Good Mourning (13 page)

“THE PRIEST
is here,” said one of the guys who did removals for Crawford. He was walking to the back, where the smell of garlic was already wafting through the air.

“A priest?” I asked, chasing him down the hallway. “I thought this was a Muslim funeral.” I looked down at the folder in my hand—yup, definitely Muslim.
Why would a priest be here?

“Yeah, whoever, he's here,” said the staffer. He had only been at Crawford for a few months, and we'd barely interacted.

I looked down the hall and saw the imam, patiently waiting by the reception desk while Monica avoided eye contact. She avoided dealing with visitors as much as she could and mostly got away with it. The union rules were locked pretty tight—it would have been hard to fire her, and weirdly, no
body seemed too concerned that she spent some afternoons napping on one of the couches in the chapel.

“That's not a priest, he's an imam,” I told him. Maybe it was all my studies, but it bugged me when people refused to use terms from a religion or culture different from their own.

The staffer turned to me, annoyed at my correction. “Yeah, well, this is fucking America,” he said. “Here, he's a priest.”

Before I could correct the narrow-minded twerp on the fact that nationality had nothing to do with it, he had already disappeared into the back room. I turned my attention to the imam. Typically, Muslim funerals were very simple and to the point. They also did a ritual washing and wrapping of the body in a white cloth that looked like a sheet, à la the Hare Krishnas, but they were super efficient at it, à la the Jews. Muslims were almost never cremated; the most religious families, had they not lived in the US, where it's illegal, would have buried their loved ones without a casket even, laying them in the ground in just the sheet, with the head facing Mecca.

“It's a pleasure to see you again,” I said to the imam. I recognized him from another service I had planned for a fabulous Muslim family whose daughter I had gone to private school with. Even though the $40,000-a-year school was historically Christian (the name was Trinity), about half of the students were Jewish, and a few were Muslim. We used to joke that the big cross hanging in the chapel was really just a “T” for Trinity.

“Same to you,” he said with a smile.

I wondered if he had heard any of the comments from the staffer, who was probably now gorging himself with ­rigatoni.

“Should I take you to the viewing room?” I asked. Sometimes, priests, rabbis, or imams would say a few prayers before visitors arrived for a service.

“This priest would like that very much,” he said, still smiling.

I felt myself blush. In 2004, when my father was sick and I was taking the subway between the NYU campus and the hospital every day, I used to read the Quran for class during each ride. (This was just a few years after 9/11, when New York was still unnerved, and as an unfortunate result, wary of Muslims.) I might not have been Muslim, but I had a lot of respect for the religion, and even learned a little Arabic through all of my readings. I hated to think that this imam might lump me in with other Crawford employees who were, shall we say, a little less open-minded. I couldn't blurt out, “I'm not like them! I know all about your religion! I've prayed in your mosques in India and Oman!” But I was deeply embarrassed at being associated with ignorance, much less intolerance.

Maybe it was because my father had always so openly embraced my mom's religion, or the fact that we only sporadically went to church, but I've always been fascinated with spirituality. And I never felt like I needed to pick just
one faith. At my desk at Crawford, I had a statue of the god Shiva. I wore Buddhist prayer beads around my neck—I picked them up at a Buddhist monastery in Tibet. And, I regularly wore a ring that Ben had brought me back from Israel after Dad died. On the inside, in Hebrew, it read: “This too shall pass.” I might not have been a stellar Catholic, but I was a spectacular optimist.

While a lot of my New York friends were atheists (a common trend in a city where people don't even make eye contact on the sidewalk), seeing so many families lean on God or some other higher power during their time of grief was starting to make a believer out of me. They say that when you experience the death of someone really close to you, you either reject God or get even closer to Him. (Or Her. Who's to say, really?) Don't get me wrong; my dad's death didn't make me want to go to mass every Sunday. But I did find myself talking to him out on jogs in Central Park, or randomly popping into churches or mosques to say a ­
berakhah
(a Jewish prayer) over a candle for him. It wasn't for show. Every part of me believed he was listening, even if God wasn't.

