Last Respects (2 page)

“What do you want me to do?” I said.

“I want you to allow me to perform an autopsy,” Dr. Herman Sabinson said.

The word slid through my mind like a politician’s campaign promise. I had heard it before, many times. Hearing it again made no special impression. It was just a word. It seemed appropriate to the conversation of a man who was intimately concerned every day with a subject about which I knew very little: death.

“All right,” I said.

“You’ll have to do more than just say all right,” Herman Sabinson said. “You’ll have to give your written consent.”

This did not seem unreasonable. I had been signing papers for almost a month. Ever since I found my mother on the floor of the foyer in her three-room apartment on 78th Avenue in Queens. I had signed the papers admitting her to the Peretz Memorial Hospital. I had signed a form giving the surgeon permission to operate on her fractured thigh bone. There had been a number of other documents. They covered her Medicare registration; the activities of a firm of anesthesiologists who serviced the operating room in the Peretz Memorial Hospital; the corporation that owned the ambulance in which she was carried to the hospital; and two or three other printed forms with blank spaces that in one way or another touched on the complicated process of attempting to bring back to normal health an ailing citizen of New York City who had almost no financial resources of her own.

“You want me to go somewhere to sign a paper?” I said into the phone.

“That’s correct,” Herman Sabinson said.

“All right,” I said. “Just tell me where.”

“Here at the hospital,” Dr. Herman Sabinson said. “I’ll leave the form with Mrs. O’Toole in the Admitting Office. Any time this morning will be okay, so long as it’s before noon, and then you’ll be in the clear.”

I wanted to laugh, but I didn’t. Herman would have thought it unseemly. He would not have understood that he had just said something funny. He had no way of knowing that so far as my mother was concerned, I had never been in the clear. My mind refused to accept the statement of a comparative outsider that I would achieve this state by signing yet another piece of paper.

My mother had been a burden to me for many years. Not only financially. The money she had cost me had merely been an irritant. What had bothered me more and more during the last decade of her almost ninety years was that I did not know what to do about her.

This was caused in part by the fact that I felt she did not know what to do about herself. Life for her had never been something you lived. It was something you got through.

She seemed to get through her first eighty years in a manner that satisfied her. At any rate, I was unaware of any dissatisfaction on her part. Perhaps because I wasn’t paying any attention. Why should I? I had my own problems.

Then my mother moved into her eighties and I became intensely aware of something she apparently did not herself understand. She was dissatisfied with the scheme of existence. Not her existence. That had always seemed to her to be perfectly sound. When she became a problem to me, and in my efforts to solve it I started paying attention to her, I began to grasp that she felt the world she had always been able to manage had suddenly become unmanageable. It annoyed her.

“I’ll sign it,” I said into the phone to Herman Sabinson. “I’ll be there in half an hour, if I can get a cab.”

I couldn’t get a cab. Not at once, anyway. I live in a part of Manhattan that is unpopular with taxi drivers. The subway and several bus lines solve most of my transportation problems, but my mother had died in a part of the Borough of Queens that I was not sure I knew how to reach by subway or bus. Besides, it was Sunday, and it was the day before Christmas, and I could not remember how the mayor was making out in his annual negotiations with the Transport Workers Union to avert the strike that always seemed to be threatened for, or actually came on, Christmas Day. Or perhaps it was New Year’s Eve? I had a feeling that I was somewhat confused about the hard facts of day-to-day life with which most of my neighbors were coping. A taxi seemed a sensible extravagance.

Even on sunny days in the summer I have to walk several blocks downtown, and move east toward the river, before I can get a taxi to stop for me. The day my mother died was not sunny. It was gray and cold. The sort of day in which, the Brontës seem to have spent their lives. The sky was sullen. I remembered skies like this during the bad days of the blitz in London. I remembered that in those days these skies reduced even my pleasant thoughts to vague, shapeless fears. My thoughts were not pleasant as I moved downtown and eastward, keeping my head down against the wind. How could they be? A man who wants to laugh when he receives word of his mother’s death is at least a son of a bitch, probably worse. Pleasant thoughts indeed.

