He asked politely after my mother and my brother, and tried to remember precisely, in the Brooklyn way, the street and cross streets where our apartment was. He said, “Next door to the Chehabs, who have the bakery?” And I said yes.
He nodded thoughtfully. “Poor Pegeen,” he said, and pursed his lips to convey, professionally, both his regret for their loss and his complete resignation to what could not be undone. “There was a great beauty.”
I liked him well enough by then to believe he said this as a gallantry, not an error of memory.
“Nothing worse for a mother than to bury her child,” he said. “The worst days of my life are when we have to bury some mother’s child.”
His accent was all Brooklyn—nuttin, motha—but there was also some vestige of the brogue he might have had growing up—poorr Pegeen—that reminded me of my father.
The job was simple enough, as he explained it. In his twenty years of business, he had always had, he said, a young woman on the payroll. She would have nothing to do with the preparation of the bodies, of course. (I said, “Thank goodness,” surprising myself that I spoke out loud. Fagin laughed.) I was only to serve as a kind of hostess, greeting the mourners, directing them to the right room, collecting their Mass cards, and asking them to sign the book or to take their seats for the Rosary. At the home wakes, you stand at the door of the apartment, he said, you take coats, you indicate where the body is laid out. I would be especially helpful to him when they were holding a wake here at the funeral parlor and another in someone’s home, as the “older ones” still preferred, when it was sometimes difficult for him to be in two places at once.
He laughed again and said, “To tell you the truth, it’s always difficult for me to be in two places at once. You might say impossible,” and he raised his gingery eyebrows. I felt more relief still to see that he was not a solemn man.
He placed his elbows on his desk and held his hands before him. They were large, well-padded hands that nevertheless, perhaps because they were so pale, looked weightless. “Two things you’ll do for this establishment,” he said, “as I see it,” and moved his hands up and down as if measuring one against the other. “The first I’ll try and put”—he searched for the word—“delicately.” And raised his eyebrows again. “We are all men here,” he said, “me and my two assistants, although, of course, the bodies we receive are of men and women equally. Maybe more women, to tell you the truth. Husbands and sons and brothers go up to the coffin of their female relatives and they see the work we’ve done: the hair, the rouge, the nice burial dress. Without saying a word about it they might start thinking—I mean some of them, not all—that a certain lack of”—he paused and glanced with some concern over his big fingers and directly into my face, which I felt was growing warm—“privacy might have been involved in the preparation of the body.”
He paused again, looked at me for my reaction, and then smiled, as if he was satisfied that the worst of what he had to say was over. “Of course, no one mentions this. In my twenty years in the business, not a single husband or father or brother or son has ever said a word—about this, I mean—but I figure the thought has got to be there. So I’ve always had a woman in the business. Not to do the work, of course. Not to handle the bodies. Holy smoke.” And he let both weightless hands sink to the desk for a second, as if to recover from the thought. “But to provide some kind of answer for the men who might think about it, the privacy bit, if you see what I mean. They can tell themselves”—he altered his voice, making it suddenly pensive—’Well, he has that nice young woman who works for him. Maybe she’s the one who buttoned up her dress or put the lipstick on her or fixed her hair.’ And telling themselves this, they’re freed in a way. They don’t have to think about it no further.”
He paused again to gauge my reaction. I only nodded to show that I understood, although, to tell the truth (this, I was also to learn, was Mr. Fagin’s favorite refrain), I didn’t, not then.
In the green and golden tree behind him, the sun-struck leaves moved with the hopping shadows of birds. A sweet autumnal breeze came through the opened window, only briefly touched with the odor of back alley garbage.
“And then there’s this,” Mr. Fagin said, once more turning his attention to the two ideas he had cupped in his broad hands. “The vigil, whether it’s long or short, is a burden on the brain. I don’t mean the wake,” he said quickly. “The wake is more of a relief than most people realize. I mean the vigil before someone dies. You probably know this from your own poor father”—poorr fadah—“No one had to tell me when I got the body here that he’d had a terrible ordeal. I could see it for myself. And after a long sickness like that, every brain of every person who stood vigil is numb. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this.” And I averted my eyes for a moment, dropped them to my lap so they would not fill with tears. I had spent the vigil for my father in the hospital’s lobby, reading magazines, watching various strangers pass by, many of them carrying cones of flowers or teddy bears, some of them crying. It was my mother and Gabe who had stood by my father’s bed.
