Last Respects Read online

  “What difference does that make?” I said.

  I could hear the cutting edge in my own voice. I did not feel we were buddies.

  “People don’t go bucking visiting hours in hospitals the day before Christmas.”

  The light changed. The cab lurched forward.

  “Hoddeyeh wanna go?” the driver said.

  I didn’t answer. My mind had been absorbed in controlling the hatred for this stranger that I could feel mushrooming inside me. Now my mind had been jolted into an examination of his remark about the times when people visit hospitals.

  “Hey,” he said. “You hear me?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t listening.”

  “I asked which way you want to go?” he said.

  I looked out the window. The street sign indicated we were passing 76th and Lexington.

  “As long as we’re heading downtown,” I said, “how about across the 59th Street bridge, then out Queens Boulevard to Union Turnpike? The hospital is two blocks further down.”

  “I know,” the driver said. “One thing a taxi driver learns in this town. You learn the places people get sick in. Christ, this is one hell of a long trip.”

  It was longer than he thought, but of course he had no way of knowing that. Even I had not known, until early that same year, when my father died, that my mother had been born in Soho. I had always assumed she had been born on the farm in the Carpathian mountains of Hungary from which she had come to America shortly before the First World War.

  A month before this day before Christmas on which my mother had died, when I was filling out the forms in the Admissions Office of the Peretz Memorial Hospital, it had seemed wise to me to forget about Soho. I listed my mother’s place of birth as Berezna in Hungary. This checked with the records of the Department of Justice in Washington.

  Only I, and the government, of course, knew that my mother had a police record. It was almost half a century old. There was probably very little chance that the Peretz Memorial Hospital would have been interested in the information. But Medicare, which was going to pay her bills, is a federal organization. So is the Justice Department. Even though my common sense told me one could not possibly affect the other, I had learned my common sense from the woman whose dead body was now waiting in Queens for the authorization that would permit Herman Sabinson to perform an autopsy. I knew what my mother would have wanted me to do. She had spent her life in the shadow of an adage of her own invention: “If you keep your mouth shut, nobody will know as much about you as you know yourself.” After half a century I suddenly found myself wishing I knew less about her than I did.

  “So where the hell are they?”

  I came up out of my thoughts. The irascible voice had come from the front of the cab.

  “Where the hell are who?” I said.

  “These dozens of people,” the taxi driver said. “That you say they’re all the time standing around here, fighting to get a hack back to Manhattan.”

  I looked out the window. The cab had stopped at the top of the low concrete rise that surmounts the crescent driveway in front of the Peretz Memorial Hospital. My first reaction was a sense of astonishment. The trip by cab from Manhattan takes approximately forty minutes. Two or three times during the past my taxi drivers had made it in thirty-five minutes. One giddy afternoon, in half an hour. The driver, a bit giddy himself, had said it was the Pope. His Holiness was on a brief visit to the United States and every automobile in the Borough of Queens, the driver had said, was chasing the Pontiff’s entourage, which was heading for God knows what, but happily the what seemed to be in the opposite direction from the Peretz Memorial Hospital. It seemed to me now that I had stepped into this taxi at Lexington and 77th only minutes ago. Yet here I was at the Peretz Memorial Hospital. At least a half hour must have gone by. I did not understand how I could have been unaware of the passage of this amount of time. It was obviously due, I felt, to my feelings about my mother’s death. Which made me suddenly wonder what my feelings were.

  I knew with certainty only one: a feeling of relief that it was all over. But there were other feelings. There had to be. Even if I didn’t know my mother as well as I should have, I know myself better than I would like. I could feel the worry about those other feelings mounting slowly and inexorably inside me.

  “They must have heard you were coming,” the taxi driver said.

  “What?” I said. I said it irritably. By now I hated him.

  “See—I was right. Those people you say they’re all the time out front here fighting for cabs,” he said. “They must have heard you’re coming. Let’s make this guy look like a liar, they must have said. And they all beat it back to Manhattan by subway so I’ll have to ride back empty.”

