LAUGHING ABOUT THE DEAD

They were sitting in the living room of the old house in Nesconset.  It was an old hodge-podge of a house, starting its life as a summer cottage some seventy years before, a rural place on Lake Avenue not far from the lake in Ronkonkoma.  The family used it to escape the heat of Brooklyn for a few weeks during the summer months.  In those depression days, most of the dwellings in the area were cottages, places to which people would come on weekends to use the beaches, both on the Sound and the lake.  After the old man retired, however, the family stayed through the entire summer, and the boys in the family, young men now whose lives would soon be diverted by the war, commuted to work.  It was around this time that the first addition was made.  Over the years, the bungalow grew, upwards and outwards, to accommodate growing numbers in the family, and it acquired that look of a hodge-podge building.  The latest addition, quite old now, was the large living room, nearly as large, in fact, as the rest of the house, in which the two ladies sat receiving their guest—a nephew, who made the pilgrimage to his aunts upon returning home for the funeral of his mother.

     Most of their generation were gone now.  They were two sisters left from a family of five siblings, and they lived together in the old cottage, as they still referred to the place.  The oldest of the two had lost her husband the year before, and the other was never married.  They had only just begun living together.  Since all the men in the family were gone, they had anticipated having their two sisters-in-law come visit regularly—as a kind of merry widows club—but it didn’t work out.  The death of their nephew’s mother so soon after their new arrangements was a blow, leaving a big hole in their little society, and their younger brother’s wife was becoming frail and visited less often than they liked.  So the two of them reconciled to a quiet existence and made the best of their time by cooking and cleaning and receiving any guest who would come.

     The nephew was now sitting in the living room while the spinster aunt went to the kitchen to put on coffee.

     “This house has seen a lot of changes, hasn’t it, Joey?” the old aunt said.

     “It always seemed so big when I was a boy.  That yard out front, where all the cousins used to play, seemed as big as the African Serengeti.  We had real adventures out there.  Now I look at it and I can’t see it at all.  It’s a postage stamp.”

     “I know, I know,” she laughed.  “We had a crowd of you

playing outside all summer.”

     “So, how are you doing, Aunt Vera?  I’m sorry about Uncle Frank.”

     “It was his time, what can you do?” 

     “He was quite a bit older than you, wasn’t he?”

     “Nine years.  Yes.  At this end of life it makes a  difference, doesn’t it?  But all the men are gone.  Your mother seemed fine only a few months ago.  And now, she’s gone.”

     There wasn’t the least bit of sorrow in her voice.  There was, perhaps, a touch of disappointment over the loss of good times they might have had.  But no sorrow.  He felt it, but she was his own mother.  Still, his aunt knew his mother better than he did.  Not only because she knew her as a young woman and because they shared a long life together, but also because he had lived away from home most of his adult life, seeing his family only for a few weeks during summers, and then not every summer.

He had been back to the cottage only a few times over the last twenty-five years, and each time it was a shock to see how tiny the place really was.  It loomed large in his memory, for his family spent summers in the cottage, along with the families of his aunts and uncles, until he was nine or ten years old.  It was during summers out here that he learned to swim in the Sound and to row a boat on the lake and to shoot a bb gun.  He and his cousins, all of whom used to sleep gathered on a couple of mattresses in the attic, peppered empty coffee tins with that bb gun and wasted the lives of countless grasshoppers. 

Aunt Josephine was laying out cups and saucers and small plates for the cake her nephew brought.  When the table was set, she called him from the living room, and they took their places round the dining room table.

“Your mother was a complainer, you know that, so I’m not telling you something new.” Aunt Josephine said.  She was a short, heavy woman with short curly hair, thinning now from age but still mostly black.  Never married, she had no one to rely on but her older sister, and she seemed now, as she had since her parents died, like a leaf cast onto the winds of time.  “She found fault with everything.  Nothing passed without her criticizing.  But she was a good soul.  We were friends all our lives.”

“She found plenty to complain about you,” Aunt Vera reminded her and laughed. 

