I stand up and do my dismissal routine, a slight Peter Lorre bow from the waist. We do some more eye-to-eye staring. He could still throw me off the floor and lock me out of the hospital but I can see he isn’t going to. He can’t afford it. He walks past me, out the door and off the floor.
An hour later a nurse scurries in with signed approval for everything.
During the next week, I stay with Dad a good part of the time; Billy comes and sits Mother most days.
Dad continues in a coma. I see Dr. Chad every morning; he’s kind and concerned. There’s nothing said about the confrontation with Benson. Chad does an LP; there are some red cells in the spinal fluid but nothing to indicate serious stroking. He takes an EEG, but it’s hard to tell anything while he’s comatose. These things should all have been done a long time ago. The brain scan shows no sign of a tumor. But he remains unconscious. His BUN stays high. His eyes are dilated and his pulse irregular. It looks as if there will be no problem about Dad leaving intensive care.
On Thursday afternoon, Dr. Chad sits down in the chair beside me in Dad’s room. He pulls out the record and goes over the medical evidence. He looks at me.
“Mr. Tremont, I think your father’s dying. I’m still not sure just what happened. It could be any of a number of things, but his condition looks irreversible. If you want to have another consultation on this, please do.”
I look at him. It’s hard to accept. I look over at Dad. If they took off all the support—IV, oxygen, monitors, catheters, all the hardware—he’d die in hours. I can’t say anything.
“Mr. Tremont, you should probably start considering arrangements for your father’s death. I know your mother is very ill and perhaps you should try to prepare her. I don’t think he will last much more than a few days.”
I go down to the lobby and call Joan. I tell her what the doctor said. She’s shocked but not surprised; that best explains the way I’m feeling myself. Joan says she’ll meet me at Mom’s.
I go home. Billy’s in back working with the motorcycle. He took a spill on it riding the fire trails and he’s trying to straighten the forks and knock out some bumps in the gas tank. The headlamp and direction-signal lamps are broken, too. Mother’s watching TV. I sit beside her. If the show is over before Joan gets here, I’ll break it to her myself. This is another hospital show. I’m beginning to think everybody’s dressed in white, blue or green gowns. The show ends with a freeze shot of a woman screaming. Some fun.
I walk over and turn off the set. Mother’s in her dressing gown after taking a nap. She has her hair in curlers and some cream worked into her face. She’s a full subscriber to the “don’t let yourself go” theory of survival.
“Mom, I just talked to Dr. Chad.”
She’s onto it right away.
“What did he say, Jacky; is he going to die?”
I think her mind is still half in the soap opera; we’re acting out another episode. I should complain; it makes things easier for me. I take on the role of kind, loving, concerned son.
“Dr. Chad feels Dad doesn’t have much longer. He wants us to make the arrangements.”
That sounds appropriate to the genre. I’m feeling disengaged, thirty-six-plottish. Then Mother puts her fist into her mouth and starts crying, really crying. The soap opera is over.
She throws her arms around my neck. Mom’s such a tiny woman, I always forget except at times like this. If a man were her size, he’d be totally marked by it, at a terrible disadvantage. I wonder if I could be five feet tall and cope.
I hold on to her until we hear Joan’s camper roll into the driveway. Joan climbs down and comes in. Mother and Joan fall into each other. I’m empty, bare, cold inside. I’m surprised to find I’ve been crying. I’m the one it hasn’t reached yet. I’ve been so busy, arranging, arguing, fighting, I haven’t allowed it to happen to me. My father’s going to die.
It’s hard for all of us to talk about it but we need to do something. Except for an insurance policy, my folks haven’t made arrangements. Like most people, they didn’t want to think about it. Mother says she and Daddy agreed they wanted the simplest kind of funeral but buried in the ground together, in the same grave. That’s all. We decide on the Holy Cross Cemetery, about two miles from my folks’ house; no showing of the body or any of that. Mother wants any money beyond the minimum to be used for mass cards, prepaid masses said by priests in different places for his immortal soul.
