Closing Time (51 page)

The second and last time my mother visited the hospital was the afternoon my sister Mary Ann and I stopped by the funeral home to arrange for his burial. For some reason, Mom insisted on tagging along. We selected a cheap casket, a cheap funeral service, and the cheapest means of disposing of the remains: cremation. When it came time to discuss what should appear on the mass card at his funeral, my mother piped up, “Memento Mori,” which was her favorite prayer, not his. She even recited a few lines: “Out of the depths I have cried out to you, Lord; Lord, hear my prayer.” The funeral director then asked how the survivors should be listed in the newspaper obituary notice.

“Survived by wife Agnes,” I ventured, but my mother shook her head.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be listed in the obituary.”

The funeral director and I exchanged glances. My heavens, this was personal. “Survived by daughter Agnes Marie . . .”

Again, my mother shook her head.

“Survived by son Joseph . . .”

Here she registered no objection.

“Survived by daughter Eileen Patricia . . .”

Another shake of the head.

“Survived by daughter Mary Ann . . .”

As Mary Ann was in situ, fully capable of speaking for herself, my mother could not scotch that suggestion. Later on, out in the car, she explained why she chose not to be identified in his obituary. Catholics, of course, were forbidden to divorce, much less remarry. But my mother had never even taken the step of obtaining a legal separation. “I didn’t do it to be mean,” she explained, “but since we were never legally separated, I’m worried that I might get stuck with all his bills.” Afterward, my youngest sister and I discussed printing up an invoice from Mulligan’s Tavern designed to look fifty years old, which would read:

But we never did. My mother had a wonderful sense of humor, but a prank like that might have killed her. Later that day, I asked my youngest sister if she hated our father. “No,” she replied.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because hatred is a useless emotion.”

The day after our trip to the funeral home, the hospital made the absurd announcement that my father was ready for discharge and could medicate himself at home until the situation deteriorated to such a point that it would be necessary to readmit him to the hospital. I responded to this lunacy by giving his doctor an earful. When this accomplished nothing, I booked a room in an assisted-care facility a few miles up the road and arranged for an ambulance to pick us up the following morning.

This proved unnecessary. When I arrived at the hospital on Saturday morning, my father had fallen prey to pneumonia and at least one other malady. Dying of cancer, he had been cleared for release; incapacitated by pneumonia, he was strictly forbidden to leave the premises. It was like telling a leper not to sleep in front of an electric fan for fear he might catch a chill. Grudgingly, the doctors accepted the indisputable evidence that he was in intense pain and started in with the morphine drip the next day. We were on the killing floor now. My father began to nod off. When I left him that Saturday night, he was dozing. The next morning he lapsed into a deep sleep that may have been a coma. That was it; he was finished; the deathwatch had begun. There was never any formal send-off; we never said goodbye. I do not remember the last words we exchanged. I probably told him to take care of himself, which was as close to affection as I could get. He probably said to be careful riding the subway, as not even the specter of death could deter a pasty-faced Philadelphian from getting in one last dig at the city’s anathematized metropolitan transport system. But for all I know, he may have asked for a firmer pillow or a package of Tastykakes. It does not matter. He was a worn-out old man, and it was time for him to go to sleep.

My father remained in this placid, comalike state for the rest of the week. Every day when I arrived, I was told by the nurses that his condition was “stable,” that this euthanasia in everything but name had not yet run its course. I would hang around for a while, studying him intently, monitoring his irregular respiratory pattern, sometimes convinced that he had stopped breathing. I was determined to be there when the end came, if not physically on the premises, at least nearby, in the city of his birth.

Meanwhile, back in New York, one of my best friends was winding up a round-the-world trip he had awarded himself as a fiftieth-birthday present. He had started his adventure all the way out in the Cotswolds, in the west of England, then traveled to Sydney, Hawaii, Victoria, and now he had finally arrived in New York. He had been at my house for a few days and was planning to fly home to England on Sunday. John was married to one of my wife’s oldest friends and lived in a sixteenth-century manor house with a cabal of anti-establishment holdouts who were only just starting to realize that Margaret Thatcher had killed off the sixties for good. There was a tiny chapel in the backyard that had survived the depredations of Henry VIII because it was privately owned, not part of the monastic system, and was still in use by local Catholics. John belonged to a world I could never have entered had I not met my wife. He would very much like to see me before he returned home, and I would very much like to see him. With my father in a serene vegetative state but the end not yet officially in sight, I decided it was safe to sneak back home for a day to see John and my family.

