“Well, I always liked nice clothes. And nice cars! But it’s also true my father had the business and there it was, you see. Before the War, I had intended on going to law school—accepted and everything—but when I came out of the Navy I found I’d lost the urge. And the business was there.”
He looked over at me and shrugged: “My son is in with me now. The third generation. But today is his golf day.”
We talked as we drove, back through Beaver Cleaver Hell, past a thousand houses with such simple lives inside them, or so I imagined, remembering when ours was. The talk never went to Micky, to his youth or the cruelty of his fate. It kept strictly to the undertaker’s considerable pleasures in life. The golf games and the clothing, the Cadillacs, the house which was too large to keep up, even his newest grandchild, a boy, born in April. He mentioned the special pride he took in bringing his educational background to the business, as a third-generation Harvard Porcellian and his son again, whose golf day it was, the fourth such.
Probably I make it sound callous or self-centered in the retelling, but it did not come down that way at all. The man had a gentle voice, almost a bedside manner, and he knew what he was doing; knew how best to soothe the bereaved, never belaboring the obvious (which we both were powerless to change) but simply being comfortable in his own skin. And whether he really fancied himself a doctor of the soul as I have speculated, an expert at bringing comfort, or was just dressing up a grand obliviousness in nice manners, it came to the same thing.
“Does your line of work—does it inure you to death?”
“I don’t know about that,” he smiled, maybe because I had struggled for the word. Inure. But I wanted to know, and kept after it. What, I asked, would he do now, this afternoon, once his Cadillacs were back in the garage and the last details had been checked off? Or did he have another one of these to do?
“Today? No. I’d like to get out to the racetrack if I can. They have some decent horses shipping in for the Mass Cap, you know. Bound to be a bit more excitement than usual at Suffolk.”
“So you’re a betting man.”
“Hardly that. We might have a drink and gamble a few dollars, that’s all. But why not? Such a glorious day.”
I suppose I could have felt offended by the remark. I did think how all remarks, all words and thoughts, will reverberate so differently on a day like this one. But I was not offended, I knew it was a glorious day, and asked who he liked in the race, God knows why. The Mick would gamble some, more dogs than horses, but I had not been anyplace like that in years. Hadn’t even noticed today was the Mass Cap, and the names of the animals had less meaning to me than a list of the twenty-eight flavors.
“Dixieland Band, naturally. He’s the undertaker’s choice!”
At a proper jazzman’s funeral in New Orleans, he explained, a real Dixieland band would go highstepping it down Bourbon Street making the gladdest music they could, throwing a final party for the dear departed. “Nothing of the sort here in Boston, of course,” he finished, and just as I wondered if there was a trade journal (Today’s Undertaker?) to which he subscribed, we pulled into the lot behind the church.
Another strange moment: I found myself telling him thanks and good-bye as though we had just shared a cab from the airport, falling right in with his day-like-any-other-day tone. It took me a minute to remember exactly where I was, and exactly why, and where I was expected next, for the rest of the family would already be at Uncle Jack’s by now.
Even so, I didn’t go right away. In fact, I didn’t go at all. Sat under the wheel with the motor running, possibly sat there that way an hour or more, I really don’t know, though I did know every tick of the time how my absence would be viewed among the family. But clear pictures of Micky were coming at me now, snapshots, mixing the early times with some more recent. My God, this was a guy whose diapers I had changed. Who I had walked to his first day of kindergarten, holding his hand, and with whom I had grilled steaks just a month ago at my place, on the occasion of his thirty-fifth birthday. It was proving one hell of a confusion finding the right face for him, who had been a baby, a kid with wifflecuts, a longhair, sometimes a beard.
Finally I did ease out of the lot (stupidly, because by now I was crying) and started working my way through the city toward the Mystic River Bridge, awfully slow going on a Saturday. I just drove, spaced out and trancy, time and trouble of no particular concern to me. Between the beach traffic and the big race, the cars in Revere were backed up solid to Slade’s Mill and by the time I crawled past the oil farm and pulled into the free lot at Suffolk, it was late in the day.
