The Way to Schenectady

by Richard Scrimger

  Dad pulled the van onto a side street and parked. “Here you are, Marty. Good luck.”

  “Thank you for the ride,” said Marty faintly. He didn’t move.

  “Marty,” said Grandma, “would you like our help? Would it be easier for you if all of us came with you to the memorial service?”

  “Would you?” His face brightened three shades. He looked like a condemned prisoner with a reprieve.

  “Of course we would,” said Grandma.

  “Wait a minute,” said Dad. “We can’t just barge in on a strange family gathering. We’re not dressed for it. We couldn’t –”

  “We’d be honored,” said Grandma.

  “I want to go, too,” said Bill.

  “And I want …” I paused. I didn’t know what I wanted. On the one hand, I wanted to see Mom. We were less than two hours from Pittsfield. We could be at Auntie Vera’s by four o’clock. Only a few hours off my original estimate. On the other hand, I wanted to see Marty’s homecoming. The way to Schenectady had been long and twisted and, to a large extent, it had been my choosing. I wanted to see the end of the journey.

  “I want to be a big boy,” said Bernie.

  Dad turned to stare at him. “Now?”

  “Right now.”

  16

  Where’s Marty?

  Dad reached for the diaper bag.

  “No,” said Bernie. “I don’t need a new diaper. I want to be a big boy.”

  Dad tensed, suddenly alert, the way a hunter tenses when, after a long night’s wait by the water hole, the tiger finally slinks into view.

  “You want to use a bathroom?” he asked, his eyes ranging up and down the side street. A coin laundry; a place that fixed computers; a place that fixed vacuum cleaners; an auto repair shop. Lots of broken things in Schenectady, apparently. No restaurant, or hotel, or public library. No place with bathrooms. And then, down the street at the corner, beckoning invitingly -the church.

  Bernie nodded. On his face was a look of inward concentration. “Big boy,” he whispered.

  Dad jumped out of the car, ran around, pulled Bernie out of the car seat, and bent over his backside to give him that very embarrassing parental check. “You’re clean,” he said. “Okay, everyone. We’re going to the church. Bill, Jane, you stay with me. Mother-in-law, we’ll meet you and Marty inside as soon as we can.”

  We hurried. Dad, carrying Bernie in his arms, the diaper bag swinging from his shoulder, set a tough pace. I didn’t look back to see how Grandma and Marty were doing.

  There were police in front of the church. Also a couple who looked like funeral people: striped pants, long gray suit jackets, very clean faces. They were putting up NO PARKING signs. They do that at the churches near our house, too.

  Dad hurried up the steps. We followed.

  There was a man inside the doors, with a sad expression on his face. He came toward us right away. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” he said, when he got up to us. I guess we must have looked very agitated.

  “Actually,” said Dad, “I don’t want to, um, intrude, but I was wondering if there was a place we could … my little boy here …”

  “Oh. Yes, of course, sir. This way.”

  He led us down the aisle of the church. I like the way churches smell – musty and full of memories. This was an old church, but even new churches smell like that. When my friend Bridget got confirmed, there was a party for all the confirmed people and their parents and friends downstairs afterward, and even the party room smelled very nice.

  The sad-looking man led us through a door at the front of the church, then downstairs and around a couple of corners to a room with shelves of toys and kids’ pictures on the wall. A day care. Across the hall was a gym. The church smell was fainter down here.

  “Will you be all right now?” asked the sad man. “I have to be going. The service will be starting soon.”

  “Oh, yes, thanks,” said Dad over his shoulder, hustling Bernie toward the bathroom.

  Time passed, but not much else. Dad said encouraging things to Bernie, and Bernie tried hard, but it looked like the tiger didn’t want to come to the water hole after all. Bill and I checked out the toys, which all had that day-care appearance. Used, but not loved. Stand-ins for the real toys at home. Bill and I wandered across the hall to the gym, which had such a low ceiling that the basketball hoops were close to the ground. I grabbed a ball – smaller than a real basketball – walked over to one of the nets, jumped up, and stuffed it in. It felt good.

  “Hey!” said Bill. I passed to him. He dribbled down-court and stuffed the ball in the net at the other end.