Friday morning, John and I rose bright and early and headed into Manhattan. New York is never more beguiling than when people not born there get to serve as tour guides. It reminds them that Gotham, like Bach, is a one-off; that, as a friend who grew up in the rural South before moving to Brooklyn once observed, “After you’ve seen New York, it’s
all
Podunk.” Friday, December 19, was an unseasonably gorgeous December day, and John and I had a swell time. We managed to squeeze in Central Park, the Museum of Modern Art, Rockefeller Center, the Staten Island Ferry, a stroll across the Brooklyn Bridge, dinner in Chinatown, cheesecake and cappuccino at Ferraro’s in Little Italy. It was the Glenn Dreibelbis Circuit, with a few new wrinkles. Topping it off was a chance for John to visit Madison Square Garden for the first time in his life; as luck would have it, a sassy British fighter named Prince Naseem Hamed was topping the card that night.

We bought our tickets, guffawed a bit as the hapless up-and-comers in the prelims flailed about, marveled at the raucous crowd. There were the usual hard-core fight fans, many of them Hispanic, plus a liberal sprinkling of those homegrown old-timers in grimy fedoras who have always given the fight game a special air of romance, not so much because they are especially knowledgeable about boxing but because they know how to wear a fedora. There was also an enormous contingent of stereotypically repellent English hooligans: hog-faced lager louts who had flown over from London to take in the fight and perhaps start a few of their own. Just before the talented but excessively operatic Prince Naseem climbed into the ring, I ducked out to a phone booth to check on my father’s condition.

“He won’t make it through the night,” the nurse who answered the phone informed me.

“But I was told that his condition was stable.”

“I don’t know who told you that,” she replied, “but he won’t make it through the night.”

“This is his son, Joe,” I now informed her. “Could you do me a favor and go in and tell him that I’m coming?”

“He’s in a coma,” she replied.

“Then he won’t mind you telling him.”

I returned to my seat, told John that I had to leave, then hustled downstairs from the Garden to Penn Station. The next train leaving for Philadelphia was at 8: 05. I was on it. I jumped off at Trenton and grabbed the local train to Holmesburg Station, a few blocks from my little sister’s house, a few blocks from the prison where my uncle Johnny had spent so much of his life, one day volunteering for the medical experiments that would eventually kill him. We rushed off to the hospital, took the elevator to the third floor, tumbled into the corridor. We were met by two nurses. We were too late.

My father had breathed his last at 8:05, just as I was getting on the train at Penn Station. Subconsciously, I must have expected this, knowing that a red-letter day like the one John and I had just experienced could not possibly come without a price. As I had always feared, he would die alone. It was typical, and there was no reason to be surprised: He had never given me a break while he was living; he certainly wasn’t going to do me any favors when he died.

My sister and I wept a bit, she more than I. We could not help noticing how small and shriveled up he had become. It was hard to believe that someone so frail could have terrorized us for so long. It was a terrible shame, I observed, that he had to be cremated, as we, neither as a family nor as a nation, would soon look again on the likes of his fabulous World War II-era tattoos. My father had crude markings on each of his biceps, one an arrow transfixing a heart beneath the words LOVE, EILEEN, the other a somewhat jaunty anchor. Eileen was my younger sister’s name, but this was not the Eileen in question. It was always a source of confusion and embarrassment whenever we went to the beach and he took off his shirt. They were primitive tattoos; they looked like someone named Shanghai or Three-Fingers Brown had sedated him, carved ugly designs into his arm with a trenching tool, poured a vat of blue ink into the holes, then sewed up the whole mess with hemp. I suspect that he got the tattoos in San Francisco the night before he shipped out for the South Pacific in 1943, ten years before my middle sister was born. None of us ever found out who Eileen was. Probably some Frisco floozie.

“We ought to get these things surgically detached and sent to the Smithsonian,” I suggested, only half in jest. If it was true, as we were told in catechism class, that the body was the temple of the Lord, then my father had not treated this temple with the respect it deserved. If nothing else, our discussion of the tattoos’ artistic merits lightened the mood.

