30 Pieces of a Novel

The Burial

HIS MOTHER DIES and he makes plans for the funeral. Days before, in the hospital, when she was still lucid, she said she didn’t want any funeral-home service. “Too expensive. They charge a fortune to rent a chapel and a little side room and for all their employees to act as ushers and doormen, and it’s also so unnecessary. Why should people, if they want to see the whole thing through, have to come to the chapel and cemetery both? And in addition some even to the funeral home the night before, just to view my cheap coffin and pay their respects to you, and I want it to be the cheapest so you don’t go broke for a stupid box, and I also don’t want you opening it once I’m inside. Have it at the cemetery only. Open air and light, even if it’s raining, is better than the solemn nonsense and awful recorded organ music of a chapel. A few people I knew saying brief things about me if they want or just praying to themselves or together from some little prayer book the cemetery could loan you, or even staring at their feet or into space if they like, and then drop me in the ground between your father and brother, and you go home. If the whole thing takes more than half an hour, starting from the time you get there till you leave, then it’s taken too long. People’s time shouldn’t be wasted for things like that. It’s already enough they had to get there.” “That’s why a funeral home might not be a bad idea, in spite of the expense, if we have to talk about it now,” and she said, “We do. If you’re not going to be the practical one, then I have to, so what were you saying?” “I was saying I could find a home in the city. People wouldn’t even have to drive their cars to it, if they lived there and weren’t planning on going to the cemetery. They can come by cab or subway or bus, and for some who live on the Upper West Side, where I think the best place is, they can even walk. Then the ones that also want to go to the cemetery can go in my car or someone else’s if someone else who comes has one, or even a limo I’ll hire if there are that many people coming. I mean, how much can one cost? The cemetery’s not that far away, if I remember. The rest will feel they’ve paid their respects and did their duty and so on by coming to the service or to the funeral home the night before, if they also did that, and they can go back to work or home. But please let’s drop the subject,” and she said, “Who are all these people you’re expecting? If you get six, tops, it’ll be a lot, or seven, right? but don’t look for a crowd. That’s also why the funeral-home service makes no sense. You’ll have to get someone to conduct it — a rabbi or some expert in Jewish religious services the home gets for you — and you want him speaking to a practically empty audience? The cemetery: have it all there. And don’t let them do anything to my body for it. Put me in the pine box straight from the hospital, store me for the night someplace — if it’s got to be at the funeral home, let it be — then ship me to the gravesite the next day in the cheapest conveyance allowable, and that’ll be it. All this is almost a favor I’m asking of you. Since I won’t be in any position to argue, do what you want except to cremate me. Even though I’ll be gone at the time—dead, why not just say it, what else do I expect will happen to me by the end of the week? — the thought of all that fire scares me. If you don’t promise you won’t cremate me, I swear it will kill me sooner. Worms and bugs and whatever else is underground don’t make me feel that much easier, but I just think if there is a soul in your body and it doesn’t get completely out of it once you die, it won’t survive those terrific temperatures. Besides, I’m leaving you almost no money. I don’t have much, that’s why, since whatever I had or Dad left me was mostly used up to keep me alive the last few years and for someone to look after me. So why waste what’s left plus some of your own on even a simple chapel service when you also have to go through one at the cemetery? I know the burial will also have to cost something. But so would anything you do — cremation; hiring a boat to drop me in the ocean, which by law you can’t do — so we know there’s a minimum you have to spend on this. You can’t, unfortunately, I’m saying, just make me disappear. I wouldn’t even have a rabbi or any kind of burial professional at the grave, since they can set you back a bundle too. Just ask the cemetery to get one of those little old religious guys who hang around the cemetery, and who know the right prayers for the dead, and slip him a twenty to read some passages over me and maybe to point something out for you to read. Or conduct it any way you want on your own, with you, or whoever has come there, reading or speaking whatever you want. In the end, what’s the difference? And I don’t say that to you that way to make a joke. Let’s face it, dead is dead, and I know that whatever you say and read and however you say it, even if it comes out fumblingly, is meant well.”

