Last Respects (37 page)

“Not unless you do,” Herman said. “Your mother and I always drank it straight.”

“Was it fun?” I said.

The question seemed to take him by surprise. The surprise led to pleasure. Herman Sabinson smiled. “It sure was,” he said. “I used to look forward to my two visits a week here.” Herman took one of the glasses. We walked into the living room together. He poured a couple of inches of hooch—no, booze—into my glass, then took care of his own. “She was a funny woman,” he said.

A scream, as I recalled.

“In what way?” I said.

“When I used to come in?” Herman said. “Every Tuesday and Friday? She was always sort of like tense, you might say. You know? On edge? Everything I did, her blood pressure, examining her eyes, the heart, every step, she watched me like I was a butcher and she was buying a chicken and she was damn well going to make sure I didn’t put my thumb on the scale while she wasn’t looking. Then, when I’d give her the old okay, when I told her she was fine, she’d smile and she’d say in Yiddish: Another week, another
schnapps.
She’d go out in the bedroom and get the bottle. Say, by the way, why did she keep it in that Sabena bag?”

Why did she keep her tube of toothpaste in the cardboard carton that had housed it on the druggist’s shelves?

“My wife and I went to Europe a few years ago,” I said. “The first Sunday we were back I brought my mother the usual stuff. Aspirin. Toothpaste. A bottle of what you call hooch. I think a girdle, too. My wife bought it for her. Anyway, I couldn’t find a shopping bag to carry the stuff in, so my wife said take the airline bag. I did, and my mother fell in love with it. Damned if I know why, but it pleased her to hide her bottle of booze in it. Well, here’s to something or other, Herman.”

I raised my glass. He tapped his against mine. We sipped.

“You shouldn’t be upset,” Herman said.

Of course not. Just as I shouldn’t be bald. Nevertheless, I was. “What do you want me to do?” I said. “Give a party?”

Herman’s button chin dug into the jowls. “Please don’t worry,” he said. “They’ll locate that ambulance. Honest, they will. That’s not the point.”

Oh, God, I thought, here comes one of those damned letters to the Corinthians.

“What is the point?” I said.

“The last few years,” Herman said, “I saw her more often than you did. I know you called her on the telephone every night at six o’clock, no matter where you were, but you saw her only Sunday mornings. I saw her every Tuesday and Friday. She was ready to go.”

Astonished, I said, “You’re saying she wanted to die?”

Herman Sabinson took a sip and tapped the embroidered flower under the knot of his tie. “Put it this way,” he said. “And let’s leave it at that. She was ready to go. Period.”

He could leave it at that. I couldn’t. “How the hell do you know such a thing?” I said.

Herman Sabinson shrugged. “You’re a doctor, you learn certain things,” he said

“Like what?” I said.

“People don’t die like cookies cut out from a piece of dough,” Herman Sabinson said. “I mean people die different. Differently? Okay. People die differently. Everyone in his own way. If you’re a doctor for old people, the way I am, you see the worst ways. It’s not like accidents. Or heart attacks. Or strokes. Or even suicide. Sudden stuff. No. You have a practice like mine, mostly old people, you don’t get a lot of sudden stuff. You get slow wearing out. Machines running down. Remember when we were kids? We used to follow the fights?”

“The fights?” I said.

Irritably, Herman Sabinson said, “Don’t you remember the Dempsey-Carpentier fight?”

I certainly did. I’d heard it from a crystal set on Columbia Street. On the sidewalk in front of Rabbi Goldfarb’s
cheder.
Chink Alberg brought the set with him from school. We met in front of the garbage cans. Instead of picking rocks out of the ashes for beaning the rats upstairs, Chink broke up the headphones and gave one half to me. We took the risk of getting our ankles broken for being late by Rabbi Goldfarb’s chair rung in order to find out how Carpentier was doing against Dempsey. He did not do well.

“What the hell has my mother’s death got to do with the Dempsey-Carpentier fight?” I said.

“Fighters get zonked,” Herman Sabinson said. “A belt to the
kishkes.
A rabbit punch to the
playtziss.
Or the poor slob has a glass jaw and the other guy clips him. Whatever it is, he gets it fast, and he’s finished. He doesn’t have time to sound off with one of those fancy last lines.”

I gave myself a couple of moments. All devoted to staring into my drink. Before I dared say what my startled mind was urging me to scream. “Had Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made contact from the Great Beyond as he had promised, but with the wrong family?”

