Everyone at my father’s funeral was familiar
to me.
Except for one person…
One woman…
…who wouldn’t take off her shades inside the
funeral home.
I had no idea who she was. I don’t think my mom cared about her being
there, Mom had other things on her mind. It didn’t seem like The Mysterious Woman knew
anyone at the funeral.
I didn’t know how I felt about this stranger
in our midst.
About 35 years ago my dad died.
Dad “caught ‘The Cansuh’” as I
euphemistically like to refer to getting cancer. It started in that February back then when he
started falling. The doctors probed,
prodded and looked with x-ray eyes and found an octopus-like tumor at the base
of his brain.
They zapped the tumor with radiation, tried
to poison it with chemotherapy, all to no avail. The thing grew and sent it’s “tentacles” deep
into the reaches of Dad’s biomechanical control center.
By the end of summer Dad was gone.
For those of us who had watched him
deteriorate his death was a relief…his suffering was done.
It seemed as if he had been unplugged from
life and spent several months winding down to the end.
Things crossed my mind: Where did the cancer come from? Was it something he was exposed to in World
War 2? He had been near those atom bombs
they dropped on Japan
Anyway
It was time for the funeral.
Mom was there, of course. My brother and his wife were there…and
me. My sister was MIA from the event. Cousin Doug was there. A bunch of people I recognized were there
too.
And The Mystery Woman was there.
She was a mystery because she kept her
distance from the family and didn’t associate with us or anyone else.
She caught my eye because she was wearing
sunglasses inside the funeral chapel and wasn’t taking them off.
She was much older than me, probably in her
60’s like my dad…she was just a touch dowdy but still attractive.
“I’d bet that’s Zelda*,” said Cousin Doug.
“Who’s Zelda?” asked my brother.
“I reckon your daddy dated her in high
school,” said Cousin Doug. “Grandma
talked about her some over the years. I
thought when Grandma talked like that it was being disrespectful to Aunt
Johnnie, but I never said anything.”
Cousin Doug was the only person I knew of
that called my momma “Johnnie.” It was a
name my Grandma gave her.
It wasn’t until I was grown that my mom told
me the story of how she came to be called “Johnnie” and my grandma came to be
known to her and my Aunt Becky, Cousin Doug’s momma, as “Madame.”
It was the classic conflict between
mother-in-law and daughter-in-law sprinkled with the cultural clash between
South and North.
When my dad came home to Virginia Ohio
Grandma called Mom “Johnnie.” Johnnie was the name of a maid who used to
tidy up around Grandma’s big house.
Grandma had a big house and took in boarders,
the young women who attended the business college nearby. At any given time there were 4 or 5 young
women renting rooms from Grandma.
Mom figured if Grandma was going to call her
Johnnie she’d just call her mother-in-law “Madame” as Grandma’s house seemed to
be like a whorehouse with those young women living there.
So with Grandma gone since the 1970’s Cousin
Doug was about the last person to refer to Mom as Aunt Johnnie. None of us in our family thought much of it
and it was something Cousin Doug grew up hearing.
Anyway, back at Dad’s funeral…
“What’d she say about this Zelda?” I asked.
“She never said much and never said it a lot,
just, ‘Your uncle should’ve married that Zelda girl.’”
“I remember now,” I said to my brother and
Doug. “Just a bit of conversation
between Grandma and Dad one time. Just
the two of them talking in the dining room one day while Mom was out and
Grandma said, ‘You should’ve married Zelda.’
And I wondered who Zelda was and why Grandma would say that.”
“What did Dad say?” asked my brother.
“He said, ‘Now mother, I’ll don’t like it
when you disrespect Louise,’” I said.
That was Mom’s name…Louise.
“Grandma and Dad didn’t talk for a few minutes after that.”
I always wondered why some people don’t keep
such thoughts to themselves…insulting other people, casting shade on other
people, insulting people behind their back, to their face even.
The service was about to begin and Mom was
making her way back to sit with us after visiting with folks.
My brother turned to me, “Don’t say anything
to Mom about that woman.”
“Do I look like I have ‘stupid’ tattooed on
my forehead?”
“Well…”
Mom sat.
The organ music began.
After a couple of minutes the preacherman got
up and started talking about Dad, saying good things about him and his life,
saying those magic words, those holy words preachermen say at funerals.
And soon the service was over.
People were leaving, talking to Mom and my
brother.
I didn’t know anyone they were talking to so
I didn’t see much sense in hanging around.
I looked around for The Mystery Woman…she was
gone. I eased on out the door ahead of
the crowd and looked around.
There she was, walking away, down the
sidewalk, by herself.
Was it Zelda?
Or was it someone who worked with Dad.
But if it was someone who worked with Dad
surely she would’ve paused to say hello to Mom.
Was she one of those weirdos who likes to go
to strangers’ funerals? There are such
people.
If it was Zelda why did she still care?
Who was I to ask?
I was curious about the story.
But Dad never would have told me anyway, he
wasn’t a storyteller…not in my eyes anyway.
He never told me shit about anything.
Dad didn’t share.
I could just see me asking him about Zelda.
He and I would be sitting in the living room
some Sunday afternoon, he’d be watching some golf game on TV like he always did
and I’d say…
“Say Dad, who was Zelda?”
He’d probably turn, his face getting red and
yell, “NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS, BOY!”
The only time he seemed to ever confide
anything in me was the time me and my buddy Catfish were in the wrong place at
the wrong time and got into a “spot of bother” with the police.
That was when my dad told me about the “spot
of bother” he got into with the police as a teenager when he and some of his
buddies ran the tollbooth on a toll road and got caught.
What happened to Dad and Zelda?
Why did my grandmother still talk about her
after all the years?
Grandma had this thing about wanting her two
boys near her. Cousin Doug’s dad didn’t
give a shit what his mom wanted but my dad wanted to be that quintessential
“good Southern son” who bought a home for his momma and daddy and lived
nearby. It’s how we ended up leaving
Hawai’I and moving back to his hometown in The Southland.
So if he’d married Zelda from the get-go he
never would have left the old hometown.
And I probably wouldn’t have been born.
If this was Zelda who had come to the funeral
how long had it been since she and Dad dated?
Fifty years?
But what’s 50 years to the heart?
I watched The Mystery Woman walk on in the
distance until I couldn’t see her anymore.
And i never mentioned any of this to Mom.
-30-
*Names
changed…
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