I’m all primed to fight against embalming. It seems I need to fight something through these hard parts, something to keep me from thinking.
When I was fifteen, my Grandfather Tremont died. I was known in the family as the one who was good at school and I’d noised it around about wanting to be a doctor. My grandfather was to be embalmed in his own bedroom for the laying out. Friends of the family, the Downeys, who had a funeral home around the corner, were doing it. I was elected to help with the embalming.
By the time I’d watched the draining of the dark, thick blood, the cutting out of the insides, the stuffing of cotton into the sides of his mouth and into the eye sockets, it was the end of my doctoring career. I also swore nobody I loved would ever have that happen to them.
This is the first time I’ve had to check out that resolve. I’ve had thirty-seven lucky years since then, not being forced to make any of those decisions, but now it’s here.
The next day, Joan and I go to Bates, McKinley & Bates, a mortuary and funeral home on Culver Boulevard. It’s a sad business for a sunny California day but it’s good doing anything with Joan.
The mortuary home is tan, plaster-covered cement, with smoked glass windows you can’t see into from the outside. I stop at the parking meter to wind in a quarter. When I turn, Joan is standing, appraising the building.
“What do you think, Jack; they’re afraid the corpses might escape?”
It does look like a camouflaged Nazi bunker.
She opens her purse, rummages around in it.
“Darn, I forgot to pack my silver-plated, pearl-handled twenty-two.”
From then on, we’re into it.
The doors are dark glass, too; swinging, metal-latched. Inside, the décor is virtually colorless; blacks, pure grays and whites. Everybody’s dressed to match. It must be weird spending your days in a place like this, dealing with sad people; death on the dotted line. I want to turn around and walk back into the clean pollution and glare of Culver Boulevard.
There’s a lady at the reception desk. She’s wearing a white carnation in the lapel of a gray suit. Her hair is a muted gray but she looks young, not more than thirty-five. Joan does the talking; I’m not paying enough attention. The lady smiles and asks us to wait. I lean toward Joan.
“I think she dyes her hair.”
I get a smile and cautioning finger.
We’re ushered into a small room with a non-view tinted window on the street. I’m shocked to see a pinking beige automobile float slowly past outside. Maybe there’s something special in this glass to make things move slowly.
Inside it’s so still. A young man with undyed blond hair in a comb-line-visible pompadour is sitting at a desk. He has very white, detached hands folded on the desk in front of him. He brings off the saddest smile I’ve ever seen. It’s the smile of a man with freckles who’s just been told the sun has burnt itself out.
We sit down. I’m into the act now. I’m even appropriate in a black suit with a gray tie. Mother and Joan dressed me. The suit was designed for Joan’s father-in-law to be buried in. He was dying of emphysema and spent his last gasping months planning his funeral. He had this suit designed for the laying out. It’s black with a silkish paisley, almost invisible pattern and is lined with black silk. There are narrow lapels, trick slant pockets and three buttons in places you wouldn’t expect them. Mr. Lazio, Joan’s father-in-law, Mario’s father, was Italian, Sicilian actually, and liked things fancy. He was also only five feet seven inches tall. I’m wearing the trousers as hip huggers, held up by a pair of Dad??
?s old suspenders let out to maximum. I’m showing about two inches of cuff and can’t breathe deeply.
The reason Mr. Lazio isn’t buried in this suit is because the last week before he died, he decided to change the game plan. Now he wanted a gray suit with a gray casket and a black pillow to set off his gray hair. So they had a new suit cut for him to the dimensions of this one. Carmen, Joan’s mother-in-law, gave this suit to my father, who is also five feet seven, but Dad would never wear it. He said he was afraid somebody would shoot him. So I’m the first one to wear it; probably the last. Some kind of hunched-over, hobbled pallbearer I’m going to make.
