Bet Your Life

by Richard Dooling

  Lenny’s mom was technically a parishioner because she still lived north of Bemis Park in the same sagging wreck of a house Lenny had grown up in—a late-nineteenth-century grand manse in terminal decline, a period home at the end of its sentence, with a crumbling carriage house out back propped up by exterior four-by-four beams, and cars on blocks up and down the busted brick alleys. But Lenny wasn’t a member of St. Dymphna’s, didn’t even live in the parish, and old Father Fogarty probably saw Lenny’s mom at mass on Christmas or Easter, but not both.

  The cathedral was still the nominal heart of the archdiocese, but the money had all moved west to the suburbs and gated communities. Fogarty was left with aging parishioners living in declining neighborhoods and a beloved landmark of a white-elephant cathedral to maintain. It wasn’t uncommon to have eight or nine funerals a week for eight or nine faithful senior citizens, old-timers whose families had been tithing to St. Dymphna’s Cathedral since the Great Depression. Fogarty wouldn’t be happy about providing funeral services for a faithless slacker cyborg like Lenny who worshipped computers instead of the Eucharist and never came to church.

  I knew, because I’d been an altar boy for Fogarty at the funeral of the notorious city councilman Michael Muldoon. To most, it was only a parish legend, dismissed by reputable old-timers as apocryphal rumor, but I’d been there, had seen and heard it firsthand.

  Muldoon was a personal-injury lawyer and public drunk who’d married wealth and then won a city-council seat by running on his Irish Catholic heritage, even though he hadn’t been to church since his first wedding. He drank himself to death at the age of fifty—got away early from life’s party without once being called an alcoholic, because in those days it was still an insult. As my grandma used to put it, “Mr. Muldoon had the failing.” The family wanted services held at the cathedral, even though Muldoon had fallen so far away from Mother Church that they could just as well have hauled his body over for services at Mount Sinai Synagogue.

  Father Fogarty did his duty, gave the Muldoon clan their funeral, and even showed up to say the mass himself. But just before the procession started down the center aisle of the nave, Fogarty paused in the narthex at the back of the cathedral, where only us altar boys, the pallbearers, and the funeral director could hear him. The old priest turned around, knocked on the casket like it was an outhouse door, and said, “Are you in there, Michael Muldoon? I just want to be sure it’s you in there, Muldoon, because the only times I saw you were when your mother carried you in here to get baptized, your first wife dragged you in here to get married, and your kids brought you back to get buried.”

  Lenny’s family would be lucky to get a no-frills funeral mass said by a newly ordained seminary grad, who would stammer through a plain-vanilla homily prominently featuring the parable of the Prodigal Son. On the other hand, if somebody showed up with a generous donation, or even if Mrs. Stillmach had been a poor parish widow who’d given her mite to help put the new slate roof on back in 1972, then Fogarty would pull out the stops and make Lenny’s funeral something special.

  Somebody must have brokered a deal with Ferryman before we got there, because Lenny’s wake was decidedly upscale, held in the main parlor, and he had a huge two-tone metal casket with silver trimmings. The casket was backed up by banked and tiered floral arrangements, even though the obituary in the World-Herald had said, “In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to the Methodist Richard Young Center” (where Lenny had taken those three-day naps after his manic attacks).

  When we went from the greeting room to the viewing room, we passed by a woman in a black gown playing a violin. And instead of a junior priest presiding over the questionable death of a former parishioner, Pastor Fogarty was there to handle it himself, with an altar boy and a thurifer swinging a silver censer of smoldering incense. Miranda exchanged pleasantries with Father Fogarty, while he gave me the evil eyeball as somebody he used to know who stopped going to church.

