Lost and Wanted(18)

I have always wondered, did this comfort the Besso family? Did it comfort his wife, Anna, to whom Einstein had introduced him? Did she believe, as Einstein did, in a sublime order of which even the most gifted people—people like Einstein and her husband—could only perceive the dim outlines? Did she think of her husband’s illustrious friend when she wondered what to do with his leather boots, or held his glasses in her hand and gasped at their sudden strangeness?

    “Where is the coffin?”

“There’s no coffin. She’s being cremated—that’s what most people do now, because there’s really not room to bury everybody. The body goes into a machine that turns it into ashes. We call them ashes, but they look more like pieces of bone. Sometimes family members scatter the ashes in a place that the dead person loved.”

It’s rare that I say something he finds interesting enough to make him stop playing, but now Jack looked up.

“Where do you love?” he said.

“You mean, where would I want my ashes scattered?”

Jack waited.

“Well, you know—I’m not going to die for a very, very long time. I told you my friend was sick, but I’m completely healthy.”

“Yeah I know. But I mean, if.”

I hesitated only a moment. “A lake in Switzerland. It’s the bluest water I’ve ever seen.”

Jack fit a tiny helmet onto a tiny yellow biker, and looked as if he were going to cry.

“But I told you—you don’t have to worry.” I tried to put him on my lap, but he squirmed away. How had we gotten into this before breakfast?

“My grandmother lived to be ninety-seven, and you know your grandma does all that yoga—she’s also going to be alive for a long time.”

But I couldn’t make Jack smile. He has his donor’s blue eyes and general coloring; a tow-headed baby, his hair has gotten steadily darker each year, stopping at the sandy color I remember from that photo on the website. His large, oval-shaped head is similar to my father’s, but his nose and pointed chin are like mine. So far his own father’s height is not in evidence, and the contrast between his big head and slight frame is striking. Especially when he’s unhappy, his face tends to look a little older than it is.

“What is it, Bug?”

He hesitated a long time, but finally spoke. “I’m scared I won’t be able to find it.”

    I did take him in my arms then. I put my face in his hair and closed my eyes.

“I’ll leave you a map.”

I could tell that he liked that idea, because I felt his body relax. When he has grievances against me later, at least I’ll be able to say that I talked to him like an adult, that I tried not to lie. We sat there like that for a while, before Jack decided that he wanted French toast.

“No problem,” I said. Breakfast is the only meal I enjoy preparing. He wiggled away and started playing, and I got up to go make it. On my way to the kitchen, he called out to me.

“I want mine at that place in California.”

“What place?” I asked.

“You know.”

“Zuma Canyon?”

“Is that where we had pizza?”

“It’s where we went hiking—with the waterfall.”

“I mean the place with the colored balls.”

“Chuck E. Cheese’s?”

“Right!” Jack said happily. “Right in the pit!”

“Okay. But you’ll have to tell your own children about that.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll give them a map.”





12.


Luvya lady, I thought, as we crossed Harvard Yard. What it meant depended upon the punctuation:

luvyalady

Luvya, lady!

Luvya,

Lady



It was a hot July morning. The campus felt empty and still, as if those three-hundred-year-old buildings had breathed a sigh of relief in expelling their messy human occupants. Oaks and honey locusts threw sharp-edged shadows on the grass, and across the radial paths. The bells in the steeple would ring at nine.

    “You know I’m going to have to get up and say something,” I told Jack. “You’ll just sit right there until I’m finished.”

“But I won’t say anything.”

“No, of course not. You don’t have to.”

“Will Simmi?”

I was surprised that he remembered the name. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’s only a little older than you.”

“But it’s her mom.” He looked to make sure he’d gotten that right. He and Simmi had never met.

“Still.” I wanted to stop talking before we reached Memorial Church, where I could see Charlie’s mother, Adelaide, standing on the columned portico, calmly greeting family and friends. Not everyone would be composed enough do that, I thought, but it didn’t surprise me that Addie was. She looked perfect, in a gray summer dress and black, short-sleeved lace jacket. Charlie’s father and her brother, William, were standing on either side of her. I didn’t see Terrence or Simmi.

“Helen,” she said, when we reached the front of the line. She took my shoulders in her hands. The face that had once put her in magazines, with its high cheekbones and wide-set eyes, was only slightly aged, with a smooth brow and delicate crow’s feet. I didn’t know what she’d done to herself, if anything, but it didn’t look false or unnatural; it was only uncanny that the twenty years since I’d last seen her seemed to have had so little effect. Her hair was done in a smooth, dark bob; her lipstick was plum-colored. Apart from the serious way she said my name, there was no visible sign of her grief. I had the same feeling I’d always had around Addie—that she saw obvious errors in the way I’d arranged my appearance, and yearned to fix me up.