A Nice Enough Funeral

It was a bright spring morning, the flowers of the Garden District were lush and open, and Baskin, unhappy with life among his numbers and equations, got out of bed slowly, dressed and walked toward his laboratory at the university. Small premonitions rode around inside him, he felt fatigued and his memory—that cavernous storehouse by which he lived—was spinning out of control. As he walked, he peered up into the leaves arching overhead, into a deep foliage that was unmistakably New Orleans, yet he saw something else: a distant ranch, his mother, the vivid snow-tipped buttes, a high pasture and the gray sweet clouds that always lingered down the length of the valley beyond his childhood house in Montana.

All that morning, then, he sat in his cubicle at the lab playing with his dull equations and thinking about his mother.

Quickthought: sitting with her in the big lunchroom at the University of Chicago in 1957. I was eight years old and proud of forking in my food European style. Very cool eating habits. Mother sat across from me reading problems out of the trig book, watching the rhythm of my eating and waiting for my answers. She read me all those problems aloud, so that I could work them in my head for her. Pleased, she offered to buy me another banana pudding and I accepted. Why all these problems when I'm eating? You know perfectly well you'll get indigestion if you don't occupy your mind while you eat, she answered. You'll get nervous tummy. No I won't, not really. Yes, you will. Drink your milk and concentrate on this one. Try to get the picture in your mind's eye as I tell you the equation. All right, now, are you ready? Yes, ready.

The prodigy years. They've ended now, haven't they? I'm 21 years old. I'm Baskin, the rememberer, the warm computer, the genius. And registration of information and recollection has always been automatic with me, yes, but why do some thoughts bubble up all by themselves? Involuntary memory, yes, I know, but it always seems so unreal.

The cubicle where he sat had no window—something he resented—so he got up several times from his work that morning and strolled around the lab. He had no assigned duties, no particular hours at the school and taught no classes. As a researcher, he came and went in first one department and then another, helping them solve their problems, entertaining the professors with his calculating speed and memory tricks, working at his own problems when the fancy struck him. So no one paid much attention to his restlessness that morning.

Toward noon, he felt a slight trembling in his hands, something he couldn't account for.

Quickthought: The wave length at which maximum intensity occurs is given by the simple formula »max = 0.29 cm/T.

He went to lunch at the Faculty Club. Two glasses of red wine (a little dribbled onto the tablecloth), two pieces of chicken, a cup of cold fruit. He borrowed a cigarette from Professor Behrman, who asked if anything was wrong.

"N-no, I'm just a little jumpy. Spring fever, maybe."

"What are you working on this semester?"

"Physical chemistry. Oh, some equations of my own, as always. Writing a little p-paper, too."

"Too much work. Take a few days off, Baskin, and go down to the French Quarter. Indulge the flesh."

He suddenly remembered going bareassed in Montana as a boy. There sat the ranch in all its splendid isolation and there were Sarah and her son with the allover tans. All through those summers of cool air and warm sunlight, we would lie on pillows on the glassed-in porch at the back of the house, books and journals strewn around, the light slanting across our bodies, or we would go across the meadows, always jabbering, of course, her large brown breasts gleaming in the warmth, small beads of perspiration gathering at her temples. The bottoms of our feet were leathery. I didn't cut my hair until I was five years old and then only occasionally, so I was a lion cub, quick of eye, in the high grass.

Lunch ended, Behrman giving him several good-natured forms of erotic advice, which he acknowledged with a fixed smile. Then Baskin walked out across the terrace, down the walkways choked with students late for the first afternoon classes and back to the lab.

Settling down to work, he broke a pencil lead. It promised to be a long afternoon. Dark thoughts hovered around the cubicle.

He began wondering, as he had often wondered in the past weeks, if his life had accelerated so that he approached a form of premature middle-age despair. That was all his genius was, get right down to it: mostly just speed. As a three-year-old, he could read the newspaper and had come to terms with triangles, Sarah's early math forms and his first music appreciation; at four, he began finding quick methods of multiplication and wrote short stories about the animals up on the mountain; at five, he composed music, but by then, clearly, numbers were his game because everything else seemed infinitely slow and plodding; at seven, he made his second trip down to the state university in Missoula with Sarah and she sat him before an examining board, the gaggle of old professors who weren't ready for him and who told his mother to bring him back, please, in two weeks, when they'd have suitable exams. They went to Chicago, instead, and Sarah turned him over for the first time to others. But all this, he speculated, is just a story of acceleration, of many minor achievements in a short span of time. And where has it led? I'm not happy in this rotework and want to do something else, something only I can do, if possible, and not merely something I can do more quickly than some other person or machine. And is this what I feel these past weeks? Or is it the first twitch of mortality? Perhaps so: the end of hope and the beginning of resignation most men feel—usually later in life rather than this soon.

