Last Respects (3 page)

It is a phrase to which during the past many years I have, now and again, given a certain amount of thought. Do people who use it really mean one moment? I own a wristwatch presented to me by my two sons on my last birthday. They chipped in and bought it in Switzerland for a modest sum. It tells what time it is now in Calcutta and, among many other things, how long you should wait before taking the second pill. As the once sexy but now loathsome girl left her desk to find Mrs. O’Toole, I pressed the appropriate knob on my sons’ birthday gift. Seven minutes and fourteen seconds after the
One moment, please
I had been asked to wait, the girl came back. Not alone.

“This is Mrs. O’Toole,” the girl said.

It was like hearing a cicerone on a bus in the nation’s capital say, “This is the Washington monument.” What else—no, who else—could Mrs. O’Toole be? She was tall. She was slender. She had white hair doctored by a blue rinse. She wore the uniform of a Red Cross Gray Lady. She had the emaciated, elegant face of a once famous but now forgotten actress who had been sent over by Central Casting to play the cameo role of Edith Cavell in a documentary about the First World War. She held her hands clasped in front of her as though she were trying to prevent the escape of a rebellious butterfly. She had not even the hint of breasts.

“Dr. Sabinson told me you were coming,” she said.

The possibility that he would not tell her had not previously crossed my mind. Crossing it now, it brought me a moment of panic. Suppose I had been forced to explain to this creature why I had come to see her? All at once I was grateful for the network of intermediaries among whom I spent my life. The dentist’s assistant to whom I didn’t have to say, “I’ve come to have my teeth cleaned.” She had sent me the card. She knew why I had come. The clerk in the grocery store to whom I didn’t have to say, “My wife said to pick up the asparagus.” The paper bag is already marked with my name, which he scribbled when my wife called.

“If you’ll give me the paper,” I said, “I’ll sign it.”

The center of Mrs. O’Toole’s smile moved. It was as though the commander of the German firing squad had said to Miss Cavell, “There’s been a small change in plans. Instead of executing you, the High Command has instructed me to present you with the Iron Cross First Class.”

“One moment, please,” Mrs. O’Toole said.

This time it didn’t take much longer than that. She opened the door next to the Information window, came out into the reception room, and closed the door carefully behind her. Except for the belligerently compassionate look from the girl behind the Information window, Mrs. O’Toole and I were alone in the room decorated with beige monk’s-cloth sofas and framed photographs of Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, and General Evangeline Booth.

“About those papers,” she said.

“Yes?” I said.

“The papers Dr. Sabinson wanted you to sign?” Mrs. O’Toole said.

“Yes?” I said.

“Actually it was only one paper,” she said.

“Was?” I said.

Mrs. O’Toole shifted her imprisoning grip on the invisible butterfly. “What I mean,” she said, “I mean it is no longer necessary for you to sign the paper.”

“Why not?” I said. “Dr. Sabinson told me he could not perform the autopsy unless he had my written permission. He said you’d have the form or paper or whatever you call it, he said you’d have it ready for me. He told me that on the phone this morning.”

“Yes, well,” Mrs. O’Toole said. “But—”

Her voice stopped without any diminution in the decibels of sound she was uttering. It was as though we had been talking on the phone and a switchboard operator had inadvertently pulled the plug that connected us. Mrs. O’Toole looked troubled. It came to me with a sense of guilt that she looked more troubled to me than I probably looked to her. I could suddenly see the faces of people I knew. Dozens of them. The faces all reflected horror. My mother had just died and, to them, the way I was taking it branded me a son of a bitch. Some of them, of course, had always thought I am a son of a bitch, so I could dismiss those. I could not dismiss the others. They were men and women I respected. All I could do was say to myself that they did not know how I was taking this. They had not known my mother.

“Mrs. O’Toole,” I said. “Has anything gone wrong?”

The idiocy of the question caused my own voice to falter. How could anything go wrong? Death, Rabbi Goldfarb used to say on East Fourth Street, was the end of all our journeys. My mother had come to the end of hers. Herman Sabinson had told me so only this morning. Nothing more could happen to her.

“Well, not exactly,” Mrs. O’Toole said. “It’s just that, well, the necessity for signing the paper, the authorization for the autopsy, it’s no longer necessary.”

“You mean,” I said, “it is no longer necessary to obtain the written consent of a member of the family before an autopsy can be performed? You mean that rule has been changed between now and the time Dr. Sabinson called me early this morning?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “No, no, no. It’s merely that, well, it’s not necessary for you to sign.”

