The Hearse You Came in On (2 page)

The interloper flashed me a peeved look and slid her arm through mine. We stepped away from the coffin, long tall me in my dark suit, long tall she in her short short skirt. Several centuries of heads turned in our direction as we crossed the room. As Mrs. Weatherby looked up, the woman on my arm hissed at me. “What do I say?”

“Tell her he was a good man. That seems to be the consensus.”

“Seriously.”

“He was a fireman. Tell her that he rescued your cat
from a tree a long time ago and that you’ve never forgotten him.”

“Could we maybe find something a little cornier?”

As we approached, the ostrich was going on about some sort of carpeting trauma she had recently experienced. I could see that Billie was grateful for my arrival. I silenced the ostrich with the sheer force of my interruption.

“Mrs. Weatherby, I’m Hitchcock Sewell, Billie’s nephew. I’m terribly sorry for your loss.” I swung my mystery guest into place. “This is—”

“Carolyn James.” Her expression softened beautifully as she took hold of the widow’s hand. “I’m so sorry. Your husband was … you don’t know me. He … I… I had a cat.”

I came to the rescue.

“Your husband rescued Miss James’s cat some years ago,” I explained. “From a tree. The cat was pregnant. Miss James was so grateful to your husband that she named one of the kittens Weatherby. In his honor.” The woman at my side stiffened as I plunged forward. “Miss James happened to see the notice in the paper this afternoon right after a set of tennis—as you can see—and she just had to rush over here and pay her respects.”

The widow muttered something in response. I missed it altogether. She had not let go of Carolyn James’s hand.

Aunt Billie chimed in. “That was very thoughtful of you, Miss James.”

Billie flashed me a get-her-the-hell-out-of-here look. I drew Carolyn James back from the gals and steered her toward the door.

“What the hell was all that about the pregnant cat?” she hissed.

I was nodding solemnly at a ghostly couple who were just coming into the room. “It’ll give her something to tell around the bridge table.”

Out in the lobby I asked Carolyn James if she wanted to sign the guest book. We keep one on a gold-plated stand in case people want to comment on what a rousing good time they had. She declined.

“I think I’ll just disappear quietly,” she said, turning away from me and stepping over to the door. I trailed her. We reached for the doorknob simultaneously. I got there first, and held on to it.

“Do you think, just possibly, that maybe you owe me an explanation?” I said. “I mean, before you ‘disappear quietly’ maybe you’d like to tell me why you wandered in here in the first place? We don’t get many drop-ins.”

“I’d rather not,” she said. But when I refused to release the doorknob she relented. She squared off in front of me.

“I apologize for crashing your party, Mr. Sewell.”

“Accepted.”

“It won’t happen again.”

I gave a little shrug. “You’re always welcome.”

Her eyes narrowed and she checked me out closely, one eye at a time.

“It was impulsive, my coming in here. Okay? I stopped in to see … to see about arranging a funeral.”

“That’s it? Then why all the fuss? Look, my office is right here. Why don’t we—”

“I changed my mind.” She gave her head a little flip and glared hotly at me. “Can I go now?”

“I hope you haven’t changed your mind because of
that cat nonsense just now. My aunt can handle the arrangements if that would make you feel better. I wouldn’t take it personally. In fact—”

“There’s not going to be a funeral,” she snapped. I could see faint yellow starbursts pulsing in her eyes. She cocked a challenging eyebrow at me. “Have you got that?”

“Yes, ma’am.” As I pulled the door open for her, I asked, “When you were thinking of burying someone, may I ask who exactly you had in mind?”

The lava shifted in her eyes. She sighed.

“Yes,” she said. “Me.”

M
y parents were local television personalities in Baltimore back in the old mom-and-pop days of Charm City, before its several heralded facelifts and makeovers. My father worked up on Television Hill, in the studios of WBAL, overlooking the gray rock valley of Hampden, the old mill town, on the banks of the rarely mighty Jones Falls. He was something of a utility man back then, reading the news, doing commercials for local merchants, introducing the late night movie on Friday nights and—in a rotating assortment of silly hats—the kiddy cartoons on Saturday mornings. Those were the days when local TV was still making it up as it went along, “giving radio a face” is how I once heard it put. My father’s face was friendly and unremarkable. He used to brag that he was as ubiquitous as a church key. A funny brag, if you think about it.

