Last Respects (35 page)

I went back to the portcullis and lowered the drawbridge. Herman Sabinson faced me through the open door. I wondered why a man in a heavy overcoat should looked naked. Then I noticed that Herman was not carrying his little black bag. Why should he? The patient was dead.

“You all right?” he said.

I gave it a moment of thought. The moment was unexpectedly filled by a recollection of my feelings years ago when I had learned the poodle had died. It seemed unwise to let my thoughts hang around in that neighborhood. “I’m fine,” I said. It was better to lie.

“So why don’t you invite a guy in?” Herman Sabinson said.

Herman was one of those strange kids who had come every day to Rabbi Goldfarb’s
cheder
from below Delancey Street. He was not a part of my life on East Fourth Street. He had gone to J.H.S. 97 on Mangin Street. He had belonged to a scout troop in the Educational Alliance. We never really knew each other. Years later, visiting a sick friend on Central Park West, I stayed longer than I had been warned to stay, and so I met his doctor coming in. The doctor said he thought we had met before. I said I thought so, too. Thirty seconds of “Didn’t you used to?” and “Weren’t you one of?” and contact was established. There are no friendships so solid as the cemented friendships that never existed. And there is no cement so binding as the Lower East Side. Ten minutes after we met in my sick friend’s apartment, Herman Sabinson and I were convinced that we had flown together in the Lafayette Escadrille.

I turned over to him all my insides. Then I fed my wife and kids into his professional orbit. My mother came last, but she got most of Dr. Sabinson’s attention. Kids from 97 and the Edgie were helpless in the presence of old Jewish ladies. Herman revered my mother. I don’t think Herman revered me. But I had an immediate feeling that he liked me. Perhaps what he liked was a recollection of the days when life was simple. When people were not yet dying. When people were not yet people. When his concern was for learning how to save the abstractions who some day would become people. Anyway, Herman seemed to like me. So I liked him back. Why not? What more can you ask? The time I spent with Herman always made me feel good. As I grow older these times become more important.

“What are the good moments of this life? They are like the good moments of an egg.” The Duchess of Malfi. I don’t quote her very often. But what the hell. It was the day before Christmas. And my mother’s body had disappeared. And I was scared stiff.

“Sorry,” I said to Herman Sabinson, and stepped aside. “Come on in, kid.”

Herman came in. He took off his hat, started to slip out of his coat, then stopped. “Jesus,” he said. “It’s cold as a duck’s ass in here.”

“I had all the windows open,” I said. “Nobody’s been in the place for thirty-two days. When I came in, it really smelled.”

“Thirty-two days,” Herman said in a troubled voice.

He scowled down at the floor. Following his glance, I wondered if it was possible that the brown linoleum on the foyer floor had come, like the living-room furniture, from East Fourth Street. Then I remembered ordering it for my mother from Macy’s when she moved into this apartment, and I knew the time had come to pull up my socks.

“Well, figure it out,” I said. “She fell and broke her hip on November twenty-second. So that’s eight days to the end of the month of November or the thirtieth. And today is December twenty-fourth. Twenty-four plus eight is thirty-two.”

Herman Sabinson looked up with apparent reluctance from his contemplation of the ugly brown linoleum. The color had been my mother’s choice. No, her insistence. All her life she had preferred not things that were pretty but things that “didn’t show the dirt.”

“You’re right,” Herman said. “Thirty-two days. What a woman.” He apparently felt this observation was either too intimate or faintly disrespectful, so he corrected it immediately. “What a person,” Herman Sabinson said. “What a wonderful person.”

The faint tremor in his voice was not unfamiliar. In tricycle weather I had been hearing it for years every Sunday morning. From the overweight young mothers who
kvelled
as they lay back in their beach chairs while I ran the gauntlet of their screaming children. On my way with my shopping bag across the scrap of damaged lawn from the pavement of 78th Avenue to the door of
I
-D. The Japanese ancestor worship syndrome ruled Herman Sabinson’s life. Geriatrics was his trade. Most of his patients were old ladies in Queens whose Manhattan-based sons paid him a monthly fee to make sure none of their business competitors could say they did not take good care of their ancient mothers.

