“Is this a code? Gus-Ira? Is this a freak connection?”
“C5H4N4O3. It’s uric acid. The basic component of gout, of kidney stones. The salts of piss, Ben. She’d been thrashing them into her thighs for a lifetime. In effect, she’d driven kidney stones into her capillaries and flesh. They blocked the blood. Uremia, too. Uremic poisoning. Her body choked on her pee. She chafed to death.”
“She died of pee-pee?”
“That’s about it, Ben.”
“Of sissy? Of number one?”
“Yes,” Gus-Ira said, “tragic.”
“Death by tinkle?”
“We were shocked.”
“I don’t know what to…”
“We never thought. We were shocked.”
“Gus-Ira, I’m so sorry. If there’s anything….”
“We knew it would happen, we just never thought—it just never occurred to us that—She used to read in bed. We’d tell her, we’d plead with her, ‘Kitty darling, get yourself grounded. Suppose you dozed off, suppose you’re lashing about and your bedlamp falls over. If the wire is worn, if there’s a hairline crack in the insulation’ ”
“In the insulation?”
“She could have been electrocuted in her urine, Ben.”
“Jesus.”
“So we always anticipated, we just never thought she’d chafe herself to death. You never know.”
“I don’t,” Ben Flesh said, “I can’t—Listen, is Kitty in Riverdale?”
“They’re shipping her body to LaGuardia. I’m flying in today. I’ve been out of town. I’m out of town now. They had to call me in Cleveland. When I heard, I asked if anyone had gotten in touch with you. Helen didn’t know. There’s a lot of confusion. When something like this happens…I figured I’d take a chance. I hate having to break news like this, but you had to know.”
“Yes,” Ben said, “thanks, thank you for calling. I’ll, I’ll get up to Riverdale. I’ll see you this evening.”
They said goodbye.
So he hadn’t heard. He’d been out of town and hadn’t heard Kitty’s bitter message about him on the Phone-Mate. He felt Gus-Ira was an ally and was immediately ashamed that he could feel such cheap relief when poor Kitty lay dead. Poor Kitty. What he’d said was now true and he did consider the source. She had been chafed; even as she’d complained of Ben to Gus-Ira, she had spoken out of her chafed, worn, cricket irritability, a woman rubbed a lifetime the wrong way. Poor Kitty. And then he thought of something else she’d said on Gus-Ira’s device. “Poor Jerome,” she’d said. He’d forgotten about the tests. He called Jerome and got Wilma, his godcousin’s wife, a girl he’d met only once. The woman was crying. He felt bad that he had not been closer to his godcousins’ families. “I’m sorry,” Ben said when he had explained who he was, “I just heard about it. I appreciate how torn up you must be. How’s Jerome taking it, Wilma?”
“Who is this?” she shrieked. “Who is this son of a bitch?”
“It’s Ben,” he said. “I told you. We met once when I was coming through Fort Worth. I took you and Jerome to dinner.”
“Who the hell do you think you are?” she demanded fiercely. “The man’s dead and you ask how he’s taking it? What kind of a son of a bitch…?”
“Dead? Who’s dead? Kitty’s dead. Who’s dead?”
“Jerome’s dead. My husband. Oh, God,” she wailed. “Poor Jerome.”
“Jerome? Oh, Wilma,” he said. “Oh, Wilma. I didn’t…I meant about Kitty. Jerome’s dead, too? Jerome? When? What happened? Oh dear. How? What happened?”
He had died that morning. Wilma had been with him. It was the tests. The Fort Worth doctors were not satisfied with the explanation about Jerome’s lifelong chronic constipation. They suspected cancer of the bowel, the colon. They didn’t buy the theory that his body simply didn’t produce enough fecal matter. They thought a virus or some kind of tapeworm must be attacking, devouring his godcousin’s shit. The tests were enemas which produced nothing but the soapy water they had just shot up his behind. High colonics. Oil enemas. They fed him roughage and gave him massive doses of the most powerful laxatives. They put him on a sort of potty and made him stay there until he went. It was like being toilet-trained, Wilma said. His legs went to sleep, his arms and hands. He begged to be put back to bed, but they insisted they had to find out what was causing his constipation. They named a dozen diseases that could kill him if they weren’t able to analyze, not the normal, beautiful stools he faithfully produced every two weeks, but the incipient shards they were now convinced were incubating morbidity in his gut. They had to find out what was destroying these. They could not reach it, take samples, with even the longest of their instruments. Cutting into the intestine was too dangerous. The roughage, the potent laxatives were the only way, the last resort. He had to stay on his giant potty until he did his duty. Wilma was with him. He squeezed and squeezed. Poor Jerome. He tried to cooperate. He forced himself, he labored. (It was like labor, like giving birth.) The tests killed him. The laxatives were too potent. He shat out his empty intestines, his long red bowel of blood. Death by caca. Death by crap.
