by Daniel Stern
“I’m having that taken care of. I think I can get it declared an accidental death. With a suicide there has to be an inquest. It’s always rotten. You go ahead and make the funeral arrangements. I’ll see that the body is released to whatever place you say.”
The body, Jud thought. So soon Carl Walkowitz has become—the body. He said, “Thanks, Joe. I appreciate it.”
“I guess he’s been kind of sick and half dead for a long time.”
“If that’s a way of saying I told you so or something, it’s not—”
Paul and Louise entered from the front entrance, breathing frosty puffs of air. It was clear from their faces that they knew. Jud walked away without finishing what he was saying. He sat down next to Marianne. Behind them someone said: “It never fails. Every time I go to a funeral it rains or snows.”
5
THERE WERE ALMOST FORTY people in the chapel when Paul walked to the dais in front. He was surprised, not only by the large number but by the unexpected ones—like Fanny Lebow and Hendrix and some other newspapermen to whom, perhaps, the event might seem vaguely newsworthy, since it was connected with a current Broadway production. Also Hendrix might have tipped them off. Larry had shown him Hendrix’s column in the afternoon paper. It was about the incident between Walkowitz and Rolfe, but it named no names except that of the play. None of the other papers had carried anything about it.
Jud and Marianne sat in the first row, the traditional mourner’s bench, only a few feet away from the closed, cloth-draped coffin. They were treated, automatically, as if they were the family. Marianne was sitting very close to Jud. She had achieved some sort of taut composure, white-faced but under control.
During the rabbis opening prayer there had been an unnaturally complete stillness. Now there was rustling of clothing and short stabs of coughs. They were settling themselves to listen. The overheated air was full of the mildewy smells of damp cloth and fur and the pungency of wet rubber. All of this was mixed with the uncentered emanation of a sickly sweet atmosphere, too slight to be called an odor, yet insistent.
Paul mounted the dais and turned to face them. Jud had asked him to speak the eulogy. He had wanted someone who had known Walkowitz, at least for a while. Paul had accepted, knowing that, in a way, he was accepting for the wrong reasons, that he was less concerned about the man who had died than he was about Jud. The rabbi, a young Ivy League-looking man, had agreed, a little coolly.
Having no idea of what he was going to say, Paul trusted to luck and to his life-long memory of Biblical passages. He waited for them to quiet down, still searching for an opening statement. The Old Testament lay on the stand in front of him. Paul knew the passages he would want to use. He’d read them through so many years, so many endings. His own parent’s death … the ending of his marriage after a certain stage … the ending of his career, years ago. And now, the ending of his closeness with Jud. All for nothing. Poor Walkowitz had tried to convince him that beginnings were still possible. And Paul had turned on him, challenged him, had called him—Lazarus.
The remembrance gave Paul his opening statement. He tried to phrase simply, knowing the Old Testament reading that followed would play a cold light on any inflated rhetoric. Just before he began, he saw Rolfe and Michaels sit down together in the back row.
“This man,” he said, “who died today, Carl Walkowitz, was treated by most of us as if he were Lazarus, who had returned, for a time, from the dead. He left everyone of his blood and name there. He, only, remained. We know very little about him. He was a Jew, a man who spoke many languages, a man who made poems sometimes. He laughed often, but I never heard him laugh without bitterness. He had no wife or children or friends.
“There are men who have undergone such experiences that we no longer have anything to say to them. The old dialogue between men is broken. And, unless they can find a voice to hear from the heavens or from themselves, there comes a silence so deep that no one can live with it. So, finally, Lazarus returns.”
Careful, Paul thought as he ran his finger down the page of the open Bible, don’t want to imply suicide. Well, Jud wanted it honest, so here it was, honest. He caught a glimpse of Jud staring, sightless, at the coffin.