There's the question, all right: What is it I can do now with this paltry index brain and with this stupid speed?

He got up again and left the cubicle and went walking outside, pacing slowly across campus, across the trolley tracks again to Audubon Park, where all the flowers of the city broke open their perfumes. He liked New Orleans in the springtime, before the humid weather set in, but his thoughts were far off and he kept seeing the jagged peaks above the Montana ranch, the white ballast of snow on the barns and outbuildings, Sarah at her typewriter, sitting there in that pudgy slump of hers as she struck out the words that made their living. Her brown body: naked all summer and heavy with great, oversized Mackinaws all winter. He pictured her in the kitchen at the stove, boiling pots all around her, odors of meat sauce and pudding ambushing him as he sat waiting at the table, his book splayed open. The agony of those odors! He got annoyed with her constant questionings, told her so, suffered them all the more and waited for the food. And they were fat together: two Buddhas, paunchy and wise.

Alongside the lagoon running through the park, the girls from the nearby universities and colleges sunned themselves on blankets and towels, and Baskin thought of Sarah's nudism, smiling, thinking of her dumpy body, the dark patch of hair, the sag of her belly. She explained nudism, he remembered, as purely one of her eccentricities, not something he should especially take up for himself, but he always joined in when the weather wasn't nippy. His torso was round, like hers, only more pale. Everyone who came to the ranch to visit joined in, too, and he remembered his earliest of early memories: searching through the clothes that hung in the bathrooms and wardrobes and closets while everyone padded around outdoors. Once, he piled everyone's money into one pile. There must have been 20 guests or more, all of them outdoors ping-ponging and barbecuing, paying him no attention—he must have been four years old at the time—and when they came back inside, there were many groans and admonishments and complaints. But Sarah was up to his tricks and said, "OK, Baskin, put it all back." And, of course, he remembered just how much everyone had, down to the last penny: The brown seersucker pants had 78 cents in the right-hand front pocket (two quarters, two dimes, a nickel, three pennies) and the blue jeans had 40 cents in change and $90 in the alligator billfold.

Quickthought: Sarah's nudism: She wasn't at all cultish about it and never made speeches and, for that matter, there weren't any literature or any picture magazines in the house. But a (continued on page 138) nudist she was, true, and so were her guests more often than not, most of the editors who flew out from New York, all the cowboys, all the old girlfriends. It was a place of varisized and odd-shaped dear cunts and dingdongs: the men flapping and dangling as they jumped around, slapping the volleyball, and the women all variously bushy and demure and the children, when occasionally there were other children, all bald and somehow sadly plain. More than nudism, as Sarah herself would explain to him, it was pantheism: the worship of the outdoors, all things natural and lovely.

Girls alongside the lagoon now. He looked at his watch. Three o'clock in the afternoon. Fourth of April. Premonitions.

At the edge of the water, he saw his reflection there between the lily pads: shaggy head of hair, a Baskin less paunchy than as a child, decent-looking, in fact, yet wearing a soft frown of melancholy.

He walked and mused. For more than a year, he said to himself in review, I've worked here as an interdepartmental researcher, a job they invented for me, yet it's work I can do, that's the sad part, and in truth, I'm just a damned oddity, a quirk of nature and Sarah's creation. And, besides, the charm of being a kid is finished. No longer when I multiply five figures by four figures in 15 seconds do the professors grin and bear it. No more hands in my blond curls, no more candy bars. I'm getting cranky and going the way of all genius—into mildly annoying eccentricity.

Back to the laboratory. An odor of sulphur tinged the air. As Baskin took his place in the cubicle, he saw that his hands were shaking again.

I'm not a moody person, he explained to himself. I'm not one of those middle-range geniuses who suffer emotional hang-ups, not at all. What was it Sarah explained to me? Ah, yes: Individuals with I. Q.s above 160 like you, Baskin, just don't succumb to the nervous breakdowns of lesser minds. All right, I accept that—but what is this I'm feeling? An emotional nausea, I'd say.

He got up and left the cubicle again.

Slightly disgusted with himself for being so restless, he began to trust his premonition. Too many times, his thoughts had leaped at something he couldn't explain; he had taught himself to try his hunches. Now, as he walked out of the building again, he let loose the worry boiling inside him, let his emotions free-fall, so that perhaps he could somehow fathom them. Oh, shit, he said to himself, this is awful. And for no reason at all, he felt that a sob might escape his throat. His eyes burned and he stopped and leaned against the cold brick wall of the building.

