The Bill from My Father (32 page)

She looked at us as though she'd just realized we were sitting there. “Were there stones in the dirt—is that why the sound was so loud? Every shovelful made that loud hollow sound and scattered across the lid of the coffin. It was like a dream, each of you taking your turn and walking up to the grave with a shovel, and I wanted to shout to stop you from falling in, but as soon as I heard that sound I didn't care how sad or frightened you seemed, how close you stood to the edge. All I thought was,
How can they do this?
”

My father and I began to stammer in our own defense, but Mother raised a hand to shush us. “I meant, how can they
stand
to do this? I know you had to. No one else should have. No one. It has to be done by the ones who are already broken and can't break anymore because of one shovelful of dirt. I was angry anyway. Who else was I going to blame? God? My son's blood? The men who'd made the grave so straight? None of it makes sense. I'm just telling you, these are the things I remember, not the view.”

The next minute got stuck in its slot. No one knew how to pry it loose. Finally I said, “There was a man I read about in
Ripley's Believe It or Not
who spent a week underground in a special coffin. They fed him through a tube and everything. People could see his face in a little window and they got to ask him questions about what it was like to be buried.”

Mother returned to the table. She lit a cigarette and leaned back in her chair. “He could say what it was like to be buried
alive,
maybe, but that's not the same thing.”

My father said, “Not by a long shot.”

“Houdini promised he'd come back from the grave,” she continued, “and look where that got him.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Dead,” said Mother. She blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. It hovered over our heads like weather.

“Be that as it may,” said Father, “he didn't say
when
he was coming
back. People are probably waiting for him as we speak, like they are for the second coming. Take it from me: whoever gets back first has a big advantage. It's no good to be the
second
person to invent the wheel.”

“Cheating death isn't something you invent,” corrected Mother. “It's something you do. If you're lucky.” She recounted a story she'd read in
Life
about a “mystic yogi” who, through the power of his mind alone, could keep his heart from beating and didn't need to breathe. Soon, the Miracle Chicken reared its headless neck. My father used its plight to illustrate the pros and cons of coming back. On the one hand, you're alive; on the other, you have to die all over again.

There arose the tempting idea of living forever. I said I wanted to.

“It
sounds
good,” my father warned me, “until you read the fine print.”

“What your father means is that the price for eternal life is having to grow older and older.” Mother gently stroked her neck. “Older than anyone we've ever seen.”

“Older than a redwood,” I said.

“It's no picnic at fifty,” said my father, “so multiply that by a couple of centuries and see how you like it. Unless,” he reconsidered, “they figure out a way to arrest the aging process.”

“Who's going to figure
that
out?” Mother wanted to know.

“The people whose business it is to take care of these things.”

We switched philosophical positions at will, one of us a champion of resurrection or an advocate of extended longevity, the others finding loopholes, casting doubt. The point wasn't to debate the issues with consistency. The point was to dodge a foregone conclusion, to leap from one diversion to the next. After losing Bob, we'd had our fill of death. We were sick of its grim contingencies.

Brian signaled well in advance of the Forest Lawn exit. I couldn't stop thinking about how insistently my parents and I had willed the topic off course that morning at breakfast, our evasion as tangible as the sensation of Brian's car banking around the off ramp. We sailed along Forest Lawn Boulevard, the concrete channel of the Los
Angeles River to our right. At night, taggers climbed over the cyclone fence and spray-painted the names of their gangs on the steep walls, loyalties trumpeted in brash colors. A Santa Ana was “in effect,” as the weathercasters said, the wind wicking moisture from everything it touched. Drought had left the river basin empty except for pools of standing water whose only current was the skyward pull of evaporation. It would take days of drenching tropical rain to turn these shallows into the murky torrent one saw on the nightly news whenever a careless child fell in and was either rescued by Caltrans workers or swept downriver to his death.

