You would think no one had ever died on Cape Cod before. Yet, on the Truro hilltop, near the Town Hall and back of another hillside where one used to find the bones of whales and their giant skeletal heads strewn among the pine trees, there was a sloping graveyard. In it was a marble cenotaph for the crew of some schooner lost in a 19th-century storm, and there were worn old slate and marble headstones, and new gray granite ones. The natives of Cape Cod must die now and then, but suitably, in winter, when there is thin snow on the ground, and the bay on one side, the ocean on the other, both visible from the burial ground, are dark and mournful. None of the summer people could remember seeing a funeral procession or a hearse, or even fresh flowers on a grave, between early June and September.
“There must be an undertaker, or a mortician, or whatever,” Ben Levin said. “I seem to remember a sign somewhere in P-town.”
“Somebody here might know,” Louise Rosenwald said, doubtfully. In her voice the timbre of doubt was most unusual, but even she had never encountered just this particular problem in all her Cape Cod summers.
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Someone they all knew had incontinently died, after only a week or two of any obvious illness. Several of Truro’s summer citizens had dropped in to see old Mabel Payne Loring during what they now realized was her final illness. She had looked gaunt and yellow, and at the same time, puffy and stained. But she was a reformed heavy drinker who had cut out drinking too late and carried with her a permanent air of hangover. Mabel had complained of pains and sensations: she had seemed apprehensive, as well as indifferent toward her visitors, who were bored with her complaints. She seemed to be receiving conventional medical treatment: old Dr. Treadwell from Wellfleet dropped in now and then and gave her pills, medicines, and shots. No one nursed her—she didn’t seem that ill—though she did live alone these days, after many a summer and many a departed husband, friend, and hanger-on.
A Portuguese neighbor, a fat old gossip who occasionally helped Mabel with housework or laundry, when she bothered with either, had seen her most recently. Something, experience probably, had made her go in more often, on her own initiative. It was this Mrs. Silva who had telephoned Louise to say that Mabel was dead.
“Must of died in the night, I guess,” she said. “I come by this morning, and she was laying there. I called Dr. Treadwell, and then I called you. She didn’t have no family I know of.”
“No,” Louise said, rather slowly, startled by death so close at hand and, as it were, out of season. She didn’t like to think of poor old Mabel dying alone like that, in grimy sheets, maybe calling out for somebody to come, and nobody there—after all the people she had known and loved and slept with, and written letters to and let stay in her house all winter when they were broke, and autographed her books for, and been interviewed by. It seemed as though some of Mabel’s current friends and neighbors should have noticed that Mabel was dying.
Now death’s thoughtless arrival, like that of an unexpected guest who must be collected and brought to the house from a distant railroad station, had a curious effect on the Truro summer community.
When she first came away from the phone, Louise went to the window of her modern house, which broached a sand dune as no old Cape house ever did—as Mabel’s house had certainly not done. Old Cape houses were set in protected places with their backs to the wind and the water. Mabel and one of her early husbands had bought a very old, very ramshackle place, with fireplaces and a Dutch oven and small windows, set well down at the base of a hollow, near a marsh. Mabel and that unremembered husband had, for months at a time in the early depression, lived there on clams and very little else. It was a difficult house to rent, with all its inconveniences, and lately Mabel had spent summers in it again, and sometimes stayed on through most of the winter.
Louise looked out at the bay. It lay calm and translucent in the early morning light, and, far out, the fragile poles of the weirs were approached by a single fishing boat. She could hear the distant sound of the engine.
“All this, right here,” she thought. “So quiet. Mabel won’t see it again.”
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Louise was drinking coffee on the front step later, still looking containingly at the view from her hillside, but already altering it a little in its proportions in order to fit it to the canvas of her memory, so the day of Mabel’s death would be a composition, a painting in terms of memory, understanding, feeling. Ben Levin, her next-door neighbor, a painter in terms of paint, from New York, came over to see her.
“Heard about Mabel?”
“Yes,” Louise said. “It doesn’t seem right. Not death in midsummer.”
“I wonder if she knew she was dying,” Ben said, slowly. “I mean, all summer. She certainly didn’t mention it to anybody, if she did. I went over a couple of days ago. The place was the usual mess and she was rooting around in her papers—you know she was trying to get her memoirs published?”
“Maybe now she will,” Louise said. “The time is about right. But it won’t do her any good.”
She saw in her mind a well-bound volume of the Memoirs of a Muckraker, Mabel Payne Loring. It would come out in paper covers at the same time. Young women writing sociological theses and young men doing graduate work in the literature of the bright 20’s and murky 30’s would all read it.
“One day over in Province town,” Ben said, “I looked in the library, to see if she was kidding, and she had a quarter of a shelf-ful of books. I was surprised. I thought of her as a poor old girl, nothing else. She’d certainly deteriorated pretty badly.”
