Good Mourning (10 page)

When Mike and his family arrived the next morning, I greeted them at the door. His mom paused and took a deep breath before entering the building, and then I guided them to the steps. Families were always allowed some private time with their loved one before other guests were allowed up. “You're coming too, aren't you?” said Mike, motioning toward the stairs. I hadn't been planning on it—I wouldn't have wanted to intrude on such a personal moment—but I didn't want to turn down the invitation either.

Mike's mom threw her arms around me when I got to the top of the stairs. “Honey, thank you,” she said, crying. I handed her a Kleenex, which I always kept on me, just in case. Mike's brother was already at the front of the room looking at the photos.

“It's like you re-created her bedroom,” said Mike. “I can feel her in here.” He took a moment to fight back tears. “It's so her.”

In that moment, I thought about all the other times Mike and I had bumped into each other since we were teenagers. Drunk nights dancing. Our friends throwing down thousands of dollars on drinks at a corner table. We never talked about anything real. We certainly never talked about family—or death. The life that so many of my friends were still living seemed more superficial by the day. On the rare occasion I went out, I couldn't help but feel like all the things that had once felt so fun were a little bit . . . silly.

When it was all over, I was completely drained; there weren't enough cappuccinos in all of Manhattan to revive me. I grabbed my bag and started walking home, thinking about Mike and what life would be like for his family now. That's one of the funny things about funerals: when it's all said and done, most people dry their tears and go about their lives. But when it's a person you really loved, the loss stays with you . . . and in a lot of ways, feels even worse after the service. I thought about my dad and how there had been a line out the door of people waiting to pay their
respects to him. I kissed them and hugged them and thanked them for coming. But that night, I was all alone. The party was over. My dad was gone. I wasn't getting him back. I hated that Mike was now going to have to go through that.

Just as I felt my eyes well up, I saw two familiar figures coming toward me. First I made out my mother's face, then my brother's. I barely had enough energy to drag myself back to my apartment, much less deal with whatever unsolicited opinion my mom was inevitably going to share. But it was too late—she had spotted me. There was no turning around.

I knew how I looked: My hair, which I had blown dry that morning, was now plastered against my head in a messy ponytail. My eyeliner was smudged below my eyes from tearing up when, during the service, Mike read a note he wrote for his sister. My ugly black blazer was wrinkled from spending two hours at my desk looking over folders for services taking place the next day.
Please don't say anything
, I thought.
Please just let this slide.

Mom's eyes stopped on my shoes, and I swear, she let out a gasp—like a rat had run across my feet.

“I . . . it's . . . it's not a good time,” I said, holding my hand out, as if it would keep her words away. “I'm really tired.”

“Elizabeth,” Mom said, looking like she might actually faint, right there on the pavement. Then, in a hushed voice:
“What are you
wearing
?” She said it less like a question and more like an accusation.

I didn't have the energy. There was just nothing left in my tank. A full day of death had sucked the life out of me.

“They're called Aerosoles, Mom,” I said, walking past her. “And they're comfortable as hell.”

SIX

What a Mob Scene

C
rawford had arranged its fair share of mob funerals over the years. I guess it made sense: New York City had been home to the five well-known mob families for ­decades—and that was just the Italian mob. The Five Families, as they're called, date back to the 1930s. And while it seemed that things had gotten less violent over the years, Bill remembered a story about a funeral home in the outer boroughs owned by a mobster, which was, of course, where lots of Mafia types held services for loved ones. During one funeral, the family was shouldering the casket down the stairs when a rival family walked up and gunned one of the pallbearers down. He slumped to the ground and rolled down the stairs, and everyone else dropped the casket and ran inside the second they heard the gunshot. There was also the story of the Jewish banker who had gotten wrapped up with
mobsters back in the sixties and worked for “the family” for years, helping them squeeze dirty money out of business deals and God knows what else. The service was going along as usual—people had paid their respects, the rabbi was giving a blessing and talking about what a loss the whole thing was—when the dead guy's son couldn't take it anymore. “My dad was
not
a good man!” he said, jumping up from his seat. “He was a criminal who ran Chicago for Al Capone! This funeral is
over
!” And, you know, so it was.

And then there was the time when I saw a six-foot-five Russian man who had been beaten to death brought in. “Had to be a mob job,” said Bill, looking down at the man's bruised face. “I've never seen someone killed like this. Just pure hate.” The weirdest part was the way the body was delivered: two guys drove it from Brooklyn themselves and then waited outside while Bill did the embalming. They just waited there, for hours. Afterward, when Bill was done, they took the body right back and drove away. “
Definitely
a mob job,” said Bill, walking back to the prep room.

