Someone (13 page)

Mr. Fagin sat down again and slid
David Copperfield
across his desk. I took the book in my gloved hand and placed it on my lap. It was heavier than a missal.

“They knew what they were doing in those days,” Mr. Fagin continued. “It’s rest for the weary eye at the end of a long vigil, the sight of someone young, a lovely young woman such as yourself. It reminds us of life. Life again, which is also the hope of resurrection.”

He was silent for a moment, assessing me. Now my cheeks were burning. I had never before heard myself referred to as a lovely young woman. Then he looked down into his own palms, as if to be sure he had given full measure to each one of the two things he had intended to say. He placed his hands on the desk again and looked up.

“Is that your only suit?” he asked.

The question surprised me. I said yes, and then added, not even sure yet I wanted the job, “I can always borrow another.”

“Have you got some nice dresses?” he asked.

I said yes again, but without much conviction, and he said, as if to himself, “Probably high-school things. Skirts and sweaters.”

I said, “Sure.”

“Dresses will be better for visiting hours,” he said. “Wool, in dark colors, but not black. Navy or deep green is good. Trim and neat. Elegant. With a touch of perfume behind the ears. Betty uses Evening in Paris.”

He reached into his desk drawer and took out a small card, slid it across the desk. “Muriel in the ladies’ department at Abraham & Straus downtown. Go see her. She knows her stuff. She’ll
help you pick something out. I’ve got an account. Buy yourself five nice dresses and put them on my account. Bring your mother, too. Your mother knows good quality. You won’t go wrong.”

I picked up the card and slipped it between the pages of the book.

Again he studied my face. “Can you see without those glasses?” he asked.

“Pretty well,” I said, lying, because now I did want the job. I had never in my life bought five new dresses all at once. It was a struggle to get my mother to pay for just one every season. Five at once. I had never even heard of such a thing.

“Take them off,” he said, and I did. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

The sun on the golden leaves behind him was strong enough to smear his pink hand with light.

“Two,” I said.

He laughed. “Three. But you didn’t squint. Good for you. Nothing worse than a four-eyed girl squinting. You can wear them here in the office, but take them off when you’re at a wake. I don’t think you’ll fall down any stairs.”

I nodded and slipped my glasses back on. He studied me again. “You’ll be fine,” he said.

He stood and I stood, and once again he wordlessly directed me to the door. In the paneled vestibule he held out his hand. It was large and soft and gentle in its grip. The hands that had received my poor father’s ravaged body. Just beyond him I could see a room with chairs and flowers and the edge of a shining coffin. I looked back at Mr. Fagin, the thick book tucked against my chest as if I had just come from church. My hand was still in his, and I knew in an instant, as if it was something I could actually recall, that it was Fagin who had lifted me to kiss Pegeen Chehab in her coffin, all those years ago.

The job proved to be as simple as he had described it. I followed Betty, a robust brunette, for a week, and from then on did as Betty had done, speaking softly but saying little and staying mostly out of the way while the friends and relatives of the deceased gathered to console and to gossip and, not infrequently, to argue with one another in hushed and furious whispers. I rode in the hearse, in the front seat beside the driver, to cemeteries all over the city—up to the Bronx, out to Queens, even to Long Island, which I had seen before only during the long train ride to Gabe’s seminary. I stood behind the mourners with my heels sinking into the dirt as the vigil came to a close in what felt like country sunlight or tree-muffled rain, among the gray cityscape of tombstones. I glanced into leafy neighborhoods where I resolved someday I would live, and when I came back to the funeral parlor with a bit of sun on my cheeks or grass on my good shoes Mr. Fagin joked that he wouldn’t have to sponsor a Fresh Air kid this year, I was it.

On occasion I saw, and began to understand, the first point Mr. Fagin had tried to make that morning. A grieving husband or father might look on the old wife or the young daughter, nodding sadly at the words of comfort—she looks so lovely, so peaceful, her beauty restored—and then suddenly glance up and around. Even without my glasses, I could make out how their eyes fell on Fagin himself in the back of the room, or on one of his young assistants at the door, and for an instant I could almost see it, glasses or no: the unwelcome thought of what the wife’s, the mother’s, the daughter’s body—at Fagin’s we said simply “the body”—had been through in the hours since her death. Who had touched her and how. And then they would look at me and an answer of sorts would be provided; they would, perhaps even without knowing it, rest assured.