  After that, we filed in the rows of chairs and kneelers and took our places facing Lenny. I could feel Miranda building to the occasion, shuddering every now again and snuffling into one of her silk hankies. She unpacked a rosary that had the heft and medieval odor of a sainted relic, with huge weathered wooden beads worn smooth by generations of fingers, real hand-wired silver links, and a silver-and-ebony crucifix. She’d shown it to me and Lenny once before at her place, had drawn it out of the carved cedar box where she kept it on the mantel and had told us its story. Her great-great-grandmother had died of consumption back in Antwerp clutching this very rosary to her bosom. Then Miranda’s great-grandmother, Zoe, had brought it over on the boat from Belgium after World War I and had given it to Miranda’s grandmother, who’d wisely skipped over Miranda’s irreligious, hippie mom and passed it to Miranda, instead. When Lenny first saw it, he wanted to take it over to Harveys Casino and see if it would bring him some sorely needed luck, but she’d told him no, because she was afraid he’d take it to Sol’s Jewelry & Loan and pawn it.

  Whenever I saw a rosary it reminded me of my grandpa—the one who died from Old Gold Filters—because near the end there, when he had only a week or so left in him, the nurses found him on the floor of his room at Archbishop Bergan Mercy Hospital at two in the morning clutching a plastic rosary. He was far gone with ICU psychosis, and his brain was already seeded with blossoming metastases. He was waving the rosary and yelling at the charge nurse, “Hey! Send somebody in here that knows how to work one of these things! Say, you there, miss! Do you know how to operate one of these things?”

  Father Fogarty blessed Lenny’s body in the open casket, then looked to heaven.

  “Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord.”

  “And let perpetual light shine upon him,” said Miranda with the rest of the group.

  The thurifer lifted the sooty silver cap of the censer by the chain, and Father Fogarty spooned in more incense. Then they walked around Lenny’s body wagging the censer at him and sending plumes of smoke drifting across his open casket.

  “Glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.”

  Back in ancient Rome, Christians were captured and fed to the lions in the Colosseum. To escape persecution they hid out in subterranean cemeteries called catacombs, where they huddled together in tombs, stared at dead people, and talked about how the world was going to end in sheets of flaming hellfire by Sunday. Back then, the incense helped take the edge off the necrotic stench. Catholics still like to huddle together and stare at their dead, and they still stand on ceremony and burn incense at the finer funerals, even though these days the body is mostly formaldehyde and emulsifiers by the time it’s displayed at a wake, and smells no worse than car wax. And no one really believes in the end of the world anymore, except me.

  Miranda pressed the silver-and-ebony crucifix to her lips and fingered the rosary. As if on cue, the mourners broke forth in murmuration, bowing their heads and telling the beads and gauds of their rosaries.

  “Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, hail, our life, our sweetness, and our hope! To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve! To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning, and weeping in this vale of tears! Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy towards us, and after this, our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus! O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary!”

  It made my hair roots tingle. It was like hearing someone read Rimbaud or Baudelaire aloud ten years after your last high school French class. Clement? Womb fruit? It was grand and moving, and I used to know what it meant, but now I seemed to be stuck on the verge of understanding without ever getting there, like the night Lenny died and I couldn’t access certain parts of my brain.

  Miranda knew every word. For her it was all Catholic Burial 3.2. And I noticed that when I came in just right on an “Amen” or a “And let perpetual light shine upon him,” she set her hand on top of mine, as if we we
re an engaged couple grieving together at the funeral of a dear friend. She even discreetly slipped her finger between two of mine and applied pressure in ways mysterious and wonderful—ways she’d never done before.

  I’d forgotten what a grim ordeal it is to say five decades of a rosary: fifty Hail Marys in all, with five Our Fathers, the Five Sorrowful Mysteries, and a lot of Ave Marias weeping in vales of tears in between. After the first few, the mob synchronized its murmurings and frantic fingerings, as if they were trying to raise Lenny from the dead or summon the Fates back from antiquity to measure off the lives of every one of us in rosary beads, then cut the threads. Every time I heard the beads clacking, saw the censer swinging, watched Father Fogarty’s special gesticulations and blessings, I felt like going Gilgamesh and grabbing a rattle and a drum and flying Lenny’s body back to Olduvai Gorge or Shanidar, Iraq, or some other cradle of civilization for an old-fashioned hominid burial, without the incense and the two-tone metal casket and the frantic ritualizing and verbigerations. And if it cost too much to ship a body out of civilization and back to nature, then under the circumstances Lenny would have preferred something more complex, sordid, and interesting, like the Dumpster behind Burger King.