Later than I thought, actually, because there was no one at the turnstiles and inside I saw that the feature race, umpty-umpth running of the Massachusetts Handicap, was up in eight minutes. Much too late for study. I glanced at the entries and the latest odds, got in a line, and started ransacking my pockets for cash. It was pure chance that I had some.
Dixieland Band was held at 6 to 1, neither the long nor the short of it, but that didn’t matter to me: if I got to the window in time to bet, he would be my horse—the undertaker’s choice at any price. It was a close thing, too, as the character in front of me trotted out a lifetime supply of exotic wagers, triples and boxes and wheels. I grabbed my ticket as the machines were locking, the horses leaving the post.
By the time I was back outside and breast-stroking my way through the milling crowd to the rail, the horses had disappeared behind the tote board and the track looked strangely deserted, empty. With ten thousand fans screaming, the race caller was not much help; I hadn’t a clue where my horse stood, or even what the hell he looked like. Then they came clear of the tote with a speedball loose on the lead. When I found my guy, though, the Dixieland Band, he was striding nice and easy off the flank of the second-place animal, and I felt a sudden wild surge, because I absolutely knew it was going to happen.
Right then he took over second, and as they turned for home he was rushing past the fading speedster and opening up a lead of his own so quickly on the straightaway that the late runners would never threaten him. Ten years away from the racetrack and here I was, still in the know, or so it felt until I remembered exactly how much expertise had gone into my wager. I had been given a horse, that was all, and by someone who hadn’t put a lot of thought into the matter himself. We played the undertaker’s choice, plain and simple.
The mutuel clerk was not a bit impressed when I went to cash. He ran my slip through the machine, slid two dimes my way, and then began licking off twenties like free passes to a religious meeting on the Common. His hands moved with the timehanging sameness, the strictly-business rhythm of a card dealer, and the bills flowed silently toward me as though they would flow forever.
Another race was already shaping up, but I had zero interest. It wasn’t like I felt lucky, or like I even cared, win lose. I bought a couple of hot dogs, walked down to the bleachers, and sat eating my first food since Thursday. I wasn’t thinking about Micky or anything else either, I was just buzzing it in the sun, eating hot dogs with mustard and feeling the warmth on my face, and maybe a little tingle still from the big strike. Dixieland Band were the only two words in my head.
The light had started changing, though, the crowd was draining away, and something told me I had better go soon, not linger, although I was not eager to jump into the crush of cars trying to siphon through the one narrow exit. Truthfully, I was loath to re-enter the world at all, through any channel. This ugly, unfamiliar bailiwick felt safe to me—nothing bad could happen to me here, not today.
Meanwhile I had forgotten all about him (and why I had come here, though who knows why) when there he was, my third-generation Harvard Porcellian undertaker, strolling from the clubhouse with a couple of well-fed friends. He wore a seersucker suit, faint gray stripes like regimented tinsel, and with his silver waves of hair he looked like the President of the United States at play, his two companions in their croc shirts and pastel trousers like Secret Service gon
e soft in the middle, thirty percent bodyfat on a good day.
We were crossing paths, as close as we had been sitting in his car, and I smiled; so did he. But as I started to speak he kept on going, for his smile had been one of instinctive politeness, not of recognition. Nor would you ever have guessed from his bearing that the man had just won a bundle of money, thousands of dollars I had no doubt. I trailed them out through the concourse, going three abreast; watched them into a valeted Cadillac at the curb, this one a dull canary yellow in the flattened light. He drove.
It was easy to understand his not knowing me. There were funerals every day of the week, morning and afternoon, and whatever they might mean to his relentlessly bereaved clientele, they could only be to him as melons to the greengrocer, or a pallet of two-by-fours to the sawmill foreman. Not that he had no care for them: on the contrary, he would do each one just right, perfectly if possible, and handle each account just so. Plus of course my eyes had been on him while his were necessarily on the road. All this I understood.
