41. The Yellow Gown

 

I—the funeral director, really—chose the soft yellow gown in which she was dressed when the women of our block and I saw her for the last time. I told the makeup artist that she always liked loose but neat fabrics that could drape, but not billow, on or away from her skin, depending on whether she’d been lying down or standing up. The crepe de chine fabric was finer and softer than anything I’d ever seen her wear. But I don’t think it would’ve upset her, if she could’ve known she was dressed in it.

But the color was---perfect! Though the woman who dressed and made my mother up was probably my age or younger. But looking at the way my mother was dressed and made up, I’d’ve thought the stylist/hairdresser had accompanied the girl who’d become my mother when, for the first time, my mother bought a dress: a soft, drapey frock in the color of August afternoon light or sunflowers. Mom’d saved her allowance—literally, what she was allowed to keep after she handed her mother the pay envelope from the shoe factory where she worked in the office. Having to save and wait frustrated her, she said, but it turned out for the best: the dress fit her perfectly, she said, for she’d grown two inches and hadn’t gained any weight.

But I can only imagine that color on my mother. Hardly anybody looks good in any shade of yellow and I, no matter how I’ve changed, couldn’t help but to look like fruit that’d over-ripened in the cindery haze of a malarial swamp. Mother’s skin, a bit earthier than mine, and her brown eyes coulldn’t’ve done that hue any more than justice than it could’ve done for her. But in the one photograph I ever saw—in black and white—of her in that lovely dress, there was a tension miising that she seemed to carry even as a very young girl. Could’ve been something about that dress, I guess. I don’t know, I’ll never know, about that color, though.

I’d never seen that color--I’d known it only from my mother’s descriptions—until I saw her in repose. That tension, gone again—before the other women of our block. I hadn’t seen that color, that look, certainly not on her, until then; haven’t seen it since. And it was the only time I saw her in a gown. She didn’t have photographs, at least none that I know of, of her wedding or any other formal occasion. Since she didn’t graduate from high school, or even junior high, I doubt she went to a prom.

In fact, the only occasion of her life marked by any ritual, besides her death, was her birth. I guess she wore a gown then, as I did. (She showed me the photos.) But then again, who knows: She entered this world in her mother’s house, only two and a half street blocks—forty-one doors—from the funeral parlor. Down the street, turn right, go four avenue blocks and there’s the window I peeked out of the night they pulled Adam out of the house across the street from ours, his head out of the oven. They wrapped a gown around him in the hospital, just as they did the one and only time I had to stay. A gown at the time of my birth, and then, in that room, as sterile and odorless as the funeral parlor, but colder.

That gown, which barely covered my crotch, was made, it seemed, for an eleven-year-old girl. I still don’t know how long they made my mother’s final dressing gown: The casket’d been open only down to her breasts; below that, the linen-colored silk lining dissolved into a shadow. Somehow I get the feeling Adam’d never been covered quite enough until the medics pulled the sheet over his head as he lay stretched on the gurney on which he made the trip from the hospital to the morgue.

Maybe some people never get to be gowned; they don’t get the chance to have their bodies covered but not confined: protected from the cold, but not prevented from gathering the shadows of trees together to allow light to pass through. Some people may get to wear such a gown when they are named; others—only women—when they take on someone else’s name; and a few people, like my mother, at the end of their lives. A garment under which their energies—their echoes and reflections—are gathered. But one which still allows the arms and legs to move, even when the newborn, the enjoined, the recently-deceased, cannot or do not want to touch anyone.

Besides mother, the only other person on this block I’ve seen in a gown was Mrs. Littington. And hers wasn’t like any of the others: only slightly too long to be a cape or poncho but too short and not bulky enough to be a kaftan, only the caps of sleeves circled her forearms. As a kid, I thought it was some French costume they didn’t tell us about in social studies class; now, as far as I know, she might’ve made it or had it made.

Sometimes some other woman—who wasn’t at the funeral—would appear at Mrs. Littington's front door or by one of the windows. She was the only person I’d ever seen who shared Mrs. Littington’s facial shape: all angles and refractions of olive bark and chestnuts baked by centuries of sun and wind. But the other woman’s—I was never sure of her relation to anyone, or role in that house—basic, earthy tones and sturdy shape hadn’t transmuted, as Mrs. Littington’s had, into a statue of shadows, each in her own reflection, or rather, refraction through time. But this is not to say she was timeless.

That is to say Mrs. Littington, before any of us met her, was not the person we knew, and she changed again after she left this block. She was just like that. On the hand, the other woman was always that, wherever she went, which is to say, wherever the Littingtons lived. She wasn’t of this block, but she was of its equivalent, in Toulon or some other place. Wherever it was, it was this block.

Which, of course, is the reason no one made any attempt to speak to her. The only one less trustworthy, or worthy in any other way, than someone who leaves this block is someone who comes from its mirror image in some other town, some other country, some other world. They’re always too dark, too coarse, too uppity, too something. So they survive they way anyone else does in the moment they’re about to enter after that uncertain and hostile moment they’ll always think of as the present—protected or at least covered up. We enter, or exit, in a gown, and don’t trust anyone who hasn’t entered our lives in that way.

40; Ce n'est pas important

For a time, I was surprised that some of the women who attended my mother’s funeral, did. As far as I knew, my mother never saw or heard from Mrs. Littington again once she moved. But that’s not the reason for my consternation at seeing her again. We all knew she’d live on the block only for a while, just as she had in every other place to which her husband’d taken her from Toulon. He plucked her, or so he wanted us to think, from the rubble the Nazis, Fascists and the ones who tried to “liberate” the old quais and cathedral from them, left behind. Ce n’est pas important, she’d say whenever anyone asked her about the war, her family or the town. Or any of the other places, people or experiences of her life.