He decides to have the body sent to that West Side funeral home, put in the cheapest pine coffin they have there, and with nothing done to the body, not even washed or reclothed, since once she’s in the coffin and it’s closed nobody’s going to see her again, and next morning sent by simple van to the cemetery for a short burial ceremony, though he doesn’t know what he’s going to do there yet. His wife’s cousin and her husband will meet him there, same with his mother’s best friend from her street, whose son will drive her and the woman who took care of his mother the last two years. Later that day, someone from the funeral home calls him and asks if he wants her marriage bands removed from her finger — she added his father’s band to her own when his father died — before she’s put in the casket, and he says, “Oh, God, she never told me what to do about that, and I don’t know. She should probably be buried with them, right?” and looks at his wife and points to his own band and she points to her chest and shakes her head, she doesn’t want them, and the man says, “Look, yes or no, because we won’t be able to get them off later without, if you’ll excuse me, chopping off her finger. And that, unless it was absolutely necessary for some other reason, I’m not allowing any of my workers to do,” and he says, “Then okay, leave them on. They’re hers, whatever that means, and eventually I’d just lose them.”

The next day, on the way to the cemetery with his wife and two girls, he blurts out, “Damn, just thought of something. I mean I’ve been thinking and thinking what I’ll say at the ceremony after someone reads a couple of prayers, and simply decided to say what comes naturally but to keep it brief. But there’s a poem she loved, and though she didn’t mention it when she talked the other day about everything she wanted and didn’t want after she died, except for the wedding bands — do you think I made the right decision on that?” and his wife says, “Too late, don’t even think of it.” “But the kids might have wanted them for when they’re older,” and his younger daughter says, “What?” and his wife says, “Nothing, we’re not going to talk about it. It’d be totally futile and it wouldn’t seem right. What’d you start out to say?” and he says, “I remember a couple of years ago when she was very sick and I was called to New York and we thought she was dying … we’re talking about Grandma, of course”—to his girls—“and she said if there’s one thing she wanted read at her funeral — but not by a rabbi, she added — it was an Emily Dickinson poem about dying. She gave me the title but I can’t remember it, though I probably wrote it down then,” and his wife says, “I don’t think hers had official titles. They were all the first lines of her poems, weren’t they? Either she decided on titling them that way or someone did it for her after she died and the poems were found. Wasn’t that her?” and his older daughter says, “Who, Grandma again?” and he says, “Emily Dickinson, a poet of the last century. And it was her, I’m sure.” “Oh, I know her. We read her in the advanced humanities class I took, but I can’t remember any of them now or anything about them except they were all short.” “There’s one very beautiful one I recall,” his wife says, “that starts, ‘Because I could not stop for death,’ and then goes on, ‘so death stopped for me,’ or something,” and he says, “That’s it, her favorite, or one of them. She used to read me them when I was a boy. And for years she kept a copy of all the poems on her night table — there weren’t many, or, as Fanny said, they were all short. The collected works in one volume, plus the letters, I think, or some of them. I haven’t seen the book around in a long time, and before that one day in the hospital she hadn’t brought up Dickinson in years. It’s probably still in her apartment somewhere, or someone borrowed it and never gave it back — it could even have been me — or she just read it till it fell apart. No, I could never have taken it from her; it had been by her bedside for maybe ten years and you don’t borrow a book like that, nor loan it out. Did she say then that it was at home and I should get it from there? I don’t remember. But I have to read that poem at the burial. It might be all I’ll read or say, in fact, except that this was one of her favorite poems, maybe her favorite, and that Dickinson was her favorite poet, or certainly among her favorites, and the only one whose book she had by her bedside so long, if I’m remembering right. And that she used to read them to me and I thought this one appropriate to read today, because of all I’ve said about it and its contents — the poem’s — and so on. Do you remember the rest of the poem?” he says to his wife. “It’s short, right? You can write it down for me, or one of the girls can; you can just recite it,” and his younger daughter says, “I’ll write it down — I’ve a pad and pen with me,” and Fanny says, “No, I will; I know her works, or read her, and those first two lines Mommy said I especially remember and won’t need her to repeat,” and he says, “Either