Free The Death of All Things Seen by Michael Collins Page A

family Christmas portrait. Dave was holding Misty like Karolyi did that little girl who won gold. Misty had broken her femur. It ended her career, the capstone of what might have been, and never would have, but it set Misty on the path of gracious acceptance of what the Lord ordained, like the Lord had time to look down on Misty, but that’s how she thought about it, and that’s what counted in the end. They had all these trophies behind her, like the spoils of Tutankhamun’s tomb.
    ‘In the end, Sheryl was beaten in a primary for the State Assembly, but she ended up getting Dad to enter into some ungodly tax shelter so he got on Medicare. They got the extension built with government money. Dad put his house into a Revocable Living Trust, so I don’t know what I’m entitled to. When I’ve tried to speak with Sheryl, she tells me, “Ask a lawyer to explain it!” It’s a war of attrition, and I’ve been shut out. I’m just coming to terms with that reality.’
    Joanne used the heel of her hand against her nose, blinked and blinked again. ‘This is just heartbreak talking, right?’
    Norman didn’t disagree. He said, ‘I think you understand life in a way most will never fully realize. It’s part of the process of reassessing and finding peace.’
    Joanne seemed appeased, when Norman wasn’t sure he wasn’t just lying, or lying was the wrong word. He just didn’t believe in enlightenment and reform in the way others believed something could be come upon and overcome. The reality was, Joanne had, in fact, talked too long and too candidly, so the essential mystery of her life was settled. Ordinarily, talks like this ended in the payoff of an entanglement of sheets, in a succor and commitment.
    In the stalemate of words, Joanne seemed to understand it. She offered an alternative: ‘I could make eggs and toast if you’re hungry?’
    Norman put his hand to his stomach for exaggerated effect and said, ‘Starving!’, paving the way to recommencing a normal routine.
    Joanne, in her genuine honesty, had set her finger on an essential fault within his work, and, in so doing, Norman felt a deepening understanding of how the drift of days should intersect with the fears and joys of others, and how the megalomania of his life had destroyed a crucial sense of perspective and balance.

6.
    I N THE WINTRY light of mid-morning, at the entrance to Lake Forest Cemetery, what Nate Feldman noted was not the solemnity of the cemetery, but the large number of rules there were for a place where only the dead resided.
    It took time to find his father’s grave. The newer part of the cemetery stood on a rolling tongue of hill. The grave markers were recessed into the grass. Flowers and wreaths could not be left. It said so on a sign, an ordinance that facilitated the living – namely, the grounds crew – in the expedient sweep of their commercial grade lawnmowers.
    When Nate eventually found the grave, he scuffed the snow away with the toe of his shoe and read the marker:
    T HEODORE L. F ELDMAN
    S GT
    US N AVY WWII
    S EPT 16 1922
    O CT 19 1987
    B ELOVED H USBAND & F ATHER
    Anyone walking through the graveyard would know that here lay a man who had served bravely and faced the line of fire when it was most demanded. But in this regard, Nate thought, his father’s individuality, his exact service, the nature of his personal history, was erased, so he was as faceless and anonymous as the heaps of corpses who had been bulldozed into mass graves.
    His father had found no valor in survival, or, for that matter, in the act of service. He had avoided the fetish of the dead, avoided the rousing sentiment of Veterans Day, when a nation’s thoughts were obliged to settle on the collective heroism of all those who had passed, when history and truth were always far more complex.
    He said it to Nate in as many words one evening, his father coming out to the perch of the carriage house out back of the main house to call Nate in for supper. A