We Never Told

by Diana Altman

  The funeral director whispered that there was a private room and ushered Joan, me, and our two uncles out of the main auditorium. He guided us with the authority that comes from experience. His professional manner was supposed to be reassuring but it wasn’t. It trivialized my father’s death. That man in his somber suit had escorted dozens of mourners to the private room, and this particular death was no more momentous than the one yesterday. He closed the door with a practiced tenderness and left us to seat ourselves on a wooden pew that faced a one-way window. We could see the congregation but they couldn’t see us. What was wrong with seeing us? Why not wail to the skies like Greek women in black shawls do in the movies? Why did everything have to be so tidy? A brief knock on the door, and a small man dressed in a black suit and wearing a yarmulke came in and introduced himself as the rabbi. We stood up and he gave each of us a piece of black ribbon with a pin on the back and told us to attach it to our clothes. We did.

  It seemed odd that suddenly now that my father was dead, Jewishness was flooding over us. It was almost as if he wasn’t there anymore to protect us from it. A rabbi was suddenly in charge of everything. He stood right in front of me and said some Hebrew words. He said the words mechanically, recited them in a rote way that made me think they didn’t mean much, so it came as a shock that he reached toward me with a razor and slashed the black ribbon I had pinned to my shirt. His invasion of my space and the abruptness with which he did it felt so violent my mouth dropped open and I took a step back, torn between wanting to smack him and appreciating the symbolism of being severed from my father. Yes, it was abrupt, yes it was painful, yes it was death. It was Jewish, he was doing something Jewish to me whether I wanted him to or not and I realized Jewish was much bigger than me. I was part of it even though I never went to temple and didn’t know the prayers and ate spare ribs and shrimp.

  Through the one-way window, we saw people coming into the funeral parlor. Some of the people went up to the coffin and crossed themselves. When everyone was seated, the rabbi said prayers in Hebrew then changed to English to speak of Seymour Adler, a man he never met. Seymour Adler, he intoned, was a movie producer, devoted father, brother, son, he blah blah blah. Here was a strange job, having to praise a total stranger in front of those who knew him well.

  When we went outside after the service to join the others, a hearse waited by the curb. Now I understood why we had to stay so long in the hidden room. They didn’t want us to see them putting the coffin in the hearse. I could see it in there through the back window. Everything was designed to remove us from our feelings. Joan and I didn’t know whose car we were supposed to go in for the ride to the cemetery so we just stood there until the funeral director ushered us to a black limousine, opened the door for us, and waited while we climbed in next to Uncle Norman and Uncle Donald. We were the celebrities of this event. Our driver, dark suit, dark tie, pulled away from the curb and a line of cars followed us. Uncle Norman took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one, so I did too and we flicked the ash into a little silver cup on the car door. Someone would have to give it a good scrub before the next family rode in the limousine. How jarring it would be to open the little metal flap and see someone else’s cigarette butt in there!

  The trees at the cemetery were decorated with icicles. We were ushered to a rectangular hole in the ground. Dirt was piled up next to the hole and there was some pulley contraption there. I was amazed to see Aunt Dovey Lee and Uncle Jack standing next to the hole. They were from the other side of my family, had nothing to do with Adler people. “You came all this way?” I said.

  “Of course we did, honey bunch,” Aunt Dovey Lee said. “Of course, we did.”

  But if they came from Rome, why didn’t my mother come from Florence? Do divorced people go to each other’s funerals? Aunt Dovey Lee and Uncle Jack stood out among the twelve or so mourners because their clothes were so chic. Whispers among the Adlers identified them as Violet’s sister and brother-in-law. There was nothing haughty about Dovey Lee or Jack, but they did look expensive in their sleek Italian coats that were long to their ankles, an elegant couple who didn’t try to mingle, just stood quietly together, apart from the others.

