Last Call

by Laura Pedersen

  Thus Hayden has determined that the best way to explore his options is by attending funerals and interviewing the relatives of those who’ve just cashed in a cancer patient. Given the occasion, it seems natural to inquire about the final hours and whether the death took place at home or in an oncology ward, and about hospice care, the Hemlock Society, barbiturates, and self-regulated morphine drips. He reasons that by taking Joey along, the boy will gradually become more comfortable with death, and it won’t be as traumatic when Hayden’s own time comes.

  “This first fellow, Richardson, is having his memorial service at Central Presbyterian, and so they’ll surely drop some money on a reception back at the house,” says Hayden. “He was a member of the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.”

  “So what did he croak of?” asks Joey.

  “Acute asthma,” Hayden answers with grave seriousness, though his green eyes glimmer with mischief.

  Joey’s momentarily alarmed before realizing his grandfather is only teasing. “C’mon. Does anyone really die from asthma, Grandpa?”

  “Do’an’ be ridiculous.” Hayden leans over and rumples his grandson’s butterscotch hair. “Richardson died o’ The Cancer, of course! Do you think I’m cruising these things for the petit fours and to hear ‘Greensleeves’ choked out on the oboe? This is a serious medical inquiry into the pros and cons of euthanasia.”

  “Then if I’m not going to die, why won’t Mom let me do anything?”

  “She’s a worrier. Always has been. Diana had more sick dolls than any little girl I ever knew. And not just a flu—oh no, Diana’s dolls contracted the rubella and smallpox and leprosy and leukemia—all requiring toothpick tongue depressors and wee IV drip bottles fashioned out o’ pipe cleaners. Her Barbies would have automobile crashes and boating accidents and get bitten by poisonous snakes and require antivenin to be flown in from remote jungles. Sometimes I think she should spell the name Di with an e added onto the end.”

  Imagining his mother as a neurotic young girl rescuing her dolls from the jaws of death brings a smile to Joey’s face.

  “Your mother grinds vitamins into my tapioca pudding,” Hayden states with a chuckle. “She thinks I do’an’ notice.”

  “But if you know, why do you let her do it?”

  “It makes her feel better. Like when you let her check your forehead for fever even though you feel fine. Relations are a willful lot.”

  “Are we going to attend funerals all summer long?”

  “Why not? For an old barracks bag, I still ha’ a lot of wind left in me!” Hayden takes one hand off the steering wheel and pounds his chest. “Besides, these forty-year-old oncology doctors don’t know a blessed thing about death. Wouldn’t know it if the grim reaper crept up and bit ’em in the arse.”

  “I wish you weren’t going to die,” says Joey. He doesn’t entirely understand how a person so alive can be expected to die. How do the doctors know for sure that Hayden is going to die soon and why can’t they give him something to stop it? Down deep Joey is convinced the doctors must be wrong and that whatever is showing up on their X-rays will eventually go away on its own, same as a cold or a headache, or like when he had the chicken pox last summer.

  “We’ve already discussed this Joe-Joe. Everyone has to die. Some boys never even get to meet their grandfathers.”

  “Yeah, but then they can’t miss them when they’re gone.”

  “Good point. But I just told you, I have a bit o’ time left.” Hayden’s tone turns more serious, like that of a pilot soothing his passengers during some unexpected turbulence. “We’ll see all the Mets games and maybe even get front-row seats to a Rangers game this winter. An insurance buddy of mine is a friend of the manager. And we’ll pick out a dog for you. A boy’s dog—a golden retriever or a German shepherd. And you’ll have friends in the neighborhood by then.”

  Hayden is in the process of trying to teach Joey everything he knows in just a few short months, from the practical—how to read the weather by the shape of the clouds and to tell time by the angle of his shadow—to the philosophical—why women are inclined to say yes when they mean no and vice versa.

  “I’ll never have friends if Mom doesn’t let me play something. All the guys are practicing baseball and soccer and playing water volleyball at the community pool. And she says dogs have dander that will make my lungs collapse.”

