Nina Silver switched off the radio, walked softly through the French doors at the back of the living room, and sat down near the pool. Strange, she thought, what happens to a person when he's dead. He becomes the property of others, part of some ghastly common pot from which anyone may feed, a shared blurred memory that can be put to many uses. He can be talked about, written about, set up as a yardstick to measure or to shame the living. A person, dead, becomes a topic, a silent, neutral thing about which others have opinions. Chatter that would be called mere gossip in regard to the living passes for serious appraisal, something right and fitting, when applied to someone dead.
But it was still gossip, reflected Nina Silver. Gossip and presumption by people trying to lay claim to a ghost. What did any of the chatter have to do with the flesh and blood man who had been her husband? What did it say about the smell of coffee on his morning breath, the glad gleam in his open eyes when their faces were close and they were making love? What did it say about the particular warp of his wit, the gruff charm that was indescribably different from the charm of other charming men, as ticklish, comforting, and sometimes prickly as an unshaved cheek?
The widow sat and smelled the evening. Salt and iodine flavored the air, a slippery odor as of earthworms in wet dirt wafted up from the cooling ground. The poinciana was just coming into flower, and Nina noticed for the thousandth time what tiny, feathery leaves it had for such a big and spreading tree; it always made her think of a great fat man with the palest, daintiest fingers.
Time passed. She knew this because the mosquitoes had come and gone, the western sky had phased from pink to lavender to jewel-box blue, and higher up Castor and Pollux, the tall spring twins, were nearly at the zenith. Nina Silver was wondering if she too was trying to lay claim to a ghost. Her claim, she told herself, at least was lawful-lawful in that vague portentous sense of lawful wedded wife. But what did that really mean? Did it set her up beyond dispute as the keeper of the true memory, the vestal standing guard against the vandals? She had built, was still building, a shrine of remembrance; other people-friends, colleagues, self-appointed judges-were building other shrines. Nina told herself her own temple was the grandest because it was built with the greatest love. But what it had in common with all the others was that it was meant to house, contain, hold captive the ghost of Augie Silver-and maybe Augie's ghost did not wish to be held.
This was a terrible thought, a thought to turn grief guilty. Perhaps, of all the rudenesses and well-meaning indignities that the living heaped upon the longed-for and admired dead, the worst was simply that they wouldn't let them go. Perhaps the dead were like tired guests who truly wanted nothing more than to leave the party and have some peace. Why did the noisy, selfish, stubborn living try to bully them into staying?
"Augie," Nina Silver said aloud, "do you really want to go?"