An usher led Nicky up the aisle. Nicky stopped, choosing to sit near the back so that the seats in the front pews might go to a mourner who knew Mr. Allison, had worked with him, was related to him, or had loved him. Nicky had been his driver on that fateful day. That was all.
Once seated, Nicky looked up the aisle, surprised to see the casket in place in front of the altar, banked with a simple blanket of the waxy green leaves of the local mountain laurel that had yet to bloom. He had never been to a funeral outside his own church, so this would be a new experience for him.
The church was full, but not overflowing. The mourners were dressed in somber tones in fine fabrics, plain silks, light summer wool, the ladies wore simple hats and short gloves. They sat in white pine pews, facing a stained glass window of Jesus kneeling in the garden of Gethsemane. The windows along the sides of the aisles were clear beveled glass. The altar was plain, as was the lectern, covered in a white ceremonial cloth. The window featuring Jesus was all the adornment in the church.
At first, the austere interior threw Nicky, who expected the polish of brass or glint of crystal in this comfortable suburb. Where was the hand of a Michelangelo, even if it was a copy, or the flair of a Bernini, even if it was an imitation, or the genius of Leonardo, even if it was a smaller-scale reproduction of a sculpture? The scent of Madonna lilies wafted through the air, but he missed the incense of his Holy Roman Church and the sweet scent of the beeswax from the candles burning in the votive trays.
Nicky had learned to pray in ornate splendor; it was what he was used to, and what his faith provided, in exchange for his lifelong devotion. When Nicky prayed to earn his salvation, he pictured the magnificence of the art of the Renaissance, in jewel-toned oil paint, gold leaf, and silver-veined marble, awaiting him on the other side. From the looks of this church, his Protestant brethren could expect a Shaker bench and an oil lamp in their version of the promised “house with many rooms” when they reached the gates of heaven.
A minister in a black suit emerged from the sacristy as the choir sang. Mrs. Allison and her sons, guided by the undertaker, walked up the aisle, taking their seats in the front row. Nicky leaned forward as the minister talked about Gary Allison, what a fine man he had been, husband, father, and co-worker.
Gary’s eldest son stood to eulogize his father. He spoke of a parent who taught him how to hunt and fish, throw a baseball, and camp in the woods. The words stung Nicky as he listened to the testimony of the life of a good man by a son who knew his father well.
Nicky had spent countless hours imagining what might have been had his own father lived. Would they have been friends? Or would he have had the other kind of father-son relationship, fraught with misunderstandings and pain and missed opportunities to connect? The thought made him weep. He hated himself for crying.
He found his handkerchief in his suit pocket and dabbed his eyes. He questioned why he had come to the funeral at all. But given that something had compelled him to attend, he was now forced to accept his portion of a grief that didn’t belong to him.
Gary’s youngest son rose to speak. Nicky thought about leaving in the moments it took the young man to walk from the pew to the lectern, but the usher had blocked him in, and he was reluctant to climb over the old couple on the end of the pew. Forced to listen, he sat back and was trying to think of something, anything, else when he heard Mr. Allison’s son say, “Dad had never been across the ocean, and this would have been his first trip.”
Nicky wanted to stand up and shout, “Your father knew he had a bad heart, he shouldn’t have waited!” but then he remembered the man could hardly be blamed for that, and besides, travel is a luxury, and the man had a family. But now Gary Allison was gone, and it turned out that he had not done everything he had hoped to do. Nicky had seen the desperation in Mr. Allison’s eyes that day. Though he knew he had a bad heart, Mr. Allison did not want to die, and he had not planned on dying that day. It was all taken from him, and he’d had no say in the matter.
Nicky felt a wave of claustrophobia so acute he could not breathe. He began to sweat profusely as his heart raced. Putting etiquette aside, he whispered a sincere apology, climbed over the couple at the end of the pew, and escaped from the church outside into the day that shimmered like a ruby. Once free, he inhaled the fresh air in huge gulps, savoring it, filling his lungs, feeling the space of the outdoors where there were no walls.
Nicky got his bearings. As he slowly walked back to his car, he heard the ticking of the big clock, the one that determines the exact moment of a man’s birth and his death and is marked by every timepiece set by the sun. He saw the days of his life pass in the plain-faced round clock in the auditorium at Saint Charles Borromeo school, in the priest’s small gold travel clock in the sacristy at Saint Rita’s, in the cuckoo in the kitchen at the Palazzinis’, and on the flashing counter on a grenade in France. Time flew on the ticker in the dispatch office, the flimsy tin one in the garage that also housed a thermometer, the wristwatch on his arm, and on the stopwatch that Mrs. Mooney used to remit a code. He heard it on the clock that rested on his nightstand with the alarm that sounded like a garbage disposal when it jumped, metal on wood, reminding him to get up and own the day that didn’t belong to him.
Time dragged on the clock that hung in the lobby of the First National Bank when he went for the loan, the Roman numeral clock set in filigree in the dressing room at Borelli’s when he waited between scenes, and the one in the train station in Rome with the mother-of-pearl face whose onyx hands had stopped and made him miss the train that would return him to the port city to catch the boat that would bring him home to America after the war. He heard every timepiece that ever ticked, rang, gonged, buzzed, chimed, and heaved Nicky toward the end of a life whose purpose he had surrendered to please everyone but himself.
Until he didn’t. Soon the only sound he heard was the barking of a dog in the distance and a curlicue of laughter that trailed off as a cluster of girls skipped past.
It was time for Nicky Castone to live a life that mattered, where the long hours of the days of his life would be spent doing work he loved, that meant something to him, that brought meaning to the world that could only be delivered by him, where risk meant growth and the reward came in the doing.
Everything must go, he decided as he climbed into the car, and everything would—because he knew now, with a certainty that few men possess, that it would soon be him lying in a pine casket under a blanket of laurel leaves on a spring day of unspeakable beauty.
Nicky Castone decided he must not die until he had lived.
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