In Case of Emergency
We buried Hank's umbilical stump in the backyard, in sight of the basketball hoop, spitting distance from where the cucumbers will be. Emmy donated the box from her first pair of real earrings, and we nestled the stump on the little mattress of cotton. It was about as big as my thumb.
Hank's mother, Della, who was certifiably nuts but had moments of stunning lucidity, sent us the remains of Hank's umbilical after her last visit. His dementia was pretty advanced by then, and Hank kept calling her "Morning Glory," which was his own drag name—but we didn't tell her that.
Two days after Della got on the bus for Newark, a small envelope arrived Federal Express. Inside was a Ziploc bag and, inside that, the dessicated leftover of the cord that, thirty-four years earlier, had looped Della and Hank together in a perfect ecosystem. Obviously, Della was cutting her ties, shedding the apron strings and the apron, too. That package said, "He's your responsibility now." As if we didn't know.
At first, I thought it was a piece of dried-up cat poop. But Mo, who'd worked in a women's health clinic, recognized the withered, rust brown bit for what it was. "Gross," Emmy said when we told her. "I hope you two didn't save mine." We hadn't, actually—even though placenta rituals were coming back in vogue when we gave birth to Em. Some of our friends even cooked theirs into soup. That sounded revolting, so we'd wrapped ours in the Sunday comics and buried it in the yard.
It was getting crowded out there. Already underground were Moishe the hamster, Hemingway the parrot, Nora the goldfish, a stray cat that died before we'd had time to name her, and Mo's diaphragm, which she'd given a ritualistic burial to mark her coming-out years ago. It was an ethical dilemma at the time, diaphragms not being biodegradable, but Mo finally justified the burial by thinking of all the condoms, spermicide tubes, and K-Y she'd have used if she'd stayed straight. Surely her diaphragm was a lesser contribution to the nation's landfill.
Hank wanted to be buried in the yard, too—"I need to apologize to Moishe for saying his tail was ugly," he said—but it turned out the county had laws about the disposal of bodies on private property, and it's hard to find the chutzpah for civil disobedience when you can't stop crying. So we had him cremated and threw the ashes off Steel Pier in Atlantic City, which was his second choice. The gray crumbs floated for a moment; then a wave came in like a giant claw and snatched Hank into the undertow.
On the way back from the shore, we told stories. How Hank loved the sound of words and would pronounce his favorites—unctuous, serendipity, calcification—again and again, until they sounded like gibberish. How he knew things—the difference between braising and sautéing, how to knit a sock, what molly bolts were for. How he'd come over to tune our piano one August and just stayed.
Hank was a friend of a friend of Mo's, and he'd been camping on various sofa beds ever since his lover died. We invited him for dinner and breakfast and dinner again, until we stopped counting and just set the table for four every time. Afterward, Hank would do the dishes, soap bubbles gloving his wiry forearms, hair flaming in the kitchen's caramel light.
Hank collected trivia, but he never made you feel stupid for not knowing. He told us the slang for gay and lesbian in a dozen languages. The only ones I remember are faygeleh in Yiddish and malas flores, Spanish for "bad flowers." Hank knew the names of the Indian tribes who lived here before, and he was the one who told us that Poe's raven, the actual bird, was stuffed and preserved and stood on a closet shelf at the central branch of Philadelphia's Free Library. All you had to do was ask.
That trip to the library was his last one out of the house. All the way there in the car, Hank and Emmy recited "The Raven" and "Annabel Lee" and any other Poe they could remember. Em's favorite line, naturally, was "Nevermore," which she'd begun using in answer to routine questions from Mo and me: "Emmy, would you like some string beans?" "Nevermore." "Em, how about practicing the piano?" "Nevermore!"
The two of them were giddy with adrenaline and springtime, so Mo and I pretended not to notice that Hank felt like a cheap marionette—all balsa wood and paper clip hinges—when we lifted him from the backseat into the wheelchair. Emmy skipped along beside him, singing lines from Poe, until we got to the library closet where the raven was kept. As soon as the librarian opened the door and a smell of old bones floated out, I saw Hank's hand grip the arm of his chair. The bird's feathers were the tired black of ruined suede gloves, its eyes flat and opaque. It listed to one side as though it would rather lie down.
"Close it," Hank said to the librarian, and when her hand paused a minute on the knob, he said it again. "I mean it. Close the goddamned door." Emmy began to cry. We drove home in silence.
Even after that, Hank still had the energy for our postdinner games of Clue, all four of us crowded on his bed. He always took Miss Scarlett, of course, and made absurd guesses, full of political and artistic allusion. "Colonel North with an Uzi in the Persian Gulf room," he'd say, or "Van Gogh with a paintbrush in the atelier."
"What's an atelier?" Emmy asked, and Hank explained that van Gogh had made himself crazy in his studio from eating lead-based paint.
"Why?" Em said, and even Hank did not have an answer to that. "Why?" she said again, and greeted our silence with an impatient toss of her hair. At ten, she was just discovering the depths of what grown-ups do not understand. We failed her daily, but so far she had managed to forgive our astonishing ignorance.
"Mom, could Hank be my dad?" she asked once, shortly after he started to live with us. Mo and I exchanged the "Okay, here goes" look. We were all set to explain about sperm donors and insemination clinics and moms who really want a baby, but then Mo said, "How come, sweetie?"
"I mean, I know he's our friend and our housemate and everything, but there's a father-daughter basketball dinner, and I thought maybe he could just pretend."
As it turned out, Hank got sick and couldn't go, so Mo escorted Emmy to the dinner. She even wore a dress. There was a gay father who spotted Mo's drag right away, and the two of them had a great time talking. Emmy got an award for Player with the Best Vocabulary. I stayed home and blotted night sweats with a Mickey Mouse beach towel.
That was last spring, a year ago. Now we are burying Hank's umbilical stump and saying what we will remember most.
"His hot-and-sour soup," said Mo, who falls asleep at night reading back issues of Food & Wine.
"The sound of his voice," I said.
Em shifted from one foot to the other. "What he told me about dying," she said finally. "He told me it hurt, and that he didn't believe any of that stuff about white light and angels, but he wouldn't mind hanging out with other dead people, because they were some of the most interesting. Except for us, that is."
She bent down and put the white box in the hole I'd dug. Mo troweled dirt over it, then wiped her face with a brown hand.
"Bye, Hank," Em said. "Nevermore."
"Never more," I said. "Never enough."
In the fall, when the ground is gray and the sun sets early, we will plant bulbs in the place where Hank's umbilical cord is buried. We will choose sultry yellow irises and black-purple tulips, crazed fiery mums and lilies that arch open without the slightest hint of prudishness. Hank's cord will turn to mineral dust and mix with the remains of Moishe and Hemingway and the nameless cat, and everyone will forgive everyone. We'll weep daily into the garden. By next spring, our yard will be a ruckus of brave blooms, roots tangling underground, a whole field of malas flores.
