Q: A Novel (8 page)

We take the 7 train.
I-60 stares out the window the entire time that we are aboveground, from Queens Plaza, over Astoria, and through Jackson Heights. He is quiet and wistful, and I have the sense he is reliving a distant memory. Perhaps baseball does not exist in the future. Perhaps the Mets follow the Dodgers to California. Perhaps I-60 lives a nomadic life that does not allow him to attend baseball games. Whatever the case may be, this ride, so much a part of my routine, is not part of his.

We exit the train and cross Roosevelt Avenue. A scalper approaches us and we buy day-of-game seats, good ones, mezzanine boxes down the first-base line, which are selling below face value. There is no demand. It is the next-to-last game of the season and the Mets are out of it. As usual, the Yankees control fall baseball in New York.

At the gate, the ushers scan our tickets, and we enter the new stadium. I-60 stares wide-eyed at the Jackie Robinson rotunda. It is new to him, and old.

Would I mind buying him a scorecard and a pencil, he asks?

I do not mind.

We go to our seats. I leave him there, go to Shake Shack, return with diet sodas and the good crinkle-cut fries. He is busy recording the starting lineups in his program, looks at me warmly, grateful for the food. Something about him is needy now—needy in the way a young son needs his father, needy in the way an elderly father needs his son.

It is a spectacular evening, perfect for baseball. The crowd is sparse but surprisingly energetic and buoyant. The Mets on the other hand are languid. Niese, recently back from an injury, hits two batters in the first inning, leading to a run, and walks in another in the second. Thole lets a ball get past him in the top of the fifth, and just like that the Mets are down three to the Phillies. Oswalt keeps them in check. No hits through four, a bunt single in the fifth, a bloop in the sixth, none again in the seventh. The Mets do not threaten to score.

“The Mets are awful,” I say.

“It’s true,” he says, “but they get better.”

I-60 absorbs everything. He records every hit and every out in his book, soaks in the peanut vendor with the impossibly accurate arm, nods his head but does not sing as the fans stretch to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” drinks in the faint smell of
seaweed in the evening air. He is engrossed in the familiar rhythm of baseball, the rhythm of life. Soon he is talking again, though this time it is not to me.

“It’s called Batten disease. It is very bad.”

I nod. My mind races. “Could you have had other children?”

“Q and I—Q and you—are both carriers of the disease. There was a one-in-four chance another child would have had it. The cure won’t be discovered for another thirty years from now, more than twenty years after he gets sick.”

I groan. I’m in pain.

I-60 says, “After he was diagnosed, we set up his hospital room so that he could watch the games on television. At first he maintained his scorebook, then he would just watch the games, then he couldn’t stay awake even for this. Before he died, he asked me if we could go to one more game together. I said we could.”

A pitch sails into the catcher’s mitt.

“But we didn’t.”

It is the bottom
of the ninth. The Mets are still down by three. The team has displayed no sign of life at any point in the game, but they stage a rally. With two out, Reyes gets a hit, Pagan another, Beltran walks behind them, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the Mets have a chance to win. Of the many ways that baseball is a metaphor for life—for the need to prepare, for the vagaries of bad bounces and ill fortune, for the acceptance of a high frequency of failure as a necessary condition of existence—none is more apt than this illustration of the fact that fortunes can change in an instant.

It is all in the hands of Wright. In I-60’s story of my future, and his son’s past, David Wright must have been old. But he is young now, fierce and vibrant. The remaining fans, subdued into listlessness for eight and a half innings, are clapping in unison, brimming with energy, ready to explode. The Mets may have no chance at the playoffs, but the Phillies do, and hatred for them runs deep.

Wright lets the first pitch pass, and the second; each is called for a strike. Then he takes a ball, and daringly takes two more close ones, and the count is three and two. After each delivery, the crowd’s rhythmic clapping stops, and the collective potential energy of their desire is released aimlessly into the nighttime air. Now, with the count full, the cadence begins again, arcing toward a climax, as Lidge delivers. Wright does not let this pitch pass. He hits it solidly, a majestic, towering fly to right center. This is not a hitter-friendly stadium, and the more experienced fans know that even the best-struck ball can land in the mitt of a competent outfielder. Collectively, they, we, hold our breath. Then it clears the fence, and the entire stadium erupts in cheers and rises to its feet to celebrate the game-winning grand slam.

