Last Respects Read online

  “Possibly longer,” Herman said. “I was in there no more than ninety seconds after your mother rang my bell.” Herman Sabinson lives in the apartment next to the one my mother and father occupied for over twenty years. “He’d been dead for at least three-quarters of a minute. My analysis indicates he was dead before he hit the linoleum. It was instantaneous. Not a split second of pain. Meet me at the Peretz Memorial Hospital as soon as you can.”

  I did, but it had taken almost an hour. There had been a taxi strike and I had taken the wrong train when I changed at Queensboro Plaza. But Herman Sabinson had been waiting when I got there.

  “Forget it,” he had said in answer to my apology for tardiness. I wondered if he knew what he was saying. Forget what? “I’ve got a dozen patients here at Peretz Memorial,” Herman Sabinson said. “While I was waiting for you I filled in the time checking them out. Sign here, and then you can go on and make the funeral arrangements.”

  Nine months later, I was going again. On a gray, unpleasant day that I felt must be making everybody in the neighborhood feel as terrible as I did. “Come all ye faithful,” Miss Kahn had led us in song in P.S. 188 when I was in kindergarten, on the day the New York City public school system had thrust us into making cardboard cut-outs of the Three Wise Men to be pasted on our classroom windows. The feelings of those days, in another time, another world, were suddenly as real as a toothache. My mother had never shared those feelings. The Christian faith was for her an important segment of enemy terrain. Gentiles had created her police record. The followers of Jesus had snapped at her heels all the days, hours, and minutes of her long and bitter life. They would not even allow her to live with the minor fiction that apparently meant more to her than the well-being of her son: her passionate belief that she had been born in Berezna, Hungary.

  “Not true,” my Aunt Sarah had said to me after my father’s funeral. “Mama was not born in Hungary.”

  We had come back to my mother’s apartment from the cemetery. A distant but well-intentioned cousin was busy in the kitchen and the living room, serving sandwiches and coffee to our relatives. I had set up a bar in the foyer. I waited until everybody had a drink before I went looking for my Aunt Sarah. Among all my relatives, Aunt Sarah, who lived in New Haven, had always been my favorite. The reason is embarrassingly simple. I had always been her favorite. My feelings about people are primitive but firm. I like people who like me. I dislike people who dislike me. Aunt Sarah always liked me.

  I made her a good strong highball and took it into the bedroom. She was reclining on my just deceased father’s bed. I use the word reclining because I think it is the way Aunt Sarah would have wanted me to describe her position. She was almost eighty, and her weight had been going up steadily for several years, but she did not like to be reminded of either. My father’s funeral had tired her. The noises the other guests were making in the living room annoyed her. Here, in the bedroom, she had taken off her shoes, released some of the complicated fastenings of her undergarments, and eased herself into a half-sitting position against the pillows on my dead father’s bed. My Aunt Sarah was definitely not lying down. I had taken the precaution to bring along a drink for myself.

  “If she wasn’t born in Hungary,” I said, “where was she born?”

  It was like discovering that the wife of Menelaus had never been near Troy. What in God’s name were you going to write in on the government form?

  “Soho,” my Aunt Sarah said.

  I had a moment of shock. Soho was Dickens. My mother was Sholem Aleichem.

  “You mean Soho in London?” I said.

  “If there’s two Sohos,” my Aunt Sarah said, “nobody ever told me.”

  She started to tell what I suppose she would have told twenty, thirty, even forty years earlier. That is, if I had asked. Crucial information—the bits and pieces that add up to a life, change it, and in the end destroy it—is always lying around waiting to be picked up. The trouble is that somebody has to be near enough to tell you to bend over.

  “But what was Mama doing in Soho?” I said.

  “What were you doing on East Fourth Street?” my Aunt Sarah said. “Getting born.”

  “Yes, but I know how I got to East Fourth Street,” I said. “I don’t know how Mama got to Soho.”

  My Aunt Sarah took a sip of her drink and said, “It was this good-looking louse Yeedle Yankov. Our Aunt Sheindle, she was your grandmother, she fell in love with the bastard.”

