LIPSTICK ON HIS COFFIN                                        

                                                                Barbara Ponse    

Among non-human female primates, estrus, the cyclical reddening of the genitalia, announces readiness to copulate and conceive.  In human females, sexual readiness is not necessarily wed to procreation. and the engorged vulva is demurely hidden.  Cultural anthropology suggests that when a woman reddens her mouth; it is an unconscious mimicry of estrus, a rosy incan-tation, promising purchase to more secret lips, Of course, painting ones lips may have no seductive motive.  If the blush on a woman's lips is a nod to convention or enticement to the male, others, typically pass judgment. 

   I asked too many questions, had too many answers.  My father was frightened of me since I was a very little girl.  I figured this out much later. At the time, I thought he just hated me.  He'd chase me down the cellar stairs, his hand raised to hit me, his mouth filled with curses.  In my dreams, he was a gorilla crushing me between the bed and the wall; squashing me like a bug. 

   I clung to my mother, which threw him into a fury.  He blamed me for all the troubles my mother had.  "You stay away from your mother!" He'd shout. But I would not.   

 My mother's unhappy childhood was a shroud around my own.  By the time all six of us were born my mother, was worn out.  Each one of "God's gifts", as we kids were called, seemed to drain life from her.  She muttered to herself all the time; her eyes looked haunted. My father thought we kids were the cause of my mother¹s sadness.  He said that if he knew what it would do to my mother, he never would have let her have us.  I used to wonder what he would have done, since the Church forbade both birth control and abortion. Years later, I heard that they were abstinent for the seven years between the birth of the fourth child, Janice, and Paul Mark, the fifth.  Seven more years passed before Teresa Ann, the sixth and last child was born.  She came into the world twenty years after I did.     

When I was very young, I forged a connection with my mother that no one else had.  In my eyes, she was an aristocrat, trapped in the wrong life; she had married beneath her station. I set myself to the task of restoring her to her proper place.  I figured she and I didn't need all those other kids and we didn't need my father either.  

  My father used to call me "back-fence Irish," a notch below shanty Irish.  He told me to quit putting on airs.  "Why don't you just be fat dumb and happy!" he'd say.  "Stop thinking!  You think too damn much!"

"I can't help it, Daddy; thoughts just come into my head!"  I'd cry. I'd reassure myself, "God gave me a brain and I'm supposed to use it!"   

 I knew my mother and I were cut from different cloth than the rest.  We didn't belong with this bunch of peasants.  We didn't even look like them. We had naturally curly, deep auburn hair.  We each had a widow's peak; a sign of beauty, my mother said.   

 When I studied Latin, I began calling my mother, Mater, in preparation for our real life that would come one day. I could not bring myself to call my father, Pater.  He worked in a factory.  Leaning over the cast iron sink in the basement, he¹d wash his hands with Lava soap. He smelled of sweat, machine oil and coffee.  Pater did not fit him.  

 Sadly, my childish cruelties hurt my father more than I could know; a hurt that was never to heal. When I moved to California, at seventeen, he, my brothers and sisters were glad to be rid of me.  Even my mother, beloved repository of my dreams, wanted me gone.  Later, when she'd lost her mind, she'd speak of me in hushed voice, "Evelyn, oh she was too much for me!" Instead of rescuing her, I was another failure, hers and my own.  The mansions, the voyages, and the life I¹d imagined for the two of us were demands neither she nor I could meet.   

 These many years later, my family is more phantoms of memory than characters in my ongoing life.  For more than forty years, we've had little contact.  My family was and is a secretive lot.  Births, deaths, marriages passed outside my awareness.  As I was away from family celebrations and troubles, I heard about the incest between the two last-born, and my youngest sister's suicide attempts by merest chance.

My trips east to see my parents did not serve to apprise me of family secrets.  "Let sleeping dogs lie!" my mother would say if I asked questions.    

My father told stories about people I didn't know.  "You remember Beth Nordgren," he'd say, confusing me with one of my sisters.   

"No" I'd say, 'til I finally began saying, "yes" to let him get on with it.     My siblings' enmity towards me grew strong in my absence, undiminished by time and distance.  The next-born after me, Dick, nurtured bitterness towards me that I could not fathom. Decades later, if contact between us was unavoidable, he'd scream as if he were seeing the devil. "Keep her away from me!"

 In recent years, my trips east became more frequent.  My parents now lived separately, my mother in a nursing home, my father, in assisted living. Both were failing.  I'd stay by the shore; visit my mother, then drive twenty miles north to see my father.  

 Not long after returning home from a trip to Connecticut, I flew back again.  My father had had another heart attack. He looked so vulnerable sitting, hunched, on the edge of the bed.  I leaned over kissed his forehead. His skin was as soft as a child's and as sweet. He rose to his feet, his face hard with scorn. My chest constricted just as it had when I was a child.  For a moment, I was afraid he'd hit me.  

