Russell Banks - A Permanent Member of the Family

Jane said sure, she had never been in a crematorium before. She felt rushed by Isabel, pushed into doing something she’d prefer to avoid, but decided to let it go. Isabel was probably experiencing a wave of grief-induced mania. A way of not succumbing to grief itself. Sometimes that happened after the death of a spouse.

They entered a darkened, windowless hallway. There was a plastic folding lawn chair by the door at the far end, and on the chair a small cardboard carton with a yellow Post-it note stuck to it. On the note someone had written Isabel Pelham in red Magic Marker ink.

“I’m reasonably certain that the ashes inside that box are George’s, not mine,” Isabel said.

“God, I can’t tell if you’re being morbid or funny.”

“Both.”

“Let’s go. This whole thing is freaking me out a little,” Jane said and turned to leave.

“Wait. Check that out.” Beyond the door was a larger room, a showroom of some kind, lit by flickering fluorescent ceiling lights. On a high four-wheeled cart in the middle of the otherwise empty room was a white casket with its lid up. The interior of the casket was lined in rolled and pleated white patent leather. Except for what appeared to be a bowling ball inside an aqua ball bag, the casket was empty. A vacuum cleaner tank and a length of coiled vacuum hose and extension tubes lay on the tile floor beside the cart.

“Check that out. Don’t you just love Miami?” Isabel whispered. She pulled her iPhone from her purse and snapped four quick photos of the scene. “It’s so fucking surreal here. Everywhere you look. I’m thinking of buying a real camera and taking pictures of everything. Might be a whole new career.” They could hear the muffled voice of a man speaking Spanish in the Comfort Room farther down the hall.

“That would be Digger O’Dell, the Friendly Undertaker. Comforting some poor widow in the Comfort Room with his hand on her knee. Or maybe they’re in the crematorium. I wonder where that is. Probably the basement.”

She made a move to enter the showroom, but Jane grabbed her sleeve and stopped her. Jane said, “Jesus, Isabel, let’s go now. You’ve got what we came for.”

Isabel lifted the small cardboard box from the chair and opened it. Inside was a polished mahogany container the approximate size and shape of an old-fashioned milk bottle. “Like it?”

“The urn? Yes, it’s… tasteful.”

Isabel held the container by the neck and examined it slowly. “Hard to imagine all of George coming down to just this. Ashes to ashes, I suppose. He was such a big man, over two hundred pounds. Reduced to a pint or so of ashes. ‘Cremains.’ Want to take a look?” she said and started to unscrew the black plastic top.

“Jesus, no! Not here. C’mon, Isabel, let’s just go now!” Jane said and walked quickly down the hallway to the door, opened it and stepped into the blinding sunlight.

LIKE A REALTOR TRYING to sell her the apartment, Isabel took Jane on what she called The Tour, first the condo and then the public areas of the building, and Jane learned that her newly widowed friend was planning to live alone in Miami Beach in the high-rise condominium on Sunset Harbour Drive with spectacular views of Biscayne Bay and the downtown Miami skyline across the bay. There was a pool in the building and a health club. An attractive marble-floored lobby with an attendant on duty day and night and twenty-four-hour camera surveillance. Isabel demonstrated how from her glass-walled aerie she could watch the glittering cruise ships glide silently out to sea. She could look down from the terrace and observe the seagulls and pelicans from above. She could spy with binoculars on lovers and smugglers and partygoers in their yachts moored at the yacht club adjacent to her building. Which was how she spoke of it, Jane noticed, as her building. Previously in their weekly phone conversations she had called it our building.

There was something weird going on with Isabel, Jane thought. She was not prepared for her friend’s sprightliness or her suddenly fortified willfulness and new enthusiasms. This was not the Isabel she had known for more than half a lifetime, the woman she had come here to console.

Isabel said, “I love that there are so many blacks in the building and that most people in the city speak Spanish. I never realized how sick I was of being surrounded by people who look and sound just like me. I’m going to learn Spanish,” she said. “You hear a lot of Haitian Creole, too. I’m becoming a permanent legal resident of Florida,” she added. “I’d rather vote here where my vote counts, rather than in New York where I’m just another liberal Democrat. I made an appointment this morning online to get my Florida driver’s license.”

“Will you live here year-round?”

“I’ll probably use the Keene house in the summer months. At least for now.”

“I thought you and George planned on eventually moving into that Christian retirement community, the one down in Saratoga Springs. What’s it called, Harmony Hills?” They were Episcopalians, the Pelhams, not really churchy, but believers. And do-gooders, as Frank called them. At least George was. For years he had spent his summer vacations building houses for Habitat for Humanity. Isabel was sort of a New Age Christian, Jane thought. Isabel and George were more conventionally religious than Jane, who described herself as a Buddhist, and her husband, Frank, who’d been raised Catholic but pointedly claimed to be an agnostic, as if it were a religion.

Isabel said, “God, no. That place was always George’s idea. Not mine. He turned seventy-three last June and planned to check into Harmony Hills before he turned seventy-five. While he could still enjoy it, he used to say.”

Jane knew all this, but had never done the math. “Wow. If he’d lived, you’d only be, what, sixty-four? Awfully young to be living in an old-age home, Isabel.”

“No kidding. We had a crisis coming down the road like a sixteen-wheeler. It’s not really an old-age home, though. It’s called an ‘adult community,’ with an assisted-living facility and a nursing home attached, so as your body and mind deteriorate you get shuttled from one stage to the next without having to leave the premises until you’re dead. So, yeah. Close call.”

THE FUNERAL SERVICE was held at All Souls Episcopal Church with a small group in attendance. The urn holding George’s ashes was placed on a pedestal in the nave with George’s Yale class of 1962 yearbook photograph beside it. George’s tennis coach was present, along with the rental agent for their condo and six or eight acquaintances from the building, retired northerners, couples they had intended to get to know better but hadn’t quite got around to yet. Otherwise the congregation was made up of George’s three siblings and a sprinkling of their spouses, children and grandchildren. And Jane, of course, who sat in the front pew next to Isabel throughout the brief service, after having declined the priest’s invitation to say a few words about George, share a few memories, tell a personal anecdote about George’s lifelong love of the Adirondack Mountains, which the priest mistakenly called the Appalachian Mountains. Jane was slightly phobic about public speaking. One of George’s younger brothers spoke of George’s love of the Adirondacks, and one of his nephews reminded the gathering of George’s willingness to write recommendation letters to Groton, his alma mater, whenever a male Pelham applied for admission.

Except for Jane, there were no representatives from the High Peaks Country Day School or the town of Keene. Which made sense, Jane said to Isabel when she groused about the absence of mourners from the north. It was an expensive full day’s travel each way, and most people up there no doubt assumed that there would be a memorial service in Keene in June or July, after school let out and the summer people who knew George personally had come back from their winter homes and Isabel had returned from her own sojourn here in Miami Beach.