Asa Ulysses Goodman’s funeral began without tragedy.
The family, semi-circling the urn and its wooden pedestal, endured the burning sun with the patience of weary travelers, even if wearing loose-fitting shirts, shorts, flip-flops, sundresses, sunglasses, and the coconut-sweet odor of suntan lotion. The siren’s call of a solitary poinciana’s welcoming shadows lingered just out of reach as beyond the cemetery walls the cool, dappled lotus-lull of banyans, palms, mahoganies, cypresses, and gumbo limbos appeared as far-away and long-ago as blind Homer’s poetry. Everything shimmered as if submerged.
Even so, the Goodmans refused to be outdone by the triviality of heat, humidity, time, or distance. Fiercely devoted to each other, they attended the many events in each other’s lives with religious . . . no, Goodman fervor, which, in every instance, became a de facto family reunion, notwithstanding the official annual ones. The Goodmans took kinship very seriously.
So, it wasn’t surprising that when Asa Ulysses died unexpectedly, Goodman argosies surfaced across the peninsula to voyage down interstates 95 or 75 where they dovetailed neatly on US 1 into one mighty Goodman fleet. They were traveling to the southernmost point in the United States, toward the archipelago known as the Keys where Asa Ulysses lived with his wife and children—Key West, specifically, or Cayo Hueso, the family’s Ithaca, upon which a forebear from the Mediterranean, Odysseus Kalogeras, established roots after rechristening himself Ulysses and changing the family name to Goodman.
To be sure, Asa Ulysses was to be sent off in proper Goodman fashion, and there was excitement at the prospect of coming together once more amid good music (performed by Cousin Ziggy’s now-geriatric rock band), good food (prepared by Cousin Chef Dirk Ulysses), and good rum (a Goodman staple). But it didn’t hurt that the Goodmans really, really, liked each other.
Therefore, on the appointed day, the family congregated inside the old cemetery in Key West to bury poor Asa Ulysses, greeting each other by the ubiquitous term of “cousin” because every one of them was, invariably, some other Goodman’s cousin. Asa Ulysses’s wife, Nell, and their children settled into the folding chairs reserved for them in front of the urn. She was the only one wearing black, face unmade, blond hair brushed carelessly.
Next to them was the oldest Goodman, Old Dante, a nonagenarian who used to brag about drinking absinthe with Hemingway on Greene Street. He hunched like a turkey vulture in his wheelchair, calling everyone by his kid brother’s name. In his heyday, Old Dante was a celebrity, too, smuggling Cuban rum into the islands until his brother’s death rid him of the habit. Old Dante and Milton Ulysses were making a run when their truck was swept off a bridge during one of the worst storms on record. Milton Ulysses drowned, and Old Dante—Old Dante even then—woke up on a gurney surrounded by G-men.
Old Dante’s daughter, May Ulysses, three times a widow and the mother of Asa Ulysses, pushed his wheelchair dutifully, the only Goodwoman ever given the Ulysses name. Her daughters, June and July, walked on either side of her. Her current anguish was plain, and everyone kept distance, for May Ulysses’s flights of temper and impulsiveness were well-known.
The Goodman men had the tendency to fight easily enough when their dander was up, particularly when infatuated with some woman they were trying to bed. Tall, rugged, good-looking, they lived by the seat of their pants, freely, daringly. Once married, however, they became the tamest of men, having fallen genuinely in love with their wives (and a little afraid of them as well), even if they occasionally strayed. Otherwise, they remained bachelors for life, like Cousin Zachary Ulysses, still romping with the rigid felicity of a young man.
The wives, not to be underestimated, helped their husbands toe the line, for which the men were grateful because if they, indeed and in deed, lived up to their name, it was because their stubborn women kept them in check. The Goodwomans, as the ladies quipped (by birth or marriage, no matter), were often more ferocious, principally when protecting their own, and quick to give anyone a good what-for if needed.
The service proceeded as expected, and all remained hushed during the eulogies, except the many Goodman children, who fretted restlessly. When Father Kazantzakis gave the final blessing, the Goodmans bowed their heads in unison like dipping bowsprits.
