“Dead? Who’s dead? Kitty’s dead. Who’s dead?”
“Jerome’s dead. My husband. Oh, God,” she wailed. “Poor Jerome.”
“Jerome? Oh, Wilma,” he said. “Oh, Wilma. I didn’t…I meant about Kitty. Jerome’s dead, too? Jerome? When? What happened? Oh dear. How? What happened?”
He had died that morning. Wilma had been with him. It was the tests. The Fort Worth doctors were not satisfied with the explanation about Jerome’s lifelong chronic constipation. They suspected cancer of the bowel, the colon. They didn’t buy the theory that his body simply didn’t produce enough fecal matter. They thought a virus or some kind of tapeworm must be attacking, devouring his godcousin’s shit. The tests were enemas which produced nothing but the soapy water they had just shot up his behind. High colonics. Oil enemas. They fed him roughage and gave him massive doses of the most powerful laxatives. They put him on a sort of potty and made him stay there until he went. It was like being toilet-trained, Wilma said. His legs went to sleep, his arms and hands. He begged to be put back to bed, but they insisted they had to find out what was causing his constipation. They named a dozen diseases that could kill him if they weren’t able to analyze, not the normal, beautiful stools he faithfully produced every two weeks, but the incipient shards they were now convinced were incubating morbidity in his gut. They had to find out what was destroying these. They could not reach it, take samples, with even the longest of their instruments. Cutting into the intestine was too dangerous. The roughage, the potent laxatives were the only way, the last resort. He had to stay on his giant potty until he did his duty. Wilma was with him. He squeezed and squeezed. Poor Jerome. He tried to cooperate. He forced himself, he labored. (It was like labor, like giving birth.) The tests killed him. The laxatives were too potent. He shat out his empty intestines, his long red bowel of blood. Death by caca. Death by crap.
And so one was dead of bed wetting. And one of constipation. Number one, Ben thought. Number two.
He wanted Jerome’s body sent to New York. Wilma couldn’t think. He made the arrangements with Fort Worth himself. He would handle everything — death’s take-charge guy.
He gave funerals away as others might bring a coffee cake to the mourners, or a Jell-O mold. “It’s the least I can do,” he said and gave away funerals as perhaps his godfather Julius might once have papered the house for an ailing show. Left and right he gave them away. So many were dying.
Moss rented a car at the airport to drive up to Riverdale. He and it were totaled when he smashed broadside at forty-five miles an hour into the side of an oil truck made out of a particular metal alloy his perfect, beautiful eyes could not see.
Helen, in her grief, drank heavily. The Finsbergs hid all the liquor and she left the house in a black mood looking for a tavern. She hailed a taxi. They tried to follow, but lost her in traffic. The police called from the morgue. She had found a place on Eighth Avenue, a hangout for whores, pimps, and degenerates. She drank more heavily than ever — a hell of a binge — and in her foul mood picked a fight with a very butch bull dyke. The dyke tried to defend herself as best she could, but Helen, made vicious by drink, was hitting her with everything she had. The poor bull dyke was terrified and broke a beer stein on the bar and cut Helen’s throat with it before Helen could choke the life out of her.
“It was self-defense,” the police said. “Everybody in the bar will swear to that. We don’t think you have a case.”
“We know,” Noël said, sobbing heavily. “Sometimes she got like that. She was a mean drunk.”
“Couldn’t handle the stuff, eh?” the cop said sympathetically. “ That’s too bad.”
“Oh oh,” Noël said and, in his grief, plunged his long nails into his hair, scratching fiercely at his cradle cap.
The doctor said it must have been the bacteria he picked up in the morgue that caused the blood poisoning he rubbed into his head like shampoo and killed him.
The Finsbergs were inconsolable. In their sorrow they closed their decimated ranks and turned once more to Ben.
“We don’t” Lorenz said,
“understand,” said Ethel.
“We were always” Sigmund-Rudolf said,
“musical comedy sort of”
“people,” said Patty, La Verne, and Maxene.
Ben nodded.
It had all happened so quickly — five deaths within thirty-six hours — that even Ben could not absorb it. He asked the people at Riverside Chapel to stall, to prepare the bodies for burial, of course, but to keep them in a sort of holding pattern before they were interred. He did not tell the twins and triplets that he was waiting for all the returns to come in, an official body count.
“Mr. Flesh,” said Weinman, the Director at Riverside, “what can I say at a time like this? You and the family have my deepest sympathy.”
“Thank you,” Ben said.
They were in the coffin room, a sort of display area for caskets not unlike an automobile showroom. The coffins, open toward one end, looked oddly like kayaks. Ben wanted identical caskets for the twins and triplets — cherry walnut, the best.
“We don’t have them,” Weinman said. “Something like this, so unusual, we just don’t have that many in stock. There’s the floor sample and the two in the basement, and that’s it. I suppose I could call Musicant in Lodi, New Jersey, he might have one, but he’s the only other funeral home in this part of the country that handles this particular item.”
“We need five,” Ben said, “maybe more. The floor sample, the two in the basement is three.”
“I’ll call Gutterman-Musicant, but if they won’t give me a wholesale price, well, I’m afraid you’ll have to absorb the cost, plus, of course, our legitimate profit.”
A young man was walking among the caskets. He was red-eyed, unshaved. He looked as if he had a cold. One of Riverside’s salesmen walked along silently beside him. The man stopped beside a dark walnut coffin. “This one?” he asked, his voice breaking.
The salesman, who wore a bright plaid-patterned suit, glanced at the coffin, at the young man in blue jeans. “The price is at the foot.”
“Thirty-five hundred dollars? So much?”
“It’s walnut. There are no nails. As I explained, the price is inclusive. You get the preparation of the body, you get the use of our chapel. The cheap coffins are down this way.” The salesman moved off.
“This one is beautiful. It’s like a, like a bed. Like a berth the porter makes up on a sleeper. It’s beautiful. My mother loved beautiful things. Me you can burn up, but my mother — thirty-five hundred dollars.” He looked toward the salesman, who was standing beside a stained pine box. The young man went toward him.
“Take the walnut,” Ben Flesh said thickly.
The boy turned around. He looked at Ben. “It’s thirty-five hundred dollars,” he said.
“I own the franchise,” he said. “Sons don’t have taste like yours today. We’re discontinuing the model. I just told my funeral director, Mr. Weinman.”
“Look, I don’t want to bargain,” the boy said.
“Who’s bargaining? It’s a sin to give a discount on a coffin. It’s against our religion. I just told you. Take it. It’s free.”
“I can’t…”
“You can’t?” Ben roared. “You can’t? You can’t, get out. Your mother loved beautiful things and you can’t? It looks like a bed made up on a sleeper, and you can’t? You can’t? You can’t give Mom a ride in the dirt? You can’t?” He turned to the salesman. “Burn it. Burn it! He don’t want it, burn it. I told you yesterday we were discontinuing. He don’t want it for nothing, everything all inclusive, the preparations, the chapel, the flowers, the death certificate in triplicate, the notice in the Times, the hearse and limo, burn the goddamned thing.”