Bitter Truth

by William Lashner

  I knew where I had sneaked myself into, of course. This was the maze of hedges and flowers that had been described to me by Grimes, the dentist, in his mournful soliloquy at the Irish Pub. He had described it as immaculately tended, but it had apparently not been touched in many many months, not since, I would guess, the death of Caroline’s sweet widowed grandmother, Faith Reddman Shaw, Grammy, who seemed to have a hand in many of the goings-on in that house. I followed the maze like a rat looking for cheese, ducking into almost completely covered entrances, under archways of branches, moving ever toward the middle, until I stepped, as cautiously as a heathen in a church, into the clearing Grimes had described so vividly.

  The sun was brightest here and the plants had seemed to mutate into wild stalks of color. Flies fell upon my neck. The statue of Aphrodite was there, on her tiptoes, reaching up to the heavens, but now it appeared she was being held down by a thick hairy vine that cloaked the base of the statue and wrapped itself like an arm around her rear leg. The bench across from the statue was also covered with a vine, but this one sported bright orange flowers. Between the two was an oval covered with high grasses and stalks of weedy green not yet brought to flower. I stepped around the oval toward the statue, feeling some dark presence beneath my feet as I walked, and pushed away the handsized vine leaves covering the base until I could see the stone in which was deeply engraved the word “SHAW.”

  I felt something on my foot and jerked it away suddenly, seeing a frog hop into the surrounding bushes. Another frog leaped by. I turned and saw two more come bounding like little flashes of light from the entrance arch and then a boot.

  I backed away, almost ducking behind the statue, but before I could hide the boot’s owner came into view and smiled at me in an unsettling way from beneath a wide straw hat. “A little sightseeing, Mr. Carl?” cackled Nat.

  “I didn’t mean to,” I stammered, backing away. “I wasn’t…”

  “You’re allowed,” he said, and his smile warmed to genuine. The spot around his left eye glowed a lurid red. “It’s just a garden.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, trying to recover my breath.

  “You should have seen it when it was tended. I spent half of each of my days maintaining it to Mrs. Shaw’s specifications. She was a demon for pruning. The elder Mrs. Shaw, I’m talking of now. Not a bloom out of place, not a weed. ‘Take off every shoot whose value is doubtful,’ she taught me, ‘and all you have left is beauty.’ It was a masterpiece. Yep. Some magazine wanted to do a spread, but she wouldn’t have strangers stomping through it with tripods and cameras.”

  I looked around at the weeds and the vines pulling at the statue. “Why’d you let it go?”

  “This is the way the elder Mrs. Shaw, she wanted it. ‘Just let it go when I die, Nat,’ she told me.” His voice took on a strange power as he imitated hers. “ ‘Let the earth take it back,’ she told me. So that’s what I’ve done.”

  “It seems a shame.”

  “That it does, yep. Every once in a while I come with my shears and get the urge to straighten it up, some. To prune. But the elder Mrs. Shaw, she was one who liked her orders carried out to the letter. It was the least I could do for her to honor her wishes. It was her place, you know. She’d been coming here ever since she was a girl. Built it up herself.”

  “What was she like, Nat?”

  “The elder Mrs. Shaw? Quite a woman, she was. Like a mother to me. Brought me here when I was still a boy and made sure I was taken care of ever since, almost like I was one of her own. She’s done more for me and mine then you’d ever imagine, Mr. Carl. Can’t say as she was the gentlest soul I’ve ever met.” He squatted down and pulled at a long piece of grass, wrapping it about his hand. “Nope, I could never say that. But deep in her heart she wanted to do good. N’aren’t too many like that.”

  He stood and strolled over to the statue and kicked roughly at the base.

  “She’s laying right there,” he said. “In some special urn of hers. Her ashes mixed up with her husband’s. I’ll tell you one thing, Mr. Carl. She loved him more than she loved anything else on this good earth. That kind of love coming from a woman for a man, she’s got to have more than a little good in her.”

  “How did he die, her husband?” I asked.