Louise said, “Everybody had to lend her money all the time. How old was she? Sixty-five?”
“Nearer seventy-five,” Ben said. “She told me once. She was born about eighteeneighty. I wish I’d finished her portrait.”
For an instant, Louise tried to think of Mabel as a whole greater than the sum of its parts, as a person and not just as a shabby old woman with yellow-gray hair cut by nail scissors if at all, and drab wrinkled stockings, and saucers full of cigarette butts surrounding her. The stubs floated disgustingly in water, because Mabel was afraid of setting herself and her house on fire.
Mabel had been an influence in her day. She had written pamphlets about labor that had made history and, after she had explored various factories and mines and dangerous trades by actually working herself, had written a series of muckraking articles, published and republished all over the world. She had been an ardent suffragette.
But Mabel had also had a personal life. It contained husbands, lovers, a dead son, and must have at one time also held simpler associates, like aunts and uncles and cousins, as well as genuine friends. She came from somewhere in California, Louise now remembered, and had once described an incident of her early days in New York. A woman had spoken to her sharply for wearing rouge on the street. “I had such black hair and such red cheeks, people thought I painted,” she said. “But I didn’t. I was a simple girl from the mountains of California.”
“No next of kin,” Ben said. “You know what that means, don’t you? I’ve talked to several people about it already.”
“No,” Louise said.
“It means we have to see about getting Mabel buried,” Ben said. “Somebody dies—there’s got to be a funeral. I don’t suppose Mabel had a cent, so we’ll have to collect money and make arrangements. I think maybe we should announce the ceremony—after all, she was somebody once.”
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Louise’s three half-grown children appeared behind her inside the house. They had been down at the post office and had come in through the other door.
“Mabel Loring’s dead,” her daughter Sylvia said. She looked confused. Her mother wanted to protect her, yet, for an instant, a chill wind blew against her. She would die, too. Where would this child be then? Once Mabel had had a child. Once Louise had had a husband, now divorced.
“I know,” she said, with something of the coldness of that wind in her voice. “I saw Mabel, oh, just a few days ago. She was very ill, and very old.”
“Dead, on a day like this,” said Berenice, the eleven-year-old, and the boy, Luther, nine, just looked at his mother and kept his thoughts to himself. At the same time, the news had excited them and Mabel dead had some importance.
Alive, Mabel came shambling into parties and picnics whether she was asked or not: and usually she was asked, out of custom. When she left, it was also custom for her to go into the kitchen and take a half loaf of Portuguese bread, or a couple of oranges: and she invariably scooped empty every cigarette box in the house. She jumbled bread, oranges, cigarettes, and all, into the big tapestry knitting bag she took everywhere with her.
“Well,” said Louise, rising purposefully. “I suppose we’d better start making arrangements then.”
“I’ll do the inquiring in P-town,” Ben said. “I’ve got to go in anyway. I suppose there’ll be formalities. Mabel wasn’t any religion, was she?”
“No,” Louise said. “We’ll make up a service, very brief. It ought not be hard, with all the writers and critics there are around here. A few words about Mabel herself. That’s all that’s really necessary.”
By the next day, Mabel’s funeral was being discussed everywhere. Louise’s telephone rang all day long with inquiries about time and place.
“Truro cemetery,” she said. “About four o’clock. It will be perfectly simple.”
There were, suddenly, notices to be sent to newspapers and quite a long obituary appeared in the New York Times. Telegrams came from various parts of the country and one or two long-distance calls from people who seemed upset.
“I’m flying down,” an old Greenwich Village acquaintance phoned to say. “I can’t afford it, God knows, but we only die once, after all! What church is the ceremony?”
“No church,” Louise said, repeating the now familiar words about time and place.
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Yet Mabel’s death made a distinct mark in the social life of Truro, that day and the next. People met at the post office and the store, and went to the beach, as usual. But children bicycled out of their way to go by Mabel’s house with the cracked old green shades pulled down. Louise had had to go into her house and, rather against her better judgment, had taken her daughter Sylvia with her. She tried to find a decent dress and a pair of shoes for Mabel to be buried in. She found out how desperately badly off she must have been for some time—begging letters, never mailed, were stirred in with smelly old underclothes and obviously hand-me-down skirts and bathrobes. Yellowed pamphlets and scrawled papers were everywhere.
Sylvia asked, “Was she somebody important, in the olden days?”
“I suppose so,” her mother replied, shortly.
The night before the funeral was the date of an annual picnic on the ocean beach. It was one of those awkwardly managed gatherings, in which there was great social strain, as nobody knew exactly who was giving it, or who was invited, but strong feelings were felt, and incivilities were frequent.