  I had never seen my mother’s mother. Aunt Sarah snapped open a small golden locket and showed me a picture of her. I don’t know how things were in Berezna, Hungary, in 1877, but in at least one respect I think it is safe to assume they were not much different from the way they had been in the Garden of Eden. My grandmother, Sheindle Baltok, had clearly been a knockout. Not a very unique knockout. When you’ve seen one golden-haired Hungarian beauty, you have seen them all. What startled me was the sudden realization that my mother’s mother had belonged in this great tradition. It made me wonder about my mother.

  “Was my, mother as beautiful as my grandmother?” I asked.

  “You wouldn’t have to ask,” my Aunt Sarah said. “If you had known her as a child.”

  “In Soho?” I said.

  “Before Soho,” my Aunt Sarah said, “a lot happened.”

  What happened was this. The Baltok family owned the most prosperous dairy farm in Berezna. The heir to the farm was the Baltok’s only child, my Grandmother Sheindle. At seventeen she fell in love with one of the town’s most distinguished bums. The word is my Aunt Sarah’s.

  “By Hungarians,” she said, “to be a bum is like by a butcher to be a lamb chop. There’s too many of them around to make any one of them something special. But Yeedle Yankov was even by Hungarians an extra-special lamb chop. He came from somewhere in the hills above Berezna. Nobody knew his family. They could have been sheep. He never did a day’s work, but he had a smile like in the morning the sun. When your Grandmother Sheindle fell in love with this bastard, and when her father said he would drop dead before he let her marry the bum, Sheindle and Yeedle ran away. Nobody knows if they ever got married but everybody knows they arrived in London without a penny because Yeedle never earned one and Sheindle’s father wouldn’t give her one. Well, one thing Hungarian women know how to do, even the ugly ones, they know how to cook. So Sheindle opened a small restaurant in Soho, where she did very well, and Yeedle started doing what all Hungarian men do very well. He started kitzling the lady customers. By the time your mother was born, even Sheindle knew she had a first-class prize bum on her hands, and by the time your mother was three years old, and Yeedle ran away with one of the lady customers, your Grandmother Sheindle was not surprised.”

  Neither, according to Aunt Sarah, was she disheartened. My grandmother was apparently a tough customer. She sold the Soho restaurant. With the proceeds and her three-year-old daughter, she followed Yeedle Yankov to Trieste, where he had settled down with his new consort.

  “Don’t ask me why in Trieste,” my Aunt Sarah said. “Except we always understood in the family that’s where Yeedle’s new girl friend owned some property. Another thing don’t ask me is how your Grandmother Sheindle found out where they were living, except when she made up her mind to do something, Sheindle did it. What she did in Trieste, when she got to the house where Yeedle Yankov and his new girl friend were living, your grandmother didn’t go upstairs herself. She sent your mother.”

  “Three years old?” I said.

  “By then three and a half,” my Aunt Sarah said. “Your mother went upstairs and she knocked on the door where Yeedle Yankov was living, and when Yeedle Yankov opened the door, and he saw standing there on his doorstep in Trieste the little daughter he had left behind in Soho, guess what happened?”

  “He dropped dead,” I said.

  My Aunt Sarah gave me a sharp look. “How did you know?” she said.

  I didn’t, of course. I had merely responded, as any conscientious actor would, to t
he role that had been assigned to me in my Aunt Sarah’s narrative.

  “You mean he really did?” I said.

  “You mean you were only guessing?” my Aunt Sarah said.

  “I meant it as a joke,” I said.

  “Some joke,” my Aunt Sarah said. “For the first time in six months a man sees his little three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and it makes him drop dead. Go laugh.”

  I did, somewhat uneasily. Aunt Sarah had the delivery of a natural-born comedian. When she paused after her punch lines, it was difficult not to laugh. But the man who had dropped dead in Trieste, this Yeedle Yankov of whom I had never before heard, had been, I suddenly realized, my grandfather.

  “What did my grandmother do?” I said.

  “What did you expect her to do?” my Aunt Sarah said. “She had come to Trieste to get back the man she loved. What did she find? A dead Hungarian. Did you ever love a dead Hungarian? Your Grandmother Sheindle took her little daughter, that’s your mother, Sheindle took her daughter and they went back to Berezna.”

  I tried to imagine what Berezna was like. I couldn’t. The word did not sound like a place. It sounded like the name of a hard, sharp cheese sold in small shops on Second Avenue.