EIGHT

A Sorted Affair

U
p until the call came in, it had been a pretty slow morning. I said hello to Tony in his office, heard Monica saying my name in between whatever she was talking about in Spanish to the other receptionist (she was really starting to get to me), and made myself a green tea. We didn't have a service until late afternoon, so it was shaping up to be a bit of a snoozer.

And then, the phone rang.

Monica transferred the call to my office without notice because Tony was in a meeting, so I was going in blind. “This is Elizabeth, how can I help you?” I asked, taking out a pen so I could jot down notes for Tony.

It was silent for a moment. “This is Linda Pressman,” said the woman on the other end. “My husband, Charles, died this morning.”

“I'm so sorry for your loss,” I said, meaning it. This was a call
nobody
wanted to make. I wanted Linda to feel as comfortable as she could. “Would you like to come in and arrange his service?”

Linda gave me the details: Charles, her husband, had died the night before on the way to a hospital on the Upper East Side. Heart attack. He was dead before the ambulance arrived at the ER, which was just blocks from their very fancy apartment building. (I recognized the address.) I told her we would take care of the transfer from the hospital—all she needed to do was come in at eleven o'clock and we'd walk her through everything. I wasn't happy for Linda's situation, but I was glad to at least have a client coming in to break up the day. For whatever reason, summer was our slow season—and it was the thick of August. I guess parties in the Hamptons and yacht trips to Martha's Vineyard were enough to keep the Crawford clientele living it up. Winter? We were usually booked solid. Tony said it was the total opposite in lower-income areas, where the heat seemed to stir up trouble on the streets and could be dangerous for the elderly. But Crawford didn't get that kind of business.

About an hour before Tony and I were expecting Linda, the red light on my phone lit up again. This time, it was
Sarah
Pressman.
What are the chances?
I thought as she said her name. Sarah told me she wanted to come in that afternoon, if possible, since she had to drive in from her house in Rye, New York, an affluent suburb. I started scribbling
down the details about her husband, Chuck. “Heart attack? Oh, I'm so sorry for your loss. Cornell hospital? Sure, yes, we deal with transfers from there all the time. Can you come in this afternoon? We'll arrange everything.”

It wasn't until I hung up the phone that it hit me: Linda Pressman. Sarah Pressman. Charles. Chuck. Heart attack. Cornell.
Oh my God
, I thought.
No.
I shot up from my seat and ran to the prep room to tell Bill, who I was praying could come up with an explanation. Instead, he let out a laugh. “I don't put anything past these people,” he said, making a “crazy” motion with his finger.

“But it can't be, right? How could a guy be married to
two
women? And the second lady, Sarah, she mentioned they have a son!” I said, suddenly dreading the rest of my day. “It's not like Westchester is in
Siberia
. It's a twenty-­minute drive away!”

“Sometimes people with money get away with crazy shit,” said Bill. “Two wives? Two homes? Crazy fucking shit.”

I walked back upstairs, pacing outside Tony's office. He was in there with the door closed, which meant he was with a client. I could feel Monica staring at me and heard her say my name again, which elicited a flurry of giggles from her front-desk posse. I'd never been someone who worried about what other people said about me; thirteen years in New York City private schools helps you build a pretty thick skin. (You know that movie
Cruel Intentions
? It was like
that, minus the incest.) But Monica had it in for me from day
one
, and the fact that I couldn't understand what she was ­actually saying irked me that much more.

“If you're going to talk about me, as least have the guts to do it in English,” I said.

“Oh look, Tony's princess is angry,” said Monica. “Or should I say, Tony's girlfriend?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I said.

“You heard me,” said Monica, smirking. “You must be doing something to get all his attention.”

“This stupid, made-up drama, it's in your head,” I said. “I've never been anything but nice to you, and I'm sorry if you don't like me, but you're just being rude now.”