But my first mob funeral started with a phone call. Nothing unusual, just some guy saying that his relative Sophia had prearranged her funeral with us—it was actually totally normal for people to come in and preplan (and prepay for) their own service—and that she was dead. Things only got weird when he started talking about Sophia's son, Sal. Sal was in a high-security prison, and the family hoped that he would be
able to make it to Sophia's funeral. She would have wanted that.

“Oh, okay,” I said, not quite sure what he wanted me to do about it. If you wanted bagpipers or flowers from halfway around the world, I was your girl. Prison release wasn't part of my repertoire. “I'll see what I can do.”

Sure enough, the number for the warden at the high-­security prison was listed on Sophia's prearrangement forms. Whatever Sal had done, Sophia still wanted him to come say good-bye, and I wanted to make that happen. Calling prisons wasn't really part of my job, but helping people get through the first few stages of grieving was. I couldn't imagine not having been able to see my dad one last time.

After hours of back-and-forth calls with the warden, he finally let me talk to Sal. Right away, I noticed his Queens ­accent—or more specifically, his
Italian
Queens accent. He sounded just like some family members on my mom's side, many of whom still lived across the river from Manhattan. Many of my friends had never been to Queens; it was yet to become a trendy destination for foodies. One time, in high school, I invited a couple of my prep school friends to dinner at my Italian grandma's house. During the ride over, we drove by a series of attached houses—the old-school ones made of red brick, where one family lives on the top floor and another on the bottom. On seeing all the homes with two doors, my friend Ben said, “Look at that, they have separate entrances for their staff.”

I secretly felt a little bad for my friend—he didn't know what he was missing. I adore the Italian side of my family. The pasta, the cheese, the way it takes twenty minutes to say hello and good-bye to everybody and then just as you're almost out the door, someone pulls the cannoli platter out of the fridge and you're taking off your coat again. I love it all.

So the phone call. I let Sal know the basics: The service would take place in two days. A priest would be there. Yes, there would be security. No, I did not have a guest list, not yet, but I would contact another family member. Sal told me that he hoped he could make it—it was all up to the warden. “I hope so too,” I told him.

That night, I went home and did some Googling to see if I could find out more about Sophia. While there wasn't so much about
her
, I found link after link about her husband, who had been a mob boss before he was killed a decade before, presumably by a hit man. Sal took over the family business, and
he
ended up in jail after killing an unarmed guy in what might have been an inside job.

“Do you think Sal will be at the funeral?” I asked Bill.

He shook his head. “From high-security prison? No way.”

“I guess prison officials don't cry tears of sympathy when a murderer loses someone
he
loves,” I said.

By the morning of the funeral, I hadn't heard a word from the prison about whether or not Sal would be able to attend, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. Bill had done an amazing job making Sophia look less like an eighty-year-old dead
woman and more like an older, sassy movie star with great taste in lipstick, and I busied myself arranging red roses—­Sophia's request—around the viewing room. The family had no other requests, which also meant there was nothing left in the budget for me to work with, but I hated how bare the room looked. I ran down the hall to a storage room where we kept random supplies like tissues and lighters, and grabbed as many candles and glass vases as I could find. I scattered them around the viewing room and dimmed the lights. Sophia may have been the wife of a mobster and the mother of a murderer, but I still wanted her to have a nice funeral. There was something so lonely about a casket in an empty room. What kind of life did you live if nobody shows up to your funeral?

Bill and I stood around for the next hour and a half, waiting for guests to appear. Just as I was starting to get nervous, two men in dark suits walked into the foyer.

“Anybody here yet?” they asked.

“Are you friends of Sophia's?” I asked.

“Uh, yeah,” said one of the guys. “We'll be standing at the door. Nobody's here yet, right?”

“That's correct,” I said.

I watched as he made a few phone calls, and then within minutes, five black town cars pulled up in front of the building. Out walked the priest, a group of men in black suits and black ties, and several women, some with diamond earrings that were so big they looked like they might rip right through their earlobes.

“I'm sorry for your loss,” I said, shaking the hand of one of the men. Nobody had introduced himself, and it was hard to tell who, exactly, was in charge. Did Sal have any brothers or sisters? Were these friends? Family? Whoever they were, and whatever “business” they were in, I wanted them to feel welcome. Sophia deserved that.

More and more guests filed in, and I escorted them into the viewing room. That's where I saw a man who looked in his midforties standing near the casket. He was wearing a pin-striped suit, and for a second, I thought it was Sal saying good-bye to his mom. I don't know if he was really guilty of murder or not—okay, probably, he was
probably
guilty—but a part of me ached for this family. When Sophia's husband died, what did people say? I thought of my mom, and the hundreds of people who had lined up to shake her hand and hug her at Dad's wake. They all had such wonderful things to say about the man she loved. Did Sophia ever have that? And who would be there to hear those wonderful things about
her
if Sal didn't show?