Toulon, Oran, Aden, Asuncion, Tahiti, this block—those are just the places I remember her mentioning. And oh yes—Montreal. The one place name that aparked herface from the impassiveness that was too expressionless to be called serenity. Apres Paris, il y a Montreal. Montreal, she said, was from le temps perdu, like Paris, la belle cite, which she saw once when she was just a young girl. The sun rose in her chestnut-flecked eyes when she described la claire, l’elegance of the women promenading under belle epoque skies just starting to turn gray, the clouds enfolding from the east rather than the north or west.

Verite and elegance, she told my mother, are all that matter. My mother, who did not use the idioms and syntax of her immigrant grandmother, and knew no language save for what she learned on this block, understood. No one talked about liberte or egalite at Mrs. Littington’s sort-of-bohemian aunt’s house on the Rue de Rennes, near the old Montparnasse station; only verite et elegance.

Mrs. Littington’s aunt had never married, and every day “Madame St. Just,” the tallest woman she’d ever met, came to visit. Madame St. Just, Mrs. Littington said, also had the deepest, throatiest voice she’s ever heard on a woman, aussi des hommes. Her high cheekbones, her thin neck and arms, were fin but not raffine; her bones neither those of a paysane nor of une Parisienne vraie.

But Madame St. Just was full of l’elegance and la verite, Mrs. Littington said. Even in her strangest, crudest gestures—She belched louder and more gratingly than any woman or man in her country!—seemed as inevitable and beautiful as tiles from a mosaic of the gods that were retreating from the darkening post-belle epoque horizon creeping along the curves of the Seine.

Nothing impressed the girl who would become Mrs. Littington nerly as much as Madame St. Just’s mouth, which softened and curled whenever she said la vie or told stories she’d probably told hundreds of times before but filled young Francoise, the future Mrs. Littington, like wines discovered behind doors left unlocked, then uncorked, poured and palated between furtive glances.

Somehow she knew enough not to repeat anything she heard from Madame St. Just, not to her mother or her father, and certainly not to any man—or anyone else—in Toulon. As far as I know, no man on this block has ever heard such stories. All about je/te, she’d tell my mother, not je suis ici, vous etes la or worse, sous moi.\

I wish I could remember more of those stories now. But I could just as well try to recall a lecture on quantum mechanics (I have no idea of what it is) or a religious revival my mother brought me to, had she been the sort of woman to attend such things. Wait—I’m remembering now that Mrs. Littington said that her aunt and Madame St. Just didn’t talk about l’amour or make promises about anything, not even about meeting for lunch or coffee in the garden behind the cathedral.

Actually, I recall now that my mother and Mrs. Littington didn’t really talk that much—at least not when I was present. And mother was never reluctant to talk, especially with women she knew. For that matter, I don’t remember her spending as much time with Mrs. Littington as with some of the other women. And, as I’ve said before, once she left, mother never spoke about her again.

But there she was at my mother’s funeral, older but not the wan or matronly presence someone expects from someone her age. Her unwrinkled yet creaseless black pants and jacket fit her as perfectly; she stood like one of those buildings that, in spite of its cracks and peels, doesn’t age much, any more than if someone had painted it a different color.

She’d left the je/tu—as if she and one of her friends had simply been conjugations of the same verb—always unchanged, something she didn’t have to, but could, return to. When one’s stories become je suis ici, vous etes la narratives, returning—remebering—becomes both necessary and impossible.

I don’t think I could’ve understood this if I hadn’t left this block and lived among men, in their world of capricious, pointless deaths—which it to say, their lives. Mrs. Littington never saw Paris again, or any place else in France but Toulon. My mother never saw much of anything but this block, but she seemed to understand, even if Mrs. Littington could never exactly translate into my mother’s idioms.

I don’t know where she came from to see my mother—or at least those other women—one last time. Certainly I didn’t know whether her husband was still alive, whether they’d stayed together, or what became of their children. And of course mother could never know: She remembered only the ce n’est pas important which someone misinterpreted before it reached her ears. So she didn’t stay in touch; in time Mrs. Littington surely forgot much about my mother’s life. That is why she did a double-take, then looked away from me, in the funeral parlor. Sometimes people aren’t sure, after absences of decades, whether the person they’ve come to see had a son, daughter, cat , dog, all of the above or none of the above. Not that it was important—to me, anyway—whether she remembered me, or how. She won’t return to this block, and neither, I hope, will I. We couldn’t, even if someone allowed it.

40-A, Her

Still wonder about that lady, the one whose name I never knew, the one whose voice I heard only once before the funeral. Did she recognize me? Now I’m remembering something else. The day before the funeral, when I walked through the graveyards that separate this block, this neighborhood, from every other place I’ve seen since living on it, the wind—at least I thought it was the wind—flickered across my face and the back of my hands, which I shaved every day at that point in my life. I felt my blood fluttering under my skin and another current of wind rushing over my pores. But—no tingles, no goosebumps—I realized the air was still and the sun, behind translucent clouds and the chill of headstones against my fingertips seemed still, almost neutral.

When I walked under the bronze cross at the top of the gate, she glanced from across the street, a few yards to my left. I hadn’t remembered, at that moment, that she was our old neighbor, but I exhaled fully, wholly, when the step I thought she took in my direction cut to her left and toward a house on the corner.

Didn’t occur to me that it was her—or that she was looking at me—until long after the funeral, after I ‘d left the block for the last time. She’s probably still there, for all I know.