Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [52]
“First time I’m wearing this suit,” he told my father.
My father reached for the suit and, like the tailor he once was, expertly examined the material between his fingertips. It looked like silk but was actually a combination of cotton and Lycra, which my uncle had chosen because it allowed the jacket to stretch without losing its shape.
“The next time I wear it,” said my uncle, “will be at my own funeral.”
When I look at those pictures now, if not for my father’s and uncle’s solemn faces, I can almost imagine that my father was simply helping his brother with the knot in his tie. Maybe this was something they’d done when they were younger, help each other dress for joyful and sorrowful occasions. But had they? They’d both worked so hard when they were living in the same country that they’d had little time for camaraderie and leisure. Then they’d spent so many years apart that they’d shared very few moments that many other brothers might take for granted.
My uncle assigned me the job of carrying to the morgue the exquisite white, pearl-beaded, two-piece suit that Tante Denise had chosen a few weeks back for her burial.
When I got to the morgue, I hesitated before entering the small dressing room. But hadn’t I, just two days before, watched the undertakers place a suit on a total stranger on the very same metal table that Tante Denise would now be lying on?
Laid out naked, in a perfectly straight line, her body rigid, her eyes sealed shut, Tante Denise actually looked like she was sleeping. But when my eyes wandered down from the folds on her neck to the larger folds on her belly and farther down to her still dark and thick pubic hair, the illusion was gone. The dresser, a cross-eyed young man who looked like he was barely out of his teens, reached between her thighs and brusquely spread her legs apart. He then lifted her arms, letting them drop with a thump once he’d placed her gloves on them. Her head fell back as he slipped her undershirt over it and I reached for it, quickly placing my hand between Tante Denise’s pageboy wig and the metal table.
“Leave it to me, please, miss,” the young man said in a voice so deep it sounded like it was coming out of someone else’s mouth. Straightening the wig, which had been sliding off one side of Tante Denise’s head, he used a thin sponge to apply a thick layer of dark brown foundation to her face, then brushed two lines of rouge against her cheeks. As he traced some maroon coloring over her lips, she finally began to look like her old self. In death, she’d regained a hint of the elegance and glamour of her youth, before the diabetes, before the high blood pressure, before the strokes, the departures and unbearable losses, which, according to my uncle, had troubled her much more than her physical ailments.
Tante Denise’s funeral was a success. It was a hot afternoon, yet still the church was packed, filled beyond its capacity to comfortably seat around two hundred people. Because she was the pastor’s wife and had for many years, before she became ill, cooked the free meals for the school’s lunch program, many people came to pay their respects. Those who couldn’t fit inside the church, neighbors, former and current students at the school, lined up on both sides of Rue Tirremasse.
During the service, my uncle got up from his usual seat at the altar and stumbled to the pulpit’s microphone.
“She was my friend, my wife, the woman who stood by me both when I could speak and when I was silent,” he said.
I remembered how much he had wanted to speak at Granmè Melina’s funeral. At least now he could, I thought. But he was unable to say more, and he walked back to his seat with his face in his hands.
After the service, the mourners packed into cars and buses and followed the hearse through the winding streets leading past the old cathedral, toward the cemetery. I was in the car immediately behind the hearse and watched as some