“You mean last lines like Nathan Hale?” I said. “‘My only regret is that I have but one life to give to my country?’”

Herman nodded. “Sort of,” he said. “Except not exactly. Nathan Hale was, I understand, a Yale man. Those Ivy League guys are not exactly typical. Most people, they’re about to buy it, they just scream no, no, no, don’t let me die. That’s how most old people do. They don’t think of anything except they’re about to go, and they don’t want to go. Younger people, they see the exit curtain going up, they try to think of something to say. Gallant like. You know? What the hell, sort of. Especially if they went to college.”

“Like that guy to whom Nelson said ‘Kiss me, Hardy’?” I said. “At Trafalgar?”

“Now, that’s very interesting,” Herman Sabinson said. “‘Kiss me, Hardy’ is not true.” He must have seen the puzzled look on my face. Herman laughed and said, “What Lord Nelson, when he was dying, what he is supposed to have said while Hardy held him in his arms, this ‘Kiss me, Hardy,’ you know, of course, it’s been an embarrassment to the British Navy for years.”

This conversation suddenly seemed singularly inappropriate to a couple of middle-aged men waiting for a call from the police about the disappearance of the corpse of one of their mothers.

“No,” I said, “I didn’t know that. Why should the British Navy be embarrassed because Nelson said ‘Kiss me, Hardy’?”

“Well, I think if you think about it a minute you’ll see it right away,” Herman Sabinson said. “One man saying to another guy ‘Kiss me.’ It’s sort of faggot stuff.”

“Oh,” I said.

I had never thought of Horatio Nelson as a faggot. I had thought of him as the insatiable lover of Lady Hamilton.

“So the British Navy did a little research,” Herman Sabinson said. “And guess what they came up with?”

Jellicoe at Jutland.

“What?” I said.

“It wasn’t ‘Kiss me, Hardy,’” Herman said. “What Nelson said was ‘Kismet, Hardy.’ You get it?”

The word brought into my disordered head the vision of Alfred Drake in a turban singing his heart out to Dorothy Sarnoff in a veil.

“Not quite,” I said.

This seemed to please Herman. He was ahead of me.

“The word ‘kismet’ means fate,” Herman said. “Nelson was upset because Hardy was upset because Nelson was dying. So Nelson said, or wanted to say, he wanted to cheer Hardy up. He said don’t knock yourself out, Hardy. Don’t take it so big. We all have to die, Hardy, is what Nelson was saying. It’s inevitable. It’s fate. ‘Kismet, Hardy.’ Relax. It’s just fate, Hardy. Kismet. It happens to everybody. Like today, to your mother.”

I tried to equate Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar with the Peretz Memorial Hospital in Queens. No luck.

“Well,” I said, “I’m certainly glad to learn that Nelson was not a faggot.”

“It clears Hardy, too,” Herman Sabinson said. “Boy, let me tell you, was that a relief to the British Navy.”

Wondering why the phone didn’t ring, I heard myself saying, “It’s like Goethe.”

“Who?” Herman said.

“That German writer,” I said. “
Faust
and all that other stuff. You know.”

“Oh,
Goy-teh,”
Herman said.

“That’s what I said,” I said.

“How is ‘Kismet, Hardy’ like Goethe?” Herman said.

Guiltily, I felt a stab of pleasure. Now I was ahead of Herman. “When he was on his deathbed, his last words,” I said. “He was supposed to have said ‘More light!’ and then died. Everybody assumed he meant what he wanted, what Goethe had missed in life was not enough truth.”

“About what?” Herman Sabinson said.

“Everything,” I said. “Learning. Human beings. What the world is all about. Why we are born. Why we suffer. That sort of thing. So everybody assumed what Goethe meant by his last words, he wanted more, you could say, illumination on the great questions that have puzzled man from the beginning of time. More illumination on life.”

“You mean Goethe didn’t want more illumination on life?” Herman said.

“Maybe he did,” I said. “But that isn’t what he meant by his last words. What Goethe actually meant, the room was dark, or it seemed to him to be getting darker as he got closer to death. So he said to the maid, she was standing by his bed, he said ‘More light!’ All he meant, Goethe wanted her to draw the curtain aside a little further.”

Herman Sabinson took a sip from his glass, replenished it from the bottle he still held in his hand, then started to laugh. “That’s not bad,” he said. “But you know the one I like?”