At the corner of Lexington Avenue and 77th Street, on my way toward Third, the traffic light changed to red. I stopped. So did a taxi heading down Lexington. I stepped quickly down from the curb, wrenched open the taxi door, plopped onto the rear seat, and pulled the door shut with a bang.

“Merry Christmas,” said the driver. “Where to?”

“Merry Christmas,” I said. “The Peretz Memorial Hospital.”

“You mean in Queens?” the driver said.

The tone of his voice told me at once I had not made a friend.

“Yes,” I said.

“Jesus,” the driver said.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“What’s the matter?” the driver said. “It’s an empty ride back, for Christ’s sake, that’s what’s the matter.”

“I guess you haven’t been there for a long time,” I said. “I’ve been there every day for the past four weeks. Every time I get there, on the front steps there are a dozen people fighting to get a cab back into Manhattan. You won’t ride back empty.”

“That’s what you know,” the driver said.

“I tell you I’ve been there every day this whole past month,” I said.

“Yeah,” the driver said. “But it’s pretty damn early in the morning, and besides, this is the day before Christmas, buddy.”

“What difference does that make?” I said.

I could hear the cutting edge in my own voice. I did not feel we were buddies.

“People don’t go bucking visiting hours in hospitals the day before Christmas.”

The light changed. The cab lurched forward.

“Hoddeyeh wanna go?” the driver said.

I didn’t answer. My mind had been absorbed in controlling the hatred for this stranger that I could feel mushrooming inside me. Now my mind had been jolted into an examination of his remark about the times when people visit hospitals.

“Hey,” he said. “You hear me?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t listening.”

“I asked which way you want to go?” he said.

I looked out the window. The street sign indicated we were passing 76th and Lexington.

“As long as we’re heading downtown,” I said, “how about across the 59th Street bridge, then out Queens Boulevard to Union Turnpike? The hospital is two blocks further down.”

“I know,” the driver said. “One thing a taxi driver learns in this town. You learn the places people get sick in. Christ, this is one hell of a long trip.”

It was longer than he thought, but of course he had no way of knowing that. Even I had not known, until early that same year, when my father died, that my mother had been born in Soho. I had always assumed she had been born on the farm in the Carpathian mountains of Hungary from which she had come to America shortly before the First World War.

A month before this day before Christmas on which my mother had died, when I was filling out the forms in the Admissions Office of the Peretz Memorial Hospital, it had seemed wise to me to forget about Soho. I listed my mother’s place of birth as Berezna in Hungary. This checked with the records of the Department of Justice in Washington.

Only I, and the government, of course, knew that my mother had a police record. It was almost half a century old. There was probably very little chance that the Peretz Memorial Hospital would have been interested in the information. But Medicare, which was going to pay her bills, is a federal organization. So is the Justice Department. Even though my common sense told me one could not possibly affect the other, I had learned my common sense from the woman whose dead body was now waiting in Queens for the authorization that would permit Herman Sabinson to perform an autopsy. I knew what my mother would have wanted me to do. She had spent her life in the shadow of an adage of her own invention: “If you keep your mouth shut, nobody will know as much about you as you know yourself.” After half a century I suddenly found myself wishing I knew less about her than I did.

“So where the hell are they?”

I came up out of my thoughts. The irascible voice had come from the front of the cab.

“Where the hell are who?” I said.

“These dozens of people,” the taxi driver said. “That you say they’re all the time standing around here, fighting to get a hack back to Manhattan.”

