Good Mourning (6 page)

“Hold on, let me check,” I said, already walking back up the stairs. After a couple of minutes of sifting through papers at the reception desk, I still didn't see anything, so I called down to the prep room. “Let me ring you in a minute, I need to ask Tony about this,” I told Bill.

He sighed into the phone. “Okay,” he said. “I'll just be down here with the body.”

I found Tony sitting in his office, flipping through his
Rolodex. “Bill's looking for the folder for the body that was just brought in,” I said.

Tony looked up. “The AIDS guy?”

“Uh, I don't . . . I don't know about that,” I said, surprised. “Just whoever was brought in this morning.”

“That's the AIDS guy,” said Tony. “Some of the boys have been trying to figure out all morning if he's gay or if it was a drug thing. You know, needles or whatever.” I was shocked at their attitude—like it was 1984 and everyone thought only gay people got AIDS.

“I'm not sure that's really relevant,” I said, suddenly wondering about who this person might have been, what his life was like. “I'm just looking for the notes.”

After a few minutes of digging around his desk, Tony plucked the folder from underneath his planner and shook his head. “Monica must have left it in here,” he said, handing it over. He paused for a moment. “What were you doing in the prep room?”

“Oh, uh, I thought I should learn how all parts of the funeral process work,” I said, hoping he wouldn't be mad.

Tony gave me a puzzled look before breaking out in a slight smile. “A go-getter, eh?” he said, shaking his head. “Well, this is new. All right, go. Go on.”

When I got to the basement, Bill was already done up in his apron and gloves, and he was looking through a stack of CDs next to a small black stereo that still had the Radio­Shack sticker on it. “I gotta put some Bruce on,” he said.
That's when I saw the body, already laid out on the table. I took a closer peek and rolled my eyes. The guy had a waxed chest, highlighted hair, and two pierced ears. Either he was gay, or Ryan Seacrest had died and nobody had noticed yet.

“I haven't seen an AIDS case in a while,” Bill said, Bruce Springsteen's
Darkness on the Edge of Town
album buzzing through the speakers. “Always brings me down a little. Reminds me of the eighties.” I vaguely remembered people wearing red ribbons when I was a kid, but it felt like a faraway, adult problem. By the time my friends and I actually understood what AIDS was, most of the panic was over. My college friends and I were much more concerned with catching herpes than contracting HIV.

My heart sank listening to Bill talk about the AIDS epidemic that swept through New York City starting in 1981. Nobody understood how the mysterious disease was being transmitted or what was causing it. Embalmers had been terrified. “They said you could get it through contact with bodily fluids,” Bill told me, shaking his head. “And I'm here thinking,
I deal with those every day
. It wasn't as clear then that there had to be a little, you know, a little more involved than that.”

Crawford had an unexpected boom in business during the 1980s. “Every day, there were at least a few bodies, if not more,” said Bill. “Young guys, so thin, and the bodies, they just kept coming. It was terrible. I mean, good for business, but that didn't even matter—it was awful to see. And I was a
young guy myself, then, and I'm just looking at these bodies, and it seemed so crazy that nobody could help these guys, you know?” He shook his head and lowered his voice. “Nobody could help them.”

Springsteen's “Badlands” came on, and neither Bill nor I said anything as he returned his attention to the body on the table, but I wondered if he noticed the all-too-true lyrics as much as I did: “It ain't no sin to be glad you're alive.” They reminded me of something my dad would have said. Of course, Dad was more Stones than Springsteen, but I think he would have agreed with the sentiment.

AFTER WORKING
six days straight, I finally had a day off. For a second, I thought I had dozed off in the funeral home; I woke up next to two four-foot-wide floral arrangements that I had taken home from a service the night before. People spent thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of dollars on roses and orchids and hydrangeas for services, and then every night, we were left to toss them into garbage bags and throw them in the Dumpster out back. It seemed like such a waste, so I started bringing the prettier arrangements home. What?
Somebody
should enjoy them.

I was jolted out of my sleepy state by the sound of my phone ringing.

“Hello?” I said, trying not to sound as groggy as I felt.