Only I-60 remains seated, and I can hear, faintly beneath the cacophonous exuberant celebration, the sound of an old man softly weeping.

Chapter Eight

T
o me this is all a dream, the worst of nightmares—the sort that stuns you awake, panting and witless, your heart racing, but even worse still. With ordinary dreams, one has the awareness, or hope, sometimes within the dream itself, that what is being experienced is so horrible that it cannot be real, and that if you can only force open your eyes then the ordeal will end. From this dream I do not wake up.

My reaction is odd in a way. None of what he describes has happened to me, at least not yet. But it feels as real as if it has. Its weight is palpable. Every moment, it feels as if someone is kicking me in the stomach or pressing down on my shoulders. Walking is an effort. Food does not taste right. It is difficult to fall asleep in the evening and, in the morning, difficult again to wake up. Writing is impossible.

Q senses something is up and asks. I tell her the friend I saw is having a hard time, and she does not pry any further. She is having her own difficulties. In the evenings we watch TV and hold hands. Television is our great avoidance. In the mornings she is up and out early to deal with the garden. Mostly I am alone.

I am in grief, but because this trauma is hypothetical or yet to happen or whatever it is, I have no natural event to bring me closure. I find myself wandering the city, walking for hours on end. I try the botanical gardens and the ferries, but these offer no comfort. So, too, Strawberry Fields fails, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nothing works until one day while aimlessly drifting through the East Village, an irresistible force draws me inside a funeral home, where I linger for a while watching the comings and goings, and then stay for a service, which is oddly soothing. To my own surprise, I return the next day, and the day after that.

It is easier to crash funerals
than one might imagine. If you wear a suit, no one asks any questions, and even if you don’t, you’re unlikely to be hassled. Who really knows who belongs at a funeral? They’re not as bad as you might imagine either. People behave well. They hold doors and speak quietly, and no one ever unwraps a sucking candy. Sometimes there is food.

I spend an entire day at Pezzano’s Nondenominational Funeral Home, just south of Washington Square, near the corner of Bleecker and Thompson. Sitting in the pews for so long changes my perspective on death. Nondenominational does not mean that God is not present; it means that all gods are present or, more accurately, the god of whoever is paying at the moment. As one funeral ends, a ritualistic changing of the guard begins, in preparation for the next event. Between the eleven thirty Abramson service and the McCallister funeral at one o’clock, a worker sprinkles the hall with an aromatic powder, which smells of frankincense and myrrh, overpowering the faint odor of Mandelbread which had permeated the room. A giant shield of David is let down by pulley. In its place is raised a crucifix, itself so immense that it would shame a Vatican cardinal. Two burly men are required for the lifting and lowering.

During the raising of the Jewish star, one of the workers inhales some of the frankincense powder, lets fly a giant sneeze, and loses his grip on the cord. The star enters free fall and only a last-minute recovery prevents catastrophe. The perfumist, or whatever one calls someone who spreads the smell of God, is standing near me as the near disaster is averted. Under his breath, he says, “Jesus Christ.”

The proprietor of the home, Chuck Pezzano, is more than happy to talk. In the corridor, between events, he tells me that he is the third generation of his family to be in the funeral business, that the money isn’t what it used to be, that he wanted to be a classicist but his father wouldn’t foot the bill for graduate school, and so here he is. He doesn’t like his job, and in subtle ways it shows. His eulogies are spotty. He makes little mistakes. One time he refers to poor Mike McCallister, an accountant and model-train enthusiast who stepped into an empty elevator shaft, as “Bob,” thinking, I believe, of the former host of
Wonderama
. His Hebrew is atrocious. He says “mitzvah,” with a long
e
sound that would have made my grandmother’s head explode.

His eulogies are calming, though. He speaks softly, with a pleasant, singsongy cadence that has a mesmerizing effect. Several times I find myself drifting off, and the day goes by quickly. Structurally, he follows the pattern of the Greek funeral oration. “The form of the
epitaphios logos
is tried and true,” he tells me in the hallway. “It was good enough for Plato and Pericles, so it is more than good enough for me.” At each funeral, he begins with a preamble, in which he explains that nothing he will say could ever adequately console the bereaved. He continues by recounting the lineage of the deceased, paying homage to all family members in attendance and to their national heritage. The first two parts work well, generally speaking.