  “The doctor says you’ll grow out of the asthma, and you will. You haven’t had an attack in months and you haven’t been in the oxygen tent for o’er two years now.”

  “But you just said that the doctors don’t know anything.”

  “Just for the record, I preferred it when you were five and didn’t question me when I told you that purple-eyed monsters lived under the stairs. Joey, doctors know all about the asthma. It’s in the first week of medical school. Furthermore, you need to be strong and healthy so you can climb to the top of the toboggan run during the winter carnival and scatter my ashes on the way down. You’ll be twelve by then.”

  “Grandpa! I hate it when you make jokes like that.”

  “Who’s joking? And do’an’ be like your muther. She won’t allow me to discuss my own death, and it just so happens that it’s what I want to talk about sometimes.”

  “It’s not my fault that I don’t want you to die.” Joey can’t imagine a world without his grandfather. Even when Joey and his mother lived in Westchester, hardly a week went by when grandfather and grandson didn’t see each other. Hayden would take the train up after work and announce his arrival by starting to play his bagpipes at the end of the block and then walk toward the house. His pockets would be brimming with treasures such as plastic bugs, disappearing ink, firecrackers, and all sorts of novelties that would cause Diana to throw fits.

  “Always remember that you’re Scottish, Joey.” Hayden’s brogue lilts upward in pride. “We do’an’ get exercised about death. Unless of course a child dies. Now that’s a tragedy. But for a fifty-five-year-old Highland geezer such as myself death is just as natural as a harvested field of wheat left to go fallow at the end of the season—its job is done.”

  If the truth be told, the actuarial tables at Hayden’s insurance office had promised him another 21.6 years, and privately he is more than a bit miffed about getting shorted. But Hayden knows that to a boy Joey’s age he must appear ancient. Fifty, sixty, seventy—there isn’t much difference to an eleven-year-old. And by talking positively about the situation Hayden forces himself to remain upbeat and free of apprehension. He keeps remembering that his own father didn’t make it to the age of forty and never had the good fortune to see his children grow up, and thus he should be thankful for the life he’s already enjoyed.

  “Okay,” Joey agrees. “Only, if you’re allowed to talk about dying then I’m allowed to talk about not wanting you to die.”

  “Hmm. I suppose that’s fair enough.” The kid has a natural instinct for a deal. He’d do okay in life. Hayden swings the car into a Sam’s Club a few blocks from the funeral home so they can use the men’s room to change into the dress clothes stashed in the paper bag.

  “It’s too bad I can’t tell Mom how much use I’m getting out of my navy blue blazer,” Joey says as they walk through the parking lot. “She thinks I only wore it once for that stupid school concert.”

  Grandfather and grandson examine themselves in the restroom mirror like nervous grooms, checking for any signs that might broadcast their status as interlopers. Hayden takes a handful of water and pats down his disorderly hair, a dark brown thatch recently streaked with gray, as if an early smattering of frost had wafted down upon it.

  “Do you really think they’ll have good food at this one?” Joey asks as they exit the enormous store, toting casual clothes and sneakers in paper bags. “I liked the one where they had hamburgers and ice cream sundaes for the kids.”

  “Those Irish Catholic welders certainly know how to throw a party—open bar, closed casket. However, this fellow was a d
octor, a thoracic surgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital. They’ll probably have carved ham and smoked salmon. Those old money Presbyterians do everything understated—you could be eating off a hundred-dollar chunk o’ china and not even know it.”

  “I bet they have brand-name scotch,” Joey adds knowingly.

  “And what does a wee lad like you know about brand-name scotch?”

  “I learned it from you. It means good hooch like Dewar’s and Johnny Walker Black and maybe Chivas Regal. Not rot gut.”

  “Well, as long as we’re on the subject of hooch, do your old grandpa a favor, will you? If you’re going to be hooverin’ up the alcoholic beverages then either drink vodka or let’s buy some mints on the way home. Last week I had to tell your mother that some bloke spilled beer all over you at the ball game. Fortunately, she do’an’ know the difference between the smell of brewer’s yeast and Drambuie.”

