She seemed to collect herself. She nodded mutely, eyes fixed on me with gratitude as I moved into the adjacent room. I gathered up a pen and the eight-by-eight-inch square form from the desk and returned to the couch, wondering how Clyde endured her dependency. Whatever compassion I felt was being overshadowed by the sense that I was shouldering a nearly impossible burden.
20
“treat this like a final exam,” I said. “We’ll do the easy questions first and then tackle the tough ones. Let’s start with ‘Name of Decedent.’ Did she have a middle name?”
Irene shook her head. “Not that I ever heard.”
I wrote in “Agnes . . . NMI . . . Grey.”
Irene and I sat with our heads bent together, meticulously filling in the meager information she had. This took a little over one minute and covered race (Caucasian), sex (female), military service (none), Social Security number (none), marital status (widowed), occupation (retired), and several subheadings under “Usual Residence.” What distressed Irene was that she didn’t know the year of her mother’s birth and she didn’t have a clue about where Agnes was born or the names of her parents, facts she felt anyone with an ounce of caring should have at her fingertips.
“Quit beating yourself, for God’s sake,” I said. “Let’s work backward and see how fat we get. Maybe you know more than you mink. For instance, everybody’s been saying she was eighty-three, right?”
Irene nodded with uncertainty, probably wishing the form had a few multiple-choice questions. I could tell she was still agitated at the notion of her own ignorance.
“Irene, you cannot flunk this test,” I said. “I mean, what are they going to do, refuse to bury her?” I hated to be flip, but I thought it might snap her out of the self-pity.
She said, “I just don’t want to get it wrong. It’s important to do it right. It’s the least I can do.”
“I can understand that, but the world will not end if you leave one slot blank. We know she was a U.S. citizen so let’s put that down. . . . The rest of the information we can pick up from your birth certificate. That would tell us your parents’ place of birth and their ages the year you were born. Can you lay your hands on it?”
She nodded, blowing her nose on a handkerchief, which she then tucked in her robe pocket. “I to almost sure it’s in the file cabinet in there,” she said. She indicated the solarium, which she’d set up as a home office. “There’s a folder in the top drawer labeled ‘Vital Documents.’ ”
“Don’t get up. You stay here. I’ll find it.”
I went into the next room and pulled open one of the file drawers. “Vital Documents” was a thick manila folder right in the front. I brought the entire file back and let Irene sort through the contents. She extracted a birth certificate, which she handed to me. I glanced at it briefly, then squinted more closely. “This is a photocopy. What happened to the original?”
“I have no idea. That’s the only one I ever had.”
“What about when you applied for a passport? You must have had a certified copy then.”
“I don’t have a passport. I never needed one.”
I stared at her, amazed. “I thought I was the only person without a passport,” I remarked.
She seemed faintly defensive. “I don’t like to travel. I was always afraid of getting ill and not having proper medical help available. If Clyde had to travel overseas on business, he went by himself. Is that a problem?” My guess was that she and Clyde had argued about her position more than once.
“No, no. This will do, but it strikes me as odd. How’d you come by this one?”
She closed her mouth and her cheeks flooded with pink, like a sudden restoration to good health. At first, I thought she wouldn’t answer me, but finally she pursed her lips. “Mother gave it to me when I was in high school. One of the more humiliating moments in my life with her. We were writing our autobiographies for an honors English class and the teacher made us start with our birth certificates. I remember Mother had trouble finding mine and I had to turn my report in without it. The teacher gave me an ‘incomplete’ … the only one I ever got. . . which just made Mother furious. It was awful. She brought it to school the next day and flung it in the teacher’s face. She was drunk, of course. All my classmates looking on. It was one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever been through.”
I studied her with curiosity. “What about your father? Where was he in all this?”
“I don’t remember him. He and Mother separated when I was three or four. He was killed in the war a few years later. Nineteen forty-three, I think.”
I glanced down at the birth certificate, getting back to the task at hand. We’d really hit pay dirt. Irene was born in Brawley, March 12, 1936, at 2:30 a.m. Her father was Herbert Grey, birthplace, Arizona, white, age thirty-two, who worked as a welder for an aircraft company. Agnes’s maiden name was Branwell, birthplace California, occupation housewife.
“This is great,” I said and then I read the next line. “Oh wait, this is weird. This says she was twenty-three when you were born, but that would make her . . . what, seventy now? That doesn’t seem right.”
“That has to be a typo,” she said, leaning closer. She reached for the document and peered at the line of print as I had. “This is off by years. If Mother’s eighty-three now, she would have been thirty-six when I was born, not twenty-three.”
“Maybe she’s much younger than we thought.”
“Not that much. She was nowhere near seventy. You saw her yourself.”
I thought about it briefly. “Well, it doesn’t make any difference as far as I can see.”
“Of course it does! One way or the other, we’d be off by thirteen years!”
I disconnected my temper. There was no point in being irritated. “We don’t have any way to verify the information,” I said. “At least that I can think of. Leave it blank.”
“I don’t want to do that,” she said stubbornly.
I’d seen her in this mood before and I knew how unyielding she could be. “Do whatever suits. It’s your business.”
I heard a key in the lock. The front door opened and Clyde came in, dressed in his usual three-piece suit. He was toting the cardboard carton I’d brought. He crossed to the couch, murmured a hello to me, and placed the box on the coffee table. Then he leaned over to kiss Irene’s cheek, a ritualistic gesture without visible warmth. “This was on the front porch-”
“That’s Irene’s,” I said. “I found it under Agnes’s trailer and had it shipped up. It arrived this morning.” I pulled the box closer and opened the top flaps, reaching down among the nesting cups, which were still swaddled in newspaper. “I wasn’t sure if this was a good time or not, but these were just about the only things the squatters hadn’t ripped off.”
I unwrapped one of the teacups and passed it over to Irene. The porcelain handle had a hairline crack near the base, but otherwise it was perfect: pale pink roses, hand-painted, on a field of white, scaled down to child-size. Irene glanced at it without comprehension and then something flickered in her face. A sound seemed to rumble up from the depths of her being. With a sudden cry of revulsion, she flung it away from her. Fear shot through me in reaction to hers. Clyde and I both jumped and I uttered an automatic chirp of astonishment. Her scream tore through the air in a spiraling melody of terror. As if in slow motion, the cup bounced once against the edge of the coffee table and cracked as neatly in two as if it’d been cut with a knife.
Irene rose to her feet, her eyes enormous. She was hyperventilating: rapid, shallow breathing that couldn’t possibly be delivering enough oxygen to her system. I could see her begin to topple, eyes focused on my face. She clawed at me as she fell, pitching forward in a convulsion that rocked her from head to toe. Clyde grabbed her as she went down, moving faster than I thought possible. He eased her back onto the couch and elevated her feet.
Jermaine thundered into the living room, a dish towel in her hand. Her eyes were wide with alarm. “What’s the matter? What’s happening? Oh my God . . .”
Irene’s eyes had rolled back in her head and she jerked repeatedly, wracked by some personal earthquake that sent shock waves through her small frame. The acrid scent of urine permeated he air. Clyde peeled his jacket off and went down on his knees beside her, trying to restrain her so she wouldn’t hurt herself. Jermaine stood by spellbound, twisting the dish towel in her big dark hands, making anxious sounds at the back of her throat.