  I wondered. Could the driver have been right when he’d said nobody goes to hospitals on the day before Christmas? On East Fourth Street, where I had been born and raised, we had never done much about Christmas. It wasn’t exactly an East Fourth Street holiday. But we always went to see sick people on the day before Yom Kippur. I remembered vividly being sent by my mother to deliver jars of chicken soup to ailing neighbors on the day before Passover. The recollection thrust me into a moment of witless generosity.

  “What does it say on the clock?” I said. “I can’t read it. I forgot my glasses at home. Three seventy-five?”

  “Three eighty-five,” the driver said. “And a quarter for the Triboro toll.”

  “Here’s ten,” I said. “If you do have to ride home empty, don’t be sore at me.”

  The driver, taking the ten-dollar bill, looked pleased but also uneasy. As though he felt he was getting the money not because he deserved it but because his sullen remarks had blackmailed a nervous passenger into doing something the passenger would not have done ordinarily. Which was exactly what had happened.

  “You don’t have to do this,” he said. There was not much conviction in his voice. “I’m what they call every year during the transit strike negotiations a common carrier. You want to go to Queens, I gotta take you to Queens. All you have to pay is what it says on the clock.”

  “It’s Christmas,” I said. “Buy something for your wife.”

  “I’m not married,” he said. I laughed. The driver said, “What’s funny about that?”

  “It’s the sort of thing my mother would have said.”

  It was, too. Among the things about her that were unexpectedly appearing in my consciousness like litmus-paper tests was the realization that I had never heard my mother tell a joke. Yet I was all at once intensely aware that she had always been able to make me laugh. Her humor had obviously been unintentional. It occurred to me, as I walked into the Admissions Office of the Peretz Memorial Hospital on this dismal morning before Christmas, that the same word applied to my mother’s whole life. She had been too shrewd to arrange the almost nine decades of her existence the way she had been forced to live them. Given a chance to control things, I felt, she would almost certainly have done better. Unintentional was the word, all right.

  “Can I help you?” said the girl in nurse’s uniform at the desk behind the Information window.

  “Mrs. O’Toole?” I said. “I’d like to speak with her.”

  “About what?” the girl said.

  I examined the several ways I could have answered her question. A darling little old lady who has just cashed in her chips after exceeding by almost two decades her biblical allotment of three score years and ten? Or: a savage old bitch who has finally, thank God, fallen off my back? Or: the Jewish Eleanor of Aquitaine?

  “Some papers I have to sign to authorize an autopsy,” I said. “Dr. Herman Sabinson called me about an hour ago. He said Mrs. O’Toole would be expecting me.”

  The girl up to now had looked bright, intelligent, and sexy. Now she changed abruptly and completely. She looked exactly like the young nurse behind the Information window of a hospital in a TV soap opera who is confronted by the middle-aged son of an elderly lady who has just Gone to Me
et Her Maker. I restrained my desire to reach in through the window and slap her.

  In a sympathetic whisper she said, “One moment, please.”

  It is a phrase to which during the past many years I have, now and again, given a certain amount of thought. Do people who use it really mean one moment? I own a wristwatch presented to me by my two sons on my last birthday. They chipped in and bought it in Switzerland for a modest sum. It tells what time it is now in Calcutta and, among many other things, how long you should wait before taking the second pill. As the once sexy but now loathsome girl left her desk to find Mrs. O’Toole, I pressed the appropriate knob on my sons’ birthday gift. Seven minutes and fourteen seconds after the One moment, please I had been asked to wait, the girl came back. Not alone.

  “This is Mrs. O’Toole,” the girl said.

  It was like hearing a cicerone on a bus in the nation’s capital say, “This is the Washington monument.” What else—no, who else—could Mrs. O’Toole be? She was tall. She was slender. She had white hair doctored by a blue rinse. She wore the uniform of a Red Cross Gray Lady. She had the emaciated, elegant face of a once famous but now forgotten actress who had been sent over by Central Casting to play the cameo role of Edith Cavell in a documentary about the First World War. She held her hands clasped in front of her as though she were trying to prevent the escape of a rebellious butterfly. She had not even the hint of breasts.

