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Fathers and Daughters:
A dignified man enters through the front gate. This man’s entrance is ceremonial, for appearance's sake. The entrance itself is also primarily ceremonial, also for appearance's sake. The entrance he walks through is a black iron gate with black arrowheads across the top. The curved arch overhead reads “Kensington Memorial Gardens” sculpted in a chaste cursive calligraphy into the iron works. On both sides of the gate runs a high wall made of white limestone blocks on which ivy grows profusely, giving it a suitably gothic look. The walls terminate a block down on either side at gates to adjacent parking lots where most people enter the cemetery. A visitor would expect a cemetery to be enclosed by a low rock wall or a black iron fence with spears ornamenting the top, but a high chain link fence surrounds this cemetery, with barbed wire atop it. High hedges on the inside discreetly hide the fence, but from the parking lots, the barbed wire is plainly visible. A large circular drive loops up in front of the entrance, a place where all the limousines would line up to luxuriously spirit away the black-clad mourners from the funeral services taking place in the quiet privacy inside the gothic walls. This man could have chosen to enter from the parking lot but chose to enter here, in the front, for ceremonial reasons, for appearance's sake.
He is dressed in a black suit with a black tie and a silver tiepin of a dove in flight. This man carries a briefcase filled with the ritual objects of his mission. He sets it down on the circular walkway inside the enclosed courtyard and looks around [with a dismaying sense of familiarity].
In the center is a small circular fountain. It has three levels of concave dishes into which the water drains down, one to another, making a quiet trickling sound. A bed of white day lilies in bloom surrounds it. The fountain and the flowers are separated from the walkway by three semi-circular concrete benches. He absentmindedly contemplates the number three, a number that used to be significant in his life.
He picks up the briefcase and makes his way slowly around the path. His step is unsure. He stops to take a deep breath and smells the sharp evergreen scent of the bushes that decorate the two buildings on either side of him.
One of the buildings is a traditional chapel with a circular, radial patterned stained-glass window situated above heavy wooden doors. The building is only about twenty years old but was deliberately constructed to look centuries old. The second building, across from the chapel, was similarly constructed but without the stained-glass window. It housed offices, including the one he used to work in. Both were covered with the gothic ivy of the walls.
Inside the chapel, dead children were laid out to be viewed by sniffling family members and friends. Photographers were provided for snapshots or portraits of lifeless children in their coffins, or group shots of the mourners. Some of the mourners, after signing the guest book, floated about munching on cookies laid out for them by the management. Others giggled inappropriately in the foyer catching up on family gossip and offered all the hackneyed platitudes to the grieving parents of what a shame it is to lose a child so young. Ministers were called in, from various denominations, to offer blessings (occasionally curses) on the dead children. Down below, in the workrooms beneath the chapel, women in faded denim overalls scrubbed and cleaned the child corpses, and men with up-raised pinkies, dressed and made-up little boys and girls, powdering and brushing pale white faces to make them into sleeping angelic beings, for their final appearance to the living, before being sealed away in deathly darkness inside satin-lined coffins.
Across the walkway, other work was going on. Work he used to do. This man had overseen the keeping of books: accounts receivable, accounts payable, receiving payments from vendors, making payments to employees. He negotiated with parents the size and scope of monuments and plots, small plots and markers in the outer gardens, large plots and mausoleums on what was dubbed “monument row.” He argued over prices, designs, and construction; all carefully described and regulated in the Garden’s black book of polices and pricing structures that were periodically reviewed by the board of trustees, controlled by the Kensington family. He had pushed papers and made phone calls; and assisted in creating advertisement schemes: (someone in marketing once proposed the following: “No price is too much to preserve the precious memory of your children.” It was rejected as too crass. It’s about image; all about image.) For all of his work, the Gardens was near bankruptcy.
Life had recently aged this man. A bald spot is growing on the back of his head, where his scalp is showing through thinning hair. Lines are forming around his mouth, giving his face a deeper look of sadness than it already bore, etching the marks of despair into his skin. His eyes, duller now, downcast mostly, (what is there to look up for?) lethargically scan the ground in front of him; his feet know the way. He doesn’t have to look.