  “I suppose her family was glad to see her,” I said.

  My Aunt Sarah’s reply was a Hungarian phrase I remembered from my youth. It can be translated into English only as “In the pig’s ass.”

  “What happened?” I said.

  “When they came back to Berezna,” my Aunt Sarah said, “Sheindle thought she was coming home, but she wasn’t. Everything had changed in Berezna since she ran away with Yeedle Yankov. For one thing, Sheindle’s mother had died. For another, her father had married again. A very young girl, younger than Sheindle. And they had two brand-new children, younger than Sheindle’s daughter, your mother. I was one of those children. Can you imagine?”

  For several moments, sipping my drink and listening to the guests out in the living room celebrating my father’s burial, I tried. But my imagination did not clarify anything. All I could see was a young girl, with a daughter not quite four, coming home to her father’s house in a Hungarian town the name of which sounded strange to me.

  “The new wife?” I said. “My grandmother’s stepmother? She didn’t like Sheindle?”

  “Nobody liked Sheindle,” my Aunt Sarah said. “Not even her father. You have to remember she ran away with a bum. So when she came back, plus now she’s got a daughter yet, a daughter that nobody knew if the baby’s father and mother they ever married, everybody said what you expect people to say in such things. They said she deserved it. Sheindle.”

  I took another sip of my drink and thought about my unknown grandmother. My thoughts were not very complicated. It seemed to me she had been given a raw deal. But thoughts don’t usually stop at logical punctuation marks. They tend to run on like dripping faucets. With a certain amount of embarrassment I realized that my thoughts about my Grandmother Sheindle were derived from recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter had moved me deeply in Miss Marine’s English II class at Thomas Jefferson High School.

  “Listen,” I said to my Aunt Sarah. “You trying to tell me when she came home from Trieste, her father wouldn’t take her in?”

  “It wasn’t Sheindle’s father,” my Aunt Sarah said. “It was his new young wife. That was my mother. And where do you get things like they wouldn’t take her in? They were all Hungarians, sure. But they were also Jews. Jews never close a door on mishpoche. They could hate them, but they never keep them out. If you don’t take care of your own, who’s going to do it? Nasser?”

  “Let’s keep him out of this,” I said. “I’m trying to find out about my mother.”

  “If you don’t interrupt so much, you will,” my Aunt Sarah said. “It wasn’t Sheindle’s father that hated her. It was her father’s new young wife. My mother. You have all this straight?”

  I did, and I didn’t. It was simple enough to follow the relationships. By comparison with what I read in the society columns of my daily newspaper every morning, grasping this was as simple as grasping an overhead strap in the subway. What I didn’t grasp was how all this had led to the bedroom of a three-room apartment in Queens on this day when I had just buried my father.

  “She hated Sheindle so much,” my Aunt Sarah said, “she said there was no room for them in the house, and she made them live upstairs in the hayloft over the cows in one of the three barns. Sheindle and her daughter. How this made Sheindle feel, you can imagine.”

  “She must have hated it,” I said.

  My Aunt Sarah nodded again. “She hated it so much, four months later she was dead.”

  “That means the little girl, my mother,” I said, “the four-year-old girl, she was now an orphan.”

  My Aunt Sarah said, “On the ball nobody is ever going to say you’re not.”

  “What did she do?” I said.

  “You mean what did her grandfather do,” my Aunt Sarah said.

  “No,” I said. “I mean his new wife. The young one. Your mother. What did she do?”

  My Aunt Sarah gave me an odd look. It could have been appreciation. It could have been annoyance. I had either shown a degree of understanding of which my Aunt Sarah had not thought me capable, or I had stepped on one of her punch lines.

  “My mother,” she said, “my father’s new wife, what I heard later, she said if they had to support a bastard, then the bastard would have to do some work to earn her bread, the bastard.”

  Thus, at the age of four, or a few months short of four, my mother learned on a dairy farm in Hungary what, half a century later, her son learned during the Great Depression on the sidewalks of New York: eating is not one of the human rights Thomas Jefferson believed were self-evident. My mother managed to eat. As, half a century later, did her son. By somewhat different methods. My mother, at the age of four, became what my Aunt Sarah called “the waker up of the goyim” on her grandfather’s farm.