  Nat’s blue eyes looked into mine and he smiled as if he knew that I knew the answer, though how he could I couldn’t know. “It was before my time. But I’ll say this, the elder Mrs. Shaw, she was probably right to let this place go. Sometimes what’s buried should remain buried. No good can come from digging up the dead. Come along, Mr. Carl, I’ll show you out. The way it is now, it sometimes gets tricky and you might end up here longer than you’d expect.”

  He winked at me before turning and starting back. I followed him, through the arched entranceway of the clearing, along passageways, through the narrow opening, thorns grabbing at my suit jacket, until we had returned to the wide lawn. The sun was bright now and there was no mist left. Nat took off his hat and wiped his head with his forearm. “Getting hot. You had best go on up and get your eggs.”

  I heard something from the patio. Some of the others were there now, Kendall, waving at me energetically, Caroline, in sunglasses, with a drink in her hand. I turned away and looked down the hill, beyond the pond to the wooded area in which sat that old weathered and burned Victorian house. From here I couldn’t see any of it, blocked as it was by the foliage, but I could feel it there, listing in its sad way.

  “There is a house down there beyond the pond, in those trees,” I said. “Who lived there?”

  “You did get around, didn’t you, Mr. Carl?” said Nat. “Feeling a bit frisky this morning, I suppose.” He turned toward the relic. “That was the caretaker’s house. Mrs. Shaw’s father, he deeded it for the whole of her life to the widow Poole. She lived there with her daughter until the widow Poole, she died. Then it reverted back to the estate.”

  “What happened to the daughter?”

  Nat, still looking down the hill, his back to me, shrugged. “She up and left. Rumor was she died in an asylum New England way. She was supposed to be demented. Caught the pox, or some such fever, and gave up the ghost. The whole family Poole sort of just withered away. I guess that’s the way of it. The good Lord’s always pruning, trying to get it right at last.”

  Before I could respond he started walking away from me, down the hill, toward the pond with all those frogs.

  “You remember what I said about leaving the buried be, Mr. Carl,” he said without turning. “Some patches of this earth are better left unturned.”

  19

  IT WAS A TOUCHING LITTLE SERVICE for Jimmy Vigs at the funeral parlor on North Broad Street. The rabbi spoke of the joy that Jimmy Dubinsky had given to his family and his friends, of the sage advice and prompt service he had given his clients, of his generous spirit in running the charity bingo events at the synagogue. A tall straw of a man with flighty hands stood up and spoke of how Jimmy was always there for him in his times of deepest need, when the fates conspired against him and OTB was closed. He was a giver, said the man, and he gave without complaint, so long as the call was laid in time. Anton Schmidt, a tie beneath his leather jacket, looking almost like a yeshiva student in his wide fedora and evident sadness, talked in soft halting sentences of Jimmy’s fairness and kindness and his facility with numbers. And then the son spoke, a young heavy man, just in from the Coast, the spitting image of poor dead Jimmy, talking of how his dad was the greatest dad in the whole wide world, always taking him to the ball game, watching sports with him on television. The son spoke of the joy they had in traveling together, father and son, to Vegas, to watch a Mike Tyson fight, and here the son choked up a bit and grabbed tightly onto the lectern before continuing. His father had taught him how to play craps, he said through a blubber of sobs, how to handicap the horses. He would remember his father, he said, for the rest of his life.

  Jimmy would have liked it. And with the over and under at seventy-five
and the higher than expected turnout in the chapel, Jimmy would also have liked that the over pulled through. But even with the turnout, when I arrived a little late and went to sign the guest book I wasn’t surprised to see it totally devoid of names. I was the only mourner willing to be identified.

  The rabbi started reading the Twenty-third Psalm and, right at the part about walking through the valley of the shadow of death, Earl Dante slid into my pew, jamming his hip into mine. With the yarmulke neatly on his head and the white rose pinned to his lapel he could have been mistaken for the owner of the joint. Like I said before, he had that kind of face.

  “Glad you could make it, Victor,” he said in his slurry voice. “We were counting on you to show.”

  “Just paying my respects.”

  “There was a rumor that the feds were tapping Jimmy’s phones at the end. Any truth to it?”