He and his wife became estranged. She had become a wilted lily. They stopped fighting; they rarely talk now. They simply haunt the solitary realm of their personal gloom. She floats listlessly through the house they share, occasionally making a spark as she shuffles her slippers over the carpet or a scratch on the wall as she drags a fingernail along it, trying to touch, he does not know what, something tangible perhaps. Now, more frequently, driven from his wife’s spectral presence, he drops into a random pub for a shot of bourbon, or a southern comfort, and stands at the bar fiddling with his wedding band, turning it round and round. Then he sits alone in his parked car waiting for the hot sickly dizziness to wear off, like he did moments ago in the parking lot of the Memorial Gardens until he roused himself to enter by the front gate.
Here in the courtyard, it was quiet and cool; an oak tree, ornamental dogwoods, and maples shade it. Early in the morning, before the dew dried, it had the smell of wet foliage. A hedge obscured the rising sun in the East, so the courtyard kept its moisture longer. When the sun mounts the hedge, its rising rays slanting under the tree branches are scattered through prisms of dew on the grass, carpeting the ground with tiny rainbows. In the past, on these mornings, he would sometimes see a lone garter snake, with a yellow streak down its back, glide through those rainbows looking for a warm place to sun itself. His presence usually frightened it back into the hedge. Right now the courtyard was warm and shady, scented with evergreen, as the sun climbed higher about the trees’ branches.
His walk today was slow and mournful. If this scene were set to music, the solemn “allegretto” of Beethoven’s seventh symphony would be heard in the courtyard, faintly echoing off the ivy-covered gothic buildings.
Now he makes his way toward the rear of the courtyard where he will pass through an opening in the hedge, under another gate topped with black iron spears, down a wide, but short row of steps, to emerge at the foot of the “tranquility pool.”
Descending those steps, the first glimpse of the Thantopolis that lies beyond would be offered; he may or may not glance up to look at, a thantopolis for dead children. No adults were buried there, except its founder, for whom the Gardens were named. Right now, its monuments seemed to be resting, still sleepy from the short spring nights.
Sometimes, on dark winter nights, the thantopolis would seem hungry and malnourished. In the summertime, it occasionally felt like it was smiling. If it was smiling today, he couldn’t see it. He was too emaciated of his own joy to meet the smile of another with anything but dismay, or even at times, contempt and resentment.
The sun cast his shadow behind him, pointing toward the West, where the sun daily dies in a blaze of gold, then pink and purple, to fade to black and sleep. He entered from the West, his shadow trailing behind him, a doppelgänger that dogged his heels. He would head East, where the sun is daily reborn out of the black, into the first glow of blue, then orange, and finally yellow. Then turn south to arrive at his destination.
Right now, he descends the steps to the tranquility pool. His gaze attracted to its smooth surface, that razor-thin barrier between two worlds, the air and the water.
The late morning sun, approaching the midway to its zenith, shimmers off the pool’s water. The light refracts and dances on its lightly disturbed surface, slightly agitated by the pumping and filtration system that kept the water clear.
A few people were milling about, some glancing into the pool, others wandering in and out, down short paths leading off the plaza with the pool dominating its center, taking in sight-seeing adventures of the more impressive monuments in ones and twos. Perhaps they broke off from or joined up with the tour guides shuttling gawkers around four times a day. Business will pick up later in the afternoon.
He stood at the foot of the tranquility pool and gazed into the cool blue water. He sat his briefcase down again, on the glazed tiles that formed the plaza around the long rectangle of the pool. He stepped to the edge of the containment wall and looked down into the clear water.
The pool was filled with large glistening goldfish. Shimmering golds and oranges floated silently, others were dappled with black on white, some streaked with silver. Fins slowly fanned the water around them, and sometimes, with the flip of an ornamental double tail, one would shoot through the water to once again come to rest and float in the gentle currents of the pool. When one of those languid creatures made a shiny streak in the water, a viewer would instinctively jerk back his head slightly, just as this man did, bringing his attention back to the pool as he glanced up to survey its full length.
Those shimmering goldfish floated and darted among and between, over and around smooth slabs of pink granite on which were engraved the names and birth and death dates of the children memorialized there: Catherine, William, James, Richard, Douglas, Rebecca, Sarah, George, Matthew, Emily, Jane, Margaret and more. Children not buried there, but added after Mr. Kensington built the first monument, the children of friends, colleagues, employees, or anyone who just asked. Children lost to polio or influenza, scarlet fever, or German measles, back in the days before vaccines were available, before the death of children was supposedly put to an end. The fish swam in their liquid world not caring about these forgotten names; swam below the slightly agitated surface unaware of the turbulence of air and breath, of wind, of choking and gasping and dying.
