The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™: 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

My Father Died Young

Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July 1965.

There is no way better calculated to recall old times and old places than opening the grave of a person you once knew long ago. It was not actually a grave, though. It was merely a niche in the wall of my family mausoleum, which stood aloof and slightly apart within an iron picket fence in the cemetery east of town.

Nor did I do the opening myself. It was done by competent workmen, hired for the purpose with official sanction, while I waited at the open door of the old tomb and looked out across green grass and gray headstones, scoured by a morning rain and now drying in the afternoon sun. I could smell red clover in a nearby field.

When had I come with my mother to bury my father in this old place? It was a long time ago, but a time easily remembered, for there were associations vivid enough and grim enough to have impressed even a ten-year-old boy. It was a time of soup kitchens and doles and idle men. A man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt had just been nominated for the presidency of his country, and in the fall he would be elected.

There was unrest everywhere at that time, and in the midwest there was an extraordinary number of bank robbers, although the banks, unfortunately, were failing fast enough, without help. It was, in brief, 1932, and my father died in August of that year.

The best that can be said of him is that he was a young man. Otherwise, he was sadly deficient in the qualities that make a good husband and father, and my mother’s marriage to him was a mistake she eventually regretted. He had no capacity to earn money or to apply himself for any length of time to constructive work, but his faults were not all negative. He had more than his share on the positive side, and the quality I remember most vividly was his insatiable appetite for bootleg gin. Not that he was ever abusive or brutal; he was merely indifferent to his family responsibilities.

However, my mother and I did not go hungry. In fact, we did not want for anything. Her family had accumulated some money and property in our town, and my memory of the depression was fixed mainly by things that hardly touched me personally. My maternal grandfather had been a prosperous undertaker, and my Uncle Ned had succeeded to his trade and condition. Folk must bury their dead in any time, good or bad, and there is usually a small insurance policy to guarantee payment for services.

Uncle Ned used to complain about the depression and make a great show of pinching pennies, but he gave us a generous allowance every month, and delivered it promptly along with a stereotype lecture to my mother on the foolishness of young girls who married wastrels and drunkards before they were old enough to make sound judgments.

My father died suddenly. He was, as I have said, a young man. To me, of course, he seemed old enough, but I learned later that he was three months younger than the century. I was shielded from most of the unpleasant experiences connected with his death, and he seemed not so much to die as simply to disappear. I was first told that he was sick, and then that he was dead, and the next thing I knew he had been taken to one of the rooms behind the little chapel in Uncle Ned’s establishment, where Uncle Ned, as a concession to my mother’s sensibilities, was giving him individual attention. Before the funeral, I saw the body only once, and that was when, with my mother’s permission and in her company, I was allowed to look at my father in his casket in the chapel.

When he was alive, he had earned scant respect, and now that he was dead, he excited little regret. For that reason, it was decided to make his last rites as simple and unostentatious as possible. The funeral was private, and the casket was kept closed. However, for those who were motivated by more than morbid curiosity to look at my father for the last time, it was arranged to make the body available to the public for an hour on the evening before the day of the burial, and for another hour on the morning of the day.

During these two brief periods his casket lay open in the chapel, and friends could pass by it to the recorded music of an organ. Not many took advantage of the opportunity. In the vestibule of the little chapel there was a registry for visitors to sign, and this was later taken by my mother, who gave it to me, and I have kept it all these years, for some strange reason, and have it still. In it are less than a dozen signatures.

I was not, of course, required to compete with even this small group for a last look at my father. I was taken to the chapel early on the evening before the funeral, and there, with my mother’s hand holding mine and Uncle Ned’s arm around my shoulders, I stood briefly beside the casket.

My father’s face looked quite natural, hardly more drawn and drained than I had often seen it on the morning after a night devoted to a bottle. I could not feel any great sadness or sense of loss, and I was sorry that I couldn’t, and wished that I could. After a while Uncle Ned took me home, told me I was a good boy, and left me with a neighbor woman who had come in to watch over me.

I did not sleep well that night. I was troubled because I had been able to feel so little for my father who was, whatever else he may have been, young and dead and almost friendless. My troubled thoughts nagged me well into the next morning, and finally I decided that I should go, before it was too late, and see him again. The unnatural stiffness of the circumstances, I thought, had dulled my feelings and made it impossible for me to react properly. If I could see him once more, perhaps alone, sorrow might come to ease my guilty conscience. My mother had already left the house, and so it was an easy matter for me to slip away undetected and make my way to the chapel.