"Don't you ever do that again!" He walked unsteadily into the bathroom to wipe my mark off his face.   

My brother, Paul Mark, and his daughter witnessed my humiliation.  I hid my tears.  "Help him," I said.  "I need to go."    

That was my good-bye to my father, the last time I would see him alive.   

 Until recently, with intermittent trips to the hospital, my father lived in his own apartment in a residential home, run by the Lutheran Church. Lutherans treat people better than the Catholics do, he said, though he remained devout to his faith to the end.  He couldn't tolerate being in church because of his vertigo.  Everyday, a brown robed Benedictine brought communion to him.  He watched Mass on television.    

Seven years before, my father had put my mother in a nursing home. After years of depression, she'd finally cracked and began running away.  My father would follow her in his old car while she¹d march, with seeming purpose, down Main Street.  He'd stay well behind her because he didn't want to hurt her feelings, nor remind her that she was lost.  He thought she could make such discriminations though she no longer knew her own name. Finally, she forgot who he was.  She forgot they were married.  She said it was a sin for a strange man to stay in the house with her.  Her father would not allow it.    

 His heart broke.  Her not knowing him hurt his feelings and scared him. He could not comprehend what was happening to her.  A lifetime of depending on her sense of what to do left him unprepared for the holes dementia made in her mind.  Like Don Quixote imagining the beauteous Dulcinea, he followed the imperatives of her lunacy.   

 Soon after he put her away, he sold the house on Main Street where they had lived.  Betrayed by her lost memory, he rarely visited her. He said she was turning into her own mother whom he never liked. My mother's mother hallucinated that men in the ceiling watched her undress and beckoned her with obscene gestures.  "Crazyirish," my father called her, saying it as if it was one word.  He'd stare at the sepia photograph of my mother taken when she was nineteen.  She was nice, he'd say.    

He enjoyed his little apartment, festooned with pictures of all his children and grandchildren.  There were no pictures of me in his gallery.  

 He liked the company of widowers.  They walked and chatted together in the surrounding woods.  He was wary of the widows, being a married man, after all.  One old woman baked him cakes in exchange for small jobs he did for her.  He kept his distance from the rest, suspicious of their mo-tives.   

 My father was popular with the staff at the residence.  The cook posted a note in the kitchen in deference to him.  It read NO TOMATOES FOR CHARLIE! HE DOESN'T LIKE 'EM!  The nurses put a sign on his door that read THE BOSS. He'd kid with around them in his jokey way.    

Some of the aides told him their troubles.  He said he didn't know why they confided in him.  He'd listen to their stories but re-mained blind to what had gone on under his own roof.  He never noticed the undertow that pulled his wife and family down.  He liked to keep things simple, he said.                 

   ******************   

 Candy, Paul Mark's youngest daughter, found my father dead when she brought him coffee from Dunkin' Donuts as she did every morning when she finished working the night shift.  His lips were slightly parted.  He looked peaceful, beautiful even, Candy reported. 

 When I returned for his funeral, spring had transfigured the small Connecticut river town where I was raised.  The trees flamboyantly emerald, lime and russet, raised their arms skyward.  New grasses greened the hills. The river ran brown, glutted with spring rains.  My father's funeral would no doubt be the last time I would see my family.    Death seemed at odds with the fecundity of the season, but my father had predicted he would die in the spring.  In winter, he'd said, the ground was too hard to bury him. True to his word, he died in his sleep at five in the morning, on May l4th. Weakened by leukemia, his blood no longer nourished his heart and he was released from a life he could no longer live. 

I drove to my sister, Margaret's house where everyone was supposed to gather. I was not looking forward to the reunion with my siblings, to experiencing either their studied indifference or open hostility.  Most especially, I was anxious about seeing my brother Dick.  Dick hadn¹t visited my father during his illness or in the hospital for fear that he might run into me, but of course he would be there for the funeral.  

 I had not seen Dick since I'd come home for our parent's fiftieth wedding anniversary.  His reaction to my presence was so apoplectic; I was startled into asking him what was wrong    

"Do you remember l957?" he whispered.  It was now l989.  "That guy, the guy at Wesleyan.  What you did with that guy!  Dad told me not to have anything to do with you!" he sobbed. "You cause all the trouble in this family!"     

So, his elaborate rejection stemmed from a dismal event that had happened more than thirty years before.  I remembered Harry. Triumphant with conquest, he'd actually missed his goal; he left his sticky deposit in the crease of my thigh.  

 I remembered looking into my bedroom mirror that night thinking that I had committed the worst sin.  At the same time, it had been so meaningless, so empty an experience; it hardly seemed to merit damnation. Yet, I was sure I was going to hell.  I swallowed a bunch of aspirin, and then vomited them up.  My mother, white faced and anguished came into my room that night. Like a witch, she knew what I'd done; not the part about the aspirin, but that I'd ruined my life, and shamed the family forever.    