Summary: eight years at that ranch, eight years alone with Sarah when it was just she and I and our thought games and our books and our long conversations, eight years of Sarah as momma. Then Chicago: eight more years, the difficult ones, when I was no longer Sarah's alone but part of many people, my professors and colleagues and acquaintances and admirers, and when Sarah and I be

The loveliness of formulas: the beauty of that great cosmic black-body radiation at three degrees Kelvin.

Dean Parmelee was at his side. He had coffee breath and clutched Baskin's shoulder.

"What is it?" the dean rasped at him. "Have you already heard?"

Baskin nodded yes. Of course, he didn't know exactly, hadn't heard the words that the dean had intended to utter, had no idea of the telephone conversation the dean had finished with Kate McCluskey up at the ranch just moments before, yet his thoughts were pinwheeling along at blinding speed and he was receiving tremors in the afternoon silence of the campus and knew the feeling that bombarded him: It was grief. Never before had the gears of his mind shifted into such a strange, extrasensory latitude. But in that moment, he knew that Sarah was dead.

• • •

Strapped into his seat in the plane, his thoughts skipped back across the events of the day, the last months, then back across the years.

Summary: eight years at that ranch, eight years alone with Sarah when it was just she and I and our thought games and our books and our long conversations, eight years of Sarah as momma. Then Chicago: eight more years, the difficult ones, when I was no longer Sarah's alone but part of many people, my professors and colleagues and acquaintances and admirers, and when Sarah and I became antagonists and fussy combatants. Then, five years away from each other: the time spent at my jobs in New York and New Orleans. And now: Sarah's death. This: the exile's return, the long voyage back.

Summary: Of course, long before this all happened, there was Sarah alone in New York, back in the days when she was a free-lance reporter, doing stories for the Herald and for Collier's, Saturday Review of Literature, Post and occasionally The Times. This was just after the War, Baskin recalled, and he thought of the photos of Sarah that had been piled unglued into all those old scrapbooks in the ranch library: photographs of a slightly plump, always smiling, tough, randy girl reporter, her red hair swept back tightly on her head, a cigarette sometimes drooping from her lips, a face something like a fat Myrna Loy's with the features set pleasantly apart, small eyes, a good nose. She was not particularly pretty, no, and that's perhaps why she went until she was 31 years old before getting seriously mixed up with a man. Of course, there was her career, Baskin felt, and the War. But more than anything, the fact was that she was plump and plain and took refuge in her deadlines and interviews, in her individualism as a newspaperwoman among men.

The plane roared down the runway, soared, leveled off. Baskin sat transfixed, looking out, and estimated their cruising speed at about 400 mph.

Momentum = hv/c2 x c = hv/c.

Momentum and mass, the velocity of light, waves and photons: The memory is quicker than all these, Baskin knew, and images came roaring back now, particles of the past like cosmic dust, wisps of thought.

When Sarah became pregnant by Dierker—early 1949, the year was—of course they couldn't marry. Dierker had three children, a big house up in Ossining and was jockeying for the presidency of his publishing firm. They were in love, but no matter; it was arranged for Sarah to leave New York, to go back to her parents in Montana and to live out the poignancy of the separation. There was also money involved: a few thousand from Dierker—Baskin never found out exactly how much—and a contract for two Western novels, the quick-sell pulp variety, for which Sarah received the unusually high sum of $2000 in advances because of Dierker's influence.

Sarah decided to buy a ranch instead of living with her parents, and although her mother helped with the birth and for a few days afterward, it was soon just Sarah and the child. She wrote her books and tried to survive the winter. Then, amazingly, her first Western, Draw Poker, sold 200,000 paperback copies. The next, Winter Kill, was serialized in Post, sold another 225,000 copies at 25 cents each and was bought by Warner Bros., never, unfortunately, to be made into the Errol Flynn movie that Sarah dreamed about. Yet, her new life was started and she would never go back to New York to stay. The first winter, with all its blowdowns along the ridges above the ranch, its heavy gray skies, the snow, the physical labor of washing and cooking and tending to the new baby, didn't discourage her. In the spring, buoyant and pleased with herself, if a little fatter, she paid off the mortgage on the ranch, bought a new jeep, a tractor, took an advance of $10,000 on the hard-back edition of her third novel (because of the sales, she had advanced in three books from a pulp writer to a "distinguished female author of Western lore," according to a New York Herald Tribune reviewer) and began some permanent improvements on the living quarters.

That first summer after Baskin's arrival, from all he now understood of the (continued on page 202)Nice Enough Funeral(continued from page 138) things Sarah had said over the years, his mother decided to do something about her loneliness. She invited Dierker and others from New York to come for a visit, and they came. It was mostly for sex, Baskin supposed, yet not altogether. They did take off their clothes, yes, but it was more matter-of-fact than an orgy, very much like those later summers Baskin could recall for himself when there was less exhibitionism than love of the outdoors and good humor. Sarah was awfully plump, for one thing, and didn't inspire an atmosphere of sexuality and the erotic; the men were also worn from the long New York winters, soft in the gut from too many business lunches at the better French restaurants where the editors and agents gathered, pale of skin and tender of foot. There was little else to do but laugh at themselves when they first stripped down during their summer visits, Baskin remembered.