Even so I felt let down, abandoned, as I saw the pale Caddy make a calm clear line through the field of tangled cars. Because there was a magic about the man, there was special knowledge, such that he would understand me too. He would know why I was here at the racetrack when I should have been at my uncle’s house, eating and drinking and mourning my brother who I loved so much. He alone could comprehend how on this day—this evil, numbing, desperately sad day—I had come to a place of frivolity and sin, and sinned with frivolous pleasure.
The Last of Harpo Berkowitz
Harpo Berkowitz had to be helped out of a car in Revere last month. He needed the help not because he was old or infirm, but because he was dead and it isn’t easy for a dead man to get himself from the trunk of a car.
Okay, so much for the frivolous tone. I happen to be in the news business and that’s just your story lead-in, what we call the hook or the grabber. The truth is I was the only sap in town who found the occasion of Harpo’s passing anything other than frivolous. Because I chanced to know Harpo Berkowitz in high school, sat next to him in Cerasoli’s homeroom from sophomore year on, and therefore exchanged pleasantries with him all those mornings. Were we friends? I was never sure, but I remember vividly and fondly that wide grin of his, the eyes almost closed like a cat’s, and his admittedly wild ways.
Everyone else had him for a “hood,” one full notch below the greasers in our outmoded social hierarchy. A greaser at least had his Ford to chop and channel or his Harley to gun and tune, whereas the handful of true hoods had nothing—possessions, sports, hobbies—and did nothing. They certainly didn’t help to write the yearbook, as I did. I wrote the thumbnail for Harpo and I recall being impressed he still was there, getting fitted for a cap and gown. The others of his ilk (Zarillio, Zullo, the Kinney Brothers, and Ralphie Flowers) were long gone, released by law on their sixteenth birthdays into the custody of outlaws. Gone to work in the world of chopshops, narcotics, and porno toys, or the relative dignity of the old daily numbers. But Harpo would wear the mortarboard, would shift a tassel with the rest of us, and I put in his squib: “Opera lover, savant, and gentleman-at-large. Looking ahead to a career in government.”
To a great extent I was joking (or we were joking, since Harpo helped me compose the copy) yet he did have irony—he really was fond of the classic Italian opera. Harpo always carried himself with the air of a gentleman from some imagined Age of Gentlemen, an almost courtly manner that blended facetiously with the switchblade stiletto and the ducktail hair locked in grease, as did his habit of bursting abruptly into song with rich gesticulation and opera-house grandiloquence.
He was of course better known for acts of violence. Sudden, almost casual tours de force (but literal force) like the battle he fought one morning in the frozen school parking lot—with about five hundred kids looking on—against Rich Miller, the big football captain. Or the time he nearly decapitated Claude Thibeau, our autocratic shop teacher, with a three pound ballpeen. Those moments impressed me too, only differently, for I saw the smile, the mischievous grin that followed so quickly upon the apparently murderous impulses. It was not a psycho grin either; Harpo was all there. He was a joker, an ironist, with a feel for theater, or for the theatrical possibilities of terror.
Richie Miller towered over Harpo, and outweighed him a good forty pounds. They did not seem evenly matched as we watched them circle that cold morning, breathing plumes of vapor as dragons clashing might breathe fire. There was special menace in the air, too, for here was a rare confrontation of cultures, of cadres that usually kept strictly separate—crewneck jocks versus the men in leather—and it seemed that something large was at stake.
For half a minute nothing happened, they just stalked one another clockwise (with Harpo’s fixed grin appearing slightly lunatic under the circumstances) and then Miller unleashed a monster of a right-hand lead that brought a collective gasp from ringside. It made an audible rush in the crisp winter air. Harpo let it fly past his head almost contemptuously, his expression unchanged, then tackled the huge tight end and twisted his nose between two fingers until it snapped, again audibly, like a dry twig. The fight was over.
Afterwards in homeroom, your reporter was right there on the spot to interview the winner. “Good thing that right hand of his missed you,” I began.