“Almost ready?” said Gaby. She was working on a series
of paintings at the time, and so she was available to hang out on a random Tuesday. Although to be fair, a lot of our friends had what you might call “leisurely” schedules.

I looked at my alarm clock, which I hadn't set. It was already eleven a.m.

“Uh, kind of,” I said.

“You're totally still in bed!” said Gaby, laughing. “Get up! Get up, get up, get up! You get to hang out with a living person today! Should we hit up Bergdorf's?”

“Meh, maybe we just go with the usual,” I said. What I really needed was a new pair of comfortable shoes. Monica may have been a nightmare to work with, but the woman knew how to keep her feet from throbbing—I'd been wearing old-lady flats to work for weeks. I also wanted to pick up another off-the-rack suit or two. I already had three black suits I wouldn't be caught
dead
in outside of work hanging next to the Armani gowns in my closet, but adding a few more to the rotation would mean fewer trips to the dry cleaners.

“Okay, okay. Fine. I'm just happy to see you finally,” said Gaby. “I still can't believe you missed London! I have to show you the pics. You'll die.”

I met Gaby on the corner of Madison and Seventy-­Second. It was our usual spot, since I liked to start off any shopping trip with a stroll through Ralph Lauren, where most of the salespeople knew me by name. Plus it was near Via Quadronno, our favorite lunch spot, which had the
best
cappuccinos in the city. I could see Gaby from a block away—she was dressed in her daytime regulars, which included a baggy tank top, big sunglasses, and pants that most women could barely squeeze their arms into. I always told her that the trade-off for having such a crazy family was that, good Lord, she at least got fabulous genes out of the deal.

“Hi, hi, hi!” I said, skipping toward her. Before I'd started working at Crawford, we'd hung out almost every day—now I was lucky to see her once a week.

Gaby gave me a hug and pointed at the store behind us. “Shall we?” she said.

“I was actually hoping we could hit up the Aerosoles store,” I said. Gaby might have grown up wealthy, but she wasn't a clothing snob.

She shook her head and laughed. “Your mom would freak if she found out you were walking around in those.”

I laughed too—it felt good to have a conversation that didn't take place in front of a corpse. “Oh, totally. Although, I haven't even talked to Mom in a few days. She wanted me to go to the country house last weekend, but I couldn't make it with work.”

“How's she doing?” said Gaby.

“She's hanging in there,” I said.

“Have you two been talking about your dad? Maybe it would be good for both of you to . . .”

“It's hard,” I said. “Dad was always my person, you know? Mom and Max, Dad and me. I want to connect with
her, but she's so against me working at Crawford, and I don't know how to make her understand it.”

“Maybe she doesn't have to understand it right now,” said Gaby. “Remember when you wanted to go to NYU and she didn't understand why you couldn't just go to Tufts like Max? She eventually came around.”

I could feel my chest tighten up. I
wanted
things to be easier with my mom. We both just felt so . . . off. I kept telling myself that we just needed some time to make everything feel normal again, or at least as normal as it could be without Dad around.

“Maybe,” I said, my voice softening.

We walked in silence for another few minutes—something we
never
did. Then Gaby said, “What do you think happens when you die?”

“Well, first they take your body away, and then once it's at the funeral home, they make this small incision—”

“Oh my God, no! No no! Stop, that's so disgusting,” said Gaby. “I mean what do you think happens to your
spirit
?”

I was quiet again. I wasn't particularly religious, and yet I wanted to believe that Dad was
somewhere
other than inside the urn my mom had placed on her bedroom shelf. It was terrifying to think about. What if I made sense of it all and came up with an answer I didn't like? Then what? My mind flashed to Bill the day before, hunched over a body, gluing on eyelashes and plumping up cheeks. The body itself
had a peaceful look, and I was satisfied knowing that we had seen this person through to the end of
this
world. But I realized then that I'd never let myself think beyond that.

“Ah, puppies!” Gaby said, breaking my train of thought. We were about to walk by a pet store that always had little Pomeranians and King Charles spaniels in the window. Gaby might have been the only person I knew who loved dogs even more than I did.

