Last Respects Page 20

  “Not bad,” the first woman said finally in Yiddish.

  “Anyway, it hides the uniform,” the second woman said. She hurried back to the white cardboard box, pulled out a mass of tissue paper, and picked the paper apart as she approached me. Out of the tissue paper came a king’s crown made of golden cardboard. That’s right. A king’s crown. Like in the pictures of Arthur pulling the sword from the stone. This fatso set the crown on my head, rammed it down as though she were fixing a hoop around a barrel, and said, “It hurts?”

  “A little,” I said.

  “You won’t have to wear it long,” the first woman said. I reached up to ease the damn thing. She slapped my hand. “Don’t touch!”

  “God in heaven,” the second woman said. “The music!”

  She grabbed another bundle of tissue paper from the white cardboard box, and while her partner helped by pushing me from behind, dragged me out into the hall. As they hurried me across to the large door through which I had earlier heard the sounds of music, I understood what the second woman’s last remark had meant. The music had changed. When I had emerged on the second floor between Mr. O’Hare and Mr. Krakowitz, the unseen band had been playing “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” Now it was playing something insanely familiar.

  “Ssshh!” the first woman ssshhed in my ear. “Only a minute we’ll have to wait.”

  I filled the time by examining the large room. It contained what seemed to me a couple of hundred people, although there were probably fewer than that. All the women wore beaded dresses, with roses pinned to their shoulders and those fat sweaty smiles pinned to their faces, and all the men wore tuxedos. They were arranged in two long rows that stretched all the way down the big room. The rows of guests formed an aisle that looked as though it had not been properly swept. A moment later I realized this was deliberate. The aisle was strewn with rose petals. At the far end of the aisle, under a blue velvet canopy, stood Rivke Shumansky and a skinny young man in a tuxedo. They were facing each other in front of a man with a beard and a black fedora who could have been Rabbi Goldfarb but wasn’t. At the other end of the aisle, near the door in which I stood with the two women who had put the cape and the crown on me, a four-piece band was pounding away on a small raised platform. What they were playing sounded insanely familiar because, at the foot of the platform, Mr. Norton Krakowitz was singing “Me and My Shadow.”

  When he hit the chorus, the two women behind me started picking apart the bundle of tissue paper they had brought from the dressing room. They worked at it as though they were plucking the leaves of an artichoke. They freed a white satin pillow with golden tassels hanging from the corners. The first woman pulled my hands out, and when the second woman set the pillow on my upturned palms as though she were handing me a tray, I saw that a wedding ring was basted lightly to the satin with white thread.

  “Go slow,” the first woman whispered in my ear. “Try to keep time to the music.”

  Not until I felt her gentle but firm shove did I realize she had led me to the top of the two rows of guests and set me in motion down the aisle toward the bride and groom under the canopy. I am not much of an authority on music but I feel reasonably certain “Me and My Shadow” was not written as a marching song. Trying to keep in step with Mr. Krakowitz’s rendition caused me to move down the aisle in a series of shuffling stumbles. My awkwardness seemed to impress the audience as enchanting. I never heard such audible kvelling. To me, concentrating on keeping the satin pillow on an even keel, the oohing and ahing on both sides was deafening. This may be why I was apparently not aware that I had reached the canopy, or the proper place under it, until the rabbi reached down and put his open hand sharply against my chest.

  “Oof!” I said.

  Involuntarily, of course.

  “Take the ring,” he said.

  I was about to obey when I saw the groom reaching for it, and realized the rabbi’s order had not been addressed to me. The groom tore the ring away from the threads that held it lightly to the white satin, and turned toward Rivke Shumansky. The rabbi tipped his head up to the blue velvet canopy and rolled into a chant that sounded like some of the Chimish we sang for Rabbi Goldfarb every day. It had the same effect on the bride and groom. The sounds made them look solemn. The chant ended in a few spoken words, to which the groom responded by slipping the ring onto Rivke’s finger. Then the rabbi took an electric light bulb from his pocket and set it on the floor.

  “Stamp on it hard,” he said to the groom in Yiddish. “You have to break it good.”

  It seemed to me Rivke’s groom stamped on it better than good. The skinny little guy tried to drive the damn thing through the floor. I had heard electric light bulbs smash before. In fact, I had smashed a few myself. We stole them from Old Man Tzoddick’s junk wagon and exploded them like grenades on the sidewalk. But I never heard one make the sound this one made when the shoe of Rivke Shumansky’s groom hit it. What emerged was not one sound but a series of sounds. It was as though a string of firecrackers had been set off.

  Then I heard the screaming all around me, and I was shoved against one of the poles that held up the blue velvet canopy, and the golden crown fell off my head. The last thing I saw was the way the red spots were slowly spreading wider and wider on Rivke Shumansky’s groom’s boiled-shirt front, as though some bastard had splashed him with horseradish sauce. I remember wondering stupidly what he was doing on the ground, writhing around like that, when the blue velvet canopy hit me and knocked me down beside him.

  8

  FORTY YEARS LATER I still had an uneasy feeling about the color red. It glared down at me from the sign over the Queens County General Hospital’s black iron gateposts. It read: Morgue.