My mother on the other hand was an exotic import from New York City, a stalled actress in the off-off scene who came down to Baltimore to essay the role of Mary Pickersgill in a fifteen-minute film that the Smithsonian Institution was putting together to accompany its display of Ms. Pickersgill’s oversized flag—
the original Star-Spangled Banner—that had flapped in the wind over Fort McHenry during the otherwise nearly forgotten War of 1812. I wouldn’t be so crass as to accuse my own darling mother of compromising her virtue to get the part, but the fact remains that a firstgeneration Italian American with shiny black hair, olive skin, a slight accent and hips like a Vespa motor scooter wouldn’t exactly be the logical first choice to portray the vaguely spinsterish and patently Waspy Ms. Pickersgill. At any rate, “somehow” she got the part and she took the train down from New York for the shoot. My dad was tapped to be Francis Scott Key, local boy and scribe of the national anthem. I don’t believe that the historical Pickersgill and Key ever actually met, despite their significant relationships to Old Glory. But the make-believes certainly did, forging an alternate history with their clandestine coupling on the second floor of the Flag House down on East Pratt Street after the film crew had wrapped for the day. For a five-dollar entrance fee you can still visit the StarSpangled Banner Flag House and see for yourself the actual room where my parents bumped and giggled in the off-hours to conceive their dear little pumpkin. When I was a teenager the Flag House was a must-go whenever I started courting a new flame. I never quite presumed I would be so lucky as to star in an actual reenactment of my parent’s infamous tryst… but it gave me an easy opening to drop the subject of sex into the conversation. Which, on balance, rarely hurts.

You can also see where the lady made the flag.

My parents fell instantly in love, and so the discovery that my mother was pregnant with me apparently did not introduce panic. The acting scene in New York
had been a constant sputter anyway, so my mother was easily convinced to move down to Baltimore and set up shop here. They married, and some months after my birth my mother began doing odd jobs at the TV station, voiceovers and the like. The station added a Bowling for Dollars show on Friday nights from seven to seven-thirty and tapped my father to host it. He convinced the station to let him bring my mother into the picture to help him in his little chats with the contestants. The pair of them were so charming and silly that soon those chats were taking up nearly as much time as the breathtaking bowling. I made my television debut, in fact, on that show. I was not quite a year old and I brought a whiff of scandal to the program as I nestled in my beautiful mother’s arms unbuttoning the top three buttons of her blouse while she and my father yak yak yakked with some kid from Dundalk who was looking to make a few bucks knocking down pins.

Eventually the bowling show died—and my parents popped up with a little talk show of their own, one of the first of the now-glutted genre. Cross-dressing in-laws and mothers who sleep with their daughters’ boyfriends were keeping a lower profile back in those days. My parents interviewed players for the Colts and the Orioles, common folk who did interesting things, local chefs, high school coaches, you name it. It didn’t really matter who they talked to or what they talked about, so long as everybody had a chummy time. I popped up occasionally on this show as well, telegenic pip that I was. God help me, I even sat there on the set once in a straw boater and a seersucker suit while my parents chatted with Bing Crosby himself, who was in town to perform at the Painters Mill Music Fair. Bing
could barely take his nasty eyes off my mother. All those old Hollywood heyday types are as horny as goats; they’re constantly trolling for it. Bing was sent packing as quickly as possible and my father personally apologized to me for making me wear that getup.

Most of my looks come from my mother, the dark hair, the blue eyes. Though the pirate’s smile … that’s compliments of my dad.

As for the wary eye I cast upon the world, you can chalk that up to the indiscriminate Fates that would take such a wonderful pair of people as my parents and send their car hurtling into the path of a beer truck on their way to, of all places, the hospital. My mother was pregnant with my little sister. When her labor pains had begun in earnest, I was dropped off with my ugly Uncle Stu and Aunt Billie, at the funeral home. The driver of the beer truck said it happened in an instant. They swerved. It was over. Ugly Uncle Stu took the phone call. His end of the conversation was minimal, and when he set the phone back down on the receiver all he said was “They’re all dead” and then he dropped into a chair and began to sob. The only time I ever saw him cry. I stayed in the room and watched him for several minutes, then went upstairs and kicked a hole in the wall.

