Two things brought me up out of this dismaying thought. My hat, caught in a gust from 78th Avenue, went sailing off my head out of the living room into the foyer, and as I turned and ran to retrieve it, I heard the telephone.
I stopped and stared at it. My mind doesn’t always function logically. Here I was, standing on the day of my mother’s death in the foyer of her three-room apartment in Queens, and what was I thinking about? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
I was suddenly remembering that when I was a boy I had read about his will in the American Weekly. Or perhaps it was some other Sunday supplement. Or maybe not his will. It could have been a statement he had made to his family from his deathbed. It was a time when famous people always kept the hearse waiting until they thought up an appropriate exit line.
Anyway, I was suddenly remembering that Sir Arthur, in addition to being the creator of the greatest character in English fiction since Mr. Micawber, had also been a militant spiritualist. I recalled distinctly that he had promised his family he would communicate with them from what the American Weekly or its contemporary called the Great Beyond. Now I almost fell through the foyer floor of my dead mother’s three-room apartment on 78th Avenue in the Borough of Queens. I was absolutely convinced the ringing phone was a call from my mother. Calling to tell me that you couldn’t trust anybody any more. Not even the people who run hospitals. When she was a girl, and a person died, the people in the hospital at least knew where the body was. Why they let the person die in the first place—all right, we won’t discuss that now. After all, what can you expect from doctors? Bills. What else? But once the person was dead, was it too much to expect from doctors that the son who came to the hospital he should be able to see his dead mother?
I figured to hell with my hat. I allowed it to go skipping across the floor of the foyer into the kitchen, and I grabbed up the phone.
“Hello?”
“Is that you?” said the voice of Herman Sabinson.
People do ask the damndest questions. Who else could it be? But the damndest questions do help. Like bicarbonate of soda. You don’t want brilliant repartee. You want your heaving stomach to settle down. Herman Sabinson had always been able to settle mine.
“Yes,” I said. “Herman, listen. Something terrible has happened.”
“I know,” Herman said. “Please stay there. I’m coming right over.”
“Where are you?” I said.
“At the hospital,” Herman said. “I stopped off to see Mrs. O’Toole and pick up the paper I asked you to sign, but she was gone.”
“It’s the day before Christmas,” I said. “She won’t be back until Tuesday.”
“How do you know?” Herman said.
“I called the hospital from the funeral parlor.” I looked at my wristwatch. “About three hours ago. When they told me I had to go to the morgue to identify the body. I called Mrs. O’Toole right away. To ask why. But she was gone.”
“Well, you see, it’s the day before Christmas,” Herman Sabinson said. “She won’t be back till Tuesday.”
So I knew the trouble was worse than I’d thought. When Herman Sabinson is upset he doesn’t listen to what you’re telling him. He’s tuning in on his own thoughts, trying to figure out what to say that will soothe you.
“I could grab a cab and meet you at the hospital,” I said.
“No,” Herman said. “I want you to stay there and wait for me. A few minutes, that’s all. I’m coming right over.”
“Herman,” I said.
“What?”
“How did you know I was here?”
The astonishment in his voice came across the wire as clearly as a perfectly tuned TV picture. “Where else would you be?” Dr. Herman Sabinson said.
Well, I thought as I hung up, I’d had a pretty good year. My wife and I had earned a winter vacation. If it hadn’t been for my mother falling down and breaking her hip, I might have been on one of those hot islands in the Caribbean, rubbing myself down with dollar-a-bottle suntan lotion and trying to keep the frolicking jet set from kicking sand into my daiquiri. Or I might have been at home, helping my wife place the children’s presents under the tree. And wondering, as I had wondered during every year of my married life, what Rabbi Goldfarb would have said if he had seen one of his old cheder students fooling around with a Christmas tree. Since I knew what he would have said, and I could see that old polished chair rung rising to the sky for a downward cut at my ankles, I came out of the past and back into the present.