  “Dr. Sabinson told me you were coming,” she said.

  The possibility that he would not tell her had not previously crossed my mind. Crossing it now, it brought me a moment of panic. Suppose I had been forced to explain to this creature why I had come to see her? All at once I was grateful for the network of intermediaries among whom I spent my life. The dentist’s assistant to whom I didn’t have to say, “I’ve come to have my teeth cleaned.” She had sent me the card. She knew why I had come. The clerk in the grocery store to whom I didn’t have to say, “My wife said to pick up the asparagus.” The paper bag is already marked with my name, which he scribbled when my wife called.

  “If you’ll give me the paper,” I said, “I’ll sign it.”

  The center of Mrs. O’Toole’s smile moved. It was as though the commander of the German firing squad had said to Miss Cavell, “There’s been a small change in plans. Instead of executing you, the High Command has instructed me to present you with the Iron Cross First Class.”

  “One moment, please,” Mrs. O’Toole said.

  This time it didn’t take much longer than that. She opened the door next to the Information window, came out into the reception room, and closed the door carefully behind her. Except for the belligerently compassionate look from the girl behind the Information window, Mrs. O’Toole and I were alone in the room decorated with beige monk’s-cloth sofas and framed photographs of Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, and General Evangeline Booth.

  “About those papers,” she said.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “The papers Dr. Sabinson wanted you to sign?” Mrs. O’Toole said.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “Actually it was only one paper,” she said.

  “Was?” I said.

  Mrs. O’Toole shifted her imprisoning grip on the invisible butterfly. “What I mean,” she said, “I mean it is no longer necessary for you to sign the paper.”

  “Why not?” I said. “Dr. Sabinson told me he could not perform the autopsy unless he had my written permission. He said you’d have the form or paper or whatever you call it, he said you’d have it ready for me. He told me that on the phone this morning.”

  “Yes, well,” Mrs. O’Toole said. “But—”

  Her voice stopped without any diminution in the decibels of sound she was uttering. It was as though we had been talking on the phone and a switchboard operator had inadvertently pulled the plug that connected us. Mrs. O’Toole looked troubled. It came to me with a sense of guilt that she looked more troubled to me than I probably looked to her. I could suddenly see the faces of people I knew. Dozens of them. The faces all reflected horror. My mother had just died and, to them, the way I was taking it branded me a son of a bitch. Some of them, of course, had always thought I am a son of a bitch, so I could dismiss those. I could not dismiss the others. They were men and women I respected. All I could do was say to myself that they did not know how I was taking this. They had not known my mother.

  “Mrs. O’Toole,” I said. “Has anything gone wrong?”

  The idiocy of the question caused my own voice to falter. How could anything go wrong? Death, Rabbi Goldfarb used to say on East Fourth Street, was the end of all our journeys. My mother had come to the end of hers. Herman Sabinson had told me so only this morning. Nothing more could happen to her.

  “Well, not exactly,” Mrs. O’Toole said. “It’s just that, well, the necessity for signing the paper, the authorization for the autopsy, it’s no longer necessary.”

  “You mean,” I said, “it is no longer necessary to obtain the written consent of a member of the family before an autopsy can be performed? You mean that rule has been changed between now and the time Dr. Sabinson called me early this morning?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “No, no, no. It’s merely that, well, it’s not necessary for you to sign.”

  “Did Dr. Sabinson tell you it’s not necessary?” I said.

  He had seen me through my first contact with death. Burying my father the year before had been made easier for me by the intelligent sympathy of Herman Sabinson. I was not going to stop leaning on him now.

  “No,” Mrs. O’Toole said. “I have not been able to get in touch with Dr. Sabinson since he called you. He called from my office here at the hospital. Then he went out on house calls. He doesn’t know what happened.”

  “What did happen?” I said.

