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Uncle Tony’s Funeral (continued from preceding page) We sat in silence, looking at the floor.
band around them. She put them on top of the books in the bag.
“We really should be thinking of going,” my mother said, getting up. “Frank’ll be home by now wondering what happened to us.”
She took out a drawing of Claire. “Jesus,” she said, and put it back and closed the drawer.
“Where was he?” “Golf.”
“A couple of months ago, he burned his paintings, brushes, paints, everything. He’d go to work and come home but he wouldn’t leave his room. Then one night I was in the kitchen and I thought I heard laughing so I went to the door of his room and lis- tened. He was giggling.”
“Maybe Tony should have taken up golf. I just got an idea what to do with him.”
“What?”
“Put him in his room.” “That’s a great idea.”
“He was watching a sitcom,” my mother said.
Carrying the brown box Millie led a funeral proces- sion through the dining room and the kitchen into Tony’s room. It felt funny for them to be there.
Tears came. Millie hugged me and said, “We all miss him. It’ll take time.”
“Where should we put him?” Millie said.
I couldn’t stop.
“On the bookcase?” I said.
“What’s the matter, Jimmy,” my mother said.
“Great idea,” Millie said. “What do you think, Margie?”
“I don’t know,” I said and wiped my eyes with my fin- gers. But, of course, I knew. Tony had died near Rock- ford. Now, I realized, my Tony had died and it felt like something was being torn out of me. He had failed and he had known it and now I knew it. What was left?
“That’s probably best. There’s really no good place for him.”
“Well, now we really do have to go,” my mother said.
“There never was,” Millie said and put the box on the bookcase. “You get all his books, Jimmy.”
Millie walked us to the vestibule and she and my mother hugged. My mother and I went out the door and I felt like I was freed of something. We had parked a couple of houses down the block. “I hope she’ll be all right,” my mother said. Driving west on North Avenue, she said, “Poor Tony, he could never settle down or fit in. Well, he’s suffered for it, and now it’s over. ... I hope you like your books. Your aunt was very generous to let you have them.”
That was a surprise.
“Are you sure?” my mother said.
“Who else’ll read them? And I don’t want to sell them or give them to a stranger.”
“Even his art books?” I said.
“Why not? You can take a some now and come back for the rest.”
~
She went into the kitchen and got a brown paper shopping bag. I didn’t have time to think. I grabbed Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, and the book on Cezanne.
In the days following, I looked at his drawings. He was dead but not his ideas. He was right, even if he couldn’t demonstrate it in his painting, he was right. Beauty is the touch of the eternal. It has to be. It just has to. I was sure of it.
Millie took large pieces of paper out of the table drawer. “Here are drawings he forgot to burn,” she said and started going through them. “See, he drew whatever he saw out the window, the garage, the alley, whatever.”
Now I wonder. You have to believe that beauty is pos- sible today and that there is an eternal. I think I un- derstand the need for such beliefs and for believing them knowing they probably aren’t true.
“Can I have those,” I said.
“Sure.” Millie rolled up the drawings and put a rubber 49
Biancalana has had stories published by the Broadkill Review, Chari- ton Review, Constellations, Courtship of Winds, Penman Review, Rockford Review, and South Dakota Review.
“He didn’t have a TV back here. I knew something was wrong.”