Last Respects Read online

  “You look a little sort of like, I don’t know, feverish?”

  My thoughts stopped. It occurred to me that since Dr. Herman Sabinson had called me in the morning, they had not been very good thoughts. Maybe I was a little feverish. I put my hand to my forehead. Damp? Yes. Undeniably damp. But not hot. Definitely not hot. On the contrary. Cool as the big brass balls on my bed against which I used to put my bare feet on hot summer days in the years when my mother was running booze for the bar mitzvahs of East Fourth Street.

  “No, I’m fine,” I said. “Or nearly fine. This sort of thing is probably more upsetting than I thought.”

  “You’re not kidding,” Mr. Beybere said. “People they come here, they think it’s a simple thing. Why shouldn’t they? Identifying a body? A person they’ve probably known all their lives? I mean seen every day for years, probably. What’s so hard about that? And yet you know something?”

  There were times, and this was suddenly one of them, when I was assailed by the terrifying feeling that I knew nothing. That more than half a century of complicated living had been nothing but a workout in the gym. The bout had never really taken place. No decision had been handed down.

  “What?” I said.

  “A lot of those people, husbands they’ve come to identify wives, wives husbands, children their fathers and mothers, they can’t do it.”

  “They can’t do what?” I said.

  “Identify the dear one,” Mr. Beybere said. “They’re in a state of shock.”

  The phrase hung in the air between us like an accusation. The muscles concealed under Mr. Beybere’s dead white face, as shapeless as his uniform, pulled enough of its spongy bits and pieces together to convey a recognizable facsimile of a truculent scowl. He was waiting. Daring me.

  “I’m sure I can do it,” I said.

  “Of course you can,” Mr. Beybere said. Out of the past came the voice of my French teacher in J.H.S. 64, saying: A boy like you? With your marks? Afraid of the subjunctive? For heaven’s sake, Benny, don’t make a person laugh! Mr. Beybere laughed. Not hysterically. Not a fun laugh. Little fragments of reassuring sound. I tried to move my thoughts into happier terrain. I wanted to think something nice. Or at least friendly.

  “What?” I managed to say with a degree of restraint that surprised and pleased me. There was hope for Benny Kramer yet.

  Flashing through my mind, the way I’ve seen these things happen to drowning people in the movies, came the moments I could remember out of my shapeless life when I had been in a state of shock. Item: the night my mother appeared on the floor of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein gym while George Weitz was wigwagging to me a fragment of Matthew XXV:29. Item: the next day when George, to whom I was making a peace offering of two pieces of fruit, both unspotted, gave me a shot in the mouth. Item: the night on the dock a week later when Walter Sinclair asked me to leave him alone with my mother so they could have a talk and I realized as I walked up Fourth Street that they couldn’t talk without me to act as interpreter. Item: the moment under the blue velvet canopy at the Shumansky wedding when I saw the red stains begin to appear and spread on the boiled shirt of the young man who had just been married to Rivke Shumansky.

  I ran the cards of these moments through the machine of my mind, fished the result out of the slot, and checked it against the way I felt now in this room at the Queens County morgue. It was not the same.

  “I guess I’m probably a little upset,” I said to Mr. Beybere. “But I’m not in a state of shock. Not yet, anyway. I might get into a state of shock if this takes too long. That taxi out there is waiting for me. The driver’s got the meter running. Could we get going, Mr. Beybere?”

  I got instead another dose of the disapproving scowl. What was I doing wrong? The situation didn’t exactly have in it the ingredients for Hamlet’s beef about posting with such dexterity to incestuous sheets. It was all very simple. There was no reason for me to make a production out of it. My mother was dead. And I had been ordered, I didn’t know why, to show up in this dismal set for an Off-Off-Broadway play to identify the body. Was it disrespectful to the departed, did it show a lack of love for the deceased to want to dispose of this unpleasant chore as quickly as possible? How the hell did Mr. Beybere know how much I had loved my mother? Suppose I hadn’t loved her at all? What business was it of his? He was paid to be here. I wasn’t. The smiling face of John V. Lindsay indicated that he approved of the way Mr. Beybere handled his job. Why, in God’s name, didn’t the old fool get on with it?

