Free The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch Page A

Eventually everything is suspect: I wash the car, it rains; she wears that perfume, he is dizzy with desire; as long as you whistle that tune no tigers appear. Ironies? Happenstance? Or is it that tune that keeps the tigers at bay? The finger of fate or of fate’s Maker that taps, deliberately, those dominoes, the tipping of which, down theages, is history.
    T wo years ago, my friend and mentor, the poet Henry Nugent, was cast into woe by the sudden dissolution of his second marriage. In hindsight there are always signs: troubles with teenagers, the death of elderly parents, professional appointments and disappointments. To the imponderable crises of middle age were added the ordinary stresses on a marriage that had survived seventeenyears but would not make another.
    They had met when she was a student and he was an associate professor of English at a small state university in southeastern Kentucky. His first marriage, a barren, seven-year mismatch born of lust and mistrusting, had just been abandoned, amicably, as they say, before the accumulation of property or progeny. Henry Nugent, at thirty, had boyish good looks, atenure-track position, no discernible emotional baggage, and a down payment on his literary estate in the form of his first book of poems on the shelf. Just out of her teens, the now former Mrs. Nugent was a singular beauty, darkly Italian, possessed of a marketable degree, her own ambitions, and the circumspection with respect to men you see in women raised with brothers. Hers were attributes ofbody and mind that amounted to more than the sum of those parts, which Henry spent the best part of the next two decades trying to decipher in verse. And she was attracted to the balance, she saw him always trying to maintain, between the tweedy man of letters and the lyric and irrepressible poet. That he made the whiteness of her inner thighs, the dark line of hairlets beneath her navel, and thebend of her body as she lay beside him the subject of well-crafted sonnets and villanelles and sestinas had been attractive in those early years. But if women in their twenties will trade favor for poems and warm to the easy duty of muses, by thirty they grow wary and by forty regard it as invasion of privacy and politically incorrect. They won’t be muses. They’ve their own version of the story. Butshe was twenty then.
    They were smitten. They married. Moved to Ohio. Made babies. And seemed happy enough until, on the brink of her thirty-seventh year, she called me one day to say she had had enough. She just needed a break. She couldn’t take it any more. She took the boys and the Buick and drove back to Kentucky, only returning when he had been served with papers and evicted by a force oflaw and custom too many men in the Western world are familiar with.
    Later, of course, the unflattering details shook out: a fling with a middle management type at the chicken processing plant.The name brand of the chicken would be recognizable to frequenters of the fresh meats section of their local grocery. There were hushed references to “diagnoses,” “appetites,” and “tendencies.” And publictalk, inevitably, of the most private matters—trusts broken, faiths breached, a house divided by hurts. In the end it was a sadness, as all such events are sadnesses, beyond the consolation of friends or the power of prayer. It was a bad thing that happened to good, if not especially perfect, people.
    I f Love and Death are the great themes, the death of love, in the lives of poets, is a predictablemystery.
    My friend, cut loose from the dockage of his household, looked into the barrel of his forty-seventh year bereft of wife and sons, bereft of the four-bedroom split-level he’d recently remortgaged, bereft of prospects of any kind. He came to the unhappy conclusion that many divorcing men with good life insurance come to—that the best thing he could do for his family, what was left of it,was to drop dead. His lawyer advised