“Which?” I said.

“Lord Chesterfield,” Herman Sabinson said. “You know. The guy who wrote all those letters to his son? Always blow your nose before it starts to drip? Never pick up a lamb chop in both hands? If a guy puts the bite on you for twenty bucks give him ten, on account of that’s all he really expected to get in the first place? That sort of stuff?”

“What about him?” I said. “Lord Chesterfield?”

“He was lying there on his deathbed,” Herman Sabinson said. “After all, you can’t keep writing letters to your son forever. You either run out of ink or you run out of steam. Anyway, the old lord was lying there, getting ready to go, when the butler came in and said some guy was downstairs. I forget his name. Say Jones or something. Anyway, Jones was one of Lord Chesterfield’s worst political enemies. So when the butler said Jones was downstairs, Lord Chesterfield said, ‘Show him up. If I’m still alive when he enters, I shall be glad to see him. If I am dead, he will be glad to see me.’” Herman took another sip from his glass. “Pretty good, no?”

“Yes,” I said, and then I had a delayed reaction. “You mean, Herman, my mother said something before she died?”

Herman nodded worriedly. “Yes,” he said.

“Something she asked you to tell me?” I said.

The worried look sank more deeply into Herman’s face. “I don’t know,” he said. “She didn’t say I should tell you, but otherwise, why would she tell it to me?”

“Tell me what she said,” I said. “We can figure out later who she meant it for.”

“Well, there’s something came first,” Herman Sabinson said. “You know she developed this bedsore? Three days ago?”

“I think the nurses could have prevented that,” I said.

“Probably,” Herman said. “Then, probably not. I gave them instructions to turn her regularly, and I’m sure they did. But you get a person over eighty years old, they’re immobilized for over a month, thirty-two days, there’s some things you just can’t avoid. Anyway, they’d been keeping her on her stomach to let the bedsore dry, and when I came to see her this morning, that’s how she was. On her stomach. I sat down by the bed, and she recognized me, but I didn’t do much. I could tell she was pretty low. I was wondering if I should call in a couple of nurses to turn her, when she opened her hand. Like this.” Herman Sabinson set down the bottle of Cutty Sark, clenched his hand into a fist, then slowly spread the fingers wide. “When she did that, something fell out of her hand and bounced off the bed to the floor.” Herman Sabinson pulled something from his pocket. “I picked it up,” he said, “and my first thought was to give it back to her, but then I saw nobody was ever going to give anything back to her. She was, well, she was gone.”

Herman put his hand out toward me. From his palm I took a small rectangular piece of cardboard. It was about three inches long and two inches wide. Then, as I felt the weight of the thing, I realized it was two or more pieces of cardboard pasted together. On the top piece was painted in long-faded colors the picture of a man and a woman in the sort of bathing suits we used to wear when I was a kid. They were sitting on the back of a grinning whale that was lashing its way happily through a piece of turbulent sea full of mountainous whitecaps. The bodies of the man and woman riding the whale had no heads. Where the heads should have been, two ovals had been cut into the cardboard. Into the ovals had been inserted snapshots of the heads of real people. The one on the left was a snapshot of my mother as she had looked on the night of the Shumansky wedding. The snapshot on the right was a picture of Walter Sinclair wearing his black turtleneck sweater. Both were smiling into the camera. Over their heads, in scroll letters that were outlined in pasted-on scraps of silver foil, were the words: “Coney Island, 1927.” The edges of the pasted-together cardboard rectangles were badly worn. Two of the corners had apparently once separated. They had been carefully fastened together with Scotch tape.

“What I can’t understand,” Herman Sabinson said, “I don’t understand how she could have held onto this thing. I mean, you know, when they check you into a hospital they take all your possessions. They lock them away downstairs in the safe, and you go up to your room balls-naked. How in the name of bejesus did she hold onto this thing for thirty-two days?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

It did not, however, seem to me much of an achievement. She had held onto a puzzling and unsatisfying life for nine-tenths of a century. By comparison, holding onto a dime Coney Island penny-arcade snapshot seemed a cinch.

“Does it mean anything?” Herman Sabinson said.

It meant two things. After all these years I finally knew where the
Jefferson Davis II
had been holed up for at least part of the time after the Shumansky wedding. And why once several years ago my mother had asked me to add to the aspirin and mineral oil and other contents of my Sunday morning shopping bag a roll of Scotch tape.