Russell Banks - A Permanent Member of the Family

“Yeah, right,” Isabel said. “ If I return to Keene for the summer. And if I decide to hold a memorial service.”

AT THE RECEPTION back at the condominium, Isabel set the urn with George’s ashes on top of the sideboard in the dining area, then stood next to the urn as if to lend George’s authority to her words and announced in public for the first time that she had decided to stay on alone in the condo in Miami Beach for the rest of the winter. “I’ll have George’s ashes to keep me company,” she said. “But only until I take them back to Keene and scatter them from the top of Mount Marcy, which is what he always said he wanted. By then I should be able to live without him beside me any longer.”

She added that she planned to use George’s life insurance money to buy the condo they’d been renting and from now on she’d winter over here permanently. She was so uncharacteristically firm that no one in George’s extended family tried to dissuade her.

After the other mourners had departed, George’s family members, who were staying at the Lido on Belle Isle, took the opportunity to go out for Chinese food. They wanted to discuss among themselves George’s money, most of which, since he and Isabel were childless, would soon belong to Isabel. George and Isabel had worked as underpaid teachers their entire married lives and between them had built up a million-dollar TIAA-CREF retirement account. But George, his two brothers and his sister were descended from early-twentieth-century owners of mountains of Minnesota iron ore plus several subsidiary steel-dependent industries in Pittsburgh, and George’s portion of the family estate was many times the size of his half of their TIAA-CREF account. From the start George had micromanaged both his and Isabel’s modest personal finances, so there was reason for the family to fear that their sister-in-law, who as far as they knew had never paid a bill on her own or written a check for more than the weekly groceries, would not be a responsible custodian of her new wealth.

George had taught math and geometry, but Isabel had taught literature and art history, and the family viewed her as mildly eccentric, possibly artistic. Isabel’s background did not reassure them, either. Her parents had owned and operated a small motel in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. A bright only child, she had been a scholarship student at Smith when she met George, who had just taken a teaching position at nearby Deerfield Academy. They hoped that George had had the foresight to establish a trust naming one or all three of his siblings as trustees, a trust that would provide Isabel with a monthly income sufficient to cover her ongoing expenses, while preserving the rest of George’s estate for future generations of Pelhams. They wished they had discussed this eventuality with him years ago. But when it came to money, George, like his siblings, was as closemouthed as he was tightfisted, and no one had been willing to broach the subject with him.

ISABEL AND JANE, like teenagers, ate standing in front of the open refrigerator, picking with chopsticks from cartons of leftover take-out curried chicken salad and couscous. Afterward, Isabel opened a chilled New Zealand sauvignon blanc, and she and Jane went out onto the balcony, carrying their wineglasses and the bottle. They sat and drank and watched the evening sun slide across the darkening sky. The coin-sized buttery yellow disc, when it slipped behind the skyscrapers and glass and steel office towers on the far side of Biscayne Bay, swiftly turned into a large scarlet fireball.

Isabel said, “Look at how when the sun gets halfway below the horizon you can literally see it move. It’s like the way the sand in an hourglass pours faster and faster as it nears the end. I should know why that happens, but I don’t. George would’ve known why. Something to do with optics and geometry, probably.”

“Something to do with time,” Jane said and refilled her glass from the bottle on the table between them. “So, what will you do now?”

“Interesting how we use ‘so’ to signal a change of subject. Anyhow, what’ll I do now that George’s gone?”

“Yes. In your rapidly encroaching old age.”

“I’m old, Janey, but not elderly. Not yet, anyhow. George liked to solve problems before they happen. I like to solve them after they happen.”

“And now you can do that? Solve your problems after they happen?”

“Right.”

“I suppose it’s like when Frank needs some R and R he takes his gun or his fishing rods, depending on the season, and heads for camp with his male hunting and fishing buddies, and they tell lies and drink and let their beards grow and don’t bathe. When I need R and R, I go down to the monastery in Woodstock and sit zazen for a long weekend.”

“No, it’s not like that.”

“Why not?”

“Because you don’t have to choose between them. The huntin’ and fishin’ boys’ camp in the woods versus the monastery with the Buddhists. I had to choose. The Linger Longer Retirement Home for Old People in Saratoga with George versus a condo in Miami Beach with no one. One or the other. Not much of a choice.”

“And now you don’t have to choose.”

“No, now I can choose. And I’m choosing a condo in Miami Beach with no one.”

“Well, I just meant that Frank and I are different. The way you and George are… were different.”

“Right. So, Janey, to change the subject, can you stay on for a few days after everyone leaves?” Isabel asked. “I’m going to need help moving George’s things into storage, his clothes and personal stuff, things I don’t need or want. I’d just as soon keep his family out of it for now. I’d like to sort it out without them hovering over my shoulder. They’re not exactly vultures, but they keep mental and computerized inventories of just about everything. Like George did.”

Jane said, “I remember how very neat and orderly he was. But I always admired him for that. Not like Frank.”

“Right, he was not like Frank. More like you,” she said and laughed.

“In some ways, maybe. Are you okay, Isabel? You seem… I don’t know, like you’re holding back your grief. Your loss.”

“You mean, am I in what you shrinks call denial? Probably. Down the road I’m sure I’ll feel crushed by his absence. I was so used to his presence. But right now the truth is I feel liberated by it. And only a little guilty,” she said. “And he didn’t suffer. We should all be as lucky.”

ISABEL WENT TO BED EARLY — to avoid the company of George’s siblings and their spouses and mostly grown children and grandchildren, Jane figured. Despite an arduous and stressful day, Isabel hadn’t seemed in the slightest tired. The opposite, in fact.

Instead of heading back to the Lido, where they had booked a string of rooms, the family lingered another half hour at the condo with Jane. It was a very chic hotel, they kept repeating, as if slightly confused and threatened by its stylishness and worried about the cost. They would have preferred to stay over on the mainland in a Marriott or Holiday Inn, but had wanted to take rooms close to their brother’s condominium, they said, in case their sister-in-law needed their ongoing comfort and help, which evidently she did not.

When finally they left, Jane washed the glasses and shut out the lights one by one and went into the guest bedroom. She knew that Frank expected her to call tonight, because tomorrow he’d be in camp and out of cell phone range for at least a week. But she did not want to talk with him. She did not want to look at herself and Isabel through her husband’s critical eyes. Not tonight, anyhow, when her views of herself and her best friend were so indistinct and shifting. She sat on the bed in the guest room and decided to send him a text. She preferred whenever possible to send texts instead of speaking on the phone — with texts she was more in control of what she said and heard and when she said and heard it. Fewer surprises that way. Jane did not like surprises.