A crisp young leaf had somewhere broken loose from a tree branch and blown onto the water. The leaf had five points like the five fingers of a hand. The tips curled up. It lay like a small green hand-print on a blue background. A groundskeeper would be by to dip it out of the pool with a net on a long pole.
He allowed his gaze to move along the pool until his vision rested on the other side. On the other side of the pool stood a man in white marble gazing at him. This life-size statue stood solitary guard over the tranquility pool and its plaza. It was a full-body statue of Mr. Kensington in his mature years. His face was rendered to be serene and kind. He had a high forehead with hair (that had to be white) wisped back over the crown of his head. His mouth portrayed sadness, and the lids of his blank eyes were half closed. His hands rested on his abdomen, one on top of the other, reaching down from broad shoulders and a straight, up-right back. He was dressed in a discrete business suit.
This was the man that had to be Mr. Kensington, not the stooped, shuffling old man that he became after his only child, his daughter Anna, died so many years ago. Her body, surly nothing more than dried bones now, was housed in the mausoleum beyond him. After Mr. Kensington’s death, when other family members gained control of his estate, they opened the Kensington Memorial Gardens and erected a life-size statue of him to stand guard before his daughter’s mausoleum. This man couldn’t understand why they turned Mr. Kensington’s back to Anna.
Mr. Kensington built the mausoleum out of grief for her, out on an isolated piece of property he owned, back when it was just a hilly landscape cluttered with pine trees and undergrowth, where he made solitary pilgrimages to her grave. He would go there at night to burn candles to keep away the dark, leaving soot on the sculpted ceiling.
The mausoleum itself had since become dwarfed by its surroundings as Mr. Kensington allowed other children to be memorialized there in the tranquility pool he built, and later when his family turned the surrounding property into a cemetery. Anna’s mausoleum, the centerpiece of the Gardens (but not the most impressive monument), was rendered diminutive in comparison.
For her mausoleum, Mr. Kensington chose a classical model; it could be a hillside temple to a minor Greek goddess--perhaps Persephone, constructed as a square shrine with four classical pillars supporting a portico, with a short-arched passageway leading into the vault itself. The inside walls were sculpted with reliefs of angels and cherubim. Its floor marble, and the soot scrubbed away from the ceiling. In the center, a baby angel reclining in sleep, its wings closed, its head resting on folded hands. Once just marble statuary, now the angel was covered with gold leaf. Below, in an ornamental crypt, Anna lies, now a skull and bones in a sunken white satin dress, her hands crossed over her heart.
A locked gate had been installed in the mausoleum’s entrance to keep unbidden gawkers away. On top of the mausoleum, up on the domed roof, he could see a red bird, an ill-omened cardinal calling out its rain song “wo-wo-wo-chew, wo-wo-wo-chew.” Beyond it, the blue sky.
He could see her, in the images his mind made, not the crumpled corpse, but a small pale girl with long blond hair spread out over a warm linen pillow. Her frail, fragile to the touch, in the warm glow of candlelight, where she lay, hot and sweaty under a mosquito net, the humid Central American night pushing her fever higher from the malaria she contracted; the nursemaids dabbing her neck and face with damp cloths, and changing the cool compress on her forehead. Mr. Kensington, nearby, cursing himself for having brought his daughter to southern Mexico, chasing after Monarch butterflies on one of his excursions, he never being able to forgive himself. Anna, late in the night, just before dawn, with the morning star rising, with one last tiny gasp of breath, slipped away into the hot dangerous night.
Mr. Kensington brought her home and never traveled again. This was the image conjured up in his mind every time he heard Anna’s story. A story told and retold by the tour guides, four times a day, to the gawkers that visited there.
He couldn’t meet Mr. Kensington’s eyes. They were the blank eyes of a statue, but still, he could find the pain if he looked into them hard enough, he knew it was there because it was his own. So, he turned away.
He stepped back from the water’s edge and picked up his briefcase, inside, his gifts for his Mary Elizabeth. He went to the right of the pool, walking the length of it, past Mr. Kensington and Anna, outward from the center, to go past the more impressive monuments now erected there, to go through the gardens, to go out there, out to the edge, where she was.
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