Last Respects (33 page)

“I need the money,” I said. “You owe me the money. Please give it to me.”

The forefinger and middle finger of Abe Lebenbaum’s right hand, which lacked the thumb he had sacrificed to the cause of peace and had been stabbing nickels out of the pile of coins on the marble counter, now changed direction. They stabbed at me. Like the tines of a carving fork. I ducked back just in time. But Mr. Heizerick was leaning forward to scoop up his third batch of twenty nickels. My elbow hit his arm. The nickels splashed down on the floor. Trying to catch them, Mr. Heizerick’s body, encased in his natty tight coat, made several odd, spasmodic movements. The results were astonishing.

First, the pearl-gray fedora popped off his head, revealing that the zombie gambler was as bald as the moon-faced man in the Admiration cigar ads. As the hat went bouncing along the dirty floor, there was a long, ripping sound, and Mr. Heizerick fell back on his own hat. He made a series of funny noises while clutching at his middle. A couple of moments later I saw why. The buttons that held his natty topcoat so close to his body had torn loose, flinging the coat open and revealing that underneath the topcoat Abe Lebenbaum’s most important customer was naked to the waist. In his long battle with the slot machine he had obviously lost his shirt.

“Git odda here!” he screamed. “Git odda here!”

I turned desperately to Abe Lebenbaum. “I need the money,” I said. “You owe me a week’s pay. Please give me my money.”

“What I’ll give you, you little bestitt,” Abe shouted, “I’ll give you a
killa!
”

A
killa
does not appear among the common human ailments listed in
Merck’s Medical Manual.
It is the Yiddish word for a hernia.

“But, Mr. Lebenbaum,” I said. “You owe me the money.”

“Not to you!” he yelled. “To your mother. She always comes to get your pay. So tell her to come now. I’d like to see her. Tell her to come collect your pay. I’ll give it to her, boy! I’ll give it to her!”

The sound of his snarling voice drove me backward to the door like the blast of heat from a suddenly opened furnace door. My movement was hastened by the fact that Mr. Heizerick was beginning to recover. He reached his knees. He began to paw about for his hat. It seemed to me I’d better get out of there before the gambler’s groping hands found the squashed fedora. As I stepped backward across the threshold of the candy store into Avenue D, I bumped into Abe Lebenbaum’s mother. The little old lady was coming in.

“Benny,” she said in English, “you’re late.”

T
HIS WAS NOT TRUE
, of course. I had arrived in the candy store an hour and a half early. In the larger sense, however, Abe Lebenbaum’s mother was right. Forty years later it occurred to me that the toothless little old lady’s statement had been more than just another demonstration of her limited command of English. The old crone’s words had been prophetic.

Walking out of the morgue in the Queens County General Hospital on that gray, cold Sunday before Christmas Eve when my mother died, I realized I was late again. In a way that, it seemed to me, could not fail to give any man pause. Not to mention the willies or even the screaming meemies. I was late for the identification of the body of my own mother.

“How’d it go?”

I looked down at the taxi driver sitting in the cab at the foot of the two steps that led up into the morgue. It occurred to me that he, too, must have had a mother.

“Not very good,” I said. “I have to make another stop.”

I opened the rear door of the taxi, humpbacked myself in, plopped down on the seat, and pulled the door shut.

“Where to?” the driver said.

“The year of Our Lord 1927,” came to the surface of my mind as the only possible reply, but I did not utter the words aloud. I said, “You know where you picked me up?” I glanced at the clock. “About seven dollars ago?”

“Yeah,” the taxi driver said. “I been thinking about that.”

I pulled out my wallet, slid from it a ten-dollar bill, and pushed it across to him. “Let’s start all over again,” I said.

He took the bill, stared at it for a moment, then flipped up the flag of his ticking clock. “I didn’t mean by what I said—” he said as the clock stopped ticking.

“I know you didn’t,” I said. “It’s just that I need you more than you need me, and I don’t want to worry about you worrying about me.”

The driver started punching the keys of his coin box and fussing with his back pocket. “I didn’t mean you should get the impression I don’t trust you,” he said again.

Who did?

“Don’t bother with the change,” I said. “That’s your tip for round one.”

