“I don’t know what the job is yet.”
She laughed. “Victor likes to be mysterious and I so hate to spoil his fun. I’ll tell you up front, it’s nothing illegal. Mostly the job is driving and meeting people, though if you’d like to expand your duties in the future, we can discuss that as we go. Are you a good driver?”
“Yes. I’ve never been in an accident.” That was true, though it might have something to do with the fact that I never drove much. When I did drive, it was in Iowa. Most roads are so flat and wide and straight, it’s like driving on an airport runway.
“Do you know the city well?” she asked.
“Yes,” I lied. I figured as long as I had my phone, GPS could talk me through New York City’s labyrinth.
“Good. Report at nine sharp. Oh, and wear toe caps.”
“Toe caps? I don’t — ”
“I mean no open toed shoes. We don’t show off our piggies on the job. No sandals and low heels are best.”
“Should I be getting the job before I have an interview?” I asked.
She paused and took a breath. I could sense her smile through the phone. “You’ve already been interviewed, sweetie. If Victor says hire you, I hire you. I manage things but Victor owns the place.”
“So I’ll be delivering antiques?”
“Often, yes.” She laughed and I started to get irritated at the game that was being played on me. I almost hung up, but Samantha quickly reassured me. “I’m not laughing at you, dear. It’s Victor. He’s as wily as he is charming. Antiques is one of Victor’s business interests. The big money is in funeral services. You’ll be working for Castille Funeral Services.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Still interested?”
“How much does it pay?”
“Not as much as you’d think, but not bad. I can guarantee you’ll pay off the suit quickly if you don’t go too crazy with your credit card.”
I had one of Mama’s credit cards for emergencies, but I was determined not to use it.
“We can discuss those details tomorrow and I’ll have some tax paperwork for you to sign and whatnot. Are you still interested now?”
I’d been looking for a job steadily and I couldn’t seem to break into a decent entry-level position. “Yes,” I said finally.
It’s startling what our choices can add up to. I was soon to learn how deep and dark and twisted the paths of the Secret City really are. A yes? A no? It’s like we’re all running blind and we only see the path we took when we look back at the end of the journey.
Turn right and you die in a fiery car crash. Turn left and maybe you meet the love of your life by a school water fountain. You make love and you hope, eventually, to make babies together and live happily ever after (though happily ever after only happens if you don’t tell a story to the end). Life and death are dice we throw every morning we open our eyes. Maybe it works out pretty well for a while. Lose focus for a moment and maybe your arms get ripped off in a giant piece of farm machinery.
Or worse.
Worse was on its way.
15
Castille Funeral Services was a low building at the edge of a cemetery filled with mausoleums. I’d never seen a mausoleum except for pictures of New Orleans.
In Iowa, we tend to bury our dead underground, not above it. I almost said: In Iowa, we bury people, “the right way.” But I’d been in New York about a month so I like to think I was getting cosmopolitan and less judgy about alien ways of doing things.
As soon as I entered the funeral home, a gentle chime sounded in the distance. The carpet was thick under my feet and it made me think how my apartment needed a rug. My first priority was to buy a futon since I was still sleeping on the hardwood floor and my sleeping bag was too thin to be comfortable.
A tall, fortyish blonde breezed out of her office. “Good morning, I’m Samantha Biggs. How may I help you?”
“I’m Tamara Smythe. We spoke on th — ”
“Good. On time and not too much makeup. My last part-timer used so much hairspray, I’m still recovering.”
“Uh. Thanks.”
She looked me up and down again, nodded and shook my hand with one firm, perfunctory pump. “The lapels are a little wide, but actually, nice suit.”
I looked down at myself and smiled proudly. “I found it at a discount store. I got a good deal on it and the owner altered it for me right away.”
Samantha’s smile disappeared and I sensed I’d said the wrong thing. My unease didn’t disappear when she said, “Given the circumstances, I suppose that was…shrewd.”