  “Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord.”

  “And let perpetual light shine upon him.”

  I had trouble imagining Lenny eternally resting and bathing in perpetual light. I’d read enough autopsy reports and seen enough body photos from the medical examiner’s office to know that Lenny had been gutted like a dressed deer, his organs scooped out, weighed, sectioned; his scalp peeled back and forward and the top of his skull sawed off, his brain removed, weighed, sectioned, sliced, and strained. When you got a Catholic corpse, the medical examiners and the funeral directors all work from the same page: Save that face and something to hang it on; you can fake the rest of it.

  “Glory be to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.”

  It would take days before the coroner would release an initial report, and maybe weeks—depending on where they sent the blood and tissue samples—before he would issue a final report containing the definitive cause, mechanism, and manner of Lenny’s death. And every time I looked at Lenny in the casket I thought about what would happen if claims on five or ten more life insurance policies at five or ten other life insurance companies came rolling in on Leonard Stillmach, with Rosa Prescott or Heartland Viatical or Hector Crogan or Raymond Guttman as the beneficiary. What if the companies went to court and moved to exhume the body so they could genetically test their blood and urine samples against his remains? See if Lenny, the Mad Hatter of Special Claims, had been HIV positive two years ago and had used a stand-in for blood and urine samples so he’d qualify for their life insurance policies?

  Remember thou art dust and to dust thou shall return. Yes, but please don’t stink with fraud in between, Lenny!

  When the rosary ended, everybody formed a grieving line and took turns going up to a kneeler that overlooked the open casket to spend a few remaining moments with Lenny’s remains. I held back and made as if to go out to the lobby, but Miranda looked at me like I was a coward or a deserter, so I fell in behind her.

  When I got up there alone with him, I saw it was nothing but a foam-filled Halloween mask made of Lenny’s skin still attached to his original neck in a sport coat he’d never worn before. His ears, lips, and nose were missing their body jewelry, and some thoughtful mortician’s apprentice had caulked all of the skin holes with cosmetic plaster and spackled over them with flesh-colored rouge. It didn’t help, though; Lenny looked like a Ghoul from Galaxy 9 who’d been hit by a death ray that had fried his chips and processors, melted his components and circuit boards, leaving only the putty-colored computer casing of his skin.

  I could see the AIDS in him, now that he was dead.

  Then I had to go over with Miranda and pay our respects to his mom, who looked even worse than Lenny.

  Vera Stillmach was from Guide Rock, Nebraska, where she’d sold the Wigwam Bar & Grill, which had passed to her from her folks. She’d moved to the big city for LPN school at the College of St. Mary’s. After that she’d spent thirty years tending the tracheostomies of ex-smokers in the Head and Neck Unit at the VA hospital. Lenny’s dad, Wally “Sneaks” Stillmach, had trouble holding jobs and mostly worked on the backside of Aksarben Racetrack as a hot-walker for horse trainers. He’d left Omaha twenty-some years ago, before Lenny got out of grade school.

  As Lenny told it, when he was only twelve years old, one of his letters to his dad had come back stamped “deceased.” Lenny had soaked his pillow with hot tears, until his mom told him not to worry—it was just Sir Sneaky Stillmach trying to wangle his way out of paying child support by pretending to be dead.

  Vera had watched her two boys and their sister run wild with no dad around to whup sense and training into them. Lenny’s brother was on work release, and over the years Vera had fetched her kids from emergency rooms, county jails, after-hours clubs, and the dayroom at the Methodist Richard Young Center, but a funeral was too much for her. Dr. Goody must have called in a prescription for her at Wal-Mart, because instead of her usual hard-bitten resolve, Vera had the vacant, lobotomized look of a parent called upon to bury her own child on short notice, present and accounted for only by the grace of Xanax or Ativan. I could almost hear the long, private, wordless conversation she was having with herself, deep inside: This ain’t clockwise clockwork with me going first, the way my ma went before me, and her ma before her; this is backassward widdershins wickedness, because there’s my baby boy, dead and gone before me. Why?

