The Year of Magical Thinking Read Online Free PDF Page B

and not just say what you wanted?
    His eyes. His blue eyes. His blue imperfect eyes.

    and what i want to know is
    how do you like your blueeyed boy
    Mister Death

    I could not that morning remember who wrote those lines. I thought it was E. E. Cummings but I could not be sure. I did not have a volume of Cummings but found an anthology on a poetry shelf in the bedroom, an old textbook of John’s, published in 1949, when he would have been at Portsmouth Priory, the Benedictine boarding school near Newport to which he was sent after his father died.
    (His father’s death: sudden, cardiac, in his early fifties, I should have taken that warning.)
    If we happened to be anywhere around Newport John would take me to Portsmouth to hear the Gregorian chant at vespers. It was something that moved him. On the flyleaf of the anthology there was written the name
Dunne,
in small careful handwriting, and then, in the same handwriting, blue ink, fountain-pen blue ink, these guides to study:
1) What is the meaning of the poem and what is the experience? 2) What thought or reflection does the experience lead us to? 3) What mood, feeling, emotion is stirred or created by the poem as a whole?
I put the book back on the shelf. It would be some months before I remembered to confirm that the lines were in fact E. E. Cummings. It would also be some months before it occurred to me that my anger at this unknown caller from New York Hospital reflected another version of the primitive dread that had not for me been awakened by the autopsy question.
    What was the meaning and what the experience?
    To what thought or reflection did the experience lead us?
    How could he come back if they took his organs, how could he come back if he had no shoes?

4.
    O n most surface levels I seemed rational. To the average observer I would have appeared to fully understand that death was irreversible. I had authorized the autopsy. I had arranged for cremation. I had arranged for his ashes to be picked up and taken to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where, once Quintana was awake and well enough to be present, they would be placed in the chapel off the main altar where my brother and I had placed our mother’s ashes. I had arranged for the marble plate on which her name was cut to be removed and recut to include John’s name. Finally, on the 23rd of March, almost three months after his death, I had seen the ashes placed in the wall and the marble plate replaced and a service held.
    We had Gregorian chant, for John.
    Quintana asked that the chant be in Latin. John too would have asked that.
    We had a single soaring trumpet.
    We had a Catholic priest and an Episcopal priest.
    Calvin Trillin spoke, David Halberstam spoke, Quintana’s best friend Susan Traylor spoke. Susanna Moore read a fragment from “East Coker,” the part about how “one has only learnt to get the better of words / For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which / One is no longer disposed to say it.” Nick read Catullus, “On His Brother’s Death.” Quintana, still weak but her voice steady, standing in a black dress in the same cathedral where she had eight months before been married, read a poem she had written to her father.
    I had done it. I had acknowledged that he was dead. I had done this in as public a way as I could conceive.
    Yet my thinking on this point remained suspiciously fluid. At dinner in the late spring or early summer I happened to meet a prominent academic theologian. Someone at the table raised a question about faith. The theologian spoke of ritual itself being a form of faith. My reaction was unexpressed but negative, vehement, excessive even to me. Later I realized that my immediate thought had been:
But I did the ritual. I did it all.
I did St. John the Divine, I did the chant in Latin, I did the Catholic priest and the Episcopal priest, I did “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past” and I did “
In paradisum