of you, so long as it’s written clearly,” and his wife says, “I only know those two, I’m afraid; the second’s ‘He kindly stopped for me.’” “That’s right, that’s right,” he says. “Think, come on, remember; Josephine, get your pen and pad out,” and his wife says, “I can’t; that’s it, a blank: ‘Because I could not stop for death,’ and ‘He kindly stopped for me.’” “Then I’ll stop in a town on the way — we’ve time — and buy it at a bookstore if there’s one, or an anthology of some sort with that poem in it. It’s one of her most popular, so it’d be in one. And every bookstore must have an anthology like that or a collection of her poems, or at a bookstore at a nearby mall where most of them seem to be now,” and his wife says, “But there could be people waiting for us already. I think even the receptionist in your mother’s doctor’s office said she was coming. And the funeral-home people with the coffin in their van. They all expect you to be the first one there, and for the funeral people, probably for some paperwork to fill out or sign.” “Then this is what. I’ll drop you all off. Anything to sign, you do it; you’re my wife. If anyone’s there or they come, tell them to wait, I’ll be back soon. As far as the funeral-van people: well, they can just put the box over the grave; the rest is up to the cemetery. Good thing no rabbi, though. If we had one and he was there he wouldn’t let me go because he’d probably have a wedding to run in an hour or another funeral somewhere and he couldn’t give us even five minutes more than what we hired him for. I’ll go to the nearest store and buy the book. I won’t be more than half an hour. If it takes more, I’ll drop it. A half hour from the time I leave you might just be when I told everyone the service would start anyway. And tell them I’ll keep the ceremony shorter even than I had planned to. Ceremony, service, whatever you want to call it: fifteen minutes, if that.” “Please don’t look for any book,” she says. “Why not just talk about the poem? Read the first two lines … read them twice, three times; they’re that good and right for a funeral service. After that, say you don’t know the other lines, but tell what Dickinson’s poetry meant to your mother: the night table, reading them to you, all that. And how you wanted to read all of this poem, how you almost even started out from the cemetery to get the book at the last minute—” and he says, “No, that’s all circling around to avoid it, and dishonest — on my part — and lazy, because this is what she wanted. She told me that first time two years ago and then again about a year later, I just remembered; I think we were in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. Didn’t say anything about it this last time in the hospital, but she was on drugs and not clear-headed—” and she says, “What do you mean? You said she was about as lucid and articulate and well-informed as you’ve seen her recently, using the big words she loved and with you having a long and absorbing personal conversation with her as you haven’t had in years,” and he says, “She was still on medication, and I think a painkiller, and being fed intravenously, and anyway, not clear all the time … dozing off, sleeping a lot. Besides—” and she says, “I don’t know how much to believe you,” and he says, “Yes, believe me. Besides, maybe she thought I already knew about her poem wish and didn’t want to repeat herself. That she didn’t want me feeling she thought I had a lousy memory and that she had to say things over and over again for them to sink in. After all, she told me at least twice before. Listen, you have to see how important this is to me. I don’t want to put you and the kids in a bind, but this’ll be my last good thing to her, or last chance to do it, rather, besides how much it’ll help me get through the day. If I can’t find the Dickinson collection or that particular poem in an anthology, or one close to it on death or immortality or the ending of life and transmigration of the soul or something, I swear I’ll give up after the first store and rush right back.”

He drops them off at the burial site. Nobody’s there yet, not even the van or the prayer reader he called the cemetery for late yesterday. A secretary in the cemetery office tells him how to get to town and says there are two bookstores there—“Lots of people must read around here, and perhaps there are two stores because the nearest mall is fifteen miles away”—and he drives there in five minutes. Both stores are on the main street. The first is really just a used paperback shop, with mostly romances, spy fiction, mass paperbacks of every sort, and the only poetry is religious; St. Augustine is in this section, plus several of the same editions of a book of poetry by the pope. The second store has an anthology of twentieth-century American poetry and books of poems by poets like Hardy, Whitman, and Blake but no Dickinson. “I know we had one,” the salesman says. “The Everyman edition: hardback, complete works, and only eleven dollars — a steal. Ah, it was sold, it says here,” looking at the inventory