Non-Fiction & Personal Essays — April Issue

THE COLD AIR— Cynthia Graae

My father took a handkerchief from his pocket. He wiped his bald head and across his face, although the March cold swept through the hallway every time the front door opened downstairs.  He caught me staring, pulled me to the side, and said, “Promise me you won’t talk with anyone about what happens in the chapel.” I wanted to ask what kind of secret that meant, but no talking meant no questions.

“Look at me,” he said. “If you can’t promise, you should wait downstairs on the bench near the viewing room.”

Whatever that was I didn’t want to be near it. He was the youngest child. He needed sugar on rice, potatoes, and lettuce. He didn’t understand that the eldest must set a good example. If I chickened out, my little sisters and brother wouldn’t be allowed at funerals until maybe they were twenty and the nine-year-old would be angry—she was so jealous of my being here today. In my firmest voice, I promised not to talk.

Great-aunts, great-uncles, second cousins, cousins once-or-twice-removed, my grandmother’s neighbors, and I don’t know who all else streamed up the stairs. A skinny great-aunt grabbed my father with her blue-veined hands and launched into a long-haul conversation.

The chapel door opened. Inside, a woman at a piano played A Mighty Fortress is Our God, a church hymn that reminded me of war and the granite façade of this funeral parlor. My mother cradled my father’s arm as if it were a lost kitten. He looked at the stairs. My uncle cleared his throat and nodded. The funeral was about to happen.

“It wasn’t too late to go downstairs,” my father said. The bench would be comfortable. A sick taste rose from my throat. I said I’d be fine. It might have helped if I’d known the secret.

My parents and I followed my uncle into the chapel. Crimson velvet curtains covered the windows. In church when I was bored with god-talk, I looked out the windows.

We walked past folding chairs filled with relatives, friends, and the I-don’t-know whos, mostly as stiff and gray as gravestones. A man with a wiggly mustache whispered to my father, I’m sorry. A great-aunt patted his shoulder. A neighbor with white, scarecrow hair, who’d known him since he was born, threw her arms around him. He looked straight ahead.

In the front row, he removed three Reserved signs with a flourish, as if reminding me to be ladylike. Last summer I went to a camp for Maine girls. My grandmother said I’d learn to be reserved, learn to, quote, put brakes on my constantly running mouth. Once she said, “Go catch it and make it stop.” I pictured myself grabbing a reserved sign and shouting to the stony audience, I’m not a library book. She would think that was a good pun. But I remembered this was her funeral with a terrible secret.

My father joined his brother at the side of the room. My mother asked if I wanted to get in line or sit quietly. Sitting quietly was not my best skill. I followed her to the end of the line, near the curtains. I couldn’t see my father. People blocked my view.

When would the funeral start? Were we lined up to see the secret?

“Stop that”, my mother whispered.

“What?”

I’d been holding my breath, she said.

I lifted a curtain.

“Don’t”, she snapped.

The line moved. Eventually I saw the flowers. They were taller than me. The usual funeral flowers, my mother said they were called gladiolas.

“Why not sadiolas?”, I could have had fun with that one. But it was my mother’s job to give my father’s family a good impression of me, and I didn’t want to embarrass her. Those gladiolas looked expensive. Yesterday my father said spending money on funerals was wasteful. When his time came, he wanted us to remember that a fancy funeral wouldn’t do him any good. I didn’t mention that a plain one wouldn’t either. Was the secret that the family spent too much money on this funeral?

The line moved forward. There was a coffin. With my grandmother in it. I wondered why no one had warned me. And why was she in her Sunday best dress, pastel blue like mine? Wasn’t she sad to die? Shouldn’t she wear black? A woman next to the coffin touched my grandmother’s hands and whispered, Peaceful. Another whispered, Yes, so lifelike, and touched my grandmother’s face.

The line moved forward.

That was not my grandmother. It was a body with a face as smooth and waxy as skin on a hard-boiled egg. If that was the secret, they should have shut the coffin lid. There should have been a law against putting empty bodies on exhibition like stuffed reptiles at the Museum of Natural History. I hoped I didn’t have to touch it.

“Stop staring”, my mother said. The music ended. The chapel door creaked shut. Near it, the carpet was threadbare. Did people stampede out of funerals the way I wanted to? I fought down the sick taste and rushed to my seat.