But it was too early for the final hour of public visits, and the chapel was closed. I tried the door and found it locked. Leaving the vestibule, I went around the chapel, through Uncle Ned’s office, and into the area in the rear. But all the other doors were closed, and there didn’t seem to be a soul there, which was odd and unusual; and then I heard the murmur of a voice and of another voice in apparent reply. They came from one of the closed rooms, and I went to the door and listened. The words were faint, a little blurred, but distinguishable.

“Did you get my ticket and reservation?” a voice said.

“Here they are,” another voice responded. “The reservation is for the ten o’clock train to Chicago tonight.”

“You’ll have to drive me to the city in time to catch it.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll get you there.”

“Thanks, Ned. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your kindness.”

So one of the speakers was Uncle Ned. I felt relieved, somehow exonerated of eavesdropping, and I promptly announced my presence by knocking on the door. There was, following this, a rather prolonged interval in which nothing happened, and then Uncle Ned opened the door and saw me standing there.

“Why, Calvin!” he said. “What on earth are you doing here? Come in, boy, come in.”

Entering the room. I was surprised and a little alarmed to find my mother present. I was afraid she would be angry with me for coming to Uncle Ned’s funeral parlor without permission, but apparently she was not. She smiled in a kind of abstracted way, as if she were thinking about something quite remote from my petty delinquency, and came over and put her hand on my head.

“Hello, dear,” she said. “This is a nice surprise. Say hello to Dr. Crandall.”

Dr. Crandall was the only other person in the room. He seemed to me at the time tremendously experienced and wise, but he was actually in his late thirties and had been in practice no longer than ten years at most. Besides being a personal friend to my mother and Uncle Ned, he was our family physician and had attended my father before his death, and so his presence was not unusual. I spoke to him politely, as he did to me.

“Why have you come here, Calvin?” Uncle Ned said. “You were to wait at home until we called for you before the services.”

“I came to see Father again,” I said, “but the chapel’s locked.”

“Father’s not in the chapel now, dear,” my mother said. “Uncle Ned had to bring him back here until it was time for his friends to come to see him. It’s nearly time now, isn’t it, Ned?”

“Very nearly,” said Uncle Ned, looking at his wrist watch. “I’ll take him back to the chapel in a few minutes. If you want to see him again, Calvin, I’ll let you into the chapel now. You may wait for us there.”

My mother’s comment, followed by Uncle Ned’s, called my attention to a casket resting on a mobile table against the wall. My father was obviously in it, awaiting his return to the chapel, but now that I was here, I was strangely reluctant to see his face again. It was better, I rationalized, to remember him as he had been when alive rather than try to force an unnatural emotional response. Suddenly I wished I had not come, and wanted to go home again. Compulsively, I said so.

“There’s a sensible boy,” said Uncle Ned. “We’ll fetch you later for the services.”

“You must walk straight home, dear,” my mother said. “It would be bad to cause any alarm in case you are missed.”

“Don’t worry,” said Dr. Crandall. “I have to be leaving, and I’ll be happy to drop him off. Wait for me in the vestibule, young fellow.”

My mother kissed me and patted my head again, and after I had waited a while in the vestibule, Dr. Crandall and I left together. My mother came home later, and we were fetched on schedule for the services that afternoon. There were only a few people there, the services were brief, and Father’s casket was sealed afterward in its niche in the mausoleum.

Father had not been a good man or a reliable provider, and his short life had left a residue of bitterness; but I was astonished to discover that he had recently taken out a life insurance policy in favor of my mother for $50,000. This was a small fortune in those hard times, and I was inclined to modify my harsh judgment of Father until I learned that Uncle Ned had negotiated the policy and paid the premiums in order to protect my mother in the event of my father’s death.

My mother did not regret my father’s passing. If she felt a little sadness, the feeling was tempered with relief. Always a pretty woman, she became prettier and more animated. Dr. Crandall, who was a bachelor, began after a decent interval to pay serious attention to her, and in two years they were married.