I followed her to the window, happy that a bunch of furry balls of cuteness had let me off the hook from answering her question. But even as we stood there cooing at the dogs, I started to feel an uneasy knot in my stomach:
Where
do
we go when we're no longer here?
I thought about the bodies on Bill's metal embalming tables and where, if anywhere, their souls were at that moment. I could imagine them floating around us, popping in and out of our world and some other realm as they pleased. I wanted to believe that—if not for my dad, for myself.

FOUR

We've Lost Her Mind

L
ovey girl, it's Nanny. I'm flying up to New York next week with the Smirnoffs. I hope my granddaughter can take an hour away from death to see the old lady. If not, then I'll see you at
my
funeral, I suppose. Although you'll have to drink alone then.”

Even through voice mail, the woman could lay on a guilt trip.

Elaine had been raised uptown, like me. She went to finishing school instead of earning a college degree, the best option for wealthy girls at the time. To be fair, this wasn't abnormal in the 1940s—but I still cringed imagining her curtsy­ing and actually
learning
to be charming. Her whole life was filled with silly rituals like this, and she was constantly being taken care of: First, an army of nannies and chauffeurs and maids (oh my!) watched over her while her
parents went to parties dressed in furs. After that, it was a husband. When he died of a heart attack, there was
another
husband she somehow lined up for the role. I have no idea how Elaine managed to land so many men, but I will say this: the woman wasn't about to let one guy's failed organ hold her back from winters in Palm Beach and summers cruising on the
Queen Elizabeth II
.

I hid my phone back in my pocket and picked up Crawford's line, which had been ringing off the hook all morning.
What is it with today?
I thought, holding the receiver up to my ear.

“Crawford Funeral Home. How may I direct your call?” I said.

“Yes. Hello,” said a nervous-sounding man on the other end of the line. “Tony, please. My mother was brought in this morning. I have a favor to ask.”

Tony was gone for the morning, and I knew he wouldn't be back for hours. “I'm sorry to hear about your mother,” I said. “Tony's not available at the moment. I'm his . . . uh . . . how can I help you?”

“I need . . . my sister and I . . .
we
need . . . Can you tell me that my mother's brain is in her head?”

Come again?
I thought.

“Her name—it's Annie. Can you check for me? I need to know absolutely for certain that it's in there.”

“Not a problem, sir. Let me check in on this and call you back in just a few minutes,” I said.

“I'll hold.”

I raced down to the embalming room to find Bill.

“Liz!” he said. “You see the game last night? What were our boys doing out there? We've got to work on defense or we don't have a shot in hell at—”

“We can't talk Giants right now,” I said, a little out of breath from running so fast. (My crazy work schedule wasn't leaving much time for my usual morning jogs in Central Park.) “There's a guy on the phone, and he says we need to make sure that his mom's brain is still in her head. Does that make any sense?”

“What's her name?” said Bill.

“Annie something,” I said. “She came in this morning.”

Bill picked up a piece of paper and scanned it. “Yup, here's her paperwork,” he said.

I walked over to see what he was holding. It looked like an autopsy report, and there was a list of all organs still inside of the body, right there: liver, lungs, brain . . .

“Bingo!” said Bill.

Before I could thank him, I was running back up to the front desk. “Hello? Are you still there?”

“Still here,” said the man. “So is everything where it should be?”

“Yes, the autopsy report says that the brain is—”

“No, no, no. Not the autopsy report. I need somebody to tell me
for certain
that the brain is there. It's very important.”

“Well, the report says—”

“You're not listening to me. I need you to physically
see
the brain.”

Am I hearing this right?
I thought. “Of course, sir,” I said. “It may take a moment to accomplish what you're asking. Would you like me to call you ba—”

“I'll hold,” he said.

Bill was working on another body when I raced back into the embalming room. “I don't know what to do,” I told him. “He wants us to see the brain.”

Bill sighed. “It's on the fucking sheet.”