So much for feeling sophisticated and cosmopolitan. Which made me think Samantha Biggs was a snob and she was going to be a shrew of a boss. Actually, she was a bit of a snob, but she wasn’t a shrew. She was just busy. Samantha always moved with purpose and if a conversation began to go off on a personal tangent, she put it back on track by answering a question that had not been asked. She had the edgy energy of someone who is constantly working and harried yet is trying desperately not to look hurried.
“I moved here from Iowa recently,” I said.
“This building used to be a school,” Samantha said. She beckoned me to follow her. “Victor bought the place in 1989 and renovations took almost a year. We repaint the entire place on the inside every Christmas day. We repaint on the outside every Independence Day. We can handle a funeral of two hundred easily and open up that wall for up to four hundred people. If there is overflow, the other visitation rooms are equipped with video for other attendees, but that’s rarely necessary.”
The corridors were broad and fresh flowers sat atop marble tables at equal intervals. Someone must have positioned those tables carefully, spacing them using a tape measure.
“How many funerals have you attended, Tamara?”
“One.”
“I see. Well, the uninitiated have some funny ideas about what we do.”
We walked through double doors made of dark wood and emerged in a narrower hallway I was sure no funeral attendee had ever seen. The floor was tile. The walls were bare white here instead of the soft cream and velvet wall paper I’d noticed at the front.
We turned a corner and Samantha brought me to the doorway of an office to introduce me to the staff. Three large desks sat together in a triangle in the middle of the room. A trio of women faced each other throughout the work day. Two were middle-aged and the third, closest to the window, seemed quite elderly.
Three computer towers sat in the triangular hole in the middle of the arrangement. There was something about the odd desk setup that made me think of the three witches in Hamlet at their cauldron. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble….
The women looked pleasant enough, however, and it was impossible for me to forget their names. “We’re all named Linda,” the first one said as she shook my hand. “One of us is Lynda with a y.” She pointed to the little old lady peering up at me through circular lenses. “She’s the rebel.”
Two video screens showed eight security camera angles. “Clyde’s at the back door,” Lynda said in a voice as thin as paper. “Someone let him in, please.”
Samantha stepped to another set of double doors. These were made of steel. In a moment, a large man stepped in and I was introduced to Clyde. His shirt was starched white and pulled tight over his large belly. The white of his shirt emphasized the redness of his cheeks. If we were back at the pharmacy in Medicament, Mama would have told the man to sit at the blood pressure machine for a checkup.
“Tamara is our new part-timer,” Samantha told Clyde. “We’ll have you show her the ropes on the road next week, I think.”
“Yup. Okay.” Clyde bobbed his head and Samantha took me by the elbow to point me back up the little hallway. When we’d turned the corner, I’d been looking to the office. I hadn’t noticed the two huge steel doors behind me.
“That’s the prep room,” Samantha said. “We’ll save that part of the tour for another day, once you’re more acclimated. Now,
before we went into the office, what was I saying?”
“You said that the uninitiated have some funny ideas about what you do.”
Samantha’s eyebrows shot high. Apparently her question had been rhetorical, but she smiled her approval. “Thank you,” she said. “I hate to repeat myself. I have a feeling that won’t be necessary with you.”
“I pick up stuff pretty quickly.”
“I’m sure. So here’s the deal. When people think of funeral services, they think about the bodies. That’s really a small part of it. It’s an important part you will be responsible for, but you know what we are?”
I shrugged.
“We are party planners. Subtract the bodies from the equation,” she said, “and we could be party planners working any major hotel in the city. A funeral is a prom with one very quiet, very special guest of honor.”
I nodded. “As Mama would say, ‘Funerals are for the living.’”
Samantha broke into a grin. “Mama? Oh my gawd, you’re for real, aren’t you?”
I shrugged again.
“Adorable.”
When she caught my annoyed look, she apologized. “Sorry, dear. I was born and raised in Long Island. ‘Mama’ sounds like someone from a television show.”
I didn’t want to let her off the hook too easily. Also, as Mama would say, you get a paycheck for your time. If the boss wants your dignity, too, you’re getting paid too little and you’re in the wrong job. I guess that’s Lesson 35, courtesy of Mama.
