New York Echoes 2

by Warren Adler

  He hadn’t even fallen dead center on the canvas bag and we had to really tug and sweat until we got him into position. The man from the funeral parlor had to really work to get Grampa zipped into the bag. With a wheezing effort he stood up and looked at the bag for a minute while he caught his breath.

  “He was big, all right.” He turned toward us boys and it seemed that he was really seeing us for the first time.

  “Your Grampa?” he asked.

  We nodded.

  “I’ll tell you this. He was one big man.”

  Then he shook his head.

  “I’m afraid you boys are going to have to help me get him into the truck.”

  We looked at each other and shrugged again. There was no point in arguing since there was no way this unhealthy-looking man was going to get that body through the downstairs hall and down the flight of stairs from the porch to the street without help.

  It was getting light by then and from the front window of the bedroom we could see people already on the street hurrying to the Saratoga Avenue El station around the corner. My grandparents’ house was just across the street from a park and people would cut across the park as a shortcut and pass right in front of the house to get to the station. Morning and night during rush hour it looked like a parade passing the house.

  It didn’t mean a damn thing to this man that the body in that bag was our Grampa and we were supposed to be grieving and crying and not carrying his body out of the house into the street. This is not to say that we were not grieving in our own way.

  We must have both sensed that we had lost something, something very important, and after this things were definitely not going to be the same as they were. Don’t think it didn’t hurt deep inside both of us to see my mother and my Grandma beside themselves with grief and unhappiness. As I said, we all loved each other in those days.

  There were four canvas handles on the body bag, two at one end and two at the other. The man told us to crouch and grab the two at the foot end, which we did while he crouched at the head and grabbed the canvas handles at that end. Once again it was one, two, three, lift and we did.

  Grampa was heavy as hell. His weight staggered us, but we managed to straighten up our legs and get enough leverage to take a step at a time without dropping him. We were two determined boys. Bobby had tightened his lips together with absolute determination and I was showing him mine in my own way. We were not going to drop Grampa’s body. No way.

  We took cautious steps, straining and huffing, hearing the man from the funeral parlor wheeze like a tire with a bad leak. Step by step we moved Grampa’s body through the bedroom doorway, down the narrow hall, past the room where my mother and Gramma were crying. We didn’t want them to see us and, for some reason, found the strength to pick up a bit of speed.

  “Papa. Papa,” I heard Gramma scream as we passed the living room. “My Papa.” I also heard my mother’s loud sobs. God, my heart was breaking for them. Suddenly tears streamed down my cheeks and I couldn’t see a thing and started bumping into walls and nearly dropped Grampa.

  “Be careful,” Bobby said, and his voice sounded like he, too, was crying behind the words.

  I thought my arms would break. I could barely catch my breath. My legs ached under the weight. Bobby huffed beside me. He was younger and, I suppose, weaker which prompted me to somehow assume more of the burden that he had. I knew I was way beyond my strength. Under normal circumstances there was no way I could have lifted that weight. Even the man from the funeral parlor was having a bad time.

  Somehow we managed to get Grampa through the front door. The sun was up by then. Of all days it had to be clear and crisp with nowhere to hide. The parade had begun in front of the house, but I refused to look at any of the faces of the passing people. I’m not even sure whether they even knew what was happening. I didn’t even look at Bobby, although I could hear him groaning with every step we took.

  Getting down the front steps was torture. At every step I felt like my insides would fall out. Still, under no circumstances was I going to drop Grampa, especially now, in front of all those people heading to work. It became in my mind an article of faith and I’m sure Bobby felt the same way. No way I was going to humiliate Grampa in front of all those people by dropping his body on the front stairs where it was sure to slide down into the street.

  “Don’t worry, Grampa,” I remember saying to myself. “I will not let that happen.” I might not have actually said it to myself at that moment, but I knew in my heart that it had become a matter of preserving his dignity and under no circumstances was I going to desecrate his body and, therefore, his symbolic spirit by allowing him to unceremoniously touch the ground.

  This may sound a bit high falutin’ for a twelve-year-old, especially in hindsight, but I have never doubted that description of my resolve in all the years since.

  We reached the street without a mishap. Bobby’s eyes were closed with pain and his face was red with effort, causing me to shift even more of the burden to myself. The man from the funeral parlor was also having a real rough time, walking backwards once we hit the pavement.

  As he had said the truck was parked near the corner, which meant that we still had to carry Grampa nearly half a block. This was the worst part of all. It was not just the burden. We were numb by then and, as they say, running on fumes, but we moved along at a snail’s pace. The pavement was narrow and by inserting ourselves into the crowd of people rushing for the subway, we slowed things down a bit.

  I had the feeling that people knew what was happening, that a dead man was being taken out of the world while they were still scurrying about like ants, surviving, working, worrying, but knowing that someday even they could not avoid being carried out of their homes just like Grampa.