On our left, the wrought-iron fence bordering Mount Sinai Memorial Park ran for a good half mile, its pickets tipped with ornamental spears. The technical distinction between a memorial park and a cemetery is determined by the presence of headstones. The Glendale branch of Forest Lawn is a cemetery renowned for its Carrara marble bas-reliefs, a stained-glass reproduction of da Vinci's
Last Supper,
a scale replica of Michelangelo's
David,
and a popular “museum store” that sells every sepulchral souvenir you could imagine short of an ashtray shaped like a cremation urn. Forest Lawn epitomizes the theme-park atmosphere envisioned by morticians of 1950s Los Angeles, whereas its sister institution, Mount Sinai, is characterized by a lack of tombstones and thematic statuary, a condition that stems, in part, from the Talmudic prohibition against idol worship. Instead, the dead are identified by evenly spaced grave markers flush with the earth and surrounded by a carpet of hardy Bermuda grass. Nothing distracts the eye from absence.

Today was the eleven-month anniversary of my father's death, the last day his grave marker could be unveiled according to the Jewish laws of mourning. That I'd postponed the unveiling till the last possible minute may seem like negligence on my part, which it was, but I also had reason to procrastinate. It's believed that this waiting period gives those close to the deceased enough time to reckon with the bleakest and most immediate phase of grief, which will better prepare them to see the intimate's name inscribed on a bronze plaque, to take in the dates of birth and death—a span as brief as the
dash between them—and to understand that, even though the body lay below the earth, moldering in its cocoon of burial clothes, the person to whom the body once belonged has been recollected from every angle, in every cast of light, scored into the survivor's heart so often and with such painstaking intensity that, over time, the deceased has become miraculously animate and has taken up permanent residence in mourners' memory. The longer I put off the unveiling, the more time my father had to settle into the chambers of my brain, to hang up his jumpsuit and make himself at home.

Not until Brian pulled up to the information booth did I begin to see the flaw in my logic. My father was already as entrenched in my memory as he would ever get, and what I perhaps should have done was arrange for the observance to take place nearer the thirty-day mark instead of the eleventh month. The eleventh
hour,
really, for I'd waited so long to call the mortuary and plan my visit that the cutoff date for this preliminary period of mourning, measured from the time entered on his death certificate, was an hour away.

The Jewish laws of mourning are less prescriptions than suggestions, and I knew that no spiritual punishment awaited me if the unveiling didn't take place precisely within the given time frame. No burning bush would lecture me on punctuality. Rabbis wouldn't cart me off in handcuffs. My grave wouldn't be turned into a planter or be repossessed. The problem was, I still feared disappointing my father, providing him with definitive proof of my irresponsibility. He may not have been sentient in a strictly physiological sense, but he was alive enough to speak his mind:
Eleven months and you're too busy to throw on some decent clothes and honor your old man?
Guilt and superstition are a volatile mix. I was really in a rush to get this done.

I gave the guard my father's name. He disappeared inside the information booth and emerged a minute later, arms folded across his chest, taking his time. “Turn right and park in front of the administration building,” he said. “A receptionist in the lobby will give you a map with directions to the grave site.”

As we drove off, I told Brian I thought the guard knew about my father's unusual epitaph.

“What makes you think he knew?”

“It wasn't anything he said or did, exactly, but we're dealing with a group of people who probably go through a training program where they learn to stay poker-faced in any situation.” Although I'd searched their faces for signs of amusement, pity, or reproach, I hadn't been able to tell what, if anything, the employees of Mount Sinai thought of the two sentences my father had asked to have chisled on his grave marker. Had his epitaph become a part of mortuary folklore, or were strange last wishes par for the course?

The day my father died, a woman named Traci Hirsch had called to introduce herself and tell me that before he'd moved to Oxnard, the two of them had met to discuss his “funerary welfare.”