As I think I’ve mentioned, the turnout for their funeral was huge. The mayor himself showed. Even with the plastic curtain drawn back between Parlors One and Two, the crowd spilled into the entrance hall and out onto the street. I was a handsome devil in my little dark suit. Twelve years old. People touched me lightly as if I were a saint. I remember thinking that there were enough flowers to clog a sewer system and
that if Bing Crosby dared to show his face I’d make him eat every single one of them. I also remember thinking, later that night as I stared out the window of my new bedroom, that if nothing else I sure as hell had just gotten over and done with what would certainly be the very worst day of my life. There couldn’t be any doubt about that. Nothing but blue skies from then on.

At his funeral the next day, Mr. Weatherby didn’t give us any trouble. None of his pallbearers were too tall or too short—which sometimes results in a weight distribution crisis—and none of his mourners flew into show-stopping paroxysms of grief. The widow sobbed politely and was gently tended to by her chums. The weather cooperated. Barometer held steady. Temperatures ran a comfortable seventy-three. We were coming off a mild winter, so the spring bloomings had come early; the burgeoning buds by the cemetery’s front gate provided an appropriately poignant counterpoint to the frank task of planting the depleted Mr. Weatherby deep deep below the topsoil. The canopy over the grave site itself carved a brilliant white triangle against the blue sky and offered a cooling shade to the half-dozen plastic folding chairs beneath it. Mr. Weatherby’s casket (the Embassy model; have I mentioned that?) really showed its stuff there out under the sun. Mahogany is a beautiful wood even in its natural state. Lacquer it up and it practically hums.

Though this was Aunt Billie’s funeral, she had been hit with a nasty cold, so I had taken it. I was standing silently off to the side, hands cupped at my crotch, my eye on the bagpiper who was planted some twenty feet off, getting ready to squeeze his cow bladder. Despite
the kilts and feathers and all the rest of it, our bagpiper is no more Scottish than the ayatollah. He is an Italian electrician named Tony Marino. Tony’s sad tale runs as follows: A Highlands lassie on a church choir trip to Rome stole and then broke his teenage heart outside the Colosseum (“… the ruins, the ruins …”) and Tony subsequently took up the bagpipes so as to further torment his forlorn soul. He even traveled to Scotland the following year on an odyssey to track down his lost lassie love, failing to locate her but fully saturating himself in all things Scottish. To this day he starts his morning with kippers and a shot of Macallans. To his credit, Tony Marino is a dynamite bagpiper. Although it is mostly “Amazing Grace” and “Danny Boy” that the bereaved tend to request, Tony includes Verdi and Puccini in his repertoire. He can also bleat out an “Ave Maria” that’ll do you in.

The Widow Weatherby had chosen “Amazing Grace.” At my discreet signal Tony puffed up his bag and launched into the dirge. How sweet the sound. When Tony finished his tune, he lowered his pipes and wiped an authentic tear from his eye. Love is a needle in your neck sometimes, I swear. The priest scattered his final words over Mr. Weatherby and the deed was done. The widow stood a moment at the coffin, looking like she had just remembered the name of some restaurant that her husband had asked her about last week and that she would now have to simply hold on to forever. She placed a veined hand on the casket and muttered something that I missed altogether, then blended back in with the flock making their way across the graves to their cars. Tony, five foot two and as swarthy as a Sicilian boot, stood erect and stock-still as the mourners passed.

I lagged behind. My job was done. I don’t usually attend the post-funeral bash. It’s my task—or Billie’s—to get the deceased safely to this point, hovering six feet above their final earthly stop. Then I sign off and pass things along to the cemetery folk. And so it was this time. Four guys you wouldn’t let near your front door emerged from behind the trees and continued an argument they had been having about Cal Ripken’s back pains as they played out the canvas straps holding the coffin aloft. Before the box sank below the surface one of the lugs snatched the flower arrangement off and tossed it aside. They take them home to the missus.

“Hey, Kid, you gonna help?”

This was the captain of the crew, a cigar-chomping bulldog with ears the size of Chincoteague oysters. He loved calling me “Kid.” I loved calling him “Pops.” So much love.