The Removers: A Memoir (7 page)

“Let’s go wait outside,” Dad said to me.

“She’s imposing on people,” I said. I had become a fanatic about imposition. “Even in death.”

A half dozen streets die at the east side of JFK Hospital. Standing on the loading dock we could see the brick walls of the ends of these rows of two-story homes.

“Ever think we’d be doing this?” I said.

“Hauling bodies?” My father looked up at the sky. “No.”

Here was an opening for a question like “Then how did you picture us turning out?” Maybe I needed to say “One two three” to get the real weight in our lives moving. Instead I said, “I guess it’s not the worst thing in the world.”

It was these kinds of moments that were our family specialty. We spent so much time within five feet of each other—none of us ever went anywhere—and yet every sitting at the dinner table together, every ride to the Acme together, nearly any and every opportunity to talk about something deeper than sports and the weather and the pertinent details of the day, anything deeper than “What time do you need to be picked up?” we defused.

Two other guys showed up, and it took the four of us plus whatever effort the security guard contributed to get this woman over. She was half again wider than the stretcher, so moving her out of the morgue and down the hall meant gripping fat and going slow. We got her out onto the loading dock, and then slowly down the ramp, with four of us backing down alongside and ahead of her, with Dad steering at the head end. Next we got the foot end of the stretcher up over the hearse’s back-door lip.

There’s a moment when the remover has to squeeze the two
handles in the stretcher’s undercarriage to release the wheeled legs, leaving nearly all the deceased’s weight in his hands. With a one-hundred-pound body this means a nearly imperceptible exertion, an unremarkable moment. A two-hundred-pounder, I would come to learn, elicits a grunt and a mild strain in the face that lasts less than a second before the momentum of the back wheels sliding into the hearse takes over. With a two-hundred-and-fifty-pounder the remover might let some of the weight rest on the tops of his thighs. By three hundred pounds, he wants help. He might not get it or need it necessarily, but it’s probably best to have someone there, a spotter, to avoid tipping, or in case of some kind of failure of his muscles or the stretcher’s legs. A five-hundred-pound body, like Susan’s, demands a team: extra hands for stability and extra muscle for that moment when all the weight belongs to the removers. On this night, Dad was in charge of the head-end weight. He counted “One, two, three” again at the moment he was going to release the legs. The other four of us stood two on each side of the stretcher, holding it like we would to slide a casket into the hearse. When he released the legs there was a second before the forward momentum of her slide into the dark car began, when the five of us shared the five hundred pounds, but Dad, standing at Susan’s head, held the most weight, and he was the one with the best leverage for driving her forward. He exhaled coolly, and put her away.

Once she was in, there was a laugh of relief that even the security guard shared. The four of us then drove to the funeral home in our separate cars. We got Susan up the ramp
into the morgue, then had to finagle four heavy nylon straps under her body. Once this was done we hooked the straps to a hydraulic hoist mounted in one of the ceiling beams. Now she was out of our hands. I remember the whine of the hoist’s motor like the compactor on a trash truck, the men’s slightly pursed lips, the slow tightening of the straps against the underside of this giant white marshmallow. And then she was in flight. For maybe thirty seconds as she was lifted off her stretcher and lowered onto the embalming table Susan arced through the air of the morgue with the four of us standing around her like moons.

My first year at La Salle I lived on campus. I didn’t drink, I was terrible at talking to girls, and the more I saw my hallmates enjoying themselves the more I felt alone. I hated being there, but of course I hated everything. I was depressed, without knowing it or even knowing what depression was. I just thought this was how I was turning out, that this hollow gloom I walked around in was meant to be my life.

One day at lunch in the cafeteria in the first month of school, an older girl, a junior named Valerie, came and sat next to me. I had never seen her before. She was nineteen. I was seventeen. She was tiny, with long black curly hair and too much black eyeliner. Immediately I could feel that we walked under the same gray skies. She told me she had a boyfriend, so I thought her talking to a strange male like myself was unusual. He went to La Salle, too, she said, but he commuted. The next day I saw
her walking with him on campus—she saw me but ignored me—so I knew who he was.