“Yes,” I said.

Herman Sabinson looked at me with a troubled frown. I sensed a note of criticism. As though he felt my comment was inadequate. A man had just said my mother had been a wonderful person. With a throb in his throat. As though he were delivering a eulogy in Riverside Chapel. And what had I said in reply? “Yes.” That’s all. A simple, unadorned yes. Worse than that. A noncommittal yes. As though I felt it was just possible that she had not been a wonderful person. I could feel Herman’s distress. I wanted to get out of the orbit of his emotions. I was having enough trouble with my own. I wrenched the steering wheel.

“Listen,” I said. “What the hell has happened?”

“Now, look,” Herman Sabinson said. “I think you should calm down.”

The notion that I did not look or sound calm was distressing. As though I had gone into a business meeting where it was important for me to give the impression that I was nonchalantly indifferent to the outcome, and one of the men at the other side of the table had made some nasty crack about the way I was biting my fingernails. The word aplomb does not cross my mind very often. Crossing it now, all I got from the brief encounter was the uncomfortable feeling that I must have lost it.

“I’m perfectly willing to calm down,” I said. “In fact, I’m anxious to calm down. But you’ve got to admit this is a pretty terrifying mess.”

“Now, look,” Herman said.

“No, you look,” I said. I could hear my voice rising, but I didn’t care. It made me feel better. “You call me in the morning,” I said. “You say you want to perform an autopsy. You ask me to go to the hospital and sign a paper. I say okay. I go to the hospital. First, this iceberg Mrs. O’Toole, she says it’s no longer necessary to sign the paper. But I insist, as long as I’m here, I tell them, I might as well sign it, so she lets me sign it. Then I go over to Battenberg’s to arrange for the funeral and they tell me I have to go to the morgue to identify the body.”

Herman came in under my pause for breath with “Did they tell you to go today?”

I stared at him. Herman is one of those men who weigh in at about a hundred and forty-five pounds, yet look fat. It’s the shape of his face. It is round and plump and sags down into a tiny button chin. He always looks as though he is trying to remember all the words of the Hippocratic Oath in Greek.

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“What they told you at the Battenberg Funeral Home,” Herman said. “Did they tell you to go to the morgue today?”

“No, they told me to go tomorrow morning,” I said. “But I figured as long as I’m out here in Queens I’ll go over now. Which I did—and what happens? They tell me in the morgue my mother’s body has disappeared.”

Sharply, Herman said, “Did they use that word?”

“What word?”

“Disappeared,” Herman said.

“For Christ’s sake,” I said. “I wasn’t carrying a tape recorder. How the hell should I know what words they used? It was some guy named Bieber. Or Beybere, he wants it pronounced. He was in charge, and he said my mother’s body was not there. In the morgue. He said her body was not there.”

“Yes,” Herman Sabinson said, “but did he say it had disappeared? Her body?”

Through my soiled anger, which was making me feel good, came a clean thought that made me feel less good. Herman Sabinson was not a fool. Just because he wore those narrow ties with small embroidered flowers under the knot and he fastened them to his shirt front with one of those gold things called a tie tack, that did not make him a fool. Herman Sabinson was trying to help me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably this Mr. Beybere didn’t use the word disappeared. Now that I think of it, I seem to remember all he said was her body was not there, in the morgue. Maybe I just assumed he meant it had disappeared. What else could it mean?”

Herman took my arm and led me into the living room. He looked around, obviously for a place to sit.

“Don’t,” I said. “Not until I get a cleaning woman in here. Just tell me, for God’s sake. You can do it standing up. What’s happening?”

“Well,” Herman Sabinson said. He paused, as though to make sure he had the right words. “There’s an ordinance in this city that says no doctor can sign a death certificate for a person who dies as the result of an accident unless the body is first checked out by the medical examiner.”

“Accident?” I said. “Do I have to tell you? You were there. You were with her. My mother died in a bed at the Peretz Memorial Hospital.”

“As the result of an accident,” Herman said firmly.

I had always thought accident meant being hit by a truck. Or gunned down while crossing a street on which a couple of rival mobs were shooting it out. Or passing under a paint scaffold when the ropes tear loose.