I approved of the marriage and was fond of my stepfather. He was a kindly, generous man, and by treating me without condescension he made me feel significant and mature. He had, moreover, an active curiosity about a variety of subjects, and was especially a devoted student of hypnosis. He argued strongly for its beneficial use in the practice of medicine, and I have even heard him make out a good case for its prospects as an anesthetic in certain kinds of surgery.

Following his example, I eventually entered State University as a pre-med student, and after three years was admitted to medical college. It was during my third year as a medical student, slightly more than a year before my internship, that the pieces of the pattern began to fall into place in my mind. Most of the pieces were old — fragments of memory that had lain dormant for more than a decade; but the final piece in the pattern, the one that wakened all the others, was something that happened that year, my third year in medical college, when I was home briefly for the Christmas holiday.

I had been out with a local girl who had proved both shy and dull, perhaps the latter because of the former, consequently I was home rather early. My mother and stepfather were entertaining a couple in the living room, and I was passing down the hall on the way to the stairs when I heard my stepfather say something that made me stop.

I could see the four of them, my parents and their two guests, from my position in the hall, and they could have seen me if they had looked in my direction. But they were interested in what they were discussing, and my stepfather, in fact, seemed quite intense about it.

“I can make you stiff as a post in sixty seconds,” he said.

“Nonsense,” said his male guest, a lawyer named Phillips.

“Would you care to have me demonstrate?” my stepfather said.

“Perhaps you’d better be a bit more specific before demonstrating.”

“Agreed. I’ll tell you exactly what will take place. As I said, I’ll hypnotize you within sixty seconds. You will fall over, but don’t worry — I’ll catch you and let you down easy. Your body will be rigid. While you are in this state, I’ll suspend your body on its back between two straight chairs. Your head will barely be in contact with one chair, your heels with the other. You will admit, I think, that such a suspension would be absolutely impossible under normal circumstances. However, to make the feat even more incredible, I’ll sit on your abdomen while your body is suspended and you still will not bend at the neck or hips.”

“Oh, come now! That’s absurd. You’re going too far.”

“It sounds dangerous to me,” said Phillips’ wife. “I forbid any such foolishness.”

“There’s no danger,” my stepfather said to Mrs. Phillips. “His breathing will be indiscernible, but I assure you that all the life processes will be going on as usual. He will awaken at my command in perfectly normal, healthy condition, and he will call us all liars when we report what happened.”

“You’re on!” said Phillips. “I challenge you here and now to give such a demonstration.”

That’s the gist of it. I cannot, of course, after all these years, reproduce their conversation verbatim, but I can still see that demonstration as my stepfather performed it in our living room. Every claim he made was substantiated. The lawyer lay suspended between two chairs as rigid as a steel rod, and he did not bend a fraction under the weight of my stepfather on his stomach. I have seen the thing done since on the stage, but at that time it was the most incredible performance I had ever witnessed.

Phillips was brought out of his trance, and I immediately went on upstairs, still undetected. Lying in bed in the marginal state between waking and sleeping, I kept reviewing in my mind the remarkable show I had just seen. As I have said, I had known for years that my stepfather was a student of hypnosis, but I had not dreamed he was capable of anything so extraordinary.

I would have suspected a trick — collusion perhaps between the two men — but I had actually seen the thing done, and I knew that trickery was impossible. There is simply no way for a normal human body to sustain suspension under the circumstances I had witnessed. I could hear my stepfather’s voice repeating in the stillness and darkness of my room a word or a phrase or a sentence that I had heard from the hall, and suddenly I was listening intently.

You will have the appearance of a corpse, he was saying.

And then a strange thing happened. I was hearing all at once another voice in another time in another place. It came to me as a whisper over more than a decade of intervening years, and I was a boy again outside a door in a building that smelled of death.

Did you get my ticket and reservation? the voice had said.

It trailed away, a whisper diminishing to a sigh. After a silent interval of seconds or years, it came back.

Thanks, Ned. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your kindness.

When I had first heard those words, so long ago, I had assumed they were spoken by Dr. Crandall, the man who was later to become my stepfather. I had made this assumption, hardly thinking about it, simply because he was the only man, besides Uncle Ned, to be seen in that room when I was admitted. But another man had been there. A third man who had spoken with an irony that I had mistaken for simple gratitude.

My father had been there in his casket, and it was his voice I had heard.