In the winters, Sarah and Baskin would mostly stay at the ranch while she undertook his education, occasionally going back to New York to visit and make a deal on a new book and occasionally going down to Mexico or the Virgin Islands. This was the schedule for all those eight years: a winter of books and Sarah's speed methods and clothes followed by a summer of house guests, social occasions, food and nakedness.

"You know we can't come to New York now," she used to say into the telephone. "We're busy with Baskin's studies. No, of course not. He never attends school. I don't want school interfering with his education!"

If that first summer of visitors was essentially a sexual adventure, even so, Baskin could understand it. The ranch was a lonely place, the house set out at a desolate distance from other houses, miles from town, and Sarah had only a child to talk to, so that her loneliness probably intensified. She needed men, a toss in bed, conversation, all those things. She used to stand at the window, a wide expanse of snow outside, drumming her fingers lightly, as he rattled off his reading assignments.

Sex, yes: There might have been a mild promiscuity in it all. But only mild. Dierker's friends, a lot of them—no doubt of this—came to the ranch out of curiosity, as one might go to any nudist colony. But when the clothes were heaped in the closets and wardrobes, everything was suddenly more tribal than sexual—or at least seemed that way. Sure, they made love. There were many jokes about mosquitoes, jokes he always only partially understood as a child. Sometimes there were jealousies he detected. And once, true, he had witnessed the act itself. That was out in the stable—he must have been about seven years old, mature enough, anyway, to be interested in such recreations—when he looked down from the rafters, where he was playing and climbing, at a Jewish girl named Melissa and good old Dierker. They had come in from riding. Of course, they wore jeans while in the saddle, and boots and shirts as well, so in the process of getting undressed—they were laughing and giggling a lot, he recalled—they got all tangled up in that narrow stall with Melissa's big roan. The best of it, Baskin saw gazing down silently from his perch in the rafters, peeking around the horse tack hung below, was that Melissa got to admiring the roan's penis and took it in her hand and she and Dierker were laughing and she just leaned over the horse's backside and exposed her own while Dierker went to work on her. He's intercoursing her, Baskin remembered thinking. Intercoursing her rear end, I guess, right there across old Rooster (the name of the roan), and, ha, what's she doing with the horse? He scarcely breathed.

Of course there was sex, much of it. But more than all that, the ones who came to the ranch had an inerrant sense of themselves, of the place, of their coming together as a group. It was not an open salon. Of the perhaps two dozen visitors who came to the ranch all those summers, there were no bores. Perhaps, alone, somewhat like Sarah herself, they were bores; but on the ranch, they comprised a nameless and always interesting group, somehow beautiful. Friends: That's what they were. Something I've never had, Baskin allowed, and he listened to the drone of the jets. The window beside him had darkened and he caught sight of his reflection in it.

Food: Ah, they were mostly fat friends or became that way over the years. The meals were long communion periods. In the evenings when it was too cool to cook outdoors, they all dressed to the hilt and sat around the big walnut dining table on the porch. Food was such a big thing out there, a way of surviving so much, even boredom, and the summer meals were deliberately festive. Everyone tried hard at mealtimes, tried to talk deeply, seriously, humorously, stylishly. Then, later, when the wind picked up and the cold air came bristling down from the snowy peaks above them, the fire would be built up and the favorite desserts—usually hot cherry pudding or trays of pannequets meringues—and liqueurs would be brought out. Fat time, Dierker always called it. Baskin would usually fall asleep, pillowed and buried in quilts, in front of the hearth. He sometimes cleaned the dessert leftovers while everybody talked on. But then sleep: My strange, good moments, he mused, when I had the great pleasure of falling asleep while friendly adult voices surrounded me.

Baskin was served dinner by the stewardess, then let his head fall back for a short nap. When he awoke, it was as if no time had passed.

Sarah: She was more than the gilded summer lady, he told himself, or the grand hostess. There was that other winter self, yes, and all those hours with our books. How deeply did the men, Dierker and the others, who she contended never hurt her, actually bruise her life? Were there scars from her early years that set her brooding on those long winter nights? Didn't she have artistic longings and didn't she hate those formula novels she cranked out—27 in all—over the years? So many questions loom up at the end of a life, but especially in Sarah's case.