  We grinned at each other.

  For the next few minutes we shot hoops. Mostly we stayed close to the baskets, dunking the ball. One-handed, two-handed, backward, on the run, spinning. It was great. Fantasy basketball. We threw alley-oop passes to each other, cramming the orange plastic sphere through the corded miniature hoops in feats of impossible, superhuman control. By the time Dad and Bernie showed up, we must have scored three hundred points each.

  “Oh. There you are,” said Dad dully. “Come on, now. The service is about to start.”

  “Let me play,” said Bernie in a loud voice.

  “No, honey, we have to go,” said Dad.

  “I don’t want to go,” said Bernie. “I don’t have to go.”

  “I know,” said Dad. “Believe me, I know.”

  A deep sound came from – hard to say where it came from. It seemed like it came from all around us. The ceiling above us shook, and so did the floor below us. The pipes on the wall rattled. Not a loud sound, but incredibly low. As if the earth itself was speaking.

  “Come on,” said Dad. “That’s the organ. The service is starting.”

  We hurried back the way we came, but the passageways in the church basement wound around and around like a maze, and before long we were lost. We went up some stairs, down a corridor. At the end of the corridor was another flight of stairs. Nowhere to go but up, so up we went. Dad was carrying Bernie by now.

  “Well, now, hello there. Mr. Peeler, isn’t that right?”

  Who was he? An old man in a funeral suit. I knew him, but couldn’t tell from where. Behind him, through a doorway, I could see rows of seats, and the church ceiling.

  “Oh, hello,” said Dad. He didn’t recognize the man either. It was the tone of voice he uses when he doesn’t recognize someone. “Nice to see you.”

  The organ was playing and people were singing.

  “So sad about Tobias,” said the man.

  “Oh, yes,” said Dad.

  “I didn’t know you knew him.”

  “Well,” said Dad.

  “Quite a coincidence, you knowing him.”

  “Ah,” said Dad.

  The organ stopped. Silence in the church. “The service is about to begin,” said the man in a whisper. “There are some seats near the railing. You’ll be able to see my wife when she gives her address.”

  “Oh, good,” said Dad faintly.

  We were up high, in a balcony that went all the way around the church, looking down on everyone in the congregation. Bernie was in Dad’s lap, wriggling faintly. Bill and I sat next to each other.

  The church was stuffed with good clothes, like a steamer trunk on the first-class deck. Suits and ties and dresses in the pews. Military uniforms with gold braid up and down the aisles and beside the doors. Red-and-white robes in the choir stalls. Black-and-white robes in front of the microphone. I felt awkward in my shorts and sandals. I pulled my T-shirt down to cover my knees.

  But the awkwardness couldn’t cover up my sense of accomplishment. It had been worth all the effort bringing Marty here. I felt satisfied, as if I’d done a good thing. I was proud of myself. A good feeling, and not all that common.

  “How do you feel, Bill?” I asked. “Are you glad Marty’s here?”

  “Where is he?” said Bill. “I can’t see him or Grandma.”

  The man in the black-and-white robes was t
all and dignified, with – very visible from the balcony – a small and perfectly circular bald spot in the middle of his head. “My friends, this is a happy occasion,” he said, surprising me, since he looked like he was on the verge of tears. Then he explained. “Happy for Tobias Oberdorf, who has been called up to heaven with a merry noise. But for the rest of us, left behind in this vale of sorrow, for his friends and colleagues, and especially for his family, it is a time of profound grief and longing.”

  When he mentioned the family, the speaker turned his head to indicate a group of men, women, and children who sat next to him, facing everyone else, the way speakers and special guests sit onstage at a school assembly. The family. Marty’s family.

  They were mostly old, mostly wearing black, mostly still. A few exceptions were a girl and a boy about my age, a lady in a purple and red dress, with a big hat, and the fattest man I had ever seen, who squirmed most uncomfortably on a front-row chair that wasn’t nearly big enough for him.

  I didn’t see Marty. I looked around the congregation carefully, taking it from the back and searching all the rows up to the front. I checked all around the balcony.