He read: “‘For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward: for the memory of them is forgotten … Remember, then, Thy Creator in the days of thy youth, Before the evil days come, and the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say: “I have no pleasure in them:” … In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few. And those that look out shall be darkened in the windows, and the doors shall be shut in the street, When the sound of the grinding is low; And one shall start up at the voice of a bird, And all the daughters of music shall be brought low; And the almond tree shall blossom, and the grasshopper shall be heavy, and desire shall fail’…”
Paul took a deep breath. God, he thought, why did I choose this? Who am I talking to? Am I talking to Jud about his work—or to myself about death? He felt a gritty moisture in the corners of his eyes. Wouldn’t that be lovely, he thought, to promise perfect honesty for the dead and end up crying for myself, for the few beginnings and the many endings.
At his right Paul saw the rabbi move. Then, on swift impulse, his eyes closed but looking in his mind’s eye, directly at Jud, he added: “‘Therefore whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might, for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave whither thou goest.’”
Then the rabbi was at his side and everyone was standing.
Paul walked back to the bench and stood next to Louise. Something was being done with the coffin. He heard the rabbi’s nasal tones begin a prayer.
On the street, after the coffin had been placed in the hearse, Jud tried to convince Marianne to go home. He reminded her about Sarah.
She shook her head, clutching her purse firmly against her breast, a small gesture of defiance. Her eyelids were stiff, unblinking against the snow that fell past them and melted on her cheeks. “Mother will take care of her,” she said. “I have to go.” Jud bundled her into the first limousine. Larry squashed in next to her and put his arm around her. Jud was sure Larry knew nothing of the true situation, yet he acted as if he knew. Marianne turned her face away from Jud and let it rest on Larry’s shoulder. Obscure winds trembled her body.
6
THE CEMETERY WAS FAR out on Long Island. Here the snow was in command. Paths were ploughed through drifts that towered on either side of the cars as they inched their way from the clogged highway to the narrow, icy road that led to the entrance of the cemetery.
When they arrived at the gate and climbed out of the cars, Jud saw that the entourage had dwindled. About ten of them trailed up the path behind the rabbi. The hearse was already parked at the path near the graveside. The wind had died. Snow dripped in straight dotted lines from a gray sky. Jud moved along the path. His eyes caught glimpses of stones … JONAH EDELSTEIN 1886–1953 … BELOVED HUSBAND, FATHER, GRANDFATHER … LILY FARBER 1886–1910 … Where they turned in, finally, a few yards from the path, a deep hole in the ground was rapidly being filled with snow. A white-flecked grave digger, face blue-shadowed with beard, stood patiently, leaning on his shovel. The small group huddled around the grave. The rabbi glanced around once; then he opened a small book, closed his eyes, and began to chant.
Jud stood so near the open grave it threatened to swallow him. His feet shifted in the loose snow. He looked at the grave. Some wooden crossbars supported the coffin, now stripped of its covering cloth. Jud said to himself the words, “Walkowitz, Carl,” remembering his father at roll call, holding Leo Gross’s body, calling out his name, then murmuring the Kaddish, even though the Prayer for the Dead was to be said only by a son or a rabbi. His father had often called him, affe
ctionately, “Kaddishl” calling to mind that he had a son who would praise God for him after he died.
His face felt cold and wet, and he stifled a sneeze. He barely heard the rabbi. A few feet away Marianne slumped against Larry, who held her on her feet with one arm. The rabbi finished a prayer, trailing off into inaudibility. From somewhere a second booted grave digger appeared. The two men began to lower the box into the grave.
