Alison Hawthorne Deming
Driving the Cadillac to Valhalla
Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla, New York. 2005
The woman who keeps the records is gracious and fashionable. She works at the cemetery amid desks cluttered and close in a big room where office staff tend to schedules and bills and keeping the grounds. I have arrived in my black Cadillac, a car so absurdly heavy I can barely open the driver seat door to get out from my perch behind the steering wheel. I keep thinking there’s a body in the trunk or a Magnum under my seat.
“It’s the only car we have,” said the rental agent in Albany, an airport small enough to make the claim credible.
But I’m an environmentalist, I wanted to protest. I can’t drive that thing. I remained silent, facing the inevitable with a nod toward the bizarre irony that I would drive to Valhalla in a funeral director’s car to visit my grandmother’s grave. I skulked through the wooded hills of the Taconic Parkway. Grey geese by the hundreds groomed the fallow fields. Oak trees gone rusty and thin white birches making their forecast of snow. The last few red barns of the Hudson Valley’s pastoral era lighting up the landscape.
When I arrived at the cemetery, crossing double railroad tracks and turning toward the English Tudor-style house marked “Office,” six or eight cars like mine were parked in a line along the driveway. A funeral was commencing, a hearse bearing a coffin laden with a thick burden of flowers and on its roof a black-and-white photograph of the deceased, a young handsome Asian man, framed with yellow chrysanthemums. Men wearing black suits and chauffeur caps waited in the black Cadillacs for their fares to finish the business of their grief. More than one of them gave me a look that confirmed my status as a fraud.
The woman who keeps the records wore a brown sweater set, tawny wool pencil skirt, a small gold cross on a thin chain around her neck, gold hoops in her ears, the contrast stunning between her brown skin and the gold’s shine. A screen saver scrolled across her monitor: “IN HIS TIME” and “Gospel Concert.” Her manner was calm and professional. She was accustomed to death and did not shrink from its obligations.
“I’m writing a book about my grandmother. I think she’s buried here. Marie Bregny Macnab. She died in 1971.” I told her about my books and she asked for the titles, my fraudulence beginning to fade.
“Yes, she’s buried here.” The woman who keeps the records checked and re-checked her screens.
“Have you got a minute?” she asked. She excused herself, went into a back room and returned carrying a large ledger with marbled cardboard covers. The entries had been handwritten with a fountain pen to fit the ledger’s narrow lines. No spreadsheets, no data sets, no digital files. She leaved through the tome, resting her index finger on the name.
“Here’s what I found.” She made notes on the back of a used index card: the names, dates of burial, dates of death, who bought the plots.
“Section 31. 6960 lot. There are two plots there for remains, three for ashes. The plot allows for six caskets.”
“Yes,” I said. “My grandmother was cremated.”
She looked at me, paused a beat.
“I’m not supposed to tell you this, but because of who you are, I think you should know. No one witnessed the burial.”
“What?”
“It happens more than you’d think.”
Suddenly my mother’s evasion of painful realities, her benumbing fear of death, didn’t seem a particular mark of distinction. Silence in a family can erase a life. Erase a death. How common a story might that be?
“They no longer list Cause of Death in records.”
“Because of AIDS?”
“Yes, and because there are so many murders.”
What had I come here for? To pay my respects, I had thought, feeling there was debt hanging in the silence that followed Marnie’s death. That’s the name my brother and I gave our grandmother. My mother once told me that Marnie had wanted us to call her “ma petite grandmère” and “Marnie” is what we came up with. My mother called her “Mother.” Never Mom or Mommy or Mamá, as my father had called his mother. There was a cold formality to the word. My mother never really cared for her mother, though she gave her a home.
“So, who would have buried her ashes?”
A long pause.
“It says here that she had no heirs.”
“That’s not right. She was my mother’s mother. She lived with us.”
I gave her the name of my mother, Travilla Deming. I give her the name of the funeral home where the body would have been carried from my parents’ house in Redding, Connecticut. I knew this must be where Marnie had been taken, because it was the funeral home where my father’s body had been delivered in 1990. I had arranged the details, my mother then incapacitated with grief.
“Hull,” I said. Like the hold of a ship. Hard to forget a name like that for ferrying the dead.
The woman who keeps the records showed me the form. Heirs: an unchecked box, an empty line. She shows me the affidavit of heirship. Marie Bregny Macnab left no children. She described the plot for six burials purchased on April 22, 1924 by Marie and George Macnab, who lived at 312 West 78th Street, New York City.
