Dead Man Dancing

Twenty-Seven

Jay’s departure from this world had been agonizing and slow, so it was only right that he be carried off to heaven in a proper, gentler way.

The Capital obituary was laudatory and long, highlighting Jay’s raised-by-his-own-bootstraps journey from oil rig roustabout to ballroom dancing star. The obit in the Sun had been edited with a heavy hand, but both papers invited friends and family to a rosary service at Kramer’s Funeral Home on Monday night at seven, followed by a funeral mass at St Mary’s at ten the following day.

‘C U @ kramer’s,’ Melanie had texted. ‘Something 2 tell U.’

When Paul and I arrived at Kramer’s, it was just as I had remembered it. Rich oriental carpets, a mahogany highboy, a massive circular table supporting a flower arrangement – fresh and very real – the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. To our right, a carpeted staircase led upstairs, but I had never seen it anything but roped off. To our left was the receiving line, and beyond that, an easel and a table decorated with flowers where Giannotti family photographs were on display.

As my husband and I were passed down the receiving line, offering condolences to tanned, rugged Texans who, with the exception of Kay and Lorraine, I did not know, I wondered which photographs Lorraine had chosen. When I got to Lorraine – who wore a suit of in-charge navy blue with bold brass buttons – she greeted me like a long, lost sorority sister, then handed me over to Kay.

Kay looked serene and fragile in a St John’s knit jacket and matching flared skirt that couldn’t have cost a penny less than twelve-hundred dollars at Neiman Marcus. The black color complimented her hair, and emphasized her paleness. ‘I’m so sorry about Jay,’ I told her sincerely as I squeezed her hand. Silently, I admired her notched collar, flap pockets and the elegant gold buttons that marched down her front and thought, Is this what a murderer looks like?

Who was it who said that poison was the weapon of choice for a woman? Dame Agatha Christie again, I suppose. Roman matrons certainly had a field day with it, possibly inspiring those modern-day women who rid themselves of burdensome husbands with loving doses of ‘inheritance powder’. If I crossed her, Kay might not come after me with a gun, but I’d better watch what I ate.

Moving away from the line, I looked around for Melanie, but didn’t see her. We said hello to Chance, and to Tom and Laurie – who had jettisoned her scarf in favor of a violet, scrunch-neck turtle. Under her overcoat she wore a short A-line skirt in a deep, dark purple that matched her heels. Tom, on the other hand, appeared in neat jeans and a collarless shirt. As the four of us dawdled at the photo display I couldn’t resist teasing Laurie, ‘You couldn’t dress down if they paid you to do it!’

She rattled her bracelets at me and said, ‘Girl, if you’ve got it, flaunt it!’

When the pair moved on to the Blue Room to find seats, I examined the photographs more closely. Lorraine had chosen a retrospective picturing Jay alone, acknowledging, I suppose, who was actually the star of the show.

Silently, with his hand on my elbow, Paul nudged me forward.

No open casket, I was relieved to see, and the service, once it started, was short and sweet. In preparation for saying the rosary, I’d rummaged through my jewelry box at home and located the rosary I’d bought from a street vendor in the shadow of St Peter’s in Rome. I brought it to the funeral home with me, hoping as I prayed my lap around the beads that its origin would give them extra oomph.

While an electronic organ played softly, two cousins from Odessa and an uncle from San Antonio stood up to deliver remembrances of Jay. The old guy stuttered and stumbled, and got so involved in a chronological catalog of Jay-isms, punctuated by snuffling and dabbing at his nose with a napkin-sized handkerchief, that he’d only reached age ten before Lorraine took him gently aside, copiously weeping, or we might have been there all night.

Hutch attended, but not Ruth. Shirley and not Tessa. If Tessa was Jay and Shirley’s child, it must have galled the woman when the immediate family traipsed around the corner after the service for a quiet dinner at Maria’s Sicilian Ristorante. Shirley could hardly expect them to include her, of course, especially if they didn’t know how she was ‘related’ to Jay. In the lull between the eulogies I studied Shirley’s grief-ravaged face and wondered, now that Jay was gone, what she was going to do.

Daddy slipped in at the last minute, taking a seat in the back that Neelie had been saving for him. Alicia breezed in late, missing the service altogether. Surprisingly, Melanie never showed at all.

But, I was sure I’d see her in the morning.

Jay’s funeral was smack dab in the middle of a class day, so Paul begged off on the Mass. Eva called and said she wanted to go, so we agreed to meet on the steps of St Mary’s at 9:45.

Occupying acres of prime real estate on the banks of Spa Creek, St Mary’s Catholic Church, red-brick and imposing, boasted a tall white spire, one of four with St Anne’s, the Maryland State House, and St John’s College that dominated the Annapolis skyline.

I walked to the church from home, cutting down private alleys, around the controversial Market House, across Main and down Green, arriving there a bit early. Eva arrived early, too. I caught sight of her chugging down Duke of Gloucester, not coming from the direction of St Anne’s as I expected, but around the corner from the St Mary’s parking lot.

I waved, and she hustled over to give me a hug. ‘Your family here yet?’

‘Not yet. Whoever got here first is supposed to save a pew.’