It was nearly the Fourth of July, so someone set off fireworks for the children, and several rockets were ignited at the wrong end. One or two people swam naked, looking oddly sliced up into areas of suntanned and pallid skin. Children toasted marshmallows. Mabel got into the conversation quite often and caused one or two sharp literary quarrels over the merits of her work and whether she had any importance at all in American letters. A critic and a Fortune writer exchanged blows. A girl who worked in a publishing office said, “So this is what they call an Intellectual Treat?” and went off to make love farther down the beach, near some bass fishermen. As people left they said good night, if they were still speaking, and added, “See you at Mabel’s funeral tomorrow.”
The responsibility seemed to belong to Louise, and she worried as though another picnic had been planned for tomorrow, all too soon.
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The day of the funeral was fair and hot, more suitable for an outdoor auction. More and more, Louise felt the awkwardness of this midsummer death. Nobody seemed to know what to do or what to say as they straggled into the graveyard. The funeral began to seem like an amateur performance, hastily arranged and badly rehearsed. Old Dexter Sanderson, a shabby friend of Mabel’s from the outer dunes, had turned up in the morning, having just heard the news, with a poem he said he intended to read at the graveside. All right. Let him. These occasions ought to be more spontaneous and natural. They were all reasonable, unconventional people, after all.
Louise arrived early, wearing a dark blue city shantung suit. Some of the children were in bathing suits, ready for the beach after this was over. At least Mabel was dressed in a decent coffin, Louise thought: gun-metal gray, closed. It rested at the surface of the pre-dug grave which was covered over with one of those rather ghastly mockgrass carpets of green crepe paper.
“Shall we begin?” said the undertaker’s man, in unctuous tones that must be learned at embalmers’ school.
“I suppose so,” Louise said, looking around and seeing a far greater number of people than she had expected, including storekeepers to whom Mabel had certainly owed money, and the friend from New York who would now probably take over Mabel’s cherished cold-water flat.
Dexter Sanderson, drunk as he was, read aloud his playlet in verse about Mabel and the youthful enthusiasms they had shared in the old days, days of Gene O’Neill. An awkward pause fell when he stopped, and the undertaker’s man finally drew from his pocket a sheet of paper, and read off a curious mish-mash of phrases from the Psalms, and the Lord’s Prayer, and lines from old hymns. At the end he said, “Amen,” and “Go ahead,” and his two assistants lowered the coffin into the grave, and rattled down a ritualistic shovelful of earth. The real work of burial would be done later.
Suddenly Louise felt to its full what had been gathering in her for many hours, a dreadful grief, which she kept trying to put down by saying to herself she was sentimental, and Mabel was, after all, nothing to her, and old. But this sleazy lack of ceremony now appalled her, and she found in her head a sudden picture of her father’s Orthodox funeral, dominated by the plain pine coffin. Death had certainly been acknowledged, and on the long ride out to the Long Island cemetery a man’s life had been recalled and considered.
“Now what?” somebody said aloud, and it sounded unfortunately cheap and quick a thing to say.
Somebody separated himself from the little knot of people near the grave and came up and shook Louise’s hand solemnly, as though she were a grieving daughter. The man wore black, and he was very hot. Louise recognized old Mr. Edelbaum, who had, for many years, run one of the Provincetown dry goods stores. A taxiful of people from Provincetown had come together.
“I knew her a long time,” Mr. Edelbaum said. “I’m sorry I didn’t see her lately.”
He turned to the grave, put his hat back on, and said what was definitely a Hebrew prayer for the dead before he slowly walked out of the graveyard.
Mrs. Silva came next. She was dressed in the most intensely Catholic and countrystyle black, with a crepe veil and black gloves. She still had her blue-glass rosary in one hand, and Louise, watching her approach, was more than ever conscious of the awkward departure of the summer people.
Mrs. Silva crossed herself. “I guess it’s all over,” she said. “So quick. I’m going to burn a candle for her in church, Sunday, and I guess we can all use a few prayers.”
“Thank you,” Louise said and, as though she were a grieving daughter, tears ran down her own face. She had done those things she ought not to have done, and left undone those things she ought to have done. She wished she had let the children come to the funeral instead of having sent them to visit in Eastham for the day. She wished there had been more honorable and final words of farewell said over the dead. She wished fame did not gather dust, and black hair not fade, and that Mabel’s tapestry bag had held more than indifferent letters and stale, purloined cigarettes. She wished she belonged somewhere herself, and had a religion, or at least knew what to do, as Mr. Edelbaum and Mrs. Silva did.
“But this is a lovely place to be buried,” she said. “Anyway.”
“Cold in winter,” Mrs. Silva said. “My man died in February.”
And, for the first time, Louise noticed that the graveyard, like the houses of the summer people, was on a hillside, and had a view.
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