  “How would I know? I’m just the lawyer.”

  “Always the last to know, right, Victor?”

  “That’s right.”

  He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. “I have you down as a pallbearer. When they turn the bier around we need you to go on up and grab a handle.”

  “I can’t believe there aren’t six men who were closer to Jimmy than me.”

  “There are,” said Dante, leaning forward in preparation to stand. “But it will take more than six to carry Jimmy off to his final reward. There’s a limo for the pallbearers that will ferry you to the cemetery. They’ll need you there too.”

  “I wasn’t planning to go to the cemetery,” I said.

  He looked at me and sucked his teeth. “Take the limo.”

  When it was time to wheel the coffin out, there were ten of us jockeying for position at the handles. From the other side of the coffin I caught Cressi grinning at me. “Yo, Vic,” he mouthed, bobbing his head up and down. Anton Schmidt was also there, red-eyed beneath his thick glasses. Then, with the rabbi silent and the mourners standing, we walked beside the coffin on its journey out of the chapel. At the side door, with the hearse waiting, its back door swung wide, we all tightened our grip on the handles and heaved. The coffin didn’t budge.

  “Put your backs into it,” said the guy from the funeral home. “Ready, one, two, and three.”

  We were able, with much grimacing, to lift the coffin and, each of us taking tiny steps, carry it, amid groans and curses, to the hearse, where it slid through on rollers to the rear of the cold black car.

  Our limo was long and gray and just as cold as the hearse, though we didn’t have as much room to stretch out as did Jimmy. I sat shotgun, with the window to the back open so I could hear the conversations of the other men jammed shoulder to shoulder inside the rear benches.

  “That was a very moving service,” said one of the men in the back.

  “I thought the son was touching, just touching,” said a second. “When he talked about Tyson it almost brought tears.”

  “If you see a McDonald’s or something,” said a third man to the driver, “why don’t you pull over. I could use a little lunch.”

  “What kind of slob are you, Nicky, we’re burying a man here.”

  “He’d a understood.”

  “We can do drive-through,” said a different man.

  “I have to follow the hearse,” said the driver.

  “So tell the hearse to go too. Get an extra value meal for Jimmy. Like a gesture of respect, you know. One last stop at them golden arches.”

  “Too many stops at the golden arches,” said Anton Schmidt softly, “that’s why he’s dead.”

  “What, he got wacked at a McDonald’s?”

  We drove up Broad Street to the Roosevelt Extension of Route 1 and then hit the Schuylkill Expressway, west, to get us to the cemetery. Buzzing past us were a horde of speeding cars and vans, swiping by each other as they changed lanes with a frenzy. I turned around and over the heads of the pallbearers I saw the long procession of cars, their headlights lit, following us slowly, and I imagined them all lined up at the McDonald’s drive-through, each putting in its order for fries and Big Macs.

  “Maybe there’s a party or something after,” said Cressi. “Hey, Victor, your people, they throw wakes after they bury their dead?”

  “We sit shivah,” I said. “That’s where we visit the families and say Kaddish each evening.”

  “Kaddish, all right,” said Cressi. “I used to date a Jewish broad. You’re talking booze, right?”

  “That’s Kiddush, which is different,” I explained. “Kaddish is the prayer for the dead.”

  “I thought I’d see Calvi at the ceremony,” said someone else.

  “Probably has gotten too fat to leave the pool down there.”

  “Last I heard, the fuck had prickly heat.”

  “You dated a Jewish girl, Cressi? Who?”

  “That Sylvia, what lived in the neighborhood, remember her?”

  “Stuck up, with the hats and the tits?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “You dated her?”

  “Sure.”

  “How far you get?”

  “You think I dated her for the conversation? I want conversation I’ll turn on the television.”

  “Why’d she go out with a bum like you?”

  “What do you think, hey? I got charm.”

  “You got crabs is all you got.”

  “You ever tell your mother you were dating some Jewish girl?”

  “What are you, a douchebag?” said Cressi. “My mother would have fried my balls for supper I’d had told her that.”

