The Virtues of Oxygen (4 page)

CHAPTER 4

A
week after her meeting with Racine, Holly found herself with her brother and sister in a funeral home. They had been charged with choosing a casket after their great-aunt Mu
riel died.

“I seem to recall that Aunt Muriel had a walnut dining-room set,” Holly’s brother, Henderson, said as he flipped through the casket catalogue in the funeral director’s overstuffed office, which smelled of stale tea bags. “Her living-room furniture was walnut too, w
asn’t it?”

“Walnut is the Hyundai of coffins,” Holly told him, taking the catalogue and opening it across her knees on the couch where she sat with Henderson. “We could at least spring fo
r cherry.”

“I have a friend who has a Hyundai,” said Holly’s sister, Desdemona, who could have chosen a chair but instead sat on a low circular ottoman covered in some kind of pink flowery fabric. “He says it’s a gre
at value.”

Henderson sighed and looked out the window, as though he couldn’t be bothered to follow the con
versation.

“How about an unfinished pine box?” Desdemona said in a low voice almost drowned out by the funeral home’s air-conditioning unit. “What kind of car would
that be?”

“That’s a beater with two hundred thousand miles on it,” Holly said, smiling at her ow
n comment.

Holly expected Henderson to make a snide remark about Hyundais or unfinished pine boxes, but instead he loosened his tie and unfastened the top button of his pressed white shirt. Holly noticed a few broken blood vessels dotting Henderson’s eyelids. His forehead was still relatively smooth, but the masculine thrust of his chin was losing a battle to the slack skin on his neck, which clearly wanted to spread its insolence, like a sullen teenager. She found herself uncharacteristically worried about him but then remembered how often he faked illness as a child. He was forever climbing on their mother’s lap, feigning a fever after pressing his forehead against the radiator in the
bathroom.

“Let’s just pick one and get out of here,” Henderson said. “I’m suffocating with all this ancient upholstery. The dust mites are everywhere. I swear I can feel them crawli
ng on me.”

The funeral director—stocky, balding, solicitous in the manner of a waiter—came back into the room. “Are we ready? I can give you a few more minutes if you
need it.”

Henderson took the catalogue back from Holly, flipped a few pages, and pointed to a cherry casket with ivory silk lining. He had chosen it just as he would a bottle of wine: not the most expensive, but in the u
pper tier.

“That one,”
he said.

“Very good, sir,” the funeral director said. “Excellent choice. I think you’ll be
pleased.”

When the papers were signed, the three of them stood on the funeral home’s wide porch, which looked out over a stand of birch trees that seemed, to Holly, to symbolize aging—the bark so fragile, layers shedding from year to year exposing the imperfections in the once-sturdy trunks. The small, blue-collar city of Newburgh, New York, was where their mother had grown up and where Muriel, sister of their maternal grandfather, had lived her whole life. Muriel had never married, but as far as any of them knew, she had been content inside her small circle of cat-loving, sweater-making, churchgoing
friends.

“I’m worried about Mom,” Desdemona said, twisting her gauzy scarf into a knot. “She must be feeling even worse than she says to skip being here for Aun
t Muriel.”

“We’ve reached that stage,” Holly said, succumbing to the mood of resignation that permeates funeral homes. “We’re standing at the precipice as the previous generation crumb
les away.”

“Uh-huh, the edge of oblivion,” Henderson added casually, looking at his watch as if it might tell him the date and time of his o
wn death.

“Dad couldn’t stand Aunt Muriel,” Holly said. “He did nothing but complain when she came to visit. Don’t you remember? He said she smelled like a w
et sheep.”

“All that knitting,” Henderson said. “Incidentally, we’ll have to get the money from Mom to pay for the casket, because I am essentially broke.” He delivered the last part with a tone of accomplishment, as if he had defied the odds and managed to pull off a feat no one had expect
ed of him.

“You don’t know what broke is,” Holly said, rolling her eyes. “You drive an Audi. You wear expensive suits, and you go abroad twice a year. You’re the one who pays for things when Desdemona and I can’t afford them. In fact, I thought you were paying for th
e casket.”

“You think there’s some law of economics that prevents me from going broke just because the two of you are poor? I’m telling you the facts. My business went under. Nobody wants a financial adviser when they have no finances left to advise.” He ran a hand over his face and avoided their eyes. “I’m filing for Ch
apter 11.”

Holly stared at Henderson as if she could see into his brain if she tried hard enough. A chill ran down
her back.

Then Desdemona voiced what Holly was thinking: “Are you really broke? As broke as the t
wo of us?”

“Holly’s not broke, she’s just in a low-income bracket,” Henderson said to Desdemona, kicking a small rock off the porch into the rhododendrons. “And dancers never make any money. There’s a di
fference.”

Desdemona pulled a hand through her long dark hair, which she usually wore in a ponytail or bun. Having it out of its restraints seemed to make her
nervous.

“We can’t afford the casket you picked out if we have to split the cost,” Holly said. “Or we’ll at least have to make sure it’s okay
with Mom.”

“Maybe we should go back in and pick a cheaper one,” Desdemona said. “Aunt Muriel would un
derstand.”

Henderson shook his head. “I need to find the restroom,” he said, and his sisters followed him back inside into a large oak-paneled viewing room, where he clutched his chest and let out a plaintive “Ow,” which gave Holly a startling twinge inside her own chest. Then she remembered it was Henderson. In response to the noise, the funeral home’s cadre of dark-suited men seemed to materialize from the paneling and practically wrestled Henderson to the shiny w
ood floor.

“Stretch him out,” one of them said. “You need a hard, flat surface
for CPR.”