“Geesh,” he scoffed. “You of all people ought to know better. A roundhouse job like that couldn’t tag my mother in her sleep. That’s what pissed me off.”
“You were pissed off?” (I had to ask because he had never appeared anything but mildly bemused and distant throughout.)
“Sure I was. A showboat move like that? That’s why I hurt the big jerk.”
“What else could you do? It was you or him.”
“That’s true too,” said Harpo, and nodded in consideration, as if to say the thought was new, but good.
“I always thought you had to be really mad to win a fight like that.”
“Nah,” he smiled. “Just dumb and mean.”
Harpo did fire a ballpeen hammer at Claude Thibeau in the woodshop junior year. It rang off a cast-iron pipe about one inch portside of old Woody’s skull, a hell of a fastball—Harpo surprised himself I’m sure. Certainly he surprised The Woodchuck, who turned back toward the workbenches in slow motion, like a statue revolving mechanically on a pedestal, his face white as flour. Harpo was already rushing forward, shaking his head in compassion. “Jesus, Professor,” he said, “I am awful damn sorry, really I am. The damned thing just slipped on me and my goodness if it wasn’t a near miss on you! Please accept my humblest apologies, Professor, I was careless. Careless.”
Somehow it washed. The Woodchuck knew he had done it on purpose (in a way) and that the hammer had just missed ending his life right there in the high school basement. Yet Harpo disarmed him anyway, irresistibly, by combining that dangerous sense of fun with the uniquely self-mocking courtly manner.
So he was a legend of sorts: desperado decked in black (black pomaded locks of hair, black boots with the heavy silver buckles, tapered black slacks and the crackerjack black leather jacket too) who for the most part ignored this typecasting, who listened and laughed and sang snatches of his favorite, Lucia di Lammermoor. Often during our senior year I wondered what could possibly become of him. He really was too smart and too sensitive to be a street hood, yet it was hard imagining other applications for his particular genius. A bartender possibly, or a prizefighter, though he was on the lazy side. An usher at the opera house, bowing the people to their seats and then standing in the back through all the great performances in his flowing black cutaway?
I asked him at graduation, the last time I ever saw him, what he planned on becoming. “A cowboy,” he told me, with a smile as wide as the Pecos River. The wide white grin, the jetblack hair combed back in perfect lustrous parallels—that was Harpo, a cartoon chiaroscuro, walking talking contrast of means—and what in hell’s name would he do, really?
What h
e did, ultimately, was get himself trunkstuffed in Revere about half a mile from where we graduated high school. No, Harpo had not gone far. Yet recalling his unique and stylish persona I found it hard to believe he had really gone nowhere, that he had become nothing more than a cheap hood after all, bearer of the black spot, bodyguard and gofer to whoremasters and drug tycoons. This was too cruel, too Darwinian a denouement. When the item came in from our stringer at the beach, no one in the newsroom batted an eyelash. Here was a non-story, just another “gangland slaying,” the only kind of gory story that sold no papers. Even the modus was reheated hash, always the trunk of the abandoned car, that or the stoneboat in Davy Jones’ locker. Nothing fancy, gents, just business as usual.
But I convinced Harry Eamon at the city desk to let me have two days on it. Might be a feature, I told him, because this one was special, the guy had real presence; he was a character and there would be people out there with colorful stories about him, people who loved and hated him. This one wasn’t going to be Faceless Killed By Nameless but a human interest angle, What Really Happened To Harpo Berkowitz. I absolutely expected a story, a tragicomedy, and I also relished the chance to reel in the past, in the person of Harpo, to stroll down the road not taken and see what went on there. I never guessed it would be so quotidian.
His mother, for instance. Harpo used to mention her a lot, dammit, and always fondly. She was a great cook, I knew, made a meatloaf fit for kings. I had taken a chance with him that day, had contradicted him lightly: “Kings don’t eat meatloaf, Harpo.” “Nah,” he shot back, at the ready, “they eat it all right, they just don’t use ketchup.”
Eccentric Circles Page 12
