Bereavements by Richard Lortz Read Free Book Online Page B

life.”
    The man was, with these words, drained of energy and interest in both his son, and in the beauty and keen sense of full-flowered selfhood of his own exposed body.
    “Go see her,” he advised Angel softly. “You haven’t looked in today; say hello. After all . . . ” He didn’t finish, but crushed the beer can, watching it crinkle like paper under the pressure of his broad fingers.
    Angel didn’t move. His eyes dropped from his father’s now-expressionless face to the black curled hair on the chest, the flat expanse of clearly-muscled stomach with its half-hidden navel, to the rounded, too-full crotch; then quickly to knees, feet, floor, where they remained.
    “After all . . . ” Auri repeated, concluding this time, “she’s your mother.”

    Dear Bruno . . .
    Among the very few options available to her, Mrs. Evans considered her salutation. She desired to write a brief, pleasant letter, but a preliminary one, subject to editing and thoughtful review, then copy a final draft.
    She scratched out the Dear Bruno. Obviously, it was too personal; indeed, in bad taste, even to a boy.
    He had addressed her Dear Madam —But to return, Dear Sir, would be offensively formal, defeating at the very start the purpose of her letter.
    Dear Mr. Carlson-Wade . . .
    That also seemed inadequate—more the beginning of a business letter than one designed to be a warm gesture of possible exploratory friendship.
    Well, then, since she intended to give her “wheel of fate” a hearty if not totally vigorous spin, why not, Dear Bruno?
    She wrote it again. No; it was impossible, even after the boy’s daring exposure of himself, his extravagant, “I . . . mail to you what is essentially my heart.” Perhaps he regretted the words now; sobered, in the sane light of morning, they may have appeared an embarrassment.
    Besides . . .
    She couldn’t traffic in hearts, his or any other; not while Jamie’s still beat within her. Dead? Even his body, when she dared to look, remained exquisite, as perfect, untouched by time—she’d seen to that!—as the day, the hour, he’d been placed in the tomb, while his spirit, his quintessential self was as much alive in her as ever. Just as she had given him out to life with a cry of agony at birth, so too, she had taken him back in, in death, and in agony different, but no less severe. The womb that carried him now, nurtured him, the new gestation that would make his “death”-in-life a “life”-in-death, was of spirit, and mind, not body, his food passion, not blood: the kind of faith and madness that moved mountains into seas.
    I’ll find a way!

    Mrs. Evans jolted into consciousness with a small breathless cry, disoriented, not knowing what had happened.
    She glanced down.
    Dear Bruno . . .
    But she had begun the letter at eleven-thirty and it was now well past midnight!
    She felt depleted, drained; her forehead and the corners of her mouth were wet. This was the third time in the past month “it” had happened. Troubled, she dried herself, again remembering the interview, fake or genuine, with Mrs. Luz: the contorted face, the trace of foam upon the pale lips, a shattered voice evoking the “dead” with an impressive prelude of barking gibberish and garish “evidence.”
    Had she been doing that too?—fake or genuine—imagining or discovering a capacity, a growing talent—whatever its name—to do the same? And would she soon be hearing voices, moving objects with her eyes, hanging misty cords of ectoplasm in the air like wash upon a line? Either way, wasn’t it a shocking joke, a warp of mind, another symptom (as Robert would say) of her indulgent Jamie-madness?
    “Carma! Bury him; be done with it!”
    Done with what?—the foolish man! She hadn’t buried Jamie, and never would. She had glorified him. But was she now hopelessly, helplessly beginning to drown in her own poetry of death?
    If she didn’t get help, or couldn’t, or manage someway to help herself, if she