After another minute or so, the man in the pinstripes sat down in the back. Nobody was talking to him, and I realized there was no way it was Sal—too many people would have been hugging him otherwise. For the next hour, I shifted my gaze from the clock to the front door, desperately wishing that Sal would walk through.

He never did. I pictured him sitting alone in a cell, grieving for his mother and feeling like he had failed her in some
way. I wondered what their last conversation had been—the words they had said, if they had any idea that it would be the final time they spoke. The whole point of a funeral was to bring people together, not just to honor the dead, but to help one another grieve. I may have holed up in a room after my dad died, but that was my choice; there was an entire apartment filled with people to comfort me if I had wanted. Sal was alone. Sophia was dead. And I couldn't help but think that there was something very unfinished about the whole thing.

MY BIG
CONTAINER
of Fage yogurt was missing. I know, not exactly a code red, but I had written my name on it with black Sharpie and there was nobody else at Crawford named Elizabeth. (Nor anyone who ate Greek yogurt, for that matter.) And the week before, my kale and adzuki bean soup had gone missing. My name was on that, too. I suspected Monica, but it was hard to tell. Two of the other receptionists had also been icing me out, and I couldn't tell if I was getting paranoid that everyone was talking about me or if I was being terrorized by lunch thieves.

I took the Sharpie out and taped a note to the fridge:
If you took my yogurt, please put it back. Thanks. —Elizabeth

Just as I was about to ask Monica directly—I was starving, and I didn't have time to walk over to Lexington Avenue to pick up a sandwich—Tony tapped me on the shoulder, snapping me out of my thoughts.

“You think you could come into my office for a second?” he said, beet red.

“Of course! Can it wait a couple of minutes, though? I'm trying to figure out what happened to my lunch and—”

“It can't wait a minute. Just come in and sit there, please,” he said.

When I walked in, I saw two women sitting on armchairs across from a couch. The one who looked like she was in her late forties was wearing a short, tight dress that looked two sizes too small. The other, who was probably in her early twenties, was wearing a tight black dress with spaghetti straps and no bra. I was afraid her boobs were actually going to pop out, tearing her spaghetti straps and flinging them right into Tony's eyes. They both had crinkly hair that seemed like it may have been teased a few too many times; long, squared-off fingernails with French manicures; and an overload of what I thought must be cubic zirconia. Nobody in their right mind would walk out of their house wearing that much bling without a security detail.

Tony motioned for me to take a seat next to him on the couch.

“Pleased to meet both of you,” I said, wishing I'd at least had the chance to read their folder before coming into the meeting. I never met with families unprepared. Who were these women? Who died? And who, for the love of God, told them that five-inch, patent-leather platform heels were in fashion?

Just as I went to sit down, the older of the women hopped up from her seat and plopped down next to Tony. He gave me a look that said,
Help me
, but I didn't know what to do other than squeeze between them (holy awkward). So I gave Tony my best
I'm sorry
face and sat down in the chair. It was still warm and a little sweaty. (I guess that's what happens when your skirt rides halfway up your ass in a leather chair.) But I just smiled and waited to see what would happen next.

“We want a harpist to play,” said the older woman, looking only at Tony. She was sitting closer to him now, to the point where their legs were touching on the sofa.
Is she hitting on him?
I thought.
No, impossible.
Tony was a nice enough guy, and he had taught me a lot, but he wasn't exactly Ryan Gosling.

Tony, red in the face, quickly explained that Crawford had a harp on the premises, and a harpist that we used regularly. (When you host funerals every day, it helps to have a team of musicians, florists, and caterers on call.) Rather than spending extra time pushing them toward a string quartet or a team of bagpipers as he normally did, he just said he would be happy to arrange their requests. The woman nudged even closer to him, and Tony looked at me, panicked, as if to say,
Get me out of here
.

“Make sure the strings are really
tight
,” said the woman, overemphasizing the last word.

This can't be happening. This isn't happening.

She leaned forward again, this time so that her left boob was practically grazing Tony's lapel. I felt bad that Tony was in such an uncomfortable situation, but it was also kind of hilarious. I couldn't figure out what this woman was trying to get at with the whole I'll-show-you-mine routine. Some customers tried to negotiate prices, but she had yet to ask for a discount. (I'm pretty sure Tony—a happily married man, by the way—would have given her a deal just to have an excuse to get off that couch.)