Curtains Read Online Free Page B

way to a marketplace solution to death, the purchase of things: rings and brooches made from the hair of dead loved ones, the memento mori, and burial robes, badges and gloves for the pallbearers (the gloves were to be left on the lid of the casket and buried with it). Neil Bardal says his grandfather sold memorial clothing, pants and dresses and shoes that split at the back for a more comfortable fit (on the corpse); for an extra five dollars he’d squirt an onion into the eyes of the horse that pulled the coach so it looked like the animal was crying. Death got more elaborate and personal. And more private.
    But the dead themselves became a nuisance. Urban cemeteries were thought to be the source of some fusty miasma that made city folk sick, so the dead were segregated to suburban park cemeteries, where families could visit if they had the car fare, bring flowers: the sanatorium model, a kind of refugee facility with nice trees and stonework. The whole puzzle of how we deal with death comes down to that nasty poser: what to do with what’s left behind? Awe of the dead was giving way to modern science’s misguided itchiness about hygiene. People just kept digging holes, farther and farther away from the living. Soon, as Geoffrey Gorer pointed out, the Victorian fussiness over sex and its fascination with death switched places. Sex came panting out of the closet, and death, and all its trappings, went in: it was best managed in the dark, preferably after a few stiff drinks.
    Henry James got so fed up with the privatization and apartheid of death that in 1895 he published a story called “The Altar of the Dead,” in which his character George Stransom builds a shrine of candles in a London church to his growing list of dead friends. In his journals, James says Stransom is “struck with the way they are forgotten, are unhallowed—unhonoured, neglected, shoved out of sight; allowed to become so much more dead, even, than the fate that has overtaken them has made them.” Without the comfort of a community, he invents his own private religion, one candle at a time, for the “worship of the Dead,” until he has a blazing do-it-yourself memorial, which of course won’t be complete until there’s “just one more” candle: Stransom’s own. But who’ll tend the altar when
he’s
gone?
    I know this story, or a version of it: the story of how we ache to remember or to be remembered. I heard it as a kid. I prefer not to think about it, but there’s a memory itch I can barely reach.
    I had a grandfather who fought in Spain with the International Brigades, killing fascists and blowing up rail lines while the Nazis test-drove their military hardware for the other big war that followed. He never discussed it. He never discussed anything. They were Finns, he and my grandmother (he was her third husband: the second was buried in Mount Pleasant cemetery in Toronto when I was still an infant, and the first, I have no idea what happened to him). Finns, especially Red Finns of their generation, had neither the language nor the inclination for chit-chat. Bertolt Brecht once said the Finns he knew, most of whom also spoke Swedish, were uncommunicative in two languages. There’s a story of two Finns in a bar drinking vodka. A half hour passes in silence, glasses are emptied.
    “Do you want another?” the first Finn says.
    “Are we here to talk or are we here to drink?” says the second.
    My grandfather had only two things to say about Spain: One, it’s possible to survive for weeks by eating toothpaste. And two, the worst thing Franco’s fascists did was to bury the enemy, the Republican soldiers, in unmarked graves. The victors got monuments. The rest were left unhallowed, unhonoured, neglected, shoved out of sight.
    I have two pictures of my grandmother, taken years apart. In one she’s sitting on the grass, wearing orange culottes and cat’s-eye glasses, her expression neutral, looking at the camera. She’s holding