They May Not Mean To, But They Do

24

There was chaos and urgency in the Bergman apartment. Daniel said, We have to call a funeral home, don’t we? Molly said, Well, they aren’t going to call us. Daniel said, I’ll call the one on the West Side. Joy, with furious conviction, said, The one on Madison is so convenient. Molly said, It’s not your health club, it’s not the subway stop, you don’t have to carry him there yourself, and she must have been screaming, because Freddie took her hand and squeezed it with what was surely excessive force and, in her annoying Yoga voice, told her to breathe.

“I’m a widow,” Joy said. “Show some respect.”

“Okay, I’ll call the one on the East Side, then.” Daniel reached for the phone.

“No! Not yet! Not yet!”

“Rigor mortis,” said the nurse.

“Mr. Aaron, Mr. Aaron,” Wanda cried.

“Grandpa,” the little girls were wailing. “Grandpa!”

Molly marched into Daniel’s old room and called the East Side funeral home on her cell phone. She told the man who answered that they would want a Jewish ceremony, as soon as possible, did they have an opening, as if she were calling to have her hair colored. Like the hair salon, the soonest appointment the funeral home had was in two days. But two days was Saturday and you could not have a Jewish funeral on Saturday.

“Of course,” said the man. “Well, we do have a spot on Sunday afternoon.”

Aaron was zipped up in a black bag and placed on a wheeled stretcher, then steered out by two silent men, the discrepancy in their heights comical, their clothing almost theatrically grim: shabby black suits, white gloves like footmen. One wore a fur cap; the other, the little one, a yellowed straw fedora with a grimy brim and stained brown hat band. Ernie, the doorman on duty, had come up to say goodbye; the grumpy super, too. He was a fine man, said the super. A gentleman, said the doorman. They stood with bowed heads while the family wailed in anarchic waves of hysteria and grief that emanated from every side of the room, then bounced back from the walls, rolling, echoing, as the little girls clutched their mother’s waist and Coco said shrilly, desperately, “Who wants cake, I brought cake.”

That was how Molly remembered it. Joy didn’t remember it at all.

Wanda and the hospice nurse stripped the hospital bed. They pushed it against the wall. Joy refused to go into the room. The room did not exist without Aaron.

She went into the hall bathroom, which Aaron had used as his own. Wipes and pads and pouches in boxes. Creams and lotions and powders. Tubes and rubber gloves. Where would she put them? Aaron was in a refrigerator on Madison Avenue, but what about all of Aaron’s supplies? They would not be buried with him, he was not King Tut and they were not treasures. They were garbage. Expensive garbage. How sad that she had all these costly medical supplies and no one to use them. Most of the boxes had not even been opened.

“Daniel, quick! Look on your phone. Where can I donate? I have colostomy pouches. Perfectly good! Someone needs them! Hurry! I have to donate!”

That was what Joy remembered.

She rushed to the phone and said, “Operator! Dial the hospital. I have urgent equipment to donate.” Daniel took the phone from her hand gently. “The operators aren’t there anymore, Mom. No more operators, remember?”

“She’s in shock,” Molly said.

“Should I slap her?” Cora asked.

“That will not be necessary,” her father said.

Ben came in the unlocked front door and saw immediately that he was too late.

“He’s gone,” Molly said. “Oh, Ben, he’s gone.”

He put his arms around her and they both cried.

Joy called her friends to let them know. Natalie first. She always called Natalie when something happened, good or bad. Sixty-five years of good and bad, and now this, which was very bad. She called Natalie to tell her, just as she had called Natalie when she was married to a man who was alive instead of to this man who was dead. She told Natalie Aaron died. She listened as Natalie said such nice things about Aaron. She stopped listening and took comfort in the voice, the same voice, hoarse with cigarettes, that had been bossing her around since college, that had bossed her around during all those days and weeks and months of Daniel’s illness, through the depths of Aaron’s financial ruin, through chemo appointments, the voice that inevitably called to cancel lunch dates and dinner dates and any date that involved the pleasant, the unnecessary, the routine encounters of a social life, but never failed her when things got tough.

“Oh, them,” Natalie said when Joy mentioned the funeral home where Aaron now lay. “They’re crooks. They’re all crooks. I plan to be cremated and set in a tin box on my own mantelpiece next to my mother and father and dog and two cats in their tin boxes. Now, let me think. I read something. A nonprofit funeral home on the West Side. Community-based and nonprofit…”

Joy imagined a community center, a rec room with Ping-Pong tables and battered metal folding chairs. “That sounds horrible. Like they hand out cheese sandwiches. Oh, I don’t care anyway. He’s gone. What does it matter?”

As soon as she said it, Joy knew it did matter, that it was all that mattered, there was nothing else. The funeral was Aaron’s funeral, the last thing she could do for him. She had to do it properly. Not just properly, but perfectly, in just exactly the way she suddenly and clearly visualized it: “There will be a violinist. The violinist will play klezmer as people file in.”

“It’s not a wedding,” Molly said.

“Never mind your sarcasm, Molly.”

“I know what you mean, Mom,” Danny said. “Sad, beautiful, Yiddish melodies.”

“Why not get a string quartet? They could wear white tie,” Molly muttered. “While you’re at it.”

For a fleeting moment Joy saw the string quartet, three men in evening dress and a woman in a black gown — the violist, probably — before the tone of Molly’s voice registered, and Joy began to cry.

Molly made up with her mother within minutes. Of course she did, and she didn’t need Freddie to open her eyes in that exaggerated way to get her to apologize, either, for heaven’s sake.

Joy was now in a terrible state, trying to decide whether or not to change funeral homes. Another friend had been to the rec-room funeral home and said it was lovely, the downstairs chapel in particular, all wood, like a Reform synagogue from the sixties.

She decided to move Aaron. They had been so happy on the West Side. When the Madison Avenue funeral home told her what they would charge even if the West Side funeral home came and got Aaron that afternoon, Joy said, “That’s highway robbery. I would not bury a fly at your funeral home,” and arrangements were made to strike camp and head to the West Side.

The funeral director on the West Side extolled the virtues of a nonprofit funeral home just as if he were selling them a fur coat. Ladies, ladies, he said, when Molly took Joy there to take a look, we will take care of everything. Our reputation is how we survive. A plain pine coffin? Of course, of course, every size, immediately available. A rabbi? Naturally a rabbi, and not just any rabbi, a wonderful man, tops, a top rabbi.

“It was very sudden,” Joy said, “and yet not sudden at all. Do you understand?”

The funeral director sighed and looked at that moment not like a funeral director or a furrier but like a human being. “I do,” he said. “I’m afraid I do.” He put his hand across the desk, across the price lists to be perused and the papers to be signed, and he patted Joy’s hand.

Her eyes full of tears, Joy gave a small smile. “You will have a coatrack,” she said, “in case it rains?”