I was excited. I was keen. Whatever might yet happen to me, whatever civil laws I was breaking, as well as whichever of God’s commandments I was violating — His injunction against false witness and, in view of my hammed-up prayers in front of the Nazis, probably the one about taking the Lord’s name in vain — and whatever arrangements had been arranged — I was sure now that Shull was the mischief-maker, that big, craven Tober was only his frightened, maybe even unwilling, accomplice — and which I in my anger and eagerness was determined to upset, I was resolved to deliver this day in New Jersey such a eulogy as had never before been heard.
I took a breath. You don’t fly off the handle, I cautioned myself. You control yourself. You don’t slander.
“I don’t know this Morris personally,” I began, “but don’t I hear your sobs and catarrhs? Copious, copious. I’m in the business, I’m a professional, and I’m telling you, you get to bury somebody pulls this much grief maybe once in an entire career. If that. This is probably it for me, I should think. I mean, what the heck, I’m a relative youngster. If, kayn aynhoreh, my health holds up, I suppose I can expect to bury maybe another six or seven thousand dead people. How do I know what lies in store, what mensches have yet to give up the ghost? But, the way I see it, it doesn’t matter. Let those six or seven thousand be six or seven times six or seven thousand, sorrow like yours knocks the needle out of the red and right off the grief-o-meter!
“What can one say about such a man? We see how loved he was all the way down the line. A second cousin is his chief mourner!
“Yes, and Cousin Levine tells me our beloved friend was a passionate, organized, misunderstood, scientific sort of man. Passionate. Organized. Scientific. Misunderstood. Ask yourselves, what does Talmud tell us it means when a man is passionate and scientific? When he’s well-organized and misunderstood? It tells us,” I told them, “it tells us that what we’re dealing with here is a super Jew, maybe the Messiah.
“That’s right, you heard me. The Messiah. Messiah Himself.”
It was, I recall thinking, the perfect touch. They were outraged. They stared at me in disbelief and wanted, I saw, to knock me down. They still wept, but now their tears were angry, furious in fact, so intense they might have scalded their retinas and burned through their cheeks.
“God takes,” I said, not through with them yet, “a Moses, He takes an Abraham and throws in an Isaac. He adds a Jacob and adds a Joshua. He takes an Elijah and stirs in a David. He folds in a Solomon and a Daniel, you homemakers and balebostes. He takes the First and Second Isaiahs and adds a dash of Noah, a pinch of Job. He separates your Maccabees, First and Second, and mixes with an Ezekiel.
“He takes,” I said, glaring at them and leaning forward, “He takes a Josef …”
I broke off and slipped into the Kaddish. It was just one more thing. They wouldn’t know. You say Kaddish at the graveside. Also, a lone man may lay t’phillim, but it takes a minyan of ten Jewish males to make a Kaddish. Me, Shull and Tober were the only Jews in the room. All my wailing, breast-knocking and trilled broches didn’t mean a thing. In God’s eyes the Kaddish not only didn’t count, it never happened! This is a Jewish mystery.
Shull’s grin had disappeared. I was pretty sure he was aware I knew what was up. What difference did it make? Nothing would happen. They kept me on because I was their stooge. They thought they could manipulate me. They knew I’d look the other way. It was all right with me. Why would I want to be in a Pittsburgh? Why would I care to go to a New York? My Shelley was here.
On the way to the cemetery I sat between Shull and Tober. We rode along in silence for a while. Then Shull chuckled. “That was one hell of a job you did back there,” he said and patted my thigh. “One hell of a job!”
“It was,” Tober agreed.
“I never heard anything like it.”
“Neither did I,” said Tober.
“You gave them a real run for their money, a real, what-do-you-call-it, catharsis.”
“You sure did,” Tober said.
“What an idea,” said Shull, shaking his head. “What a thing to do.”
“Messiah recipes.”
“Mocking their dead.”
“Making them feel guilty.”
“Having them eat their misery like pie.”
“Lick their loss like a lollipop. A catharsis. A real catharsis.”
“They’ll owe you forever. They’ll never forget it.”
“None of us will. Though you might have added,” Tober added, “about how they loan him all that money to open his hat place in Garden City, then, after he’s sick, when his visitors leave and his painkillers kick in, he turns around and jimmies the books on them right from his hospital room. Or how his widow wouldn’t come to his funeral because she was too humiliated.”
My God, a widow-humiliating book-jimmier! How could I have thought he was Mengele? Or any other high-up or low-down Nazi either? How could I? Because. Because you want to believe. Because you want to believe all the high jinks, all the back-room, front-page, deep-throat kinkery and irregularity, all the rumor, all the talk. Because you want to believe there’s all-out, anything-goes evil in the world, conspiracy, Armageddon moving in like a cold front, anything, whatever keeps you engaged. Like you want to believe there’s a God.
How could I? Because the honeymoon was starting to wind down, the three or four years of desert-isle lust and abandon beginning to feel more like four than three. She wasn’t there that morning and I hadn’t even realized she was missing, and both of us, me with the distractions that my work sometimes offered or that I could invent, and Shelley with her visits and Lady Bountiful routines, were just beginning to look around.
“I stay open,” Sal said, “in the hopes that Lud will grow and I can turn this place into a real barbershop one day.” He was brushing loose hairs from my jacket with one of those yellow, short-handled whisk brooms you don’t see anymore or you’d buy one.
“Nice job, Sal,” I told him, admiring myself in the mirror. “The wife’s been after me to get this done.” I handed him his money and waved off the change.
“Thanks,” Sal said, then made his voice lower than ever. I had to strain to hear him. “The gangland killing in that restaurant over in Brooklyn? Joe ‘Black Olives’ Benapisco that they shot bullets in his eyes?”
“Yes?”
“I think I may have to style his hair.”
“Sal,” I said, “come on.”
“No shit,” he said. “And Rabbi?”
“What is it?”
“There’s some bones and ashes I’m supposed to put into his pockets with him. Some ground-up teeth.”
“What?”
I couldn’t hear him.
“What’s that?” I said. “Who?”
“Jimmy Hoffa,” he whispered.
three
IN LUD, on the night before a funeral, you used to be able to see, through the wide plate glass of the funeral homes, the dead laid out in their caskets. The practice was discontinued when the oversight committee that passes on such things, that determines the height of the buildings you can put up and rules on the color of the bricks you may use, decided that however convenient it was for the old and infirm to be driven past their loved ones lying in state behind the mortuary’s big windows and view them from their cars, it never quite made up for a certain lapse in taste, that the deceased always looked too much like the lobsters one picks out for one’s dinner at the bottom of the tanks in seafood restaurants.