Last Respects (36 page)

“That’s better,” he said.

“What’s better?” I said.

“Your tone of voice,” Herman Sabinson said. “Shouting at me is understandable under the circumstances, but not helpful.”

“When did I ever shout at you?”

“You’ve been shouting at me ever since I came in here,” Herman said.

“It’s just because all the windows are closed,” I said. “The place is just a great big sound box. Every word booms.”

“My words don’t boom,” Herman said. “And now that you’ve got yours down to a rational tone, I’ll tell you exactly what we know. This morning the clerk at the Peretz Memorial Hospital called the medical examiner’s office, as he does every morning, and reported the number of people who had died at Peretz during the past twenty-four hours. There were four, among them your mother. Ordinarily the medical examiner’s office would have replied okay, Dr. Soandso will be over sometime before noon, or between one and three, or whatever. But not today. You know what the guy at the medical examiner’s office said today?”

“Herman,” I said, “if I did, would I be standing here in this lousy apartment up to my knees in thirty-two days of dust, listening to you drive me crazy?”

“This happens to be a very nice apartment,” Herman Sabinson said. “The sons of very few of my patients have provided their aged mothers with comparable accommodations. As for the dust, that’s not your mother’s fault. As I need hardly remind you, she has not been here to keep it clean.”

“Then where is she?” I said.

“We will come to that,” Herman said. “The man at the medical examiner’s office told the clerk at the Peretz Memorial that he was alone in the office. It was the day before Christmas. It was also Sunday. And because of the lousy weather, his two assistants had called in sick. He was all alone. He could not leave the office to come over to Peretz Memorial to examine the four dead bodies. So the clerk at the hospital said what should I do with the bodies? And the man in the medical examiner’s office said all I can do is send over the ambulance to pick them up and bring them over here to the morgue. So the clerk at Peretz Memorial said okay.” Herman Sabinson’s scowl was now directed at me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But that’s what happened.”

“The ambulance came?” I said. “They picked up my mother’s body and the three other bodies? And they took them to the morgue?”

“Yes,” Herman said.

I thought about it for a couple of moments. “I see,” I said, although I wasn’t quite sure what I saw. “It must have happened, then, between the time you called me early this morning, and the time I arrived at the hospital?”

“That’s right,” Herman Sabinson said.

I did some more thinking. “Wait a minute,” I said. “By the time I arrived, Mrs. O’Toole knew about it, because she said it was no longer necessary to sign the paper you asked me to sign.”

“What happened was this,” Herman Sabinson said. “After I called her and said you were coming in to sign the paper giving me permission to do the autopsy, she did a routine check to make sure they would have an operating room waiting for me. When they asked what for, she told them, and what they did was check the room in which your mother had died, just to make sure they would be able to move the body to the operating room for me. That’s how they learned the body had already been taken away to the morgue. So they called Mrs. O’Toole and told her. She was upset, naturally, and she tried to reach me on the phone, but I was out on calls. It was at this point that you arrived at the hospital. After you left, Mrs. O’Toole called the morgue. They said the ambulance had not yet come back with the four bodies, but she’d better tell the next of kin of the four dead people they’d have to come to the morgue the next day to identify the bodies. Now, I want you to understand this. She’s a very conscientious person, Mrs. O’Toole.”

“I’ve seen her,” I said. “She looks conscientious as hell. But she left her job around noon today. With four dead bodies floating around in an ambulance somewhere in the Borough of Queens.”

“Well, for Pete’s sake,” Herman Sabinson said. “It’s the day before Christmas.”

“It’s the day before Christmas for everybody,” I said. “Including the next of kin of those four dead people. I assume your conscientious Mrs. O’Toole, before she left the hospital, she called the Battenberg Funeral Home and told them to give me the message about going to the morgue?”

“Of course she did,” Herman Sabinson said. “I told you she’s very conscientious. I don’t know who she called about the other three dead people, because they were not my patients, and I’m unfamiliar with the details. But she knew you were a Battenberg customer because their name was on the papers involving the demise of your father last spring.”

“As I understand it, then,” I said, “Mrs. O’Toole now disappears from the story?”