The next, penultimate, section is more problematic. Here Pericles would honor the sacrifice of fallen war veterans. This could be dispensed with for most urban funerals, but Chuck is wed to the form, and so we are left to hear how Shelly Abramson, a jewelry engraver, toiled in service to the engraving industry, and of his unfailing devotion to its (unidentified) ethical principles.

But Chuck always closes strong with his epilogue, forceful words of consolation and encouragement to the families, which focus on the lessons the deceased’s good works offer. It is another standard bit, and sometimes requires contortion, as in the case of Shelly the jeweler, but even still it is engaging and comforting. “Heddy, Judit, and Irv, your father’s life is a shining example of a life lived well and in the service of others. If he were here today, he would surely say, ‘Do not grieve,’ but instead, ‘Honor me by living your own life well through works of charity and by your devotion to your own children.’ ”

Without any emotional connection to the deceased, I focus less on the details of their lives and more on the patterns that emerge. From my distance, one life looks pretty much like another. Everyone has friends and families and coworkers. Every service is attended by some people who are there out of love and others out of obligation. Everyone pretends the dead had no flaws, for the complicated reasons people do this: as a peculiar sort of honor, out of obedience to social convention, in the hope that they will be treated with the same generosity of spirit when their own time comes. When it is an adult who has died, funerals can produce great hope. People cry, but by the end of the service, healing has already begun. Small jokes are made, reconnections, and plans for the future. Watching this is comforting and, in some cases, even vaguely pleasant.

As the day wears on, I notice another man doing the same thing as I, attending one funeral after another. He is dressed neatly, in a gray suit and rep stripe necktie, though he has a coarse, weathered face, which suggests to me that he has not spent his life in an office. I guess that he is mid-sixties, though his leathery skin is the sort that can make one look older than he is. As the workers transition from the McCallisters to the Karpels, I wander over to him.

“Are you watching too?”

“Yes,” he says. “I’m on disability. I fell off a forklift. This helps keep me out of trouble. Most days I go to the courthouse and watch trials. When things are slow there, I come here. Otherwise I’d be at Aqueduct.”

I nod. I want to tell him that I have had my own bad luck. Most people expect that in the unlikely event they are ever visited by someone from the future it will be by another person, and that if it is by himself or herself, they will be given information that can be exploited, like the winner of the next Kentucky Derby or the name of a company whose stock will soon rise. It is my peculiar misfortune to be convincingly advised to abandon the most important and loving relationship of my life. But this seems better left unsaid. Instead I say, “The racetrack can be depressing.”

“Yeah, and the state cut kills you. Anyway, Chuck doesn’t mind. He’s nice.”

I nod. “It’s not as bad here as I imagined.”

“Some funerals are sadder than others,” he says, “but it can be therapeutic, and you don’t have to worry about blowing the rent on an exacta. You should spend a day at one of the graveyards. I recommend Cypress Hill in Queens.”

The cemeteries of New York
are hidden treasures. In 1852, Manhattan passed a law prohibiting burials on the island, and so cemeteries were hauled east to the wooded hills of Long Island, beautiful pristine land, still largely agricultural and sparsely settled, other than a few summer homes dotting the north shore in what would become Great Neck and Glen Gove. None is more beautiful than Cypress Hills, in the ribbon of parkland bisected by what lifelong New Yorkers know as the Interboro Parkway. On top of a bluff, just south of Glendale and west of the golf course in Forest Park, it commands views of the ocean to the south and the Long Island Sound to the north. A mere thirty-minute trip on the J train deposits the courageous traveler in a forgotten, mystical universe.

Though the cemetery has fallen into disrepair, its beauty is still evident. The wind blows through the ancient cypresses and maples and a towering oak, which is a living memorial to the assassinated president James Garfield. There’s a babbling brook and a quiet pond, and they still have room for you at prices that are surprisingly affordable, given the history of the place. Even an average Joe can be buried near the great jazz musician Eubie Blake, the entombed Mae West, and the immortal Jackie Robinson, who could not possibly have known that the adjacent highway would someday bear his name.