  “I just wanted to see what it tasted like.” A sheepish Joey slides down into the passenger seat.

  “Right, and I drink martinis for the nutritional value of the olives. Do you think I was never eleven years old, that your old grandpa sprung up with the heather after yesterday’s rain?”

  chapter three

  The parking area at the funeral home is full and the MacBrides are directed to the overflow lot on the grass next to the blacktop. Always a good sign—with an excess of mourners it’s easier to blend in and mingle. As they walk toward the main entrance Hayden leans over and whispers to Joey, “I’ll bet a lot of his patients saw the big write-up in the newspaper.”

  Once inside, they follow the DR. RICHARDSON signs, respectfully keeping their heads bowed while passing vacant-eyed mourners in search of coffee and restrooms, enormous vases overflowing with fragrant white azaleas, and strategically placed boxes of tissues. Over the past three weeks Joey has noticed the one thing all funeral homes have in common is that they keep the air-conditioning at full blast. He assumes they’re worried about the smell from all those rotting bodies coming up from the basement.

  Hayden makes a beeline for the casket since that’s where the family always congregates. His modus operandi is to chat up the relations in order to get invited back to the house for further research. If the guest of honor died at home he can usually even wangle a tour of the sickroom. Did the deceased prefer the shades up or down? Did he mostly read, watch TV, or listen to the radio? Did they rent the hospital bed or buy it? Who’s the best supplier? Were private-duty nurses hired?

  First prize is of course an open-casket liver cancer corpse. In these instances Hayden feels as if they’d attended school together, only that the cadaver graduated slightly ahead of the mourner. The newspaper said that Dr. Richardson died of lung cancer, but you can’t always go by this. If a patient outlives the initial diagnosis then most malignancies spread, and the only reason they still call it such and such a cancer is due to a system of nomenclature that permanently identifies you by whatever you were struck with first.

  This time it’s a closed casket, causing Hayden to comment, “So much for doctor heal thyself. He must o’ looked a wreck at the end.”

  Although Joey can’t bring himself to tell Hayden, there are a few things about the funerals that he doesn’t really like—the boring talk by the minister or rabbi, and the people moaning and crying. At the same time, he has to admit that there are some things he really enjoys. If it’s an open casket then seeing an actual dead body is really freaky. Joey likes to challenge himself to see how close he can get to the corpse and then imagine it jumping to life and running up the aisle. He also has a good time counting how many Mass cards the person received and peering inside the shiny limousines. Sometimes during the eulogy the funeral director even lets him put the flags on the hoods of the cars out in the parking lot. But most of all, he enjoys meeting the other kids.

  Hayden is pleased that Joey doesn’t cling to him after they view the body. A natural born socializer that kid is. Or a “people person” as they said in Hayden’s days as an insurance salesman. Joey can always land a job in sales if he doesn’t make it as a catcher for the Mets, his dream job.

  And circumstances being what they are at funerals—distant cousins arriving from far-off places and throngs of wriggling children, many who’ve never met before—Joey is immediately accepted. There isn’t any of that competitive schoolyard stuff. The boy simply informs them that his grandfather is a friend of the family and he’s in like Flynn.

  Sometimes Hayden observes Joey playing cards or video games with the other kids and knows that his grandson is going to be just fine after the mess of the divorce settles down, Diana stops fussing over him, and he makes some friends at his new school. After one funeral there was even a game of kickball out in the street. Joey was so excited to be pitching the ball and running bases—something Diana never would have allowed.

  However, if Joey had suffered an asthma attack and Diana found out that Hayden had let him play kickball, it’s certain she would have euthanized him faster than you put down a decrepit cat that pees all over expensive new carpets. Hayden keeps the inhaler in his pocket, just in case, though he doesn’t tell Joey this. In truth, Hayden finds it amazing that with all of Diana’s precautions and ministrations Joey hasn’t already voluntarily checked himself into an iron lung for safekeeping.

  As Hayden takes up a position near the casket, pondering the fine line between life and death, a strong arm claps him on the shoulder followed by a voice that would be considered loud for a wake. “Crazy Hady MacBride!”