“What accident?” I said.

“She fell down right here in this apartment,” Herman Sabinson said. He gestured toward the foyer. I had a stab of irritation. Did he think I had forgotten? Did he have to refresh my recollection? Didn’t I know where she had fallen? Didn’t I know where I had found her? “She broke her hip,” Herman Sabinson said. “She was taken by ambulance to the Peretz Memorial Hospital. Thirty-two days later, this morning, she died. As the result of an accident. It may not make immediate sense to you, but believe me, it’s the law. In the eyes of the law your mother died as the result of an accident. The accident of her fall out there in that foyer. Therefore, I cannot sign the death certificate until the medical examiner looks at the body.”

“What’s stopping him?” I said.

I hadn’t really asked a question to which I expected an answer. I had merely exploded a piece of my irritation with a situation that was driving me crazy. It was the remark of a smart aleck. To my astonishment Herman Sabinson took it seriously.

“The day,” he said. “That’s what’s stopping him.”

“What day?” I said.

“What day?” Herman said. “You must be a little
farmisht.
Don’t you know what today is?”

“It’s the day my mother died,” I said.

“It’s also the day before Christmas,” Herman said.

“What’s that got to do with my mother?” I said.

“And it also happens to be a Sunday,” Herman said.

Through my confusion I could feel the necessity to grasp at the role of the cool, unemotional man of reason. “Why should those two facts affect the disappearance of my mother’s body?”

“Look,” Herman said. “She was a wonderful woman, and I can understand your being affected by her passing, but you must bear in mind that she is not the only person who died today in the City of New York.”

I must confess it was a thought that had not crossed my mind until now. “All right,” I said. “I’ll bear it in mind.”

“Bear this in mind, too,” Herman said. “People are dying in the City of New York every day. Seven days a week. Not only on Sunday. In every borough. Not only in Queens.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll bear that in mind, too.”

“To handle a situation like that, the medical examiner has to work out a system,” Herman said. “I mean, think about it. One man can’t go running around all over the city and look at all the dead people that keep piling up every day.”

I wished Herman had not told me to think about it. Into my head suddenly came the image of a man in running pants. A stethoscope in one hand. A pad of death certificates and a ballpoint clutched in the other. I could see him running down the streets of the city. Entering the doors of Bellevue at one side. Emerging moments later at the other. Racing for St. Vincent’s. Streaking through Mt. Sinai on his way to the Peretz Memorial.

“I assume he has assistants,” I said.

Again Herman Sabinson gave me the precise little school-teacherly nod of approval that dug his button chin into the jowl to which, at his weight, he was not really entitled.

“Exactly,” he said. “In each borough the medical examiner has an office and a staff. Every morning the hospitals all over the city call the medical examiner’s office and report the number of deaths that took place in their hospital during the past twenty-four hours. Then a member of the medical examiner’s staff comes over to the hospital, checks out the dead bodies, gives them the official okay, and the doctors involved in each case are in the clear to issue the death certificate.”

“Why aren’t you in the clear?” I said.

Again Herman looked troubled. He unbuttoned his heavy overcoat. He tapped first the knot in his tie, then the small embroidered flower under the knot, and finally the gold tack shaped like the sign of Caduceus that held the tie to his shirt. I had the wild feeling that Herman was thinking of himself as a cornet and he was tapping his keys to come up with the right musical answer to my question.

“Because the medical examiner has not yet seen your mother’s body,” he said.

Curiouser and curiouser, I thought, and wondered if under the circumstances a mind into which lines from
Alice in Wonderland
came flooding was not in danger of going off its rails.

“As I said before,” I said, “what’s stopping him?”

“He doesn’t know where it is,” Herman said. “Your mother’s body.”

“Then the word I used is right,” I said. “My mother’s body has disappeared.”

Herman Sabinson looked around the room through the sort of scowl that occasionally crosses the face of a politician’s press representative as he steps up to a battery of TV microphones and cameras to make an unpleasant but inescapable announcement.

“We don’t know that yet,” he said.

“Herman, for God’s sake,” I said, “what
do
you know?”