The Bestiary by Nicholas Christopher Read Free Book Online

perfume of flowers from various bouquets was overpowering. She was lying in a rosewood casket lined with lavender silk. They had put a blue dress on her and fixed her hair and applied makeup to her face. I had heard people say that, freshly laid out, people look as if they are sleeping; but she didn’t look like she was sleeping, she looked dead. It brought me up short. I didn’t shed tears by her casket. I don’t remember feeling anything at all. In the suffocating stillness of that place I was sure if I looked at my wristwatch—a tenth-birthday gift from my grandmother—I would discover that time itself had stopped.
    The funeral service the next day was at Saint Anthony of Padua Church, on another bus route. Wearing the same suit and tie, with Evgénia at my side, I entered the church near the end of the service and sat in a rear pew. My grandmother’s closed casket was up at the altar. The priest, flanked by acolytes, was praying over it in Latin. I glimpsed the backs of my relatives’ heads, including the children, my cousins, one of whom, a girl about my own age, had the reddest hair I’d ever seen. Once I had seen her in the rear seat of Uncle Robert’s car. This was Silvana, named after my great-great-grandmother the dryad; of all my cousins, she was the one my grandmother had most wanted me to meet. “Because you’re so much alike,” she once remarked. “And she’s going to be a great beauty, too.” But, thanks to my uncle, I hadn’t met her, and now I probably never would. I started to cry again, and for the next half hour I looked around that church, the stained glass, the icons of the saints, the flickering candles, through a veil of tears. And I never did see Silvana’s face.
    Evgénia comforted me as best she could, keeping her arm around my shoulders, stroking my head. She had done as she promised, and then some. Her courage and audacity did not extend to marching me down the aisle to take my “rightful place,” as she called it, in one of the first three rows, reserved for family. Nor would I have wanted her to make this sort of scene; I doubt either of us could have handled the consequences. So, as the service wound down, we walked out of the church, past the hearse and limousines, back to the bus stop.
    Some years later, I would discover the location of my grandmother’s grave at Sacred Heart Cemetery in Yonkers. But that night, I thought back to the first time my grandmother had taken me to my mother’s grave, a few miles to the east, in Mount Vernon. Chosen by my father, her gravestone was a modest slab of marble. Her name and dates were plainly chiseled, and in the upper corner there was a flying fish at the center of a rosette. My grandmother didn’t approve of the site, beside an iron fence at the end of a long row of graves. Down a slope of tall grass, traffic hummed on a busy road. Exhaust fumes rose through the trees. My grandmother didn’t like the flying fish, either. She said it was a symbol of resurrection for Greek sailors. “Marina wasn’t a sailor,” she muttered, resentful of this final intrusion by my father. What she wanted to say, and refrained on my account, was that my mother wasn’t Greek, but Italian—a distinction to be strictly maintained, even after death. I traced the letters of my mother’s name—their edges sharp beneath my fingertip—while my grandmother got to her knees, pulled weeds from the dirt, and planted geraniums. I thought of my mother lying face-up below my feet. Was she just a skeleton now, or was it too soon for that? I noted the dates on neighboring gravestones. Most were for old people. One was for an infant. My mother might have liked that, I thought, since she hadn’t had the chance to be with her own child. I realized that if I had died with her, I would have been buried in that place, too. Later, when my grandmother and I walked out the gates and down to the train station, I was glad to have visited, but I wasn’t sorry to