  Read in red electric lights. Small bulbs, each one looking like one of those stains on the shirt front of Rivke Shumansky’s brand-new husband of about thirty seconds. The poor guy had certainly hung up a record for the shortest unconsummated marriage in the books.

  “This is where you want to go?” The taxi driver jerked his thumb up toward the blood-red sign. “Here?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  The driver turned to give me a look. Troubled? Puzzled? Annoyed? I couldn’t decide. It seemed unbelievable, and yet I was willing to bet it was true: this New York taxi driver had never before been asked to take a fare to a morgue.

  “Hodde we do this?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s my first time. Why don’t we ask that guy in the booth.”

  The booth was just inside the iron gates. It looked somewhat like one of those sentry boxes in front of Buckingham Palace. A bit wider, perhaps. With a window, and a ledge, and a complicated little IBM machine with a clock and a stamping device to log visitors in and out. Also, a guard in a shapeless dark blue uniform to do the logging. He looked at me suspiciously when the taxi pulled up at the window ledge and I leaned out.

  “I’ve been sent up here to identify a body,” I said. “Could you tell me where to go?”

  His face cleared at once. A man trying to sneak through for the purpose of stealing an X-ray machine or raping a nurse’s aide wouldn’t fix his feet with Lady Luck by using the terrifying reality of death as a cover story.

  “Straight up the drive to that there circle,” the guard said. He leaned out of the booth, into the gray, now faintly drizzly nastiness of the day before Christmas, and pointed. “With the sort of like gravel around the sign? You see the place?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  The guard looked relieved. He was obviously trying to get rid of me. Who could blame him? If our positions had been reversed, I would certainly be trying to get rid of him. Not an easy thing to do if you’re dealing with a visitor so dumb that he can’t see a gravel traffic circle when it is pointed out to him.

  “Well, you just go on up there and turn left,” the guard said. “The drive leads right up to the door. A sort of red brick building, the bricks, I mean, with gray stone around the doors. You can’t miss it.”<
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  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Tzokay,” the guard said, and then he took me by surprise. “Merry Christmas,” he said.

  “Schmuck,” the taxi driver said as he sent the cab up toward the gravel circle. “A guy comes to the morgue to identify a body, so this putz says Merry Christmas.”

  “What else could he say?” I said.

  “He could shut up,” the driver said.

  A thought for today.

  “Here we are,” I said.

  A thought for any day.

  “You want me to wait?” the driver said.

  I was climbing out of the cab. I paused, one foot on the ground, the other still in the taxi. How long did it take to identify a body in a morgue? Was it something you could do while a taxi meter was ticking away outside?

  “I don’t know,” I said to the driver. I tried to bring to mind the area through which we had just driven. Unfortunately, I had not been paying much attention. All I had was a general impression of desolate streets. “Is it tough to get a cab out here?” I said.

  “The other side of the hospital, probably not,” the driver said. “I mean, you know, it’s sick people, there’s visitors coming and going all the time. But this side, I mean here—” He paused and looked out at the entrance to the morgue. “I don’t know,” he said. “This is my first visit.”

  I pulled my foot out of the cab.

  “Mine, too,” I said. “If you don’t mind waiting, I’d appreciate it. I’ll take care of you.”

  “That’s all right,” the driver said. “You just pay what’s on the clock.”

  “No, I’ll take care of you,” I said. The man who had brought me from my home in Manhattan to the Peretz Memorial Hospital where my mother had died had benefited from my sense of guilt to the extent of a six-dollar tip. Was this man entitled to less? Who could I ask? Certainly not him. “I’ll make this as fast as I can,” I said.

  “Take your time,” the driver said. “There’s no rush.”

  Maybe not at his age. But I had come around the pylon into my fifties. More than half the race was run. And the best part, at that. If I didn’t get my mother off my back soon, I probably never would. According to the Reader’s Digest, I was now living squarely in the middle of the coronary belt. If I died before I learned what my mother had been all about, I would never forgive myself.

  “Yes, sir? Can I help you, sir?”

  Where had the words come from? I looked around. I was in a sort of square hall. Why sort of? Because the chamber had several offshoots from an essentially though not conclusively square center. As though somebody had decided to design it as a wheel, and only when the spokes were built, did it occur to the designer that the center of a wheel is round. Whatever the shape, even with my eyes closed I would have known I was in a municipal institution. The place smelled exactly the way P.S. 188 and J.H.S. 64 used to smell. Which is the way subway toilets still smell, reform administration in residence at Gracie Mansion notwithstanding. Then I became aware that there seemed to be some point to the offshoots. One, I noticed, was lined with fumed-oak benches. Nobody was on them, but this was a really mean day, and it was also the day before Christmas. On better days I suspected this offshoot and its benches served as a waiting room. But in a morgue, what were better days? And what did people wait for in a place so inescapably terminal? The happy face appearing at the door? The uplifted voice? “Hey, sorry! It’s not your mother at all! It’s just some old lady we picked up in a gutter who looks like her!”