  As we carried Grampa along the busy Brooklyn street, slowing down the crowd, I remember suddenly feeling a certain weightlessness take over. Grampa stopped being heavy. I looked over at Bobby wondering whether he was feeling the same thing and, by God, he was smiling, happy, too, that we were moving Grampa with dignity along that sidewalk with people slowing down respectfully knowing what was happening. He wasn’t going feet-first either, since we were carrying the feet end, but going headfirst into what I once heard called the long night. I always felt, and still feel, that to Grampa, human dignity always came first and he had miraculously made himself light so that he would not be humiliated on his final journey.

  We reached the truck and almost without effort hoisted Grampa and slid him into the back.

  “Thank you, boys,” the man said and without another word got into the truck and drove away.

  We boys looked after him as the crowd passed us by, not looking at each other. It was, at that moment, as the truck disappeared around the corner that I knew… I’m sure of it now… forty years later… that I had left boyhood behind and had become a man.

  And in the telling of this, I am also sure that it has given me what I crave at this moment in the hushed twilight of manhood.

  To be a boy again.

  Their Greatest Achievement

  “I want this to be a real tribute to your mom, Barry, a real tribute,” Marvin Stewart told his son. “A 50th birthday is a real milestone. Above all, I want it to be a surprise, a wow surprise.”

  Barry had come down to Manhattan from Boston where he was working for a software company. This was a business trip, but his father had corralled him for a coffee at a Starbucks on Third Avenue.

  “She’ll get a kick out of that,” Barry said, studying his father across the little table. The man was clearly excited, enjoying the idea, smiling broadly, patting his son’s hand. He had begun to gray around the temples, but his bright blue eyes still had the comforting intensity of his earliest memories.

  “I think that’s great, Dad,” Barry said, feeling the old tightness growing in his stomach.

  “Remember. Not a word.
All the invitations are prepared and ready to go. Your mom, as you know, has lots of friends. Aunt Alice is coming in from Charlestown with all the kids and Uncle Mike and his brood will be coming in from Milwaukee. All her close friends from the store where she works will be there. It will be one hell of a bash, one hell of bash. I’ve booked the ballroom at the Lotos Club. I’m hoping for a hundred people.”

  “That will set you back a pretty penny, Dad,” Barry said.

  “Your mom is worth every cent,” his father said. His vocal admiration of his mother was, as always, boundless. Considering what Barry knew, it had always struck him as an exercise in extreme denial. Or blindness. Or both.

  Living with the pressing burden of what he characterized as “the great secret” was the hardest task he had ever had to deal with in his life. Its effect on his feelings for both his father and his mother, despite his love for them, was corrosive. In his heart he could find no residue of respect or admiration for them. As much as he had tried, he was unable to define his father as anything but a blind fool and his mother as a whore.

  As an only child, he was adored by each of them. They had been devoted, dedicated to his well-being, cheering him on as he moved ahead in his studies and his career. No parents could be more loving, more respectful, avoiding any temptation to be cloying or interfering.

  “You are our greatest achievement” had become their mantra. It distorted everything he tried to do, as if he had to continue to top himself, fearful that he would dilute their “greatest achievement” by any misstep or failure or, worse, that his actions might lead to the explosive revelation that would cause the rupture of his parents’ marriage.

  At the first opportunity after graduating college, he had jumped ship, gone to Boston to work. Of course, he called them frequently, but at that distance he could avoid face-to-face meetings like the one he was currently enduring.

  Soon, he knew, he would jump again, further and further away from Manhattan, leaving them both in his wake. He berated himself for not having the stomach to make the move in one long jump.

  Still, he could not find the courage to reject the role of devoted and loving son. For more than twenty years, he calculated, he had turned the matter over in his mind and as it matured he grew more and more resentful. It was becoming increasingly difficult to keep it bottled up, and he was fearful that one day he would slip and all he knew would inadvertently come out.

  Worse, he was discovering as he grew older that such a possibility had become a terrible barely endurable temptation and keeping it inside himself was increasingly difficult. Even now, as he sat at the little round table at Starbucks, sipping his coffee and listening to his father enthuse over the coming birthday party, he felt the scalding words forming just below the level of articulation. He wanted to say it, shout it, scream out the truth.

  “You fool, Dad. Don’t you know that your wife has been making a monkey out of you for years, that she has had a string of lovers, that she has betrayed you numerous times?” In this fantasy revelation, he never referred to his mother as anything but his father’s wife. How do you tell your own father that your mother is an adulterous whore?

  It was the same with his mother and had destroyed any real intimacy between them, although he walked the walk, as he told himself, showing the façade of a loving son. If his mother recognized the gap between them, she never let on, never whined about his lack of candor about his life, about his relationships, about the lack of explanation about his various activities.

  His communication with both his parents was merely reporting, mostly about his advancing career. If they inquired about his personal life, he offered little by way of information. For whatever reason, they never probed or interrogated him. The fact was that holding the big secret within himself had stultified his relationships with both men and women. He was, he knew, inhibited by distrust and the source of this attitude was no mystery to him.

