The Bill from My Father

by Bernard Cooper

  I figured I might as well use this opportunity to learn CPR. I sat up and followed along with Dr. Rawlings. In with the good air, out with the bad. Count the seconds. Compress the chest. And if the victim doesn’t respond, if the heart ceases beating or the lungs collapse, if the body resists resuscitation and the soul refuses to be redeemed, take another breath and try again.

  Rest in Peace

  Before the new owner took possession of the trailer, Betty phoned to ask if I wanted my father’s bed. “I wouldn’t feel right taking it with me when I move, and I thought you might like to have it as a keepsake.”

  “It’s kind of big for a keepsake,” I said, “but thanks anyway.” I told her Brian and I already had a bed that was, to quote Goldilocks, just right. What I didn’t tell her was that I could never rest in a bed where my father spent so many hours of his life. A bed in which he’d had sex. From which he’d been banished. Where he’d possibly been assaulted in his sleep. Where he’d read TV Guide and listened to scripture. A bed where he tossed and turned past midnight, weaving his clients’ misfortunes into a story that, like many on my syllabus, laid bare the course of a failing marriage.

  In Cheever’s “Reunion,” the son says of his father, “I knew that when I was grown I would be something like him. I would have to plan my campaigns within his limitations.” I’d pretty much resigned myself to this relay race of fate, but there were certain campaigns I was determined to wage on a fresh, untrammeled mattress of my own. Namely: sex, reading, and sleep. Each was my idea of heaven, especially in that order.

  “We could always get a new mattress for it,” said Brian. He didn’t want the bed either; he was playing devil’s advocate.

  “It’s not just the mattress. My father is embodied in the whole bed. His likeness might as well be carved into the headboard.”

  “That’s …”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s primitive. It’s superstitious. But I hid in that bed when I was frightened of the dark as a kid. My mother chain-smoked in that bed, blaming herself when her sons were sick and her husband was seeing other women. I was born in that bed!”

  Brian looked doubtful.

  “Well, according to lore.” My father probably meant to say that I was conceived in the bed, not born in it. Still, as a son to whom little history was handed, I grabbed at even the misremembered bits.

  “When you went back to Canada for your father’s funeral,” I asked, “did you sleep in his bed?”

  “He’d been dead less than a day!” said Brian. Then he grew quiet. “I considered it, then I slept in my old bed. I was worried his sheets might still be warm. Or might have grown cold.”

  In what turned out to be my last conversation with Betty—once she’d moved to her new apartment, she seemed eager to start over, and we had little reason to stay in touch—she told me she’d placed my father’s bed on consignment at Rags to Riches, an Oxnard antiques shop. California may have been booming with new housing for the elderly, but several retirement villages and nursing homes consisted of single rooms that came with a bed, a chair, and a dresser, like college dormitories. Someone had to buy the furniture the elderly were leaving behind. It was highly unlikely, but not impossible, that a few belongings auctioned off in estate sales or sold at secondhand stores would miraculously gravitate back to the houses from which they came. To give my father’s life more resolution than it actually had, I liked to imagine his bed returning to the house on Ambrose Avenue after the new owners, who just happened to be antiques hunting in Oxnard one day, found the mahogany headboard of their dreams. “Wait till you see it,” they’d tell their friends. “It looks like it was meant to be here.”

  The bed had been purchased from a department store on Wilshire Boulevard in 1940. Once the deliverymen drove away, my parents sat on opposite sides and bounced on the mattress to test its firmness. Then they lay back and stared at the ceiling. They’d lived together for fifteen years. All three sons were still alive, the fourth unborn. They stretched their arms toward each other and found that their fingers barely touched. The bed seemed larger than it had in the store. It sprawled beneath them like a continent.

  They’d bought the bed thinking it was just a big soft slab upon which a person either slips into or resists slipping into unconsciousness. But to say a bed is a thing to sleep on is like saying the sea is a drop of salty water. Below the cotton quilting lay a hidden world. Wooden braces keep the mattress from collapsing. Inner springs coil when pressure is applied, twanging each time we shift in our sleep or flail to find the ideal position, searching for the lost aquatic comfort we knew long ago in our mother’s womb. However tame or acrobatic, sex takes its toll on the foam padding, lust grinding it down to powder, the grains sifting earthward night after night. Microscopic colonies of mites wait for the falling manna of our skin. Dreams sweep across the surface like seasons. Fevers and night sweats drench the sheets. A bed is a lectern, a pedestal, an altar, a rack, a boxing ring, a cavern of blankets, a spotlit stage, a trampoline, a nest, a grave.

  Last Words

  We hit a stretch of the I-5 where Griffith Park’s scrub brush and rocky outcroppings gradually thinned into the manicured green hills of Mount Sinai Memorial Park. Brian was only slightly more cautious behind the wheel of a car than my father had been; if counseling clients required him to keep his reactions in check, the road was a blank canvas on which he expressed his every impulse. That day, though, he was solemn and cautious, hands positioned on the steering wheel at ten and two o’clock. He stuck to the speed limit despite the mammoth trucks and SUVs looming up in the rearview mirror and following inches away from our tail. When Brian refused to yield the right of way, they’d veer into another lane and hurtle past us like missiles on wheels.