“I know, I know it's on the sheet. But he said it's important. Maybe she was, like, murdered, or something.” Just as I said it, something clicked in my brain: Annie. Murder.
No fucking way
, I thought. “Bill, give me that sheet for a sec?”

Sure enough, there was her name: Annie Nast. The woman was the stuff of New York City legend. She grew up in Manhattan around the same time as Elaine—but with the kind of money that set her in a whole other class. Annie was the daughter of a businessman, and when he died when she was just a girl, she inherited tens of millions of dollars. It's an outrageous amount of money now, but it was downright
absurd
at the time. To top it off, she was beautiful—she looked like she could have been sisters with Grace Kelly. And they had similar taste in men, because, like Grace, Annie married a prince. They divorced after two kids and almost a decade of marriage, but still,
the woman married a prince
. And when the whole thing ended, she actually wound up paying
him
a
settlement of a million dollars, plus a couple of estates. Baller move, especially back in the day, when most women still relied on husbands to pay their bills.

Annie's biggest downfall might have been her crappy taste in men. She was still pretty, and Lord knows she was still rich, when she found herself back on the market, and it didn't take her long to find husband number two. On the social scale, this guy was a significant downgrade—I mean, where do you go after a prince, really? Despite what people might have said, Annie went ahead and married Frederick Nast. The next thing you knew, they had a kid. You would have thought things were pretty good. This guy would have been straight-up mental to stray on his gorgeous sugar mama. But like many men with an inferiority complex, ol' Frederick had a mistress before they'd been married very long. Nobody knew if things were ever that great between him and Annie anyway, but pretty much
everyone
knew it by the time they were on the brink of divorce. (It didn't help that they would talk openly about it at parties. Total faux pas.)

Before you could say “divorce papers,” Annie was suddenly and inexplicably in a coma. And not one of those Sandra Bullock–­movie, my-lipstick-is-still-perfect-even-though-­I've-been-unconscious-­
for-two-days comas, but one that lasted for
decades
. All fingers pointed toward Frederick. Blabbing about how much you hate your wife is never a smart precursor to killing her, especially when there's serious cash on the line. Neither is having your mistress take the stand at your murder trial to re
veal that she had given you an ultimatum to leave your wife. But you couldn't just
leave her
—good God, no—because a ­divorce would cut you off from her fortune. Frederick was convicted but quickly teamed up with a big-shot lawyer for his appeal. In a second trial, Frederick's guilty verdict was overturned after the defense called up one medical expert after another who claimed Annie wasn't killed by her greedy shit of a husband but rather her own form of self-medication.

The upper crust of New York watched the trials like it was
Days of Our Lives
. It was the 1980s. The city was hot with cocaine, crime, and more money than it knew what to do with. (So I've read. I was, like, two. My New York was filled with carousel rides in Central Park and My Little Ponies.) Finally, at the request of Annie's two children from her previous marriage, Frederick agreed to grant Annie—still in her coma—a divorce and leave the country. She eventually ended up in a nursing home, kept alive by machines, and allegedly never with a blip of brain activity, until she died as an old lady. Heartbreaking.

And now here she was at Crawford. “Bill,” I said, “you know who this is, right?” There had been books written, even movies made about Annie's murder trial. People couldn't resist the juicy plotline. It was like reality TV before there was even a name for it.

Bill looked at the sheet again. He might not have lived in Manhattan—none of the other Crawford staff did—but he'd certainly seen the news reports all those years ago. “I'll be damned,” he said.

The only way to see what, exactly, was left of Annie was to cut open her skull. Bill started to cut with extreme precision while I braced myself for an eyeful of brains. I even held my gloved hands out to make sure that nothing fell on the floor. Finally, there was enough of an opening to see inside.

That's when the paper towels fell out.

They unfolded like an accordion—pieces of Bounty that had been stuffed in there in place of what we were
actually
looking for. “Oh my God!” I said, my heart racing.

“Take it easy, take it easy,” said Bill, his voice steady. He scratched his head and shrugged. “It might be in her stomach.”

“Her
stomach
? Why would her brain be in her stomach?”

“Sometimes after an autopsy, they take all the organs and stick 'em in a bag, then sew it up in the stomach,” said Bill.

