dabbing at my eyes I studied his widow’s face, looking for clues. It was as if she’d drawn a line in the sand and was waiting – composed, and lethal – for me to cross it.

I knew I’d have to force her hand.

Even though I stood in a church sanctuary only inches from the holy water, the devil made me do it.