“Yes, that was my grandmother, Marie Bregny Macnab and her husband George Travilla Macnab.”
“On April 23, Julia B. Smith was buried here.” She showed me the rectangular plot on the cemetery map. “That one is a body.”
“Yes, Julia was Marie’s sister. Jou-Jou, they called her. Both sisters were dressmakers. Their mother too. They ran a salon in the city designing and making Parisian dresses.”
“Then in 1941 George T. Macnab was buried. That one is also a body. Then in 1932 Sarah E. Alliger was buried. . . a body . . . here.” She showed me the spot on the map of the dead. There were two empty plots remaining.
Who was Sarah Alliger and why she was buried with my relatives?
“Here is where your grandmother’s ashes are.”
She pointed to the spot in the Uncas plot, Section 31, located just off Tecumseh Avenue on a high knoll.
Pause.
“There’s no gravestone. You’ll have to find it by locating the ones on either side.”
She circled the spot on the map and drew little arrows on the lanes for me follow up the grassy hill through the massive land of the dead.
“There’s no marker of any kind?”
Pause. I can feel the woman who keeps the records calibrating her response.
“Your grandmother died on February 9, 1971.”
“Yes, she was living at home with my mother and father.”
“She arrived here February 19. No one claimed her. There was no funeral, no instructions. And the paper work said there were no heirs. When that happens, we store them for a year. She was buried in January 1972.”
“So, who would have buried her?”
“I don’t know. But we can’t keep them. They start to smell.”
We looked at the dates. The form stating that Marie Bregny had no heirs.
“That’s not true. My mother was her daughter.”
We entered that into the record.
“Did she have any other children?”
“One stillborn in Mexico by her first marriage, but I guess that doesn’t count.”
“No, we have to put it down. What year was that?”
“Maybe turn of the century?”
She wrote into the record “one stillborn child around 1900.” She handed me the affidavit to take for my mother’s signature as heir to the plots.
***
Kensico Cemetery is a beautiful place to be dead. Created in Valhalla, New York, a forty-minute train ride from Grand Central Station, the cemetery sprawls over four hundred acres of graceful, rolling hills, land ascending to the highest rise between Long Island Sound and Tarrytown and fronting a mile along the rail line. Built in 1889 when New York City cemeteries were filling up, Kensico was intended to be New York’s “Great City of the Dead.” A special rail conveyance, “Car Kensico,” carpeted and draped in heavy Victorian style, could be hired for sixty dollars to carry the remains and mourners out for the burial. One compartment carried the remains, the immediate family sitting in upholstered chairs lining the walls of the railcar’s parlor. A turn-table at the cemetery station spun the car around, so that mourners could return to the city “without the slightest contact with the traveling public,” as the company advertised. This was meant to be a cemetery for the wealthy and cultural elite. New York in the 1880s flaunted its wealth and turned a good deal of it toward culture. The New York Public Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Madison Square Garden and American Museum of Natural History were all paid for not by taxes but by donations from New Yorkers who intended for their city to rival the great cities of Europe. In spite of massive immigration—one million residents in 1860 swelled to five million in 1900—in spite of desperate poverty and cruel working conditions in the tenements, in spite of cholera and gang wars, New York City was a place exhilarated by its promise. Even the dead could look forward to luxury.
The Kensico founders gave Native American names to lakes and lanes and plots in the cemetery: Montauk, Dacotah, Pawhatan, Iroquis, Mohegan, Katahdin, Kenesaw, Uncas. They believed the spirit of the land and its ancestral people would lend harmony to the newly dead. Impressive as an advertising slogan, but as a trope it carries heavy freight, considering the deep wound of European incursion on the Americas. Down slope from the graves, the old village of Kensico lies flooded under a great reservoir that flows to New York City. The first dam was built in 1885 to impound the Bronx River where the lay of hills and valley were right for holding water. Locals say if they stand on the top of the dam, they can see the chimneys of their great-grandparents’ houses ghosting up from the reservoir’s depths. Layer after layer of erasure.
During construction of the dam, labor camps were set up for workers. Their train stop needed an address, as Kensico’s was about to be lost under the reservoir. The postmaster’s wife was said to be an opera buff who loved Wagner and Norse mythology. She suggested the name of Valhalla for the new post office, honoring the Hall of the Slain in Viking tradition where Norse warriors feasted on endless mead and boar stew while awaiting their great and final battle against the World Serpent.