I raised my eyebrows.

“It's just what they do,” he said. “I don't make the rules.”

It all sounded very Egyptian to me, but it's not like I had any better ideas. I looked on as Bill undid the Y-shaped stitches in her abdomen and pulled out a bag—no joke, like a plastic bag—filled with organs. Bill laid them all out on the table, and I stared at the pieces, trying to figure out which was which. Biology was never my best subject, but after a quick scan, I was pretty sure our worst fears were realized: there was no brain. I felt a wave of anxiety. I was going to
have to go back upstairs, pick up the phone, and tell Annie's son that we had no idea where his mother's brain went. I tried to imagine the conversation:

“Hello again! It's Elizabeth. So, now, here's a funny story, I mean you're really going to get a hoot out of this. We can't find the brain! It totally vanished! We thought it would be . . . you know . . . IN HER HEAD. But it's not. Ha! Anyway, it's okay, because I got you a free roll of paper towels out of the deal . . .”

I snapped back into the present. “What am I supposed to tell her son?” I asked Bill, a jolt of panic running through me. This was a
big
problem. Things had been going so
well
at Crawford. Thanks to all the extra hours I worked and my connection with clients, Tony had started to treat me more as a funeral planner than a receptionist, and I was allowed to do more than answer phones all day—the task I was actually hired for.
I can't do this, I can't do this, I can't do this
, I thought. I started longing for my apartment and a nice bottle of wine. In my old life, the one before Crawford, murder mysteries were never on the menu.

When I got back to my desk, I took a deep breath and picked up the phone. Another of my dad's sayings popped into my head: “Sometimes there's no way out but through.”

So through I would go. “Hello, sir, are you still there?” I said, feeling slightly queasy. (And not from a hangover this time.)

“Elizabeth. Here. Yes. Did you find it?” he said.

Deep breath. “I'm sorry to relay this news, but we actually weren't able to locate the brain. Or, rather, we looked . . . but it's . . . it's—it's not there, sir.”

“That's what I needed to know. Thank you,” he said. Then, before I could say another word:
click
. He hung up.

What just happened?
I thought.

I never heard about the brain again—not at Crawford, not in the newspapers or
Vanity Fair
, which had covered Annie's death at length. I wondered if they wanted the brain to test it for chemicals—maybe one last-ditch effort to prove their mom (the “kids,” of course then adults, still called her “Mummy”) had been murdered. Instead, Annie was prepped and brought to a church on Park Avenue for an ­impressive funeral. Almost all the pews were filled. A choir sang. Her son gave a eulogy that touched on everything from his mummy's amazing taste in design and affinity for cute dogs (she'd had four, before the coma) to her hidden dream of being an astronaut. Afterward, they held a reception in a grand space on Fifth Avenue, where Annie's friends—now old—ate cucumber sandwiches and sipped champagne in her honor. Perhaps her kids let the murder thing go; proving Frederick guilty wasn't going to bring their mother back. But it was hard not to feel like there was something unfinished about the whole thing.

When I got back to my apartment that night, I had an urgent feeling that I needed to see my mom. Max had told
me the day before that she was doing fine—she was mostly busying herself with learning about investing, since Dad had always taken care of that—but that was about as much detail as he gave me. I kicked off my Aerosoles and hung up my Ann Taylor black blazer; changed into jeans, a button-down, and a string of pearls; and called her, thinking of those kids, who'd been grieving their mother for decades.

“Hello, Elizabeth,” she said, sounding exhausted.

“I'm on my way over,” I said. “Is that okay?”

It was quiet for a moment. “You know you don't need to ask if you can come home.”

Maggie greeted me at the door the way she always did, by barreling into me and slapping my legs with her tail. I pet her ears and gave her a kiss, wishing that I could bring her home with me—but I knew my mother needed her. Still, it was so much easier greeting the dog than my mom, who was standing in the foyer with a cashmere shawl wrapped around her. I was startled by how much weight she had lost. Dad's death had stressed us all to our limits, but Mom looked frailer than I'd remembered.