  “You have to remember one thing,” my Aunt Sarah said. “Here, in America, they have a thing they call anti-Semitism. It means if you’re a Jew, do me a favor and drop dead. Jews are so used to this, especially in America, they forget there are places where it’s different. Anyway, where it used to be different. One of those places was Berezna. In Berezna, if you were a goy, it was you do me a favor and drop dead, you goy. In Berezna there was anti-goyism. All the big dairy farms, like my father’s, they were owned by Jews like my father. You own a big farm, you want it to work, you want to make money, you have to have labor. Cheap labor. In Berezna the cheap labor was goyim. They were glad to get the work. If they didn’t get the work, they were hungry. But their gladness to get the work didn’t change how God had made them. God made them slobs. So every morning, before the sun came up, somebody had to go out to wake them up they should be on time to milk the cows. That somebody, my mother, my young mother who married my old father, after Sheindle died my young mother said the person to wake up the goyim every morning for milking the cows it should be Sheindle’s daughter.”

  There is nothing in the record to indicate that my mother objected. Perhaps she didn’t remember. I have tried many times to remember what the world was like when I was four years old. No luck. I can get back to six, when I was in kindergarten and I had trouble with clay and colored chalk. I can remember watching soldiers unload from troopships at the East Third Street docks. That must have been between 1917, when we got into what my father called Woodrow Wilson’s War, and 1918, when we got out into what my father called Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. I was more than four then. Not much more, but more. Four and a half, perhaps. But I can’t work my way back to four or less than four, the age at which my mother started out every morning before sunrise to wake the goyim on her grandfather’s farm in the Carpathian mountains so that the cows would be milked on time.

  “She did a good job,” my Aunt Sarah said. “I never heard a word of complaint.”

  But the
re must have been words of complaint. Even if unspoken, in my mother’s heart. Otherwise, what would I be doing, eighty years later? On the morning before Christmas Eve? Trudging through the gray, dismal, bone-cold streets of Queens? From the Peretz Memorial Hospital on Main Street to the Battenberg Funeral Home on Queens Boulevard? A Jewish boy from East Fourth Street? Wearing a Brooks Brothers overcoat? Carrying a head stuffed full of long division from P.S. 188 on Houston Street? Algebra and Nathaniel Hawthorne from Thomas Jefferson High School on Tenth Avenue? The Rule in Shelley’s Case from New York University Law School on Washington Square? In short, if my mother had been content with her life in Berezna at four, what was I doing three thousand miles away an hour after her death in the Borough of Queens?

  Well, for one thing, I discovered when I got to the Battenberg Funeral Home, I was trying to choose the appropriate coffin.

  “It all depends on the family,” young Mr. Smith said. “Not only how they feel about the deceased, but also their economics.”

  I was no longer inexperienced in these matters. When I had buried my father out of, as the phrase goes, this same funeral home, in what had been for me then a totally new and somewhat jolting experience, I had learned a couple of things. One was this: when you are negotiating the price of a coffin, it is less disturbing for the buyer if the man at the selling end of the negotiation is named Smith rather than Dinkelhelmwurster. A mind distracted into wondering how anybody came to be named Dinkelhelmwurster might also be distracted into wondering why a pine box should cost seven hundred and fifty dollars.

  “Look, Mr. Smith,” I said. “My mother was a very simple Jewish woman.”

  I paused. I had just realized, from hearing my own words, that the statement was as totally preposterous as a War Department press release about Vietnam. For several moments I sat in silence, listening to the echoes of my own foolish words, and then a curious thing happened. It happened inside me. I made an effort to remain motionless. I did not want young Mr. Smith, who was obviously an heir to the Battenberg family business, to sense that the man to whom he was trying to sell a coffin had just had a moment of revelation. My mother had never been anything more to me than one of the many irritations and nuisances with which daily life is strewn: tax returns, physical check-ups, dentists’ appointments, drivers’ license renewals, supplications for worthy charities. Now, all at once, facing young Mr. Smith in his glistening black Italian silk suit across the table in the Arrangements Room of the Battenberg Funeral Home, I realized that I was doing something much more important than discarding a nuisance. I suddenly realized that my irritating mother had been a very important person. Not because of her police record. But because of the way she had been forced to live her life.