Frank De Felitta: For Love of Audrey Rose

“You saw with your own eyes,” she said simply.

“He bewitched her. Didn’t he? He bewitched all of us.”

“No, he did not bewitch her.”

Bill sighed wearily.

“I went to the temple, Janice… but I couldn’t go in. I wanted to, but I couldn’t….” His voice trailed away into a sibilant, meaningless whisper.

Janice wiped her eyes at the kitchen door.She found the light switch. The glow filled the dining area. Light sparkled from the china in the cabinet, off the Mexican vases. Bill stood immobile, in the center of the room.

“Please, Janice, forgive me,” he pleaded.

“Nobody’s blamed you, Bill.”

“Janice, I’m begging you.”

“In time. You’ll forgive me in time, too. But we need time.”

Janice turned, more to escape the sight of Bill’s manic, sleep-deprived stare. When she turned on the kitchen light, the sudden glare shocked her. The physical reality of stainless-steel sinks, water faucets, calendar on the wall, and plates and cups, restored a sense of gravity.

Janice found remnants of an old roast and cold potato salad. They ate in silence. She saw Bill’s hands tremble; the tears fell down from his face as she shoveled the food into his mouth.

He took a deep breath, washed his face at the faucet. The harsh light bounced off the yellow kitchen walls as though to bleach them both of each and every facade, to reveal each of them utterly naked to the other, all softness and illusion destroyed in a terrible finality.

Bill could not turn to face Janice. He tried, but a kind of magnetic pull prevented it. He wiped his face on a kitchen towel. When he finally spoke, the silence broke under the cruel, cold voice.

“It was because I approved the test,” Bill croaked. “It was all my fault.”

Time passed like a dark tide, scraping them, tossing them about in inchoate currents of bitter regrets and self-accusations. Janice remembered key words from the temple service, from Hoover’s crudely articulated philosophies, and they brought a kind of balm. A diffused substitute for serenity that outdid Dr. Kaplan’s Valium at any rate. Bill had nothing. He lay on the couch, eyes wide at the ceiling. From time to time, his arm jerked from nervous exhaustion.

Janice brought some scotch and water to him, but he ignored it.

In the morning, Janice dressed in a soft beige suit and a dark hat. Bill huddled in his dirty clothes on the couch.

“I can’t go,” he whispered hoarsely, breaking a night-long silence.

“No one will be there,” Janice said. “Only us. The Federicos.”

“I can’t — I can’t go—”

“Do you think it’s wise to stay home alone?”

“I won’t go and have them accuse me!”

Janice knew it was useless to argue. The cremation took place without him.

Flames roared from gas jets arranged in a semicircle around the entire wooden casket. It was so hot that the interior walls, cast iron, flaked off in large patches. Ivy, who had fled in panic from the fire, was consumed in an obliterating flame.

Only a few ounces of pebbly ash were left of the human body.

Steel instruments gathered the ashes into a brass urn. The urn was placed in a small varnished mahogany chest. A thin man with sober eyes lifted the chest into a compartment in a marble wall.

On the marble wall was a brass plate: IVY TEMPLETON— 1964–1975 No. 5693452. There was nothing else left.

Janice stood in the marbled hall. Ivy, she silently prayed, forgive us. Forgive and understand us. She prayed for the liberty of her child’s soul. Then she added a Catholic prayer that she remembered from her own youth. When she was through, a great silence filled the chamber.

She walked away on the arm of Russ Federico. Outside, the sun glinted on patches of snow on the small lawn. Running water glistened in the roads. It was Ivy’s kind of spring — a quick transition, full of clean snow, warmth, and icicles melting with musical drops into the muddy ground below. The crisp air breathed hope.

At the door of Des Artistes, Carole and Russ took their leave.

“Sure we can’t come up and sit with you?” Carole asked.

“Thank you, but Bill wants to be alone.”

Russ shook his head. “My father always said that grief is something you can’t work out on your own.”

“I know, Russ,” Janice answered, “but I think it’s better if we wait until tomorrow.”

“As you think best.”

Stepping alone onto the ninth floor was an eerie sensation. It seemed denuded, all the life sucked out of it by death. Janice plucked up her courage and stepped into the apartment. Bill had not moved from where she had left him that morning.

He moaned softly as she closed the door.

She tried to get him to eat but he refused. She brought fresh clothes from the bedroom and he slowly dressed. Throughout the day, she answered the telephone, calls from family and relatives, the parents of Ivy’s friends. A small delegation of Ernie, Dominick, Mario, and several members of the restaurant staff came to pay their respects.

Later that night, a massive bouquet of flowers arrived from the Hompa Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, with poems that expressed how the flower reincarnated the soul of the plant.

Bill began to bite his knuckles until they grew raw and bleeding. Janice slipped a crumbled Valium into his dinner but it had no effect. He paced through the apartment, restless as a caged panther, saying nothing.

Suddenly the wind blew and the pressure slammed the door of Ivy’s room.

Bill stopped, frightened, and stared up at the landing, at Ivy’s door. He put his hands over his ears as though to block out inaudible screams, the scurry of twisting, pattering feet.

At 10:30, two reporters came with questions, but Janice excused herself and closed the door. She instructed Dominick not to send up any reporters. Dominick apologized, saying they had passed themselves off as members of the family.

By 11:30, Bill fell asleep on the couch. Exhaustion showed plainly on his face. Janice worried about him. Even in his sleep his face twitched, grimaced. Janice took two Valium and slept alone. Beyond the wall was Ivy’s room, and a dark silence, as though waiting.

Five days after the cremation, Janice went to Ivy’s room and cleared away most of the clothes. These and the toys she sent to a relief agency in India. Many of the small mementos she kept: the aquarium with its fantailed Mexican shells, the picture albums, the panda bear, pages of her artwork, and the crude vase she had fashioned in a summer’s course of pottery in Central Park, things that were still alive with her creative spirit. The rest she hoped would find their use among children who also had but a brief time on the earth for happiness before the responsibilities of adulthood or poverty or death claimed them.

With the removal of each box of Ivy’s possessions, Bill sank deeper into guilt-ridden gloom, until he could no longer speak, but hung about the living room like a scarecrow, devoid of soul.

One afternoon, the young Buddhists appeared at Des Artistes but Janice asked them not to come up. Instead, she went down and they talked in the lobby. They told her that Hoover, after being acquitted, had stopped by to offer his prayers. They had a letter for her.

Janice opened a small yellow note and read the even, small handwriting that filled the page to the margins.

Dear Janice — My thoughts are with you and Bill now as they have been ever since the trial began. I pray that understanding has come, and with it the serenity to accept and bless what the divine universe has created. For destruction is but the beginning of further creation, as the falling seed is but the preparation for the growth of the milk pod. Please accept my prayers for you and for Ivy. I think I speak for Ivy in saying that the great struggle is at last over, and that her soul is now free to continue on its long, never-ending journey to perfection. Janice, may you find favor in life, and wisdom in your search for happiness, for love has spread its canopy over you and will bless you with profound peace, if you but let it.