***
My grandmother was an opera lover, attending frequently when she lived in the city. At our home in Connecticut, on Saturday afternoons she listened to live broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera House, singing along with the arias in the soaring thin voice of one not to be denied her passions. During intermission, she followed along with the Opera Quiz, though as a subscriber to Opera News she would have taken the quiz before the airing. A sparkling conversationalist well into her nineties, she enjoyed the on-air repartee of the opera aficionados. I think of her room as a little Europe in our woodland home. She had an ornate cherry secretary desk with mother of pearl inlays, teak chiffoniere and dresser, a round table with decorative floral inlays of blond wood. She kept a covered Lemoges porcelain dish the size of a dinner plate in the center of the table. The dish was a translucent white---bone china is make from ground up cattle bones which make the porcelain particularly strong and translucent—with art deco swirls of embossed gold. Marie loved material culture and collected it: a “painting” of elegantly dressed women in floor-length gowns, the work entirely composed of azure wings from morpho butterflies; drawers full of handmade lace; diamond rings and broaches that she wore as an everyday matter of style. In the Lemoges dish she kept, as I recall from childhood, marshmallows coated with toasted coconut. She also loved sweets and on her annual trips in the city returned with a white baker’s box tied with thin white string and filled with pastries each with its special architecture: brioche, éclair, Napolean, streudel, macaroon.
The dress-form manikin stood in the corner, clothed in her sheath of ivory muslin. She stood as sentry, buxom torso weirdly truncated at the thigh, guarding, it now seems, the history and dignity of a woman whose life had narrowed down from one of cosmopolitan bustle to the redoubt of old age. Though her business of dressmaking had folded during the Great Depression, she continued to make her own clothes until the end of her life, dresses fit perfectly to her shape, the cut she knew was most flattering, fitted snugly at the bust and torso, then flaring at the waist into a graceful A-line skirt that flowed over the hips and hovered mid-calf. She had been gifted, my mother told me, at designing clothes for women who had a deformity—a hump on her back or a surgical scar. It was one of the few things my mother told me about her mother’s business. Silence, in general, abounded. She’d been ashamed that her mother was a business woman and not one of leisure. When I asked about the business, her most frequent reply as, “Why would you want to know about that?” I never had the guts to stand up to her imperious dismissals, so now I’m left with silence and an unmarked grave.
“Did she ever want you to help in the dressmaking?”
“She tried, but I was too nervous. I was hopeless.”
Marnie was always old to me. She came to live with my parents in 1945, the year before I was born, when she was 73. She had outlived two husbands. The first was Antonio del Valle, a Cubano living in New York, to whom she was betrothed in an arranged marriage when she was nineteen. They lived in Mexico City. She showed me a framed photograph of her mounted on the horse that had been a gift from the President of Mexico. It was the happiest six years of her life. When her husband died from consumption, she returned to New York to run her mother’s business. And here is the small cloisonné vase and a blue Bohemian cut-glass bowl, gifts she handed to me from her private collection. It had been a present from the husband of her best friend Adeline Donché, a corsetiere who made a fortune.
“That terrible man, a strike breaker,” my mother cursed when she years later saw the blue cut glass bowl on my table. She said it was an ashtray for cigars and only then did I see the cigar-sized divots along its thick glass edge.
***
I took Tecumseh Avenue up the long grassy slope as it meandered through landscaped grounds loud with songbirds, dogwood, azalea. The place looked more like a park or sculpture garden than a graveyard. Kensico has a Tree Walk Guide, each numbered tree with its legend: Norway Maple, White Ash, Dwarf Alberta Spruce.
White Ash (Olive family) is subject to many diseases which have killed
many notable trees recently. The wood is known for its use in baseball
bats.
Grows to 80 feet.
White Birch, usually called paper birch. Bark layers have been
used for canoe and wigwam covers.
Grows 50 to 70 feet.
Gingko. Virtually unchanged on the earth for some 150 million years.
One of the few trees that existed during the dinosaur era that is still in
existence today. Gingko is one of the most distinct of all deciduous trees.
