Burial of the Dead

PLOTS - 8

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Mark Moraski was a Marine, and his wife was Miss Cobb County – one of the last. They’d met at the pageant when Mark’s platoon had been dragged into honor guard duty. Mark fell for the soft blonde southern girl who knew how to flirt, and she fell for the Marine with the brush cut, the jaw and the blue-gray eyes. It was a brief courtship, shorter engagement; they got married with one on the way.

Years later up north in the cold weather that depressed her and the two children, Mrs. Moraski grew tired and plump and lost her looks, let her hair go brown, then red-brown with a wash she picked up from a hairdresser who believed in big hair as a matter of conscience.

Mark went to law school and worked days. The marriage was tough; law school got him out of the house longer, later. He did fair to average. Sometimes the rigidity of military-thought bumped up against the incongruities, inconsistencies of an adversarial system overseen by some Greek goddess with a blind fold. Ninety percent of law school is an unresolved shade of gray. Marines are a lot of things, but rarely unresolved, rarely gray.

By second-year he’d made some friends. He wasn’t a party-boy like the younger guys. He wasn’t a politician or some feeble kid in search of an identity. He was a married cop who wanted to be a detective with a leg up on the D.A.

He met Ann Dillon second year in Domestic Relations, taught by a tall guy from Texas who had a habit of leaving his roller-ball tip down in his dress shirts, creating small pools of blue at the bottom of his shirt pocket.

Mark was attracted to Ann, and noted the many differences between her and his wife. His mother had said: “Breeding will out.” As regards Ann Dillon, it had – even though acknowledging the hard fact would offend his wife, let alone the democratic ideals of the politically correct, ideals that reside light years beyond and above the all-too-human propensity for rewarding or penalizing appearance.

At the pageant, in full bloom, at the beach and in town afterwards, Mark’s wife had been more brilliant than stunning, a flame, a shock of beauty, which in her youth was capable of masking all the work that went into the presentation. On the other hand Ann Dillon did nothing to look the way she looked, and although she wouldn’t blind a guy with shining overstatement, she was long-time, long-term beautiful, another carrier of another generation’s pleasant burden.

Mark and Ann talked during breaks. She had little good to say about the students her age, especially the guys who were on the make and loud and bright in ways that were more offensive than attractive. She liked Mark because he was older, quiet, steady, circumspect, married and almost handsome in a jarhead sort of way.

Any school’s a closed system and students see enough of one another to see through one another soon enough. Over time all the masks, charades and postures fall away with the relentless wearing of time’s tendency towards truth. Cool students become assholes; quiet students grow wise. Benefit inures to introverts. Extroverts rise, shine and flame out. But Ann liked Mark and he liked her, and (as far as he was concerned) only some vague sense of honor, culled not from the Marines Corps or any church sodality, but from a father and grandfather from the old country who wouldn’t stand for anything as tawdry as an affair, kept the whole thing above board and, for all of that, enduring.

Years after they graduated, years after Mark became a detective and Ann (who had had some trouble with the bar exam) chose to run Cal Stevens’s office, Mark stayed in touch with her. There’d be the surprise telephone call, short conversations, a cup of coffee during the day in bright lights and public. And now he had a reason to see her again.

He made the call early in the week. They agreed upon a dark, private, cozy restaurant.

That night his kids fought over the TV, complained about a ruined dinner (one of Miss Cobb County’s new recipes), and Mark left the house, sucking air, about to yell nonsense, holding himself together, thinking about Ann Dillon, about how much he needed to be with a pretty woman and, for a short time, not to trouble himself with the consequences of decisions made at a time when he didn’t know better, when he should have known better.