  Mrs. O’Toole’s hands crushed together. Oh, God, I thought. That poor bastard of a butterfly. He ain’t coming home for dinner tonight.

  “Nothing happened,” Mrs. O’Toole said sharply. Then the sharpness in her voice seemed to come back and hit her. She blushed. I thought with almost insane irrelevance that I had never before realized how much a blush can do for a woman. For a moment or two this bloodless old do-gooder looked almost pretty. “The signing of the paper is no longer necessary,” Mrs. O’Toole said. “That’s all. You don’t have to sign the paper.”

  I thought that over for a couple of minutes. The thinking did not help. Something had obviously happened after Herman Sabinson had called me. It was pretty obvious that I would not learn what it was from Mrs. O’Toole. It was even more obvious that it couldn’t possibly make any difference. My mother was dead. Nothing more could happen to her. Except, of course, the funeral arrangements, which were my next chore. It was the day before Christmas. I had just given a sullen taxi driver a six-dollar tip. A moment of generosity to this Red Cross Gray Lady did not seem inappropriate.

  “Look,” I said. “If it’s no longer necessary to sign a paper authorizing an autopsy, okay. But as long as I’m here, why not let me sign it? The worst that can happen is that you’ll just have to throw the paper away. If it turns out later that the rules have changed again, and I do have to sign it, then I won’t have to make another trip back here. This will be a great convenience for me because I have to go over to the undertaker now and make the funeral arrangements.”

  I did not add that it would also make me feel better about Herman Sabinson. I had made him a promise. I wasn’t feeling my best. I knew it would make me feel better if I did not break my promise to him. I wished all the people who thought I was a son of a bitch were in a position to make a note of that.

  “Well, all right, yes, very well,” Mrs. O’Toole said. “That makes sense.”

  She went back through the door beside the Information window. I stared at the pictures of Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, and General Evangeline Booth. I hoped Rabbi Goldfarb, who died the day Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, would forgive me for thinking General Booth was the best-look
ing of the three.

  Mrs. O’Toole came back with a printed form and a ballpoint pen. “Here,” she said.

  I signed below her pointing finger. The nail was painted blood-red. The color gave me a small stab of pleasure. All at once Mrs. O’Toole was part of the world of the living rather than the world of the dead.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Mrs. O’Toole took the paper. She retracted the ball point. And my pleasure fled. I could tell from her face what she was going to say.

  “I’m sorry for your trouble,” she said.

  For a startled moment I wondered why the pain seemed to ease somewhat. The line from A. E. Housman’s poem, “Others, I am not the first,” was suddenly running through my mind. The problem of facing the undertaker, whom I had faced so short a time ago when my father died, all at once seemed no more than an unpleasant chore. A chore I was capable of handling.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Mrs. O’Toole touched my arm, gently, exactly as the director, beyond the camera’s sight lines, would have instructed her to do it, thus destroying the moment of dignified understanding we had shared. But I walked out of the Admissions Office with the feeling that I had no right to dislike her. She could not help being what she was: a pain in the ass to a middle-aged man who had wanted to laugh on learning that his aged mother had just died.

  Out on the street, at the top of the low concrete rise that surmounts the crescent driveway of the Peretz Memorial Hospital, I forgot about Mrs. O’Toole. There were no taxis. There were no people waiting for taxis. There was only a scene of desolation that it occurred to me was typical of the Borough of Queens. I decided to walk up to the Battenberg Funeral Home. It was a journey I had made before.

  My father had died nine months earlier. On an ordinary Tuesday in April. Warm but not too warm. Sunny but not bright. The casualties in Vietnam, announced on the kitchen radio as I boiled my egg, were lower than those announced for the previous week. Horst the elevator operator said, “Have a nice day, sir.” In a way, I did. My father had died in a manner that I knew would have pleased him. Neatly. No fuss. He rose from the breakfast table, holding his copy of the Jewish Daily Forward, and he fell down. Eleven minutes later, when Herman Sabinson called me, he said my father had been dead for ten and nine-tenths minutes.