The Dogs of Babel

TWENTY-EIGHT

I was glad when the death-mask business was over. Except that, as it turned out, it wasn’t over at all. The dead girl’s parents were so pleased with their mask that they put it on prominent display in their home and showed it off to all their friends, several of whom they’d met through a support group for families of cancer patients. As a result, Lexy started getting requests for death masks rather frequently. After the fourth or fifth one, she got a call from a reporter who’d seen one of her masks at a funeral; the dead man had been in a car accident, his body too mangled to allow for an open casket, so instead, his family displayed Lexy’s mask on top of the coffin. The reporter was haunted by the mask, he told Lexy, so ghostly and tangible at the same time, and he wanted to do a story for the paper. The headline was ARTIST FINDS BEAUTY IN DEATH, and the story hailed Lexy as a pioneer in a new “trend” in memorializing the dead. The reporter called her work “eerily delicate” and said that with each mask she succeeded in capturing “the substance and texture of grief itself, while still managing to celebrate life as it was lived by her subjects.” It was a glowing article, accompanied by several photographs of the masks (and one of Lexy herself—look how lovely she was!), and it started a flurry of interest in her work. She received so many requests for death masks that she was forced to put aside her other projects, her vibrant theatrical masks, her gaudy Mardi Gras faces, for how could she say no to a grief-sick mother or lover in order to work on something as trivial as a summer-stock play?

Eventually, she began to advertise herself as a maker of death masks. She liked doing them, she told me; it fulfilled her to see how moved people were by them, the solace it seemed to give. “It’s important work,” she said. “People need this. It helps them. It helps the living.” It is often said that when a loved one passes away, it helps to see the body lying still and dead. It helps make it real. People whose loved ones have disappeared, never to turn up again, they suffer forever. Lexy believed that by fixing her gaze upon the moment of death, she was helping the world’s survivors carry on with the business of living.

She began leaving her card with funeral directors, and she took out ads in the obituary section of the paper. She visited the dying in hospitals, the ones who knew they were going to die and had reached some acceptance of it. And she did not lack for work.

The masks she made were beautiful, I have to admit it. She took great care in designing each one. She met with families, listened to their stories, took notes. It did them good, the survivors, to talk. She never said “the deceased” the way the funeral home people did. She said, “Tell me about your mother. Tell me what you remember.” She asked leave to surprise them, to come up with something unexpected. Always with a promise that she’d make a new one if they weren’t pleased. But that only happened once.

Her goal was to figure out the one image that would forever call to mind the person who had been lost. Not just what that person’s life was, but who he was, summed up in a drawing, an emblem, a single scene. A person’s life written across his face, as personal as a tattoo. Nothing so obvious as golf clubs for a golfer or a caduceus for a physician. Her paintings had the quality of a dream. The dream-life of the dead. She painted shadowy figures, dark against the bright sky. She painted pastoral scenes, trees on hills, birds in nests. A cityscape, a skyline. Constellations and shooting stars. A name in graffiti. There was a joy in what she painted. A nudge to remember the good things. A young girl dancing and spinning across the face of an old woman. For a pilot, middle-aged—dead of a heart attack, not a plane crash—she painted not an airplane but a view of the world from above, with the words Call it Heaven or call it flying written among the stars. For another man, an AIDS activist who had succumbed to the disease, a picture of the virus itself, unfathomably pretty for something so deadly, surrounded by scenes from the man’s life. For an old woman who had been a seamstress, a patchwork design covering the entire face, each square painted in the texture of a fabric from a loved article of clothing—here a wedding gown, there a baby blanket. And always, in every mask, the face hidden beneath the painting, adding its poignant topography.

Lexy took special care with the suicides. She had two of them. The first was a man in his fifties. He had been depressed for a long time, but his family thought he had recently shown signs of getting better. It was July when he died, but after his death, his family found a closetful of Christmas gifts, wrapped and waiting for them. For this man, Lexy painted a winter scene, peaceful but impenetrable: snowdrifts, bare trees, icicles like shards of glass. A tiny figure stood in the foreground, looking upward; if you followed his gaze, you would see that, off in the distance, just barely visible, there was a tiny cottage with a light in its window. The man had a long road ahead of him—the steep hill he would have to climb looked almost insurmountable—but he could see that light and warmth were not so far away.

The second suicide was a teenage girl. Her name was Jennifer. Lexy met with her parents, their faces blank with shock. They seemed hardly able to tell Lexy what their daughter was like; each detail, each thing they thought they knew about her, had been called into question, and they wondered now if they had really known her at all. They gave Lexy the girl’s diary to read. Lexy read it in a single night and returned it to the parents in time for them to bury it with their daughter. They didn’t read it themselves. They didn’t want to know what it said.

I don’t know what Lexy learned from the diary, if anything. She wouldn’t talk to me about it. Usually when Lexy took a job, she would tell me about the person she was working on. She would tell me what she had learned of their lives, and she would discuss her ideas for the design of the mask. But not this one. She seemed to carry this girl’s story inside her. Sometimes, months later, when she seemed sad and I would ask her what was wrong, she would say, “Oh, I was just thinking about Jennifer.”

For Jennifer, Lexy painted a mask upon a mask. At first glance, it appeared as if she had simply painted Jennifer’s own face, smiling. But when you looked closer, you could see that the smiling face was itself a mask; there was a faint outline, shield shaped, like those happy-and-sad faces used to symbolize the theater, drawn around the painted features, and painted ribbons extended from each side, as if to hold the mask in place. Underneath it all, Jennifer’s own features stood in somber contrast to the bright, bright smile and the wide, happy eyes.

It was a masterwork. But it was not what Jennifer’s parents were hoping for. As far as I can remember, this was the only time that Lexy’s clients refused the mask she offered them. It made them angry to see it, she told me. Jennifer’s mother cried, and Jennifer’s father actually yelled at Lexy. “This is not my daughter,” he told her.

She agreed to make a replacement mask. The new mask was very pretty but not particularly substantive. It showed a swarm of butterflies taking flight. There was a feeling of lightness about it, of being freed from the gravity of the earth. There were bright colors and fluffy clouds. It was just what the parents wanted.

Lexy kept the first mask. She hung it on the wall above her worktable, and sometimes when I went downstairs to see what she was doing or to say hello, I would find her sitting on the couch, staring at the mask of the smiling girl.