A forest stream runs through the cemetery. Two lakes grace its hillside lawns. The living find space to contemplate their losses. The dead find room to breathe. Elbow room for the wealthy and accomplished to express themselves one last time. One mausoleum sports giant bronze doors, each with an elegant bronze knocker. On the back wall, a Tiffany window depicts a woodland stream composed of blue glass that meanders under the canopy of a great oak. The Guide to Notable Burials reads like a micro-portrait of New York City:
Swing trombonist Tommy Dorsey
Baseball legend Lou Gehrig
New York producer Florenz Ziegfeld
Opera singer Geraldine Farrar
Pioneer aviatrix Harriet Quimby
Broadcaster Fred Friendly
Comedian Danny Kaye
Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky
Department store magnate Paul Bonwit
Special sections for members of the Actors Fund of America and National
Vaudeville Association, some of whom died in poverty
Special section for the Salvation Army where General Evangeline Booth,
London’s White Angel of the Slums, daughter of the Army’s founder, buried
surrounded by rows of her warriors
Piedmontese veteran of the Crimean and U.S. Civil Wars and the first
director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Luigi Palma di
Cesnola, lies under a towering monument
Composer Sergei Rachmaninoff beneath an Eastern Orthodox cross
Author Ayn Rand beneath a six-foot dollar sign
***
I walked upslope to Section 31. I find Lot 6960. The Suplee family. The Towbins. Simple granite gravestones. A less grandiose neighborhood of Kensico. An open space the size of six graves was marked with patchy died grass, a small pile of browned leaves, and tangled among them a half-deflated Mylar balloon tied with red-braided ribbon. The groundsmen had been piling autumn leaves in the one blank spot in the neighborhood. The site was a little trashy, a little threadbare, which was pretty much how I felt knowing my grandmother lay there, a pile of ashes poured into the crematorium’s transport container and buried by a gravedigger in order to clean out the storage closet by attending to this stranger who had no heirs. I must have been the first person to ever visit her grave and this was happening more than forty years after she had died in her bed in our family home.
A flood of images from childhood flickered by my mind’s eye: the way she made crepe suzettes for my brother and me when my parents were away for dinner; Swedish meatballs she cooked; blueberries she picked from our forest meadow and made into pie and preserves; canning jars of brandied peaches she put up; being taught how to properly sew on a button so that it would not come loose; sitting on her lap while she bounced her knees and taught me songs, a French lesson in “La Plume de ma Tante” and “Frère Jacques”; a life lesson in “My Grandfather’s Clock.” She bounced me on her knees in time with the hymnal beat, tempo and knees halting for the caesura of poor grandfather’s heart, all in good fun.
My grandfather's clock was too large for the shelf
So it stood ninety years on the floor
It was taller by half than the old man himself
Though it weighed not a pennyweight more
It was bought on the morn of the day that he was born
And was always his treasure and pride
But it stopped, short never to go again
When the old man died
Ninety years without slumbering
Tick-tock tick-tock
His life seconds numbering
Tick-tock tick-tock
It stopped, short never to go again
When the old man died
Marnie always wore a corset, a beige lace-up affair with stays, covering her torso from thigh to bosom. It was neither elegant nor seductive, rather a practical matter of keeping the lines of feminine form clear on her somewhat prodigious form. I think too she found comfort in the corset’s embrace. She tucked a small pink, silk sachet into her cleavage, in which she kept a few dollars folded very small. She pinned this to the inside of the corset. She advised me always to do this to keep myself safe in the city if my purse was stolen. Because of the corset, her body felt hard when I sat on her lap or embraced her. I didn’t feel the soft, warmth of flesh while in her arms, but they offered a stiffened version of intimacy and I welcomed it.
On the grassy hill below, a funeral procession wended along one cemetery lane. A Black family walking together, the old and the young making their way to a place of farewell. Another procession traced a further lane, an Asian family, everyone dressed in black with white silk sashes. After the burial, they walked in the opposite direction, all the sashes are gone.
I stood beside the silence of the unmarked grave. A grave not sanctified by ritual or love. I could see why Marnie would have chosen Valhalla to bury her sister and later her estranged husband. I could see why she would have wanted this to be her resting place. A cosmopolitan woman, a purveyor of high fashion, an entrepreneur, world traveler, lover of opera and finely made things. I gathered up the Mylar balloon and some cedar chips used for mulch. I wanted evidence, though of what I could no longer be sure. The birds were going crazy, singing away as dusk came down like lid.
Alison Hawthorne Deming is the author most recently of Stairway to Heaven (Penguin Poets 2016) and Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit (Milkweed 2014). She is Regents Professor and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. This essay is from her book-in-progress Lament for the Makers.