And so one was dead of bed wetting. And one of constipation. Number one, Ben thought. Number two.
He wanted Jerome’s body sent to New York. Wilma couldn’t think. He made the arrangements with Fort Worth himself. He would handle everything—death’s take-charge guy.
He gave funerals away as others might bring a coffee cake to the mourners, or a Jell-O mold. “It’s the least I can do,” he said and gave away funerals as perhaps his godfather Julius might once have papered the house for an ailing show. Left and right he gave them away. So many were dying.
Moss rented a car at the airport to drive up to Riverdale. He and it were totaled when he smashed broadside at forty-five miles an hour into the side of an oil truck made out of a particular metal alloy his perfect, beautiful eyes could not see.
Helen, in her grief, drank heavily. The Finsbergs hid all the liquor and she left the house in a black mood looking for a tavern. She hailed a taxi. They tried to follow, but lost her in traffic. The police called from the morgue. She had found a place on Eighth Avenue, a hangout for whores, pimps, and degenerates. She drank more heavily than ever—a hell of a binge—and in her foul mood picked a fight with a very butch bull dyke. The dyke tried to defend herself as best she could, but Helen, made vicious by drink, was hitting her with everything she had. The poor bull dyke was terrified and broke a beer stein on the bar and cut Helen’s throat with it before Helen could choke the life out of her.
“It was self-defense,” the police said. “Everybody in the bar will swear to that. We don’t think you have a case.”
“We know,” Noël said, sobbing heavily. “Sometimes she got like that. She was a mean drunk.”
“Couldn’t handle the stuff, eh?” the cop said sympathetically. “ That’s too bad.”
“Oh oh,” Noël said and, in his grief, plunged his long nails into his hair, scratching fiercely at his cradle cap.
The doctor said it must have been the bacteria he picked up in the morgue that caused the blood poisoning he rubbed into his head like shampoo and killed him.
The Finsbergs were inconsolable. In their sorrow they closed their decimated ranks and turned once more to Ben.
“We don’t” Lorenz said,
“understand,” said Ethel.
“We were always” Sigmund-Rudolf said,
“musical comedy sort of”
“people,” said Patty, La Verne, and Maxene.
Ben nodded.
It had all happened so quickly—five deaths within thirty-six hours—that even Ben could not absorb it. He asked the people at Riverside Chapel to stall, to prepare the bodies for burial, of course, but to keep them in a sort of holding pattern before they were interred. He did not tell the twins and triplets that he was waiting for all the returns to come in, an official body count.
“Mr. Flesh,” said Weinman, the Director at Riverside, “wh
at can I say at a time like this? You and the family have my deepest sympathy.”
“Thank you,” Ben said.
They were in the coffin room, a sort of display area for caskets not unlike an automobile showroom. The coffins, open toward one end, looked oddly like kayaks. Ben wanted identical caskets for the twins and triplets—cherry walnut, the best.
“We don’t have them,” Weinman said. “Something like this, so unusual, we just don’t have that many in stock. There’s the floor sample and the two in the basement, and that’s it. I suppose I could call Musicant in Lodi, New Jersey, he might have one, but he’s the only other funeral home in this part of the country that handles this particular item.”
“We need five,” Ben said, “maybe more. The floor sample, the two in the basement is three.”
“I’ll call Gutterman-Musicant, but if they won’t give me a wholesale price, well, I’m afraid you’ll have to absorb the cost, plus, of course, our legitimate profit.”
A young man was walking among the caskets. He was red-eyed, unshaved. He looked as if he had a cold. One of Riverside’s salesmen walked along silently beside him. The man stopped beside a dark walnut coffin. “This one?” he asked, his voice breaking.
