Jonathan Dee - The Privileges

In May, just a week before the end of the school year, Ruth’s husband Warren died. He’d had a lung removed two weeks earlier but never made it home from the hospital. Even though his cancer had been diagnosed two years ago, Cynthia was almost as surprised as if the news had come out of nowhere; her mother’s peerless flair for pessimism had her convinced, right up until the final hysterical phone call, that Ruth was probably making too big a deal out of it.

The four of them flew to Pittsburgh the next morning. Adam asked Cynthia if she planned to stay on for a few days after the funeral to “help out” and Cynthia said she didn’t know, it hadn’t occurred to her. Indeed there was a whole barrage of quotidian death-consequences that somehow had never occurred to her. Ruth came to the door to greet them in what for her might have passed as high spirits; she exclaimed, as well she might have, over the changes in her tall and comely grandchildren, who had not seen her in years and who were not entirely sure how to act but instinctively determined to err on the side of restraint. “It’ll be so nice for you to see your cousins,” Ruth said to them, and at the word “cousins” Cynthia saw them indiscreetly catch each other’s startled eyes.

The funeral was still three days away. Ruth kept stressing how much she would require Cynthia’s help with various decisions but then it would turn out that she had already made those decisions anyway, some of them so far in advance as to border on the ghoulish. Cynthia had little advice to offer in any case. She had no experience with funerals but beyond that she could bring only a generic approach to the question of how Warren’s life ought to be celebrated. He was a sort of machine of dependability. He was also a former managing partner at Reed Smith and a surprising amount of ceremony was dictated by that, which was helpful if also a little perverse, as if the law firm were a branch of the armed services with attendant arcane, unquestioned rituals. Ruth wanted a closed casket because toward the end he’d looked too little like himself. They could put a lot of makeup on him but they couldn’t put the weight back on. She went instead for a large framed photo to be placed on top of the casket itself, a formal portrait commissioned when he’d been made managing partner: round-faced, smiling appropriately, projecting, with his glasses and his silver hair, a kind of well-fed competence.

The house was too small for all of them to sleep in; they spent the day there, battling their own restlessness as an assortment of Tupperware-bearing geriatric strangers consoled them on their loss, and then at night they escaped to the Hilton downtown, where they splurged on every silly, expensive amenity as a way of getting the hours of toxic solemnity out of their systems. The tips Adam doled out had the bell staff literally fighting for his attention. He’d never really liked Ruth: he didn’t do well with negative people. This time was different, obviously, and he was more than willing to make allowances; still, he wasn’t sure how to take it whenever she acted as if she and Adam were as close as mother and son, not just when others were around but even in the rare minutes when the two of them were alone together. She didn’t seem to be performing, either, as she often did. When he smiled and stood aside in her kitchen doorway just to let her pass, she put her forehead on his shoulder and closed her eyes, and Adam felt as he might have if a woman in a strange city had mistaken him for someone else.

He wasn’t sure what to tell the kids to do in that house of mourning, so he settled for telling them what not to do: no texting from inside Grandma’s house, no earphones in their ears for any reason. Save it all for the hotel. He and Cynthia took them to the church where they were married and the four of them even had dinner in the Athletic Club dining room, which was the site of their reception; Jonas and April were indulgent about it at best. Nor were they especially diverted by the introduction of their “cousins,” a term that turned out to refer to the twin sons of Cynthia’s stepsister, Deborah. The two women hadn’t had occasion to speak to each other in years; April heard her mother cooing about some recent Christmas-card photo of the twins but it was not any Christmas card that she and Jonas had ever seen. The boys were five years old and, April couldn’t stop herself from thinking, really unfortunate-looking. Virtually the only way to get them to stop talking was to feed them something. Somehow they’d gotten to know their grandpa Warren much better than she and Jonas ever had, and they turned cutely somber when discussing the loss of him.

Deborah was much altered. She was fat, for starters, with no vestiges of the goth edge, faint to begin with, she had cultivated as a grad student, to say nothing of her one night at Bellevue; she taught twentieth-century art history at Boston University, as did her husband, who was a good deal older than her and had been, Cynthia was amused to learn, the chair of the search committee that hired her. When Deborah cried at the funeral, not at all showily, Cynthia found herself struggling not to stare at her, without quite knowing why. She had written a eulogy for her father but had arranged for her husband to read it for her, as she doubted her ability to get through it. And when the last mourner had gone through the receiving line in the room at the back of the church after the service, Cynthia and Deborah hugged.

But that feeling of kinship was short-lived. After the last guest left Ruth’s house that evening, Cynthia heard two more voices out on the deck, and when she went out to investigate she found Deborah and Jonas leaning against the railing, deep in conversation. She tried to conceal her surprise, but could not, and when they both noticed her standing there in the doorway, they laughed. “We’re arguing about Andy Warhol,” Deborah said. “Pittsburgh’s own. I feel like I’m defending my thesis again.” Unless Andy Warhol played the fucking banjo, Cynthia thought, she would not have guessed that Jonas knew or cared who he was; but before she could say anything else, Jonas said, “Mom, what time is our flight tomorrow?”

“I’m actually not leaving tomorrow after all,” Cynthia said. “Your flight is at something like three-thirty.”

Jonas pumped his fist, and Deborah said, “Well, would you mind then if I took Jonas out to the Warhol Museum? One of the curators there is an old classmate of mine. It’s a pretty great museum, actually. Maybe you want to come too.”

She did not miss the look that crossed her son’s face when Deborah made that last suggestion. “No,” she said, “I’m sure it’s a real life-changer and all that, but there’s things to take care of around here. You go. Knock yourselves out. Just be back at the hotel by, I don’t know, one.” Smiling as tightly as her mother might have, she stepped back inside the house and slid the door shut. Back in the kitchen there were a thousand dishes to wash, and she briefly entertained the pros and cons of just throwing them all in the garbage. It’s not like there’d ever be a crowd this size here again. Andy Warhol, she thought suddenly. It’s one thing to fall for that bullshit as a high-school student, but imagine devoting your whole life to it.

Adam and the kids flew home the next day, and so, as it turned out, did Deborah’s family; but Deborah stuck around. Cynthia supposed she should be happy that the burden of the next few days — all those hours maintaining one’s patience on the phone with the insurance company or the idiots at Social Security — wasn’t all going to fall on her, only child or not. Still, it was a little confounding to see how close Deborah and Ruth seemed to have become over the past few years, outside of Cynthia’s awareness. At some point, she thought, Deborah must have really bought into that whole extended-family thing, because she certainly hadn’t been buying into it when they first met each other, more than fifteen years ago now.