The Bill from My Father (33 page)

Brian and I looked at each other. By “these things” did she mean homosexuality, or death? Was she telling us it was okay to kiss, or to drop dead in front of her?

“Let me begin by saying that we at Mount Sinai want our pre-need clients to feel that any sentiment they choose to express on their bronze marker is entirely up to them. Our job is to honor the client's wishes. We do whatever we can to help him or her find that special phrase or inspirational quote that will best represent who they are and will continue to touch the hearts of their loved ones for years to come. You may be surprised to learn that many people find it an enormous responsibility to choose just one memorable sentence …”

“I wouldn't find it surprising at all,” I interjected. “You're asking them to compress an entire lifetime into a few words.”

Stiff to begin with, Traci stiffened further.

“He's a writer,” explained Brian.

I said, “It's quite a challenge, is all I meant.”

“A challenge we here at Mount Sinai are more than prepared to meet.”

“Oh, I'm sure …”

“You might perhaps be pleased to know that ours is one of the first mortuaries in the country to develop a photo brochure featuring examples of the kinds of plaques people have created over the years. We also offer a wide variety of visual symbols one can add for emphasis, such as a menorah or Star of David. I can assure you that the majority of our clients leave their pre-need session with no complaints whatsoever about the statement they've decided upon. And of course, it can be revised at any time before the client dies. I can assure you I'd be the last person to underestimate the importance of one's final words. Certainly, as a writer, you must know that the Greeks had a name for composing commemorative remarks,
epitaphion,
from which we derive the word
epitaph
?”

“No, I didn't.”

“You didn't? How interesting. They considered it one of mankind's most noble and demanding arts. You see, Bernard—may I call you that, rather than Mr. Cooper? It cuts down on the confusion—as I was saying, pre-need may sound like a very up-to-the-minute development in the funerary profession, but in fact it dates back to ancient civilizations, who, judging from the hieroglyphs they left on cenotaphs and inside tombs, were quite meticulous in their preparations for the hereafter. The memorial parks of today, however, are limited in space and regulated according to strict local zoning codes and industry-wide regulations, one of which calls for the standardization of grave markers. And that's as it should be. We wouldn't want to play favorites. Why should we require one client to keep it short while we permit another to inscribe a lengthy farewell address? Brevity plus quality. That's our approach.” She waited, unsmilingly, for us to nod. “Your father, as I'm sure you'd agree, was … he was … an individual.”

The room grew smaller.

“May I cut to the chase, Mr. Cooper?”

“Please,” I begged.

She consulted the ledger. “‘They finally got me.' ”

“I'm sorry?”

“‘They finally got me.' ”

“Are
you
saying that, or are you telling me what
he
said?”

“I'm telling you that's what your father asked to have inscribed on his marker. Unless you have any objections. And I should tell you now to prevent any future misunderstandings that seeking amendments to his pre-need contract would require you to obtain full power of attorney and to assume, in writing, responsibility for any additional fees incurred beyond the one thousand dollars your father entrusted to us.”

I assured Ms. Hirsch that I wanted him to have whatever he wanted, and that whatever he wanted done should be done in exactly the way he'd wanted it done, no deviations. “Excellent,” she said, briskly closing the ledger. “I'm sure he'd be pleased to hear you say this. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll make sure the viewing room is ready. The county coroner requires verification on the part of a relative or friend, but you're free to spend as much time with your father's body as you feel necessary.”

Your father's body.

“In the meantime, let me leave you with some material to peruse. Your father left funds toward a casket but he hadn't decided on a particular model at the time of his death.” She handed me a casket price list and paused to look fawningly at Brian and me. Such bright piety glistened in her eyes that I nearly felt jilted when, instead of saying, “I respect your lifestyle,” she let go of the list and disappeared.

My head was reeling. Brian and I scooted our chairs together and flipped through the numbingly long list. I picked the first casket that sounded decent. “What about the Bedford?” I suggested. This model was described as “Eighteen-gauge steel. Blue finish. Blue sand pebble crepe interior with matching overlay and sunburst in head panel.”

