“How can I pass up a roomful of old beatniks?”
We reached the campus and the statue of the college’s famous founder, Horatio Ellsworth Hemphill, pointing toward the future. H.E. Hemphill had been one of those indefatigable Renaissance men that nineteenth-century America produced by the bucketful: theologian, Civil War general, advocate for women’s education, pioneer in rot- resistant seed potatoes for farmers. We took the brick circle to the right and turned north on Goodhue Avenue. We parked across the street from the P.W. Leech Unitarian Universalist Chapel.
Gordon’s memorial service was nothing like I’d feared and everything I should have expected.
First of all, the music: It was not that dirgey organ music you usually hear at funerals, that squeals away at your ears like it’s being played through the snout of a gerbil. It was jazz. Bebop jazz. Played loud and live by nobody less than Shaka Bop, Hannawa’s answer to Charlie Parker. And it was not just Shaka Bop and his big silver saxophone filling the chapel. There was a drummer and a bass player. All three of them were wearing sunglasses and colorful African dashikis. Shaka was wearing a leather porkpie hat.
Second, the people in the pews: They hadn’t come to mourn Gordon’s death. They had come to celebrate Gordon’s life. Crammed shoulder to shoulder, they were bobbing their heads and snapping their fingers, and whenever Shaka took off on some frantic run on his sax, they shouted, “Blow, baby, blow!”
Eric was thrilled by all this. I nudged him into a back pew. I resisted as long as I could, but as soon as Shaka’s trio launched into Salted Peanuts my head started bobbing along with everybody else’s. I’d forgotten how good Shaka was-and how much I liked that kind of music.
The coroner hadn’t released Gordon’s body yet. So there wasn’t a casket or urn of ashes to keep my eyes busy. There were just the people in the pews. What an odd collection! There were a lot of students, some so nerdy you just knew they had to be archaeology majors, others with tattoos and body piercings and brightly dyed hair that looked like a chimpanzee cut it. I figured they were the current crop of campus bohemians. There were lots of old hippies, too, middle-aged men with ponytails and pasty earth mother-types with long, straight Peter, Paul and Mary hair down to their sagging boobs. Professors, I guessed. Then there were the ancients, the folks my age. Most were dressed sensibly enough, although I did spot a beret or two.
Shaka Bop shifted to a surprisingly unjazzy rendition of Ebb Tide, a soothing old tune from the fifties. When everyone was mellowed out, the Rev. Bernice Wallenburg came to the pulpit. She was not a small woman. She was wearing a flowered dress that reminded me of my grandmother’s drapes. She spoke for fifteen minutes on the ups and downs of life without once mentioning how Gordon’s life ended.
She was followed by a small wiry woman with thick yellow lollipop glasses and hair so short you’d swear she was a lesbian if you didn’t know she was anything but. “Good heavens,” I whispered to myself, “that can’t possibly be Effie.”
But it was Effie. Fredricka “Effie” Fredmansky. We’d graduated the same year, both with degrees in library science. Like me, she was one of the charter members of the Meriwether Square Baked Bean Existentialist Society. Unlike me, she’d been quite popular with the college boys. That popularity had nothing to do with her looks. In the looks department she was as below average as me. But Effie had an extremely relaxed view of sex for those years. She flitted about as she wished, without guilt or emotional expectations. The last I’d heard Effie ran a used bookstore just off campus.
Effie had apparently remained very close to Gordon over the years. She told five decades’ worth of wonderful stories about him. She talked about his good heart and his easygoing ways. It made me wish I’d stayed close to Gordon, too.
Chidsey “Chick” Glass was the next to speak. Like Gordon, he’d returned to Hemphill College to teach. Except for a few wrinkles and the curly, white hair hanging over his ears, he didn’t look much different than he did in his college days. He was still skinny as the dickens. His nose still hung over his lips like the beak of a cockatoo. And he was still wearing a beret.
While Shaka Bop tootled softly in the background, Chick recited a poem he’d written for the occasion. It was in the old beat style we once considered so deep and dangerous, that was now, to tell you the truth, nearly impossible to follow:
“Man, wow,
Sweet Gordon
You vamoosed
So completely
So metaphysically
Without you and me
Resolving ever
That weighty question
That was such a thorny
Hang-up
That split us asunder
So un-copectically
Like Ti-Jean and the Howler
And now
You’ve split forever
And now that weighty question
That never mattered much
Matters not at all
And now I am bugged to the bone
Over the whole terrible ball of wax.”
Eric was the only one who clapped. I stopped his hands. “Quit being so bourgeois,” I whispered. “A beat never applauds. You show your appreciation with a slow nod and a faraway look in your eyes, as if you actually understood what he was saying.”
The service went on for another half hour: kind words and funny stories by Gordon’s old friends, praise and platitudes from his students, more wonderful tunes by Shaka Bop, a final prayer by Bernice Wallenburg that didn’t once mention God. The only thing missing was Gordon’s relatives. And I found that odd. Gordon didn’t have a wife or children, but his obit did mention a sister and a nephew. And certainly he must have had cousins. Everybody has cousins. Didn’t any of them have anything to say? Were any of them even there?
After the service we shuffled to the anteroom for cake and coffee. “Stay close to me,” I told Eric. “I mean it.”
“Sure,” he said. Seconds later he made a beeline for a girl with a yin and yang tattoo on her bare midriff.
I retreated to the safety of the refreshment table. There was a big white coffee maker. There were stacks of Styrofoam cups rising from the white tablecloth like stalagmites. There were rows of white paper plates with squares of white cake with white frosting. There were white napkins and white plastic forks and spoons. Fortunately, there also was a white porcelain bowl of tea bags.
While I was making my tea, a shadow drifted across the table. With all that white staring me in the face, it was as ominous as a rain cloud. I looked up and found Chick Glass. “I figured that was you, Maddy,” he said. He playfully flicked my Prince Valiant bangs with his fingers. “You haven’t changed one iota, babe.”
“And I see you still love those berets.”
He sheepishly slid it off his head. “Actually I think they’re silly. But for Gordon-and the poem-I thought what the hell.”
He’d put such emphasis on the poem that I just had to lie and tell him I loved it. Chick had always fancied himself a poet. “Did you really dig it?” he asked.
“The most,” I said.
He pulled a stack of folded Xerox copies from his suit coat and handed me one. “I ran them off just in case somebody wanted one.”
He grinned at me like a love-struck circus clown while I pretended to read it. I folded it into a manageable square and slid it into my purse. “It’s so good to see you again,” I said. “If only the circumstances were