  I glanced at my watch, a not-so-subtle hint for him to step on the gas. I often asked Brian to drive when we were running late; his dependably breakneck pace and disregard for solid objects always made up for lost time. “Relax,” he said, eyes on the road. “This isn’t a race.”

  Going to visit my father’s grave also meant visiting the graves of my mother and three brothers, all buried in a family plot whose last available space was reserved for me. Dad had acquired a total of six plots when he’d made funeral arrangements for my brother Bob, in 1964, though he didn’t mention the purchase to anyone in the family for nearly a year.

  “I bought plots,” he announced to my mother and me one morning at breakfast, apropos of nothing. I was in my first semester of junior high. Ron and Gary lived in apartments near the Spring Street office.

  “Plotz?” said mother, setting her coffee cup in its saucer. A spoonful of corn flakes was suspended near my lips. My father slathered his toast with jam.

  “Plots. Like in a cemetery. Now we each got a plot of our own. Next to Bob, olev hasholem. It’s all taken care of.”

  “You could have let me in on this!” she cried.

  My father glared at her. “I told you about it just now! Was I talking to myself?”

  “After the fact is not letting in on.”

  Had my father only left well enough alone, or apologized for not consulting her. Instead, he added that Mount Sinai’s funeral director agreed to sell him six graves for the price of five. “Consider the savings!” Recounting his riposte isn’t easy, because my parents warned me at a young age that many non-Jews believed we had horns, were cheap, and killed Jesus Christ. (These faults, I assumed, went from least to most egregious. Had I arranged the list, horns would have come last. As for Christ, I would have remembered killing someone’s savior.) My father wasn’t boasting about his clout as a negotiator so much as he was defending his decision to grab the land while the grabbing was good. In some respects, Mount Sinai was similar to the new subdivisions that were being bulldozed into the Hollywood Hills—vacant lots bought for their promise of peace, an investment with long-range benefits.

  Still, any father who brings up, at breakfast, the eventual death of his entire family should probably expect eve
ryone seated at the table to ponder, at least fleetingly, their own mortality and the mortality of others. But my father was (a) surprised that his news put a damper on the meal and (b) miffed that my mother wasn’t quicker to appreciate his foresight. “You want I should’ve left the matter up to chance? I thought you’d be pleased.” Panic tinged his voice, the panic of a man who, beyond haggling with a mortician, signing contracts, and writing a check, had nothing left to say or do. His business was finished. A row of trenches were reserved in the dirt.

  He looked so miserable I almost blurted, “Thanks for the grave, Dad,” but merely thinking it made me feel jinxed, and I only got as far as an intake of breath.

  Mother said, “I suppose I should be grateful you told me now instead of letting me find out about it when I’m dead. A mother deserves some say in these things. A wife too, in case the word should ring a bell.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She cinched her bathrobe, rose to her feet, and made a show of clearing the table. Our plates were still full.

  “You don’t want me to take the initiative? Fine. I’ll cancel the contract. You go to the graveyard and pick out plots. But do it soon, because we sure as hell can’t change our minds once we’re in there.”

  Mother dumped scrambled eggs into the garbage disposal, a dire act for a woman who, hungry or not, ate scraps from our plates on principal rather than letting food go to waste. She rinsed a fistful of cutlery, then paused to calm down. “Is there a view?” she asked, clutching a bouquet of wet utensils.

  “Sinai is a mount, Lil. Of course there’s views. You got Burbank and Studio City right at your feet. Everywhere you look is a panorama. Bob is close to the top of the hill, don’t you remember?”

  “I remember the ground,” she said, drying her hands on a dish towel. “I remember the grass as we walked up the hill. When we got closer, I saw that the walls of the grave were moist and flat, the corners as sharp as they are in this room. I was glad—glad, can you imagine?—that it was like a room and not just a hole in the ground. The mound of soil next to the grave? I think they put a tarp over it so you almost believe the grave will never get filled, will always stay open to the air and light. After Kaddish, Rabbi Kaplan lifted a corner of the tarp, and I remember him handing you a shovel, Ed, and when you were done, he gave it to Ron, then Gary, then Bernard. He had to lay his hand on each of your shoulders and look into your eyes, nodding his head to let you know that God thought it was all right. It wasn’t, though, was it?”

  She looked at us as though she’d just realized we were sitting there. “Were there stones in the dirt—is that why the sound was so loud? Every shovelful made that loud hollow sound and scattered across the lid of the coffin. It was like a dream, each of you taking your turn and walking up to the grave with a shovel, and I wanted to shout to stop you from falling in, but as soon as I heard that sound I didn’t care how sad or frightened you seemed, how close you stood to the edge. All I thought was, How can they do this?”

  My father and I began to stammer in our own defense, but Mother raised a hand to shush us. “I meant, how can they stand to do this? I know you had to. No one else should have. No one. It has to be done by the ones who are already broken and can’t break anymore because of one shovelful of dirt. I was angry anyway. Who else was I going to blame? God? My son’s blood? The men who’d made the grave so straight? None of it makes sense. I’m just telling you, these are the things I remember, not the view.”