“That's a woman's casket.”

“There are men's and women's?”

“You'll see what I mean when she takes us to the showroom.”

I ran my finger down the page. “What about this one, the Majestic? ‘Brush natural smoky gray shading with pinstripe. Gray cloud velvet interior. Solid bronze.' That sounds manly.” The thought of velvet and gray clouds made me sleepy, plus the room was overheated and nodding off would have been better than waiting to see my father's body.

“The Majestic is over six grand,” said Brian.

I turned to another page. “Look. This one's a lot less expensive. The lamb's wool sounds nice.”

“That's a children's casket.” He pointed to a parenthesis that read, “Twenty-one-inch stillborn.”

I rubbed my temples. “Well, you choose one.”

“Here's a perfectly good one made of fiberboard. The Kent.”

I wrenched the list out of his hands. “Fiberboard!”

“It has silver ventura fabric and the interior is madrid crepe,” he said defensively.

“You don't know what ventura fabric and madrid crepe are any more than I do! The Kent is just a step up from”—I squinted at the small print—“a metal-gasketed transfer case.”

“It says the transfer case is for shipping only.”

“Oh.”

Brian gripped my hand and held it. “She's going to try to sell you the most expensive coffin,” he said. “Take it from me, it's a business. They're out to make a dollar like any other business. The money he left won't go very far, and you'll end up owing the rest. This may sound crass now, but you'll be relieved when the bill comes.”

“For Christ's sake,” I said in the voice of my father, “and your people think
our
people are cheap.”

I was laughing when Ms. Hirsch opened the door, but it was hilarity under pressure, heavy on the bobbing shoulders and shortness of breath, and maybe, just maybe, it passed as grief.

Which it shifted into as soon I stepped across the hallway and into the viewing room. “Do you want me to …?” asked Brian, and then he and Ms. Hirsch were waiting on the other side of the closed door. The room, a dim ivory cube, was empty except for a gurney positioned
in one corner. Directly behind it, another door led to the chamber where bodies were cleansed, injected with preservatives, and arranged for presentation. I smelled a medicinal odor tinged with rotting fruit: perfumed embalming fluid. A sheet had been draped over the gurney, leaving his shoulders and head exposed. I quickly glanced at the floor, focusing on the black wheels, the silver axles. Any minute I would lift my eyes and look. But first I had to renounce my faith in reconciliation. First I had to tell myself that souls are better spent than saved.

His eyes were closed. Slack flesh hung from the armature of his bones. Succumbing to its own weight, the bulk of him was caving in. Once I'd looked, I couldn't turn away, couldn't sever the gaze that held us together. As I approached, I could have sworn the freezing air wasn't a condition intended to preserve his body, but a force emanating from it. In death he radiated cold just as surely as, alive, he'd radiated heat. Cold issued from him like a warning, and it was impossible not to take heed. Gooseflesh tightened my skin, muscles contracting against the drop in temperature. I drew close enough to see the back of his neck sagging toward the metal table, his earlobes stretched and pendulous. Blood was settling like silt in my father's body, turning it an otherworldly blue. Not the human blue of eyes or veins or bruises.
Cobalt? Sapphire?
My throat constricted and names escaped me. When I'd stood beside his hospital bed, there'd been things I'd wanted to say, and I'd said them in the hope that he might somehow hear and understand. Now language couldn't bridge the distance. Language was a vacuum, unspoken, recanted. Silence interceded for us both.

Brian and I pulled into a parking space in front of the administration building. “Keep the motor running,” I told him. “I'll get a map of the grounds.” I raced across the parking lot and into the building's recessed entry, the glass doors parting biblically before me. Arrangements of carnations and roses lined the display window of the on-site florist's shop. Moisture beaded at the corners of the plate
glass, spilling cool, leafy light into the lobby. The whole place was as still as a terrarium, impervious to the world. No receptionist sat at the desk. I peered around corners and investigated hallways, searching for someone in charge. I considered asking one of the occasional passersby if they knew where I might find a map, but it wasn't easy to wrest their attention. Men and women alike might as well have been wearing veils, so remote were their expressions, so inward their submission to grief.

