Later he would tell me that it was his intention to reclaim the name of Fagin from the bastard—a writer, he said, whom he loved and admired and despised in what he believed was the very way of brothers.
There was also on one of the shelves, among the books, the bodiless head of a china baby doll, curly-haired and beautiful, with a rosebud smile and what might have been human lashes on the edges of its closed eyes. A model, he would also tell me later, for the face of a child in restful sleep. It was the only thing about the place that made me uncomfortable.
He asked politely after my mother and my brother, and tried to remember precisely, in the Brooklyn way, the street and cross streets where our apartment was. He said, “Next door to the Chehabs, who have the bakery?” And I said yes.
He nodded thoughtfully. “Poor Pegeen,” he said, and pursed his lips to convey, professionally, both his regret for their loss and his complete resignation to what could not be undone. “There was a great beauty.”
I liked him well enough by then to believe he said this as a gallantry, not an error of memory.
“Nothing worse for a mother than to bury her child,” he said. “The worst days of my life are when we have to bury some mother’s child.”
His accent was all Brooklyn—nuttin, motha—but there was also some vestige of the brogue he might have had growing up—poorr Pegeen—that reminded me of my father.
The job was simple enough, as he explained it. In his twenty years of business, he had always had, he said, a young woman on the payroll. She would have nothing to do with the preparation of the bodies, of course. (I said, “Thank goodness,” surprising myself that I spoke out loud. Fagin laughed.) I was only to serve as a kind of hostess, greeting the mourners, directing them to the right room, collecting their Mass cards, and asking them to sign the book or to take their seats for the Rosary. At the home wakes, you stand at the door of the apartment, he said, you take coats, you indicate where the body is laid out. I would be especially helpful to him when they were holding a wake here at the funeral parlor and another in someone’s home, as the “older ones” still preferred, when it was sometimes difficult for him to be in two places at once.
He laughed again and said, “To tell you the truth, it’s always difficult for me to be in two places at once. You might say impossible,” and he raised his gingery eyebrows. I felt more relief still to see that he was not a solemn man.
He placed his elbows on his desk and held his hands before him. They were large, well-padded hands that nevertheless, perhaps because they were so pale, looked weightless. “Two things you’ll do for this establishment,” he said, “as I see it,” and moved his hands up and down as if measuring one against the other. “The first I’ll try and put”—he searched for the word—“delicately.” And raised his eyebrows again. “We are all men here,” he said, “me and my two assistants, although, of course, the bodies we receive are of men and women equally. Maybe more women, to tell you the truth. Husbands and sons and brothers go up to the coffin of their female relatives and they see the work we’ve done: the hair, the rouge, the nice burial dress. Without saying a word about it they might start thinking—I mean some of them, not all—that a certain lack of”—he paused and glanced with some concern over his big fingers and directly into my face, which I felt was growing warm—“privacy might have been involved in the preparation of the body.”
He paused again, looked at me for my reaction, and then smiled, as if he was satisfied that the worst of what he had to say was over. “Of course, no one mentions this. In my twenty years in the business, not a single husband or father or brother or son has ever said a word—about this, I mean—but I figure the thought has got to be there. So I’ve always had a woman in the business. Not to do the work, of course. Not to handle the bodies. Holy smoke.” And he let both weightless hands sink to the desk for a second, as if to recover from the thought. “But to provide some kind of answer for the men who might think about it, the privacy bit, if you see what I mean. They can tell themselves”—he altered his voice, making it suddenly pensive—’Well, he has that nice young woman who works for him. Maybe she’s the one who buttoned up her dress or put the lipstick on her or fixed her hair.’ And telling themselves this, they’re freed in a way. They don’t have to think about it no further.”
He paused again to gauge my reaction. I only nodded to show that I understood, although, to tell the truth (this, I was also to learn, was Mr. Fagin’s favorite refrain), I didn’t, not then.
In the green and golden tree behind him, the sun-struck leaves moved with the hopping shadows of birds. A sweet autumnal breeze came through the opened window, only briefly touched with the odor of back alley garbage.
“And then there’s this,” Mr. Fagin said, once more turning his attention to the two ideas he had cupped in his broad hands. “The vigil, whether it’s long or short, is a burden on the brain. I don’t mean the wake,” he said quickly. “The wake is more of a relief than most people realize. I mean the vigil before someone dies. You probably know this from your own poor father”—poorr fadah—“No one had to tell me when I got the body here that he’d had a terrible ordeal. I could see it for myself. And after a long sickness like that, every brain of every person who stood vigil is numb. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this.” And I averted my eyes for a moment, dropped them to my lap so they would not fill with tears. I had spent the vigil for my father in the hospital’s lobby, reading magazines, watching various strangers pass by, many of them carrying cones of flowers or teddy bears, some of them crying. It was my mother and Gabe who had stood by my father’s bed.
“And a sudden death is no different—worse, I think,” Mr. Fagin said. “Look at Pegeen. Because when there’s a sudden death, everybody thinks about all the days before, the days that were a vigil, after all, a vigil everyone was living through but nobody knew it.” He shook his shoulders, seemed to shudder a little. “Worse,” he said. “But here’s where you come in.” He flattened out his right hand and extended it toward me, as if to say, Here you are. “You are the consoling angel,” he said, indicating me with his big hand. “The very sight of you gives comfort to a weary eye.” He snapped the extended fingers into a fist, leaving only the thick thumb, which he shook at the bookcase over his shoulder. “In Charles Dickens’s day and age,” he said, “they always had child mourners. Professional child mourners. I got the idea from him. It’s in Oliver Twist, the book that besmirches my good name.” He smiled wryly. “Have you read David Copperfield?”
And because I wasn’t yet sure I wanted the job, I had no impulse to lie. “No,” I said. I had read A Christmas Carol at Manual and had been frustrated to learn that no one could say, not even my English teacher, if Scrooge had indeed been visited by spirits or had only dreamed it.
“You should,” Mr. Fagin said. And suddenly he stood to take the book from the shelf. He was a large, broad man in his suit, and yet his small head made him seem younger than he was. As he turned back to me with the book in his hands, one of the remaining volumes tilted softly into the empty space. It would remain just so my ten years at Fagin’s until I returned the book to him on my last day—married by then and expecting my first child—apologizing that I just kept losing the thread of the tale.