Last Respects (26 page)

Maybe not at his age. But I had come around the pylon into my fifties. More than half the race was run. And the best part, at that. If I didn’t get my mother off my back soon, I probably never would. According to the
Reader’s Digest,
I was now living squarely in the middle of the coronary belt. If I died before I learned what my mother had been all about, I would never forgive myself.

“Yes, sir? Can I help you, sir?”

Where had the words come from? I looked around. I was in a sort of square hall. Why sort of? Because the chamber had several offshoots from an essentially though not conclusively square center. As though somebody had decided to design it as a wheel, and only when the spokes were built, did it occur to the designer that the center of a wheel is round. Whatever the shape, even with my eyes closed I would have known I was in a municipal institution. The place smelled exactly the way P.S. 188 and J.H.S. 64 used to smell. Which is the way subway toilets still smell, reform administration in residence at Gracie Mansion notwithstanding. Then I became aware that there seemed to be some point to the offshoots. One, I noticed, was lined with fumed-oak benches. Nobody was on them, but this was a really mean day, and it was also the day before Christmas. On better days I suspected this offshoot and its benches served as a waiting room. But in a morgue, what were better days? And what did people wait for in a place so inescapably terminal? The happy face appearing at the door? The uplifted voice? “Hey, sorry! It’s not your mother at all! It’s just some old lady we picked up in a gutter who looks like her!”

“Can I help you, sir?”

I turned toward the repeated words. Repeated this time with a rising inflection. And in another offshoot above a marble ledge I saw a small information-inquiry-“Who are you looking for, mister?” type window. Framed in the window was the man who had directed me from the sentry box at the iron gates outside. I know this sounds silly, but it had to be the same man. There couldn’t be two of them. Not even twins could manage to look so alike. And yet, how did he get here? He had certainly not leaped out of the sentry post and sprinted past the taxi as we drove up the path. Or had he? A mental picture took shape in my head. I could see the whole thing clearly. The man in the shapeless blue uniform leaving the sentry box as the taxi pulled away. Racing like crazy all the way around to the front entrance of the hospital. Belting through a labyrinth of corridors. Bowling over with his pumping elbows doctors and nurses and patients and visitors and orderlies carrying trays loaded with hot meals. Emerging breathlessly from the back of the building into the hall of the morgue a moment before I came in from the front, just in time to appear at the window above the marble ledge and say, “Can I help you, sir?”

Except that he didn’t sound breathless. And examining his face, I knew that no matter when he reached his appointed place on the old slab, this man would never look deader than he looked now.

“I’ve come to identify a body,” I said.

“Of course,” he said.

The response annoyed me. I don’t know why. After all, he couldn’t really have been expected to say oh, I thought you’d popped in to have yourself measured for a new set of dental plates.

“What’s the name, please?”

I told him. He examined a sheet of paper attached to a clipboard. It seemed to me he took a long time doing it.

“You sure?” he said finally.

“About what?” I said.

“The name,” he said.

Always, I thought, there are jokers. In the most unexpected places, out of the most improbable faces, at the most inappropriate moments, the voice of the smart-ass rises in the land.

“It was her name for more than eighty years,” I said. “It’s been mine for over fifty. I ought to be sure.”

“You mind spelling it?” he said.

I forced back my irritation. After all, he could have asked me to wigwag it in Morse. I spelled it. He listened attentively.

“Hmmm,” he said. I sensed a note of suspicion in the single syllable. Considering my record as a speller in P.S. 188, this boy was flirting with a caustic riposte. He stared at me for several moments, then said, “You mind waiting a minute?”

What I minded most was the way he began every sentence with “You mind.” I began to have a feeling that my reactions were all wrong. I felt as though I were watching a movie and the sound track was out of synch.

“I’ve got a taxi waiting,” I said.

But he was gone. I dipped down to peer through the information window. I wanted to see how he had done it. My examination indicated that he had obviously sunk through the floor. In the room behind the information window there were no doors. Only a picture of John V. Lindsay smiling down with self-confident sincerity from the facing wall.

“This way, please.”