  I turned and saw the hearse, saw it come to a stop, saw the driver get out. Then the coffin came toward us carried by my uncles and men I didn’t know, probably from the funeral home. All of them had the same expression of intense concentration as if they were afraid they might stumble. No one spoke as they came toward us, a timeless scene, the coffin and the pallbearers. My heart leapt to my throat. This was scary. This I hadn’t imagined. This was death and it was coming toward me, a colossus coming toward a speck. The workmen waiting by the rectangular hole came to attention. My heart was thudding as the men lowered the coffin onto the pulley contraption. The pallbearers stepped back and the rabbi started saying Hebrew words and the workmen lowered the coffin into the hole slowly and the pulleys made a metallic squeal, and I couldn’t believe my eyes, they were lowering my father into a hole, a dirt hole all dressed up like it wasn’t a dirt hole with green blankets around the edges but it was a dirt hole and into that pit they were putting my father. I was paralyzed, heard my sister crying, heard the other relatives crying. Someone handed me a shovel, a heavy shovel not a ceremonial toy. I had no idea why. They pointed to the coffin at the bottom of the hole and it dawned on me that they meant I was supposed to shovel some dirt onto the coffin. They wanted me to shovel dirt onto my father. Were they crazy? Why would I shovel dirt on my father? It was my father! Then someone took the shovel out of my hand. It was Dovey Lee. She took the shovel out of my hand and passed it to someone else then put her hand in mine and just stood there with me, not looking at me, not hugging me, just with me.

  She wasn’t there anymore when we arrived at Uncle Norman’s home in Woodbridge. As Joan and I walked up the path to Uncle Norman’s small stucco house, Joan said to me, “Daddy kissed me.”

  “What?”

  “Daddy kissed me. I felt him kiss me at the cemetery.”

  “He did?”

  “He kissed me on my cheek. I felt it.” We made our way up the icy front walk and went inside the house. He didn’t kiss me. He was still hurting my feelings.

  The house was the size of a cottage, kitchen divided from living room by a short wall so everyone in the living room could see into the kitchen but it wasn’t like a loft. It was just small, and you couldn’t escape the sound of the television that was always on, nor the clutter of the newspapers piled up next to Uncle Norman’s armchair, all the pages folded back to the crossword puzzles, nor the ashtrays everywhere full of cigarettes, nor the piles of Readers Digests.

  Some thoughtful person had put food out on a folding table set up in the living room, coleslaw, cold cuts, Kaiser rolls. Woodbridge people came through the front door cautiously, looked around in hopes of discovering the proper protocol because they were used to wakes. Some brought bottles of whiskey and looked around for the bar to set the bottle down, but there was no bar and no one was drinking. I had to greet them and shake their hands and receive their looks of solicitude and listen to their tales of when they did such and such with Seymour, what a great guy, how he helped them that time they were having trouble with their insurance company, how he volunteered to judge the talent contest at the Knights of Columbus that time thirty years ago, how once he brought Joan Crawford to Woodbridge but her name was Lucille LeSeur then. Midway through their story, they remembered they were talking to the daughter of a dead man and a cloud passed across their faces as they realized their story would soon come to an end and then they’d just be face to face with a stunned young person. I heard anecdotes from the man who owned the cigar store, the fire chief, the local newspaper editor, the manager of the Strand cinema, stories that all ended with a sympathetic look that was supposed to mean they understood my sorrow. But I didn’t have sorrow. I had numbness.

  Joan and I had to remain at Uncle Norman’s for three days, sleeping all that time on the pu
llout sofa bed in the living room, Joan on one side, me on the other, her whispering into the dark, “Stop wiggling,” and me trying to lie still, something impossible for a wiggly person. But Joan wasn’t easy to sleep with either. She sniffled. She wasn’t crying. She just always sniffled before she fell asleep. It was infuriating.

  Barely rested, I woke up thinking, My father’s dead, as I heard Aunt Maggie early in the kitchen, clanking pots and pans and opening and closing the refrigerator door. Sitting at her kitchen table eating the eggs she made for us, I marveled that of all people it was Aunt Maggie who was taking care of us. Here was an adult woman stepping up when needed. Try as I might, I couldn’t imagine my mother helping like this, filling the role of the female head of the family. Someone organized the funeral and the reception after it, and the food required for the three days of Shiva, and it certainly was not Uncle Norman. It had to have been Aunt Maggie who was now an example for me.

