Little Casino

Shuffle off to Buffalo

WHEN HIS MOTHER DIED, HE WAS CIVIL, even somewhat friendly toward the handsome and correctly serious priest who had come to the hospital to administer extreme unction, which sacrament, he learned, was now called “anointing of the sick.” He was grateful, in his apostate’s ignorance, to be so enlightened. He had, after all, won, at the age of twelve, a certificate for Excellence in Religious Studies, signed by Monsignor Patrick J. O’Hara.

She was waked out of the same funeral home that had waked his grandmother, grandfather, and aunt. The mother of his closest boyhood friend came on the second night of the wake, embraced him, then knelt at the casket and wept more bitterly than he thought it possible for anyone to weep. He realized, not for the first time, that his mother had lived a life of her own, a life other than the one he recognized, a life wholly hidden from him, but known to others. He arranged for a High Requiem mass, and she was buried next to her mother in Holy Cross cemetery. He ordered a stone for her from Iavoni and Sons, to carry her name and dates of birth and death. After the stone had been finished and put in place, he learned that she was four years older than she had always claimed. Well, she had been a vain woman, proud of her looks and figure, meticulous in her dress, stiffnecked and vindictive yet “full of fun,” as she might say, and oddly puritanical and bawdy at once. She was perfectly willing to terminate friendships of years’ standing in an instant, and her overt sentimentalism was but a mask for her absolute toughness and contempt for most of the people she had to do with. She would have liked the mass, the black-and-silver vestments, the properly gloomy church, the singing and the candles: the works. That’s what she’d wanted, that’s what she got.

A month or so later, he went to the parish church she’d been buried out of and lighted a candle for her, but said no prayers. He sat in a pew, inhaling the coolly thin odor of wax and lingering incense in the air. He had spent years and years going to mass in this church, wherein he had been baptized, received his First Holy Communion, been confirmed. That he’d done his duty by his mother, relied on the church as she would have wanted him to, made him feel himself more remote than ever from this complex religion, more excluded from its enigmas and paradoxes. The abyss is just that, so he thought, and his mother was nowhere at all, gone, gone into the gloom of oblivion. He walked out into the familiar streets on which he had grown up into doubt and weakness and error. World without end? Shuffle off to Buffalo.

When all is said and done — lovely phrase — it has to be acknowledged that Roman Catholicism is not a Christian religion; or, to put it better, the neurotically cheerful, doom-obsessed, you-can-take-it-with-you hysteria of eccentric American Christianity has little to do with Roman Catholicism, which is, essentially, a mystery religion. All those worldly priests who can chat about mundane problems are but masks and diversions to hide the center of the faith from the general, snarling populace, lest they should see it for what it is: magic.

The woman who wept herself into hysteria was Katie DeLeon. Two other women, who also wept so uncontrollably that they had to be helped out of the viewing room, were Anna Claves and Mary Filippo. He sat with each of them, individually, on a small love seat outside of the funeral director’s office, and each gripped his hand and held white handkerchiefs, sodden with tears, to their streaming, swollen eyes. The handkerchiefs had lace edgings.

“Anointing of the sick” has a more hopeful sound to it than “extreme unction.” As if “the sick” may perhaps recover.

“Shuffle Off to Buffalo” was published in 1932, words by Al Dubin, music by the wondrous Harry Warren. Ginger Rogers and Ruby Keeler sang this song, and, of course, danced to it, on a Hollywood back-lot version of the Niagara Limited. The film was Forty-Second Street.

Al Dubin, Harry Warren, Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers, and the Niagara Limited are all dead. Let perpetual light shine upon them.