Last Respects (25 page)

“Five each,” I said. “Eighteen bottles all together. Where were you?”

“I was here, upstairs,” my mother said. “I was watching for you from the window. When I saw you coming on Avenue D, I ran down. Then I saw him, the
momzer,
waiting on the sidewalk, so I ran back up here.”

“The gangster?” I said. “Imberotti’s son?”

My mother was ramming the hasp back into place. She looked up. “How did you know?”

“He was waiting down there when I got to the front,” I said. “He tried to stop me coming in the building.”

My mother stood up. “He saw what was in the wagon?”

The mixture of anger and fear in her voice gave me a chance I could not resist. “What do you think I am?” I said. “A dope? I told him to beat it.”

My mother looked at me with a frown. I could tell I had overdone it. She went quickly to the window, peered out, and turned back to me. “He’s still there,” she said.

Okay, boy, get yourself out of this one. “I can’t chase him away,” I said. “All I could do is tell him.”

“What are you talking about?” my mother said.

I nodded down toward Mario Imberotti. He was leaning against the stone balustrade, staring idly up Avenue D. “The gangster,” I said to my mother. “I told him to beat it. I didn’t mean he should go away. I meant he wasn’t going to look in my wagon, and let me tell you something, he didn’t. I came upstairs and I was looking around for where to go find you, when you came out of here and pulled me in.”

My mother gave me another of those long looks. She must have known I was full of malarkey. What her glance was saying was: How full?

“All right,” my mother said at last. “You wait here.”

She dragged the wagon out of the room and pulled the door shut behind her with one of those bangs that say more than I am closing a door, kid. I didn’t worry too much about what that more was. My first feeling was a sense of relief. I had been ordered to collect the eighteen bottles of Old Southwick and deliver them to my mother in front of the Lenox Assembly Rooms at seven-thirty. I had done the job. If she would not remember to be proud of me, I was sure Walter Sinclair would.

My next feeling was a little more confused. I had lied to my mother about how I had managed to get past Mario Imberotti with the hike wagon. There was no reason why this should have made me uneasy. I had been lying to her for years. I did it as easily as I ate her honey cake. Just the same, this time I didn’t feel relaxed about it. On the contrary. I felt I had left something out. What had I forgotten? A moment later I knew what was wrong. I should have told my mother Mr. O’Hare and Mr. Norton Krakowitz were loose in the building. A moment after that the door opened and two women came in. They came in the way my mother came into our kitchen. As though nobody was going to be dopey enough to question her right to enter. These women were wearing beaded dresses, and their hair was combed in a complicated way, and they had roses pinned to their shoulders. What they had pinned to their faces were those sweaty fat smiles of women up to their ears in the arrangements for a Jewish affair. The smiles took a sock in the
kishke
when they saw me. They gave me the hairy eyeball, then turned the X-ray looks on each other.

“It’s a uniform,” one woman said. “He’s wearing a uniform.”

The second woman turned back to me and said, “You’re the pageboy?”

I was a very confused boy scout.

“My mother told me to wait here,” I said.

The two women looked at each other again. Then they shared a shrug and hurried across the room to the leather couch. From behind it they pulled a large white cardboard box. From the box they drew a blue velvet cape with gold embroidery at the edges. It could have been one of the curtains behind which Rabbi Goldfarb kept the Torahs. The women brought the cape across the room. I stood there like a dope while they hung it around my shoulders and fastened it at my throat with a brass clasp. I had a moment of desperation. What was going on? How did this fit in with my mother’s plans? Should I shove my way out of the room and run? They stepped back and cocked their heads to one side. Then they tipped their heads the other way, and they shared another shrug.

“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.

F
ORTY 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.”

“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.”