by Philip Roth
Maureen was a buxom, smiling redhead who had grown up something of a roughneck in an Irish-Slavic family in the Bronx and had a blunt way of talking that was fueled by the self-possession of a working-class toughie. The mere sight of her raised his spirits when she arrived in the morning, even though the postsurgical exhaustion was so severe that merely shaving—and not even shaving standing up but while sitting in a chair—tired him out, and he had to return to bed for a long nap after taking his first walk down the hospital corridor with her at his side. Maureen was the one who called his father's doctor for him and kept him informed of the dying man's condition until he had the strength to talk to the doctor himself.
It had been decided peremptorily by Howie that when he left the hospital Maureen and Olive would look after him (again at Howie's expense) for at least his first two weeks at home. His wife was not consulted, and she resented the arrangement and the implication that she was unable to care for him on her own. She particularly resented Maureen, who herself did little to hide her contempt for the patient's wife.
At home it was more than three weeks before the exhaustion began to diminish and he felt ready even to consider returning to work. After dinner he had to go back to bed for the evening simply from the effort of eating sitting up in a chair, and in the morning he had to remain seated on a plastic stool to wash himself in the shower. He began to do mild calisthenics with Maureen and tried each day to add another ten yards to the afternoon walk he took with her. Maureen had a boyfriend whom she talked about—a TV cameraman whom she expected to marry once he found a permanent job—and when she got off work at the end of the day, she liked to have a couple of drinks with the neighborhood regulars in a bar around the corner from where she lived in Yorkville. The weather was beautiful, and so when they walked outdoors he got a good look at how she carried herself in her close-fitting polo shirts and short skirts and summer sandals. Men looked her over all the time, and she was not averse to staring someone down with mock belligerence if she was being ostentatiously ogled. Her presence at his side made him feel stronger by the day, and he would come home from the walks delighted with everything, except, of course, with the jealous wife, who would slam doors and sometimes barge out of the apartment only moments after he and Maureen had swept in.
He was not the first patient to fall in love with his nurse. He was not even the first patient to fall in love with Maureen. She'd had several affairs over the years, a few of them with men rather worse off than he was, who, like him, made a full recovery with the help of Maureen's vitality. Her gift was to make the ill hopeful, so hopeful that instead of closing their eyes to blot out the world, they opened them wide to behold her vibrant presence, and were rejuvenated.
Maureen came along to New Jersey when his father died. He was still not allowed to drive, so she volunteered and helped Howie make the arrangements with Kreitzer's Memorial Home in Union. His father had become religious in the last ten years of his life and, after having retired and having lost his wife, had taken to going to the synagogue at least once a day. Long before his final illness, he'd asked his rabbi to conduct his burial service entirely in Hebrew, as though Hebrew were the strongest answer that could be accorded death. To his father's younger son the language meant nothing. Along with Howie, he'd stopped taking Judaism seriously at thirteen—the Sunday after the Saturday of his bar mitzvah—and had not set foot since then in a synagogue. He'd even left the space for religion blank on his hospital admission form, lest the word "Jewish" prompt a visit to his room by a rabbi, come to talk in the way rabbis talk. Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life, and he found all religions offensive, considered their superstitious folderol meaningless, childish, couldn't stand the complete unadultness—the baby talk and the righteousness and the sheep, the avid believers. No hocus-pocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him. There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us. If he could be said to have located a philosophical niche for himself, that was it—he'd come upon it early and intuitively, and however elemental, that was the whole of it. Should he ever write an autobiography, he'd call it The Life and Death of a Male Body. But after retiring he tried becoming a painter, not a writer, and so he gave that title to a series of his abstractions.
But none of what he did or didn't believe mattered on the day that his father was buried beside his mother in the rundown cemetery just off the Jersey Turnpike.
Over the gate through which the family entered into the original acreage of the old nineteenth-century cemetery was an arch with the cemetery association's name inscribed in Hebrew; at either end of the arch was carved a six-pointed star. The stone of the gate's two pillars had been badly broken and chipped away—by time and by vandals—and a crooked iron gate with a rusted lock hadn't to be pushed open in order to enter but was half off its hinges and embedded several inches in the ground. Nor had the stone of the obelisk that they passed—inscribed with Hebrew scripture and the names of the family buried at the foot of its plinth—weathered the decades well either. At the head of the crowded rows of upright gravestones stood the old section's one small brick mausoleum, whose filigreed steel door and original two windows—which, at the time of the interment of its occupants, would have been colored with stained glass—had been sealed with concrete blocks to protect against further vandalism, so that now the little square building looked more like an abandoned toolshed or an outdoor toilet no longer in operation than an eternal dwelling place in keeping with the renown, wealth, or status of those who'd constructed it to house their family dead. Slowly they passed between the upright gravestones that were mainly inscribed with Hebrew but that in some cases also bore words in Yiddish, Russian, German, even Hungarian. Most were engraved with the Star of David while others were more elaborately decorated, with a pair of blessing hands or a pitcher or a five-branched candelabrum. At the graves of the young children and infants—and there were more than a handful, though not as many as those of young women who'd died in their twenties, more than likely during childbirth—they came upon an occasional gravestone topped with the sculpture of a lamb or decorated with an engraving in the shape of a tree trunk with its upper half sawed away, and as they headed in single file through the crooked, uneven, narrow pathways of the original cemetery toward the newer, parklike northern spaces, where the funeral was to take place, it was possible—in just this little Jewish cemetery, founded in a field on the border of Elizabeth and Newark by, among others, the community-minded father of the late owner of Elizabeth's most beloved jewelry store—to count how many had perished when influenza killed ten million in 1918.
