Last Respects Page 4

  “The best pine?” I said. “How much will that cost?”

  Young Mr. Smith’s face did not exactly brighten. The trick in the funeral parlor business is never to vary your expression. But I could tell that young Mr. Smith felt he had made a score.

  “Why don’t we go downstairs and take a look at what’s available?” he said.

  What was available had a grisly fascination. The room in which only a few months ago I had selected my father’s coffin had been redecorated. Or rearranged. I stepped through the door held open by the obsequious Mr. Smith, and paused.

  “Is something wrong, sir?” he said.

  I hesitated, forced myself to concentrate, and had it. “The hand-carved walnut job,” I said. “The twenty-two-hundred-dollar number. It used to be on this side.”

  Mr. Smith looked startled. He surveyed the room. His face cleared. “Oh, yes,” he said. “We moved it because the sunlight from the center window was fading the grain.”

  “It looks better over here,” I said.

  “Thank you, sir,” Mr. Smith said. “By the way, there’s been a slight increase in price for the walnut. It’s now twenty-three hundred fifty.”

  “Well,” I said, “I didn’t have the walnut in mind.” I was aware that I was speaking quickly. I wanted to forestall the inevitable speech about inflation and how everything was going up. “I want something appropriate but not expensive.”

  I was pleased by the sound of my own voice. Relaxed. A man in control. Why not? I knew the dialogue. I had spoken it all once before, nine months ago.

  “Yes, sir,” Mr. Smith said. “Here, then, to begin, this is our most inexpensive item.”

  The Battenberg Funeral Home’s most inexpensive item was a pine box in which the citizens of Pompeii, fleeing the encircling lava, would have been ashamed to pack their lares and penates.

  “Is it still seven hundred and fifty dollars?” I said.

  “No, I’m sorry, it’s eight hundred now,” young Mr. Smith said. “It’s this inflation, you know. Everything is going up.”

  Everything, apparently, except Mr. Smith’s voice. It had sunk to his lowest register. The sounds reminded me of Orson Welles when I first encountered that extraordinary talent.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll take it.”

  “There’s only one point, sir,” Mr. Smith said.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Your mother, I take it, sir, was of the Orthodox Jewish faith?”

  I gave him a sharp glance. “What about it? So was my father. And that’s the coffin I got for him,” I said.

  “Then you must know,” Mr. Smith said, “that a person of the Orthodox Jewish faith is not allowed to be buried in a casket fastened together by nails or any other kind of metal.”

  “But the one I got for my father less than a year ago didn’t have any metal in it.”

  “What can one do?” Mr. Smith said. “It’s a matter of rising labor costs. To comply with the Jewish faith, to fasten a casket with wooden pegs, that costs money. Nails are cheaper because driving them in is quicker.”

  “The Romans made the same discovery,” I said.

  Mr. Smith looked puzzled. “I beg your pardon,” he said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just show me the lowest-priced pine casket that’s fastened with wooden pegs.”

  Mr. Smith led me to an imitation “mahogany” casket. On it was a discreetly lettered price tag: $1,250.

  “Please don’t go any further,” I said. “I’ll take it.”

  Mr. Smith bowed slightly and led the way back upstairs to his office. Mr. Smith’s office was small and had no windows. The door did not open and close on hinges. It slid back and forth on a chromium track. The bare walls were the color of a Hershey bar. The long polished table that filled almost all of the floor space was somewhat darker. The six chairs that surrounded the table were made of the same wood. They had high backs. I wondered where the light came from. Then I remembered I had wondered the same thing nine months ago. I glanced up at the ceiling paneling which concealed the sunken fluorescent bulbs. It was the sort of room in which Gestapo officers used to interrogate their victims in movies.

  “Please sit down,” Mr. Smith said.

  I took the chair in which I had sat last time I was there. I knew the chair Mr. Smith was going to take. He did. The one that faced me directly across the table. From a concealed drawer he brought out a pad of yellow forms. From his breast pocket he drew a ballpoint.

  “Name, please?”

  I told him. He wrote it down.

  “Address?”

  I gave him my address. He wrote it down.

  “Is this where the bill is to be sent?”

  I wondered if Mr. Smith would think me irreverent if I answered the way I knew my mother would have answered: “No, send the bill to the cemetery.” I wondered. But what I said was, “Yes.”

  Mr. Smith made a note on his pad. “How many limousines will be required?” he said.

  I had forgotten about the limousines. Or rather, their contents. I was reminded now of another unpleasant chore: the people, mostly relatives, who would have to be called.

  “Well,” I said, and I tried to remember my father’s funeral. Had there been three limousines? Or four? The number of cars depended now, as it had depended then, on the number of people I would have to call and invite to the funeral. But at the moment the only person I could think of was my Aunt Sarah in New Haven. Surely three limousines would be enough for even a favorite aunt?

  “Let’s say four,” I said. “Just to be on the safe side.”

  “Four,” Mr. Smith said, and his ballpoint nailed the number down into the proper blank space on the yellow pad. “Now about the shrouds.”