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  I turned toward the repeated words. Repeated this time with a rising inflection. And in another offshoot above a marble ledge I saw a small information-inquiry-“Who are you looking for, mister?” type window. Framed in the window was the man who had directed me from the sentry box at the iron gates outside. I know this sounds silly, but it had to be the same man. There couldn’t be two of them. Not even twins could manage to look so alike. And yet, how did he get here? He had certainly not leaped out of the sentry post and sprinted past the taxi as we drove up the path. Or had he? A mental picture took shape in my head. I could see the whole thing clearly. The man in the shapeless blue uniform leaving the sentry box as the taxi pulled away. Racing like crazy all the way around to the front entrance of the hospital. Belting through a labyrinth of corridors. Bowling over with his pumping elbows doctors and nurses and patients and visitors and orderlies carrying trays loaded with hot meals. Emerging breathlessly from the back of the building into the hall of the morgue a moment before I came in from the front, just in time to appear at the window above the marble ledge and say, “Can I help you, sir?”

  Except that he didn’t sound breathless. And examining his face, I knew that no matter when he reached his appointed place on the old slab, this man would never look deader than he looked now.

  “I’ve come to identify a body,” I said.

  “Of course,” he said.

  The response annoyed me. I don’t know why. After all, he couldn’t really have been expected to say oh, I thought you’d popped in to have yourself measured for a new set of dental plates.

  “What’s the name, please?”

  I told him. He examined a sheet of paper attached to a clipboard. It seemed to me he took a long time doing it.

  “You sure?” he said finally.

  “About what?” I said.

  “The name,” he said.

  Always, I thought, there are jokers. In the most unexpected places, out of the most improbable faces, at the most inappropriate moments, the voice of the smart-ass rises in the land.

  “It was her name for more than eighty years,” I said. “It’s been mine for over fifty. I ought to be sure.”

  “You mind spelling it?” he said.

  I forced back my irritation. After all, he could have asked me to wigwag it in Morse. I spelled it. He listened attentively.

  “Hmmm,” he said. I sensed a note of suspicion in the single syllable. Considering my record as a speller in P.S. 188, this boy was flirting with a caustic riposte. He stared at me for several moments, then said, “You mind waiting a minute?”

  What I minded most was the way he began every sentence with “You mind.” I began to have a feeling that my reactions were all wrong. I felt as though I were watching a movie and the sound track was out of synch.

  “I’ve got a taxi waiting,” I said.

  But he was gone. I dipped down to peer through the information window. I wanted to see how he had done it. My examination indicated that he had obviously sunk through the floor. In the room behind the information window there were no doors. Only a picture of John V. Lindsay smiling down with self-confident sincerity from the facing wall.

  “This way, please.”

  I turned. The man who had directed me at the sentry box, the man who had asked if I minded waiting a minute at the window, that man was now beckoning me into one of the offshoots from the square center of the hall. This boy was obviously better than Charlie Paddock, who when I was a boy had been known as the world’s fastest human. And Charlie had been forced to wear running pants to prove it. I moved toward New York City’s fastest civil servant. He moved down the offshoot, beckoning me to follow. Near the bottom of the corridor he stepped in front of a gray metal door and waited for me.

  “Mr. Bieber will see you,” he said.

  “You mind spelling it?” I said.

  Inexplicably, I suddenly felt mean. It embarrassed me, but it didn’t stop me from sounding the way I sounded.

  “What?” the man said.

  “The name,” I said. “How do you spell it?”

  “Oh.” He scowled. “Why do you want me to spell it?”

  Because you wanted me to spell mine.

  “It could be B, e, e, b, e, r,” I said. “Or it could be B, i, e, b, e, r. I’d like to get it straight.”

  “Oh,” the man said again. He gave the matter some thought. So did I. Always, I thought again, always there are the voices of jokers. And w
ith all too increasing frequency, I reflected grimly, the voice is proving to be yours. The man’s face cleared. He pointed to the gray metal door. On it in black was lettered: Mr. Beybere. The man said, “Those other two, no. It’s B, e, y, b, e, r, e.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He opened the door, waited until I passed him, then closed the door behind me. I looked around. This room looked like the others I had seen in the morgue. A gray metal desk. Two gray metal chairs. A window that looked out on the gray sky, the dismal gray drizzle, and the gray rear bumper of the taxi that had brought me here. On one wall another print of the same picture of John V. Lindsay smiling down with self-confident sincerity. And behind the desk the same man who had directed me at the sentry box, questioned me at the information window, and led me down the corridor to this room. I hoped John Lindsay was smiling because he was looking down on a civil servant of such peripatetic dedication that he managed to fill all those posts without the help of Charlie Paddock’s running pants.

  “Mr. Beybere?” I said.

  “No, Beyber,” he said. “A lot of people think it’s French on account of the way it’s spelled, but we, the family, we always pronounced it Beyber.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Was I?

  “That’s all right,” Mr. Beybere said. “Please sit down.”

  I sat down. He studied a sheet of paper on the desk in front of him. It was, of course, fastened to a clipboard.

  “You all right?” Mr. Beybere said.

  I came up out of my thoughts. “How do you mean?” I said.