It sounds like the move of someone equipped with boldness to start seeing an older girl with a boyfriend. It wasn’t. She said she’d been noticing me. She invited me to her room. I had no idea what would happen, but I had enough sense to show up. As soon as I got there she started kissing me and let me take her shirt off. I left mine on because I hated my body. If you had asked me at seventeen to draw a picture of my self-image, I would have traced a photograph of the teenage Jerry Mathers, somehow gangly and pudgy at the same time, like a skeleton smuggling kielbasa under his sweater.

After that first day with her it became a regular thing. I would go to her room and we’d make out. Her boyfriend would call and I’d lie there rigid and silent as she told him, “No, there’s no one here.” After a few sessions it became the norm that she would let me put my fingers inside her. When it was done she would cry. This went on for a few weeks. One day in the courtyard between our dorms I saw her talking to a guy I had a class with. A few days later I saw her talking to another guy. The invitations to her room dwindled.

The Phillies blew the World Series on a Saturday night, and the next morning in despair I asked a kid in my hallway to shave my head. I had no room for the luxury of hair. When she saw me later that day she said, “Any attraction I had to you is gone.”

One night after Christmas break she came to my room and said she wanted to talk. We sat side by side on the bed. She
rubbed my thigh, tried to kiss me. I said I wasn’t interested. At the door she said, “I want you to know I only used you. I never liked you.”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“Do you understand? I never liked you. I used you.”

I moved home after freshman year, returned to what I knew. One of my first days back in Frankford I was walking on Orthodox Street past the park in the late afternoon and in my peripheral vision I saw a man sitting under a weeping willow, his back against the trunk, and noted someone else huddled next to him. I turned my head to them. I saw, under the willow’s shady canopy, a woman taking the man’s penis in her mouth, an act I had never before in any form witnessed. I turned to look straight ahead down Orthodox Street. I snapped my head back to them and saw again a woman giving a man a blow job under a weeping willow, her hand gripping his penis while she disengaged to tuck back her hair; his eyes closing and staying shut; she resuming.

Until I was ten, our next-door neighbor was a woman named Eleanor Hippel. In 1906, Miss Hippel was born in the house where she lived her whole life, 4627 Oakland Street. She had already lived in her house seventy years when my parents moved into 4625 Oakland in December 1976, when I was one. If you said to me, “Describe the average seventy-five-year-old
woman living in Frankford in the early 1980s,” I’d provide you with a whole list of suppositions: she’s a widow; she wears cat’s-eye glasses; she spends a chunk of every morning sweeping her front steps with a kitchen broom; she wears a housedress and rolled-down stockings and pulls a silver shopping cart home from the grocery store; she ties a flower-print kerchief under her chin to cover her head on cold days and on rainy days she protects her hair with a sheet of clear plastic. What I didn’t get as a kid was that these were Old World women. They might have been born in Philadelphia, their parents might even have been, but their style of living, for reasons having mostly to do with social class and education, hadn’t changed much since Sicily or Warsaw or County Clare.

In a part of the city with a Catholic church seemingly on every other block, Miss Hippel was an Episcopalian. Her father had been an executive with the Philadelphia Electric Company, PECO, and had bought his new home when Frankford was about as far out as you could live and still make it to an office in Center City. (The elevated train wouldn’t connect Frankford with downtown until 1922, so I’m guessing Mr. Hippel either commuted by trolley or was a very early adopter of the automobile.) Miss Hippel spent most of her adult life as a secretary at PECO. She retired to play golf and tennis, and she looked the part: tall and slim, curly blond hair, a golden tan, slacks and cashmere sweaters in winter, plaid shorts and golf shirts or white tennis dresses in summer. She had never married, but even in her seventies she was pretty and ebullient. She would talk with such joy about the time she met Arnold
Palmer, her decades-long crush. She smoked Virginia Slims. She had a friend named Sheree (shuh-REE), whom she’d grown up with in Frankford. Sheree lived in Monterey and when she visited in the summers would bring my parents a loaf of sourdough bread from San Francisco.

