Memorial

IV.Marjorie

MARJ Herlihy resides in Beverlywood, off Robertson. Until Hamilton passed, a few months back, she’d been married 27 years — her 2nd husband. They’d lived well even though Tremayne Clothiers always seemed on iffy financial grounds. (When his partner died 8 years ago, she told Ham to rename it Herlihy Clothing, or Herlihy-Tremayne, but he said that would only confuse the buyers. He finally agreed but never got around to it.)

After the fatal heart attack, she was surprised to learn a secret: long ago, Ham had bought a policy called “term life.” By paying a premium, her husband’s trust was insured for $2,000,000, all of which became hers. Marj wasn’t sure what the genesis of this idea was — she’d never even heard of “term life”—maybe he’d had a premonition. At death, he had already owned the policy 14 years and it wasn’t cheap, something like $7,000 per annum, but it wasn’t exorbitant either (considering the unhappily fateful returns), except for the fact that had he outlived the 20 year contract none of the payments were refundable; he had probably kept it from her because she would never have sanctioned such an arrangement. She might have called it wasteful. Now that he was gone, every time Marj turned around she seemed to be listening to an ad for term life on the radio or reading about it in the paper. By the time she paid off the house and various debts, there was over a million left.

She had loved Ham dearly but not the way she loved Raymond, her 1st. Hamilton was a bland, steady rock, fit and handsome, a golfer and compulsive tennis player. He was sociable and liked to tell people he “brought Marj out,” meaning out of her shell, because she tended to turn inward. Adopting her kids had been his idea, and made him such a bigger man in Marj’s eyes. The children loved him too but never warmed up to being Herlihys instead of Rausches; they never exactly understood, it was as if they had been forced to wear cloaks which kept them warm but didn’t fit. Schoolmates teased them about suddenly having different surnames.

When Chess and Joan came to the wake, it was the 1st she’d seen of them since Christmas. They didn’t show much emotion. Marj wasn’t proud of the fact she hadn’t spent much time with her kids — it felt like having strangers in the house. On bad days, she blamed herself for being the type of mother who’d been so determined not to meddle that she’d done irreparable damage all around; on good days, she blamed Raymond. The divorce had come so early and the family had been deeply fractured; never a good thing but sometimes there is perseverance and triumph. It was their lot never to recover, not even with name changes and the syrup of Hamilton’s mayoral good cheer. No one knew where Ray had gone and the kids didn’t seem too interested in finding out. (Probably for the best.) They got along with Ham, which was easy because of his sunny, silken handyman’s disposition. Still, there was always a disconnect. As time passed, Chess and Joan went their own ways, and the rare occasions they did come over they were on smiley autopilot, as if to trigger early release from visitors’ jail. They didn’t divulge much about their lives; neither Marj nor her husband had ever been invited to any of the places her son and daughter lived. She wouldn’t admit it, not even to Ham, but that pained her. He must have known.

She was close with her neighbor. Cora was nearly the same age, and a widow too, though it seemed like her kids and grandkids were always dropping by. She subtly lorded her familial bounty over Marj but the old woman never let on that she knew what Cora was up to. Besides, the neighbor helped more than hurt and was wonderful after Hamilton died. Cora’s little Pahrump squealed and strangle-yipped all the time but when her Ham passed on, she relocated the spaniel to a different wing of the house so he wouldn’t grate on Marj’s nerves — a small act, yes, but one of great kindness. Long ago, the old woman told herself that people did what they could; that was an ingrained sentiment of her father’s. (She still had the needlepointed PATIENCE heirloom pillow Joan and Chess used to throw around when they were kids.) Overall, she felt blessed to have Cora next door. Steady, haughty Cora, loyal and royal in her own way, and vigilant.

Life after Hamilton Herlihy was strange because it was oddly the same as when he was alive, only now he was absent. Marj tried to express this conundrum to her daughter but Joan was so busy (for which Mom was grateful) that she listened as distracted loved ones do or anyone really who’s obliged to indulge someone trying to make sense out of the death of a partner or pet or relationship, glossing over whatever is said, skating away then skating back, concealing one’s distraction, and that was all right, Marj knew she was guilty of doing the very same thing herself. She never spoke to her son about how she felt; Chess had too many turbulent feelings of his own, and troubles as well. At least, that’s what she surmised. She was actually bemused when he came to the memorial and even more surprised he didn’t ask for money. Though she was starting to get a feeling in her bones, like she got before it rained, that he would soon call to ask, now that the mourning period, in his mind anyway, was officially ending.

Marj kept buying lottery tickets, never missing a day, not even when Ham was buried. Who knew? It might bring luck. The good and the bad always had a habit of coming one’s way when least expected (to paraphrase her father). She busied herself by visualizing the article in the Times, category: human interest, California section, Gift From Beyond — Widow Wins $93,000,000. It reminded her of that saintly couple who picked the right numbers a few years back, a husband and wife who raised money to bury newborns thrown into Dumpsters. O, the Lord worked in mysterious ways! Rich folks won the lottery and so did the poor and aggrieved. (The rich always fared better.) Goodness, she had just read an article about a couple with criminal pasts who won the Super Lotto and within a year, both were dead.

One thing Marj didn’t share with her daughter, Cora, or anyone, was a wild-eyed, magical idea that had grown inside her over the last few weeks with an ineluctable pull: Widow Herlihy had made up her mind to go to India and revisit the hotel Dad brought her to when she was a girl — the very best time of her life, a time she was convinced had made her the person she was today, suffusing her disposition, her entire existence, with a kind of diurnal poetry and peasant’s optimism, a time that allowed her to suffer all life’s vicissitudes, coloring her day-by-day mood with the lingering incense of nonsectarian spiritual hopefulness.

In the winter of her life, Marjorie Herlihy would travel to Bombay and check into the very suite that father and daughter once shared at the Taj Mahal Palace, a stone’s throw from the Majestic Gate of India.