After that, we covered his face with a sheet.

“Don’t take any wooden nickels,” my sister said in parting. Then I called my mother and told her that her husband was dead. Her response is written in my heart. “It’s always something,” she said.

 

“He did have his good qualities.”

So my mother would often remark after he was gone. It was true. As my father’s death approached I made a laundry list of the things I admired about him. The list was surprisingly long. He was the type of man who bantered effortlessly with strangers, an art not all men possess, and certainly not men of my generation, whose idea of conversing with tradespeople or counter help is glib condescension. He was not afraid to visit rough neighborhoods, because he believed that neighborhoods never stopped belonging to the people who had grown up in them; that the old haunts were sacred, and in some way beautiful, no matter how ravaged they might seem to the naked eye.

He truly loved Philadelphia, a city that is not especially easy to love. He knew where John Barry was buried, where Benjamin Franklin was interred. He would take you there if you liked, then lead you to the pew where Betsy Ross sat every Sunday in Old Christ Church. He could tell you the history of Roman Catholicism in Federal-era Philadelphia, or the causes of the Civil War, and was reasonably conversant with the circumstances surrounding the disintegration of the Roman Empire. He may not have known who Tacitus was, but he was no stranger to the name Tiberius. He knew where Birnam Wood was and why Macbeth feared its arrival in Dunsinane. He could explain why Henry Plantagenet had ordered his henchmen to murder Thomas à Becket. He could tell you why no one was terribly broken up when Oliver Cromwell died. He could tell you the same about Crassus, Marie Antoinette, Joe McCarthy. In late-twentieth-century America, such acumen was astounding.

Many of his traits were bequeathed to me, though not all would agree that these traits were desirable. He had a hair-trigger temper. He did not vacillate when making judgments about people, and once he decided that he hated you, he hated you for good. He maintained a fierce devotion to unpopular theories, even when he suspected that they were no longer tenable. He mispronounced the words “theater” and “nuclear,” and seemed to derive considerable pleasure from doing so. He had nothing but disdain for anything that could be categorized as “rah-rah”: fraternities, Ivy League tailgaters, anyone who opened his yap about the regatta. He did not dislike rich people, only rich people who pretended they were not; he had no patience with instigators, organizers, and Maoists, convinced that the unscrubbed card-carrying radical in the FREE MUMIA tee shirt was almost certainly the son of the third most sought-after obstetrician in Bryn Mawr. He suspected that anyone who waxed poetic about the old neighborhood in Kensington or Brewerytown or South Philly had probably grown up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. He also believed that middle-class people who impersonated working-class people should be prosecuted, just like anyone who tried to pass himself off as a doctor or a cop. It was one subject on which we were always in complete agreement, even though my own escape from the proletariat was the greatest achievement of my life. I, like him, could never stomach faux proles, with their nebulous economic underpinnings and suspicious genealogies, creeps who acted as if choreographed goatishness was the salient feature of the blue-collar experience. Just because I wanted out of the working class didn’t mean I had invited anyone else in.

For the last twelve months of his life, my father lived in a one-bedroom apartment in a glamour-free but safe working-class neighborhood in Philadelphia. It was the prototypical Quaker City community, where tattered Eagles banners rippled from every flagpole; where the streets teemed with husky young women sporting big hair, their mammoth thighs shoehorned into stonewashed jeans, every last one of them hawking their merchandise in skintight Philadelphia Flyers jackets. It was the kind of community where no block was complete without a funeral home named McGivney’s or McGuire’s or McGettigan’s. It was at one of these establishments that we held the funeral service. Fifteen people attended. There were no eulogies, no reveries, no affirmations, no wisecracks. People were there to mourn and weep, not to try out new material. The priest said what he had to say, and that was that. At one point in the service, my father’s downstairs neighbor John, his accomplice in pain management, began to cry inconsolably, to the point that I had to turn around and hug him. Jesus Christ Almighty, I thought at the time; this was my father’s funeral; I was the one who should be weeping, yet here I was, consoling the inconsolable. Yet in a way, this situation seemed neither inappropriate nor unexpected. After all, John had enjoyed a better relationship with my father than I did.