“Listen,” I said to my Aunt Sarah. “You trying to tell me when she came home from Trieste, her father wouldn’t take her in?”
“It wasn’t Sheindle’s father,” my Aunt Sarah said. “It was his new young wife. That was my mother. And where do you get things like they wouldn’t take her in? They were all Hungarians, sure. But they were also Jews. Jews never close a door on mishpoche. They could hate them, but they never keep them out. If you don’t take care of your own, who’s going to do it? Nasser?”
“Let’s keep him out of this,” I said. “I’m trying to find out about my mother.”
“If you don’t interrupt so much, you will,” my Aunt Sarah said. “It wasn’t Sheindle’s father that hated her. It was her father’s new young wife. My mother. You have all this straight?”
I did, and I didn’t. It was simple enough to follow the relationships. By comparison with what I read in the society columns of my daily newspaper every morning, grasping this was as simple as grasping an overhead strap in the subway. What I didn’t grasp was how all this had led to the bedroom of a three-room apartment in Queens on this day when I had just buried my father.
“She hated Sheindle so much,” my Aunt Sarah said, “she said there was no room for them in the house, and she made them live upstairs in the hayloft over the cows in one of the three barns. Sheindle and her daughter. How this made Sheindle feel, you can imagine.”
“She must have hated it,” I said.
My Aunt Sarah nodded again. “She hated it so much, four months later she was dead.”
“That means the little girl, my mother,” I said, “the four-year-old girl, she was now an orphan.”
My Aunt Sarah said, “On the ball nobody is ever going to say you’re not.”
“What did she do?” I said.
“You mean what did her grandfather do,” my Aunt Sarah said.
“No,” I said. “I mean his new wife. The young one. Your mother. What did she do?”
My Aunt Sarah gave me an odd look. It could have been appreciation. It could have been annoyance. I had either shown a degree of understanding of which my Aunt Sarah had not thought me capable, or I had stepped on one of her punch lines.
“My mother,” she said, “my father’s new wife, what I heard later, she said if they had to support a bastard, then the bastard would have to do some work to earn her bread, the bastard.”
Thus, at the age of four, or a few months short of four, my mother learned on a dairy farm in Hungary what, half a century later, her son learned during the Great Depression on the sidewalks of New York: eating is not one of the human rights Thomas Jefferson believed were self-evident. My mother managed to eat. As, half a century later, did her son. By somewhat different methods. My mother, at the age of four, became what my Aunt Sarah called “the waker up of the goyim” on her grandfather’s farm.
“You have to remember one thing,” my Aunt Sarah said. “Here, in America, they have a thing they call anti-Semitism. It means if you’re a Jew, do me a favor and drop dead. Jews are so used to this, especially in America, they forget there are places where it’s different. Anyway, where it used to be different. One of those places was Berezna. In Berezna, if you were a goy, it was you do me a favor and drop dead, you goy. In Berezna there was anti-goyism. All the big dairy farms, like my father’s, they were owned by Jews like my father. You own a big farm, you want it to work, you want to make money, you have to have labor. Cheap labor. In Berezna the cheap labor was goyim. They were glad to get the work. If they didn’t get the work, they were hungry. But their gladness to get the work didn’t change how God had made them. God made them slobs. So every morning, before the sun came up, somebody had to go out to wake them up they should be on time to milk the cows. That somebody, my mother, my young mother who married my old father, after Sheindle died my young mother said the person to wake up the goyim every morning for milking the cows it should be Sheindle’s daughter.”
There is nothing in the record to indicate that my mother objected. Perhaps she didn’t remember. I have tried many times to remember what the world was like when I was four years old. No luck. I can get back to six, when I was in kindergarten and I had trouble with clay and colored chalk. I can remember watching soldiers unload from troopships at the East Third Street docks. That must have been between 1917, when we got into what my father called Woodrow Wilson’s War, and 1918, when we got out into what my father called Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. I was more than four then. Not much more, but more. Four and a half, perhaps. But I can’t work my way back to four or less than four, the age at which my mother started out every morning before sunrise to wake the goyim on her grandfather’s farm in the Carpathian mountains so that the cows would be milked on time.