I turned. The man who had directed me at the sentry box, the man who had asked if I minded waiting a minute at the window, that man was now beckoning me into one of the offshoots from the square center of the hall. This boy was obviously better than Charlie Paddock, who when I was a boy had been known as the world’s fastest human. And Charlie had been forced to wear running pants to prove it. I moved toward New York City’s fastest civil servant. He moved down the offshoot, beckoning me to follow. Near the bottom of the corridor he stepped in front of a gray metal door and waited for me.

“Mr. Bieber will see you,” he said.

“You mind spelling it?” I said.

Inexplicably, I suddenly felt mean. It embarrassed me, but it didn’t stop me from sounding the way I sounded.

“What?” the man said.

“The name,” I said. “How do you spell it?”

“Oh.” He scowled. “Why do you want me to spell it?”

Because you wanted me to spell mine.

“It could be B, e, e, b, e, r,” I said. “Or it could be B, i, e, b, e, r. I’d like to get it straight.”

“Oh,” the man said again. He gave the matter some thought. So did I. Always, I thought again, always there are the voices of jokers. And with all too increasing frequency, I reflected grimly, the voice is proving to be yours. The man’s face cleared. He pointed to the gray metal door. On it in black was lettered: Mr. Beybere. The man said, “Those other two, no. It’s B, e, y, b, e, r, e.”

“Thanks,” I said.

He opened the door, waited until I passed him, then closed the door behind me. I looked around. This room looked like the others I had seen in the morgue. A gray metal desk. Two gray metal chairs. A window that looked out on the gray sky, the dismal gray drizzle, and the gray rear bumper of the taxi that had brought me here. On one wall another print of the same picture of John V. Lindsay smiling down with self-confident sincerity. And behind the desk the same man who had directed me at the sentry box, questioned me at the information window, and led me down the corridor to this room. I hoped John Lindsay was smiling because he was looking down on a civil servant of such peripatetic dedication that he managed to fill all those posts without the help of Charlie Paddock’s running pants.

“Mr. Beybere?” I said.

“No, Beyber,” he said. “A lot of people think it’s French on account of the way it’s spelled, but we, the family, we always pronounced it Beyber.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Was I?

“That’s all right,” Mr. Beybere said. “Please sit down.”

I sat down. He studied a sheet of paper on the desk in front of him. It was, of course, fastened to a clipboard.

“You all right?” Mr. Beybere said.

I came up out of my thoughts. “How do you mean?” I said.

“You look a little sort of like, I don’t know, feverish?”

My thoughts stopped. It occurred to me that since Dr. Herman Sabinson had called me in the morning, they had not been very good thoughts. Maybe I
was
a little feverish. I put my hand to my forehead. Damp? Yes. Undeniably damp. But not hot. Definitely not hot. On the contrary. Cool as the big brass balls on my bed against which I used to put my bare feet on hot summer days in the years when my mother was running booze for the bar mitzvahs of East Fourth Street.

“No, I’m fine,” I said. “Or nearly fine. This sort of thing is probably more upsetting than I thought.”

“You’re not kidding,” Mr. Beybere said. “People they come here, they think it’s a simple thing. Why shouldn’t they? Identifying a body? A person they’ve probably known all their lives? I mean seen every day for years, probably. What’s so hard about that? And yet you know something?”

There were times, and this was suddenly one of them, when I was assailed by the terrifying feeling that I knew nothing. That more than half a century of complicated living had been nothing but a workout in the gym. The bout had never really taken place. No decision had been handed down.

“What?” I said.

“A lot of those people, husbands they’ve come to identify wives, wives husbands, children their fathers and mothers, they can’t do it.”

“They can’t do what?” I said.

“Identify the dear one,” Mr. Beybere said. “They’re in a state of shock.”

The phrase hung in the air between us like an accusation. The muscles concealed under Mr. Beybere’s dead white face, as shapeless as his uniform, pulled enough of its spongy bits and pieces together to convey a recognizable facsimile of a truculent scowl. He was waiting. Daring me.

“I’m sure I can do it,” I said.

