No, that’s lemonade.
She’s tearful again. One little thing I ask you, one little thing and you can’t do it for me. Would it be too much to ask you to shift my feet, would it? They’re in the one place all day.
I want to ask her why she doesn’t move her feet herself but that will only lead to tears so I move them.
How’s that?
How’s what?
Your feet.
What about my feet?
I moved them.
You did? Well, I didn’t feel it. You won’t give me lemonade. You won’t shift my feet. You won’t bring me a proper blue plastic razor. Oh, God, what use is it having four sons if you can’t get your feet shifted?
All right. Look. I’m moving your feet.
Look? How can I look? ’Tis hard for me to lift my head from the pillow to be looking at my feet. Are you done tormenting me?
Is there anything else?
It’s a furnace in here. Would you open the window?
But it’s freezing outside.
There are tears. Can’t get me lemonade, can’t . . .
All right, all right. I open the window to a blast of cold air from Seventy-seventh Street that freezes the sweat on her face. Her eyes are closed and when I kiss her there is no taste of salt.
Should I stay awhile or even all night? The nurses don’t seem to mind. I could push this chair back, rest my head against the wall and doze. No. I might as well go home. Maggie will be singing tomorrow with the choir at the Plymouth Church and I don’t want her to see me slouching and red-eyed.
All the way back to Brooklyn I feel I should return to the hospital but a friend is having an opening night party for his bar, the Clark Street Station. There is music and merry chatter. I stand outside. I can’t go in.
When Malachy calls at three in the morning he doesn’t have to say the words. All I can do is make a cup of tea the way Mam did at unusual times and sit up in the bed in a dark darker than darkness knowing by now they’ve moved her to a colder place, that gray fleshly body that carried seven of us into the world. I sip my hot tea for the comfort because there are feelings I didn’t expect. I thought I’d know the grief of the grown man, the fine high mourning, the elegiac sense to suit the occasion. I didn’t know I’d feel like a child cheated.
I’m sitting up in the bed with my knees pulled to my chest and there are tears that won’t come to my eyes but beat instead like a small sea around my heart.
For once, Mam, my bladder is not near my eye and why isn’t it?
Here I am looking at my lovely ten-year-old daughter, Maggie, in her white dress, singing Protestant hymns with the choir at the Plymouth Church of the Brethren when I should be at Mass praying for the repose of the soul of my mother, Angela McCourt, mother of seven, believer, sinner, though when I contemplate her seventy-three years on this earth I can’t believe the Lord God Almighty on His throne would even dream of consigning her to the flames. A God like that wouldn’t deserve the time of day. Her life was Purgatory enough and surely she’s in the better place with her three children, Margaret, Oliver, Eugene.
After the service I tell Maggie her grandmother has died and she wonders why I’m dry-eyed. You know, Dad, it’s all right if you cry.
My brother Michael has returned to San Francisco and I’m meeting Malachy and Alphie for breakfast on West Seventy-second Street near the Walter B. Cooke Funeral Home. When Malachy orders a hearty meal Alphie says, I don’t know how you can eat so much with your mother dead, and Malachy tells him, I have to sustain my grief, don’t I?
Afterward, at the funeral home, we meet Diana and Lynn, wives of Malachy and Alphie. We sit in a semicircle at the desk of the funeral counselor. He wears a gold ring, a gold watch, a gold tie clasp, gold spectacles. He wields a gold pen and flashes a consoling golden smile. He places a large book on the desk and tells us the first casket is a very elegant item and would be somewhat less than ten thousand dollars, very nice indeed. We don’t linger. We tell him keep turning the pages till he reaches the last item, a coffin for less than three thousand. Malachy inquires, What is the absolute rock-bottom price?
Well, sir, will this be interment or cremation?
Cremation.
Before he answers I try to lighten the moment by telling him and my family of the conversation I had with Mam a week ago.
What do you want us to do with you when you go?
Oh, I’d like to be brought back and buried with my family in Limerick.
Mam, do you know the cost of transporting someone your size?
Well, she said, reduce me.
The funeral counselor is not amused. He says we could do it for eighteen hundred dollars, embalming, viewing, cremation. Malachy asks why we have to pay for a coffin if it’s going to be burned anyway and the man says it’s the law.
Then, says Malachy, why can’t we just put her in a Hefty trash bag and leave her outside for collection?
We all laugh and the man has to leave the room for a while.
Alphie observes, There goes a life of extreme unctuousness, and when the man returns he looks puzzled at our laughter.
It is arranged. My mother’s body will be laid out in her coffin for a day so that the children can see and say good-bye to a dead grandmother. The man inquires if we’d like to hire a limousine to attend the cremation but no one except for Alphie is inclined to travel to North Bergen, New Jersey, and even he changes his mind.
In Limerick Mam had a friend, Mary Patterson, who said, Do you know what, Angela?
No, what, Mary?
I often wondered what I’d look like when I died and do you know what I did, Angela?
I don’t, Mary.
I got myself all dressed up in my brown habit from the Third Order of St. Francis and do you know what I did next, Angela?
I don’t, Mary.
I laid down on the bed with a mirror at the end, crossed my hands with the rosary beads around them, and closed my eyes and do you know what I did next, Angela?
I don’t, Mary.
I opened one eye and took a little look at myself in the mirror and do you know what, Angela?
I don’t, Mary.
I looked very peaceful.
No one can say my mother looks peaceful in her coffin. All the misery of her life is in the face bloated from hospital drugs and there are stray tufts of hair that escaped her plastic razor.
Maggie kneels by me, looking on her grandmother, the first dead body in her ten years. She has no vocabulary for this, no religion, no prayer, and that’s another sadness. She can only look at her grandmother and say, Where is she now, Dad?
If there’s a heaven, Maggie, she’s there and she’s queen of it.
Is there a heaven, Dad?
If there isn’t, Maggie, I don’t understand God’s ways.
She doesn’t understand my babbling and neither do I because the tears erupt and she tells me again, It’s all right to cry, Dad.
When your mother is dead you can’t be sitting around looking mournful, recalling her virtues, receiving the condolences of friends and neighbors. You have to stand before the coffin with your brothers Malachy and Alphie and Malachy’s sons, Malachy, Conor, Cormac, link arms and sing the songs your mother loved and the songs your mother hated because that’s the only way you can be sure she’s dead, and we sang
A mother’s love is a blessing
No matter where you roam,
Keep her while she’s living,
You’ll miss her when she’s gone.
and
Goodbye, Johnny dear, when you’re far away,
Don’t forget you dear old mother
Far across the sea.
Write a letter now and then
And send her all you can
And don’t forget where’er you roam