Mr. Fagin sat down again and slid David Copperfield across his desk. I took the book in my gloved hand and placed it on my lap. It was heavier than a missal.
“They knew what they were doing in those days,” Mr. Fagin continued. “It’s rest for the weary eye at the end of a long vigil, the sight of someone young, a lovely young woman such as yourself. It reminds us of life. Life again, which is also the hope of resurrection.”
He was silent for a moment, assessing me. Now my cheeks were burning. I had never before heard myself referred to as a lovely young woman. Then he looked down into his own palms, as if to be sure he had given full measure to each one of the two things he had intended to say. He placed his hands on the desk again and looked up.
“Is that your only suit?” he asked.
The question surprised me. I said yes, and then added, not even sure yet I wanted the job, “I can always borrow another.”
“Have you got some nice dresses?” he asked.
I said yes again, but without much conviction, and he said, as if to himself, “Probably high-school things. Skirts and sweaters.”
I said, “Sure.”
“Dresses will be better for visiting hours,” he said. “Wool, in dark colors, but not black. Navy or deep green is good. Trim and neat. Elegant. With a touch of perfume behind the ears. Betty uses Evening in Paris.”
He reached into his desk drawer and took out a small card, slid it across the desk. “Muriel in the ladies’ department at Abraham & Straus downtown. Go see her. She knows her stuff. She’ll help you pick something out. I’ve got an account. Buy yourself five nice dresses and put them on my account. Bring your mother, too. Your mother knows good quality. You won’t go wrong.”
I picked up the card and slipped it between the pages of the book.
Again he studied my face. “Can you see without those glasses?” he asked.
“Pretty well,” I said, lying, because now I did want the job. I had never in my life bought five new dresses all at once. It was a struggle to get my mother to pay for just one every season. Five at once. I had never even heard of such a thing.
“Take them off,” he said, and I did. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
The sun on the golden leaves behind him was strong enough to smear his pink hand with light.
“Two,” I said.
He laughed. “Three. But you didn’t squint. Good for you. Nothing worse than a four-eyed girl squinting. You can wear them here in the office, but take them off when you’re at a wake. I don’t think you’ll fall down any stairs.”
I nodded and slipped my glasses back on. He studied me again. “You’ll be fine,” he said.
He stood and I stood, and once again he wordlessly directed me to the door. In the paneled vestibule he held out his hand. It was large and soft and gentle in its grip. The hands that had received my poor father’s ravaged body. Just beyond him I could see a room with chairs and flowers and the edge of a shining coffin. I looked back at Mr. Fagin, the thick book tucked against my chest as if I had just come from church. My hand was still in his, and I knew in an instant, as if it was something I could actually recall, that it was Fagin who had lifted me to kiss Pegeen Chehab in her coffin, all those years ago.
The job proved to be as simple as he had described it. I followed Betty, a robust brunette, for a week, and from then on did as Betty had done, speaking softly but saying little and staying mostly out of the way while the friends and relatives of the deceased gathered to console and to gossip and, not infrequently, to argue with one another in hushed and furious whispers. I rode in the hearse, in the front seat beside the driver, to cemeteries all over the city—up to the Bronx, out to Queens, even to Long Island, which I had seen before only during the long train ride to Gabe’s seminary. I stood behind the mourners with my heels sinking into the dirt as the vigil came to a close in what felt like country sunlight or tree-muffled rain, among the gray cityscape of tombstones. I glanced into leafy neighborhoods where I resolved someday I would live, and when I came back to the funeral parlor with a bit of sun on my cheeks or grass on my good shoes Mr. Fagin joked that he wouldn’t have to sponsor a Fresh Air kid this year, I was it.
On occasion I saw, and began to understand, the first point Mr. Fagin had tried to make that morning. A grieving husband or father might look on the old wife or the young daughter, nodding sadly at the words of comfort—she looks so lovely, so peaceful, her beauty restored—and then suddenly glance up and around. Even without my glasses, I could make out how their eyes fell on Fagin himself in the back of the room, or on one of his young assistants at the door, and for an instant I could almost see it, glasses or no: the unwelcome thought of what the wife’s, the mother’s, the daughter’s body—at Fagin’s we said simply “the body”—had been through in the hours since her death. Who had touched her and how. And then they would look at me and an answer of sorts would be provided; they would, perhaps even without knowing it, rest assured.
The second point, the one that had to do with David Copperfield, was less clear. But I began to have a sense of this, too, as the weeks went by. I dotted Evening in Paris behind my ears and on my wrists, and the scent, along with the good dresses from A&S, and the expensive heels my mother had provided, seemed to raise my station in life, seemed to lend me a maturity I had not had before. I saw grown women, women my mother’s age, duck their heads shyly when I quietly greeted them at the funeral parlor door. Old men gratefully took my hand or steadied themselves on my extended arm. Young men who might not have given me a second glance on the street touched their hearts and whispered, “Thank you, thank you very much,” when I directed them to a chair or handed them a remembrance card as they were leaving. Once, and then twice, and then three times over the course of my first year at Fagin’s, one of these young men was waiting for me when I left the funeral parlor or the apartment house at the end of the evening, waiting to ask for my name.
Never once did I have to venture to the basement of the place, although I grew to recognize the particular odor of what went on down there when it wove its way through the heavier scents of the funeral flowers, and my perfume, and the general Brooklyn air: a cloying, vinegary smell that wafted up on occasion but quickly dissipated if I opened a window or fanned the front door. But neither did I fear, after the first few weeks, the sight of the corpse laid out in its coffin at the front of the room.
If the body was a child’s, rare enough but not uncommon in my time at Fagin’s, I would simply leave my glasses off and avert my eyes. I learned how to drift out of the room at the sound of a mother’s keening. Despite the many times, over the years, I had thought of Pegeen Chehab as I stood at the head of a long set of stairs, I never considered until I got to Fagin’s the variety of missteps that might take a child from the world: burst appendix, whooping cough, consumption, pneumonia, lead poisoning, the infection from a dog bite once (an angel, Mr. Fagin had said, of the little girl), and accidents, accidents. Run over, drowned, electrocuted by a table fan; one lanky boy had tried to leap between rooftops and fell instead into the lightless areaway—even in his coffin you could see how new his body had been to him.
Later I would tell my own children when they complained that as a mother I had been overcautious about the simplest things, anxious, superstitious, plagued by dreams of disaster: “You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen what I’ve seen.”