“I lived with her a long time after my brother died,” and she laughed, then, herself.  “I was doing her a favor and she was doing me a favor.  The house was empty, you were all married by then, and she was in it alone.  So I came to live with her.  She didn’t like nothing I did.  I couldn’t cook good enough, I fell asleep watching television, I washed the dishes before she could get to them—I don’t know why that bothered her.  God forbid I should try to vacuum!  Like I was taking her work away.  I was only helping.”

“You beat her at rummy all the time.  That wasn’t politic, Josephine,” Vera said, and they both laughed.  When Aunt Vera laughed, her face about the eyes became deeply creased. 

“She complained about everything, but I knew she didn’t mean it,” Aunt Josephine continued.  It was a trial living with his mother.  He knew his aunt didn’t have options.  But he also knew what she wanted him to understand—that she didn’t resent his mother. 

“I would laugh and then she would laugh, and then she’d go on doing whatever she was doing.  No one could please her.  Only you, Joey.  You were here favorite.”

They all laughed at that, because all his brothers and sisters said they were mom’s favorite.  It was a thing in their family to be mom’s favorite.

Joey told them about being at her bedside when she died, and that brought a silence, but it didn’t last longer than a few breaths.  They were both unaffectedly cheerful.  It was one of the things about them he most liked.  The two had come to the hospital to visit his mother while he had been at the bedside.  They stayed only a little while because she was asleep and they didn’t want to wake her.  Later, after they left and his mother had wakened, he told her they had been there, and she said, “I hate happy morons.  Who can live with them?”

He didn’t tell his aunts, however.  It was true, about his mother.  She was a criticizer.  She had a colorful way with language when she railed at the world.  Her criticisms were always a topic of conversation when he was with his brothers and sisters.  They would tell each other what she had said about who to whom.  Then they would weigh the vehemence of her comments, feign shock and dismay, and laugh.  Now she was gone. 

The ceremony in the church was solemn and moving.  It was a large, airy, brightly lit sanctuary.  Her coffin was draped with a white ceremonial cloth and rested in front of the altar.  A lot of people had come, friends and family, and he had said a few words over her.  Later, when they left the cemetery, they gathered at one of the local restaurants for the consolation dinner.  It was there his aunts invited him to the cottage.  Sitting, now, at the table in this old dining room, so filled with memories, he felt like a motherless son.  It was a strange and heartbreaking feeling, strange because it had arisen from the memories of this place, and heartbreaking because all those memories were of childhood.

“When Frank was dying,” Aunt Vera said, “we had him in a rented hospital bed in the living room over there,” she pointed across the room to the wall where the sofa was.  “He liked that.  We were with him, too.”

“And the kids?  They were here?”

“No, no.  Just me and Lucille and her family,” she said.  Lucille was her youngest daughter, his cousin, a few years younger than himself.  “It was quiet and peaceful.  But Joey, let me tell you….”

“Yes, yes,” Aunt Josephine intruded, laughing.  “You have to tell him this story!”

Aunt Vera laughed, too.  Then she composed herself and put on a serious face.  “Just a little while before he died, Frank said to me, ‘Vera, are you ready?’ He was trying to get out of bed, but he could hardly move.  He had no strength left.  I said, ‘Ready for what, Frank?’ and he said, ‘For the party.  Everybody’s at the party waiting for us.’  I said, ‘What party, Frank?  Who’s at the party?’  And he said, ‘Everybody’s there, Vera.’  And then he started naming who was there.  His mother and father, his brothers, your father—they’ve all been dead for years!  I said to him, ‘Frank, I don’t want to go to that party.  You go.  Say hello to everyone.’  And then he died only a little while later.”  

Aunt Josephine thought that was a skit and laughed heartily.  Aunt Vera laughed, too.  They were a study, the two of them, sitting there, sipping coffee, eating cake, and laughing about the dead. 

They wanted to console him for the loss of his mother.  But they needed to console themselves, too.  They were good at it.  They told stories and evoked memories and dabbed at their eyes, but they also laughed.  As he sat with them, he knew that it may well be for the last time.  They knew it, too.  It was not something spoken.  He could see it in the care they took to comfort him, and they in the efforts he made to acknowledge them. 