Everyone I saw wore black and gray and navy. At least I'd dressed appropriately. Sort of. My jeans were the saturated blue of new denim, and with them I'd worn a relatively unwrinkled white shirt. While I wasn't exactly a fashion ad, neither was I slovenly. After all, does it really honor the departed to get so done up that, from their vantage in the afterlife, they couldn't pick you out in a crowd of mourners?

“Sir?” The receptionist had returned to her desk. “How may I help you?”

She typed
Edward Cooper
into her keyboard and scanned the screen, which lit her pretty, noncommittal face. Whir of micro-circuitry. “Goodness,” she said. “That must be one of our most common names. I show a total of six Ed or Edward Coopers. Shall I go through them one by one?”

I startled us both with my
No!
Opening the files of deceased strangers seemed as ghoulish as exhuming graves, all that musty information brought to light, plundered as though from a cyber-tomb. My father's death was complicated enough without having to learn the identities of his half a dozen graveyard namesakes. Besides, I was running out of time to pay proper homage.

“When did he pass?” she asked.

“Two thousand.”

She hit Return and scavenged the database. Hanging on the wall behind her was a framed photograph of an astronaut wearing a space suit and holding his helmet under one arm. A placard identified him as Ilan Ramon, the Israeli crew member who died in the explosion aboard the space shuttle
Columbia
. Ramon possessed the vigilant,
unchanging gaze one sees on the faces of stone lions and wary caryatids—an ideal sentry for this outpost of mortality.

“Your father!” exclaimed the receptionist. “He's here!” I spun around to look behind me, half expecting a repeat of Dad's appearance at Kennedy Airport.

“Edward and Hilda Cooper,” said the receptionist triumphantly. “They're located in Maimonides, one of our loveliest sections. Properties 4418 and 4419.”

Hilda? I would have brought this error to her attention sooner had I not been sideswiped by the thought that Hilda, a woman I'd never heard of, was in fact the person beside whom my father had asked to be interred, and whose existence, or former existence, I was only just now learning about. Hilda might have been his wife, girlfriend, housekeeper, nurse. I'd seen enough
Herald Examiner
s in my life to know that bigamy, and its industrious cousins polygamy and adultery, were practiced far and wide.

“My mother's name was Lillian, not Hilda.”

“Apologies,” said the receptionist. She removed her sweater and hung it over the back of her chair. This was going to take a while. “Mother's maiden name?”

“Harrison.”

She spelled it back for confirmation. “I do show an Edward and Lillian, but they're in a multiple listing along with—”

“Yes,” I said. “The other three are my brothers.”

“All right!” she exclaimed, giving me a thumbs-up. She removed a map from her desk drawer, uncapped a fluorescent yellow highlighter, and drew a line leading not toward Maimonides, but toward Moses, a section farther up Mount Sinai Drive. Midway, she stopped drawing and looked up at me. “That sounded awful, what I just said. I'm sorry for your losses.”

“You live,” I said. “Things happen. You go on.” This had a familiar ring, but not until hours later would I remember that my father had said this to me in his living room, explaining, or explaining away, three years of estrangement.

The receptionist handed me the map.

“When I get to the site, will the plaque be covered with something?”

She cocked her head.

“For the unveiling. Is there something I'm supposed to take off the plaque? Or should I have brought something along to put on the plaque so I could, you know, take it off?”

“There is no
unveiling,
technically. Unless you made special arrangements. Some people have ceremonies. Maybe a rabbi or a family member says a few words. Our maintenance staff makes sure the plaque is in place on the appointed day.” She hugged herself against a chill. “I hope you aren't disappointed?”

“I'm relieved,” I said. “It's one less thing I can do wrong.”

“You can't do sadness wrong,” she said. “You either do it or you don't.”