  Joan and I returned to the house in New Rochelle with no idea how to get rid of all the stuff or how to choose a real estate broker. There were tax receipts, bank statements, unused checks, files full of paid bills and letters from the insurance company and the hospital. “Hey, look at this,” I said. “It’s a letter from our mother.” It was typed on Barbizon Hotel stationery so Mother must have written it when she was twenty and living at that all-women residence while trying to launch a career as a Spanish dancer. She wrote that she intended to move to Chicago if Seymour didn’t marry her. “You mean he didn’t want to marry her?”

  Joan said. “Apparently.”

  “I wonder why he did?”

  He had saved the playbill from the Apollo Theater where she gave a concert and he had saved a copy of Dance Magazine with her on the cover, adorable in a gypsy costume. Joan said, “Because he was forty.”

  The letter helped to explain why my parents never spoke of their courtship, why my father never mentioned the first sight of my mother, or why neither of them ever spoke of dates they went on or parties they attended or mishaps that only proved how much they were in love. They never spoke of their wedding. It was as if they had no past together. He was an aging bachelor who had a housekeeper/cook who came in every day to his apartment on Central Park West and, suddenly, so it seemed, Violet got attached to him and babies came out and they moved to New Rochelle. The union was wrong right from the start and this was a consolation because it meant that marriages didn’t necessarily have to sour, that divorce didn’t strike suddenly like lightening but was there from the start so if I paid attention, if I was careful, I might not get divorced. I dreaded nothing more than getting divorced. My goal in life was to raise my children in a peaceful home.

  Joan and I contacted an appraiser, who told us none of the stuff in the house was worth very much. He gave us a price, we said okay, and he took much of it away. We knew he cheated us. He could hardly look at us as he left with the contract we signed. Maybe it was guilt that made him leave his expensive Mont Blanc pen on the kitchen table. He told us there were men in trucks who would take away all the rest of the furniture, like the bureau in our father’s bedroom, but we had to clear out all the drawers. We did not want to deal with Seymour’s clothes, were not ready to acknowledge that he’d never wear any of them again.

  The Salvation Army said no, they would not come to the house. We had to pack it all up and bring it to them. We started with the bureau, opened plastic garbage bags and dropped his socks in and then we had to see his underpants, white cotton briefs all stacked neatly one on top of the other. This was too much for Joan, the underpants so abandoned. She started crying and saying, “Daddy, oh, Daddy,” and this annoyed me so much that I glared at her and scooped up the cotton underwear, the underpants and the sleeveless undershirts that always showed his gray chest hair at the neckline, and dumped it all furiously in the garbage bag and said, “Are you going to help or not? If you’re not going to help, go away. Just go away.”

  She said, “But it’s Daddy. It’s Daddy.”

  I said, “Oh, shut up. Just shut up,” and I slammed the empty bureau drawer so hard a piece of the veneer fell off. “Darn. Look what I did.”

  Joan said, “Doesn’t matter. Isn’t worth anything anyway.”

  I opened the next drawer and saw his folded starched shirts in neat piles. “You want any of these?” I said. Joan wiped her nose on the back of her hand, looked into the drawer and whispered, “His shirts.”

