the Little Children,” not taking no for an answer.
Putting love away , Emily Dickinson writes in her poem about death, and as I stare at Cleo’s coffin I figure my love has been put away in that small box. We shall not want to use again/Until eternity . Sealed up tight with decorative latches, it is a box one strong man could surely hoist onto his shoulder. While Greg sniffs and wipes and fidgets with his father’s pocket watch, I turn to look at him and suddenly think, There’s no leftover love, nothing to be warmed up and served to you. And fleetingly I feel sorry for him. Peering out through the fogged-up window of my own grief, I see that Greg has lost his child too. And then, just as quickly, he becomes a blur.
The Reverend Alex Takamura reads the second lesson in a thespian voice and then Chuck, in Greg’s pulpit, begins his homily. The words buzz around. I see his mouth moving and I hear sounds, but it all seems to come out like a badly dubbed movie. What does he have to say about Cleo? Is he saying anything about her? Maybe it is a prayer he is saying, or a Scripture verse. I try to listen closely but keep being drawn back to the coffin. A box. That she should be lying in there seems all wrong, and suddenly I recall the ghoulish story Beauty told me of the albino girl with the crooked back whose family had once lived on my grandmother’s land. The land that had swallowed the native girl, still alive in her box, because the white doctor had pronounced her dead. You can still hear her scratching some nights, especially during a full moon, Beauty told me. I sit and stare, waiting for the box to wobble slightly, straining beyond the blah-blah-blah to listen for the sound of nails against wood.
Chuck and Alex beckon to Greg, who joins them at the coffin. Laying his hands on it, Alex says, “In infinite wisdom and love, our Lord has received the innocent spirit of Cleo. We therefore tenderly commit her body to its resting place in the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection unto eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Amens recited, benedictions pronounced, Greg and I now stand like store-window mannequins while a long line of people take their places to bestow on us their tidy condolences. Teary faces, pulled long like Edvard Munch paintings, crowd in on mine. Cleo’s preschool teachers, the bedraggled clump of widows, the parishioners, the Rotary Club board members, the neighbors I all recognize, but others just come and go without names. And suddenly here is the unexpected guest. Sal takes my hand and kisses the back of it so tenderly I feel like I have splintered into a thousand shards of light.
“ELIZABETH DEIGHTON, meet Salvatore Mariotti,” said Buella on my first day at the magazine, “art director and resident Italian stud.” When he stood up from his chair and came around to the front of his desk to shake my hand, it was as though he had stepped off the page of a Barbara Cartland paperback.
“Watch out for Buella.” He laughed, taking his spectacles off and hooking them into his dark, curly hair. “She is fond of building reputations that are impossible to live up to.”
“But you do your best, don’t you, darling?” she retorted. “This one is spoken for, by a man of the cloth no less, so try not to incur the wrath of the Almighty, won’t you?” she said, spiriting me away before he could say another word. “Charming but harmless,” she said of him as we wandered to the next office. “He’s still pining for his ex. A nasty piece of work, rumor has it, who dumped him for a wealthy divorce lawyer. You fill in the rest of the blanks—it’s all too cliché for me.”
“It’s not cliché, it’s sad,” I said.
“It’s sad because it’s cliché, silly girl.”
After that, every morning on his way to the coffeepot, Sal wouldpause in my doorway to give a smart bow as if he had just concluded conducting an aria. Sal in faded jeans and a shirt that always
Putting love away , Emily Dickinson writes in her poem about death, and as I stare at Cleo’s coffin I figure my love has been put away in that small box. We shall not want to use again/Until eternity . Sealed up tight with decorative latches, it is a box one strong man could surely hoist onto his shoulder. While Greg sniffs and wipes and fidgets with his father’s pocket watch, I turn to look at him and suddenly think, There’s no leftover love, nothing to be warmed up and served to you. And fleetingly I feel sorry for him. Peering out through the fogged-up window of my own grief, I see that Greg has lost his child too. And then, just as quickly, he becomes a blur.
The Reverend Alex Takamura reads the second lesson in a thespian voice and then Chuck, in Greg’s pulpit, begins his homily. The words buzz around. I see his mouth moving and I hear sounds, but it all seems to come out like a badly dubbed movie. What does he have to say about Cleo? Is he saying anything about her? Maybe it is a prayer he is saying, or a Scripture verse. I try to listen closely but keep being drawn back to the coffin. A box. That she should be lying in there seems all wrong, and suddenly I recall the ghoulish story Beauty told me of the albino girl with the crooked back whose family had once lived on my grandmother’s land. The land that had swallowed the native girl, still alive in her box, because the white doctor had pronounced her dead. You can still hear her scratching some nights, especially during a full moon, Beauty told me. I sit and stare, waiting for the box to wobble slightly, straining beyond the blah-blah-blah to listen for the sound of nails against wood.
Chuck and Alex beckon to Greg, who joins them at the coffin. Laying his hands on it, Alex says, “In infinite wisdom and love, our Lord has received the innocent spirit of Cleo. We therefore tenderly commit her body to its resting place in the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection unto eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Amens recited, benedictions pronounced, Greg and I now stand like store-window mannequins while a long line of people take their places to bestow on us their tidy condolences. Teary faces, pulled long like Edvard Munch paintings, crowd in on mine. Cleo’s preschool teachers, the bedraggled clump of widows, the parishioners, the Rotary Club board members, the neighbors I all recognize, but others just come and go without names. And suddenly here is the unexpected guest. Sal takes my hand and kisses the back of it so tenderly I feel like I have splintered into a thousand shards of light.
“ELIZABETH DEIGHTON, meet Salvatore Mariotti,” said Buella on my first day at the magazine, “art director and resident Italian stud.” When he stood up from his chair and came around to the front of his desk to shake my hand, it was as though he had stepped off the page of a Barbara Cartland paperback.
“Watch out for Buella.” He laughed, taking his spectacles off and hooking them into his dark, curly hair. “She is fond of building reputations that are impossible to live up to.”
“But you do your best, don’t you, darling?” she retorted. “This one is spoken for, by a man of the cloth no less, so try not to incur the wrath of the Almighty, won’t you?” she said, spiriting me away before he could say another word. “Charming but harmless,” she said of him as we wandered to the next office. “He’s still pining for his ex. A nasty piece of work, rumor has it, who dumped him for a wealthy divorce lawyer. You fill in the rest of the blanks—it’s all too cliché for me.”
“It’s not cliché, it’s sad,” I said.
“It’s sad because it’s cliché, silly girl.”
After that, every morning on his way to the coffeepot, Sal wouldpause in my doorway to give a smart bow as if he had just concluded conducting an aria. Sal in faded jeans and a shirt that always
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