The second point, the one that had to do with
David Copperfield
, was less clear. But I began to have a sense of this, too, as
the weeks went by. I dotted Evening in Paris behind my ears and on my wrists, and the scent, along with the good dresses from A&S, and the expensive heels my mother had provided, seemed to raise my station in life, seemed to lend me a maturity I had not had before. I saw grown women, women my mother’s age, duck their heads shyly when I quietly greeted them at the funeral parlor door. Old men gratefully took my hand or steadied themselves on my extended arm. Young men who might not have given me a second glance on the street touched their hearts and whispered, “Thank you, thank you very much,” when I directed them to a chair or handed them a remembrance card as they were leaving. Once, and then twice, and then three times over the course of my first year at Fagin’s, one of these young men was waiting for me when I left the funeral parlor or the apartment house at the end of the evening, waiting to ask for my name.

Never once did I have to venture to the basement of the place, although I grew to recognize the particular odor of what went on down there when it wove its way through the heavier scents of the funeral flowers, and my perfume, and the general Brooklyn air: a cloying, vinegary smell that wafted up on occasion but quickly dissipated if I opened a window or fanned the front door. But neither did I fear, after the first few weeks, the sight of the corpse laid out in its coffin at the front of the room.

If the body was a child’s, rare enough but not uncommon in my time at Fagin’s, I would simply leave my glasses off and avert my eyes. I learned how to drift out of the room at the sound of a mother’s keening. Despite the many times, over the years, I had thought of Pegeen Chehab as I stood at the head of a long set of stairs, I never considered until I got to Fagin’s the variety of missteps that might take a child from the world: burst appendix, whooping cough, consumption, pneumonia, lead poisoning, the infection from a dog bite once (an angel, Mr. Fagin had said, of the little girl), and accidents, accidents. Run over, drowned,
electrocuted by a table fan; one lanky boy had tried to leap between rooftops and fell instead into the lightless areaway—even in his coffin you could see how new his body had been to him.

Later I would tell my own children when they complained that as a mother I had been overcautious about the simplest things, anxious, superstitious, plagued by dreams of disaster: “You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen what I’ve seen.”

But I quickly came to feel that there was a numbing sameness about the full-grown dead, young or old, male or female. It might have had to do with the particularities of Mr. Fagin’s art—I’d heard the two assistants complaining more than once about his heavy-handedness with rouge—it might have been that every mortician, like any artist, from Al Capp to Leonardo da Vinci, had his own recognizable style, a style that could make everyone look alike.

But it was also, I came to believe, the very lifelessness of the bodies that made them all somehow indistinguishable and anonymous. Although it was a favorite refrain among the mourners, there was never any question in my mind that the body at the front of the room was “only sleeping.” No natural sleep looked like that, no eyes that might flutter open again were ever stitched closed in just that way. And then there was the feel of them, of hand or cheek or arm: stiff and cold and as hard as if they’d been stuffed with horsehair. Even among the many faces I knew—I saw, in my years with Fagin, my fifth grade teacher, Dora Ryan’s father, the man who sold Italian ices from a pushcart, old Mrs. Fagin, Mr. Chehab, and, of course, Bill Corrigan himself—there was little continuity between the living and the dead. I was some months at Fagin’s before I found the courage to reach into a coffin to adjust a curl or a fallen pair of rosaries, or to brush away an errant bit of lipstick, but having done it once, I was quickly cavalier.

When the boys who waited for me outside the wake, and
then later, the uniformed young men who began to fill the city once the war began, asked how I could bear it—being in the presence of the dead day after day—I blew smoke into the air and laughed casually. “They’re just bodies,” I would say. “Like dolls. Like empty shells. Might as well be a sack of potatoes.”