In that moment Jud understood why people blurted out mad statements to cold corpses and wooden boxes. Every chance to speak was the last chance. In the hotel in Gramercy Park, a block away from that other hotel where this event was being prepared, he had gone to bed in the drowsy assurance that the next morning he could speak whatever words were necessary to close the distance between himself and Walkowitz, that he would make peace with him by confirming the loss of a part of his, Jud’s, own peace. To Walkowitz, sleepwalking was peace, wakefulness, the absence of peace. Now the other man slept and Jud was more awake than ever. He knew how Walkowitz must have felt; everyone was dead who could hear what he had to say. It was only left for Jud to stand here and help them put him into this frozen hole in the ground and think: Did I help? And how much? All the while Walkowitz had kept him pinned and spinning on a hook, the word that kept returning was “victim.” He had given Jud a flesh and blood victim, the final proof of responsibility. Here was the last link in the well-wrought chain of evidence: the body. Unarguable, unanswerable, conclusive. (Why unanswerable? Isn’t it mad to kill yourself to prove a point? Can madness prove anything?) But even if Walkowitz had killed himself in an act of madness, the body in the snow-covered box was there, its accusation was real.
Jud looked straight ahead in the white glare of falling snow. He felt surrounded by an impossible clarity. Every thought that ran through his mind brought such clear outlines that it was like using a new organ of sense, the way a chair or bowl must feel to a newly blinded man’s touch—strange but specific. His sense of himself was different. It seemed to have more weight, not just the weight of shock or grief, or even accusation. His mind groped for the reality of it.
Jud knew exactly what he had come to do. Not just to stand there and help them put Walkowitz into this frozen hole in the ground. He had come to claim his victim. And, in doing so, he was claiming, finally, his own dead. It was like losing them all over again. The sense of their absence, unchangeable as stone, brought pain, fresh as if never felt before. He had inherited Walkowitz’s suffering, too. Not just in dreams—the sleepwalking was ended and so was the night. Now began the daylight, bright and implacable, like the light in a prison cell that is never turned off. Like this white afternoon in which they were lowering everyone into one encompassing mass grave.
The face was his to carry, always—the stiffened eyelid over the accusing eye. It would be there. He could count on that. It was not a question of expiation because it was not a question of responsibility. He was not directly responsible for Walkowitz’s death. Yet it was his death. He had been involved enough for it to belong to him. “Here they are,” Walkowitz had said with that strange gesture, palms turned inward, with which he had indicated the presence in his own flesh of his mother and father—Anna and Josef—and even that third unremembered name. Then he had proven it. He had been more right than he could have dreamed. They were all entombed in this grave, all now marked with this date. His mother waiting at the window … Miriam craning her neck in dark, pecking movements … his father’s ragged beard the last time he had seen him. … Even more, he thought with a crazy rush of feeling, and remembered the ghostly parade of barely remembered faces he had seen that night in Gramercy Park. All those who had made up the world when he was a child, all dissolved into nothing—and the others, the millions that were meaningless in their number but who were names (from some dark corner came the name: Kunferman, Josef), and even more than names, were flesh (the cigarette pasted against the bluish lips, the eyes with more white than he had ever seen eyes have before—above the belt twisted around the wrinkled neck). All of them were here in this winter, the Walkowitzwinter, that stubbornly refused to join the past. He shut his eyes against the ceaseless snow. Then he opened them again.
The grave diggers were nowhere to be seen. The rabbi looked around expectantly. The Kaddish, Jud thought … It was why he had come. How many prayers, how many K’doshim had been left unsaid. And how strange that in ending his own life, Walkowitz should open all the old, nonexistent graves … touch a well of pity and tenderness. …
None of them had been buried. Ashes owned no Kaddish … on what date of month or year did, Max Kramer die, or Sarah, or any of them?
Jud moved his head back and forth in meaningless, despairing motion. Mixed in his mind was the picture of Walkowitz rocking back and forth on the stage, clutching at his shoulders with his arms, trying to hold his body together—and his father shivering in the final morning air.