“She did a good job,” my Aunt Sarah said. “I never heard a word of complaint.”
But there must have been words of complaint. Even if unspoken, in my mother’s heart. Otherwise, what would I be doing, eighty years later? On the morning before Christmas Eve? Trudging through the gray, dismal, bone-cold streets of Queens? From the Peretz Memorial Hospital on Main Street to the Battenberg Funeral Home on Queens Boulevard? A Jewish boy from East Fourth Street? Wearing a Brooks Brothers overcoat? Carrying a head stuffed full of long division from P.S. 188 on Houston Street? Algebra and Nathaniel Hawthorne from Thomas Jefferson High School on Tenth Avenue? The Rule in Shelley’s Case from New York University Law School on Washington Square? In short, if my mother had been content with her life in Berezna at four, what was I doing three thousand miles away an hour after her death in the Borough of Queens?
Well, for one thing, I discovered when I got to the Battenberg Funeral Home, I was trying to choose the appropriate coffin.
“It all depends on the family,” young Mr. Smith said. “Not only how they feel about the deceased, but also their economics.”
I was no longer inexperienced in these matters. When I had buried my father out of, as the phrase goes, this same funeral home, in what had been for me then a totally new and somewhat jolting experience, I had learned a couple of things. One was this: when you are negotiating the price of a coffin, it is less disturbing for the buyer if the man at the selling end of the negotiation is named Smith rather than Dinkelhelmwurster. A mind distracted into wondering how anybody came to be named Dinkelhelmwurster might also be distracted into wondering why a pine box should cost seven hundred and fifty dollars.
“Look, Mr. Smith,” I said. “My mother was a very simple Jewish woman.”
I paused. I had just realized, from hearing my own words, that the statement was as totally preposterous as a War Department press release about Vietnam. For several moments I sat in silence, listening to the echoes of my own foolish words, and then a curious thing happened. It happened inside me. I made an effort to remain motionless. I did not want young Mr. Smith, who was obviously an heir to the Battenberg family business, to sense that the man to whom he was trying to sell a coffin had just had a moment of revelation. My mother had never been anything more to me than one of the many irritations and nuisances with which daily life is strewn: tax returns, physical check-ups, dentists’ appointments, drivers’ license renewals, supplications for worthy charities. Now, all at once, facing young Mr. Smith in his glistening black Italian silk suit across the table in the Arrangements Room of the Battenberg Funeral Home, I realized that I was doing something much more important than discarding a nuisance. I suddenly realized that my irritating mother had been a very important person. Not because of her police record. But because of the way she had been forced to live her life.
“The best pine?” I said. “How much will that cost?”
Young Mr. Smith’s face did not exactly brighten. The trick in the funeral parlor business is never to vary your expression. But I could tell that young Mr. Smith felt he had made a score.
“Why don’t we go downstairs and take a look at what’s available?” he said.
What was available had a grisly fascination. The r
oom in which only a few months ago I had selected my father’s coffin had been redecorated. Or rearranged. I stepped through the door held open by the obsequious Mr. Smith, and paused.
“Is something wrong, sir?” he said.
I hesitated, forced myself to concentrate, and had it. “The hand-carved walnut job,” I said. “The twenty-two-hundred-dollar number. It used to be on this side.”
Mr. Smith looked startled. He surveyed the room. His face cleared. “Oh, yes,” he said. “We moved it because the sunlight from the center window was fading the grain.”
“It looks better over here,” I said.
“Thank you, sir,” Mr. Smith said. “By the way, there’s been a slight increase in price for the walnut. It’s now twenty-three hundred fifty.”
“Well,” I said, “I didn’t have the walnut in mind.” I was aware that I was speaking quickly. I wanted to forestall the inevitable speech about inflation and how everything was going up. “I want something appropriate but not expensive.”