  I knew about the shrouds. When I had been preparing for this visit in connection with my father’s funeral, the rabbi of my father’s synagogue had come to my parents’ apartment to instruct me.

  “Don’t let them rook you,” the rabbi had said. “These wise guys, they’re always tryna runyuppa bill. What you want, and you tell it to him plain, I mean don’t let them push yirround, you tell this guy this is an Orthodox Jewish funeral, you tell him. What you want is plain, simple, ordinary linen shrouds. The cheapest.”

  “This is an Orthodox funeral,” I now said to Mr. Smith. “I want plain, simple, ordinary linen shrouds.”

  Mr. Smith muttered to his darting ballpoint, “Plain, simple, ordinary linen shrouds.” He looked up. “How about somebody to sit with the body overnight in the chapel?”

  I hesitated. When I had been asked the same question about my father, I had unhesitatingly said yes. I had known then that my mother would have been annoyed if I had said no. Not to have paid for someone to sit up with my father’s body would have been an advertisement to her neighbors that her son was a cheapskate. My mother didn’t really care if I was a cheapskate. What she cared about was that her neighbors should not be aware of this degrading fact. Now, however, the situation was different. I didn’t give a damn about what my mother’s neighbors thought of me. Furthermore, I didn’t see how they could possibly learn whether I had or had not paid for someone to sit up with my mother’s body. Most important, however, was my recollection of my mother’s feelings. She had never liked people peering over her shoulder.

  “No,” I said. “Let’s skip somebody sitting up with the body in the chapel.”

  Mr. Smith studied the yellow sheet. He was silent for a couple of moments. “Now the honorariums,” he said.

  I already knew what this meant: the tips to the drivers of the limousines and the various cemetery employees.

  Mr. Smith went on, “We can place a round figure on the bill, or would you prefer to handle this yourself?”

  “No,” I said. “Put the round figure on the bill. Anything else?”

  “The date,” Mr. Smith said. “Tomorrow being Christmas Day, the cemetery employees will not be working, so the funeral can’t take place until Tuesday, the earliest.”

&n
bsp; “Tuesday will be fine,” I said.

  “Eleven o’clock?” Mr. Smith said. “Or the afternoon? Two? Three?”

  “Better make it three,” I said. Aunt Sarah would have to come down from New Haven.

  “Three o’clock,” Mr. Smith said to his moving ballpoint. He paused, and again he studied the yellow sheet. “I think,” he said finally, “yes, I think that covers it.”

  I stood up and said, “Thank you.”

  Mr. Smith stood up and said, “There’s just one more thing.”

  The sound of his voice made me look at Mr. Smith more closely. He had suddenly reminded me of Mrs. O’Toole in the Peretz Memorial Hospital. “What’s that?” I said.

  “Tomorrow morning at eight o’clock,” Mr. Smith said, “you will have to appear at the morgue in the Queens County General Hospital to identify the body.”

  My reaction to this statement reminded me of a moment during the war. I had been sailing in a British convoy from Halifax to what was then always identified on travel papers as “a U.K. port.” This always proved to be Liverpool. I was on a small freighter that had been built before the First World War. It had been put out to pasture on the Mersey after the Treaty of Versailles, but recalled to service when the German submarines in the early days of World War II were sinking British hulls faster than the shipyards on the Clyde could build them. The small vessel could just barely make seven knots. Since a convoy takes its speed from the slowest vessel in it, our eighty-five vessels went lumbering across the North Atlantic at seven knots. A week out of Halifax the convoy was caught by a German submarine pack. We were under attack for three days.

  At first, it was like watching a movie. From my gun pit, a makeshift box that had been built hastily on top of the wireless room, I grew accustomed to seeing, in the distance, a ship that had been plowing along as a heaving silhouette on the horizon suddenly erupt into the air, fanning out in a shower of countless scraps, like a handful of sand flung to the sky by a child on a beach. I was frightened, of course, but in a few hours I had become anesthetized by the distance. It was happening to other ships, not mine. Then, on the second day, it happened to a ship on our port side, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. The impact of the explosion rocked our small vessel. I was flung across the gun pit and slammed into the twin Marlins I was supposed to be manning. It was as though the actors in the movie had come off the screen and started to belabor the people in the theater. I remember the indignant words that flashed through my mind: “What the hell do these bastards think they’re doing?”

  Years later, in the Battenberg Funeral Home, I had the same reaction. I stared at Mr. Smith. “What did you say?” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said nervously. “But you will have to show up at the morgue in the Queens County General Hospital tomorrow morning at eight o’clock to identify your mother’s body. Until you do that, we can’t go ahead with the preparations for the funeral.”

  “There’s something wrong,” I said. “My mother can’t be in the Queens County General Hospital. She died less than two hours ago three blocks from here, in the Peretz Memorial Hospital.”

  Mr. Smith put his palms together. I thought: Oh, God, he’s got a trapped butterfly, too.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what happened. All I know is that we had a call from Peretz Memorial, and they said your mother’s body is in the morgue at Queens County General.”