The man at the lectern looked ordinary, not like a minister. He said, “Let us pray.” I didn’t close my eyes. My great-uncle winked at me. Was that allowed? I winked back. He winked again. The man at the lectern said Amen. If the secret happened during the prayer, I missed it.

A room full of people with granite faces stood to sing Rock of Ages. I wondered if my grandmother would get the joke. We sat for a Bible reading about the ultimate reward for a godly life and stood again for the Lord’s Prayer, the debtors and trespassers competing loudly against each other. Then the lectern man praised my grandmother’s goodness. He obviously hadn’t been confined day and night to a cot in her parlor for two weeks of no getting out of bed, morning and afternoon naps without books, and only brown and white food. I was. Last summer I got strep throat at camp. My fever was so high I couldn’t travel back to New York, and although she wasn’t well herself she had to take care of me. After that ordeal ended, she wrote to my parents about how whiny and difficult I was. Now she couldn’t take that mean letter back. The lectern man said that during the Great Depression my grandmother made soup for the hungry men who knocked at the back door. I knew for a fact she called them tramps. He told us she was going to heaven. Eyes followed his hand upward. Not mine. I can positively say the air above the coffin didn’t move, which proved heaven didn’t exist.

Unless the secret was that my grandmother wasn’t going there.

Soon came a prayer long enough for a good look around. Now almost everyone had handkerchiefs, some resting like wrinkled church programs on their laps, some clutched like bouquets of white violets, and others looking as if people were about to use them. Maybe for a farewell, I hoped. I’d seen a photograph of a steamship about to sail for Europe. The handkerchiefs that people on the pier waved looked like a flock of white doves. It would be beautiful to say goodbye to my grandmother that way.

Deep down I knew that wouldn’t happen at this funeral, but maybe, I hoped, the next time we left my other grandmother, instead of crying, we could flutter handkerchiefs.

My mother’s eyes warned me to stop fidgeting. If I looked straight ahead, how could I discover the secret? My father whispered the funeral is winding down.

The lectern man recited the Lord bless you and keep you benediction that ministers give in church. The woman at the piano played Morning Has Broken, as if this were Easter, which was almost two weeks away.

Handkerchiefs disappeared. People shook hands and walked into the hallway. I was surrounded by Remember-When stories—about my grandmother’s sister carrying a bucket of soapy water onto the train to Boston to wash the windows near her seat, about that sister rolling in the snow because, she claimed It is good for a body to do, about my grandfather combing his hair in a mirror when my grandmother tricked him into believing that a woman he claimed he never wanted to see again was in the parlor, about my grandfather hacking into a cousin’s radio, announcing—as if he were the local broadcaster—that the entire town was invited to her place for a picnic. The stories were endless. One great aunt’s amusement turned into a coughing fit. An uncle seemed to struggle not to fold himself in half. Many people laughed so hard that tears dripped from their eyes. It was almost as much fun as a family reunion. But then I remembered. My grandmother would never go to reunions again. Her body was nearby. Why couldn’t adults be respectful?

I went into the chapel for another look. This time I’d be brave enough to say goodbye. A man stacked folding chairs against the wall. The coffin was closed. There was no funeral left. For a moment I wished she’d been a grandmother who hugged.

I returned to the hallway, where my father waited. We walked in silence down the stairs, through the massive funeral parlor doors, and into Portland’s gray March air. He didn’t tell me his secret. I would have to bear mine alone: I didn’t feel sad, even though I was from New York, I was just like the rest of them.

Years later, the cousin whose outgrown dresses I’d worn and I were telling family stories. I found myself blurting out the long-ago promise I was holding in, a promise I hadn’t told anyone, a promise that still puzzled me.

My cousin knew the backstory. “You were an emotional child”, she said, “Not like the kids I knew in Maine. Your father worried you’d tell your New York friends you’d seen him cry.”

“Cry? My father never cried.”

She told me that he cried at the funeral. In fact, both brothers did. And that my mother had claimed that I spent so much time looking around that I wouldn’t even notice.

If only it had been possible for my grandmother to wave goodbye the way the passengers in that photograph bid farewell to New York, I might have understood that the New England version of a New York family weeping together on the living room sofa felt like love. 

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