“Funerary welfare?” This was the first I'd heard of Ms. Hirsch, or of my father's posthumous plans. The conclusion I jumped to proved I was my mother's son as well as my father's: I wondered if their discussion took place in a hotel room over watery highballs. My suspicion was dispelled when Ms. Hirsch identified herself as a “pre-need counselor” on staff at Mount Sinai Memorial Park, where the hospital had sent his body. With her silky phone persona, she explained the nature of her work: helping clients “customize a burial service to suit their budgets and personalities.” The plans are kept on record so a client can rest assured that, when the time comes, their wishes will be met to the letter. “Your father knew what he wanted and spoke his mind,” she told me. I recalled Dad's brio at the Toyota dealership and pictured him slamming a coffin lid to see if it was well constructed. Ms. Hirsch added, a little ominously I thought, that the men and women of her profession considered it the height of kindness for people such as my father to make difficult decisions in advance so that others wouldn't have to. I agreed with her in theory—it
was
considerate—but I couldn't get past, for starters, the fact that her phone call came as a total surprise. Out of the blue was the last place from which I wanted information about my father, and the first from which it usually came. Mr. Delaney at
Pacific Bell, Mr. Gomez at Adult Protective Services, Dr. Montrose and Lucinda at Saint Joseph's Hospital had all contacted me—in the sense that lightning contacts a tree—out of the blue. And like Ms. Hirsch, each of them implied that my father was irascible while at the same time commending in him a certain charm they had a hard time putting their fingers on. I was sure that Ms. Hirsch's comment about Dad's kindness was offered to counterbalance whatever flabbergasting revelation she had in store for me. When I asked for the details, she said it was her policy to speak with relatives in person whenever such a meeting was “geographically feasible.”

In the hours between the call from Ms. Hirsch and going to meet with her at Mount Sinai, I tried to second-guess what kind of rites Dad would have taken the time and trouble to prearrange. By a quirk of metaphysics, second-guessing him effectively assured that my various guesses would be wrong
because
I'd thought of them, which didn't stop me from trying. By midnight my mantra was,
How bad can it be?
I'd heard of people in New Guinea who paid to have coffins built in the shape of sports cars, a red Porsche with racing stripes the most requested model. In Atlanta, a traveling salesman's last wish was to have an exact replica of his battered valise carved in granite and used as his headstone, too heavy to tote through the afterlife. The world's most lugubrious jewelry may have been crafted by the Victorians, who wove locks of the loved one's hair into pendants and brooches to go with their mourning garments, memento mori worn close to the heart. I had no idea what state of mind my father had been in when planning his funeral. For all I knew, I might find myself standing at his grave site while a portable tape recorder (the one I'd used to interview him for the book I'd never written) blared “The Trolley Song” across the park, a few bereaved and clinging families turning from their services to shoot me angry looks.

The next morning, in the lobby of Mount Sinai's administration building, Traci Hirsch greeted Brian and me with her firm, unhurried handshake. She led us from the lobby into her office, a place made dour by velvet curtains and Federal furniture. She smartly folded herself into one of several chairs at a circular table and nodded
for us to follow suit. Ms. Hirsch produced a black leather-bound ledger, and once she set it before us, she laid her hands guardedly over the cover. Her every gesture had about it a cautious grace, as if clumsiness or haste might wake the dead. She was all ceremony, the air oppressive with impending disclosures. Compared to her formality, an unscheduled sniffle or hiccup would rip through the room with the force of an explosion, and I started tamping down my reaction to Dad's last wishes before I'd even found out what they were. “Please accept my condolences,” said Ms. Hirsch, opening her ledger. The binding cracked like cartilage. She turned to Brian. “Were you the deceased's physician, Dr. Miller?”

“I'm Mr. Cooper's partner.”

“I see,” she said, jotting a note. “Deceased's business partner.”

“No,” corrected Brian. “I'm Bernard's partner.”

“We live together,” I explained to Traci. “We're a couple.”

“And Dr. Miller is here to offer moral support? Isn't that wonderful. You know,” she said confidentially, “these things are just a part of life, aren't they? You needn't feel at all self-conscious about it in front of me.”