Nineteen eighteen: only one of the terrible years among the plethora of corpse-strewn anni horribili that will blacken the memory of the twentieth century forever.
He stood at the graveside among some two dozen of his relatives, with his daughter at his right, clutching his hand, and his two sons behind him and his wife to the side of his daughter. Merely standing there absorbing the blow that is the death of a father proved to be a surprising challenge to his physical strength—it was a good thing Howie was beside him on the left, one arm holding him firmly around his waist, to prevent anything untoward from happening.
It had never been difficult to know what to make of either his mother or his father. They were a mother and a father. They were imbued with few other desires. But the space taken up by their bodies was now vacant. Their lifelong substantiality was gone. His father's coffin, a plain pine box, was lowered on its straps into the hole that had been dug for him beside his wife's coffin. There the dead man would remain for even more hours than he'd spent selling jewelry, and that was in itself no number to sneer at. He had opened the store in 1933, the year his second son was born, and got rid of it in 1974, having by then sold engagement and wedding rings to three generations of Elizabeth families. How he scrounged up the capital in 1933, how he found customers in 1933, was always a mystery to his
sons. But it was for them that he had left his job behind the watch counter at Abelson's Irvington store on Springfield Avenue, where he worked nine A.M. to nine P.M. Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and nine to five on Tuesdays and Thursdays, to open his own little Elizabeth store, fifteen feet wide, with the inscription in black lettering on the display window that read, from day one, "Diamonds—Jewelry—Watches," and in smaller letters beneath, "Fine watch, clock, and jewelry repair." At the age of thirty-two he finally set out to work sixty and seventy hours a week for his family instead of for Moe Abelson's. To lure Elizabeth's big working-class population and to avoid alienating or frightening away the port city's tens of thousands of churchgoing Christians with his Jewish name, he extended credit freely—just made sure they paid at least thirty or forty percent down. He never checked their credit; as long as he got his cost out of it, they could come in afterward and pay a few dollars a week, even nothing, and he really didn't care. He never went broke with credit, and the good will generated by his flexibility was more than worth it. He decorated the shop with a few silver-plated pieces to make it attractive—tea sets, trays, chafing dishes, candlesticks that he sold dirt cheap—and at Christmastime he always had a snow scene with Santa in the window, but the stroke of genius was to call the business not by his name but rather Everyman's Jewelry Store, which was how it was known throughout Union County to the swarms of ordinary people who were his faithful customers until he sold his inventory to the wholesaler and retired at the age of seventy-three. "It's a big deal for working people to buy a diamond," he told his sons, "no matter how small. The wife can wear it for the beauty and she can wear it for the status. And when she does, this guy is not just a plumber—he's a man with a wife with a diamond. His wife owns something that is imperishable. Because beyond the beauty and the status and the value, the diamond is imperishable. A piece of the earth that is imperishable, and a mere mortal is wearing it on her hand!"
The reason for leaving Abelson's, where he'd still been lucky enough to be collecting a paycheck through the crash and into the worst years of the Depression, the reason for daring to open a store of his own in such bad times, was simple: to everyone who asked, and even to those who didn't, he explained, "I had to have something to leave my two boys."
There were two upright shovels with their blades in the large pile of earth to one side of the grave. He had thought they had been left there by the gravediggers, who would use them later to fill the grave. He had imagined that, as at his mother's funeral, each mourner would step up to the hole to throw a clump of dirt onto the coffin's lid, after which they would all depart for their cars. But his father had requested of the rabbi the traditional Jewish rites, and those, he now discovered, called for burial by the mourners and not by employees of the cemetery or anyone else. The rabbi had told Howie beforehand, but Howie, for whatever reason, hadn't told him, and so he was surprised now when his brother, handsomely dressed in a dark suit, a white shirt, a dark tie, and shining black shoes, walked over to pull one of the shovels out of the pile, and then set out to fill the blade until it was brimming with dirt. Then he walked ceremoniously to the head of the grave, stood there a moment to think his thoughts, and, angling the shovel downward a little, let the dirt run slowly out. Upon landing on the wood cover of the coffin, it made the sound that is absorbed into one's being like no other.
Howie returned to plunge the blade of the shovel into the crumbling pyramid of dirt that stood about four feet high. They were going to have to shovel that dirt back into the hole until his father's grave was level with the adjacent cemetery grounds.