“And a sudden death is no different—worse, I think,” Mr. Fagin said. “Look at Pegeen. Because when there’s a sudden death, everybody thinks about all the days before, the days that were a vigil, after all, a vigil everyone was living through but nobody knew it.” He shook his shoulders, seemed to shudder a little. “Worse,” he said. “But here’s where you come in.” He flattened out his right hand and extended it toward me, as if to say, Here you are. “You are the consoling angel,” he said, indicating me with his big hand. “The very sight of you gives comfort to a weary eye.” He snapped the extended fingers into a fist, leaving only the thick thumb, which he shook at the bookcase over his shoulder. “In Charles Dickens’s day and age,” he said, “they always had child mourners. Professional child mourners. I got the idea from him. It’s in Oliver Twist, the book that besmirches my good name.” He smiled wryly. “Have you read David Copperfield?”
And because I wasn’t yet sure I wanted the job, I had no impulse to lie. “No,” I said. I had read A Christmas Carol at Manual and had been frustrated to learn that no one could say, not even my English teacher, if Scrooge had indeed been visited by spirits or had only dreamed it.
“You should,” Mr. Fagin said. And suddenly he stood to take the book from the shelf. He was a large, broad man in his suit, and yet his small head made him seem younger than he was. As he turned back to me with the book in his hands, one of the remaining volumes tilted softly into the empty space. It would remain just so my ten years at Fagin’s until I returned the book to him on my last day—married by then and expecting my first child—apologizing that I just kept losing the thread of the tale.
Mr. Fagin sat down again and slid David Copperfield across his desk. I took the book in my gloved hand and placed it on my lap. It was heavier than a missal.
“They knew what they were doing in those days,” Mr. Fagin continued. “It’s rest for the weary eye at the end of a long vigil, the sight of someone young, a lovely young woman such as yourself. It reminds us of life. Life again, which is also the hope of resurrection.”
He was silent for a moment, assessing me. Now my cheeks were burning. I had never before heard myself referred to as a lovely young woman. Then he looked down into his own palms, as if to be sure he had given full measure to each one of the two things he had intended to say. He placed his hands on the desk again and looked up.
“Is that your only suit?” he asked.
The question surprised me. I said yes, and then added, not even sure yet I wanted the job, “I can always borrow another.”
“Have you got some nice dresses?” he asked.
I said yes again, but without much conviction, and he said, as if to himself, “Probably high-school things. Skirts and sweaters.”
I said, “Sure.”
“Dresses will be better for visiting hours,” he said. “Wool, in dark colors, but not black. Navy or deep green is good. Trim and neat. El
egant. With a touch of perfume behind the ears. Betty uses Evening in Paris.”
He reached into his desk drawer and took out a small card, slid it across the desk. “Muriel in the ladies’ department at Abraham & Straus downtown. Go see her. She knows her stuff. She’ll help you pick something out. I’ve got an account. Buy yourself five nice dresses and put them on my account. Bring your mother, too. Your mother knows good quality. You won’t go wrong.”
I picked up the card and slipped it between the pages of the book.
Again he studied my face. “Can you see without those glasses?” he asked.
“Pretty well,” I said, lying, because now I did want the job. I had never in my life bought five new dresses all at once. It was a struggle to get my mother to pay for just one every season. Five at once. I had never even heard of such a thing.
“Take them off,” he said, and I did. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
The sun on the golden leaves behind him was strong enough to smear his pink hand with light.
“Two,” I said.
He laughed. “Three. But you didn’t squint. Good for you. Nothing worse than a four-eyed girl squinting. You can wear them here in the office, but take them off when you’re at a wake. I don’t think you’ll fall down any stairs.”