It consisted of a windy foyer that had been cleansed of the smell of death. The place now smelled like all the rest of the Borough of Queens. An improvement, I suppose. I started moving around the apartment, shutting at a more leisurely pace the windows I had only a few minutes earlier so hysterically opened. In the process two things happened.
I retrieved my hat. And for the first time I took a good square look at the arena in which my mother had spent the last years of her life.
The word arena had never occurred to me before. Now that the defending champ was gone, I saw why. On the inside of her door, in addition to the double Segal lock, she had hung a chain bolt with links as thick as a salami. There was also a peephole, but my mother never used it. She answered her bell by pulling open the door as far as the chain allowed: three inches. Thus she could see not only the face of her visitor but also the visitor’s legs.
“When somebody comes to steal your money,” I remembered her once saying, “who cares about the shape of their nose or if they wear glasses? It’s with the feet that they’ll kick you in the kishkes.”
All visitors were potential assailants. In my mother’s strange view of life some things were diamond-hard. Profits were rare. Losses normal. You had to devote the main thrust of your energies toward taking precautions against loss.
I now noticed for the first time, even though it must have been there for years, that leaning against the wall in the corner of the foyer, just inside the door, was the fat bamboo pole of the Morse flag I used to carry every Saturday night from East Fourth Street to the meetings of Troop 244 in the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House on Avenue B. The sight made me remember something else my mother had once said.
It was during one of my regular Sunday morning visits. We were discussing a grisly New York Daily News murder in one of those high-rise apartment houses on the Upper East Side of Manhattan where the only people who seem to be safe are the landlords. Probably because they are always in the sauna bath at the Fontainebleau in Miami. The victim, an elderly widow, had admitted to her apartment a man who had claimed to be an upholsterer. When he came at her with a knife, the woman tried without success to defend herself by swinging at him a baseball bat her now grown and married son had used when he was in the Little League.
“A mistake,” my mother had said. “When the murderers come, anything you have to swing, it’s too late. A stick is better. A pole. Something you don’t have to swing. Just poke. With the sharp end. If you know where to poke.”
I did. It astonished me that she knew. During the war, when I was stationed in England, I had been ordered to take, as a preparation for D-Day, a commando course given by a British guerrilla officer who had been trained in Burma.
“What you want to do is forget the Marquis of Queensberry rules,” he told us one morning on the lawn in front of our barracks. “What you want to remember is your life depends on putting the other bloke out of commission before he can do the same to you. The easiest way to do that is to get at what we might call his vital parts. Like this.”
With a broom handle not unlike the bamboo pole that later showed up in the foyer of my mother’s apartment in Queens, and without any swing or wind-up, he lunged forward, as though with a spear he were stabbing at a boar during a hunt in some Silesian forest.
“There, now,” the British officer said as he straightened up. “There’s one chap wouldn’t be in a position to do any more procreating of his species, would he?”
Probably not. But at least he
would have lost the capacity in an understandable conflict. A formally declared war. Between his country and a clearly identified enemy. With a name. And a flag. And a capital city. And field marshals whose exploits were described with foreign correspondent clarity in the daily press.
But who had been my mother’s enemy? Against what had she chained her door? To fight off whom had she placed my old Morse signal pole at the ready?
Surely not against the rapists and murderers who had killed the woman in the high-rise apartment house on the Upper East Side. These creatures were a recent development. They had appeared on the scene since New York had become Fun City. That chain on the door, however, and that bamboo pole in the corner, these had been there from the day my mother had moved into this apartment. The day, or a few thereafter, when I had come home from the war and had helped move her into 78th Avenue. In those days New York had been safe for the residents of Queens. But not, apparently, for my mother.
I hooked the chain into place. She was dead. But her body was missing. I had a small boy’s irrational but very real feeling that she might walk in at any moment. If she did, I did not want her bawling me out for not locking the gates of her castle properly.
I turned from the front door with the feeling I was turning from a portcullis, after making sure the drawbridge was up, to move on in my inspection of the castle defenses.