• • •

Sarah's tactics with Baskin had consisted of a series of bribes, brags, urgings, pleas, threats and noble speeches on the exalted life of the intellect. She rewarded him with too many foods and desserts, which made him fat. She told him that he was the brightest child in the history of great prodigies, and he beamed.

Sarah kept igniting him; and looking back, now, he could remember the times he actually caught fire, how he went spinning off into projects with his childish adrenaline pumping: At the piano, he broke into furious compositions, banging out chords and descants, leaning forward to get it down on paper like a mad young Mozart, begging Sarah, then, to play it for him. His little nocturnes and sonatas filled the room. Or he would get into a sudden frenzy over an experiment. Once, as a joke on Sarah, he went around gathering all his chemical compounds and mixing vigorously and peeking into his microscope and dashing off secret formulas in his notebook until she asked him what he was doing. He wouldn't tell her and the secret grew. Then, impishly, he swiped three of her Alka-Seltzers and crushed them into a powder, which he dyed blue with a food coloring. "Come see! Come see!" he yelled at her and she ran from the kitchen—she was wearing only an apron—and at the moment of her arrival, he poured the powder into a glass of red water and a bright-purple fizz erupted. Sarah's eyes widened. "Ha! I've done it!" he cried and he laughed a long mad-scientist cackle until Sarah shivered with terror, then, as the purple Seltzer sputtered and popped, he held it aloft, cackled again and drank it off.

"Baskin!" she screamed and knocked the glass out of his hand and he rolled on the floor in laughter, hysterical. Or he wrote his famous short story The Man on the Mountain, which he read aloud to her one cold winter night by the fireside. In the story, the old hermit's face was lashed by snow as he went in search of his faithful dog, Shep, and in the end the old man was discovered dead and frozen and Shep howled at the cold moon and Baskin wrote that "life is brutal," which he learned, of course, from Jack. London, but Sarah dutifully wept and put her arms around him and gave him an extra pudding.

In those days, she drove him, yes, but usually such projects kept him toiling on his own. That was it, put simply: Sarah cared and he cared and out of those seasons came the necessary passion.

Then Chicago.

Long before Lothridge and the more sophisticated professors, there had been a squadron of young teachers who had worked with him, eager scholars who wanted to fathom the nature of his prodigy and lead him on to greater achievements. The liberal education Sarah had offered was mostly finished as the young professors urged him to concentrate on his math skills and his chemistry talents. Time, time, he could say to himself now; it took me in its grip, saying, solve problems, get something done, learn ambition. The university offered, among other things, its peculiar vanity.

In the late afternoons and nights, he still belonged to Sarah, though, and they went to sit behind third base, watching Minnie Minoso spear line drives, pound his glove, spit, stab hot grounders, fire his rifle shots to first base. The sky above Comiskey Park was dark sapphire. The arc lights glamorized the world. With baseball and other small maneuvers, Sarah sought to keep her son.

The years went on, all the doting-psychologists parted and Baskin, by his 12th year, was a campus fixture. Except for Sarah, life there proceeded filled with tranquil habits. She had had a new novel published that year and enough money had flowed in so that they dined out frequently; she had resorted to the bright approach by this time and always smilingly asked him what he had done with his day and made conversation, but their alienation had definitely set in. By this time, also, the young profs had given him over to some of the more renowned professors—Lothridge, for example—and he was at last at the start of his first original research in chemistry. Lothridge and Jurgens, his two favorite old gentlemen, helped him devise his first project: a series of experiments by which he could possibly gauge more accurately the radioactivity of some meteorite fragments that the university owned. Days, weeks, months went along at this and Sarah gave up trying to entertain him in the evenings, because he was usually so irritable. She once suggested that he go to the campus psychiatric clinic, "Just for, you know, a little weekly therapy, so you won't get mentally exhausted in your work." But he said no.

With his puberty came Sarah's deepest frustration. She brought forth stacks of modern novels, trying an appeal to his literary humanity, and also a pile of new records, everything from Segovia to the Dave Clark Five, but work and sex—mostly work, alas—were driving him along. Pimples sprouted. His stutter became more severe.

By his 13th year, then, when his thoughts were dizzied with sex and when Sarah was fussing at him and his confident professors seemed excited to find his physical and mental limits, the pressures built and he started his retreat. Turned in and down on myself, he recalled now; down, down into the tiny quiet place in the mind where dreams are stored. The sexual urge, for instance, was pathetic; he was still a boy-child physically, all plump and white, like some species of featherless bird, so that no girl would even consider him. Yet he burned. A small collection of pornography accumulated among the stacks of Scientific American in his closed office, and between the thighs of those anonymous sweetmeats, his private theater flourished. But, also, his experiments with the meteorite fragments had come to nothing and he felt—though he couldn't have articulated it then—the same kind of anguish that might be felt by a junior instructor who had to impress the deans and regents in order to keep his position. In the late afternoons, over worked, he walked home beneath the bare limbs of the winter trees, sighing, his briefcase almost dragging the ground.