  Hayden turns to find the last person he expects to see, T. J. Cory, a young colleague from the financial services division of his old Brooklyn office. Effectively concealing his surprise at being discovered, Hayden gives T. J. a hearty greeting and a big smile, successfully disguising the fact that his mind is racing to figure out how Cory is connected to the deceased.

  T. J.’s eyes well up with tears as he tells Hayden, “Your coming to the funeral will mean so much to Mom! You have no idea!”

  Mom? Dr. Richardson can’t be T. J. Cory’s father. Hayden hadn’t seen T. J.’s name in the paper. On the other hand, T. J.’s first four names were something that sounded more like a Civil War battleground than an insurance salesman. But Hayden manages to stay one step ahead of being found out.

  “Actually, I’m sorry to say I wasn’t aware he was your dad, T. J.,” says Hayden, his brogue swelling and making this confession sound all the more heartfelt.

  “Stepfather,” interjects T. J.

  “Yes, oh, now I see,” says Hayden. He scours his memory in an attempt to recall something pertinent about Richardson from the obituary, but all that comes to mind is the fact that he was a navy veteran. “T. J., I’m here to pay my respects to a fellow member of our armed forces.”

  T. J.’s eyes practically leap out in front of his nose and he puts a beefy arm around Hayden and starts steering him over to a fifty-ish woman in a black dress and black lace gloves just a few feet away. “Mom, Hady here was in the navy with Dad!”

  The small woman looks up at Hayden as if he’s a ghost. “You survived the rescue in the South China sea with Marvin? I’d heard that everyone else was gone.” She hugs Hayden and presses her face into his chest.

  “Well, ma’am.” Hayden stiffens slightly as he imagines himself in the navy and tries to place the South China Sea, but a group of people have surrounded them and all talk at once. Apparently T. J. has informed the relatives that another survivor is in attendance.

  “You simply must say a few words,” insists Dr. Richardson’s brother Drew, an ophthalmologist.

  “Oh yes,” concurs T. J. “Especially how you were in the water for two days with the sharks.”

  Joey arrives at Hayden’s side, intrigued by the word sharks, and not surprised to see that Hayden has so quickly ingratiated himself with the entire family. Hayden introduces his grandson and they all solemnly shake Joey’s hand as if he’s the offspring of a great war hero.

  “No, I couldn’t speak,”
Hayden demurs.

  “Oh, you must say a few words!” the widow urges Hayden as if he’d be shirking his duty not to say a few words.

  Joey looks up at his grandfather for a signal that they should make a run for it.

  Drew comes huffing back over after a brief word with the minister. “It’s all set. You’ll speak first, Officer MacBride.”

  Joey’s mouth drops open at the word officer. The closest Hayden has ever been to the armed forces was when they went to buy Joey a sailor hat at Reliable & Franks military surplus store outside the gates of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

  Before another word can be said the minister walks to the podium and the mourners take their seats. The family pulls Hayden along with them to the front row. Meanwhile Hayden quickly puzzles together what he knows—he and Richardson are the same age so it must have been Vietnam. They must have landed in the water due to a ship or a submarine sinking. And there were sharks. That was settled. He’d go with the sharks. To bolster his confidence, Hayden reminds himself that supposedly there aren’t any other survivors who can contradict his story.

  When called to the podium Hayden clears his throat and the fear of being found out translates into an appearance of mournful solemnity. He starts by saying how wonderful it was that Marvin devoted his life to medicine, to helping people, and yet it was no surprise. His brogue swells as he recounts how Marvin was always concerned with the well-being of others, even that tragic day when they were in the frigid shark-infested waters of the South China Sea, praying to be rescued. Hayden takes a pause as if he hesitates to revisit those terrible two days in his mind, no less talk about them. But then he steadies himself and tells the story about the explosion and the waves as high as a house, and finally, the sharks.

  “You’d swim over to your buddy through the freezin’ cold water thinkin’ he was still alive and tap him on the shoulder from behind. The torso would bob once and there wouldn’t be anything below the waist.”

  The audience gives a collective gasp.