I didn’t get very far. In the living room I realized that for thirty-two days, while my mother had been in the Peretz Memorial Hospital, I had refused to face what I now could not escape: the disposition of her possessions. Looking around, I could see that even in this area she had left behind her an irritating contradiction. So far as my mother was concerned all those TV commercials paid for by manufacturers of furniture wax and other cleaning products were a lot of malarkey. My mother’s final word was spread all around me: nothing improves the appearance of old furniture so much as a thirty-two-day layer of dust.
I don’t mean old furniture as in antique old. I mean old as in Grand Rapids old. Or wherever the furniture came from that used to stand around our tenement flat on East Fourth Street. Note the words: stand around. On East Fourth Street people did not decorate rooms. They filled them.
Where the stuff came from with which my mother had filled ours, I don’t know. Some inexpensive furniture store on Avenue D, C, B, or A, no doubt. These thoroughfares were lined with them. And the stores were stuffed with pretty much the same things. Sets, they were called. Bedroom set: bed, bureau, two chairs, and a mirror. Dining-room set: table, sideboard, four or more chairs (purchaser’s option), and a mirror. Living-room set: couch, known as a lounge or “lunch,” two stuffed chairs with matching upholstery, a sweet table, later known as a coffee table, and a mirror. Kitchen set: not yet invented.
These pieces were placed around the appropriate rooms in accordance with their shape and the wall space available.
I was standing in the middle of her apartment on 78th Avenue, remembering the way my mother had arranged our dining-room set in the front room on East Fourth Street, when I realized I was staring at the pieces of the same set, and that they were arranged now, so many years later, exactly as they had been arranged when I first became aware of them as a boy.
Astonished, I saw that even the cut-glass bowl, from which I was once allowed to take fruit without asking permission, stood on the sideboard, to the left of the door. I walked to the bowl and picked up a dusty orange. Through the grit under my fingers I could tell it was wax. I poked about among the dust-covered apples and bananas and peaches. All wax. I did not understand why I had never before noticed that all these years my mother as an old woman had preserved here in Queens the appearance of the rooms in which she had lived as a young woman on East Fourth Street. I was asking myself why when the doorbell rang.
I went back to the portcullis and lowered the drawbridge. Herman Sabinson faced me through the open door. I wondered why a man in a heavy overcoat should looked naked. Then I noticed that Herman was not carrying his little black bag. Why should he? The patient was dead.
“You all right?” he said.
I gave it a moment of thought. The moment was unexpectedly filled by a recollection of my feelings years ago when I had learned the poodle had died. It seemed unwise to let my thoughts hang around in that neighborhood. “I’m fine,” I said. It was better to lie.
“So why don’t you invite a guy in?” Herman Sabinson said.
Herman was one of those strange kids who had come every day to Rabbi Goldfarb’s cheder from below Delancey Street. He was not a part of my life on East Fourth Street. He had gone to J.H.S. 97 on Mangin Street. He had belonged to a scout troop in the Educational Alliance. We never really knew each other. Years later, visiting a sick friend on Central Park West, I stayed longer than I had been warned to stay, and so I met his doctor coming in. The doctor said he thought we had met before. I said I thought so, too. Thirty seconds of “Didn’t you used to?” and “Weren’t you one of?” and contact was established. There are no friendships so solid as the cemented friendships that never existed. And there is no cement so binding as the Lower East Side. Ten minutes after we met in my sick friend’s apartment, Herman Sabinson and I were convinced that we had flown together in the Lafayette Escadrille.
I turned over to him all my insides. Then I fed my wife and kids into his professional orbit. My mother came last, but she got most of Dr. Sabinson’s attention. Kids from 97 and the Edgie were helpless in the presence of old Jewish ladies. Herman revered my mother. I don’t think Herman revered me. But I had an immediate feeling that he liked me. Perhaps what he liked was a recollection of the days when life was simple. When people were not yet dying. When people were not yet people. When his concern was for learning how to save the abstractions who some day would become people. Anyway, Herman seemed to like me. So I liked him back. Why not? What more can you ask? The time I spent with Herman always made me feel good. As I grow older these times become more important.