  The next minute got stuck in its slot. No one knew how to pry it loose. Finally I said, “There was a man I read about in Ripley’s Believe It or Not who spent a week underground in a special coffin. They fed him through a tube and everything. People could see his face in a little window and they got to ask him questions about what it was like to be buried.”

  Mother returned to the table. She lit a cigarette and leaned back in her chair. “He could say what it was like to be buried alive, maybe, but that’s not the same thing.”

  My father said, “Not by a long shot.”

  “Houdini promised he’d come back from the grave,” she continued, “and look where that got him.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Dead,” said Mother. She blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. It hovered over our heads like weather.

  “Be that as it may,” said Father, “he didn’t say when he was coming back. People are probably waiting for him as we speak, like they are for the second coming. Take it from me: whoever gets back first has a big advantage. It’s no good to be the second person to invent the wheel.”

  “Cheating death isn’t something you invent,” corrected Mother. “It’s something you do. If you’re lucky.” She recounted a story she’d read in Life about a “mystic yogi” who, through the power of his mind alone, could keep his heart from beating and didn’t need to breathe. Soon, the Miracle Chicken reared its headless neck. My father used its plight to illustrate the pros and cons of coming back. On the one hand, you’re alive; on the other, you have to die all over again.

  There arose the tempting idea of living forever. I said I wanted to.

  “It sounds good,” my father warned me, “until you read the fine print.”

  “What your father means is that the price for eternal life is having to grow older and older.” Mother gently stroked her neck. “Older than anyone we’ve ever seen.”

  “Older than a redwood,” I said.

  “It’s no picnic at fifty,” said my father, “so multiply that by a couple of centuries and see how you like it. Unless,” he reconsidered, “they figure out a way to arrest the aging process.”

  “Who’s going to figure that out?” Mother wanted to know.

  “The people whose business it is to take care of these things.”

  We switched philosophical positions at will, one of us a champion of resurrection or an advocate of extended longevity, the others finding loopholes, casting doubt. The point wasn’t to debate the issues with consistency. The point was to dodge a foregone conclusion, to leap from one diversion to the next. After losing Bob, we’d had our fill of death. We were sick of its grim contingencies.

  Brian signaled well in advance of the Forest Lawn exit. I couldn’t stop thinking about how insistently my parents and I had willed the topic off course that morning at breakfast, our evasion as tangible as the sensation of Brian’s car banking around the off ramp. We sailed along Forest Lawn Boulevard, the concrete channel of the Los Angeles River to our right. At night, taggers climbed over the cyclone fence and spray-painted the names of their gangs on the steep walls, loyalties trumpeted in brash colors. A Santa Ana was “in effect,” as the weathercasters said, the wind wicking moisture from everything it touched. Drought had left the river basin empty except for pools of standing water whose only current was the skyward pull of evaporation. It would take days of drenching tropical rain to turn these shallows into the murky torrent one saw on the nightly news whenever a careless child fell in and was either rescued by Caltrans workers or swept downriver to his death.

  On our left, the wrought-iron fence bordering Mount Sinai Memorial Park ran for a good half mile, its pickets tipped with ornamental spears. The technical distinction between a memorial park and a cemetery is determined by the presence of headstones. The Glendale branch of Forest Lawn is a cemetery renowned for its Carrara marble bas-reliefs, a stained-glass reproduction of da Vinci’s Last Supper, a scale replica of Michelangelo’s David, and a popular “museum store” that sells every sepulchral souvenir you could imagine short of an ashtray shaped like a cremation urn. Forest Lawn epitomizes the theme-park atmosphere envisioned by morticians of 1950s Los Angeles, whereas its sister institution, Mount Sinai, is characterized by a lack of tombstones and thematic statuary, a condition that stems, in part, from the Talmudic prohibition against idol worship. Instead, the dead are identified by evenly spaced grave markers flush with the earth and surrounded by a carpet of hardy Bermuda grass. Nothing distracts the eye from absen
ce.

  Today was the eleven-month anniversary of my father’s death, the last day his grave marker could be unveiled according to the Jewish laws of mourning. That I’d postponed the unveiling till the last possible minute may seem like negligence on my part, which it was, but I also had reason to procrastinate. It’s believed that this waiting period gives those close to the deceased enough time to reckon with the bleakest and most immediate phase of grief, which will better prepare them to see the intimate’s name inscribed on a bronze plaque, to take in the dates of birth and death—a span as brief as the dash between them—and to understand that, even though the body lay below the earth, moldering in its cocoon of burial clothes, the person to whom the body once belonged has been recollected from every angle, in every cast of light, scored into the survivor’s heart so often and with such painstaking intensity that, over time, the deceased has become miraculously animate and has taken up permanent residence in mourners’ memory. The longer I put off the unveiling, the more time my father had to settle into the chambers of my brain, to hang up his jumpsuit and make himself at home.