Stephen Dixon - Frog

Olivia’s in the city to give a paper. Her husband and two children come with her to see some sights, go to a few art museums and a recital and play. On the last day of the conference she says “I’m going to skip the rest of it. How many seminars can you go to? I’ve learned all I’m about to learn before what I’ve learned starts depercolating. And I’ve made enough new contacts and seen more than enough old colleagues and friends, and I need to relax and enjoy myself a little before we head home. This might seem an odd way of doing that, but I’d like to drive out to the cemetery to pay respects to my folks and Grandma and Uncle Jerry, as I haven’t been there for years.” She doesn’t know exactly where it is or even the name of it. “It’s in Suffolk County, I know that. I remember we’d drive through Nassau County on the expressway and then see an entering-Suffolk-County sign. Or maybe it’s the other way around, but we’ll know which counties we’re leaving and entering when we see that sign. And that the cemetery’s about ten exits past that sign and called something like Brookside or Breitenbrush or Baron Birch or Beth something — but I’m sure it starts with a B. If we drive out on the Long Island Expressway — the road you get from the Midtown Tunnel, or off Vandam Street, I think it is, after you cross the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge — Tm sure I’ll recognize the exit sign for the road or route number to the cemetery in whatever county it is that had that you-are-entering sign, or it could even have been a you-are-leaving. One thing I remember distinctly is that there was a service road alongside the expressway going east just before the turnoff and then a couple of sod farms along the two-lane road to the cemetery and a number of cemeteries down that road, though I’m sure the farms are gone now. Anyway,” she says to the children, “you’ll see some of Long Island for the first time, and of course where your closest relatives on my side are buried, if we get there. And we can stop for lunch at a fish place on the Island and maybe even go to the ocean later. I don’t think you’ve seen the Atlantic, except from a plane, have you?” They start out, half an hour later pass the entering-Suffolk-County sign — she says it looks like the same one from years ago and seems to be in the exact same place — but for the next fifteen exits, no service road or familiar landmark or road name or route number on an exit sign that she’d follow to the cemetery. “Is it possible they’ve done away with the service road? It was about a mile long. I remember there was a famous-make — I can’t think of the name now — cosmetics corporate headquarters on it, or maybe only the plant, but that seems to be gone from around here too. I thought the route to the cemetery would all come back. That I’d just go from A to B to C, once we left the city, but there’s nothing left out here to bring it back, or else I’ve completely forgotten everything but the entering sign in ten years, or however long it’s been. I should just look it up.” They stop for lunch at a diner off the expressway, she looks in the phone directory under Cemeteries but doesn’t recognize any name, and after several calls to different places she locates Eva. Eva can’t remember the name of the cemetery or what exit it’s off of or the town it’s in or even if the name begins with a B. “To tell you the truth, I think D. David something. Or Dav, Duv, Darien — no, that’s a town in Connecticut. One of Uncle Jerry’s children might know. If only the other uncle and aunt hadn’t died so young. There’d be a bigger pool of cousins to draw information like that from. But I’m terrible. Most times I can’t even remember either of our grandfathers’ names.” Olivia calls one of Uncle Jerry’s children and he doesn’t know the name or where the cemetery is, except for it being on Long Island and somewhere off an expressway—“I remember you went right for a long ways once you left the off-ramp of the expressway”—and says he’s ashamed to admit that he hasn’t been out to it since his mother died. “I doubt my sisters would know either. They’re even less interested.” “Who keeps it up, if it is kept up?” and he says “Our grandfather bought the plot long ago for practically nothing, I remember my dad saying. Then he sold off a few parcels of it, it was so big, making back twice what he put out for the entire thing, and paid the cemetery enough money to keep the plot mowed and clean for about seventy-five years. Dad told me I’d only be called — or one of us, meaning you and Eva too — if one of the monuments fell over or the plot was vandalized in some way or the town wanted to move the graves to some other place in the cemetery to make room for more town road or something. Maybe one of those things already happened and the cemetery has changed hands and the new owners don’t bother with that kind of notification anymore. Or the old owners don’t or they tried to reach us but we’ve all moved around so much that they’re now waiting for us to notify them where we are. But with vandals and such is the only time we’d have to pay something, till after the seventy-five years when we’re supposed to take over the maintenance costs. But by then, which of us will care, right? We’ll all probably be buried elsewhere — I know I’m going to, and not just because there’ll probably be no room at the family gravesite — so I’m sure our kids won’t be interested in it either.” “As for caring about it,” she says, “I suppose that depends when those seventy-five years are coming up. And as for my