A starting point, on more than one occasion, for the boys’ own arguments, later in the evening, when they slipped their hands inside my blouse or over my stockings, “We’re only bodies, after all, just dolls.” It was an argument I was more often than not happy to let them make, up to a point. By the time I reached my twenties, my heartbreak was mended, I suppose—much as the notion of what might have been still lingered: the bright wedding in the pretty church, not to mention that house in the country—but I was no fool.

I said as much to Gabe very late one evening—early morning, in fact, the dawn just striking the kitchen window, lighting up the curtain in the dining room but not yet reaching the couch where he sat in his robe and his slippers, a book in his hands, waiting up for me. I had come in from a date with a GI whose mother we had buried just yesterday. He was a quiet boy, somewhere in the middle of a pack of twelve children. The children, and the various aunts and uncles and cousins who attended them, had filled Fagin’s parlor and hallway and vestibule with thunderous shouts of laughter and greeting and argument and conversation and tears. So many people that when the priest led them all in the Rosary at the end of each night, the volume of their collective response—Holy Mary, Mother of God—was enough, Fagin said, to blow the feathers off the wings of the Angel Gabriel himself.

But Rory, my date, was a subdued young man, skinny and long-faced. I had taken his cap from him when he first came in, and for the next three days he was my shadow. Homely, from what I could see of him. In uniform already, home from Camp
Crowder to bury his mother and back to soldiering tomorrow—today, I corrected myself, explaining it all to Gabe. After the funeral and the drive to Gate of Heaven, we’d had dinner together, seen a movie, and then I had gone with him to his house to get his kit. There was some crisis with the plumbing, there were children in pajamas everywhere, holding their noses, crying, laughing, battering one another with what looked like broomsticks and plungers, the chaotic world happily closed up over their mother’s disappearance. It seemed hardly a one of them noticed that the poor guy was leaving. So out of sympathy alone, I told Gabe, I went with him to the station to wait for his train, where we necked ferociously (I didn’t tell Gabe this) and shared a bag of doughnuts and a fifth of whiskey (nor this) until 5:15.

I’d taken a cab home, an extravagance, yes, but wasn’t it better to be safe than sorry?

Gabe sat in the middle of the couch, in his bathrobe and his slippers. “I’ve made up my mind to enlist, too,” he said softly. “Better to get in early.” I felt myself sway a little, still drunk. For all the anxieties that would plague me as a mother, for all the superstitions I’d absorbed as a child, my first thought on hearing this was not for Gabe’s safety but for his room and his bed, which would be mine once again if he went into the army.

“Now I’m sitting here worrying about leaving Momma alone.”

I had the impulse to sit down next to him, to pat his hand, but the whiskey I’d been drinking made me hesitate. He had lectured me already. Have just one drink when you go out, it’s easy enough to do. A boy will respect you for it. He’ll be grateful not to have to pay for more. “If you allow yourself license in little things,” he’d told me, quoting someone or other, “little by little, you’ll be ruined.”

“Momma won’t be here alone,” I said, shifting my unsteady weight from one leg to the other. “I’m here.”

He lifted his arm, tapped on his watch. “It’s six a.m.,” he said, reasonably enough. “You haven’t been home all day. You’re just getting in.”

I looked around the narrow room to avoid his frown. “Oh come on,” I said, trying to make my tongue behave. “This was a special case. A kid going back to camp. Just buried his mother. I couldn’t leave him at the station alone. It’s not like I stay out this late every night.” Although I had another date that very evening with the florist’s boy, who was also joining up.

Gabe looked at his hands. “You run around too much,” he said. “It’s not good, Marie. I know you want to make up for what happened with Walter, you want to prove something about yourself. Your attractiveness, I suppose. But this is no way to go about it. Drinking, running around. You’ll get yourself into trouble instead.”

I knew what he meant by “get yourself into trouble,” and I was astonished to discover how furious I became—a lightning bolt of black fury running across my scalp. Furious to discover that he thought of me in this way: that his thoughts had crept in this direction, sitting here in the dark with his book, his prayer book no less, waiting for me to come home. Thinking here in the darkness that I was out somewhere in the city—where, the cold benches of the train station?—baring myself to a stranger, going as far as you could go just to prove Walter Hartnett wrong.