record on the computer screen by the cash register. “Last week, May third. I could order a copy today,” and he says, “No time; I need it right away.” “Try the library; they should have it if Miss Dickinson hasn’t been assigned as a class project at one of the local schools,” and he says, “Great idea, why didn’t I think of that?” and at the library down the street he locates a volume of Dickinson poems with the one he wants in it and goes up to the main desk and says, “Excuse me, I don’t live in this area; I’m not even a resident of New Jersey. But I’d like to borrow this book just for an hour or so,” and the librarian says, “If you want to sit here and read it, that’s fine, but we can’t loan a book to a non-New Jersey resident.” “Let me explain why I need it,” and he does, points out the poem, and she says, “I’m sorry, I appreciate your reason and offer my condolences, but it’s a bylaw of our town’s library system I’d be breaking if I loaned you the book. In the past we’ve had every excuse imaginable for loaning books to nonresidents, and if we see a fifth of them returned we call ourselves lucky. Try to imagine what that figure would be if—” and he says, “Believe me, I’ll return it. I’ll drive back here right after the burial. You can even call the cemetery — I have the number here — to see if my mother’s being buried today,” and she says, “Whether you’re telling the truth or not—” and he says, “I am,” and she says, “Then even though you are telling the truth, which is what I meant to say, it’s strictly prohibited to give loaning privileges to people without valid library cards of this town. If they have cards from other New Jersey localities, then that town’s library has to request the book for them and it’s sent to that library through the state’s interlibrary loan system.” “Look, I have people waiting at the cemetery for me; the burial service was supposed to start five minutes ago. Not a lot of people — I don’t want to lie to you — but my wife and daughters and my wife’s cousin and her family from Brooklyn — they drove all the way from there to come — and other people; cemetery personnel, et cetera. Again, it was among my mother’s favorite poems and to have it read at her funeral was really one of her last wishes. But because I was so upset over her death yesterday — confused, everything — I forgot, and we didn’t — I didn’t; I’m the only surviving child — have a regular funeral; this is the only ceremony we’re having. And when I was driving to the cemetery I suddenly realized—” and she says, “I wish I could. What if I photocopied the poem for you?” and he says, “I thought of that as a solution. But I want to hold a book — not a Bible, not a prayer book, since she didn’t go for that stuff at funerals or really anywhere, but a book of poems — and read from that. Look, I’ll leave a deposit. Ten dollars, twenty, and when I return the book I’ll donate the money to the library,” and she says, “This book”—turning to the copyright page—“is more than forty years old. In excellent condition for a book that’s been circulating that long. Maybe it’s the delicacy of the poetry that makes readers handle the book delicately, though I don’t want to engage in that kind of glib speculation here. I don’t know what it originally cost, nor do I know what this copy’s worth now. Fifty dollars, perhaps, though more likely five, but around twenty to replace. I’m not a rare book collector, so that’s not my point. We simply can’t be loaning works to out-of-state residents because they’re willing to give money to the library. That policy would mean only the more privileged among you can borrow from us, which wouldn’t be the right perception for a library to give.” “Okay, okay, I’ll try and get the book somewhere else,” and starts back to the poetry shelves with it, and she says, “You can leave it here, sir; I’ll reshelve it,” and he says, “Nah, I’ve put you through enough already,” and she says, “Thank you then, but please make sure it’s in the right classificatory order,” and once there he thinks, Take the photocopy; better than nothing. Have her copy two or three different Dickinson poems; they’re all there in that last Resurrection-and-something section he just saw…. No, you want what you said you did and that’s a book to read from and not some flimsy photocopy sheet, and this edition particularly because it has a real old-book look, and he looks around, doesn’t seem to be anyone else here but her, and sticks the book inside his pants under the belt. Feels it, it feels secure; he’ll take it for the day, return it by mail tomorrow with a donation and his apologies, won’t give his name or a return address, of course. Though she can probably find out who he is, if she wants, from the cemetery, for how many burials can there be there at this hour in one day? and he gave her enough information to give himself away. But what is she going to do, get the police to arrest him in Baltimore or New York for stealing a book for a day after he sent it back carefully wrapped and in the same condition and with a ten- or twenty-dollar bill?