"Please don't tell Daddy!"  I begged her.  But of course, she did.  And my father, who'd always said I was a tramp, was justified in banishing me from his heart. I was a fallen woman.    

The kitchen of the aborted yellow Victorian where my sister, Margaret and her husband, Vinnie lived was full of people when I came in the door. My arrival went unremarked. Dressed in bib overalls and work-man's boots, Theresa Ann, my youngest sister and her partner, Sharon, stood near the cellar stairs that led to the "rec room" below.  With their wire-rim spectacles and men's haircuts, it was no wonder that my mother mistook them for "nice young men."  But there was no mistaking the maternal, worshipful relationship Theresa Ann had had with my father. 

 In a speech she was to read at the funeral Mass, she recounted how she had told her kindergarten class, that our father, who had been elected president of the county volunteer fire chiefs, had been elected president of the United States.  "It seemed perfectly reasonable" she said, "that when Daddy left for work with his lunch box and thermos, he was going out to run the country!"    

 It was mostly on Theresa Ann¹s behalf that I had come back for the funeral.  Paul Mark, my youngest brother, understood having power of attorney to mean that he controlled all information and access to our father.  He forbade Theresa Ann, from talking to our father¹s doctors.  He would tell her (as well as the rest of us) all she needed to know.  In the absence of being loved, Paul Mark grasped at power wherever he could.  He was a bully yearning for someone to think him important, to care about him. He hungered for some acknowledgment from Dad; some recognition of how diligently he was taking care of him.  Our father, blind always to emotional needs, his own as well as that of his children, had now left Paul Mark eternally unsatisfied.   

 The heart of the conflict between my two youngest siblings lay in their early relationship. According to Theresa Ann, Paul Mark's nightly visits to her room began when she was very young and continued until she was hospitalized for the first time. Even recently, he had stalked her, she said.  She had crouched on the floor of her apartment while he circled her house and called at the windows to let him in.          " You can¹t get away from me!"  He reportedly said. ²I tried suicide about a dozen times; sometimes I'd cut my arms, just to see the blood."  Her voice was calm as butter.    

Paul Mark denied that any of what Theresa Ann said was true but no one believed him.  He was known for his rage as well as for intimidating anyone who stood in his way.  He bragged that he never drew a sober breath in over twenty years.  My father called him a loose cannon, yet seemed to admire Paul Mark's capacity to instill fear.  He talked approvingly about Paul Mark getting things done because people were afraid of him.    

Paul Mark had worked in army intelligence and did a stint as a mercenary in Cambodia.  He boasted that he knew state secrets. He even claimed that he was in charge of the president¹s briefcase that held the signal for nuclear war!  He bragged about the drugs he'd injected and the chances he had taken. Yet, his arrogance had a hollowness to it.  Underneath, lay his plea to be accepted by those who feared him.  I could not help knowing that Paul Mark was a lonely, unloved little boy himself when he first slipped into his younger sister's room in the middle of the night.  Like two birds, they were starving in the nest.     

Dick had already been to Margaret's house when I arrived.  Standing in the middle of the kitchen, Paul Mark was holding court.  "Well," he drew in his breath and looked at me,  "Dick says he wants to be sure he won't have to stand near you at the wake or the funeral.  He wants me to put you at the end of the line."    

 I wanted to leave.  I was crazy to have come back. The rejection no longer mattered but I felt ridiculous, being where I was not wanted, and where I didn't want to be.  I knew it would cause more ruckus if I left since Paul Mark had insisted I be there, "out of respect for Daddy."   

 I had always tried to avoid open conflict with my family, but I was not going to stand for this.  My back hurt after flying and driving for so many hours.  And besides, where would I go?  "This is unbelievable! No! I won't do it!  I will not go to the end of the line like some pariah!" I said, annoyed at my tears. 

   I refused to play the fallen woman to Dick's ancient obsession with my virginity.  I was sixty years old for God's sake!  Paul Mark volunteered to stand next to me.    

"Not at the end of the line," I said.   

 "Nope, not at the end of the line.  You'll be next to me and Cindy at the head of line.  Let him go to the end if he wants to be that way."   

 I felt so absurdly grateful for his support, I cried in earnest.   

 In the morning, we all gathered for the wake at the funeral home. The white clapboard funeral parlor stood directly across the street from the house where my parents had lived.  My father's coffin, flanked with red roses, stood on a platform at the front of the white receiving room.  He was dressed in his Sunday suit; he wore his glasses.  He did not look like himself.  His mouth looked odd, stiff and narrow, his full lower lip, diminished.  His hands were covered in deference to Theresa Ann who, having tried to die by her own hand, could not bear to see dead people's hands.    