  I remembered Mrs. O’Toole’s uneasiness when she told me it was no longer necessary to sign the document Herman Sabinson had said he would leave for me in her office. “How did my mother’s body get there?” I said.

  Mr. Smith looked as though he was about to burst into tears. “I don’t know,” he said. “All I know is what they told me.

  I hesitated, staring across Mr. Smith’s head at the Hershey-bar wall. Slowly, through my confusion, came a curious feeling of Tightness. This, I began to grasp, was precisely the sort of thing that would happen to my mother. All the streets down which she had walked during her lifetime had taken unexpected turns. She had never ended up in the places toward which she had started.

  “May I use your phone?” I said to Mr. Smith.

  “There’s a booth out in the hall,” he said.

  Phone calls were obviously not like honorariums. There was no line for them on the yellow pad. “Excuse me a minute,” I said.

  I went out into the hall and into the booth. The ping from the instrument when my dime dropped into the slot was reassuring. It had nothing to do with death. The sound would have been the same if I had been making the call from a cocktail lounge.

  “Dr. Sabinson’s wire.”

  “Is this Dr. Sabinson’s office?” I said. “Or his answering service?”

  “This is his service,” the female voice said. “Can I help you?”

  “I wanted to talk with Dr. Sabinson.”

  “He’s out on house calls. If you’ll give me your name and number I’ll have him get back to you when he checks his messages.”

  “How long will that be?”

  “Dr. Sabinson usually calls me about once every hour. Is this an emergency?”

  For a few moments I didn’t know how to answer the question. I knew what the girl at the other end of the phone meant by an emergency. I was suddenly wondering if she would understand what the word emergency now meant to me.

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “But Dr. Sabinson won’t be able to call me back because I’ll be moving around.”

  All at once I was less confused than I had been for an hour. I knew what my next move was going to be.

  “I’ll try him later,” I said and hung up. Fed another dime, the instrument pinged again. I dialed the Peretz Memorial Hospital. “Mrs. O’Toole,” I said. “Admissions Office.”

  “Admissions Office, good afternoon.”

  I looked at my watch in surprise. It was afternoon. “Mrs. O’Toole, please.”

  “She’s not in at the moment. Can I help you?”

  The girl at Dr. Sabinson’s answering service had asked the same question. God helps those who help themselves, my mother used to say. And repeat. She never said anything only once.

  “When will she be back?”

  “Not until Tuesday. Mrs. O’Toole has gone for the day, and tomorrow is Christmas, so she won’t be in until Tuesday.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”

  I would have to do this on my own. I hung up and went back into Mr. Smith’s room.

  “Is there any reason why I can’t go out to the morgue now?”

  “I don’t understand,” Mr. Smith said.

  Why should he? It was not his mother.

  “I’m out here in Queens,” I said. “Why can’t I go over to the morgue and identify the body?” Mr. Smith didn’t seem to understand. He looked confused. It occurred to me that he was upset by what he apparently considered my unseemly haste. I said, “What I mean is, there’s no point in my coming all the way back from Manhattan tomorrow morning at eight to do something I can do now, while I’m out here in Queens.” Mr. Smith’s face cleared. “You know,” he said, “that might be a good idea. You’ll get it out of the way and we...we’ll be free to go ahead with the funeral arrangements. In these situations, we see it happen every day, there’s so much to do, a person never knows where to begin.”

  2

  THAT’S WHERE I WAS ONE up on Mr. Smith. I knew exactly where to begin. The night the Manhattan Council of the Boy Scouts of America staged the eliminations finals for the 1927 All-Manhattan rally.

  At the time the trouble seemed no more than a laundry problem. The Council had scheduled the eliminations for a Wednesday night. But the regular weekly meetings of Troop 244, of which I was senior patrol leader, took place on Saturday nights. Every Friday, therefore, my mother laundered and pressed my uniform. Not because she approved of the Boy Scouts of America or my participation in their program. On the contrary. My mother hated all uniforms, whether they were worn by Cossacks, ushers, Babe Ruth, or her son. B
ut the weekly meetings of Troop 244 took place in the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House on Avenue B between Ninth and Tenth Streets. This was pretty far uptown from our tenement flat on East Fourth Street at the corner of Lewis, where my mother felt safe, and uncomfortably close to what my mother thought of as gentile terrain, where she would not have ventured without a police escort. Also, the scoutmaster of my new troop was an uptown goy named Mr. O’Hare. While my mother continued to ignore my activities as a boy scout, even though I had been one for over two years, she was not going to allow her oldest son to show up on the fringe of enemy territory, and appear in front of a shaygitz scoutmaster, looking like a slob.

  So, as I said, every Friday she laundered and pressed my uniform, and every Saturday, when the senior patrol leader of Troop 244 showed up at the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House, his profile may have looked somewhat different from that of Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the commander of the garrison at Mafeking who founded the Boy Scout movement after the Boer War, but the starched khaki breeches, the immaculate khaki shirt, and the beautifully ironed blue neckerchief would have done credit to the snub-nosed, apple-cheeked little Norman Rockwell type whose picture adorned the cover of the B.S.A.’s national handbook.