“What are the good moments of this life? They are like the good moments of an egg.” The Duchess of Malfi. I don’t quote her very often. But what the hell. It was the day before Christmas. And my mother’s body had disappeared. And I was scared stiff.
“Sorry,” I said to Herman Sabinson, and stepped aside. “Come on in, kid.”
Herman came in. He took off his hat, started to slip out of his coat, then stopped. “Jesus,” he said. “It’s cold as a duck’s ass in here.”
“I had all the windows open,” I said. “Nobody’s been in the place for thirty-two days. When I came in, it really smelled.”
“Thirty-two days,” Herman said in a troubled voice.
He scowled down at the floor. Following his glance, I wondered if it was possible that the brown linoleum on the foyer floor had come, like the living-room furniture, from East Fourth Street. Then I remembered ordering it for my mother from Macy’s when she moved into this apartment, and I knew the time had come to pull up my socks.
“Well, figure it out,” I said. “She fell and broke her hip on November twenty-second. So that’s eight days to the end of the month of November or the thirtieth. And today is December twenty-fourth. Twenty-four plus eight is thirty-two.”
Herman Sabinson looked up with apparent reluctance from his contemplation of the ugly brown linoleum. The color had been my mother’s choice. No, her insistence. All her life she had preferred not things that were pretty but things that “didn’t show the dirt.”
“You’re right,” Herman said. “Thirty-two days. What a woman.” He apparently felt this observation was either too intimate or faintly disrespectful, so he corrected it immediately. “What a person,” Herman Sabinson said. “What a wonderful person.”
The faint tremor in his voice was not unfamiliar. In tricycle weather I had been hearing it for years every Sunday morning. From the overweight young mothers who kvelled as they lay back in their beach chairs while I ran the gauntlet of their screaming children. On my way with my shopping bag ac
ross the scrap of damaged lawn from the pavement of 78th Avenue to the door of I-D. The Japanese ancestor worship syndrome ruled Herman Sabinson’s life. Geriatrics was his trade. Most of his patients were old ladies in Queens whose Manhattan-based sons paid him a monthly fee to make sure none of their business competitors could say they did not take good care of their ancient mothers.
“Yes,” I said.
Herman Sabinson looked at me with a troubled frown. I sensed a note of criticism. As though he felt my comment was inadequate. A man had just said my mother had been a wonderful person. With a throb in his throat. As though he were delivering a eulogy in Riverside Chapel. And what had I said in reply? “Yes.” That’s all. A simple, unadorned yes. Worse than that. A noncommittal yes. As though I felt it was just possible that she had not been a wonderful person. I could feel Herman’s distress. I wanted to get out of the orbit of his emotions. I was having enough trouble with my own. I wrenched the steering wheel.
“Listen,” I said. “What the hell has happened?”
“Now, look,” Herman Sabinson said. “I think you should calm down.”
The notion that I did not look or sound calm was distressing. As though I had gone into a business meeting where it was important for me to give the impression that I was nonchalantly indifferent to the outcome, and one of the men at the other side of the table had made some nasty crack about the way I was biting my fingernails. The word aplomb does not cross my mind very often. Crossing it now, all I got from the brief encounter was the uncomfortable feeling that I must have lost it.
“I’m perfectly willing to calm down,” I said. “In fact, I’m anxious to calm down. But you’ve got to admit this is a pretty terrifying mess.”
“Now, look,” Herman said.
“No, you look,” I said. I could hear my voice rising, but I didn’t care. It made me feel better. “You call me in the morning,” I said. “You say you want to perform an autopsy. You ask me to go to the hospital and sign a paper. I say okay. I go to the hospital. First, this iceberg Mrs. O’Toole, she says it’s no longer necessary to sign the paper. But I insist, as long as I’m here, I tell them, I might as well sign it, so she lets me sign it. Then I go over to Battenberg’s to arrange for the funeral and they tell me I have to go to the morgue to identify the body.”
Last Respects Page 27