The Chrysanthemum Palace

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HE WAS BURIED IN THE Vineyard with Jack and Jeremy, as his mother had wished.

Sudden death expunged her rancor; at last, Thad was brought into protective arms. It came to mind this was the closest he’d been to his brother in the forty-odd years since that time beside the gently rocking Sea Horse where they parted. Miriam said the configuration of monuments in the family plot put him farthest from Jack, which gave a small measure of comfort. She said there was a wake, with far less turnout than the one I’d attended, and Morgana had behaved much the same as at her husband’s — brave and wittily stoic, boisterously bereft.

We scattered Clea’s ashes at sea. There was to be no headstone or grave marking, by her request. TV tabloids and magazines made much of the lurid deaths, mostly on account of the illustrious parents. In the end, the light (“Even the light”) — the white dwarves that were their children — could not escape the gravity of those legendary black holes.

My own mother took great care of me in the days that followed.

She got some of her old energy back and threw a lovely memorial. It was as if Gita knew that with this death — Clea’s — I had finally graduated, and we now shared consecrated alma maters. (Heartbroken wolves cloaked in sheepskin.) The celebration took place on the beach, where I once fantasized they would exchange vows. Everyone linked hands and cried — friends from AA, the gang from Starwatch. Dad walked me to the wet sand and said that my eulogy was “the finest thing” he’d ever heard. With tears in his eyes, he begged forgiveness for all fatherly transgressions. He was a little drunk but his sentiments were in earnest. I did forgive him, from the bottommost bottom of my heart. I forgave just about everyone for everything, including myself.

Gita was right. School was out — forever.