It took close to an hour to move the dirt. The elderly among the relatives and friends, unable to wield a shovel, helped by throwing fistfuls of dirt onto the coffin, and he himself could do no more than that, and so it fell to Howie and Howie's four sons and his own two—the six of them all strapping men in their late twenties and early thirties—to do the heavy labor. In teams of two they stood beside the pile and, spadeful by spadeful, moved the dirt from the pile back into the hole. Every few minutes another team took over, and it seemed to him, at one point, as though this task would never end, as though they would be there burying his father forever. The best he could do to be as immersed in the burial's brutal directness as his brother, his sons, and his nephews was to stand at the edge of the grave and watch as the dirt encased the coffin. He watched till it reached the lid, which was decorated only with a carving of the Star of David, and then he watched as it began to cover the lid. His father was going to lie not only in the coffin but under the weight of that dirt, and all at once he saw his father's mouth as if there were no coffin, as if the dirt they were throwing into the grave was being deposited straight down on him, filling up his mouth, blinding his eyes, clogging his nostrils, and closing off his ears. He wanted to tell them to stop, to command them to go no further—he did not want them to cover his father's face and block the passages through which he sucked in life. I've been looking at that face since I was born—stop burying my father's face! But they had found their rhythm, these strong boys, and they couldn't stop and they wouldn't stop, not even if he hurled himself into the grave and demanded that the burial come to a halt. Nothing could stop them now. They would just keep going, burying him, too, if that was necessary to get the job done. Howie was off to the side, his brow covered with sweat, watching the six cousins athletically complete the job, with the goal in sight shoveling at a terrific pace, not like mourners assuming the burden of an archaic ritual but like old-fashioned workmen feeding a furnace with fuel.
Many of the elderly were weeping now and holding on to each other. The pyramid of dirt was gone. The rabbi stepped forward and, after carefully smoothing the surface with his bare hands, used a stick to delineate in the loose soil the dimensions of the grave.
He had watched his father's disappearance from the world inch by inch. He had been forced to follow it right to the end. It was like a second death, one no less awful than the first. Suddenly he was remembering the rush of emotion that carried him down and down into the layers of his life when, at the hospital, his father had picked up each of the three infant grandchildren for the first time, pondering Randy, then later Lonny, then finally Nancy with the same expressive gaze of baffled delight.
"Are you all right?" Nancy asked, putting her arms around him while he stood and looked at the lines the stick had made in the soil, drawn there as if for a children's game. He squeezed her tightly to him and said, "Yes, I'm all right." Then he sighed, even laughed, when he said, "Now I know what it means to be buried. I didn't till today." "I've never seen anything so chilling in my life," Nancy said. "Nor have I," he told her. "It's time to go," he said, and with him and Nancy and Howie in the lead, the mourners slowly departed, though he could not begin to empty himself of all that he'd just seen and thought, the mind circling back even as the feet walked away.
Because a wind had been blowing while the grave was being filled, he could taste the dirt coating the inside of his mouth well after they had left the cemetery and returned to New York.
For the next nine years his health remained stable. Twice he'd been blindsided by a crisis, but unlike the boy in the bed next to his, he'd been spared the disaster. Then in 1998, when his blood pressure began to mount and would not respond to changes in medication, the doctors determined that he had an obstruction of his renal artery, which fortunately had resulted so far in only a minor loss of kidney function, and he entered the hospital for a renal artery angioplasty. Yet again his luck held, and the problem was resolved with the insertion of a stent that was transported on a catheter maneuvered up through a puncture in the femoral artery and through the aorta to the occlusion.
He was sixty-five, newly retired, and by now divorced for the third time. He went on Medicare, began to collect Social Security, and sat down with his lawyer to write a will. Writing a will—that was the best part of aging and probably even of dying, the writing and, as time passed, the updating and revising
and carefully reconsidered rewriting of one's will. A few years later he followed through on the promise he'd made to himself immediately after the 9/11 attacks and moved from Manhattan to the Starfish Beach retirement village at the Jersey Shore, only a couple of miles from the seaside town where his family had vacationed for a portion of every summer. The Starfish Beach condominiums were attractive shingled one-story houses with big windows and sliding glass doors that led to rear outdoor decks; eight units were attached to form a semicircular compound enclosing a shrubbery garden and a small pond. The facilities for the five hundred elderly residents who lived in these compounds, spread over a hundred acres, included tennis courts, a large common garden with a potting shed, a workout center, a postal station, a social center with meeting rooms, a ceramics studio, a woodworking shop, a small library, a computer room with three terminals and a common printer, and a big room for lectures and performances and for the slide shows that were offered by couples who had just returned from their travels abroad. There was a heated Olympic-sized outdoor swimming pool in the heart of the village as well as a smaller indoor pool, and there was a decent restaurant in the modest mall at the end of the main village street, along with a bookstore, a liquor store, a gift shop, a bank, a brokerage office, a realtor, a lawyer's office, and a gas station. A supermarket was only a short drive away, and if you were ambulatory, as most residents were, you could easily walk the half mile to the boardwalk and down to the wide ocean beach, where a lifeguard was on duty all summer long.