The salesman, who wore a bright plaid-patterned suit, glanced at the coffin, at the young man in blue jeans. “The price is at the foot.”
“Thirty-five hundred dollars? So much?”
“It’s walnut. There are no nails. As I explained, the price is inclusive. You get the preparation of the body, you get the use of our chapel. The cheap coffins are down this way.” The salesman moved off.
“This one is beautiful. It’s like a, like a bed. Like a berth the porter makes up on a sleeper. It’s beautiful. My mother loved beautiful things. Me you can burn up, but my mother—thirty-five hundred dollars.” He looked toward the salesman, who was standing beside a stained pine box. The young man went toward him.
“Take the walnut,” Ben Flesh said thickly.
The boy turned around. He looked at Ben. “It’s thirty-five hundred dollars,” he said.
“I own the franchise,” he said. “Sons don’t have taste like yours today. We’re discontinuing the model. I just told my funeral director, Mr. Weinman.”
“Look, I don’t want to bargain,” the boy said.
“Who’s bargaining? It’s a sin to give a discount on a coffin. It’s against our religion. I just told you. Take it. It’s free.”
“I can’t…”
“You can’t?” Ben roared. “You can’t? You can’t, get out. Your mother loved beautiful things and you can’t? It looks like a bed made up on a sleeper, and you can’t? You can’t? You can’t give Mom a ride in the dirt? You can’t?” He turned to the salesman. “Burn it. Burn it! He don’t want it, burn it. I told you yesterday we were discontinuing. He don’t want it for nothing, everything all inclusive, the preparations, the chapel, the flowers, the death certificate in triplicate, the notice in the Times, the hearse and limo, burn the goddamned thing.”
“The flowers,” the salesman said, “the notice in the Times, the cars are—All that’s—”
“All inclusive,” Flesh said, “all inclusive is all inclusive, all death’s party favors. Burn it,” he shouted.
“No,” the boy said, “if you’re going to burn it…I mean, if you’re really going to burn it—”
“All right, then,” Flesh said. “Fix him up.”
“Hey, listen,” the boy said, “thank you. I mean, well, thank you. I…”
“Look, please, we’re doing inventory here.” He turned to the salesman. “Take him. Write up the papers. ”
The young man came up to Flesh and extended his hand. “Hey…” he said.
Ben took his hand but couldn’t feel it. “Listen, what can I say at a time like this?” Flesh said. “You and the family have my deepest sympathy.” Weinman looked at him. “Look,” Flesh told him, “about the cherry walnut—it makes no difference. Just so they’re identical. They grew apart, but they died together. Identical boxes. That’s a must.” He turned to go, then looked back at Weinman. “You make them look real, you understand? Real. It takes make-up, all right use make-up. They know the smell. These are boys and girls grew up backstage. Make-up wouldn’t dishonor them. They wouldn’t faint from pancake powder. All their lives they lived behind the costumes of their faces. But real. No waxworks. You’ll do your best, yes, Weinman?”
There were no more deaths. All the returns were in. At the graveside he thought about this. Three of the girls were dead. (He included poor, bored Lotte, who had childhood diseases as an adult, and who, in her suicide, had died of her peculiar symptoms, too—tantrum.) Three of the boys. The two houses were in equilibrium again. The checks and balances. No one had the votes now, and he was safe. And ashamed of his safety.
In their grief—their noses and eyes swollen with tears and floating behind faces puffed with sorrow like people pouting into balloons (for they had identical emotions as well as identical taste buds, identical hearts, tempers, sympathies, sensibilities)—they were as alike as ever, differing more from their dead sibs than from each other. Weinman’s people had done a good job. The look of waxworks had been unavoidable, but cosmetics suited them, death’s rouges and greasepaints, its eyeliners and facials—all its landscape gardening, all its prom night adjustments. They might have been Finsberg chorus girls and boys seen close. Fleshed out in their morticianed skin, identical as skulls.
The rabbi, the same man, now grown old, who had officiated at Julius’s funeral twenty-five years before, and then at Lotte’s and at Estelle’s, said the prayers.
Then Ben stepped forward.
