The Startup Wife(5)
I’d never been to a white person’s funeral, but I knew I was supposed to wear black, so I put on a turtleneck and spent the ride down from Boston rolling my chosen sentence around in my mind. Mrs. Butterfield always knew I was more devoted to science than literature, but she didn’t hold it against me—she believed that I deserved novels as much as the students who went around quoting David Foster Wallace. I should have kept in touch.
When I entered the auditorium, I saw some familiar faces—a few teachers; the principal, Mr. Gatney; Iris and Ruby, the twins who formed a band my senior year called One Placenta; and even some of the boys who were never seen without their shiny varsity jackets. I said some awkward hellos, silently judging everyone yet annoyed when they didn’t remember me. We shuffled into our seats; the lights went down and up again, and standing in the middle of the stage was Cyrus Jones.
His head was bent over a microphone. “Mrs. Butterfield’s family—her niece Elizabeth and her nephew Constantine—were, sadly, not able to travel from California to be here, and they asked me to conduct today’s celebration in their stead.” He spoke slowly, and it sounded like he had a slight English accent, and I was going to have a stroke.
“You will remember Mrs. Butterfield as the teacher who impressed Shakespeare and Hemingway upon you. You will remember that she drove to school every morning in her pristine Volkswagen Beetle. You will remember her kindness and her solitude. As she passes, we celebrate all of this, but it also gives us an opportunity to celebrate what we didn’t know.
“There are people we are familiar with only in certain contexts—ministers, therapists, doctors. Teachers are our most intimate acquaintances for a period of our lives, but the relationship is tilted toward us; they mute themselves in order to act as a conduit for our growth. No one played this role more seriously than Mrs. Butterfield. There are the things we knew about her—you will remember, no doubt, the fondness with which she spoke of her dog, Harold—but the rest of her remains an enigma. Death gives us the opportunity not to complete the picture, necessarily, but to contemplate the unknowability, the strangeness, of others, even our most intimate friends. And what better way to do that than through fiction, the human endeavor that cleaves itself most closely to the mysteries of our lived experience?”
Cyrus gestured, inviting us all onto the stage. The lights changed; he faced each of us in turn and moved us around into a circle. When he reached me and looked into my eyes and whispered, “Asha Ray,” all of the blood pooled in my legs.
“Hello,” I breathed.
Finally, we were assembled. Cyrus asked the person on his left to begin.
“?‘Do not go gentle into that good night,’?” they said. Cyrus nodded to the next person in the circle.
“?‘Good night, good night, parting is such sweet sorrow.’?”
Then: “?‘I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.’?”
And: “?‘People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.’?”
There was laughter. Cyrus gave it a moment. The next person read: “?‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed, and the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night, I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.’?”
“?‘And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.’?”
I was last. “?‘Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.’?”
The lights went down, and in the darkness Cyrus whispered, “Jana—Mrs. Butterfield to most of us—and I spent a lot of time talking about death. Her final words to me were ‘The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman!’ and I knew, when she said it, that her pain was coming to an end.”
I couldn’t believe he was right there, being a real person. And while I had no reason to hope this was true, I felt like maybe he was thinking the same thing about me. He looked so different than when I saw him last—the basic facts of him were still the same, the lanky, long torso, the angle of his jaw, his wavy, calligraphic blond hair—but everything had slowed down. He was beautiful and older and completely perfect.
Afterward, he found me in the cafeteria nibbling through a sandwich. “We kept in touch,” he said. “After I dropped out. She would call me and check that I was reading enough Shakespeare. She told me everything else was optional.”
I wasn’t thinking about Mrs. Butterfield. “How did you do that?”
“You mean the service?”
“Getting all those people to have a moment.”
“That’s kind of my thing,” he said. “I create rituals.”
“But do you do that to all the grieving people?” I asked.
“What?”
“Look into their eyes and cause mayhem? Internal organ damage?”
He smiled. “I hear you live in Cambridge.”
“How did you know?”
“Mrs. Butterfield gave me a list of people to invite. Turns out we’re neighbors.”
“No.”
“Streets away.”