  “I understand your feelings,” he said. “But there are a few questions I have to ask. I mean it’s my duty. I’ll try to make them as brief as possible. I hope you don’t mind?”

  Why did I have to worry about his hopes? Who cared if he minded or didn’t mind? I had always thought death was a private affair.

  “Of course not,” I said. “You ask. I’ll answer.”

  “Thank you,” Mr. Beybere said. He consulted the sheet of paper on his clipboard. “Your mother died in an accident, is that correct?”

  The answer was, of course, yes. She had not thought up the Eighteenth Amendment. She had never heard of the Volstead Act. But they had come hurtling into her life and changed it as surely and as violently as it would have been changed if she had been hit by a truck.

  “No,” I said. My private feelings about my mother were my private business. This protégé of John V. Lindsay wanted the facts. He was entitled to them. I let him have them. “My mother fell down in her apartment and broke her hip late in November,” I said. “She was taken to the Peretz Memorial Hospital on Main Street. She was operated on, they put in a silver splint or a pin, whatever it’s called, and for a while it looked as though she’d be all right. I mean, she’s broken her hip twice before during the last ten years, and she recovered both times without too much trouble. But this last break was apparently more than she could handle. She was, after all, a very old lady. Anyway, she was in the hospital for thirty-two days. The last two weeks, almost three, the doctors have made it pretty clear they didn’t think she’d ever get out of the hospital. She just sort of ran down, you might say. I saw her last night. She looked pretty weak but she wasn’t in any pain. After she fell asleep, I left the hospital. This morning her doctor called me and said she’d died quietly during the night. He wanted to perform an autopsy, and he said I had to sign some papers to give him permission. So I went out to the hospital, signed the papers, and went over to the funeral parlor. I made all the arrangements there, and then they hit me with this surprise.”

  Mr. Beybere nodded. “They said you had to come out here to identify the body,” he said.

  “They sure did,” I said. “And I don’t mind telling you I’m pretty confused. The man at the funeral parlor didn’t know why I had to do this. He said all he knows is that the hospital called and told him to give me the message when I showed up. I don’t understand it. My mother died in the Peretz Memorial Hospital on Main Street just a few hours ago. What is her body doing here in the morgue?”

  The look that gathered slowly on Mr. Beybere’s face seemed to me to be building clearly as an accompaniment to the words “I don’t know.” What gathered slowly inside me as I watched was the certainty that if that’s what this fool actually said to me, my reply was going to be, in a voice as cold and hard and unpleasant as the weather outside the window, “Why the hell don’t you know?” Mr. Beybere, like his counterpart at the sentry box, took me by surprise.

  “You paid her hospital bills?” he said.

  “Who?” I said. I was, as I said, surprised.

  “Your mother,” Mr. Beybere said.

  All of a sudden I didn’t want to tell him the truth. I wanted to tell him my mother’s illness had been a severe financial blow to me. A long, slow, draining disaster that had driven me to the edge of bankruptcy but not even remotely to the edge of hesitation. Without flinching, without a murmur of complaint, I had been for months writing checks like mad. Borrowing heavily from the banks. Mortgaging
my home, my future, the future of my wife and children, and my career. Flying in doctors from Switzerland, or wherever the most expensive doctors fly from. Hiring extra nurses, nurses that were not even needed but looked good standing there in phalanxes around my mother’s bed. Stuffing her hospital room with color TV sets. Baskets of fruit from Madison Avenue shops in which a single candied prune went for eighty cents. Bed jackets from Bergdorf. And even making a special deal with Muzak to pipe Yiddish melodies from Tel Aviv direct to her bedside.

  I felt this was the sort of thing Mr. Beybere wanted to hear. I sensed this was the language that would convince him I had loved my mother. With me and my mother, I wanted him to believe, it had been like with Daddy Browning and Peaches Heenan. I wanted him to believe that when it came to being shattered by her death, Abélard had nothing on me. I wanted this idiot to think well of me.

  I was clearly going off my rocker.