  She was in no danger of smiling and putting cracks in the mask of foundation and waterproof makeup she’d patted onto her face. She must have given up by the time she got to the fine-motor work of eye pencils and eyeliners, because it looked as if she’d smeared Rawlings Athletic Eye-Black in the bags and hollows around her eyes, antiglare war paint for the big game against the heavily favored Grim Reapers. She couldn’t even see me and Miranda, because it was just her and her kids now, out there naked and trembling under the stadium arc lights on their own twenty-yard line, while the hooded Reapers lined up opposite—all mounted on black stallions, their polished scythes shimmering with the white radiance of eternity. She couldn’t hear Miranda and me making noises about how we didn’t know what had happened to Lenny, and how sorry we were even though it wasn’t really our fault. She couldn’t hear us, because the steeds were snorting and whinnying and pawing the turf at the other end of the field, and then the lead horseman in the black hood raised his scythe like a royal standard and shouted: “Take her children, but leave her alive!”

  Miranda brought Vera around long enough to recognize us. Vera thanked Miranda for her prayers and for telling her to call Norton. Her voice droned in a hollow, robotic monotone about how the arrangements had all been taken care of by the life insurance man. That nice lawyer who’d been managing Lenny’s affairs and helping him get advance money against his insurance policies had called her.

  “Mr. Crogan took care of everything,” said Vera. “He said not to worry, and it would all be paid out of Lenny’s insurance.”

  13

  TO THE MACHINES

  NO SENSE TALKING ABOUT what had to be done now, and no sense waiting till after the funeral. If Hector Crogan was paying the bills for premium services, it was because he wanted old Vera on his side before she found out that Lenny had sold life insurance policies to Heartland—policies that could have had her name in the beneficiary slot, if only Lenny hadn’t sold them. It meant that Old Man Norton was probably right—again!—and Lenny had something going with Hector or somebody else at Heartland. Only question was: Doing what exactly? So far he’d sold two life policies to them.

  In the fraud-defense business it’s sometimes a matter of restraining your overly suspicious nature. Maybe Heartland Viatical was a legitimate viatical company, and ma
ybe Lenny was a legitimate AIDS patient with the uncanny foresight to buy a big extra term life policy just before testing HIV-positive. I had ways to find out if Lenny owned other life insurance policies, and I could do it without alerting every special investigator in the country on the Fraud Defense Network. But unless I called Addie soon with a true and accurate account of the life insurance of Leonard Stillmach, that’s exactly what she would do.

  We needed a computer with a broadband connection. My place was closer to the funeral home, but Miranda’s was a lot nicer and came with plenty of good wine. She lived on Jones Street in the Old Market, not two blocks from Lenny’s, so close that I could see it gave her the creeps to go home alone these days. Good for me, because I could offer to go home with her, and sometimes she’d even let me stay—on the couch.

  She had a condo in an old furniture warehouse that had been converted several times, the first time as a haven for fine arts graduates dressed in basic black Gap activewear. A fire emptied the place in 1997, right about the same time technology fever swept through the town. To lure and accommodate “people of technology” like Lenny and Miranda, the building had been stripped down to the exposed brick walls, supporting beams, and original wood floors, then retrofitted with Sub-Zero and Viking kitchen appliances, granite countertops, slate-and-marble baths with oversized showers, and fiber-optic cable to the main rooms, as well as being prewired for home theater, digital jukeboxes, and five-speaker sound systems—all the connections for every toy in the IT worker’s arsenal built right in—and two-foot sound insulation between all shared walls.

  Miranda stopped in the frosted glass entryway and unslung a leather handbag embossed in crocodile, pawing through its lined interiors for the smart card on her key chain. The keys jangled on the way out, and no sense pretending I wasn’t looking for the ones rimmed in red and green plastic.