I cleared my throat. “My mother is from Texas, Miss Biggs. If I say something that sounds like what you’ve heard off of TV, perhaps it’s because in many of the American states you fly over on your vacations, we do, in fact, speak in familiar, friendly colloquialisms and regional idioms. We like it. When you pronounce the g in Long Island — as if it’s a hard g — I can assure you, it sounds very much like a New York cliche, too…but I’m far too polite to say so because,” — I smeared Mama’s Texas accent on far thicker and heavier that it actually was — “Mama brung me up right. Mama ben to church and she churched me.”
Samantha burst out laughing. I thought I was about to go back to hunting for a job in my new secondhand suit. I was wrong.
“It’s Mrs. Biggs,” she said, “but all the staff and my friends call me Sam. Please call me Sam.”
“Sure, Sam.”
“We’ll start you as a door swinger.”
“Okay. A what?”
“You’ll greet people at visitations. We serve coffee. We’ll need your help doing things like setting out extra chairs. People think all we do is embalming. They have no idea how much we vacuum. We’ll give you some time on the inside and you’ll attend funerals. After a week, maybe two, Clyde will introduce you to driving the coach. That’s what we call the hearse. Three months probation, but if I need to talk to you about something before your probation is up, I’ll just tell you straight out. Suppose you’re walking around here with your cell phone out during a visitation. I’ll tell you right away that’s not appropriate.”
“Okay.”
“Later on, if you’re up for doing it, you can drive the bus. That’s the big white van. We pick up at hospitals and bring the bodies back here. We pick up at private homes, as well, but for that we always send two representatives. If you’re up for work in the Prep Room, dressing and so forth, I can give you more hours down the line. How does that sound?”
I had butterflies in my stomach, but I didn’t let it show. I never had Brad’s self-confidence, but I supposed I could fake it. “No problem.”
Faking it is Lesson 36. The longer I spent in New York, the more I began to suspect that lots of people are faking it. They fake expertise at their jobs because no one wants to feel like a beginner. Everyone wants everyone else to know they know what they’re doing. Everybody has an instant opinion on any subject even when they obviously don’t know a damn thing about, say, how to fix the Middle East or how souvlaki is crushed into a hunk of meat that holds together on a spit.
Mostly, I think a lot of people are so fake all the time, they’ve forgotten what’s up and what’s real. And they’re probably happier that way.
Ask a cabbie who drives the monied guys on Wall Street around and that taxi driver will tell you with certainty what stock to buy. Why not? His guess is as good as the guy studying quarterly projections and staring at stock tickers.
Lots of people fake it until they make it and by then they’re successful experts making too much money. Too late to admit they’re frauds then, isn’t it? Illusions are everywhere and no one seems to notice. That’s our everyday magic.
Lesson 37: However, #36 is only good practice for normal people. If you’re a Normie, relax and do that. Be a fraud…unless you’re a cardio-thoracic surgeon or something.
If you’re one of us, however, any illusions you have about yourself can get you killed, or make you wish you were dead. People like us don’t have the luxury of illusions when we’re dealing with the Secret City. The Unseen has long, sharp teeth.
16
My training for the role of door swinger included an expanded tour of the premises. Sam called the funeral home, “the sanctuary.”
“The most important thing,” Sam said, “is to know where the sanctuary’s bathrooms are. Many of our guests are elderly and it is amazing how often they have to visit the facilities. Ladies, first on the right. Gentlemen, second on the right. Everything is wheelchair accessible, of course.
“I can’t keep fancy, fragrant little soaps in the bathrooms,” Sam complained. “I don’t know if it’s that they’re wanting a keepsake from a loved one’s funeral or if too many little old ladies are thieves. I have to stick to the liquid soap dispensers. And those are bolted to the wall.”
The lilac wallpaper mimicked the lilac bouquet at the entrance to the Lilac Room. Each room was marked by a signature bouquet: the Rose Room, the Tulip Room and the Chrysanthemum Room.