Miss Hippel was kind, an eager babysitter, and had that bygone romance about her that my parents, more than any other neighbors, were helpless against. My dad especially liked her. Unlike my mother, she drank a bit and smoked. In summer the three of them would sit behind the houses at cocktail hour, the yards separated only by a two-foot-high wall of stacked bricks that they would put their feet up on. Miss Hippel knew the history of the neighborhood, the block, and our house, which especially fascinated my father. She loved to tell us that when she was a little girl there were no houses on the other side of Oakland Street, just meadow, with sheep grazing by a stream. By the early eighties you’d have to drive maybe thirty miles outside the city to see a sheep, but she kept a touch of that wilderness alive. The backyards on our block were a uniform size, about thirty feet deep and twelve feet wide. Miss Hippel’s was something different: a brick path crowded on both sides by explosions of snowdrops, daisies, ferns, azaleas, cosmos, violets, dusty miller, mums. Her front yard, maybe fifteen by ten, was covered in pachysandra and surrounded by a regal chest-high hedge. (We had the same kind of hedge in front of our house, only with ivy as ground cover. In spring, somehow, a few daffodils would come up through Miss Hippel’s pachysandra but never through our ivy.) My father has a
poem called “Hippel’s Wilderness” that says a lot of what I’m trying to say, but much better. One stanza reads:

You have seen the faces fall away, like trees

along the street, and, grey, the soot from diesels

build up everywhere, traffic rattling

sashes up and down the block. But you

have saved a bit of city as it was.

In a yard smaller than a good-sized truck

Frankford as it used to be goes on.

Our house shared an enclosed porch with Miss Hippel’s. Between the two porches was a window that swung open. (It had been painted shut for decades, but my father chiseled the paint away one day to make the commerce between houses easier, and so that on winter nights she could come in or vice versa without having to set foot on icy steps and sidewalk.) Many Saturdays in fall and winter the four Merediths would climb through to her house for cocktail hour. One night I wore a blazer over my usual T-shirt and sweatpants, and Dad tied me a bow tie. Theresa and I drank orange juice in highball glasses. I remember, too, handfuls of macadamia nuts; the smell of cigarettes rich in the butterscotch carpet; easy laughs among the adults; golf from the West Coast on the television in the early dark of winter. Miss Hippel was like a third grandmother to my sister and me, but she did so many things our parents’ mothers never did. She traveled, had a career, played sports, lived alone. Neither of our parents’ mothers drove, but Miss
Hippel kept her cream-colored ’66 Buick Skylark convertible in a garage in the neighborhood and would take it out to the Main Line to play golf or visit a nephew or her old friends, human links to a time when it was not inconceivable to leave Frankford for enclaves like Bryn Mawr or Swarthmore. No one else I’ve met in my life has left Frankford for Bryn Mawr or Swarthmore.

In 1985, Miss Hippel gave up her Skylark after an accident, and my mom started to shop for her groceries. Later in the year she moved out to the Main Line to live in a nursing home near her nephew and his family. She died in the spring of 1986.

Her house wasn’t empty for long. By the summer a couple named Peg and Bill Stanley moved in with their three toddlers. The day they arrived they backed a pickup truck full of their possessions over Miss Hippel’s hedges. After moving day they dug out the remaining hedges and pachysandra. In its place they threw down grass seed that never held for all their kids’ foot traffic. The Stanleys eventually bought a Rottweiler named Tank that would sit in their front window and, seemingly as if trained, bark in long, lingering rumbles whenever a black person walked by. One day Tank was reduced to cowering by an aggressive poodle on the block. For the rest of that night we could hear Bill through the wall bellowing about his “faggot dog.” “Buy a rockweiler and he’s scared of a fuckin’ poodle. You’re a fuckin’ faggot dog.” Before the summer was over all of Miss Hippel’s backyard flora was gone, replaced by a monster aboveground swimming pool. Peg and Bill and their friends would stay out there till late at night drinking
beers and smoking joints. The four of us spent more time inside than ever.

By Christmas of 1986, Miss Hippel, both of my dad’s parents, and our neighbor Mrs. Hollins, who was my mom’s close friend and the mother of my buddy, Richie, had all died in a twelve-month span. Mom stood on the front porch that day and cried about the hedge. She cried the rest of that night. Grief, I’m sure, but also the fear of trading one kind of wilderness for another.