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I nodded as though I understood, but didn’t really, except in some abstract sense of knowing that we all have an impulse to answer death with life.

We got dressed and attended to the doleful necessities. I called the Medical School to whom Elsbeth had left her body. A couple of hours later a vehicle arrived from Flynn’s Funeral Home and bore Elsbeth away after Diantha and I, alone and then together, spent a few more moments with the still and still-beautiful form lying on the bed.

Diantha called Win Jr. and remained some time on the phone with him. “Like talking to an imitation human being,” she told me. She hugged me again, to assure and be assured. “It’s amazing. He wanted no details, no times, or what she said, or anything else. Let me know, he said, when you’ve made arrangements for a memorial service. But Win’s never quite connected with his own species, never mind his own family.”

For some reason we found ourselves both quite ravenous. So together, already like a long-established couple, we made ourselves an old-fashioned breakfast — bacon, eggs, toast, orange juice, and coffee. But I’m afraid it only gave us the energy for grief, at first together, talking about Elsbeth, her vitality of old, her foibles, and her knack for turning life into an occasion.

Then alone. When I went upstairs afterward, the mystery of death persisted. Where had Elsbeth, where had life gone?

I spent the rest of the morning making phone calls to our little network of friends. I phoned Lotte and Izzy, who were very kind. “Come to dinner tonight, you and Diantha,” Lotte insisted. I accepted for both of us.

I called Alfie Lopes, who said he would say a prayer for Elsbeth, “though, frankly, Norman, I doubt that she really needs one. I have feeling she’s already the life of some heavenly party.”

I called Korky and left a message. I fear for the dear boy’s reaction. He already has so much to contend with.

I called Father O’Gould, and he said he, too, would say a prayer.

Upstairs, in the drawer of the little desk she used for her correspondence, I found a sealed envelope addressed to me. Inside was a letter written several weeks after we had learned the terrible news of her condition.

Norman dearest,

I know you are sad right now (or, at least, I hope you are!), but time, I know, will heal your heart. Along with my dear children, the best part of my life has been you. I thanked God every day for the chance to spend these last few, blissful years as your wife. Perhaps it is only the courage of fatalism, but I find myself less fearful hour by hour of what lies ahead. My only worry is for you and Diantha. It would be mawkish to nudge you into each other’s arms, but I only pray that you will, in some loving way, take care of each other. I am gone, Norman dearest, but I have every faith that somehow, somewhere, I will be waiting for you.

With love forever,

Your adoring Elsbeth

I wept again, and then again later at dinner, with tears and with that inner weeping of the heart, with a kind of sorrowful joy, exacerbated, no doubt, by the generous hand of Izzy, who kept filling my glass at dinnertime with a wonderful new Malbec from Argentina. Indeed, as I write this now, my head and my heart both thump painfully, and I feel the first faint yearnings for that void where I might go in search of Elsbeth.

30

Oh, Elsbeth, where are you? Why did you leave me again? My house is empty. My heart is empty. My soul is empty.

Grief is never comic. But it can be grotesque. I writhe on a rack of loss and lust. The ghost of Elsbeth beckons but so does the living presence of Diantha. I have had to all but manacle myself to keep from leaving my empty bed and falling at the foot of hers, on my knees, imploring, take me, hold me, give me life again.

But Diantha has grown distant in her own grief. She spends more time at her work now, a fixture in front of a fixture. She has promised to go to the Curatorial Ball with me, but that seems a pathetic sop to what I now crave in the core of my being. I feel like one of evolution’s bad