I looked out the window. The cab had stopped at the top of the low concrete rise that surmounts the crescent driveway in front of the Peretz Memorial Hospital. My first reaction was a sense of astonishment. The trip by cab from Manhattan takes approximately forty minutes. Two or three times during the past my taxi drivers had made it in thirty-five minutes. One giddy afternoon, in half an hour. The driver, a bit giddy himself, had said it was the Pope. His Holiness was on a brief visit to the United States and every automobile in the Borough of Queens, the driver had said, was chasing the Pontiff’s entourage, which was heading for God knows what, but happily the what seemed to be in the opposite direction from the Peretz Memorial Hospital. It seemed to me now that I had stepped into this taxi at Lexington and 77th only minutes ago. Yet here I was at the Peretz Memorial Hospital. At least a half hour must have gone by. I did not understand how I could have been unaware of the passage of this amount of time. It was obviously due, I felt, to my feelings about my mother’s death. Which made me suddenly wonder what my feelings were.

I knew with certainty only one: a feeling of relief that it was all over. But there were other feelings. There had to be. Even if I didn’t know my mother as well as I should have, I know myself better than I would like. I could feel the worry about those other feelings mounting slowly and inexorably inside me.

“They must have heard you were coming,” the taxi driver said.

“What?” I said. I said it irritably. By now I hated him.

“See—I was right. Those people you say they’re all the time out front here fighting for cabs,” he said. “They must have heard you’re coming. Let’s make this guy look like a liar, they must have said. And they all beat it back to Manhattan by subway so I’ll have to ride back empty.”

I wondered. Could the driver have been right when he’d said nobody goes to hospitals on the day before Christmas? On East Fourth Street, where I had been born and raised, we had never done much about Christmas. It wasn’t exactly an East Fourth Street holiday. But we always went to see sick people on the day before Yom Kippur. I remembered vividly being sent by my mother to deliver jars of chicken soup to ailing neighbors on the day before Passover. The recollection thrust me into a moment of witless generosity.

“What does it say on the clock?” I said. “I can’t read it. I forgot my glasses at home. Three seventy-five?”

“Three eighty-five,” the driver said. “And a quarter for the Triboro toll.”

“Here’s ten,” I said. “If you do have to ride home empty, don’t be sore at me.”

The driver, taking the ten-dollar bill, looked pleased but also uneasy. As though he felt he was getting the money not because he deserved it but because his sullen remarks had blackmailed a nervous passenger into doing something the passenger would not have done ordinarily. Which was exactly what had happened.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said. There was not much conviction in his voice. “I’m what they call every year during the transit strike negotiations a common carrier. You want to go to Queens, I gotta take you to Queens. All you have to pay is what it says on the clock.”

“It’s Christmas,” I said. “Buy something for your wife.”

“I’m not married,” he said. I laughed. The driver said, “What’s funny about that?”

“It’s the sort of thing my mother would have said.”

It was, too. Among the things about her that were unexpectedly appearing in my consciousness like litmus-paper tests was the realization that I had never heard my mother tell a joke. Yet I was all at once intensely aware that she had always been able to make me laugh. Her humor had obviously been unintentional. It occurred to me, as I walked into the Admissions Office of the Peretz Memorial Hospital on this dismal morning before Christmas, that the same word applied to my mother’s whole life. She had been too shrewd to arrange the almost nine decades of her existence the way she had been forced to live them. Given a chance to control things, I felt, she would almost certainly have done better. Unintentional was the word, all right.

“Can I help you?” said the girl in nurse’s uniform at the desk behind the Information window.

“Mrs. O’Toole?” I said. “I’d like to speak with her.”

“About what?” the girl said.

I examined the several ways I could have answered her question. A darling little old lady who has just cashed in her chips after exceeding by almost two decades her biblical allotment of three score years and ten? Or: a savage old bitch who has finally, thank God, fallen off my back? Or: the Jewish Eleanor of Aquitaine?

“Some papers I have to sign to authorize an autopsy,” I said. “Dr. Herman Sabinson called me about an hour ago. He said Mrs. O’Toole would be expecting me.”

The girl up to now had looked bright, intelligent, and sexy. Now she changed abruptly and completely. She looked exactly like the young nurse behind the Information window of a hospital in a TV soap opera who is confronted by the middle-aged son of an elderly lady who has just Gone to Meet Her Maker. I restrained my desire to reach in through the window and slap her.

In a sympathetic whisper she said, “One moment, please.”