After the urn was placed in the columbarium by his younger half-brother, Homer Ulysses, who studied his namesake’s epics when he wasn’t skippering his fishing charter, the Goodmans broke up into smaller groups, leaning next to or sitting upon the single and double crypts ranged about, sometimes stacked unevenly two or three high, as relaxed around their dead kin as they were their living ones. Large iguanas, startled by the sudden commotion, dashed away on their short, stubby legs.
There was no discernible pattern to the graves in the Goodman lot, which was in keeping with the cemetery’s diverse and chaotic scheme. Stone coffins were perched and strewn at odd angles to one another, crookedly and askew, as if an enraged cyclops had tossed them in the air in a bunch. Everything was catty cornered to something else and alabaster corners of buried crypts and slabs jutted out of the ground without rhyme or reason. In the center was the small and modest mausoleum that housed the venerated Ulysses and Hera Goodman.
Serving as backdrop to the Goodman necropolis were obelisks, cenotaphs, monuments, ossuaries, sarcophagi, crosses, and many, many statues of angels, fairy sprites, Greek and Roman gods, Christs, Madonnas, and an enigmatic naked woman of stone, her hands bound together, resembling the Andromeda of mythology, fixed forever as a figure of woe.
With the tension loosened, the Goodmans unbuttoned shirts and removed shoes and socks, if any, for they preferred bare skin and feet whenever possible and were as informal as they were steadfast, especially in typical South Florida weather. They shared many laughs and tears when they spoke about Asa Ulysses.
He’d become distant of late, slow to respond to texts and phone calls, and his appearance at the last reunion shocked and bewildered everyone. Normally clean-cut and primly dressed, Asa Ulysses surprised them with his long, messy hair, full, unkempt beard, and rumpled clothing, reminding the oldest Goodmans of those flower-power hippies from the sixties.
Asa Ulysses was a professor of classical literature. His relatives usually found his words about meaning and purpose cockeyed and naïve, but no one expected abstract ramblings about love and guilt, meandering words traveling like wayfarers lost in some wood. He’d never been this animated either, cornering Goodmans singly or in bunches, gesticulating wildly as if everything he believed had blown apart overnight and he was duty-bound to share. Otherwise, Asa Ulysses sat by himself, eyes downcast, sipping from a plastic cup of Cuba Libre and shaking his scruffy head from time to time.
What no one could glean—really, how could they?—was that Asa Ulysses’s alteration was the result of a baffling event in his life, unforeseen and unexpected, which set him adrift like a drunken ship far from home. Nell suspected there was another woman. June or July swore she said as much.
Cousin Tommy, the unofficial curator of Goodman lore and planner of the annual reunions, provided directions to the resort near Eisenhower where the clan was to gather, reminding them that Cousin Dirk Ulysses was catering and Cousin August Ulysses, who managed a liquor store in Jacksonville, was supplying cases of their favorite rum.
With his hand on the mausoleum, Cousin Tommy then paid tribute to Ulysses and Hera and urged everyone to revisit the ancestor’s bust, which was perched alongside Mallory, Whitehead, Simonton, Fleming, and other Key West notables near Mallory Square, where the breathtaking sunsets occurred.
He followed up with anecdotes about some of the Goodmans buried right here, closing with Brady Ulysses Goodman, the only Goodman to die during the Civil War. Cousin Tommy, who was always researching family history, recently unearthed a letter written by Brady Ulysses to his fiancée. After describing his paralyzing homesickness and alluding to some of the horrors he’d witnessed, he arrived at the letter’s final, cryptic lines, which Cousin Tommy read from his phone: Men are flawed things; I am no exception. I am not worthy of your love nor can bear its responsibility. He died the next day when a musket ball hit him between the eyes during Pickett’s charge.
In time and with some reluctance, the conversation devolved into the details of Asa Ulysses’s murder. No one was sure what to make of it. He’d been shot twice. Footage from street cameras caught Asa Ulysses as he stumbled through the crowd, a woman in white trailing behind, reaching for him. He bled to death outside the famous hotel on Duval Street.