  “With a little garlic, some gravy and mozzarella, they’d probably taste all right.”

  “Yeah but such small portions.”

  General laughter.

  “Hey, Victor, about this shiver?” said Cressi.

  “Shivah.”

  “They have food?”

  “Usually.”

  “Well then, after the burial, I say we do some shivering.”

  “But if you pass a McDonald’s before that…”

  At the cemetery, we strained our backs lugging the heavy metal coffin from a hearse to the cart and then pushing it over the uneven turf to the hole in the ground. As we shoved our way into places around the hole, like a crowd at a street show, a man from the funeral parlor handed out yarmulkes and little cards with prayers and then the rabbi began. The rabbi spoke a little about one-way journeys and the son sobbed and the rabbi spoke some more about ashes and dust and they lowered the casket into the hole with thick gray straps and the son sobbed and then a few of us who pretended to know what we were doing said Kaddish for James Dubinsky. I read the transliteration of the Hebrew on the little cards they handed out so I don’t know if my words counted, but as I read yis-gad-dal v’yis-kaddash sh’meh rab-bo, as I struggled through the faintly familiar pronunciation, I thought of my grandfathers, whom I had helped bury, and my grandmothers, whom I had helped bury, and my father, who was coughing out the blood in his lungs as he got ever closer to that hole in the ground, and I hoped with a strange fervor that my words were doing some good after all.

  The rabbi tossed a shovelful of dirt onto the wide wooden lid of the coffin, some pebbles bouncing, and then the son, and then the rest of us, one by one, tossing shovelfuls of dirt, one by one, and afterward we walked slowly, one by one, back to the road where our cars waited for us.

  “It’s a sad day, Victor.” A thick, nasal voice coming from right next to me. “Jimmy, he was a hell of a guy. Hell of a guy.”

  “Hello, Lenny,” I said. “Yes, Jimmy was something.”

  The nasal voice belonged to Lenny Abromowitz, a tall barrel-chested man of about sixty, with plaid pants and the nose of a boxer who led with his face. He had been a prize-fighter in his past, and a professional bruiser, so I’m told, who did whatever was required with that brawn of his, but now he was only a driver. He wore a lime-green jacket and white patent leather shoes and, in deference to the somber occasion, his porkpie hat was
black. And as he walked beside me he draped one of his thick arms over my shoulder.

  “Haven’t seen much of yas, Victor. You don’t come to the restaurant no more?”

  “I’ve been really busy.”

  “Ever since the Daily News put those pictures on the front page, people they don’t come around so much as before.”

  “Oh, were there pictures?” Of course there were pictures. The Daily News had rented a room across the street from Tosca’s and stationed a photographer there to capture exactly who was going in and going out of the notorious mob hangout, plastering the pictures on a series of front pages. Politicians and movie stars and sports heroes and famous disc jockeys were captured in crisp blacks and whites paying court to the boss. Each morning everyone in the city wondered who would be the next cover boy and each evening the television news broadcasts started with pointed denials of any wrongdoing by that day’s featured face. The only ones who weren’t impressed were the feds, who had rented the room next to the Daily News’s room and were busy taking pictures of their own. As would be expected, since the front-page series, Tosca’s business had been cut precipitously.

  “Yeah, sure there was pictures. Front page. Surprised you missed it.”

  “I read the Inquirer.”

  “Hey, Victor, let me give you a ride back to the city.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll go back with the limo.”

  “Take a ride with me, Victor.”

  “No really, it’s taken care of.”

  His hand slid across my shoulder onto my neck and squeezed, lightly sure, but still hard enough for me to know how hard he could squeeze if ever he wanted, and with his other hand he reached over and gave my head a few light knocks with his knuckle.

  “Hello, anybody home? Are you listening? I think maybe you should come and take a ride with me, Victor. I’m parked over there.”

  We crossed the road with the hearse and the limousine and the other cars and kept going, across a field of tombstones with Jewish stars and menorahs and torah scrolls carved into the stone, with names like Cantor and Shure and Goodrich and Kimmelman, until we reached another road, where, down a ways, was parked a long white Cadillac.