“Did Dr. Sabinson tell you it’s not necessary?” I said.

He had seen me through my first contact with death. Burying my father the year before had been made easier for me by the intelligent sympathy of Herman Sabinson. I was not going to stop leaning on him now.

“No,” Mrs. O’Toole said. “I have not been able to get in touch with Dr. Sabinson since he called you. He called from my office here at the hospital. Then he went out on house calls. He doesn’t know what happened.”

“What did happen?” I said.

Mrs. O’Toole’s hands crushed together. Oh, God, I thought. That poor bastard of a butterfly. He ain’t coming home for dinner tonight.

“Nothing happened,” Mrs. O’Toole said sharply. Then the sharpness in her voice seemed to come back and hit her. She blushed. I thought with almost insane irrelevance that I had never before realized how much a blush can do for a woman. For a moment or two this bloodless old do-gooder looked almost pretty. “The signing of the paper is no longer necessary,” Mrs. O’Toole said. “That’s all. You don’t have to sign the paper.”

I thought that over for a couple of minutes. The thinking did not help. Something had obviously happened after Herman Sabinson had called me. It was pretty obvious that I would not learn what it was from Mrs. O’Toole. It was even more obvious that it couldn’t possibly make any difference. My mother was dead. Nothing more could happen to her. Except, of course, the funeral arrangements, which were my next chore. It was the day before Christmas. I had just given a sullen taxi driver a six-dollar tip. A moment of generosity to this Red Cross Gray Lady did not seem inappropriate.

“Look,” I said. “If it’s no longer necessary to sign a paper authorizing an autopsy, okay. But as long as I’m here, why not let me sign it? The worst that can happen is that you’ll just have to throw the paper away. If it turns out later that the rules have changed again, and I do have to sign it, then I won’t have to make another trip back here. This will be a great convenience for me because I have to go over to the undertaker now and make the funeral arrangements.”

I did not add that it would also make me feel better about Herman Sabinson. I had made him a promise. I wasn’t feeling my best. I knew it would make me feel better if I did not break my promise to him. I wished all the people who thought I was a son of a bitch were in a position to make a note of that.

“Well, all right, yes, very well,” Mrs. O’Toole said. “That makes sense.”

She went back through the door beside the Information window. I stared at the pictures of Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, and General Evangeline Booth. I hoped Rabbi Goldfarb, who died the day Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, would forgive me for thinking General Booth was the best-looking of the three.

Mrs. O’Toole came back with a printed form and a ballpoint pen. “Here,” she said.

I signed below her pointing finger. The nail was painted blood-red. The color gave me a small stab of pleasure. All at once Mrs. O’Toole was part of the world of the living rather than the world of the dead.

“Thanks,” I said.

Mrs. O’Toole took the paper. She retracted the ball point. And my pleasure fled. I could tell from her face what she was going to say.

“I’m sorry for your trouble,” she said.

For a startled moment I wondered why the pain seemed to ease somewhat. The line from A. E. Housman’s poem, “Others, I am not the first,” was suddenly running through my mind. The problem of facing the undertaker, whom I had faced so short a time ago when my father died, all at once seemed no more than an unpleasant chore. A chore I was capable of handling.

“Thank you,” I said.

Mrs. O’Toole touched my arm, gently, exactly as the director, beyond the camera’s sight lines, would have instructed her to do it, thus destroying the moment of dignified understanding we had shared. But I walked out of the Admissions Office with the feeling that I had no right to dislike her. She could not help being what she was: a pain in the ass to a middle-aged man who had wanted to laugh on learning that his aged mother had just died.

Out on the street, at the top of the low concrete rise that surmounts the crescent driveway of the Peretz Memorial Hospital, I forgot about Mrs. O’Toole. There were no taxis. There were no people waiting for taxis. There was only a scene of desolation that it occurred to me was typical of the Borough of Queens. I decided to walk up to the Battenberg Funeral Home. It was a journey I had made before.

My father had died nine months earlier. On an ordinary Tuesday in April. Warm but not too warm. Sunny but not bright. The casualties in Vietnam, announced on the kitchen radio as I boiled my egg, were lower than those announced for the previous week. Horst the elevator operator said, “Have a nice day, sir.” In a way, I did. My father had died in a manner that I knew would have pleased him. Neatly. No fuss. He rose from the breakfast table, holding his copy of the
Jewish Daily Forward,
and he fell down. Eleven minutes later, when Herman Sabinson called me, he said my father had been dead for ten and nine-tenths minutes.

“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.