As chief emeritus of the town's volunteer fire department, he had been honored, the autumn before he died, in a parade of all the volunteer fire departments in the county.   He'd worn his old uniform and had his picture taken as he rode in the fire truck that had been named after him.   

 Now, for his final parade, he wanted his coffin carried on the back of the fire truck to the cemetery.  As he'd wished, his fire helmet sat on top of the coffin.  Members of the fire department formed an honor guard on either side of the bier.  Every half hour, two new guards approached the coffin.  With somber salutes, they changed guard.   

 The photograph of my father in the fire truck, other early snapshots, various honorific medals and a framed blessing from the pope had been placed on a small table against the wall.  There was no picture of him with my mother.    

 Across the room was a row of high-backed chairs in front of which we arranged ourselves to greet those who came to pay their respects.  I stood next to Paul Mark, his wife, Cindy; Janice, her husband, Dan were followed by Margaret and Vinnie on my left. Theresa Ann and her partner, Sharon were next in line.  Dick and his wife, Noni, were last.   

 Like my father, Dick had a long upper lip that barely moved when he talked. His brown basset eyes were turned down at the corners in permanent sadness.  His body looked tense, as if he was warding off the very air around him.  Even his voice fought for breath in his throat.  His red hair had darkened and receded from his forehead.  Were I to have seen him on the street, I would not have known him.    

One by one and two by two my family went up to the prie-dieu in front of the coffin.  Among the first, I knelt alone in front of my dead father. Those that preceded me all wept but I struggled to conjure up feeling.  My heart felt thick and quiet.  "Good-bye, Dad.  Good-bye.  I hope you're at peace!"         

 On impulse, I leaned over and kissed him. His skin was cold and grainy beneath my lips. A scarlet imprint blazed on his forehead.  "What are you going to do now Daddy?"  It was my final, paltry defiance.    

Margaret pressed into my back, Paul Mark breathed heavily behind her.  

  "What have you done?  Take that off him! Take it off!  Right now!" they hissed in unison.    

 "I will, I will, I will."  I was calm.  I took out one of my father's big old handkerchiefs; I wiped away the evidence of my transgression.   

 Back in the receiving line, I felt more like an observer than a participant.  Few people knew who I was and I did not know them.  Nor did I really know the man they came to mourn.  

  "Sorry for your loss" someone would murmur shaking my hand and move then on to embrace Paul Mark and his wife.  "Sorry for your loss."   

 From the corner of my eye, where he stood with his wife, I could see Dick watching me.    

Four hours later, the mourners had come and gone.  The funeral director approached us; it was time to say our final good-byes before we boarded the limousines (separate ones at Dick's insistence) to go to the church.  

  "I'm going out to pray in the parking lot!" the funeral director announced. 

   "Pray in the parking lot?" Paul Mark was confused.  

  "I'm going to pray that the coffin doesn't fall off the damned truck!"    

The grandchildren served as pallbearers.  They carried the coffin to the back of the waiting fire truck.  There was a moment when the coffin hung at a precipitous angle.  I had a grim fantasy of the casket dropping and my father's body falling out.  But despite the novelty of the hearse, the coffin was secured without incident and led the parade to St. Pius for the funeral Mass.     

 We were each given a candle at the entrance to the church.  Slowly, we walked in procession to the front pews.  Amazing Grace pealed out in sweet soprano from the choir loft.  The Benedictine stood smiling at the altar, welcom-ing "our brother Charles" home to his heavenly reward.  

 After Mass, we were back in the limousines.  We followed the fire truck as it wound its way up Main Street to the next town, Rocky Hill. A light rain had begun to fall as my father¹s coffin was lifted gently down from the back of the truck to the open grave.   

We stood waiting for some direction.  Were there to be no prayers at graveside, no final words of mourning or comfort, no Kaddish for my father? No one seemed to have an idea of how to bring things to a close, yet, simply walking away felt wrong.   

 "Is the priest going to say something?" I whispered to Paul Mark.

 "I dunno," he was stymied like the rest of us.    

Something should be done.  "I'll read the Twenty-third Psalm," I volunteered.   

 I took out the prayer card we'd been given at the funeral parlor and began to read:    

'The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures."  My voice sounded solemn in the hush of the falling rain.    

I came to the phrase:     "THOU PREPAREST A TABLE BEFORE ME IN THE PRESENCE OF MINE ENEMIES."  My voice rang with the truth of the words; the rain was a benediction on my face.    

"Thou anointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over!"  I exulted. Free at last, free at last!  "Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil!"  Giddy, light coursed through me. Triumphally, I read it to the end.   

 "And I shall dwell in the House of the Lord forever!"  

 I kissed my fingers and put them to the coffin.  When I moved my hand, I saw a bright streak of lipstick glistening on the dark wood.  I lifted my eyes.  My brother Dick was watching me from across the grave, his eyes wet with longing.