I knew Monica wasn't going to apologize—that would be asking too much. But she did at least shut up. Bill had told me that “the girls”(which is how he referred to the receptionists) had taken to calling me Princess, a totally obnoxious name considering I clocked more hours than all of them and did a lot more dirty work. (Monica could barely summon the energy to say hello to clients without mumbling.) Tony had heard as well, and he made a joke out of it by placing a flower stand next to his desk and calling it his Liz pedestal. Really, he was making fun of my short stature. But Monica and company didn't get the joke—and the silly gesture gave them something else to bitch about. A literal pedestal. Can you imagine the fuel
that
added to their fire? I could deal with being called a princess; it was obnoxious,
but I had come to expect that from Monica. The girlfriend comment was just downright inappropriate . . . not to mention ridiculous.

After I spent twenty minutes walking back and forth, back and forth, Tony finally came out of his office. “I have to talk to you,” I said, my stomach feeling queasy from the nerves. “Like, right now.” It was almost ten fifteen, and we had to figure out what we were going to do before Linda ­arrived.

“Okay, let's talk in my office,” he said.

I nodded and walked past him, ignoring whatever comment Monica was making from the front desk.
You don't have time for that BS right now
, I told myself.

I briefed Tony on the situation, waving both folders in front of him. “I don't know how to deal with this,” I said.

Tony sighed and looked up at the ceiling for a second. He didn't look happy, but he wasn't panicking.
Shouldn't we be panicking?
I thought.

“I probably need to call her, right?” I said, still waiting for Tony to weigh in.

“This stuff happens sometimes,” he said, shaking his head. “You got the number? I'll call and take care of it.”

I pointed on the folders to where I had written down both Linda
and
Sarah Pressman's phone numbers and watched as Tony picked up the phone and dialed each of them separately. “Like a Band-Aid,” he said. First, he spoke with Linda, telling her calmly that someone else had called
in with the same information as she did. He didn't go on and on; he simply suggested that she come in that afternoon so that everyone could talk together and plan what felt most appropriate. Then he called Sarah and said pretty much the same thing.

“That's how it's done,” he said. “These people, I tell ya.”

“How did they take it?” I asked, genuinely concerned. I couldn't imagine ever getting a call like that. Now these women had to deal with not just the death of their husband but the fact that he was a two-timing jackass. “What did they say?” I couldn't imagine the same scenario happening again, but I wanted to learn how Tony had handled it.

“Not much,” said Tony. “The goal of these conversations is to keep things short, calm, and make them feel like you have everything under control.”

“Were they surprised?” I asked.

Tony shrugged. “I've been doing this a long time,” he said. “Even when they don't know, they know.”

The man had a point. By the time I was fourteen, my dad started taking me to parties with him. They were usually thrown by his clients, and he had to go show his face. Mom had zero interest in hanging out with a bunch of rap stars and music moguls, so Dad would take me. By that point, I had already seen my friends' fathers out to lunch with young, attractive women who were definitely
not
my friends' mothers. In Manhattan, there was always this sense of anonymity; in a big city, there's a decent chance you won't get caught slipping
into a hotel or disguising a date as a “working lunch.” But I was still shocked to see how many of his business acquaintances openly cheated on their wives, taking trips with their mistresses and barely caring if they were caught. Maybe it was all part of the arrangement: These women got to live the life of rich housewives, spending their afternoons shopping at Hermès and taking private yoga lessons. In exchange, they turned a blind eye when their husbands came home late . . . or not at all. My dad never addressed it with me, but he didn't really need to.

This was my first funeral with a man who was literally leading a double life—but I had already worked on more than a few services where it turned out that the guy in the casket practically had a PhD in philandering. At least in
those
cases, he hadn't gone ahead and married both of the women. But still, it was sad at one funeral to see the mistress who wasn't allowed into the wake for a man she had been seeing for eighteen years, even though more than a thousand other people were welcomed to pay respects. (“You are
not
part of the family,” the man's son had yelled at the woman, while she stood crying in the foyer. His mother had paid for the funeral, so there was no way in hell “the other woman” was getting in.)