“Story?” Herman Sabinson said.

“What would you call it?” I said.

“You’re shouting again,” he said.

“I’ll stop when you tell me where my mother’s body is,” I said.

Herman Sabinson blew out his breath in a tired sigh. It made the small embroidered flower on his tie buckle. The sign of Caduceus, however, stayed put. My confidence in the medical profession took a step upward.

“We don’t know yet,” he said.

The word “we” was a jolt. In my youth it was the word Charles Augustus Lindbergh always used when he referred to himself and
The Spirit of St. Louis.

“Who is we?” I said.

“Well, all the people involved,” Herman said. “You see, what happened was, the two men on the ambulance, after they made their pickup at Peretz Memorial, they had three more stops.”

Their favorite discotheques, no doubt.

“Three more hospitals?” I said.

“Of course,” Herman said firmly, and then all the firmness seemed to drain out of him. Herman Sabinson looked as though he was going to cry. I glanced swiftly at his tie tack. The sign of Caduceus had buckled. My confidence in the medical profession took a nose dive.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“The ambulance,” Herman said. “The two guys running it. I mean the driver and his assistant. They never showed up at those three other hospitals.”

If I had been capable of thought, I would have taken a stab at it. But I didn’t seem to be capable of anything. I was numb. My incapacity seemed to help Herman. At any rate, he didn’t cry.

“I want you not to worry,” he said. He came close to me and put his hand on my arm. “It could be at worst maybe one of these traffic accidents. Or they got lost. That’s probably the explanation. They got lost.”

“Two guys from the medical examiner’s office?” I said. “Who pick up dead bodies at these same hospitals every day of the year?”

Herman nodded grudgingly. It was as though we were playing a game and he felt he had to acknowledge the fact that I had scored. What you learned at ten in the Educational Alliance on East Broadway you did not forget at fifty on 78th Avenue in Queens. Fair is fair.

“I know it sounds crazy,” Herman said. “But a lot of things that go on every day in this city seem crazy.”

Few things are more irritating than the incontrovertible statement that is also irrelevant.

“Herman,” I said.

“No, wait,” he said. “What I’m trying to say is ambulances don’t disappear into thin air. This ambulance is bound to show up. It could be located any minute. We’ve got the cops on it. What I mean is, after all, what’s the harm? Those four poor souls, nothing more can happen to them. After all, they’re dead, aren’t they?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I never saw them.”

It was not a kind thing to say. But I was not feeling kind.

“You mean you don’t trust me?”

Herman Sabinson’s usually steam-heated voice was all at once as cold as a popsicle. His hand, I noticed, left my arm like a pigeon taking off.

“Stop talking like an idiot,” I said. “Of course I trust you. I’m just confused. I don’t know what to do next.”

“That’s why I asked you to meet me here,” Herman said. “I gave the police this number. They promised to call as soon as they got word about the ambulance.”

He looked at his watch. For no reason that makes sense, I found myself wishing desperately that the timepiece was not fastened to his wrist with one of those gold-plated expansion bands that has imbedded between its links a tiny calendar.

“It could be any minute now,” Herman said. “The cops are really very reliable. People are always rapping them. They’re never around when you need them. They never show up when you call them. Maybe so. But one or two rotten apples in a barrel doesn’t mean the whole barrel is rotten. They have good people, the police. They have feelings. A man’s mother dies, her body disappears, the cops of this city will find her. Believe me, they really will. While we’re waiting for them to call, there’s a couple of things I feel I must tell you.” Again Herman sent his troubled look around the room. He reminded me of those characters in gangster movies who hesitate and check their immediate surroundings on the brink of a crucial revelation to make sure there are no eavesdroppers. Herman Sabinson said, “Maybe we should have a drink, huh?”

I looked at my watch. The glance was not upsetting. No gold links. No imbedded calendars. Just a black leather strap that was beginning to look seedy. As a gesture toward stupid, brain-fatigued normalcy, which suddenly seemed to me the most desirable state a human being can attain, I made a crisp mental note to buy myself a new watch strap. After the funeral, of course.

“Isn’t it a little early?” I said. “It’s only about three-thirty.”