We tell the man we want the least expensive funeral possible. We try to make this sound as if it’s a deep religious conviction but I can tell he pegs us as cheapskates. He moves a small pad from the corner of his desk and starts writing down the figures. He asks questions, we answer. “Yes, burial, not cremation.” “But cremation is so much less expensive.” “That’s all right.” We’ll blow it on a bit of ground. “No, we don’t have the plot; we’ll buy it after we’re finished here.” …No, the corpse isn’t dead yet. But he’s working on it; we’ll deliver, don’t worry.
There’s some complication about burying them in the same grave on top of each other. There has to be a cement vault, California law. OK, we’re in for a double vault, cheaper in the long run and appropriate.
Then he quotes the price for the embalming: not much, about seventy-five bucks. Up to this point Joan has done most of the talking, very refined, very capable at keeping things on an even keel. I come drifting in.
“No, please, we don’t want him embalmed.”
A small squall passes over the unlined, calm, passive features.
“But it’s customary to embalm, sir.”
“We don’t intend to have a showing of the body, so there’s no reason to embalm.”
“But, Mr. Tremont, it’s a California state law; the deceased must be embalmed before burial.”
“How about the ones you cremate?”
“They’re embalmed, too. It’s the California state law.”
He smiles. I figure he’s got us, I don’t intend to do time over an unembalmed body. But then Joan comes on.
“I have a friend who’s Jewish Orthodox; she was allowed to bury her mother without embalming because it’s part of her religion. Is this true?”
He folds his fingers, interlacing them the other way.
“Yes; it’s an exception to the law; a question of religious freedom.”
“Well, we want a Jewish burial.”
She turns to me.
“Don’t we, John?”
I nod. I can see us making arrangements at the local temple, running around sticking up crosses to confuse Mother, Oy veh! But we’re past the embalming part for the time being. We’re into caskets. He leads us down a corridor. I peek in several doors on the way. There are little metal name plaques over each door. Two I can remember; The Everlasting Peace Room, and The Eternal Truth Room. The room at the end has wall-to-wall caskets, three deep, hung on hooks and tilted slightly forward so we can see into them. They look like gigantic jewel cases. Most of them are lined with quilted silk in light colors from white through pink to gray again. The outsides of some are armored like Brink’s trucks.
Our man is going along describing each coffin, its advantages and disadvantages, quoting prices. There’s no stopping him, this is grooved-spiel time. He has instructions to give us the full treatment even if we are cheapskates.
We go along beside him, listening, waiting till he’s finished. He’s doing his best to make us feel that if we don’t buy a foam-rubber-lined coffin so Dad’ll be comfortable, with Duralumin or stainless-steel exterior to keep the worms out, we don’t really love him. Joan looks at me. I don’t know what she expects me to say.
“Sir, do you have anything in the line of a plain pine box?”
He looks down at his shined shoes, then up at us.
“No, the least expensive casket we have is this one. It is pine, sir, and painted metallic gray. It’s priced at only one hundred twenty-two dollars.”
“Would it be all right if I built a casket? My father was a carpenter, so he has all the tools. I’m sure I could build a box he’d like in two days or less.”
He brings up a hand to smother a cough, probably a smirk or, hopefully, a smile.
“I’m afraid not, sir. We shall be responsible for the funeral, transportation, ceremony and interment; the reputation of our establishment would be involved. We couldn’t allow a thing like that.”
I know I’m being ornery, dumb; maybe I’m taking it out on death. Joan pulls me by the arm and turns toward the door. She whispers.
“That’s enough, Jack, you’ve had your fun. You know how Dad is. He wouldn’t want anything out of the ordinary. We’re not going to have a hippy funeral.”
She turns and goes back to the man.
“We’ll take that one there.”
She points to the one with the metallic gray paint.
“Is it possible to have it unpainted?”
He smiles and leans forward. Joan can get just about anything she wants. She’s such a handsome woman. When you’re her brother, it’s easy to forget.
“I am sorry, madam, I don’t think there are any in our reserve without paint and if there is to be no embalming—well—we can’t wait very long.”
Oh, he is a son of a bitch but it doesn’t faze Joan; she smiles and nods.
“All right, we’ll take this one just as it is, paint and all.”