Down the corridor from Sam’s small office was a large conference room. She called it the Family Room. At its center was a rich mahogany table surrounded by deep leather chairs.
“This is the room where I make the arrangements with the families,” Sam said. “It can take minutes or hours. It all depends on them. My rule is they get all the time they need to make the decisions they must make. Your mama is right, Tamara. Funerals are for the living. When you’re out there doing pickups, you aren’t just driving around those who have passed. We can’t do anything more for them but show them respect. However, you are delivering compassion every time you meet a family. It’s that important. This job isn’t about shaking hands and driving corpses. This is a valuable opportunity to serve people when our service is most needed. Death is a vulnerable time and the families we serve need our help.”
When I’d met Sam that morning, I wouldn’t have suspected she had it in her to be so kind and compassionate. We all have our missions.
Next to the Family Room was the Display Room. An array of coffins sat ready. Some were beautiful and some were ugly. “Believe it or not,” Sam said, “the cheapest caskets are the heaviest. Too much particle board. Try it.”
I took the handle on one end and lifted it a few inches to gauge the casket’s heft. I was glad of all the pushups Mr. Chang insisted upon and resolved to get back to doing them. I’d hiked all over New York and was confident in my cardio, but I’d taken too much time off from structured, weight-bearing exercise. I needed to get some kettlebells, too.
As if reading my mind, Sam asked if I worked out regularly. I told her I was getting back to it.
“Good,” she said. “We serve three hundred families a year here, but we handle the refrigeration and prep for another, larger funeral home, as well. Victor owns that one, too, so we actually handle closer to seven hundred bodies a year. There’s hardly anyone here who doesn’t have low back pain from all the lifting. I wish I could hire a massage therapist and a chiropractor to work in the back. We have the tables…but the tables are all stainless
steel and have drains. Not very comfortable.”
As cool as Sam could be when she was in manager mode, she was warm with people in grief. “Offer them water or tea or coffee,” Sam said. “Water first, if they look agitated. I always suggest decaf at a funeral reception, but people rarely take good advice.”
I worked my first funeral that same night. Sam was right. It was, oddly, very much like a party.
Brad’s funeral had been more funereal and dour. On the other hand, Brad died a violent death at eighteen and Mrs. Ada Adams died at eighty-nine.
As I passed four women (who looked only slightly younger than Mrs. Adams) one of them whispered, “Pneumonia. She always had problems with her lungs. I told her she should see the doctor but she put me off. And now here she is.”
“She looks nice, though,” another hastened to put in.
“Oh, yeah,” said the first. “She does look good. A vision in blue.”
I hurried on. Over time I was to hear that conversation repeated with a hundred variations but with the same theme. Survivors whistle past the graveyard. “He shouldn’t have eaten so much,” or, “She must have felt a twinge of warning. She should have called an ambulance right away.”
Lesson 38: The living blame the dead for dying. They look for reasons why the dead are gone because the survivors want to think they are safe. They’re too sure they are such light sleepers, they would have awoken before the smoke strangled and the fire burned. The people left behind all want to believe they are exempt from entropy.
But those patterns emerged for me later. For that first funeral at Castille Funeral Services, the contrast between Mrs. Ada Adams’ funeral and Brad’s staggered me.
There were tears among a few of her contemporaries and Ada’s grandchildren’s eyes were wet. However, there was a lot of laughter, too.
A collage of photos showed Ada as a young woman. Here she was in black and white, graduating from high school. There was a faded photo of Ada at thirty-five or forty in a bright orange lifejacket. She’s sitting in a rowboat toasting the camera with a bottle of beer. The last photo showed an array of birthday candles reflected in her huge glasses, moments before she was to make a wish and blow them out. She was eighty then. The woman she’d been, the one in the rowboat, had all but disappeared except for her bright blue eyes.
The Haunting Lessons: 1, 2, 3, 4, I Declare a Demon War (The Ghosts & Demons Series) Page 8