We Are Not Ourselves(194)

She started to say the Lord’s Prayer and Connell joined in. It had the soft familiarity of a bedtime routine. The words came easily to him; he wondered if they were stored so deep that they’d be among the last things he remembered when he died.

When his mother finished, she patted the ground in search of pebbles to leave on the gravestone. It was a Jewish custom she had picked up like a magpie building a nest of grief. The capillaries in her cheeks were red, but the cold seemed to have no other effect on her. She was tough, but as they stood in that astringent wind, Connell thought of her living in the house alone, so many empty rooms, all of them still and quiet. After he left the house later, after tea and cake, she would remain behind in it. He had been glad when she told him she was thinking of selling it, but in the end she hadn’t put it on the market; something held her back.

His mother put two pebbles on the gravestone and stepped back, buffeted by wind. “Your father picked this spot out,” she said. “We looked at the brochures right after we moved. This was before we knew anything about his illness. It sounds morbid, but it wasn’t. He wanted to see the plot of land, so we came out here and looked at it. This area wasn’t filled in yet, but they had it all planned out. Your father wanted to be on this hill. He would have loved a day like this, chilly and misty, the sky full of rain clouds. I don’t know if you remember, but he loved cemeteries. Any trip we took, we had to stop at a cemetery. He liked to read the inscriptions on the gravestones. Maybe I should have come up with something better.”

He considered the carved words: “Beloved husband and father.” It was boilerplate, but novelty wasn’t called for on a headstone, and it was a fitting summation of his father’s life, even if it fit a lot of men’s lives. Beneath that spare etching was a space where the inscription for his mother would go. She was standing with him now, and the day would come when she no longer would be, when he would arrange for the lowering of her into the earth. He wanted to put his arms around her and shield her from what was to come, and he felt a kind of panic bloom in his chest. The most he could do to try to chase it away was drape an arm across her shoulders.

“This was the only real estate your father ever really cared about,” she said, as if in answer to a private thought. It was a paltry plot, but the view was beautiful. If you added the adjacent space that Ruth and Frank McGuire had bought, it started to look like a little neighborhood. They’d been trailblazers when they’d secured the plots, but in the intervening years the march of mortality had swept past the area and filled it up, and another vanguard was forming a little way up the road. There wasn’t room there for Connell, which was just as well. He would make his own decision about a final resting place, or perhaps someone he didn’t know yet would make it for him.

Real estate. He couldn’t help hearing another meaning in the phrase. What was his father’s real estate? There was the investment portfolio, and the house and the things in it; there was the contribution to science; there were the altered lives of the students he’d taught, and the impacts those students had had, and would have, on others. And then there was him. He was his father’s real estate. At the moment he was an underwater asset.

He picked up a pebble and added it to the little pile atop the gravestone. They headed toward the car.

“Your father got a kick out of the fact that Babe Ruth was buried here.”

Connell remembered reading about ballplayers driving to Ruth’s grave to soak up some luck, but he hadn’t realized this was the cemetery in question.

“Where’s the grave?”

“Not far.”

“Did Dad ever see it?”

“He stood in front of it for a long while.” She chuckled. “Silent. Sort of solemn. The way you two get about baseball.”

They drove until they reached a tall marker set back from the road, with a plinth that said RUTH in big block lettering under a large central stone that depicted Jesus gesturing to a little boy. One smaller stone bore a quote from Cardinal Spellman: “May the divine spirit that animated Babe Ruth to win the crucial game of life inspire the youth of America”; another listed the years of Ruth’s birth and death, as well as those of his wife, Claire. There were baseballs stacked in a little offering, a solitary bat, baseball cards taped to the stone.

He thought of his father down the road, ignored except by family members. Death may have been the great leveler, but there were still hierarchies in cemeteries.

He went up and rubbed his palm on the gravestone. He wasn’t above asking for a little luck. He might even have knelt if his mother hadn’t been there. It felt for a moment as if he were back in church as a little boy, as if he’d placed a quarter in the box and lit a votive candle and now the time had come to say a prayer. Saying a prayer, making a wish, having a thought—were they all the same? Was anyone listening? Was there anything other than a void in the universe? Help me, he thought. Help. But the Babe just stood impassive in his frieze, a gray block, silent as the stone it was quarried from.

? ? ?

When they got to the house, his mother put on a pot of tea. Connell went into the study to use the computer. The study still smelled like his father, or at least like things he associated with his father—old books, pencil shavings, the heated metal of the desk lamp. His mother came in and picked up something from the desk.

“I was going through these file cabinets,” she said, “and I found this.” She handed him an envelope with his name on it. “Your father wanted me to give it to you a while ago, but with everything that was going on, I must have mislaid it.”