  “I have contributed to my mother’s support ever since I was a boy,” I said. I had the feeling, from listening to my own voice, that I was dictating an affidavit intended to clear a slur on my character. “Luckily, in the case of her last illness, Medicare and Medicaid took care of all the hospital and doctor’s bills. Not the extras, you understand. The specialists. The private nurses. The things like that. I paid all that out of my own pocket. But the basic bills,” I said, “Medicare and Medicaid took care of all that.”

  “They did?” Mr. Beybere sounded pleased as well as astonished.

  “They did,” I said.

  “How does it work?” Mr. Beybere said.

  I looked at him sharply. “Are you serious?” I said.

  Mr. Beybere obviously sensed the skepticism in my voice. He looked hurt. “I really am,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “My mother-in-law lives with us,” Mr. Beybere said. “She’s a very old lady and she’s not well and she’s getting sicker and sicker all the time. My wife and I have been able to take care of her up to now, at home, I mean, but if she gets worse, and she has to go to the hospital, my wife and I, I don’t know, we’re going to be in the soup. It’s a problem that’s hanging over us, and we’re, you know, we’re scared.”

  He certainly looked scared. His fear made me feel better. My emotional state at the moment was clearly such that only to people being sucked into a whirlpool and calling desperately for me to fling them a life preserver could I feel superior. I took full advantage of this. I immediately felt sorry I had thought of Mr. Beybere as an idiot. Not that I felt he was not. In many years of contact with the type that attracts this designation, I had never met anyone who—pending investigation that might lead to a subsequent change of opinion—more clearly deserved to be called an idiot. Just the same, I was sorry. I had to be, to save myself. My voice began to drip with that most inexpensive and readily accessible of all human lubricants: the milk of human kindness.

  “It’s really quite simple,” I said.

  I explained. In detail. With footnotes. And quiet, brotherly gestures. I made this idiot—sorry—I made this unfortunate man take notes as I spoke. I don’t think I have ever more greatly enjoyed one of my own conversations.

  “Got all that?” I said finally.

  “Oh, yes,” said Mr. Beybere.

  “Any questions?”

  He asked a few. I answered them. He added my answers to his notes.

  “Okay?” I said finally.

  Enough is enough.

  “Yes, perfect,” Mr. Beybere said. “My wife and I are most grateful to you.”

  “Not at all,” I said.

  “I wish there was something I could do to repay you,” said Mr. Beybere.

  “There is,” I said.

  “What?” he said.

  “Lead me to wherever it is I have to go to identify my mother’s body,” I said. “I’d like to get out of here.”

  Mr. Beybere’s shapeless face fell apart. “I can’t do that,” he said.

  “Why not?” I said.

  “I have no idea where your mother’s body is,” Mr. Beybere said. “It’s not here in the morgue.”

  9

  BY A CURIOUS COINCIDENCE—in reverse, of course—my father was using almost exactly the same words when I came home from cheder shortly after six o’clock on that day in 1927 following the Shumansky wedding.

  “She’s not here in the house” was what my father actually said.

  Since he said it in Yiddish, the words made no particular impression on me. At home he always talked Yiddish. More accurately, on this occasion I assumed he was talking to a neighbor. Or maybe to some friend from the Erste Neustadter Krank und Unterstitzing Verein. Since our family was clearly in some kind of trouble, a visit from a neighbor or a member of the Verein seemed almost inevitable. The central figure in the social life of our block, as I had observed it, was the busybody, and we had certainly earned ourselves the right to be the target of the local busybodies. Boy, had we earned it!

  Consider. My mother had not been in the house when I got home the night before from Lenox Assembly Rooms. My mother had not been in the house when I came home from school to leave my books and knock back my glass of milk and slab of honey cake. And my mother had not been in the house when I set out for Rabbi Goldfarb’s cheder.

  What I’m getting at is that with these facts already on the record, why should my father be saying “She’s not here in the house” unless he was being patiently polite to a well-intentioned busybody?

  “This is my son,” my father said.

  “This is Mr. Kramer’s son,” another voice said.