kids’ interest, maybe that’s one of the things I’m trying to stimulate today by coming out here with them, though I think I just thought of that. But you sort of hope, no matter where you’ll be buried or they’ll be living, that they and even their children take care of this site so it doesn’t become a little forest, don’t you? Because some places in very old cemeteries, and I’m talking mostly about European ones now, just look so sad and ugly.” “I’ve seen them on my trips there but never felt anything bad about it. They even looked kind of interesting, all packed in very tight and overgrown. Listen, if that’s the outcome, because of whatever it is, historical or indifference, you face it.” She goes back to the table. “Maybe we passed the cemetery exit, she says. “Anyone mind if we drive back to that entering-Suffolk sign and then come back this way again till we reach, say, the turnoff to the Fire Island state park? Deal is, if we don’t see any roads to the cemetery, we’ll go right to the ocean.” She asks her husband to drive this time so she can watch the exit signs and service roads more carefully and anything else that might help them get to the cemetery. They drive back, turn around, about five miles past the Suffolk sign she sees a little sign on a road off the expressway that says “Wellingham National Cemetery” and has an arrow on it. “That could be it,” she says. “Not the national cemetery but the road with maybe a few other cemeteries on it, including ours.” They exit, drive along that road—“No service road near it, sod farms on it, but it could still be the right road — just widened threefold because of the increased traffic on it or just crooked politics well say”—and see a cemetery. “It doesn’t look familiar, nor start with a B. But it’s the right religion, not a national cemetery, and on the same side of the road ours was and the approximate distance I figured the road to it would be from the expressway exit and the expressway would be from the Suffolk County sign.” They drive in, her husband goes into the office, comes out shaking his head. “Nothing even close to a Tetch here,” he says. “But there are two more nonnational cemeteries on this road, and three or four exits farther on the expressway is a Meldana Boulevard with about five cemeteries on it and two that start with a B, one of which is called Beth-El. Does it sound familiar — cemetery or boulevard?” “The Beth part of it does, but let’s try the two on this road first.” Both are the wrong religion. They go to Meldana Boulevard, pass the first cemetery—“Starts with a B, all right, but the wrong religion, so why even bother with it?” The second cemetery’s an annex to the national one before. The third cemetery’s on the other side of the road than the one she remembers was on. “Let’s check it anyway. Right religion, no B, but my memory could be wrong on that account and also which side of the road it was on. And they could have changed where the main gate was, making the back part of the cemetery the front part now, simply to make it easier entering or they wanted it off a much wider and even grander road like this one.” They drive in, no Tetches here, though there is a Titch, the office worker says. He looks up the name in a book: Randolph and Evelyn, parents; Carolyn and baby Arthur, children. They drive past the next cemetery to Beth-El. “I’m almost positive this is it. Right side of the road, religion, the Beth — even the ‘El’ is coming back to me now, I don’t know why — and the main gate looks familiar and it’s not that farther away from the Suffolk sign than where I thought the cemetery would be. Let me see if I can find the plot on my own. I’d prefer that, just coming on it, and even just to see how good my once-great memory still is, rather than going to the office and given directions to road L, lane six, row double-A, plot 117, and so on.” She directs her husband to where she thinks the plot is. They get out. No Tetch tombstones or benches there. “I think it’s over there, actually,” pointing to a place several rows away. “To the left of that tall pointy stone…. The breeze,” as they’re walking to the plot, “is just about what I remember it was like from the times I used to come here with my mother and Eva and a couple of times with my first husband. He didn’t want to but knew how important it was to me for him to come. Also how shaky I’d be driving back alone. It must be the flatness of the place and the openness that creates it, this breeze all the time. Really, almost everything looks the same, but with a lot more graves around — all that over there was just empty grass. And that grove of trees along the boulevard there was a lot shorter.” They reach where she thinks the plot is. No Tetch there. “Let’s go to the office,” her husband says. “Even if the gravesite’s somewhere around here, we can look and look like this for hours and I don’t think we’d ever find it.” “I have to go to the ladies’ room anyway,” she says, “and I’m sure the kids do too.” She doesn’t recognize the office but doesn’t think she was ever in it. The office worker looks up the name Tetch in a book and says it isn’t there. “Titch, Tutch, any name like that?” Olivia says. “What I’m suggesting is that in the last few years or so — if this book was entirely reorganized, for instance, which I think it would have had to have been, at least worked on a little — there might have been a typographical mistake.” The woman looks. “No name even near it. ‘Tisch,’ in fact, is as close as it gets.” “Could you give me their first names please?” The woman later tells them