Evil Breeding

battle for America’s scalps by discreetly calling itself Sawyer Mac Productions, instead of, say, The American Louse and Nit Foundation. Imagine the graphics on the letterhead stationery. Anyway, it’s easy to see that just as national political parties divide themselves into conservatives and liberals, so, too, do external human parasitic parties. Truly, the National Pediculosis platform calls for the traditional, conservative reliance on a fine-tooth comb, supplemented in emergency cases of all-out war by the pesticide-shampoo defense, whereas the liberal Sawyer Mac agenda demands immediate, global comb and pesticide disarmament and proposes instead the near-pacifist policy of dousing louse-ridden heads in olive oil.
    Human mortality. Delicacy, compounded by a profound and blissful ignorance of exactly what undertakers do to dead bodies, restrains me from pointing out what I am sure are exact parallels between the preparation of show dogs for the ring and the grooming of deceased human beings for open-casket viewings, but I am sure that the parallels are there. Ah, but politics? Cremation versus burial? Funeral services: In the conservative approach, a member of the clergy says flattering things about someone who may have been a total stranger. The liberal preference is for spontaneous eulogies delivered by family and friends, who are encouraged to celebrate the life of the departed by relating cheerful anecdotes of generous deeds, amusing pranks, revealing witticisms, and lovable quirks. A strength of the conservative approach is that the clergyperson usually admits aloud that the subject of the eulogy is dead.
    Have I digressed? No. Parallel universes. If it exists, it exists in nations, dogs, lice, and human mortality. Politics. Grooming. Social rank. Art! Dog art. The art of head lice? Indeed. The letterhead stationery? And mortuary art, as is evident at Mount Auburn Cemetery, where the alert visitor may admire everything from immense stone edifices like the Mary Baker Eddy Monument, to quaint, homey cottages like the Gardner family vault, to intricately carved angels, crosses, and sheepdogs, to unadorned granite slabs. Old money rests peacefully in or under, as the case may be, the vaults and statuary on the artificial hillsides and next to the miniature man-made lakes of Mount Auburn’s grand neighborhoods. Mature trees of exotic species soften the landscape. The section occupied by deceased parvenus suffers by comparison. With its skimpy, adolescent trees, its newly paved streets, and its unadorned slabs of rock, each barely distinguishable from all others on the block, it is the tract housing of death. There lay Christina Motherway and her son, Peter.
    When I pulled up near the Motherway plot and parked behind a battered black Ford pickup truck, Jocelyn was kneeling by the brand-new headstone of her mother-in-law and, to my surprise, of her father-in-law, too. The stone was a thick, substantial double model reminiscent of twin beds shoved together to form a king. Christina slept on the left, at least according to the name carved there. B. Robert’s name had already been carved on the right. His late wife’s headboard had two dates: birth and death. His had no date at all. The omission seemed odd. He didn’t know exactly when he was going to die, but his birth date wasn’t going to change, was it? If something is figuratively carved in stone, why balk at the literal? In contrast to his mother’s grave and his father’s grave-to-be, Peter Motherway’s final resting place had no stone. I assumed it hadn’t been delivered yet. Although Mount Auburn must have strict zoning codes to ban the headstone equivalent of hovels, I had the feeling that Peter’s grave marker would be a thin and vaguely shoddy single-bed slab. I toyed with the idea that if Jocelyn were buried in the same plot, she wouldn’t get so much as half a gravestone for herself. She might not even get a separate grave. Rather, Peter’s would be opened, and his wife would be laid to rest directly above him. I imagined Jocelyn’s posthumous astonishment at the radical transformation in her conjugal relationship. In life, I suspected, she’d never been on top.
    Delayed by trouble in starting my car and then by commuter traffic between Newton and Cambridge, I’d taken a shortcut by turning off Greenough Boulevard, zipping uphill, and going straight ahead on Grove Street until reaching the gate that served as the cemetery’s back door.