And it was downright surreal the day a man came in to preplan a service for himself, his wife,
and
his mistress. It was important to him to know that they would all be buried together whenever that time came. Why? No idea, although
my guess was that he wanted to keep the love triangle going for as long as possible—for eternity, even. The weirdest thing about the guy wasn't so much his obsession with keeping the magic going; it was that he wouldn't shut up about his forty-two turtles. I'll say it again:
forty-two turtles
. If you ever doubted New York City was a fucked-up place, now you have proof. Yes, in New York City, even a man who hoards dozens of disgusting, disease-ridden reptiles in his bathroom can manage to seduce two women.

I was nervous waiting for Linda and Sarah to show up when Gaby texted me:
STILL ON FOR TOMORROW?

Tuesday. Dinner. I had totally forgotten. Before I started working at Crawford, I used to host Tuesday dinner parties with my closest friends, plus Max and anyone else we knew who might be popping into town for a visit. I was stressed enough thinking about the meeting that afternoon, but I didn't want to disappoint my friends.
SURE, WHY DON'T YOU COME OVER AROUND 8 ISH?
I wrote back. I took a swig of coffee, desperate for some energy.
You can't cancel
, I told myself.
That would be super lame.
I had already turned down an invitation to go with Gaby on a private jet to the Caribbean. She understood—if anyone had come around on the whole me-working-with-dead-people thing, it was Gaby. But I still felt bad not having as much time as I once did for our wild adventures together. The least I could do was keep our dinner plans.

My stomach was in knots by the time one o'clock came
around. Linda was the first of the Pressmans to arrive. She was wearing a navy blue sheath dress and looked to be in her fifties, with short brown hair and enough of a tan to suggest a trip or two to the Hamptons. Even though she probably hadn't gotten a blip of sleep, she had managed to do her makeup and match her brown leather shoes to her classic Louis Vuitton tote.
I was impressed.

“So sorry for your loss, Mrs. Pressman,” I said, as usual.

She looked at me cautiously, like when you're walking through the Saks makeup counters in fear someone in a black suit and ponytail is going to jump out and spray you with perfume. “Thank you,” she said. “Is, uh, is everyone here?”

“Not yet,” I said, looking at my watch. “But let me introduce you to Tony and we can wait in his office.”

Just as I turned around, in walked Sarah Pressman with a boy who looked to be eleven or twelve years old. Sarah was a little younger than Linda, maybe in her early forties. She was also a brunette—Charlie must not have been a blonde guy—but didn't have Linda's classic style. Instead of a cute dress, she was wearing khakis, sandals, and a white tennis shirt. She didn't have a lick of makeup on, and her eyes were swollen from crying.

There they were. Charlie's wives. Both of them. I watched in a certain horror as Linda took in Sarah and then the child. She and Charles never had children, but there she was, looking at his son. She took a sharp breath and clapped
her feet together, as if to keep herself standing upright. Sarah was holding her son out in front of her like a shield, a hand on each of his shoulders.

“Hi,” she said, finally. It could have been just seconds later, but it felt like hours. Even Monica was watching, like it was a soap opera.

“Hello,” said Linda. Even though she was talking to Sarah, her eyes were fixed on the boy.

I figured this was my cue. “Now that everybody's here, let's sit down with Tony,” I said, motioning toward his office. I looked at Monica, hoping that she might make herself even the
smallest
bit useful and set the kid up with crayons or something. But she was already walking back toward the break room, now that the dramatic moment had passed and there was nothing left to entertain her.

Tony walked out and shook both Linda's and Sarah's hands. Before he followed them into the office, I pulled him aside and suggested that maybe I should stay with the kid. We both looked toward the lobby, where he was sitting in a chair, looking at the floor. Pretty much nothing upset Tony anymore except seeing the kids left behind after a parent died, and there was high potential for this to be a, shall we say, “complicated” week for the family. “Go ahead,” he said. “I'll take care of this and fill you in later.”