  “So what,” I said. “Do you want them or not?” She shook her head and I dumped them in the garbage bags and hoped that some poor person would find them at the Salvation Army, because they were expensive shirts. He kept his ties in a drawer, each one curled up into a little circle. Joan said, “I want this one,” and selected the one that was the most him and my stomach roiled for a second with jealously. I wanted that one. I didn’t want it before she wanted it, but the second she said she wanted it I wanted it. Why should she get everything good? Why couldn’t I have something for once in my life? I didn’t dare tell her I wanted it too because she would give it to me and I only wanted it because she wanted it so it wasn’t fair that the person who didn’t really want it should end up with it. So I hunted among the ties for the next best one and chose one not because it was so him but because it had colors that would go with a jacket I owned, and I thought it might be chic to wear a man’s tie. I was sick with jealousy. It was as if that tie she selected was the most precious thing in the world. We uncurled all the ties and examined them. “Look at the design on this one,” Joan said. “Would you mind if I keep this one? I’m going to copy this design at work.” How did she do that? How did she always home in on the best thing? I shrugged then selected another tie, but knew I’d never use it. “Oh, look at this one,” Joan said. “This would make a really good sash.” She tied it around her waist. “You could put a buckle on it or maybe a loop with a leather strap. Don’t you think that would be cool? Do you want it?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?” At last, all the bureau drawers were empty and we set about tackling the closets, but my insides were aching from jealousy though I knew the items my sister had taken were worthless to me.

  His suits were on hangers lined up perfectly. “What are we supposed to do with all this?” Joan whispered. We stood there looking into his tidy closet, everything precise, the wingtip shoes on the floor, the shoulders of each jacket precisely in line with the shoulders of the jacket next to it, the cartons of playing cards on the shelf above. Joan patted the shoulder of one of the pinstriped jackets and cooed, “Daddy. Hello, Daddy.” I felt tears welling up, and I didn’t have time for them, and I didn’t want to face being sad. I hated being sad. There was a chore to do and we had to do it, so I lifted the suit from the closet, jacket plus trousers, and was surprised by its weight. It felt almost human in my hands, so I dropped it on the bed. “Are you going to help or just stand there?” I said. “I have to get back to work. I’ve been gone almost two weeks.” We took all the suits out of the closet then mashed them into plastic bags. It felt obscene to discard such expensive clothes. When we came to the tuxedos, Joan said, “Look at this,” and fastened one of the cummerbunds around her waist. “Does that look weird?” She looked at herself in the mirror. “Do you mind if I take this?” I hadn’t even noticed that cummerbund. Now I wanted it. Just because she had a better eye it didn’t mean she should get everything. Now that she pointed it out to me, I could see that the cummerbund was the most extraordinary thing in the world.

  At the bottom of the closet was my father’s shoe polishing kit. It was a wicker basket with a lid that folded back, exposing a piece of metal shaped like a shoe. Inside the basket were polish, rags, and brushes. Often I watched my father shine his shoes on that basket. “I want that,” I said embarrassed because my voice was so harsh and urgent. Nothing in any of the closets said Seymour to me as much as his shoe polishing kit. I was sure Joan would object. Here was the most Seymourish thing in the whole house. There wasn’t a trace of scre
aming or door slamming lodged among the tins of cordovan and black shoe polish. Even the distinctive aroma of the contents was peaceful. Of course Joan would want it. She’d say it wasn’t fair, a couple of ties didn’t equal a whole shoe polishing kit, the symbol of how fastidious he was, the emblem of one of his favorite sayings, “If you look like a million dollars, you’ll feel like a million dollars.” Joan said, “What do you want that old thing for?” I was so relieved that I had to turn away and bite the insides of my cheeks. When I could speak I said, “I don’t know.”

  We went to the lawyer’s office to hear the reading of Seymour’s will. I believed we’d discover that Seymour left everything to Joan and nothing to me, despite what Clement Monroe said. We would also discover whether it was justified to ask him to pay for my expensive college and whether he was right during the divorce to demand the mortgage-free house. Was he a miser as my mother claimed or just a man living within his means?

  The answer was ambiguous. Yes, he could have been more generous and yes he was right to squirrel away his savings. He was going to have to live on his portfolio for a long time. He certainly didn’t expect to die at sixty-four. His estate was equally divided between Joan and me. I tortured myself by wondering if I would rather have Daddy or his money. It wasn’t a lot of money. I would still have to work for a living, but it was a cushion that afforded me the bliss of feeling independent even though, in reality, that independence would have only lasted a year or two.