I was pleased by the sound of my own voice. Relaxed. A man in control. Why not? I knew the dialogue. I had spoken it all once before, nine months ago.
“Yes, sir,” Mr. Smith said. “Here, then, to begin, this is our most inexpensive item.”
The Battenberg Funeral Home’s most inexpensive item was a pine box in which the citizens of Pompeii, fleeing the encircling lava, would have been ashamed to pack their lares and penates.
“Is it still seven hundred and fifty dollars?” I said.
“No, I’m sorry, it’s eight hundred now,” young Mr. Smith said. “It’s this inflation, you know. Everything is going up.”
Everything, apparently, except Mr. Smith’s voice. It had sunk to his lowest register. The sounds reminded me of Orson Welles when I first encountered that extraordinary talent.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll take it.”
“There’s only one point, sir,” Mr. Smith said.
“What’s that?” I said.
“Your mother, I take it, sir, was of the Orthodox Jewish faith?”
I gave him a sharp glance. “What about it? So was my father. And that’s the coffin I got for him,” I said.
“Then you must know,” Mr. Smith said, “that a person of the Orthodox Jewish faith is not allowed to be buried in a casket fastened together by nails or any other kind of metal.”
“But the one I got for my father less than a year ago didn’t have any metal in it.”
“What can one do?” Mr. Smith said. “It’s a matter of rising labor costs. To comply with the Jewish faith, to fasten a casket with wooden pegs, that costs money. Nails are cheaper because driving them in is quicker.”
“The Romans made the same discovery,” I said.
Mr. Smith looked puzzled. “I beg your pardon,” he said.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just show me the lowest-priced pine casket that’s fastened with wooden pegs.”
Mr. Smith led me to an imitation “mahogany” casket. On it was a discreetly lettered price tag: $1,250.
“Please don’t go any further,” I said. “I’ll take it.”
Mr. Smith bowed slightly and led the way back upstairs to his office. Mr. Smith’s office was small and had no windows. The door did not open and close on hinges. It slid back and forth on a chromium track. The bare walls were the color of a Hershey bar. The long polished table that filled almost all of the floor space was somewhat darker. The six chairs that surrounded the table were made of the same wood. They had high backs. I wondered where the light came from. Then I remembered I had wondered the same thing nine months ago. I glanced up at the ceiling paneling which concealed the sunken fluorescent bulbs. It was the sort of room in which Gestapo officers used to interrogate their victims in movies.
“Please sit down,” Mr. Smith said.
I took the chair in which I had sat last time I was there. I knew the chair Mr. Smith was going to take. He did. The one that faced me directly across the table. From a concealed drawer he brought out a pad of yellow forms. From his breast pocket he drew a ballpoint.
“Name, please?”
I told him. He wrote it down.
“Address?”
I gave him my address. He wrote it down.
“Is this where the bill is to be sent?”
I wondered if Mr. Smith would think me irreverent if I answered the way I knew my mother would have answered: “No, send the bill to the cemetery.” I wondered. But what I said was, “Yes.”
Mr. Smith made a note on his pad. “How many limousines will be required?” he said.
I had forgotten about the limousines. Or rather, their contents. I was reminded now of another unpleasant chore: the people, mostly relatives, who would have to be called.
“Well,” I said, and I tried to remember my father’s funeral. Had there been three limousines? Or four? The number of cars depended now, as it had depended then, on the number of people I would have to call and invite to the funeral. But at the moment the only person I could think of was my Aunt Sarah in New Haven. Surely three limousines would be enough for even a favorite aunt?
“Let’s say four,” I said. “Just to be on the safe side.”
“Four,” Mr. Smith said, and his ballpoint nailed the number down into the proper blank space on the yellow pad. “Now about the shrouds.”
I knew about the shrouds. When I had been preparing for this visit in connection with my father’s funeral, the rabbi of my father’s synagogue had come to my parents’ apartment to instruct me.