Here, too, are moments of grace and humor. At the burial of Jack McCarthy, a former firefighter who died of unidentified causes, one mourner after another throws flowers and other remembrances into the new grave. The last, a sullen man, with stooped shoulders and caverns under his eyes, tosses a bottle of Jack Daniels down the hole. When the priest looks at him quizzically, the man says, “Now he’ll be able to sleep.”

I watch the interment of Lou Marino, a high school teacher from Brooklyn. It is sad, but not too sad. Many of the people in attendance are quite old. If they are sad, it is as much the result of reflecting on their own mortality as on Lou’s. For it is obvious that Lou has led a long and full life. His wife is there, in the front, and she is crying, which does not sound noteworthy, but I have seen many services where the spouse does not shed a single tear, and one can almost see the balloon above their heads, expressing relief that the half-century nightmare is finally over. Mrs. Marino, by contrast, is heartbroken. Lou was obviously a good man. And there are children. Some are on the doorstep of old themselves, and from where they are positioned in the group, I know that these are Lou’s sons and daughters. They are sad too, though not too much. They have children of their own to distract them, good kids. They are wearing suits and dresses. The boys are not fussing about their neckties. The girls have kept their stockings up. A few are sufficiently grown to have children of their own and sure enough, toward the back of the gathering, a pretty woman in her early twenties is rocking and hushing a little baby girl. No one minds, and when the infant cries “Mama,” it brings a smile to many faces, including Mrs. Marino’s, and it is obvious that this is her and her husband’s beautiful great-grandchild. I think to myself that one could do much, much worse than Lou Marino.

I am so absorbed in the Norman Rockwell moments that I barely notice it is a rabbi presiding. Following some
mlech
ing and
baruch
ing, he says the word
hashem
, pauses, looks up, and asks, “What was the deceased’s Hebrew name?” Now, one does not have to be a genius to conclude that Lou Marino was not Jewish. It is obvious what has happened. Lou married a Jewish woman, and because she loved him for more than fifty years, and gave him beautiful children, who in turn gave him beautiful grandchildren and a great-granddaughter, Lou decided that he wanted to be buried Jewish and rest with his wife when she someday joined him. The rabbi either cannot or will not intuit this. From behind his thick beard, he asks again, “What was the deceased’s Hebrew name?”

The members of the Marino clan begin to look at their shoes and shuffle their feet. Mrs. Marino appears dumbstruck, the second generation of Marinos are red in the face, even the grandchildren are quiet and chagrined. The day is saved by a spunky
altetshke
, with frosted hair and cat’s-eye glasses, who obviously has been flown in from Florida. It is a seasonable late autumn day in New York City, in the mid-fifties, but she is wearing the burliest of parkas, lined in fur and topped with a thick hood, the kind of jacket Shackleton’s mother tried to get him to take to Antarctica but the explorer rejected as too warm. She is a fireplug of a woman, and the coat consumes her torso. With the hood drawn about her, all that is visible are her feet, her eyeglasses, and a sliver of nose.

This, I conclude, is Louis Marino’s mother-in-law. It is easy enough for me to imagine that she did not approve of Lou, who was probably a hell-raiser in his day, any more than John Deveril approves of me. But she is here, which tells me that this man was indeed good to her daughter, and she is not about to allow any ruse to be exposed on her watch. As the rabbi asks a third time, “What was the deceased’s Hebrew name,” the little bundle screams, “Moishe!”

In the back, a giggle is suppressed, but it will not be contained. Soon a chuckle emerges, then a full-on laugh, and finally the entire Marino clan is breaking up in front of the bewildered rabbi.

When it’s a child,
though, it is never lighthearted.

Life, in subtle and gross ways, is a transition to death. The wrinkling of skin, the stiffening of joints, and the diminishment of appetites are all reminders, not just to ourselves but also to our friends and loved ones, that we will not be around forever. When an adult dies, no matter how he or she goes, even if he is hit by a bus or falls down an empty elevator shaft or some other pointless death, we can make sense of it. It is within our experience and narrative capacity to satisfactorily explain events such as these. We may grieve, but we are consoled by the joys of the life lived—by the fact that Lou Merino loved and was loved by his family, by Mike McCallister’s passion for his trains, by Shelly Abramson’s career, such as it was. Even if it is an imperfect life that has ended, we can console ourselves by saying that the departed made choices, that no one gets everything they want, that part of living is compromising. This is an account of existence we can accept.