At 14, Baskin had handled sex in the simplest way, by repressing it, but Sarah had somehow got stuffed away with it down in the dark recesses of his nether mind. She was a bother he simply couldn't think about, because she hurt. Nothing personal, he wanted to tell her. I'm just beyond mothers and motherly flutterings forever. Yet it was personal. Her stockings bagged, she sounded like one of those older frustrated intellectuals who had never had a hearing and demanded one, and she could be casual about nothing.

Memory: Sarah standing with her back against the door, having just come back from a date with some man. Her eyes are shut. Tears on her cheek. She has just left his automobile out on the street and there she stands with some of her own inner life glistening on her face; we have our own secret selves, sure, Momma as well as I, but we're distant satellites now, turning in a widening orbit. I peer out from my stance at the kitchen blackboard and there she is, slumping against the door; one of the brain's permanent records.

It was later, toward the last months of the Chicago degree, that Sarah dated so much. Where she found the men, Baskin didn't know, but she learned his lab schedule, he knew, and he could tell sometimes that the Kimbark Street apartment had been mussed with her middle-aged pursuits and skirmishes. Then she began another book, something about wildcatting for oil, so that she had to advertise for research help, and Kate, divorced and embittered, appeared on the scene. Kate, ah, yes: She was reading a Frenchwoman—probably Simone de Beauvoir—and taking lessons in tae kwon do and karate. (It all fits together now, Baskin thought, remembering the early forms of her feminist philosophy.) And with Kate's arrival, or soon afterward, Sarah stopped seeing her parade of men and the two of them talked, yes, all day and all night, and went down to the Loop to shop and linger and talk some more. In those days. Kate seemed much the same—of an indefinite age, certainly not girlish, although younger by far than Sarah. Kate didn't even seem particularly sexy. She was Momma's friend, the one who required a pot of coffee to get started in the mornings, nothing more. She wore slacks and heavy sweaters—no bra, probably—and wore her hair pulled tightly back and falling in a single heavy ponytail. Once, she came back and propped herself in the doorway while I tossed up some equations and her face was etched with wonder; childishly, he thought, I didn't even notice her and just went on working, aware that she sort of vaguely admired me.

• • •

It was Kate who met Baskin that night in Montana, drove him to the ranch and who helped organize the funeral, a last rite punctuated with Sarah's flair. Sarah would be dropped into the open earth, according to her instructions, and those attending would wear no clothes. Also, they would read from her works—those old Western novels.

The letter that bore all those instructions—a terse and impersonal note to Sarah's lawyer, Neuborn—made an even more unusual request: Sarah wanted Baskin to stay on at the ranch for a year with Kate. Baskin left those gathered downstairs at the lodge and went upstairs to the loft to read all this in solitude.

A year spent up here at the ranch: He read that part again, not sure of what he felt. Kate, who seemed so different now—pinch of waist, jut of breast, lovely—would be here with him.

At the bottom of the last page, Neuborn had attached a brief estimate of the estate, not including the ranch. It came to slightly over $400,000.

Baskin sat slumped on his narrow bed. He folded the letter back into the envelope and breathed a heavy sigh.

Later, he asked Kate to select something to read at the graveside, something out of Sarah's own writing. It was a troublesome job, because Sarah's style was short, tough and action-packed.

Kate gave him a hopeless look but said she'd find something.

Baskin mingled again. Outside on the sun deck, a definite warmth rode around in the air. April was the changeable month, he remembered, with snow and sudden gusts of warm air all in one day sometimes. Flood weather. He walked across the soggy road above the house. The mass of photon is equal to hv-c2. Bus rides from the old U of C along Lake Shore Drive, then up toward Wrigley Field. Old Professor Lothridge: I wonder if he would be sad at all this, if he would've come out here for our silly ceremony if he had known. Not many friends over the years, strictly speaking, who belong to me. Sarah's buddies, all these.

On the side of the hill above the road, the ranch hands had finished their chores and Baskin stood there in the slush and mud, duly complimenting them. "No real use waiting any longer either," he told them. "Let's bring Miss Sarah up here within the hour." Then he had the difficult job of inviting them to stay for the ceremony, yet explaining the delicacy of it all. Their boss and mistress, ah, that is, Miss Sarah, had asked for, well, a nude funeral. "You know how she was sometimes," he added hopefully.

"Naked?" one of the men asked, for emphasis. The men gave one another a certain sly look.