  A familiar old lady was talking now. Black dress, white hair. She’d been sitting onstage near the girl, who was trying not to yawn. The old lady called the congregation her friends, too. “My husband and I were on vacation in Canada two days ago,” she said, “when we happened upon a copy of a New York newspaper in our hotel room. An earlier guest had left it behind. Chance, you might think. But not I. It was not chance that forgot to clean out our wastebasket. It was not by chance that I glanced down at the obituary page. No, my friends, it was …” – I turned to Bill, my mouth wide open – “… the Hand of God.”

  “Her!” I whispered. I looked back over my shoulder at the old guy who had led us in here. “And him,” I whispered. Bill nodded.

  Myrna and Henry – the generous old couple we had left at the lakeside picnic spot without donuts. This was their church.

  Myrna had a lot more to say, but I soon found my attention wandering. I kept looking for Marty and Grandma, and couldn’t see them. I noticed a plaque on the wall behind me, which said that Mary Ann somebody or other had departed this life in 1825, in her seventh year; I couldn’t decide if she was older than I was, or not. She was either a hundred and eighty, or seven.

  The service dragged a bit. Bernie wriggled off Dad’s lap and tried to fling himself over the railing. “Thanks,” Dad whispered to a lady with piled-up hair and fast reflexes. I found another plaque to read. Susan had been cut down in the flower of youth – mind you, no one puts up a plaque if you’re still alive.

  At last I saw Grandma. She was staring up at us, probably because of Bernie. She was sitting toward the back of the church, with a face like thunder. I knew better than to wave in church, but I nodded my head in her direction. She nodded back, but she still looked furious.

  Marty was not sitting beside her. Marty didn’t seem to be anywhere in the church.

  “There’s Grandma,” I told Bill. “But where’s Marty?”

  17

  Make a Noise

  The organ played something I knew. “Amazing Grace! How sweet the sound! That …” something, something, something. People stood up to sing, and stayed standing even after the hymn was over.

  “Come on,” Dad said, heading for the archway, Bernie in his arms. Below, people were filing slowly down the aisles. The organ was playing something else.

  We met up with Grandma at the bottom of the stairs. People were milling all around us. Lots of conversation. Not a lot of laughter. Grandma was still upset. “I thought everyone had disappeared on me,” she said.

  “Where’s Marty?” I asked her right away.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. He ran off,” she said. “We got to the front door of the church and he saw a lady in a big hat and he started to tremble. ‘I can’t do it,’ he said, over and over, and bolted.”

  “Poor guy,” said Dad. “Oh, excuse me,” he said to a woman who was pushing past us. We moved a little farther down the hall. The church smell was still there, but it was accompanied by another familiar smell. Bill recognized it, too. His eyes lit up. “Chocolate,” he said.

  I felt like an overloaded computer. Function error, probably insufficient memory to process data. I felt sorry for Marty, of course, but I was also mad at him. Ungrateful, that’s what he was. After all the trouble we’d taken to get him here. My feeling of accomplishment went phut!

  “Let’s go,” I said. Suddenly I was struck by a picture of Mom waiting for us at Auntie Vera’s – all dressed up to go to dinner. “Let’s leave right now.”

  But by then we had already drifted farther down the hall, borne along by a tide of well-dressed bodies that kept pushing us onward, a current of Oberdorfs and friends of Oberdorfs, who carried us downstream with them. And more bodies came bumping into us, even now, pushing us closer and closer to –

  “There you are! Isn’t this providential!”

  Myrna, of course. She came right over to us and put her arm around my shoulders. “Henry told me that you’d come! I am so glad, so very glad!” Myrna couldn’t hear of us going just yet. Or maybe she just couldn’t hear. We tried to tell her, but she pushed along with the rest of the congregation, and soon we found ourselves in a large room filled with people standing around, drinking coffee and eating dessert.

  “You must know Marie,” she said. “Let me find her for you.”

  “Actually,” said Dad, “we –”

  “There she is. Oh, Marie!” Myrna waved. Marie was the lady in the hat and striped dress. Tobias’s wife – widow, I guess, now. The man in the black-and-white robes had spoken very feelingly about her. A nice woman, apparently.