The driver looked up into the mirror over his steering wheel. Startled. “Well, gee,” he said.

Why not? I was not at the moment on the prowl for phrase-makers. “Forget it,” I said. “It’s Christmas.” And I was on the trail of my mother’s body. What a parlay.

“Well, gee,” the driver said. That settled it. A phrase-maker he wasn’t. “Thanks a lot, mister.”

The witless phrase held my ear. One man’s despair is another man’s gratitude. I waited for him to ask the inevitable question. He did.

“Where to, mister?” he said again.

The beginning of the road. The start of the trip. The invention of the riddle. The initiation of the horror. But how would he know that destination? He didn’t look any smarter than I did.

“One, three, eight dash two seven, Seventy-eighth Avenue,” I said. “It’s just off Main Street. If you know the general direction, I can guide you into the side streets.”

“Do I know the general direction?” the taxi driver said. “My mother lives around the corner.”

Why shouldn’t she? All mothers live around the corner.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

I didn’t really know where. Correction. I did know the precise address. I knew exactly how to get there. The way a jockey once told me a horse knows how to get back to the stable. But what was it I was getting back to? A modest three-room apartment in the Kew Gardens Hills section of Queens? Where my mother had spent the last of her eighty years? What was the point?

My mother was dead. I had to find her body. It had vanished somewhere between the Peretz Memorial Hospital on Main Street and the morgue of the Queens County Hospital on God forbid anybody should ask me what street. My mother’s body was not likely to be in her apartment on 78th Avenue. Yet I knew that was my next stop.

“This it?”

I looked out the taxi window. “Yes,” I said.

Yes, indeed. This had been it for almost a quarter of a century. How, I thought as I cringed under a sudden unexpected assault of terror, how was I ever going to get the hell out of it?

“Mister, I’m sorry,” the taxi driver said. “I’m afraid I don’t have the change.”

I stared at the second ten-dollar bill I had handed over. It calmed me down. What in God’s name was the matter with me? Had I signed onto some witless TV show to give an impersonation of Diamond Jim Brady? Who was I to go around handing out ten-dollar bills to taxi drivers?

“That’s all right,” I said. “Keep the change.”

Answer: I was a terrified fool confronted by the only experience nobody can handle in life: death.

“Jesus Christ,” the taxi driver said.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s his birthday.”

I got out of that cab fast.

My mother’s apartment was one of about two hundred built around a courtyard in the form of eight two-story buildings made forty years before of red brick, gray plaster, and black iron window frames. Forty years had taken their toll.

On this dreary day before Christmas the red brick looked like carrots going bad on a vegetable stall outside a grocery store. The gray plaster was dripping away in unpleasant pellets. The black iron window frames were rust-pink. Fair enough. Scalps lose their hair. Muscles sag. Rear ends spread. Death shall have no dominion?

One of the nice things about the Borough of Queens, what makes the architectural pattern known as the development something that pleases the eye, is the arena it provides for children. Little children. Tricycle size.

The arena is always covered by pulped brown sod with enough peripheral fragments of green to indicate that once it was covered by grass. I have always liked places from which grass has been tramped away. Like Tompkins Square Park. Across the street from the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House. It indicates that people have been there.

In Queens the people are usually overweight young mothers with peripatetic children. Every Sunday of my life during the past years I had walked the gauntlet. From the curb to the entrance to
I
-D.

The nice Jewish boy. The devoted son. Coming to make his weekly visit to his ancient mother. Carrying a shopping bag loaded with the items that any other mother could have purchased for herself during the past seven days in shops no more than three hundred feet around the corner from her front door: aspirin; bagels; toothpaste; whiskey; and of course mineral oil. My father left my mother a single legacy: the conviction that the human bowel is totally incapable of performing its function unassisted.

Over twenty years. Lugging bagels and mineral oil. Through clusters of gossiping mothers who should have been dieting, and whirling knots of screaming kids who should have been muzzled. Twenty-odd years of nodding and smiling, acknowledging the
kvelling
of the fat ladies who, like the Japanese, are ancestor worshipers. Adoring the weekly arrival of the successful son from downtown who turned his back every Sunday on God knows what enormously lucrative business deals in order to bring to the mother he loves her weekly ration of intestinal lubricant.