“I’ve been on my dogs since a quarter to six this morning,” Herman Sabinson said. “It wasn’t light yet, for Christ’s sake. That’s almost ten hours, Benny boy. My ass is dragging. A shot of the old elixir is just what the doctor has just ordered for the doctor.” Herman laughed. Well, tittered. No. What in God’s name did he do? It comes back. He giggled. And added, “As well as for the patient.”

So I giggled, too. After all, it was what the doctor had ordered. “Let’s see if I can get a couple of clean glasses,” I said. I moved toward the kitchen.

“I’ll get the hooch,” Herman Sabinson said.

The word plucked at my mind. I had not heard the word “hooch” spoken aloud since the days on East Fourth Street when I first discovered that my mother was running the stuff for Mr. Imberotti.

“It’s on the floor in the bedroom closet,” I said. “In that little blue canvas zipper bag marked
Sabena
.”

“I know,” Herman Sabinson said as he walked out into the foyer toward the bedroom. Following him into the foyer on my way to the kitchen, I thought about that. He knew? How did he know? The question suddenly gave me a picture of Herman Sabinson’s relationship to my mother. He used to come in to see her every Tuesday and Friday. Anyway, that’s what his bills indicated. Somewhere between eleven o’clock and noon on those two days every week he would check her blood pressure, listen to the beat of her heart, examine the tiny veins in her eyes, ask her to cough, urge her to lay off the Hershey bars, suggest low-caloric cola drinks instead of Dr. Brown’s Celery Tonic, and assure her that for a woman of her years she was doing fine.

It had not occurred to me until this moment that some time during or after these items on the bi-weekly ritual were checked off, my mother and Dr. Herman Sabinson had shared a shot of hooch. I mean booze. I could see them doing it. I could see the picture in my head. Somehow, the picture cheered me. There had been very little pleasure in my mother’s life. It was refreshing to realize on this terrible day that for years I had unconsciously helped provide her with two tiny islands of pleasure every week. My mother had always liked Herman Sabinson. I had always paid not only for his visits but also for the booze. Sorry, hooch.

I went into the kitchen feeling confident I would find something on my dead mother’s shelves I had never found there during the last years of her life: two clean glasses.

It is a fortunate thing for those who guard and burnish the image of Benjamin Franklin that my mother had never heard of him. She did not trust electricity. I had, over the years, succeeded in shoehorning into her apartment an electric toaster and an electric heating pad. But that was as far as she would go with what Franklin brought into Western civilization when he went out into the thunder and lightning storm and flew his kite. Even with these two items my mother’s distrust was obvious.

She was never satisfied that her toaster had turned itself off when the toast popped up. She pulled the plug out of the wall. My mother felt that as long as the plug was sunk in the socket, electricity, which she understood only in terms of dollars-and-cents figures on her monthly bill from Con Edison, was flowing out like water from a dripping faucet. I have often thought she was right. You should see some of my Con Edison bills. But my mother was not right toward the end. When her eyes began to fail.

When I discovered my mother couldn’t see what she was doing, I tried to put a dishwasher into her kitchen. She reacted like Horatius holding back the enemy at the bridge. Electricity to wash a glass? If I wanted to be crazy uptown where I lived, fine. That was my business. But not for her. She didn’t need any help from Con Edison with the simple business of keeping her house clean. As a result, while she thought her glasses were spotless, the things from which she actually drank looked like just-emptied milk bottles.

I found two of them in the cupboard over the kitchen sink. I rinsed them carefully, dried them with a paper towel, then gave them a final rubdown with my handkerchief. Unsanitary, no doubt. But cosmetically more attractive than the last dish-towel my mother had used before she was carried to Peretz Memorial. It looked like the flag of Tripoli. That is, if the dominant color of the Tripolitan flag is still charcoal-black. Coming out of the kitchen with the glasses, I met Herman Sabinson coming out of the bedroom with the bottle of Cutty Sark.

“No dust on this stuff,” he said.

When he is not talking about the health of his patients, Herman’s conversation tends to be not unlike lettuce on inexpensive sandwiches. Filler.

“It’s because of the way she kept it locked away in that zipper bag,” I said. “You want any ice?”