The Goodmans, down to the last, couldn’t believe Asa Ulysses capable of an affair. It just wasn’t in him. On top of everything else, Nell Goodman was jealous as a hellcat, hurling fists and vile words at him if his eyes but strayed. She could be downright scary when the green-eyed monster was upon her, so it wasn’t likely that Asa Ulysses, as stoic and reserved as he was, would risk Nell’s ire. Hell, she once went as far as to wave her gun in his face over a love-note delivered by a besotted student who dotted her i’s with little hearts. The threat was real because, as everyone knew, Nell carried that gun in her handbag with the floral print and had learned how to use it after she was assaulted in her youth. By all accounts, she kept a keen eye and steady hand. Regardless, the family admired her tenaciousness. You wouldn’t mess with Penelope Goodman if you could help it. She was a punch to the stomach, all right. Was it her fault she was more Goodman than Asa Ulysses?
As Father Kazantzakis was reading passages from the New Testament, many of the men had glanced askance at her, wondering if she might’ve, could’ve, but, no, it was inconceivable. Nell would beat the hell out of both, particularly if she’d found them in flagrante, but murder?
Still, there was no doubt that the professor was gunned down in cold blood. So, who, then, if not the volatile wife? The mysterious woman in white? An angry, jealous husband? An angry, jealous student? A crazed lunatic? Was it a case of mistaken identity? Or a random, luckless act of violence? There’d also been a rash of murders on the island, whose victims were men who’d committed indiscretions. Most assumed the culprit was a scorned woman.
Inevitably, stories had begun to flourish, fanciful enough to capture the imaginations of locals, especially since a descendant of the celebrated Ulysses Goodman was involved, and there was much speculation about Asa Ulysses’s mystery woman. Outlandish things: she was a practitioner of Santeria, sacrificing the blood of innocents; a disembodied spirit, haunting the Keys; a beautiful outcast with an inscrutable past, wandering aimlessly from Atlantic to Gulf and back again, like the forlorn lovers of English novels who worry desolate moors.
One story contended she was the lovely Andromeda freed from her fetters, not by Perseus, but by Asa Ulysses himself, while another metamorphosed her into the offspring of the famous Cuban fisherman and his marlin, homage, certainly, to the great writer whose Whitehead Street home tourists frequented. Some said she was Circe or Calypso, keeping Asa Ulysses away from all he’d loved.
While the groundskeepers waited patiently at a respectful distance to remove the chairs and pedestal, Nell stood watching the gated entrance to the cemetery, a question rising and dying on her lips. She hadn’t noticed May Ulysses coming up from behind with Nell’s large floral-print handbag in tow, which the distracted widow forgot near the columbarium. Almost upon her daughter-in-law, May Ulysses, whose eyes were crazy with despair, stopped to look in the same direction and hugged Nell’s handbag to her chest.
Who . . . ?
The men were suddenly pricked by an odd but familiar pang in the pit of their stomachs and shifted their collective gaze toward the same faraway point beyond the lone poinciana and the stone effigy of the enchained woman. Catching the eye of the other, they asked, silently, Are you feeling it, too?
Their heads, breaching like dolphins, abruptly snapped to at the emergence of a creature rising out of the heat shimmer of fantasy, floating through the far gates as if from another realm. They stared, agog, wondering if they were witnessing a visitation from a seductive creature of old, and glimpsed at each other in periphery.
Borne by an invisible crest of sun and water, she came, swaying her hips in the practiced way of women who knew how to inflame the desires of men. Her hair was long and dark, and she wore a short, white dress with thin straps appropriate for the Keys, if not for funerals. Her full, curvilinear figure reminded them of paintings of mermaids, and she walked with sultry ease astride her orange wedges, her naked legs and painted toenails an invitation to intrepid men daring to wrack themselves upon her shores and gladly, too. Her body spoke thousands of words at once, only to be replaced by thousands more with every beguiling step, while her skin burned and cooled the eyes simultaneously.
The woman’s eyes were masked by sunglasses while her wrists and neck were encircled by the jewelry typically seen on women of the Antilles. She was from Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, or any of the Caribbean island-nations. Her scent reached them first, coconut and lavender, reminiscent of things long unfelt by the older men. She transformed them into young boars again, rutting in the sties of their imaginations.