Eva checked her watch. ‘Good. We’ve still got time. Come with me.’

She grabbed my upper arm and practically dragged me down the driveway and behind the church to the parking lot. ‘I have to show you something.’

The back window on the driver’s side of her little gray Corolla was open a couple of inches, and I was about to say, ‘Hadn’t you better lock your car?’ when she wrenched the back door open. ‘Look at that.’

Resting on the back seat was a brand new, two-toned, high-class pet carrier. Inside the cage, head on paws, staring morosely out the door with bright, golden eyes was a plump, gray cat.

‘Let me guess,’ I said, noticing the elaborate red bow tied to the carrier handle. ‘Jeremy.’

Eva folded her arms across her chest and nodded.

‘I thought you had a restraining order!’

‘I do, but apparently that only applies to Jeremy Dunstan and not this beautiful animal. Whose name, by the way, is Bella de Baltimore.’

Eva reached into the pocket of her overcoat, pulled out a legal-size envelope with a piece of masking tape still attached to a corner, and handed it to me.

‘I can hardly wait,’ I said, opening the flap and pulling out the paper inside.

Dear Eva (I read).

Even though you won’t go out with me, you can hold this sweet kitty and feel GOD’s love (and mine!) that way. But you can’t fight LOVE forever!

Yours always,

Jeremy

P.S. Her name is Bella de Baltimore and she is a PURE-BRED Chartreux

My eyes darted from the cat, to Jeremy’s letter, to the face of my friend, and back to the cat again, and for some reason, I started giggling. ‘It’s unbelievable! If you wrote this in a book, nobody’d believe it!’

I was glad to see Eva giggling, too, but after half a minute of silliness her face grew serious. ‘What am I going to do, Hannah?’

‘With the cat?’

‘That, too.’

‘I’m at a loss at what to do about Jeremy. The man’s clearly deluded. As for the cat, it’s pedigreed, you can take it back to the breeder.’

‘And just who might the breeder be?’

I admired the gorgeous animal, marveling at its woolly gray-blue fur and unique golden eyes. ‘We have the cat’s name, so there’ll be records. You can check with the Cat Fanciers’ Association.’

‘And in the meantime?’ Eva’s eyes were as pleading as the cat’s.

‘Oh, oh. I have a feeling there’s a litter box in my future.’

‘As a guest, I can’t possibly bring a cat into a house with two dogs! I can’t keep the cat, Hannah. Particularly not now. Maybe when I move back into the parsonage.’

We hadn’t owned a cat for years, not since Emily left home and Marmalade, age twenty, died. I couldn’t see any reason not to, so I agreed to host the cat temporarily. ‘I’ll have to ask Paul, but I think he’ll be OK with it.’

Eva hugged me. ‘Thank you, friend!’ She closed the door and locked it, leaving the window cracked as before. I was grateful that the day had dawned cloudy and cool, so there was no danger of little Bella What’s-her-Name overheating while we attended Jay’s funeral service.

Inside the church a few minutes later, the organ prelude had already begun, a ponderous and solemn hymn that I didn’t recognize. On the left-hand side of the aisle, about halfway down, I could see Emily discreetly waving. Eva and I hurried past the photographs of Jay that were on display at the back of the sanctuary, accepted a program from a young second cousin, blue-suited, scrubbed and polished within an inch of his young life, and slid into the wooden pew next to my daughter.

I leaned across Emily to plant a kiss on Chloe’s cheek, gave one to Emily, too, then sat back to examine the program: Mass of the Resurrection for Jerome I. Giannotti, 1958-2008. So, Jay had been fifty. He looked much younger. Centered on the program cover, in full color, was a picture of Jay taken at the same event as the 18 x 24 I’d recently seen in Kay’s dining room. In this pose, however, Kay was facing away from the camera, while Jay looked over her shoulder, smiling directly into the lens.

Sadly, what was left of that gorgeous man lay in a polished rosewood coffin, sitting on a bier just in front of the altar, surrounded by flowers.

I pulled a handful of tissues out of my purse. I was going to need them.

‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ played softly as the sanctuary gradually filled up around us. Hutch arrived, pushing Ruth in a wheelchair, her leg extended stiffly in front of her. Although I caught their eye and waved them forward, they took an easier route and sat in the back. When Daddy and Neelie arrived, they took the pew immediately behind us, sliding all the way over to the wooden divider to make room for Alicia and Chance when they arrived. I caught sight of Tom and Laurie, sitting together near a bas relief plaque depicting the seventh station of the cross and waved. Melanie I didn’t see anywhere.

A mystery tune segued into the more familiar ‘Morning Has Broken’, and then it was time for the opening hymn. We stood, and the congregation managed – just – to muddle through the next hymn:

Be not afraid.

I go before you always.

Come follow me,

And I will give you rest.

‘I’m not familiar with this hymn,’ I whispered to Eva somewhere in the middle of the verse about raging waters and burning flames. ‘It’s not very singable.’

‘Another legacy of the Folk Mass debacle,’ she whispered back. ‘Some of that St Louis Jesuit crap, written by priests whose mothers were struck in the head with guitars while pregnant with them.’ She raised her eyes to the blue, star-studded sanctuary ceiling and added, ‘May God forgive me for saying so.’