Alarm goes off as he’s leaving. She’s looking at him from behind the main desk. “Oh, Christ,” he says, “who the hell thought you’d have these books electronically coded in such a small library. Here, take it, will ya?” and sets it on a chair by the door, and she says, “Oh, no, mister, you’re not getting off as lightly as that. I don’t believe your mother-burial story one iota now. And don’t think of bolting or I’ll follow you outside and take down your license number,” and dials her phone and says, “Officer Sonder? … Anyone, then, though he’s the one I’ve dealt with so far for this particular problem. Amy LeClair at the library. I have a man here whom I caught stealing one of our items …. A book, but a potentially valuable one, and I believe he knew it …. Thank you,” and turns to him and says, “He says for you to wait; a police car will be right over,” and he says, “Call back and tell him I can’t; to catch me at the cemetery on Springlake,” and she says, “Leave now and you’ll be in even deeper water. We’ve lost too many books and documents as it is, and this is the only way to stop this kind of petty crime that tallies up for us to grand larceny.” What to do? Take the book, read the poem at the burial, and then tell everyone what he did and wait for the cops there, or leave it and go and just hope they don’t come after him, or wait for the cops here? Surely they’re not going to arrest him. “Do you mind, while I wait, if I call the cemetery to hold up the burial?” and she says, “If that is whom you’ll call,” and he says, “Then you dial for me — I have the number right here, or get it out of the phone book,” and she says, “I’d rather not waste anymore of the library’s money by using the phone, even for a local call. We have restrictions regarding that too. We’re barely surviving, you know. People aren’t exactly putting this institution in their wills.” “Then will a dollar cover the phone cost?” and she says, “I’d also rather not take money from you. Who knows what that’d imply.” Just then a policeman comes in. Gould explains quickly. She says, “Nothing for me to add; whatever his reasons for the theft were, he just admitted he was caught walking out with one of our books,” and the policeman says to him, “Looks like I’ll have to write out a summons or even arrest you if Miss LeClair insists I do,” and she says, “I don’t think we have to go that far, but certainly a summons.” The policeman starts writing one out. “This means you’ll have to appear in county court in a number of weeks. Unless you check the ‘no contest’ box on the court notification you get and request to be fined through the mail and the judge accepts it,” and he says, “Okay, but please hurry it up. I don’t mean to sound disrespectful, but there are all those people waiting at the cemetery for me, and I still have my mother to bury,” and the policeman says, “No disrespect meant either, sir, but I can do it much faster with machines at the station house if that’s what you want.”

Only his wife and children are at the cemetery when he gets there, sitting on a bench several plots away; casket’s on a few planks above the open grave. “By the time your message got to us,” his wife says, “Rebecca and everyone else had left. They all had to be somewhere later this afternoon and didn’t know when you’d get back. They were concerned about you, paid their respects to you through me, and said a few words of their own to your mother. You’ll tell me everything later, all right? Now we should get the cemetery people to help us get the coffin in the ground.” “Did you get the poem, Daddy?” his younger daughter says, and he says, “Oh, the poem; Jesus, I even forgot to get it photocopied. I could have before but this librarian, you can’t believe it, she gave me the option to, but I wanted to hold the whole book, this beautiful old hardbound copy of Dickinson, as if it were a religious book, rather than read from this skimpy transient sheet—” and his wife says, “What are you talking about?” and he says, “The poem. ‘Because I could not stop for Death.’ There’s a capital D in Death. The prayer guy ever show up?” and she says, “He waited awhile, then said he had to go to another gravesite, and made some prayers over her coffin and left.” “So let’s do it ourselves, though we’ll have to get the cemetery workers to lower the box once we’re done. Maybe that’s all it should be anyway, since we’re the only ones left of her family who are still semisound.”

He drives to the office, returns with a cemetery official and two gravediggers in a truck behind him, and standing in front of the grave says, “Please, now let the funeral and burial and service and everything else begin. Sally, do you have anything to say?” and she says, “Just that we all loved you, Beatrice, very much. You were always wonderful to be around, wise in your ways, delightful to the girls, and, because you’re Gould’s mother, special to me, and we’re profoundly sorry to see you go. Kids?” and the older shakes her head and starts crying and the younger says no and then, “Yes, I have something. Goodbye, Grandma. I wish I knew you longer and when you were younger, and I feel extra bad for Daddy. And I love you too and am sorry to have you die and be buried.” “Thank you, dears,” he says. “As for me, if I mention the word love and how I feel I’ll blubber all over the place and won’t be able to continue. So to end the service, because I’ve kept everyone here way too long, I’d like to read something — I mean, recite — and very little because it’s all I know. I tried to get more but that’s another story, Mom, so just two lines of an Emily Dickinson poem you like so much. ‘Because I could not stop for Death’ … what is it, Sally?” and she says, “‘He kindly stopped for me.’” “Right. ‘Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me. Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me. Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me.’ Amen. Now if you gentlemen will lower the coffin, we’ll go home.”