It had always been the toughest part of those Sunday morning visits. The adoration of those fat ladies reminded me of a poodle I had bought for my sons when they were very young. It was a mistake. I don’t like dogs. But I had been boning up on how to be a good father. The books said the way to do it is to provide the kids with one of man’s best friends. My sons didn’t seem to know the rules. The poodle bored them. They paid no attention to him. My wife, a kindly girl, is also a tough-minded citizen. The dog had been my idea. It was up to me to take care of him. I did.

With an irritation that verged on repugnance. Not because the poodle was unattractive. On the contrary. The papers that came with him indicated clearly that he was a beauty. Our neighbors agreed. They petted him and made murmuring sounds of endearment that drove me to a hatred for Albert Payson Terhune that was thoroughly irrational. Terhune was a collie man.

The reason for my hatred made me feel like Jack the Ripper. The foolish dog loved me. He followed me everywhere I went. Even into the bathroom. I had to learn how to snap the door shut fast. When I wasn’t looking he sneaked up behind me and licked my hand. Frequently, I regret to say, other parts of my body. When he heard my voice he came loping out to smother me with what I suppose must be called kisses. Boy, were they wet. And boy, did I hate them. And boy, was I going crazy.

Why? Because I don’t like affection I have not earned. That dog loved me, sure. But I knew why. I was the only one in the family who would feed him. How could I not? What kind of person would allow a three-hundred-dollar dog to die of starvation?

Not a boy who went out to Queens every Sunday morning to bring his mother the toothpaste and bagels she should certainly have learned, after all her years in this country, how to purchase for herself. Especially since she was in perfect health, vigorous to the point of being a nuisance, and plentifully supplied with cash by guess who.

The poodle finally died. My wife and sons did not notice his passing from our family scene. I did not call his absence to their attention. Their indifference gave me a chance to live with the discomfort of my relief. I had not wanted the stupid dog to die. I’d had nothing to do with his demise. But his death took a load off my back.

Now, twenty years after the death of that dog, crossing the grassless square in front of my mother’s apartment house in Queens, I faced a moment of horror. The parallel between the death of the poodle and the death of my mother made my stomach knot. I couldn’t believe that such a detestable thought should have crossed my mind. But it had. It had. It had. And the only thing that saved me from being sick was the weather.

Today I did not have to nod and smile to
kvelling
fat ladies. Today I did not have to pat the heads of screaming kids trying to knock me down. Today was not tricycle or wading-pool weather. And it was only a few hours before Christmas.

The fat ladies and their screaming offspring were indoors. Probably eating their heads off. Nobody saw me as I crossed the hard grassless square of frozen sod to the
I
-D entrance. Anyway, I didn’t see anybody see me. It was a short journey. For years the distraction of the plump mothers and their maniacally active children had made it easier for me to walk the perhaps one hundred feet. Today, for the first time, as I pulled from my pocket the key to my mother’s apartment, I was glad to be alone.

The feeling vanished as soon as I closed the door behind me. The smell almost knocked me over.

Let me say immediately that my mother was a neat housekeeper. Not sensational. But neat. I cannot say honestly that I would have wanted to eat off her floors. But that was not because of the way she treated them. My mother treated her floors as though they were an enemy who could be kept at bay only by constant sluicing and scrubbing. The reason why I would not have wanted to eat off my mother’s floors is simply because she had spent her life on floors that were not made of the best materials. All the sluicing and scrubbing in the world will not take the smell of decay out of rotten wood. That’s why my mother as a young woman always bought the strongest-smelling cleaning materials in the grocery store. I was raised on Fels-Naphtha. It is conceivable that this is why I have been totally bald since my twenty-third year. I consider myself lucky to have retained my teeth.

During the last days of her life my mother came to grumbling terms with detergents. She went at her floors with weapons that came in plastic squeeze bottles, later in spray cans, and were advertised on TV by fading movie stars and glowing quiz masters. As a result, her three modest rooms on 78th Avenue in the Borough of Queens always smelled like those tiny porcelain bowls in which my dentist’s nurse mixes the stuff she uses to clean my teeth.