“Don’t let them rook you,” the rabbi had said. “These wise guys, they’re always tryna runyuppa bill. What you want, and you tell it to him plain, I mean don’t let them push yirround, you tell this guy this is an Orthodox Jewish funeral, you tell him. What you want is plain, simple, ordinary linen shrouds. The cheapest.”
“This is an Orthodox funeral,” I now said to Mr. Smith. “I want plain, simple, ordinary linen shrouds.”
Mr. Smith muttered to his darting ballpoint, “Plain, simple, ordinary linen shrouds.” He looked up. “How about somebody to sit with the body overnight in the chapel?”
I hesitated. When I had been asked the same question about my father, I had unhesitatingly said yes. I had known then that my mother would have been annoyed if I had said no. Not to have paid for someone to sit up with my father’s body would have been an advertisement to her neighbors that her son was a cheapskate. My mother didn’t really care if I was a cheapskate. What she cared about was that her neighbors should not be aware of this degrading fact. Now, however, the situation was different. I didn’t give a damn about what my mother’s neighbors thought of me. Furthermore, I didn’t see how they could possibly learn whether I had or had not paid for someone to sit up with my mother’s body. Most important, however, was my recollection of my mother’s feelings. She had never liked people peering over her shoulder.
“No,” I said. “Let’s skip somebody sitting up with the body in the chapel.”
Mr. Smith studied the yellow sheet. He was silent for a couple of moments. “Now the honorariums,” he said.
I already knew what this meant: the tips to the drivers of the limousines and the various cemetery employees.
Mr. Smith went on, “We can place a round figure on the bill, or would you prefer to handle this yourself?”
“No,” I said. “Put the round figure on the bill. Anything else?”
“The date,” Mr. Smith said. “Tomorrow being Christmas Day, the cemetery employees will not be working, so the funeral can’t take place until Tuesday, the earliest.”
“Tuesday will be fine,” I said.
“Eleven o’clock?” Mr. Smith said. “Or the afternoon? Two? Three?”
“Better make it three,” I said. Aunt Sarah would have to come down from New Haven.
“Three o’clock,” Mr. Smith said to his moving ballpoint. He paused, and again he studied the yellow sheet. “I think,” he said finally, “yes, I think that covers it.”
I stood up and said, “Thank you.”
Mr. Smith stood up and said, “There’s just one more thing.”
The sound of his voice made me look at Mr. Smith more closely. He had suddenly reminded me of Mrs. O’Toole in the Peretz Memorial Hospital. “What’s that?” I said.
“Tomorrow morning at eight o’clock,” Mr. Smith said, “you will have to appear at the morgue in the Queens County General Hospital to identify the body.”
My reaction to this statement reminded me of a moment during the war. I had been sailing in a British convoy from Halifax to what was then always identified on travel papers as “a U.K. port.” This always proved to be Liverpool. I was on a small freighter that had been built before the First World War. It had been put out to pasture on the Mersey after the Treaty of Versailles, but recalled to service when the German submarines in the early days of World War II were sinking British hulls faster than the shipyards on the Clyde could build them. The small vessel could just barely make seven knots. Since a convoy takes its speed from the slowest vessel in it, our eighty-five vessels went lumbering across the North Atlantic at seven knots. A week out of Halifax the convoy was caught by a German submarine pack. We were under attack for three days.
At first, it was like watching a movie. From my gun pit, a makeshift box that had been built hastily on top of the wireless room, I grew accustomed to seeing, in the distance, a ship that had been plowing along as a heaving silhouette on the horizon suddenly erupt into the air, fanning out in a shower of countless scraps, like a handful of sand flung to the sky by a child on a beach. I was frightened, of course, but in a few hours I had become anesthetized by the distance. It was happening to other ships, not mine. Then, on the second day, it happened to a ship on our port side, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. The impact of the explosion rocked our small vessel. I was flung across the gun pit and slammed into the twin Marlins I was supposed to be manning. It was as though the actors in the movie had come off the screen and started to belabor the people in the theater. I remember the indignant words that flashed through my mind: “What the hell do these bastards think they’re doing?”
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