“One died of tantrum, her grownup’s colic, and one of pissed beds, and another angrily tight. One of constipation and one of freak eyesight and one massaged poison into his cradle cap.” He thought he knew what they were thinking. How they wept as much from contemplation as from loss. How Gertrude thought of her gravid bones and La Verne of her organs strapped like holsters to her rib cage, how Oscar brooded over his terminal compulsive speeding and Sigmund-Rudolf about his epicenity. How Mary wondered what to make of her inability to menstruate and Ethel of her heart in its casket of tit. Each mourning for each and for his own doom. As he was moved by his multiple sclerosis, his own flawed scaffolding of nerves. Everyone carried his mortality like a birthmark and was a good host to his death. You could not “catch” anything and were from the beginning yourself already caught. As if Lorenz or Cole, Patty, Mary, or himself carried from birth the very diseases they would die of. Everything was congenital. Handsomeness to suicide. “There are,” he said, “no ludicrous ways to die. There are no ludicrous deaths,” and, weeping, they all held each other as they made their way from the graveside like refugees, like people blinded by tear gas, and stumbling difficult country.
He mourned the full time. A few had to leave early but he stayed on in the house in Riverdale. His position in the family restored now, they believed he would outlive them. (It had given them a new respect for him, their own sudden sense of having been condemned altering their opinion, his promise that there were no ludicrous deaths oddly reassuring to them.)
Stayed on for a week to sit an improvised, crazy shivah, in which Ben played the old ’78’s, original cast recordings from their father’s hit shows: Oklahoma! Lady in the Dark, Showboat, Brigadoon, and Bloomer Girl. Allegro. Call Me Mister. Carousel. Finian’s Rainbow. All of them.
Listening, concentrating, as if at a concert, as if stoned. Not “ You’ll Never Walk Alone” or any of the songs of solace that Ben, or any of them, might have expected, not “Ol’ Man River,” or any of the you-can’t-lick-us indomitable stuff, not even the showstoppers—“Soliloquy,” “My Ship”—but the chorus things, the entire cast, all the cowboys and their girls singing “Oklahoma!,” the veterans singing “Call Me Mister,” the elf and townspeople singing “On That Great Come and Get It Day,” the fishermen and their families doing “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over.�
�� It was, that is, the community numbers that reinforced them, the songs that obliterated differences, among men and women, among principals and walk-ons, not the love songs, not even the hopeful, optimistic songs of the leads who, down and out, in the depths of their luck, suddenly blurt their crazy confidence. Again and again it was the townsfolk working as a chorus, three dozen voices singing as one, that got to them, appealing to some principle of twin- and triplet-ship in them, decimated as their ranks now were. The odd bravery of numbers and commonality, a sort of patriotism to one’s kind. And Ben, more unlike them than ever, now he looked so old and felt so rotten, as cheered and charmed as any of the Finsbergs could have been.
And talking, talking non-stop, neither a stream of anecdote nor reminiscence nor allusion to their dead brothers and sisters, nor even to themselves, but a matrix of reference wholly out of context to their lives, telling them, for example, of the managers of his franchises, people they hadn’t met, didn’t know, had never heard of, people, he realized, he himself rarely thought of except during the five or so days a year he spent with each of them during his Grand Rounds.
“I go,” he said, “with the Dobbs House heart, with the counterman’s White Castle imagination, his gypsy’s steam-table life. Hillbillies, guys with nutsy tattoos on the insides of their forearms. People called Frankie, Eddy, Jimmy—the long e of the lower classes. Men with two wives and scars on their pusses, with clocked socks and black shoes. One guy, the manager of my Western Auto, was totally bald, and instead of a wig he sprung for a head of tattooed hair. From fifteen feet you couldn’t tell it from the real thing. It had a tattooed part, I remember, and when sideburns came in back in the sixties he had them added on; only the color, the dye, wasn’t an exact match and it looked a little goofy.
“But that’s where I pick them. My middle-management people from the barrel’s bottom. Bus depots my employment agencies, the waiting room of the Cedar Rapids railroad station. If you can’t find reliable people there, you can’t find them anywhere. You didn’t know that? Oh, sure. Certainly. An eye out always for guys who pump quarters into jukeboxes and bang the pinball. I cover the waterfront, I hire the handicapped.
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