I nodded and slipped my glasses back on. He studied me again. “You’ll be fine,” he said.
He stood and I stood, and once again he wordlessly directed me to the door. In the paneled vestibule he held out his hand. It was large and soft and gentle in its grip. The hands that had received my poor father’s ravaged body. Just beyond him I could see a room with chairs and flowers and the edge of a shining coffin. I looked back at Mr. Fagin, the thick book tucked against my chest as if I had just come from church. My hand was still in his, and I knew in an instant, as if it was something I could actually recall, that it was Fagin who had lifted me to kiss Pegeen Chehab in her coffin, all those years ago.
The job proved to be as simple as he had described it. I followed Betty, a robust brunette, for a week, and from then on did as Betty had done, speaking softly but saying little and staying mostly out of the way while the friends and relatives of the deceased gathered to console and to gossip and, not infrequently, to argue with one another in hushed and furious whispers. I rode in the hearse, in the front seat beside the driver, to cemeteries all over the city—up to the Bronx, out to Queens, even to Long Island, which I had seen before only during the long train ride to Gabe’s seminary. I stood behind the mourners with my heels sinking into the dirt as the vigil came to a close in what felt like country sunlight or tree-muffled rain, among the gray cityscape of tombstones. I glanced into leafy neighborhoods where I resolved someday I would live, and when I came back to the funeral parlor with a bit of sun on my cheeks or grass on my good shoes Mr. Fagin joked that he wouldn’t have to sponsor a Fresh Air kid this year, I was it.
On occasion I saw, and began to understand, the first point Mr. Fagin had tried to make that morning. A grieving husband or father might look on the old wife or the young daughter, nodding sadly at the words of comfort—she looks so lovely, so peaceful, her beauty restored—and then suddenly glance up and around. Even without my glasses, I could make out how their eyes fell on Fagin himself in the back of the room, or on one of his young assistants at the door, and for an instant I could almost see it, glasses or no: the unwelcome thought of what the wife’s, the mother’s, the daughter’s body—at Fagin’s we said simply “the body”—had been through in the hours since her death. Who had touched her and how. And then they would look at me and an answer of sorts would be provided; they would, perhaps even without knowing it, rest assured.
The second point, the one that had to do with David Copperfield, was less clear. But I began to have a sense of this, too, as the weeks went by. I dotted Evening in Paris behind my ears and on my wrists, and the scent, along with the good dresses from A&S, and the expensive heels my mother had provided, seemed to raise my station in life, seemed to lend me a maturity I had not had before. I saw grown women, women my mother’s age, duck their heads shyly when I quietly greeted them at the funeral parlor door. Old men gratefully took my hand or steadied themselves on my extended arm. Young men who might not have given me a second glance on the street touched their hearts and whispered, “Thank you, thank you very much,” when I directed them to a chair or handed them a remembrance card as they were leaving. Once, and then twice, and then three times over the course of my first year at Fagin’s, one of these young men was waiting for me when I left the funeral parlor or the apartment house at the end of the evening, waiting to ask for my name.
Never once did I have to venture to the basement of the place, although I grew to recognize the particular odor of what went on down there when it wove its way through the heavier scents of the funeral flowers, and my perfume, and the general Brooklyn air: a cloying, vinegary smell that wafted up on occasion but quickly dissipated if I opened a window or fanned the front door. But neither did I fear, after the first few weeks, the sight of the corpse laid out in its coffin at the front of the room.
If the body was a child’s, rare enough but not uncommon in my time at Fagin’s, I would simply leave my glasses off and avert my eyes. I learned how to drift out of the room at the sound of a mother’s keening. Despite the many times, over the years, I had thought of Pegeen Chehab as I stood at the head of a long set of stairs, I never considered until I got to Fagin’s the variety of missteps that might take a child from the world: burst appendix, whooping cough, consumption, pneumonia, lead poisoning, the infection from a dog bite once (an angel, Mr. Fagin had said, of the little girl), and accidents, accidents. Run over, drowned, electrocuted by a table fan; one lanky boy had tried to leap between rooftops and fell instead into the lightless areaway—even in his coffin you could see how new his body had been to him.