Henderson tried to sit up once, then swooned back. Two of the men eased his shoulders down to the floor as the third called 911, speaking with
urgency.

“I just need some air,” Henderson said weakly, as if everyone else in the room were taking more than his or her fair share. It was the kind of stunt he had pulled when they were kids, Holly thought, and their mother wanted him to clean up
his room.

“We’ll take him outside,” Holly said, wanting to suppress the panic rising in the room around her. She didn’t want a repeat of her episode with Vivian, which had left her depleted for days. “I’m sure he’ll be fine in a few
minutes.”

“We can’t take a chance with chest pains,” one of the funeral employees said. “It’s best to be conse
rvative.”

While they waited for the ambulance, the men in suits hovered around Henderson, checking and rechecking his pulse so compulsively that Holly began to wonder if they expected him to die, accustomed as they were to
corpses.

After the cavalry came and took Henderson away in the ambulance, Desdemona and Holly followed them to the hospital in Ho
lly’s car.

“I’m sure he’s okay,” Desdemona said as Holly pulled out of the funeral-home parking lot. “This is just one of his stunt
s, right?”

“Of course it is,” Holly said, though she suddenly felt a dull ache in her left arm. “He’s pulled this a million times. Remember? Every time Mom asked him to take out the garbage he’d suddenly develop a migraine or abdominal pains. He did the same thing to Wendy, which is probably why she divo
rced him.”

As Holly searched for a place to park at the hospital, that nagging 1 percent of doubt began to creep in, and she started to wonder if Henderson might really be sick. But by the time Holly and Desdemona were allowed to see Henderson in his curtained emergency room bay, the doctors had determined that his chest pains were caused by indigestion. They gave him some Prilosec and told him to
go home.

Desdemona sat in the back as Holly drove them to the funeral home so Henderson could pick up his Audi. When Holly turned off the motor, they all listened to the ping and hiss of her old Subaru giving voice to its chronic exhaustion. All three got out of the Subaru and walked toward Henderson’s Audi, then Desdemona and Holly watched Henderson fold his six-foot-one frame into the tidy leathered nook of the driver’s seat. For some reason they all looked back toward the funeral home, which had the ivied air of a business that prints money, death being such a dependable commodity. Holly thought about the wood floor—Henderson’s CPR staging area—its gleaming planks hammered down with grief and polyeurethaned with the tears of countless grieving r
elatives.

Holly gave Henderson a long hug, half out of smugness that she had been right about his exaggerated pains and half out of true sympathy for his financial plight. She knew his sense of self-worth was tied to his bank balance. Poor Hen, sh
e thought.

When Henderson drove off, heading to an expensive apartment in Boston he doubtless could no longer afford, Desdemona and Holly walked back to the Subaru so that Holly could drive to the station, where Desdemona would catch a train back to the city. Desdemona stepped toward the car with a dancer’s unconscious extension of limbs, her toe skimming the ground before the rest of her
followed.

“I’m used to scraping by,” Desdemona said over the top of the car as Holly walked around to the driver’s side. “But I never worried about it when Henderson and Mom were there for backup. Not that I would ask,
but . . .”

“I know exactly what
you mean.”

Once inside, they both stared straight ahead through the windshield, and the car—mobile confessional that it was—allowed Holly to tell Desdemona something she’d been keeping
from her.

“Mom has been helping me and the boys lately so we could keep up the house payments,” Holly said. “But I always assumed I could go to Henderson for help if I got desperate. He was my
cushion.”

“Are you?”

“A
m I what?”

“D
esperate.”

“More like pred
esperate.”

“Didn’t Chris have life i
nsurance?”

“Who expects to drop dead at his age? He had a little insurance through work, but I ran through that years ago. I just never thought I’d come this far down the ladder,
you know?”

Desdemona nodded as they left for the train station. “I do know,” she sai
d quietly.

“But I have a second job now, so maybe I’ll finally be able to save a little,” Holly said. “I know I can’t ask Mom to help me
forever.”

Desdemona didn’t seem to hear her. She continued to look out the window as the broad, slate-colored Hudson River came i
nto view.

“When Dad died, I thought we’d have a reprieve from funerals,” Holly said as they drove through the city’s crumbling downtown, absorbing its sadness. “I thought Mom would be next, but ten or twenty years down the road. Instead, it was Chris and then Aunt Muriel, who I thought would be knitting cat clothes until she was a hundred and ten. People shouldn’t die in the wrong order. It’s so muc
h harder.”

When she got home, Holly took out her cell phone and dialed her mother’s number. She was exhausted from the driving, the casket shopping, the news about Henderson’s bankruptcy, the trip to the ER, all of it, but she couldn’t go to sleep without hearing her mother’s reassurance that it would al
l be okay.

“Hi, Mom, it’s Holly,” she said. “Just checking on you. Feeling an
y better?”

“Hi, sweetie. Yes, I’m just fine,” Celia said. “Still a little tired, but I’m sure I’ll shake
it soon.”

Holly thought she detected a note of false bravado in her mother’s voice, but she attributed it to a bad c
onnection.

“So did you hear all this about Henderson? About his
business?”

“Oh goodness. He told you? I heard yesterday, but I thought maybe he’d keep it to himself until after Aunt Muriel’s
funeral.”

“Well, he did keep it to himself until after we picked out a fairly expensiv
e casket.”

“Don’t you worry about that,” she said. “I’ll take care of it. Muriel didn’t have anyon
e but me.”

Holly felt a knot in her neck loosen just a bit. Her mother had a way of taking a heavy burden without complaint. She was the family’s financial and emotion
al Sherpa.