“Of course you can,” Mr. Beybere said. Out of the past came the voice of my French teacher in J.H.S. 64, saying:
A boy like you? With your marks? Afraid of the subjunctive? For heaven’s sake, Benny, don’t make a person laugh!
Mr. Beybere laughed. Not hysterically. Not a fun laugh. Little fragments of reassuring sound. I tried to move my thoughts into happier terrain. I wanted to think something nice. Or at least friendly.

“What?” I managed to say with a degree of restraint that surprised and pleased me. There was hope for Benny Kramer yet.

Flashing through my mind, the way I’ve seen these things happen to drowning people in the movies, came the moments I could remember out of my shapeless life when I had been in a state of shock. Item: the night my mother appeared on the floor of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein gym while George Weitz was wigwagging to me a fragment of Matthew XXV:29. Item: the next day when George, to whom I was making a peace offering of two pieces of fruit, both unspotted, gave me a shot in the mouth. Item: the night on the dock a week later when Walter Sinclair asked me to leave him alone with my mother so they could have a talk and I realized as I walked up Fourth Street that they couldn’t talk without me to act as interpreter. Item: the moment under the blue velvet canopy at the Shumansky wedding when I saw the red stains begin to appear and spread on the boiled shirt of the young man who had just been married to Rivke Shumansky.

I ran the cards of these moments through the machine of my mind, fished the result out of the slot, and checked it against the way I felt now in this room at the Queens County morgue. It was not the same.

“I guess I’m probably a little upset,” I said to Mr. Beybere. “But I’m not in a state of shock. Not yet, anyway. I might get into a state of shock if this takes too long. That taxi out there is waiting for me. The driver’s got the meter running. Could we get going, Mr. Beybere?”

I got instead another dose of the disapproving scowl. What was I doing wrong? The situation didn’t exactly have in it the ingredients for Hamlet’s beef about posting with such dexterity to incestuous sheets. It was all very simple. There was no reason for me to make a production out of it. My mother was dead. And I had been ordered, I didn’t know why, to show up in this dismal set for an Off-Off-Broadway play to identify the body. Was it disrespectful to the departed, did it show a lack of love for the deceased to want to dispose of this unpleasant chore as quickly as possible? How the hell did Mr. Beybere know how much I had loved my mother? Suppose I hadn’t loved her at all? What business was it of his? He was paid to be here. I wasn’t. The smiling face of John V. Lindsay indicated that he approved of the way Mr. Beybere handled his job. Why, in God’s name, didn’t the old fool get on with it?

“I understand your feelings,” he said. “But there are a few questions I have to ask. I mean it’s my duty. I’ll try to make them as brief as possible. I hope you don’t mind?”

Why did I have to worry about his hopes? Who cared if he minded or didn’t mind? I had always thought death was a private affair.

“Of course not,” I said. “You ask. I’ll answer.”

“Thank you,” Mr. Beybere said. He consulted the sheet of paper on his clipboard. “Your mother died in an accident, is that correct?”

The answer was, of course, yes. She had not thought up the Eighteenth Amendment. She had never heard of the Volstead Act. But they had come hurtling into her life and changed it as surely and as violently as it would have been changed if she had been hit by a truck.

“No,” I said. My private feelings about my mother were my private business. This protégé of John V. Lindsay wanted the facts. He was entitled to them. I let him have them. “My mother fell down in her apartment and broke her hip late in November,” I said. “She was taken to the Peretz Memorial Hospital on Main Street. She was operated on, they put in a silver splint or a pin, whatever it’s called, and for a while it looked as though she’d be all right. I mean, she’s broken her hip twice before during the last ten years, and she recovered both times without too much trouble. But this last break was apparently more than she could handle. She was, after all, a very old lady. Anyway, she was in the hospital for thirty-two days. The last two weeks, almost three, the doctors have made it pretty clear they didn’t think she’d ever get out of the hospital. She just sort of ran down, you might say. I saw her last night. She looked pretty weak but she wasn’t in any pain. After she fell asleep, I left the hospital. This morning her doctor called me and said she’d died quietly during the night. He wanted to perform an autopsy, and he said I had to sign some papers to give him permission. So I went out to the hospital, signed the papers, and went over to the funeral parlor. I made all the arrangements there, and then they hit me with this surprise.”