“The flowers,” the salesman said, “the notice in the Times, the cars are — All that’s—”
“All inclusive,” Flesh said, “all inclusive is all inclusive, all death’s party favors. Burn it,” he shouted.
“No,” the boy said, “if you’re going to burn it…I mean, if you’re really going to burn it—”
“All right, then,” Flesh said. “Fix him up.”
“Hey, listen,” the boy said, “thank you. I mean, well, thank you. I…”
“Look, please, we’re doing inventory here.” He turned to the salesman. “Take him. Write up the papers. ”
The young man came up to Flesh and extended his hand. “Hey…” he said.
Ben took his hand but couldn’t feel it. “Listen, what can I say at a time like this?” Flesh said. “You and the family have my deepest sympathy.” Weinman looked at him. “Look,” Flesh told him, “about the cherry walnut — it makes no difference. Just so they’re identical. They grew apart, but they died together. Identical boxes. That’s a must.” He turned to go, then looked back at Weinman. “You make them look real, you understand? Real. It takes make-up, all right use make-up. They know the smell. These are boys and girls grew up backstage. Make-up wouldn’t dishonor them. They wouldn’t faint from pancake powder. All their lives they lived behind the costumes of their faces. But real. No waxworks. You’ll do your best, yes, Weinman?”
There were no more deaths. All the returns were in. At the graveside he thought about this. Three of the girls were dead. (He included poor, bored Lotte, who had childhood diseases as an adult, and who, in her suicide, had died of her peculiar symptoms, too — tantrum.) Three of the boys. The two houses were in equilibrium again. The checks and balances. No one had the votes now, and he was safe. And ashamed of his safety.
In their grief — their noses and eyes swollen with tears and floating behind faces puffed with sorrow like people pouting into balloons (for they had identical emotions as well as identical taste buds, identical hearts, tempers, sympathies, sensibilities) — they were as alike as ever, differing more from their dead sibs than from each other. Weinman’s people had done a good job. The look of waxworks had been unavoidable, but cosmetics suited them, death’s rouges and greasepaints, its eyeliners and facials — all its landscape gardening, all its prom night adjustments. They might have been Finsberg chorus girls and boys seen close. Fleshed out in their morticianed skin, identical as skulls.
The rabbi, the same man, now grown old, who had officiated at Julius’s funeral twenty-five years before, and then at Lotte’s and at Estelle’s, said the prayers.
Then Ben stepped forward.
“One died of tantrum, her grownup’s colic, and one of pissed beds, and another angrily tight. One of constipation and one of freak eyesight and one massaged poison into his cradle cap.” He thought he knew what they were thinking. How they wept as much from contemplation as from loss. How Gertrude thought of her gravid bones and La Verne of her organs strapped like holsters to her rib cage, how Oscar brooded over his terminal compulsive speeding and Sigmund-Rudolf about his epicenity. How Mary wondered what to make of her inability to menstruate and Ethel of her heart in its casket of tit. Each mourning for each and for his own doom. As he was moved by his multiple sclerosis, his own flawed scaffolding of nerves. Everyone carried his mortality like a birthmark and was a good host to his death. You could not “catch” anything and were from the beginning yourself already caught. As if Lorenz or Cole, Patty, Mary, or himself carried from birth the very diseases they would die of. Everything was congenital. Handsomeness to suicide. “There are,” he said, “no ludicrous ways to die. There are no ludicrous deaths,” and, weeping, they all held each other as they made their way from the graveside like refugees, like people blinded by tear gas, and stumbling difficult country.
He mourned the full time. A few had to leave early but he stayed on in the house in Riverdale. His position in the family restored now, they believed he would outlive them. (It had given them a new respect for him, their own sudden sense of having been condemned altering their opinion, his promise that there were no ludicrous deaths oddly reassuring to them.)
Stayed on for a week to sit an improvised, crazy shivah, in which Ben played the old ’78’s, original cast recordings from their father’s hit shows: Oklahoma! Lady in the Dark, Showboat, Brigadoon, and Bloomer Girl. Allegro. Call Me Mister. Carousel. Finian’s Rainbow. All of them.
Listening, concentrating, as if at a concert, as if stoned. Not “ You’ll Never Walk Alone” or any of the songs of solace that Ben, or any of them, might have expected, not “Ol’ Man River,” or any of the you-can’t-lick-us indomitable stuff, not even the showstoppers—“Soliloquy,” “My Ship”—but the chorus things, the entire cast, all the cowboys and their girls singing “Oklahoma!” the veterans singing “Call Me Mister,” the elf and townspeople singing “On That Great Come and Get It Day,” the fishermen and their families doing “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over.” It was, that is, the community numbers that reinforced them, the songs that obliterated differences, among men and women, among principals and walk-ons, not the love songs, not even the hopeful, optimistic songs of the leads who, down and out, in the depths of their luck, suddenly blurt their crazy confidence. Again and again it was the townsfolk working as a chorus, three dozen voices singing as one, that got to them, appealing to some principle of twin- and triplet-ship in them, decimated as their ranks now were. The odd bravery of numbers and commonality, a sort of patriotism to one’s kind. And Ben, more unlike them than ever, now he looked so old and felt so rotten, as cheered and charmed as any of the Finsbergs could have been.
And talking, talking non-stop, neither a stream of anecdote nor reminiscence nor allusion to their dead brothers and sisters, nor even to themselves, but a matrix of reference wholly out of context to their lives, telling them, for example, of the managers of his franchises, people they hadn’t met, didn’t know, had never heard of, people, he realized, he himself rarely thought of except during the five or so days a year he spent with each of them during his Grand Rounds.
“I go,” he said, “with the Dobbs House heart, with the counterman’s White Castle imagination, his gypsy’s steam-table life. Hillbillies, guys with nutsy tattoos on the insides of their forearms. People called Frankie, Eddy, Jimmy — the long e of the lower classes. Men with two wives and scars on their pusses, with clocked socks and black shoes. One guy, the manager of my Western Auto, was totally bald, and instead of a wig he sprung for a head of tattooed hair. From fifteen feet you couldn’t tell it from the real thing. It had a tattooed part, I remember, and when sideburns came in back in the sixties he had them added on; only the color, the dye, wasn’t an exact match and it looked a little goofy.
“But that’s where I pick them. My middle-management people from the barrel’s bottom. Bus depots my employment agencies, the waiting room of the Cedar Rapids railroad station. If you can’t find reliable people there, you can’t find them anywhere. You didn’t know that? Oh, sure. Certainly. An eye out always for guys who pump quarters into jukeboxes and bang the pinball. I cover the waterfront, I hire the handicapped.