Audrey Rose

EPILOGUE

He had not come to the cemetery since his mother’s funeral more than three years before. He was not sure why he had come today. What had started out as a directionless Sunday spin in the new Camaro had somehow turned into a purposeful trip down U.S. 1 to Woodbridge, New Jersey. He had given it no prior thought. It was really the last place he cared to be on this warm, breezy, peaceful May afternoon.

To Brice Mack, cemeteries were not places of peace, but of turmoil. Of abrupt endings and dreams unresolved. Of bones and spirits linked together in an outcry of rage against a fate that is snappish, arbitrary and rude, heedlessly interrupting deeds in middoing, thoughts in midflight, words in midsentence.

Driving through the main gates and up the winding road to the crest of Beth Israel Cemetery, he brought the car to a sudden stop as he saw below him a wilderness of headstone stretching out as far as the eye could see. In three years the cemetery’s population had truly exploded. Had at least quadrupled. My God, he thought, so many in so short a time.

Easing up on the brake, he allowed the Camaro to inch its way down the hill into Beth Israel’s granite densities, heading not for the part set aside for individual plots, but for the substantial section apportioned into small communities, each one representing a lodge, society, or brotherhood from a city, township, or hamlet in the old country, permitting families, relatives, and friends to live together in death as they had lived in life, huddled in their tiny ghettos, landsmen forever.

The car moved slowly along the narrow street, flanked on either side by these settlements, each one fronted by elaborate posterns proudly bearing the town names. “RAWICZ INDEPENDENT BROTHERHOOD,” “THE CHILDREN OF CZERSK,” “PAUSZKOW LODGE 121,” “BOYS OF KRAJENSKIE,” were some of the names Brice Mack remembered passing on the two other occasions he had come to the cemetery. It surprised him to discover how surely he knew the route to the “STANISLAWOWER INDEPENDENT SOCIETY,” named for the Polish village where his parents were born, raised, were married, and from which they emigrated.

The marble gateposts prominently featured the names of the long-deceased first president, Jacob Gilbert; the vice-president, Oscar Goldfeder; the treasurer, Morris Pinkus; and the sergeant-at-arms, Max Ladner. Beneath the executives’ names were listed those of the membership in order of demise, Max Marmorstein’s preceding Sadie’s by seventeen names. The list had grown long in three years, Brice Mack sadly reflected. The membership had died off, seemingly all at once, choking the settlement with tombstones.

It was no hardship locating his mother and father’s plot. Denied of care, it stood out among its neighbors like a small patch of desert in a rich and fertile valley—abandoned, forgotten.

A sense of shame filled Mack as he bent down and tried to pull a dead weed from the dry, powdery soil near the stone, but its roots were deep and stubborn and resisted his strongest efforts. He rose to his feet, panting, resolving to stop by the office and order “Care” for his parents’ grave on the way out. At the very least, he could do that for them. Restore their pride. Allow them to hold up their heads again before their landsmen.

He felt a sting at his eyes, and tears began to blur the names on the double headstone. How little they had asked of him and how little he had given.

Still, they would be proud of him today. Momma especially. His future was assured now. It’s what she had always wanted for him—a future free of the doubts and uncertainties that had plagued her own life.

Well, Sadie would be pleased to know that from where he was standing now, the future looked mighty bright for her boy. The case of the decade won. A partnership in a firm with a Fifth Avenue address secured. A duplex apartment in Greenwich Village rented. New clothes bought. New car leased. Even the boss’ Bryn Mawr daughter, Cynthia, a serious romantic possibility. It was a Horatio Alger script, a delicious fantasy come true.

Whether or not he had earned it was immaterial. Though the case had not been won entirely by his own hand, there was no denying he had been the winner’s representative and the rightful beneficiary of a good part of the glory. Judge Langley was certainly making hay, stomping the countryside, indulging in a lot of bragging, name-dropping rhetoric, part the jurist, part the Buddhist monk. Even Scott Velie, the loser, had had his shot on the Johnny Carson Show.

And still—whenever the peculiar facts in the case came rushing back in the dead silence of a sleepless night, contradicting and distorting his carefully developed daytime explanations and rationales, he would have to admit that he didn’t really know what had happened and what the hell it had all been about. It was crazy, was all he knew for sure—the whole case was crazy, from its nutty start to its deadly finish.

A breeze rolled across the cemetery, rustling leaves and bending bushes. Brice Mack’s face reflected feelings too complex to disentangle. It happened whenever he thought of the little girl behind the mirror, choking, gasping for breath, dying—just as that other little girl had died in the car crash. He had known, even before Hoover’s Valkyrian wind-up, as everybody in that room must have known, that there was no hope of rescue for her—that all the doctors and needles and tubes down the throat would not alter her destiny, that her death had been preordained from the very beginning, from that very moment of dawning consciousness she had so graphically described to them during the hypnosis. It was this memory of the girl, the memory of her floating in her mother’s womb, that came stealing back at unsuspecting moments to taunt his skepticism and erode his confidence—and that would continue to do so, he knew, for the rest of his life.

Brice Mack sighed deeply and shook his head. Who knew? Who knew anything? Reincarnation. Rebirth. Another life. A thousand lives. An eternity of lives. Back and forth. Here and there. Was it true? Could it be? Were Max and Sadie watching him from some astral plan even now, shaking their heads and smiling reassurances down at him? Or were they already reborn, kicking up a fuss in a couple of Long Island baby carriages? Who knew? Who knew what was true? What was true was what was here before him—now. A Sunday in May. A warm breeze. A present that was real. A future that was potent, wholesome, and intact.

“Excuse, please—”

The man had approached from behind so that Brice Mack did not see him until he felt the soft touch of his hand on his own and heard the gentle voice.

“You want I should say a Yiskor for Max and Sadie?”

He was one of the men, Brice Mack remembered, who spent their days at cemeteries, plying God’s word at gravesides for a consideration. Hatted and flocked in unseasonable woolens, the pale eyes shone out of a face that was pure, unlined, and lightly bearded with silken hair.

“You want?” he prodded, smiling.

“Yeah, sure,” Brice Mack mumbled, seeking his billfold while the man produced a paper yarmulke and give it to him to cover his head. Brice took out a ten-dollar bill, then as an afterthought, made it twenty, and quickly wrote three names down on the back of a card. Handing the money and card over to the man, he said, “Include them in, too.”

The man scrutinized the names for a long moment in a puzzled way, silently saying the surnames to himself before asking. “They’re Jewish?”

“No.” Brice Mack replied. “Does it matter?”

The man thought a moment, then shrugged and smiled. “It can’t hurt,” he assured and, lowering his head, began to read from a slip of paper the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.

“Yiskor elohim nishmos ovi ve’imi, skeynay, Max, u’skeynosay, Sadie, es nishmas, James Beardsley Hancock, Ivy Templeton, Audrey Rose Hoover, baavur sheanee nodeir zdokoh baadom, bischar zeh tihyeno nafshosom zruros bizror hachayim im nishmos Avrohom, Yizchok ve’ Yaakov, Soroh, Rivkoh, Rocheil ve’Leyo, v’im sh’or zadikim vezidkonios sheb’gan Edne, venomar omain.”