"Of course, you d-don't have to take part," he went on. "And if you do—ah, let's say the request is optional. It's a little chilly this afternoon and I suppose s-some of you have your own way of thinking about this sort of thing." Ridiculous saying it outright like this—even sillier than it looked written out in her letter—but Baskin went on with it, suffering a couple of tight grins. And, after all, the workers did know Sarah. Baskin only vaguely recalled there being ranch hands around when he was young, but there must have been; they must have always understood some things, surely.

He trudged back downhill to begin the unhappy business. Let Sarah have her last jokes, he decided. The whole matter began to amuse him slightly and he could see Kate reciting a gun-fight scene or describing the pinto pony ridden by Tumbleweed Jack while all the ranch hands stood there, lean and salty, jeans and long-handle underwear in their arms, their bodies white with red stripes at the forearms and necks. He could envision Kate and the secretaries who accompanied Dierker and the New York editor and his imagination tripped along. Then: I'm not taking my clothes off. bet on that. Request or no request.

Back inside the house, he turned Sarah's letter over to Neuborn once more and asked him to read Sarah's instructions for the funeral to those gathered. It was to be announced that lack of attire was optional.

The table in the cove was heaped with food again: the liquor supply dwindled, but everyone ate the food, stayed sober and kept up a steady flow of reminiscences. Tina, one of the secretaries, arrived with a cup of tea, then stood gazing at Baskin while he sipped, her own mouth silenced by large bites of cheese and bread. She wore her auburn hair long and combed straight. No stenographic talents, Baskin concluded as he sipped. When she talked, though, it was in a kind of hip shorthand. "Tea up," she told him as he let his lip dawdle at the rim of the cup, and when he asked her if she went to school in the East, she said, "No, you smartee and me dropee." He didn't understand at first but blinked and smiled.

Then Dierker was making a toast, raising his glass and saying, "To our sturdy girl," and it seemed right and everyone drank up and soon started up the hill.

As the letter also required, Baskin carried Sarah himself. She was just a small red bundle now, not the Sarah of pizzas and thick bologna sandwiches and strudel in the Chicago days, yet she was difficult to hold in all that wrapping. Besides, the path through the slick mud to the grave was all uphill and treacherous. After about 50 yards, too, Baskin discovered that he wasn't used to the thin mountain air, so that by the time they reached the road, he was gasping and wheezing. Then, after a few more strides, his right foot got caught in a suction of cold mud and wouldn't budge until one of the ranch hands came over to assist. The stuck shoe came off. The ranch hand held Sarah, supported Baskin while the shoe was replaced and somewhat reluctantly gave her back. All this time, the wind gathered in the pines and the sounds of the valley around them intensified, giving off a high descant to the procession.

Baskin imagined how it must look: a muddy, primitive troupe marching up-hill, the weird bundle, Kate still fumbling those frayed paperback Westerns, the pretty secretary named Bennie, Dierker with a drink in hand and in seemingly good humor, shy Tina, the wildly expectant ranch hands and the somber business associates. What, he wondered, are the right emotions? As the slope increased, he could hear his own rasping breath. What should we feel now? Painfully silly, all this, but maybe Sarah's greatest single work of art, this funeral: her first creation beyond cliché, a moment of serious comedy in which she finally catches and plays with her audience, makes them search themselves for their own feelings, surprises, entertains and pokes them with some paradox and jokes.

They arrived exhausted. Baskin decided to go ahead and put Sarah in place, instead of laying her down and hefting her again. Clumsily, then, assisted by two of the ranch hands, he slid off into the hole. His backside covered with cold slime, he fumbled to lay her out. Puddles of muddy icy water in the bottom of the hole edged into his shoes.

"OK, Momma," he told her. "Here you are. Just like in the letter: all natural."

He rested. Pausing to get his breath, he listened to the rising wind in the distant pines. The mountains rose up all white and lovely in the distance and, yes, this is a good place, he told himself, just as Sarah used to describe it: gaudy pretty.

Then he couldn't get out. The sides of the grave were slick and cold and the men couldn't give him a hand without sliding off into the opening themselves. Baskin struggled up on one elbow, slipped, tried again. Thick mud covered him. At last, someone reached him with the handle of a shovel and pulled him up.

There he stood, coated with mud, breathless, but just in time to see shy Tina open her topcoat and let it fall away. She was magnificently naked and Baskin looked away, looked back and looked away again at the poor ranch hands, who stood there hypnotized with the sight of her. Then Bennie and Kate were taking off their clothes, too. Bennie got undressed first, almost as effortlessly as Tina: long willowy girl's body with small breasts, all blonde, that mop of curls topping her off. Kate removed her things slowly, stacking them neatly. She had several books with the pages marked and fumbled those around and it seemed forever until she was ready. She was an unusually handsome woman, no denying it. Baskin wondered again how old she was; not old at all, judging that shape, but her eyes and mouth were accented with crow's-feet. Heavy breasts, a little overlarge, but a flat stomach and strong brown legs. Too much. Then Dierker: He was the only man to comply—probably because of his proud sun-lamp tan. There he stood with his chin upright, his worsteds in his arms, trying to look casual while the ranch hands gawked and Kate began her reading. Bennie's poor nipples turned hard as pebbles; across from her, stupefied, all the cowboy jaws had stopped working tobacco.