  Turning to the other voice, I grasped two points: it was my Aunt Sarah from New Haven who had translated my father’s Yiddish statement for the stranger in our kitchen, and our family was in worse trouble than I had suspected. My Aunt Sarah from New Haven came down to East Fourth Street only for catastrophic events: the birth of my kid brother that had almost killed my mother, and the pneumonia that had almost killed my father the winter before the Shumansky wedding. All at once the smell of death was in the room. It cleared the air.

  The strange creature in the kitchen facing my father and my Aunt Sarah from New Haven was a goy version of Mr. Seaman, the Avenue C undertaker.

  “I’m very glad to meet you, Mr. Kramer,” this man said. It was not until he shoved his hand at my bellybutton that I realized the man had meant me. Mr. Kramer? I took the hand and shook it. Not exactly a bracing experience. This guy had a hand that felt like a slab of cold matzoh brei. “I’m Jim Kelly,” he said. “Special Investigation.”

  “Mr. Kelly wants to ask you a few questions,” my Aunt Sarah said in Yiddish. Since I knew she spoke English, I also knew she was trying to tell me something over Mr. Kelly’s head. “He’s from the government,” my Aunt Sarah said. “He’s been here already an hour. The questions he asks, a person could plotz, but you do just like your father and I have been doing. You give him the answers you think he wants to hear, and there will be no trouble.” My Aunt Sarah turned to the man and said in English, “He’s a very delicate boy. With Benny it’s books, books, books all the time. Like you could say, a saint. The real world outside, in the street, Benny doesn’t even know it exists. He’s studying to be a rabbi. That’s where he just came from. I mean this minute. Now. From cheder. You know what a cheder is, Mr. Kelly? It’s a school. A holy school. Where only the boys who want to serve God are allowed to study. It’s like by your people, Mr. Kelly, a school where they allow to study only those boys who some day they want to be the Pope. To want to be the Pope, this is bad? Of course not. It’s like wanting to be God. That’s Benny. So please be careful. This boy will tell you the truth. Benny doesn’t even know what the word lie means. But when you talk to him, it’s got to be like you’re walking on eggs, or he’ll break into tiny little pieces. Benny is very delicate. All right, Mr. Kelly?”

  “Of course,” said the man from the Special Investigation. “I’m very grateful to you for your help,” he said. “I will do my best to be gentle
.”

  “Thank you,” my Aunt Sarah said. She turned to stroke my hair as though it were a bundle of rare spun glass not a splinter of which did she dare to snip off under penalty of some unspeakable tribal rite. “Sit here,” my Aunt Sarah said. She pointed to one of the chairs at our kitchen table, using both hands in a gesture of reverence, as though, after a long ordeal by fire—who knows? maybe water, too—during which I had not flinched by so much as a quivered lip, I as the young prince had earned the right to ascend to the throne. I sat down in front of a large glass of milk and a slab of warm lekach as thick as my school textbook on the Basic Principles of Elementary Biology. It was clear that my Aunt Sarah had not just arrived. She had been in the house long enough to bake a honey cake. “You mind if he takes a little bite on something while you talk to him?” my Aunt Sarah said to Mr. Kelly. “The poor child, he hasn’t had anything in his mouth all day.”

  Except my heart, of course. But how much nourishment did that provide?

  “No, no, of course not,” said Mr. Kelly. “It’s quite all right. I want him to be completely relaxed.”

  So did I, but everything inside me that could be stretched tight was in perfect condition for being strung on a ukulele.

  “Joe,” my Aunt Sarah said to my father. “You sit here.”

  I watched him take the chair facing me at the other side of the kitchen table. Except for those few totally unexpected moments the night before, when he had surprised me by the way he talked to Mr. Velvelschmidt, my father’s movements had never held my attention for very long. They didn’t exactly absorb me now, either. But I remember thinking: Watch it; whatever you say to that man will also be heard by the old man.

  “Now, then, Benny,” Mr. Kelly said.

  “You want a bite?” I said.

  “What?” Mr. Kelly said.

  “In cheder,” my Aunt Sarah said. “In these religious schools, Mr. Kelly, the children are taught to share and share alike.”

  “What?” Mr. Kelly said again.