I missed the next half stanza while biting my tongue and concentrating on the stained glass windows in order to keep from laughing.

During the eulogies, I located Shirley and Link sitting with Tessa in a pew near the front, and a block of graying heads that I suspected belonged to the Swing and Sway Seniors since I’d seen their Ford Econovan parked outside. By mid-service I was intimately familiar with the backs of several hundred heads of people I didn’t know, but no Melanie.

Before I knew it, the priest was holding up the host and saying, ‘This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world…’ and we were responding, ‘Lord I am not worthy to receive you…’ and I’d still not located her.

‘Have you seen Melanie?’ I asked Eva as members of the congregation began filing up to the altar rail to receive communion.

‘Is she Catholic?’

‘I’m pretty sure. Of the evangelical persuasion.’

‘If she’s a faithful Catholic, she’ll go up to receive. Keep watching.’

We sang the communion hymn ‘I am the Bread of Life’, repeating the refrain ‘I will raise them up’ so many times I thought I would scream, and still no Melanie.

Not at the rosary service.

Not at the funeral.

I was getting seriously worried.

The Mass ended, we were directed to go in peace, and the congregation recessed silently while a soloist sang the Prayer of St Francis of Asissi, ‘Make Me an Instrument of Peace’, in Spanish, in a clear, high soprano voice that tore at my heart.

Rather than following my family and friends out of the sanctuary, I loitered at the back, listening, all the while studying the photographs of Jay, silently mourning the man who, against all odds, had taught my lead-footed husband how to waltz.

Oh, Señor, hazme un instrumento de Tu Paz…

Porque es:

Dando, que se recibe;

Perdonando, que se es perdonado;

Muriendo, que se resucita a la

Vida Eterna.

It’d been years since I took Spanish, but with what I knew of French, I translated the words silently as she sang:

Lord, make me an instrument of peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love.

Where there is injury, pardon.

Where there is discord, vision.

Where there is doubt, faith.

Where there is despair, hope.

Where there is darkness, light.

Where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master,

Grant that I may not so much seek to be

Consoled as to console;

To be understood as to understand;

To be loved, as to love;

For it is in giving that we receive,

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

One day, I thought as I stood there quietly sobbing, we’ll all be gone and forgotten. The HIA monogram on my towels faded, their edges frayed, the terrycloth cut up into squares for polishing whatever passes for cars by then.

As the last notes of the song died away, I was startled out of my reverie by a voice behind me. ‘He was the love of my life, you know.’

I turned to find Kay regarding me with puffy, red-rimmed eyes. Behind her stood a priest. With a light touch of her hand on his surplice, she indicated that he should go ahead without her.

‘The pictures you selected are wonderful,’ I said after the priest had disappeared through the doors that led to the narthex.

A corner of her mouth twitched. ‘Lorraine went a bit overboard, so I had to pare it down a bit from what you saw at the house the other day, but I think it’s representative, don’t you?’

I scanned the photographs, a dozen or so, that were arranged on the table just as they had been at Kramer’s the night before. As then, there were none that featured little Lorraine. Once again, I wondered if Kay had noticed Lorraine’s resemblance to Tessa or if, as Paul kept suggesting, my overactive imagination was running away with me.

I blew my nose, carefully considering my answer. ‘I didn’t know Jay as a youth, so it’d be hard to say, but seeing him looking so happy in these pictures makes me wish I did, and feel even sadder that such a promising career was cut short.’

‘He set his goals very high,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I thought he’d bitten off more than he could chew.’

I froze. Was she talking about Jay’s plan to franchise J & K? His crushing workload? His personal life?

While dabbing at my eyes I studied his widow’s face, looking for clues. It was as if she’d drawn a line in the sand and was waiting – composed, and lethal – for me to cross it.

I knew I’d have to force her hand.

Even though I stood in a church sanctuary only inches from the holy water, the devil made me do it.

I took Kay’s pale, too-cool hand in both of mine, looked straight into her ice-blue eyes and said, ‘By the way, Kay, sometime when you’re not so busy, and all this is over, I need to return Jay’s gym bag to you. From the Hippodrome? Hutch retrieved it simply ages ago and gave it to me, but with all that’s happened, golly, I’m sorry, I simply forgot about it. There’s probably nothing of value in there, but I’d like to get it back to you sometime. At your convenience, of course.’

As I rattled on, I noticed that Kay’s chest had stopped rising and falling – appropriate for a funeral, I suppose – but it told me more or less what I wanted to know. If she had been going about the business of widowhood feeling secure, I sure as hell wanted to give her something to worry about.

I dropped her hand, tossed a cheery, ‘Just give me a call, will you?’ over my shoulder as I turned and headed for the door.

Leaving Kay standing alone amidst the photos of her victim, I fled the church and joined my family who were waiting for me on the sidewalk.

‘Mother! Where have you been?’

I kissed her cheek. ‘Later, Emily.’ With a conspiratorial wink at Eva, I rounded up the stragglers and said, ‘Come with me to the parking lot. There’s somebody there that I’d like you to meet.’