The Second Coming

could see everything so clearly? Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he allowed himself to come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself forward from some dark past he could not remember to a future which did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream.
    Is it possible for people to miss their lives in the same way one misses a plane? And how is it that death, the nearness of death, can restore a missed life? Marion knew this. She loved to go to funerals. They went to funerals in Manhattan, Long Island, Utica, and all over the South; funerals of her uncles and aunts and cousins, his uncles and aunts and cousins, kinfolk he’d never seen. Funerals made her solemn and vivacious. The old folk here died off like flies. She attended every funeral and volunteered him as pallbearer. Suddenly he had become pallbearer to friend, kin, and stranger. It became clear why Presidents like to go to funerals. The worse things got for Lyndon Johnson, the more funerals he went to, there he stood grave and silent, dispensed. Like a President, Marion stood in her braces at a hundred gravesides, solemn and exultant.
    Why is it that without death one misses his life? When Marion was dying, he was standing at the window of the hospital room, hands in pockets, gazing down at the bluish-white street light above the empty corner. It was four o’clock in the morning. She spoke to him in a different voice. In the dark her jaundice—she was yellow as a gourd—did not show, but her voice was quavery with fever. “Yes?” he said and came to the bed. She looked at him calmly. Had they looked at each other in years? “I want you to do something,” she said. “All right,” he said. “Keep the house for Leslie.” “All right,” he said. “She is going to need a place,” she said. “She is going to California but she will want to come back here, won’t she?” “Yes,” he said. “Very well. I will.”
    She spoke with the quietness of people after a storm which had drowned out their voices. What struck him was not sadness or remorse or pity but the wonder of it. How can it be? How can it happen that one day you are young, you marry, and then another day you come to yourself and your life has passed like a dream? They looked at each other curiously and wondered how they could have missed each other, lived in the same house all those years and passed in the halls like ghosts.
    â€œLet me say this, Will,” said Jack Curl, dancing around and stopping him in a kind of mock confrontation.
    â€œO.K.”
    â€œMarion, your dear wife, my friend, the only benefactor these old people had, is gone. Right?”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œDo you know the last thing she told me before she died?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œShe wanted to go ahead with the one project closest to her heart.”
    â€œWhat was that?”
    â€œYou know. Her idea of a retirement village. A total love-and-faith community.”
    â€œAh.”
    â€œWhat do you think of this for a name? The Marion Peabody Barrett Memorial Community.”
    â€œSounds fine.”
    â€œDoes it sound too much like a commune?”
    â€œNo, it sounds fine.”
    â€œAll I ask of you is what you yourself want: to carry out her wishes.”
    All you ask from me is three million dollars. Well, why not?
    How could he not have noticed this about Jack Curl before? that even as he was moving his shoulders around under his jump suit, playing the sweaty clergyman doing good, that Jack too was trying to catch hold of his own life? that in the very moment of this joking godly confrontation—sure, I’m trying to con you out of three million, Will, but it’s a good cause and I’m God’s own con man, okay? and so forth—here was Jack Curl trying to catch hold. And wasn’t he doing it? Wasn’t he doing everything right? Yet when you took a good look at him, this sweaty Episcopal handyman, this godly greasy super, you saw in an instant that he was not quite there. Looking at him was like trying to focus on a blurred photograph.
    But you, old mole, you knew otherwise, didn’t you? You knew the secret. I could see it in your eyes, open and clear and brown, when you were run to ground in a Georgia swamp and looking up at me. You shot yourself, and then we