That, gentlemen, is one hell of a piece of ass, Cousin Zachary Ulysses said, smiling shamelessly when he realized he’d voiced his thoughts.
The children grew hushed, the women indignant.
Oh, she wouldn’t have the audacity, thought Cousin Lucy.
How could she? thought Cousin Jo.
She doesn’t belong here, thought Cousin Patricia, stealing glances at her husband’s face.
I ought to tell her a thing or two, thought June or July.
My poor son, thought May Ulysses.
The woman in white halted before them, removed her sunglasses, revealing eyes the deep blue of lapis lazuli, and regarded them with what? Defiance? Arrogance? Indifference? She turned her face into stone, anticipating some rebuke or challenge before wading into the Goodman sea. The men, unsure what to do or how to act, parted mechanically in front of her and, just as mechanically, filled her wake as she passed. No one dared impede her progress.
“They say a good man’s hard to find,” she said, scornfully. “But that’s not true, is it? They’re all here, aren’t they?” Her accent was difficult to place, a combination of granite and surf, yet her syntax was flawless. “I fell in love with the best of them.”
The woman checked her gait at the columbarium before Asa Ulysses’s urn, resting her long fingers upon its rounded shape. She bowed her head in prayer or contemplation. Within the instance, she was falling to her knees, sobbing, looking to drown herself inside the coral earth.
When she was through, she lifted herself to her feet, stiffened her shoulders, and turned a hardened face to them once more, like Galatea, neglecting or refusing to wipe away her tears. Unlike the rest, her clothing barely betrayed wetness from the heat. The Goodmans, stung by her stare, fanned backward, and the men saw how beautiful she was, the very figure of hope and redemption. At that moment, many of them came to believe in the gods again.
No one could say how the women came to face each other. Perhaps Nell spun the stranger around by her purse as the latter walked by, or maybe it was the woman who, of her own volition, approached the heartbroken widow, asking forgiveness, offering explanation. Nevertheless, here they were.
Nell was ready to throw obscenities like jagged fragments of stone, her mouth twitching in that familiar way the family feared. Some looked for her floral-print handbag and sighed with relief when they saw it in the hands of May Ulysses. Nell, oblivious, gaped into the profound blue of the other’s eyes and saw the tragedy of her own life mirrored there, which centered upon the inscrutability of her husband.
The woman in white, for her part, experiencing no enmity toward the wretched wife, saw everything at once. They were sisters after all, who shared the misfortune of having been fastened to the same incomprehensible man, so she did the unexpected: she pulled Nell into herself and hugged her close.
Taken completely by surprise, Nell’s hands shot straight up, her fists clenched to smash down upon the woman’s shoulders, and she uttered a cry. But in place of violence, Nell lowered her arms gently and returned the other’s embrace, provoking an audible gasp from the gathered.
The Goodmans gave each other sidelong glances of awkwardness, sharing a general sense of intrusion upon some private affair.
The women contemplated each other, communicating in that telepathic way of women when dealing with each other. Even so, Nell spoke aloud the question she dreaded to ask, whose answer she already knew, and the woman in white shook her head in understanding.
“Somewhere between us he got lost,” she said, “and couldn’t find his way back.”
“Lost?” Nell asked, dazedly. “He couldn’t return home?”
“He tried,” the woman in white said, cryptically. “He loved us both.”
It was a terrible admission to make, one rival to the other, how ultimately they failed him, and Nell’s face broke but only briefly when she recalled she was a Goodman—a Goodwoman— so she set her expression as hard as coral, reared back, and slapped the other woman with everything she possessed.
The thunderclap made every Goodman flinch. Old Dante recoiled in his wheelchair and cried, “Milton!” June and July fell into each other’s arms. Cousin Tommy’s brain took a flurry of notes. Homer Ulysses finally comprehended the metaphor of Scylla and Charybdis. Nell’s children wailed unhappily. Even those passed to the other side, the Goodmans whose mortal coils lay among limestone and coral, watched the drama unfold. In the end, one of these women may have murdered the unfortunate Asa Ulysses.