  “Um,” said Dad. He tried to wrestle free of Myrna’s grasp, but she had a grip of iron as well as bad ears. He was led away, trailing Grandma like clouds of glory.

  Ham! I said to myself.

  Bill and Bernie weren’t upset. Was it an awful fate to be abandoned in a roomful of dessert? Bill licked his lips. Bernie stood on tiptoe to see better. I could understand their point of view. But I was so disappointed about Marty, I almost didn’t have an appetite.

  We found ourselves behind the very fat man. All three of us. His dark suit was wide enough to block our view of the food table. I peeped around the back of his coat, and saw squares and cookies and triangle sandwiches. When he’d finished loading up, it was our turn.

  The noise level rose around us like water in a bathtub. The fat man ate busily. So did we. Bernie had a Rice Crispie square in each hand, and was taking alternating bites. Bill grinned around a mouthful of chocolate chip cookie. “Not bad, eh?” he whispered.

  “Not too bad.” But it wasn’t really good either. Marty should have been there, not us. We didn’t belong. And time was marching on. It was three o’clock. The sooner we left the better. I wanted a chance to have a bath, maybe have Mom fix my hair. I tried to smile when Myrna came back, but it wasn’t my best smile.

  “Jane, Jane, come with me! There’s someone I want you to meet.” Somehow Myrna being so happy to see us made it worse, not better. “You boys come along, too,” she said.

  She grabbed the arm that wasn’t full of dessert and propelled me forward. Bernie and Bill followed, munching doubtfully. She led us up to a family group – a woman, a boy, and a girl. I’d noticed the girl during the service, yawning. Part of the family.

  Myrna introduced her daughter, Mrs. Stouffer. The girl and boy were her children, Myrna’s grandchildren. Emma, the granddaughter, was the one I was supposed to have so much in common with. “Hi,” I said to her. She kept her hands together, so I gave a small hello wave.

  She unclasped her hands. “Bye,” she said, waving back.

  “Now, Emma,” said her mom. “Don’t tease the girl. She’s not used to you.”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “There’s no excuse for you,” said Emma quickly.

  Her mom laughed
. Myrna smiled and moved off, now that the two of us were getting along so well.

  “Ha, ha,” I tried to smile. “That’s a good one. Very sharp.”

  “Not like you, then.”

  “What?”

  Emma grinned. “You’re very dull.”

  “Oh?” I said. And stopped.

  “Emma,” said her mom warningly. Her brother -who’d been introduced as an afterthought – looked blank.

  She was a little taller than I am, and a lot ruder. Her dark hair was cut close to her head. Her dress hung on her skinny shoulders like a set of drapes. Her chin bent to one side, like her mom’s. Like Marty’s, come to think of it.

  Emma sneered. “Why don’t you make a noise like an airplane and take off,” she said.

  Her mom snickered. “Emma, stop that. You’re such a tease.”

  Bill said, quietly, “Let’s go.”

  “Emma’s so clever,” her mom went on. “We’re used to her, but she oughtn’t to be rude to strangers. She just does it to show off her high spirits and intellect.”

  Emma made a face at me. High spirits.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “No hard feelings, Emma. One of these days you’ll make a noise like a tree and grow up.”

  Emma’s head snapped back as if I’d closed a door in her face. “Why don’t you make a noise like snow, and melt away.”

  Her mom laughed, but not very hard. “Snow … melt away. Very good, Emma.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said to Emma’s mom. “You call that good?”

  “Don’t say anything,” she replied. “It’s better not to try. She’ll only get worse. And really, her insults are so amusing.”

  Emma opened her mouth again. I should just have gone. I shouldn’t even have stayed this long. But I couldn’t help myself. I spoke fast. “Why don’t you make a noise like a dead bird and get stuffed,” I said. Emma closed her mouth. I kept going. “Why don’t you make a noise like a golf ball and fall in a hole.”

  Behind me, Bill spluttered. Emma’s mom didn’t say anything.

  Emma took a step back. High spirits indeed. The girl was a bully. “You should go to the store so you can get a new outfit,” she said.