She grabs my arm and we follow him to the office again. As we go along the narrow corridor, I fall back and take a closer look into one of those rooms. There’s a casket on a little platform, surrounded by vases of flowers. There are indirect lights and baby spots on the casket and it’s open. An old lady, dressed in orchid, is sleeping in the casket. There’s a smell of beeswax and floor polish. I run back out and catch up.
We sit down. He opens his pad and writes in the price of the casket.
“And where shall the services be held? We have lovely chambers for private services here in our own chapel.”
I’m completely boggled again. That little smiling lady did me in; but Joan sticks with it.
“We’ll have a funeral mass at Saint Augustine’s and then the burial will be at Holy Cross.”
He looks at her. What kind of a Jewish funeral is this? I half expect him to start talking embalming again. But he’s given up; we could ask about hiring a five-piece band and he’d go along. There’s more talk concerning the hearse, the number of limousines and a police escort. I’m not fighting anymore. It’s going to be a funeral like any other funeral and Joan’s right, that’s the way Dad would like it.
The total bill comes to something over a thousand dollars. That was the maximum we’d set when we talked with Mother. We plunk down a two-hundred-dollar deposit and say we’ll notify him when Dad dies. He also wants us to let him know soon as possible the exact location of the burial plot at Holy Cross.
We walk out, through the glare, to our car. The parking meter is almost run down. We climb in and I sit there watching the meter.
“What in heaven’s name are you doing, Jack? What are we waiting for?”
“I’m getting the rest of my money’s worth from this meter. Spending a thousand dollars—barn, like that, throwing it into a hole, shakes me up.
“You know, Joan, what I can’t understand is why I’m not crying. Inside I’m like soft water flowing, going nowhere, but I can’t seem to cry.”
Joan turns and looks at me, a glint in her eye.
“Do you really want to cry? I can make you cry.”
She folds her hands in her lap, clears her throat and starts singing:
“Where is my Mommy, where can she be?
I’m so awfully lonesome, lonesome as can be.
Papa is brokenhearted, Mother left us alone,
So if you see my Mommy, tell her to come home.”
She
hasn’t gotten into the second line before my sobs start, softly, openly. I’m crying, scared, and ashamed as I always was. I stare through my tears at Joan. She stops. I get back some control.
“Did Mom really hide from us when we were little? Sometimes I think I made it all up; it’s so hard to believe.”
“Yep, she really hid. She even recommended the idea to me for my kids. She’d hide behind the hedge or sometimes go over to Mrs. Reynolds, for a cup of coffee.
“She thought it was funny how she could make you do anything she wanted by threatening to sing that song. You really were a ‘simp’ when I think about it.”
“Well, why weren’t you scared?”
“There is a song that makes me cry, too, you know, Jack. I never let Mother know about it and don’t you snitch. I only hope I can sing it without crying now.”
I pick up the melody and we sing together. There on Culver Boulevard, under clear California sunshine, we cry our way through the rest of my quarter.
I pull out and we head toward Jefferson Boulevard. This part of town is cemeteryville. There are three cemeteries within three square miles: a Protestant one, a Jewish one and a Catholic one. I don’t know what you do if you’re an atheist or a Moslem. I wonder if there are still black cemeteries in America? There were when I was a kid. We called them colored cemeteries.
The Catholic one we’re going to is built over what used to be a riding stable.
It has an entrance gate like Mount Vernon. The main administration building is a studio-set blend of a Howard Johnson’s and a Bavarian chapel. Californians come up with the weirdest combinations in architecture. Except for Spanish-adobe style, there’s no indigenous form, and they have no fear.
Inside, it’s a more practical setup. On the wall is Pope Paul VI staring down at us. I wonder if they’ll ask for our baptismal and confirmation certificates. Who’s to know if Dad’s Catholic?
We’re ushered into a cubicle in a row of cubicles. A woman comes with a sheath of folders under her arm. We explain what we want. Again, we’re going for the cheapy but it doesn’t bother her. She puts aside two leather-bound folders and opens the folders in cardboard.