Later I would tell my own children when they complained that as a mother I had been overcautious about the simplest things, anxious, superstitious, plagued by dreams of disaster: “You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen what I’ve seen.”
But I quickly came to feel that there was a numbing sameness about the full-grown dead, young or old, male or female. It might have had to do with the particularities of Mr. Fagin’s art—I’d heard the two assistants complaining more than once about his heavy-handedness with rouge—it might have been that every mortician, like any artist, from Al Capp to Leonardo da Vinci, had his own recognizable style, a style that could make everyone look alike.
But it was also, I came to believe, the very lifelessness of the bodies that made them all somehow indistinguishable and anonymous. Although it was a favorite refrain among the mourners, there was never any question in my mind that the body at the front of the room was “only sleeping.” No natural sleep looked like that, no eyes that might flutter open again were ever stitched closed in just that way. And then there was the feel of them, of hand or cheek or arm: stiff and cold and as hard as if they’d been stuffed with horsehair. Even among the many faces I knew—I saw, in my years with Fagin, my fifth grade teacher, Dora Ryan’s father, the man who sold Italian ices from a pushcart, old Mrs. Fagin, Mr. Chehab, and, of course, Bill Corrigan himself—there was little continuity between the living and the dead. I was some months at Fagin’s before I found the courage to reach into a coffin to adjust a curl or a fallen pair of rosaries, or to brush away an errant bit of lipstick, but having done it once, I was quickly cavalier.
When the boys who waited for me outside the wake, and then later, the uniformed young men who began to fill the city once the war began, asked how I could bear it—being in the presence of the dead day after day—I blew smoke into the air and laughed casually. “They’re just bodies,” I would say. “Like dolls. Like empty shells. Might as well be a sack of potatoes.”
A starting point, on more than one occasion, for the boys’ own arguments, later in the evening, when they slipped their hands inside my blouse or over my stockings, “
We’re only bodies, after all, just dolls.” It was an argument I was more often than not happy to let them make, up to a point. By the time I reached my twenties, my heartbreak was mended, I suppose—much as the notion of what might have been still lingered: the bright wedding in the pretty church, not to mention that house in the country—but I was no fool.
I said as much to Gabe very late one evening—early morning, in fact, the dawn just striking the kitchen window, lighting up the curtain in the dining room but not yet reaching the couch where he sat in his robe and his slippers, a book in his hands, waiting up for me. I had come in from a date with a GI whose mother we had buried just yesterday. He was a quiet boy, somewhere in the middle of a pack of twelve children. The children, and the various aunts and uncles and cousins who attended them, had filled Fagin’s parlor and hallway and vestibule with thunderous shouts of laughter and greeting and argument and conversation and tears. So many people that when the priest led them all in the Rosary at the end of each night, the volume of their collective response—Holy Mary, Mother of God—was enough, Fagin said, to blow the feathers off the wings of the Angel Gabriel himself.
But Rory, my date, was a subdued young man, skinny and long-faced. I had taken his cap from him when he first came in, and for the next three days he was my shadow. Homely, from what I could see of him. In uniform already, home from Camp Crowder to bury his mother and back to soldiering tomorrow—today, I corrected myself, explaining it all to Gabe. After the funeral and the drive to Gate of Heaven, we’d had dinner together, seen a movie, and then I had gone with him to his house to get his kit. There was some crisis with the plumbing, there were children in pajamas everywhere, holding their noses, crying, laughing, battering one another with what looked like broomsticks and plungers, the chaotic world happily closed up over their mother’s disappearance. It seemed hardly a one of them noticed that the poor guy was leaving. So out of sympathy alone, I told Gabe, I went with him to the station to wait for his train, where we necked ferociously (I didn’t tell Gabe this) and shared a bag of doughnuts and a fifth of whiskey (nor this) until 5:15.
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