238: Someone nudged me.
Herb ’n’ Lorna, the Preface continues
Someone nudged me. My mother. I looked at her. She nodded ever so slightly. What did that mean? Had she discovered, from my expression, what I had been thinking? Did she know about the jewelry Gumma had left me? Had she, perhaps — She nodded again, in the direction of the pulpit, and gave me a little nudge. The eulogy. Of course. The eulogy.
I got up. I mounted the pulpit in a fog. I looked around at the congregation of mourners. Who among these friends, relatives, and acquaintances knew the truth? Was I the only one? Or was I the last to know? I took my remarks from my pocket. I read them. I had written a little catalog of my grandmother’s kindnesses, as I knew them. When I had written it, I had worried that it would be too much for me to read without breaking down. Now I found that I couldn’t concentrate on it. I read, but I wasn’t paying attention to what I was reading. My eyes were on the paper, but my mind was on the animated copulations of tiny ivory men and women.
Worse, I was getting excited — sexually. I was standing in the pulpit at my grandmother’s funeral, reading her eulogy, and (out of sight of the mourners, thank God) clenching and relaxing my thighs, rotating my pelvis, twisting, and squirming, trying to shift my erection, which was thrust painfully up against the elastic band of my briefs, into a more comfortable position. Still reading, I reached into the side pocket of my pants, reached through the leg hole of my briefs, and pushed the tip of my penis out from under the elastic. That was better, but I was immediately seized by the fear that everyone had noticed, that they had been able to tell from some shift of my shoulders exactly what I had been doing. I scanned the congregation. They were sniffling and blubbering and dabbing their eyes and blowing their noses. I wondered whether my grandmother had imagined this moment and presented me with the problem of her eroticism as she might have presented me with one of the logical puzzles she enjoyed so much. She always wanted to make me think. She always warned me against taking things for granted, against the blindness of assumptions. Was she doing me another kindness, inviting me to solve her puzzle instead of mourning her? I wasn’t sure whether to smile, or blush, or cry.
In the afternoon, after my grandmother had been buried, there was a buffet dinner at my parents’ house. The afternoon passed. The crowd dwindled. My grandparents’ closest friends and admirers remained through the afternoon, and on into the evening, drinking and telling stories. As the evening wore on, no one became more sentimental than my old high-school friend Mark Dorset, who, after a while, as if he’d been quite deliberately working up to a level of intoxication that would allow him to say what he had to say, took me aside and said that he had something to give me, a memento of my grandparents that he had had in his possession since my grandfather had died, three years before.
From his pocket he took what seemed to be a pocket watch. He pressed the stem, and the lid popped open. Inside were three tiny ivory figures, two women and a man, sexually entangled on a miniature bed. “Just look at that workmanship!” said Mark.
I did. Immediately, I could see that this was even better than any of the pieces my grandmother had given me. (I know now that the little trio was the best work they ever did.) In the carving of the figures, I was certain, I could recognize the work of my grandmother’s hand, her fine eye, her loving touch, her sense of detail. In the smooth mechanical animation, I was certain I could recognize my grandfather’s ingenuity, his fascination for the complex and puzzling, his love of impractical gadgets. I stared at the trio and their performance. My throat was tight. My eyes were wet. I was dumbfounded. I was grief-stricken. I was proud.
But I was also envious. Mark’s initiation into my grandparents’ secret had preceded mine. By three years. Why? Mark had a story, of course. I listened to him tell it, and while I listened I tried to wear the amused look of one who knows it all already, who has heard it all before. In truth, though, it was news to me, and it hurt to hear it from someone other than my grandparents. Why had they never told me? Why had they told Mark before me? My fear of the answers to those questions was one of the things that for so long kept me from writing this book.
[to be continued on Friday, April 15, 2022]
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