Burial of the Dead

PLOTS - 12

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In the television room of a lovely house on a lovely street in a quiet neighborhood of a small town, Mister and Mrs. Wyman sit in their lounge chairs, foot rests up, prepared for flight. She’s got the remote and switches channels until she settles on the Hartford station when the newscaster introduces the video of the young and handsome Attorney General standing at a podium in the Senate caucus room, flanked by a younger brother and unknown members of his family, a priest with an Episcopal collar and other supporters as he announces his run for Governor.

The sight of the young man on the TV stops Mrs. Wyman, because he’s so handsome with his hair falling in a full wave over his brow, left to right, unusual in most men, and the sad eyes, so blue, and the hard jaw, not square like some jarhead Marine, but tapered with a touch of elegance, the line from cheekbone to chin.

“Isn’t he handsome?” she says, and Mr. Wyman grunts and opens his eyes, sleepy now with time and whiskey and the last nod that took him someplace far away, gentle and kind, though out of reach, now gone, not to be remembered, as he looks at the skinny kid on the screen who’s saying something about the return of integrity to state government, about how we all can do better, about some Greek poet who wrote a play. Mr. Wyman fingers the small glass on the side table and holds it and starts to nod again wondering what it is he can do better since he’s done the best he could for so long and has accomplished so little, leaving him bereft and tired, a visitor, a watcher, like many men approaching sixty, on the sidelines of a game he once played, a game that rewards propriety and manners and absolute devotion to the boss, the company, the rightness of a life lived correctly – a life for which Mr. Wyman found a metaphor in columns of numbers and an arithmetic that seeks zero, as if seeking the grail, a magical and existential number, an unmoved and unmoving notation, a mystery and sometimes, if not a window on some other, better place, then a mirror of this place, the here and now, the unforgivable normal world, the unfortunate cipher his youngest, the gifted one, departs on occasion.

“Another drink, Henry?” Mrs. Wyman asks, and Mr. Wyman moves his glass a millimeter, which is all he has to do, and she gets up and crosses the room and fills it with rye whiskey, pouring another for herself, wiping the glass bottoms with a small towel to soak up the condensation, to make the glass cold again, to make it seem like the first and not the seventh drink of a short evening.

“I just think it’d be nice to have a handsome young man like that rise up in government,” she says, handing Henry his drink, taking her seat, moving the remote, sitting back with those foggy eyes, uncertain whether they should flash with an ever-ready indignation, or just get pleasantly sleepy in the cocoon of medicinal drink.

“Who is he?” the accountant asks, having missed the beginning, which is deadly for accountants, having missed the name or the city or the reason why all the people on the TV are so serious until the skinny kid stops talking and they let loose with smiles and applaud as if somebody had actually done something worthwhile.

“He’s Thomas Somers,” she says, “the Attorney General.”

“He’s a kid,” Mr. Wyman grunts.

“He’s Matthew’s age,” she says, defensive, defending Somers and not Matthew, which is her way of reminding her husband of failures and negation, of saying look at what this young Somers boy is doing and look at what your son’s doing - next to nothing, reliant on the state and welfare to keep him in a room where he won’t hurt himself.

“That’s awfully young,” Henry Wyman says, which is his way of telling his wife there’s plenty of time for a man like Matthew, who has troubles, problems, but who’s gifted too, who will mature in his own time, at his own speed, in accordance with the Greek concept of Kairos, capable of great things, greater than empty and self proclaimed integrity at a news conference called by one’s self to further one’s career.