Call this a revelation if you wish. Call it what you will. As for me, I prefer to believe that it was an instance of long-delayed insight, a tardy wakening of dormant truth that had been waiting in my subconscious all those years for the one missing fragment of knowledge that it needed to rouse it.

Whatever you call it, whatever it was, I did not reveal it to my mother and stepfather. I took it with me as my secret to the medical center where I was studying, and in the following week or two, between practice diagnosis and theoretical treatments, I reassessed the circumstances of my father’s death, and every odd circumstance fell into a new and startling pattern.

Let me itemize them, one by one.

In the first place, consider the cast. There was my father, a wastrel and an alcoholic and altogether a problem. There was my mother, who wanted to be rid of him. There was my Uncle Ned, who loved my mother and despised my father and practiced an essential trade. There was, finally, the man who became my stepfather, Dr. Crandall, who also loved my mother and also despised my father and also practiced an essential trade.

Consider the strange factors of my father’s death. Attended by Dr. Crandall, taken care of later by Uncle Ned personally, he was ill, he died, and he was prepared for the grave in what amounted to almost complete secrecy.

Then the funeral. Remember that the services were conducted with a closed casket. The two brief periods when my father had been exposed to the public view had been daring and brilliant strokes. Hypnotized, lying in the appearance of death with his breathing reduced to an indiscernible level, he had allayed all possible suspicions that might arise. Between the two periods — the night before and the morning after — he was revived and fed and rested in secrecy. After the second period — before the funeral in the afternoon — he was revived again and held in secrecy until Uncle Ned, that night, could take him to the city to catch the train to Chicago. There was very small risk in this. After all, my father had been observed in death by nearly a dozen people. Even if he had been seen later by someone who happened to know him, the slightest disguise would have been sufficient to maintain the deception.

Finally, consider the insurance policy. It had been arranged by my Uncle Ned, not as protection for my mother, but as a bribe to induce my father to participate in the conspiracy. No doubt Uncle Ned could have raised $50,000 if he had been forced to, but it was, after all, much less painful to have it paid by an insurance company. And no doubt my father, being what he was, was glad to leave with the money either in his pocket or soon to be delivered.

Shall I confess something? Once I had reassessed the circumstances and become convinced of the truth, I felt, far from shame or guilt, a kind of perverse pride. It was surely one of the most bizarre and daring conspiracies to commit fraud that had ever victimized an insurance company. Moreover, the fraud had been incidental. The primary purpose of the conspiracy had been to rid my mother of my father.

I did not know what happened to my father later, and I must say I had singularly little curiosity about it. Inasmuch as my mother had remarried two years after my father was last seen, I could assume that he had died, or had secured a quiet divorce in some remote place, or that my mother and Dr. Crandall, protected by father’s part in the conspiracy, had boldly committed bigamy. To me, it didn’t much matter. I loved my mother and respected my stepfather, and I was certainly not going to divulge anything to hurt them. Besides, you see, I had no tangible evidence. However much I knew, I could prove nothing.

And so I lived comfortably with my guilty knowledge until all the parties to the conspiracy were dead. Uncle Ned was the first to go, then my stepfather, and finally, my mother. Then, when all were beyond hurt or harm, my mental attitude changed. I was beset by a persistent and intolerable itch to know once and for all, and beyond any possible doubt, whether I was right or wrong. In brief, I simply had to know if my father had gone to heaven or to hell or to Chicago. Did his casket hold his bones or merely ballast?

I came back to find out. As I said in the beginning, I arranged to have the niche and the casket opened, and I employed competent workmen to do the job. I waited at the open door of the mausoleum, and remembered all these things, and smelled red clover in the sunlight following rain, and the work was eventually done.

The casket was laid out on the floor, and the lid was opened. The workmen, in deference to me, had gone outside.

I went over and kneeled beside the casket and looked in — and I wish I hadn’t. I would give anything now if only I hadn’t.

For, you see, my father’s bones were there, still wearing the blue suit that had, in the dry niche, survived the years that had made dust of his less durable flesh.

But that was not the horror.

The horror was peeping over the edge of his breast pocket, where he himself had put it so that it would be immediately available for use when he should awaken to a command that was never given.

Even before looking closer, I knew that it was a train ticket to Chicago.