The conversation about his mother went on, however, and he enjoyed the odd things they thought up to tell him.

“I remember when your mother’s father was still alive,” Aunt Josephine began.

“Oh, he was a character, that old man,” Aunt Vera put in.

He remembered his grandfather fondly.  He was named after him.  His grandfather used to put his old opera records on the stereo, and they used to play chess and listen to music.  When he was still a boy, his grandfather used to let him win, and later when he returned for his summer visits, they would play and he would let his grandfather win, but he had to be subtle, because the old man was quick enough still to detect a false move.

“He would sit in the kitchen while your mother was cooking,” Aunt Josephine went on, “and tease her.”  Then, imitating his Italian-American dialect, “‘MillIE, your sisters are all instaBILe.  AnNA è fatalIST, FanNIE è cretINa, JoSIE è touchEE.’ ‘And what am I?’ your mother would ask.  ‘You’re norMALe,’ he would say.  One time I asked her if he wasn’t insulting her, too, you know, sticking her with a pin.  Who wants to be normal, right?  But she said, ‘I’m the only normal person I know.  Everybody’s crazy but me!’”

“My mother always said that,” he laughed. 

“But she meant you were crazy, too,” Aunt Vera laughed at her sister.

“She would holler at me.  You know how your mother could scream.  ‘Get away from those dishes, Pina!  Leave the vacuum alone, Pina!’  She’d split my eardrums.  Sometimes, when she wasn’t looking, I’d season the food on the stove the way I like it.  She’d say, ‘Boy, it came out good this time, didn’t it?’ Your mother had such a big family, so many around the table.  Then it was just us.  She wasn’t used to cooking for only two.  So I had to help it along.”

“Did you ever tell her?” Aunt Vera asked, laughing.

“Are you kidding?” Aunt Josephine laughed right back.   “She’d’ve thrown me out.”

“No, mother wouldn’t have done that,” he replied, “would she?”

“Not really.  Your mother screamed and carried on, but she was an old trooper.  She never had anything but that house.  Your father wasn’t a big wage earner, you know that.  Then you were all gone.  There was only us.  I could always rely on her.  We loved each other in our own ways.”

Aunt Josephine became wistful, then.  Her face was less creased than her sister’s.  She talked about how one day she opened an old cigar box on the shelf in his mother’s closet and found old love letters from her brother.  It surprised her that the old criticizer would keep them, admitting that she had never got love letters herself. 

He looked at both of them in the silence that followed his aunt’s admission, finishing his cup of coffee.  So much was passed.  The old cottage had fewer visitors, now, and the only child who played there was a great granddaughter, who came too seldom.  In the silence, he could almost feel the ghosts.

 When he was a child summering there, the cottage was surrounded by pine forest; its little yard and garden were carved out of the woods.  The lane that led to the place came down the sandy hill from Lake Avenue, which was a simple two-lane avenue just wide enough for the cars of those days.  Now the cottage sits amid modern split-foyer and ranch homes, the avenue is a wide concrete thoroughfare, and strip malls, gas stations, supermarkets, and businesses of all sorts have usurped the rest of the forest. 

He said to his aunts, “Time is running out.  I’ll need to leave soon.”

“When do you go to the airport?” Aunt Josephine asked.

“I’ll go back to my sister’s from here, and she’ll take me in around five.”  He looked at his watch.  It was nearing three.  The aunts, always practical, had made a little package for him to put in his carry on.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“They don’t feed you on airplanes anymore.  You have a long flight.  Open it when you’re hungry.”

“It’s just little things,” Aunt Josephine said.  “Finger food.  We made it up this morning.  Take it.  Even if you don’t eat it.  It’s better to have it and not eat it than not have it and wish you did.”

He put the package to his nose and could smell the cheese and the briny olives and the meats.  He would certainly take it.  He thanked them, hugged them, took their hands, kissed them both on the cheeks, and left. 

They returned to their places in the living room, sighing as they sat.  It was too early to cook, the cleaning had been done, and no one was expected.  So they sat for a long time, comforted in each other’s presence.