that seven exits farther on the expressway, “almost to where the island forks, or perhaps a bit after it, is Cranberry Road. Just count off the expressway exits from the Meldana entrance. I don’t know the exact expressway exit number, but at seven get off, go right on the overpass and then straight for half a mile or a mile — I wish I could remember what route number it is — and you’ll hit Cranberry. If you get lost, ask around for Cemetery Road. That’s what it’s more commonly called, though not officially on the maps, it has so many cemeteries on it. Eight, maybe nine. After that, the cemeteries are mostly isolated. An eighteenth-century cemetery here, an old slave cemetery there, one for Chinese fieldhands someplace from a long time ago, one even just for artists, and lots of modern ones of every religion and denomination, but all by themselves.” “Tell me, is there a directory for all the cemeteries on the island of the people buried in them?” Olivia says. “No such thing.” “For the county then or a directory only by religion?” “Nothing like that.” “Cranberry Road doesn’t sound familiar,” Olivia says in the car. “But let’s try it. If it is near where the island forks, then we’ll be fairly close to Fire Island State Park, I think, or even the Hamptons. Or Montauk, which can’t be an hour’s drive from that exit. If you’re going to see the Atlantic for the first time, that’s the place to see it from. Giant cliffs, hidden inlets, all very dramatic and, if they haven’t done their best to ruin it, quite beautiful. Heck, I could even be tempted to stay over. Off-season rates now, so it shouldn’t set us back too much. Even if it does, what do we care? — we’re sort of vacationing.” “Stay over how?” her husband says. “Our luggage is in the hotel. We’ve paid dear for that suite.” “So we’ll buy a few toothbrushes and clothes. Things we’ve needed and can use after today. And if we don’t, it’ll be like camping in. But it’s one night I’m talking about, and it’s just lousy money.” “Listen, Cranberry Road can’t be the one your cemetery is on. It’s got to be a good twenty to thirty miles past where you thought it was. It’s impossible, it’s unrealistic, it’s lots of things.” “OK, no Montauk overnight. But what more do we have to lose — half an hour at the most — by driving down Cranberry Road? If no cemetery looks right — we don’t even have to get out of the car — I’ll quit.” They get on the expressway, count off the exits, follow the woman’s directions, can’t find Cranberry Road. They stop at a service station. “I never heard of it,” the attendant says. “And you live in the area, or know for sure there’s no Cranberry Road nearby?” her husband says. “I’ve been here almost all my life.” “Cemetery Road’s what it’s also known as, we were told,” Olivia says. “I never heard of that one either. There’s a cemetery on Deepdell and another on Indian Fort and that’s it for miles around here, except for some backyard family grounds and under-the-tree things and a pet cemetery that costs more, I heard, than for a person.” “I give up then,” she says to her husband. “This never would have happened, you realize, if my grandfather hadn’t been such a perfectionist in seeing to the maintenance costs so long beforehand. We should appreciate what he did, I guess — saving us the time and expense — but what did he think, that my father and Uncle Jerry wouldn’t have taken care of it? And his two other children, if he did all this before they died? From what I know, all of them were every bit as conscientious and meticulous about things as he, but maybe not as wily with the buck. Maybe that’s it. It was too good a financial arrangement to pass up then. Or the maintenance contract also covered the plots he apparently sold off because his own was so large, giving them even added value, but I’m being unfair to the man. I’ll find the cemetery though. Not today, of course. Information about it should be among my mother’s papers, though I don’t even know where most of those are now. Or my cousins might turn up something, or Eva, but I doubt it. She’s always made sure I kept the important documents — that she’d lose them. But something has to be around somewhere — on the burial certificates for my parents, if there are such things. There have to be and officially recorded; you can’t just put a body into the ground. Or the rabbis for their funerals, if they’re still alive and I can remember their names or where we got them from. Dad’s I’ll never remember. Too far back. Mother’s I got from a friend of mine — Liselotte — who married her, so shell know or have it on her marriage license. Or Uncle Jerry’s kids could give me the names of the minister and rabbi who did the services for their parents’ funerals. Then I’ll fly back alone — make a special trip for it and rent a car at the airport and drive straight out here and leave stones, enough for all of us since we’ve all in a way been out to see them, and on all their graves, aunts and uncles also. I think I owe them that. I don’t owe them anything — I simply want to do it. I also want to see how the plot’s been kept up after so long. And if it’s deteriorating in any way or not kept up in the way I think it should be, to give the cemetery additional money to maintain it better.” They drive to the ocean, park, take off their shoes, roll up their pants and hike up their skirts and wade in the water and sit in the sand. Then it gets too cold for them and they return to the car and drive back to the city. As they’re approaching the Midtown Tunnel Olivia shouts “Mount Zion — it just came to me; but the next time.”