  He was five years old that first time and his father was out of town on one of his thrice-yearly selling trips flogging a line of men’s suits. His territory was the northeast, all the way up to Bangor with as he put it “a smile and a shoeshine,” once a baffling reference. Later the image and the words would make sense when he finally saw the play “Death of a Salesman” and understood what it meant. Seeing the revival of the play, he was stunned by it. It shook him to the core.

  In Arthur Miller’s scenario, it was the father who was the adulterer, and it had a profound effect on one of his sons who had discovered it when he unexpectedly showed up in his father’s hotel room. The role reversal in his real life did not make the play any less affecting and powerful.

  They lived then in a small apartment on the West Side. His father had left for the road the day before. For some reason, he was awakened. He would never know why except that perhaps a strange disruption in the nightly routine of the household had interfered with his sleep. He had crept out of bed. It was not uncommon for him creep into his parents’ bed and snuggle between them during the night when bad dreams made him fearful. When his father was away, he continued to seek comfort and solace during the night in his mother’s bed when childish fears afflicted him.

  At the entrance to his parents’ bedroom that night, he heard noises and peeking in, saw two bodies joined like wrestlers, which frightened him so much that he went back into his own bed and drew the covers over his head. Eventually when he awoke to the affectionate ministrations of his mother, he told her he had a dream about Mommy and Daddy fighting in bed.

  “Just a bad dream, baby,” his mother told him. It did have its effect. When a male visitor was present, his parents’ bedroom door remained locked. Not that it mattered, since he was too fearful to approach it.

  Even then he knew it was not a dream. Other men were paying his mother visits when his father was on the road. Occasionally, if they appeared at the apartment prior to his bedtime, his mother would introduce him to her pals, as she called them. In his child’s mind, he did not think twice about her so-called pals. They seemed a normal part of his mother’s life. Nor did he think it amiss that they appeared mostly during his father’s absences, although sometimes they were familiar to him as “pals” of his father.

  As he grew older, his mother seemed to change the routine of interaction with her men pals. They would take him on country outings and while he played with other children, his mother and her pal would drift away to some secluded spot. Sometimes he might come across them doing what he then thought were strange things together, but it was years before he determined the truth of those strange things.

  When his father returned from his trip, life went on as before, although sometimes one or another of his mother’s pals came to visit with his spouse, and they seemed happy and content to be with each other. By the time he was twelve and had learned from his friends what sex was all about, the truth began to dawn on him.

  But while he was troubled by the knowledge of his mother’s infidelity, he was baffled by the lack of reaction on his father’s part. Life at home for his parents was tranquil and loving, and he basked in the warmth of their affection. Even then, he feared that the big secret that he harbored would be fatal to what appeared to be his parents’ loving relationship.

  “I want this surprise to knock her for a loop. A birthday celebration like no other birthday celebration. The works,” his father said.

  “Sounds like you’re going over the top.”

  “Absolutely. And remember, not a word. But keep September 25th open. You’ve got to be there. Naturally we expect you to say a few words.”

  Back in Boston, Barry could not shake the idea that his father was a bigger fool than he originally thought. He wished he could find the courage not to show up, but, of course, that was out of the question. He would have to steel himself against the platitudes that he would hear about his mother, particularly the grand adoring speech his father was sure to make and his mother’s
saccharine and phony response.

  As for his own speech, he fantasized what he might say. How his mother had cheated, had affairs, humiliated his father. It had occurred to him many times that his father might be having affairs himself, just like Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s play, and that all this show of devotion on his part was a ruse, playing the role of the good and faithful husband to keep the peace. Perhaps the idea was to keep the marriage going for the sake of “their greatest achievement,” another nail in the coffin of his guilt.

  Yet the fact that when they were together, his parents showed no signs of resentment or bitterness, never said an unkind word to each other and seemed as loving and affectionate as ever, continued to baffle him. There were never accusations between them, nor arguments, nor the slightest sign of discord. He concluded that his father was spineless and henpecked and his mother a clever liar.

  In his mind, he made up nasty little birthday speeches bluntly accusing his mother of hypocrisy, dissimulation and sanctimonious duplicity and his father of obtuse ignorance and cupidity. While such a public accusation might lift the burden that he carried on his back like a heavy stone, he doubted he could face the aftermath of incrimination and alienation. To be certain he would not stray from the expected ritual, he wrote a toast, traditional, expected, and brief, that he would read to the assemblage.

  The birthday party celebration was amazingly close to what his father had envisioned. Relatives came from long distances. He saw cousins he had not seen in years. An elegant and elaborate sit-down dinner was arranged, complete with a continuous video show of his mother’s days before and after her marriage with pictures taken years ago that he had no idea still existed.

  His mother, looking lovely, slim and marvelously preserved for her fifty years appeared dutifully surprised and blushingly kissed everyone she greeted, repeating over and over again to every well-wisher: “I was completely fooled. I can’t believe it.” In surveying the guests, Barry noted that one or two of them, his father’s colleagues, looked excruciatingly familiar. By then, his mother, who worked as a salesperson at a Madison Avenue boutique, had surely acquired some new pals who passed unrecognizable among the many guests.