Page 52 - Demo

Uncle Tony’s Funeral (continued from preceding page) “He’s in his room,” she said. “Where else? I’m glad
I shouldn’t ask questions.
you’ve come.”
We walked through the dining room into the kitchen. “Try to cheer him up. He’s been down lately.”
After that I went over there less often. Sometimes he said he didn’t want to see anyone. Sometimes I found him in his armchair his eyes glassy or he’d be asleep with his head back, mouth open, tongue hanging out. Sometimes he slept with a happy, babyish smile on his face.
I knocked and he opened the door. A few minutes after I stepped inside, he said, “Let’s get out of here. Where can we go? I know. The Art Institute.”
~
We got the car out of the garage and drove down the Eisenhower under the post office to the lake shore. As we walked up the Michigan Avenue steps, he said, “Ever been here before?”
Bright light glared down on Tony in his coffin. I fol- lowed my parents down the aisle between beige metal folding chairs, my feet feeling the thick maroon and white pile. The air smelled heavy with chemi- cals. Short and thin, with a tired gray face, Millie had tight black curly hair, cheekbones red with rouge, lips bright with lipstick. Off to the right stood her broth- ers, George and Martin, and their wives, Sheila and Helen. They wore black and looked as though they were waiting for a bus or for valet parking attendants to bring their cars. We nodded hello. My father said hello to Millie then went over to talk with my uncles. My mother and Millie looked at each other, then hugged each other and cried. Then they laughed, wiping their eyes with their fingers. Then they hugged again.
“Are you kidding?” I thought. “Nope,” I said. “You’re in for a treat. I’ll show you my favorites.” He took me to a Cezanne.
“Hey,” I said, “that’s the painting in the book.” “Good memory.”
Whispering, he pretty much repeated his lecture on the painting and showed me other Cezanne’s. He took me to a Pissarro of a woman sewing and said she reminded him of his grandmother. He showed how that painting and other paintings by Pissarro were put together. The way he talked about the Cezanne’s and the Pissarro’s I thought I had never seen him
so intensely happy until I remembered him playing with Claire on the living-room floor or him sitting on the sofa and Claire standing with a bare foot on each thigh pushing his nose with her index finger as if it were a doorbell and him saying “Ding, dong,” her wig- gling his ears, pretending to comb his hair. They were giggling and laughing even before he tickled her and raised her upside down toward the ceiling.
Tony, solidly built, looked cramped in his coffin. They had put him into a suit and tie and had carefully combed his greying brown hair. He looked younger, with skin too smooth to be real. Smiling, he seemed happy to be somewhere else. A white thread kept his hands, better groomed than when he had been alive, together on his stomach as if he had a stomach ache.
A few months before he died, he lost all interest in art. One day I saw none of his equipment, no easel, paints, brushes, canvases—nothing. I asked him where they were. He said he had burned them.
I went over to my father who was talking with my uncles. Stout and muscular, they worked for a dairy company delivering milk and cheese to stores.
“Why did you do that?” I was horrified.
“He was always strange,” George said. “He was lucky to go to college, but wasted his chance, studying art and art history, nothing useful.”
“I couldn’t do it.”
“And this one,” Martin nodded towards me, “is he go- ing to college?”
“Do what?”
“Do it the way it ought to be done. The way I needed to.”
“Yes,” I said.
They laughed. “He’s sure already,” Martin said.
I didn’t understand but from his look and tone I knew 45
Two old women, his aunts, came up to Millie. Their shiny black dresses hung unevenly, smelled of moth balls, and were badly buttoned in back. They wore thick stockings and shoes worn down at heel.