The first passage was the only good one, something about the mountains, lovely killers, sitting serene and cold. Then Kate was trying a passage about a gun fighter considering his last night on earth. It didn't work at all and Baskin found himself grinning slightly. Also, as he concentrated on the words, his eyes wandered away.

Once, as he looked at Kate, she returned his gaze and he had to look elsewhere. She was simply splendid, of course, just too much. A healthy lust roared up inside him and also a helpless tender regard. For one thing, she was cold and he saw her shiver slightly, but also the naked body has a vulnerable, childish look to it; she seemed very alone, very small, standing there in the great outdoors. He smiled at her efforts.

Sarah and all those long-ago summers: He couldn't help thinking of them. Down there at the river, he had gathered colored stones, set them off in separate piles and graded them; geology lessons along the steep cliffs where the river bends. They built a water wheel together: his early lessons in hydrodynamics. All the creatures of his biology lessons, too: everything from water mites to graylings to the bleached skeleton of the beaver that they found on the far shore. Naked and bouncy, wearing only her tennis shoes, Sarah led their expeditions. Because of the mosquitoes, they always smelled strongly of citronella and at age six, in fact, Baskin worried about it; he thought he might stumble, slip off into the river and float all the way to the Polebridge store—oily and buoyant, yes, but terrified and unable to get to shore—before they could rescue him.

Sarah: Goodbye now, Momma.

And now the truth arrives, slightly late: She was always tuned in to me, Baskin thought. After all the long Chicago winters of his botched adolescence, she must have prepared this deliberately: this new encounter with Kate, this journey out. Does Kate suspect it? How far back, I wonder, did Sarah's plan begin, when she said to herself: I will throw my grown baby Baskin in with this wounded female creature who has so much of the hot musk of sex, and she will melt his icy little bones.

Goodbye, Momma, and hello, Kate; hello, time present; hello, world.

Kate's pages flapped in the rising breeze, but she went on searching out phrases and passages. Once, she read on past a paragraph she had marked and smiled to herself—it must have been wretched prose. Then, at the end. she couldn't keep the bargain and she read a Psalm. Baskin noticed that in spite of Tina's extraordinary young figure and Bennie's sweet curves, the gaze of all those middle-aged ranch hands had settled on Kate. Her voice strained in the noisy wind but was full and honeyed.

Then Baskin was watching his father. Old Dierker was the same as ever: a man dedicated fully to the moment, an ingenious inventor of games and the creator of recreations. It seemed to Baskin that he ought somehow to see himself reflected in that tanned optimism and strong jut of chin, but he didn't. Dierker had passed along some good strong genes, nothing much more. If Sarah was industrious, Dierker was naturally lazy; his only bursts of energy came when there was fun to be had—or so it seemed. Baskin stood there, wishing there was something they could say to each other on such an occasion.

Now DeMarco, the editor, and his Tina, lawyer Jack Neuborn and Bennie were all sniffling. The Psalm reading did it. Sarah, you didn't want that, right, but you never get it like you want it. I'm not even in the buff for you, am I? My sweater and seersuckers are caked with Flathead mud and Kate has found your prose wanting.

Then it was over.

The girls and Dierker dressed haphazardly.

On the way back down, Kate caught up with Baskin and took his hand. He felt like a glacier melting away.

At the party that night, he began thinking, ah, well, it was a nice enough funeral. Feeling slightly guilty for not having undressed and worked things out in strict compliance with Sarah's wishes, he decided that he would have to do the one thing she had requested: He'd stay on at the ranch. Where was there to go? He was tired of the work he was doing, that sensational rotework for which everyone overpraised him, and he had been feeling the approach of a great unrest, after all, one of those emotional low tides he didn't want to suffer. Breakdowns are too melodramatic, he told himself, and I'm above them, and, sure, I'll just stay here.

The old crowd sang while Kate played the guitar. Outside, the night air had frozen the slush, stopping the rivulets in their paths, and in the morning, he knew, it would be warm again and sun would fill up the valley. He sang with everyone else in his off-key tone. The song evolved into Clementine. Nature, Kate, friends: There were more of Sarah's lessons to learn now, another course to take, but, as usual, he supposed that once he had begun, he would be precocious. He smiled and sang louder.