426
"Gone."
"Where are you?"
"I'm at Ma's house."
"Gone where?"
PARTISAN REVIEW
Clara's sister-in-law got on the phone: "CIa? He passed away
an hour ago."
The terrible thing has happened.
Clara woke her children up. "Never," she said; "Never never
never." What had she ever understood. "Never." Her son held her.
Her daughter kissed her. She felt - she dressed -like a widow in her
grief. She arrived too late to see her father's body taken away. "What
were his last words?" Clara said. But Sadie had been on the phone
when the old man died.
She stretched her body on the old man's bed, rested her face on
his pillow. She pressed her flesh hard against the narrow bed. The
windows were open and the summer cries of children filled the air:
Hide and Seek!
Kneeling, she made the sign of the Cross. She remembered
only her father's outstretched hand, she could not summon up an
image of his face. When she was young- she had not thought of this
for years - she had seen graffitti on the posters of their subway stop,
words she was supposed not to know; she'd thought she recognized
her father's spiky handwriting.
In the name oj the Father, the Son and the
Holy Ghost.
Are the stories of our lives the real stories of our lives or
are they stories about stories? She remembered his spiky handwriting,
but she could not remember his face. She said The Lord's Prayer,
stumbling over the word trespasses;
sin
came to her lips, it always
had, more easily than trespasses.
In the kitchen they were having coffee, Sadie was in her Bar–
calounger: "Kiss me," she said. Clara lit a cigarette, observed the
dandruff on the undertaker's jacket. She felt as if she had been car–
ried a long distance - this was her own voice, sighing- to a place of
no rest. She felt the future enter into her, darkly: "Kiss me," Sadie
said.