Oh, God, it is not enough. We need a Kaddish to be said by the stones, by the bare trees, the skies—and, somewhere, by the sun, by green trees and blue and red flowers. If they could all say a final, total Kaddish, only then perhaps could something be assuaged. Let the indifferent snow bury them all with a white, gentle Kaddish. All of them—equally—summed up in this still unmarked grave: Max, Sarah, Miriam, Zvi, Josef, Anna, Carl, and all the millions of others, family names obliterated, families melting away …
Since there was no male next of kin, the rabbi began the somber phrases of the Kaddish, alone. Then, in instinctive spasm, Jud felt the prayer being pulled from him. He moved a half step forward and cried out mournfully: “Yisgadal, v’yiskadash, sh’mai, rahbaw …”
The rabbi was surprised, but did not interrupt. He allowed Jud to chant the prayer and joined with him in the periodic responses, ending, each time, with “Amen.”
7
AT THE AIRPORT THEY waited in the glass-walled vestibule near the gateway that led onto the field. It was nine o’clock at night, and the snow was still falling. Searchlights swept the field and the sky over it. Clouds were lit, then obscured. The shiny nose of a plane was led down by a beam to a steady landing and a smooth stop not far from where Jud and Marianne stood.
He lit a cigarette for her and then for himself. “We could have had another cup of coffee, or a drink,” he said.
“I don’t like to be late.”
“I still think it’s crazy for you to go tonight.”
“You heard the man. They fly above the weather.”
“I suppose they know.”
“Stop it, Jud, please. You make me feel as if I should say some last words.”
“Do you have any?”
“I guess I said them all last night.” She was watching him, closely.
He said, “It’s the wrong time to talk,” and scrambling in the pockets of his coat he pulled out an envelope. He handed it to her.
“A note,” he said, half smiling, “from your loving husband.” He kissed her lightly on the lips. She stood so stiffly against his kiss that he knew he could not quite leave it at that, even for the time being.
“When I was alone in the hotel last night,” he said, “before I fell asleep, I remembered some lines from Blake that I haven’t thought of in I don’t know how long.” He gestured with a nervous hand. “You know the first day I met Walkowitz I asked what he did. He said if it didn’t sound so foolish he would say he was a poet?”
“I remember he made a poem for Sarah, on the spot. What were the lines from Blake?”
He recited:
“Throughout all eternity,
I forgive you,
You forgive me.
“I don’t know much about Blake or his life. I don’t know who he meant it for—God, his wife, himself …”
He kissed her again, self-conscious, awkward, as if it were their first date. Then he said, “Make a good picture.”
She said, “Make a good play.”
He was gone, and she turned toward the gate and beyond it to the waiting plane, a silve
r blur seen through the confusion of snow, in the mixed glow of floodlights and moonlight.
There was no longer any excuse for busying herself with the trivial details of travel. The seat belt was unfastened—the enormous leather purse which served her as hand luggage was placed in easy accessibility on the empty seat next to her; hair and make-up had been checked and redone and the stewardess had paid the magazine and chewing gum visit.
Marianne looked out of the window. For the first time in weeks she could see a sky untouched by snow. They were flying above the clouds. Occasionally one of the clouds below them was touched by the lights of the plane. Otherwise all she could see was the wing directly in front of her and the little red light that flashed on and off in the usual alarmingly irregular pattern.
It was the kind of trip that held few surprises. She had made the New York to Los Angeles run often since starting in films. She settled back in the seat, glad that the weather or the lateness of the hour had left the seat next to her unoccupied. She was in no mood for airplane chitchat. Only one stewardess had recognized her, so there was a good chance of her being left to herself for the entire five and a half hours. She lit a cigarette and adjusted the light above the window. Then she opened the envelope Jud had given her and began to read.
MY DEAR MARIANNE,
This note will seem foolish if I should suddenly find an articulate tongue and complete lack of nerves at the airport tonight. I doubt it.
Larry and I just came back from Carl’s hotel room. We had to see to his belongings, etc. In that bare hotel room I found a kind of journal to which he had obviously been saying all the things he couldn’t say to anybody else, for years. (I am writing this in the study and I can hear you getting Sarah ready for bed. You just assured your mother that you were quite capable of doing something or other for your own daughter. I’m glad that, like me, you’re both a parent and a child, still. Authority and rebellion under one roof of skin.)