The woman’s composure disintegrated as she raised her hand to her stinging cheek, trying to control her sudden anger, until she saw the telltale signs of Nell’s weakening resolve. She understood that neither could be blamed because the full weight of the burden of love fell heaviest on women, regardless of time, place, or circumstance, so she stretched an unsteady hand to impart this understanding through the medium of touch, one woman to the next, except that a startling agony restrained her, and she couldn’t complete the gesture. She clutched her stomach with both hands.
Nell winced when she grasped the other’s right to mourn. They were sisters, helplessly fated to love without limits. Only women could do that. Only women were capable of the breadth and depth required. No man came close no matter how faithfully he tried, because a man’s love was earthbound, corporeal, temporary, defined through the prism of his perceived fitness to provide, protect, make love, here, in this life, for as long as it lasted. For women, love was more sublime, celestial, divine; it was of the earth, too, but occurring simultaneously here and there, on several planes of existence at once.
Nell realized that Asa Ulysses, more sensitive to the whims of human experience than most men, discerned the truth of this, and the acknowledgment of his own worthlessness might’ve proven too much to bear.
The woman saw the blood on her hands and searched among the Goodman faces for some explanation, some hint as to why she was subject now to these new sensations, but nothing came until she spotted May Ulysses standing beyond Nell, the raised gun still in her hand, a handbag in the other.
“You chose to love him,” May Ulysses said, “and he died.”
The woman in white wondered at the paradox of this, the idea that love was or could ever be a choice; still, she conceded the point as the earth began to tilt, and she gazed down at the bloom of red mushrooming across her white dress.
“My God!” Nell shouted, reaching out. As they fell to their knees, Nell clasped the other frantically as if it were her own life dissipating. She felt the ebb and flow of transformation, the commingling of atoms between them shifting and altering with every breath. Nell knew exactly when she changed into something other than what she was, sensed the blood thickening inside of her, stone and flesh merging, life, death, love, hate, all as one.
She wondered about the nature of things. The human heart was as vast as the universe, its cosmology as complex, and she thought that if she held her sister long enough, hard enough, they might solidify into one, forever fixed as figures of woe.
May Ulysses fell into the embrace of her only living son, the gun and handbag at her feet.
The Goodmans scattered like startled suitors, crying out, pulling on their cell phones.
Cousin Zachary Ulysses, unmoving and unmoved, already considering which tavern to settle into for the night, thought, “Asa Ulysses, you old dog.”
“What was all that about?” a Goodman husband asked his Goodwoman wife.
“Beats the hell out of me,” his wife said, adding the family joke when something was difficult to understand: “It’s Greek to me.”
“Asa Ulysses was trying to get home?”
“Who knows?” The wife shrugged.
After a bit, he then asked, “Do you think she killed him?”
“Who?”
“Nell,” he said, scratching his gray beard. They heard the sirens getting closer.
“No, my money’s on that harlot,” she said, clucking her tongue.
“Who?” the husband asked.
“Her!” the wife spat out, pointing to the image like stone in front of them.
“Who are we talking about?” the husband asked. He thought they were talking about Nell, but he wasn’t sure anymore.
“Never mind,” she said.
“Well, you don’t double down on a woman who loves her man with that kind of passion, you know?” he said, thinking he’d achieved the tonal clarity of certainty.
“I don’t know,” the wife said. “Maybe he brought it on himself, on purpose!”
“Huh?” the husband said. “Why would Asa Ulysses do that?”
“That man was too sensitive for this world,” she said. “I’d heard May Ulysses say as much more than once!”
The husband thought about that and said, “Maybe he thought he wasn’t good enough.”
“What’s that?” said his wife.
“Maybe he thought he wasn’t good enough to be loved with such devotion,” he said, adding carefully, “I don’t know too many men who do.”
The wife looked up at her husband of thirty-one years with sudden appreciation.
“Yes,” she said. “Maybe you’re right.” She grabbed his hand and added with playful mischief: “How about you? Are you worthy of a good woman’s love?”
He stifled a laugh, winked, and said, “Probably not.”
“Come on,” she said, smiling grimly. They could see flashing lights at the entrance gates. “Let’s go before we’re asked questions we can’t answer.”
“Yeah,” her husband said, eagerly. “I could use some rum anyway.”
