Good Mourning (11 page)

“Liz, maybe you have some suggestions for these ladies?” said Tony. I was trying so hard to keep a straight face, I knew if I looked him in the eye I would crack. It was clear now that he hadn't brought me in to help plan the funeral—he just wanted a witness so that he wasn't accused of sexual harassment or whatever else they were trying to pull. Tony was smart enough to know that two scantily clad women
probably
weren't throwing their panties in his face for no reason.

I suggested a few different floral arrangements, as well as some musical selections for the harpist—nothing out of the ordinary. Then, sensing that Tony was about to jump out the window, I helped to tally up their total for them to let them know the damage. If I had talked to Tony beforehand and knew the 411 on the client, I perhaps wouldn't have almost fallen off my chair when the two women picked up their oversized purses and pulled out $30,000 in cash.

I looked at Tony and raised my eyebrows.
Are these
women seriously trying to hand over stacks of $100 bills? What kind of crazy person walks the streets of New York City with that much cash on them?
I'd seen women get their purses stolen on the subway. It happened fast: usually the woman was sitting on the blue plastic seat with her bag on her lap, and right as the automated announcement “Please stand clear of the closing doors” blared through the car, some guy scooped up her handbag and ran up the stairs and through the turnstiles. Done. Gone. Arrivederci, dahling.

Instead of suggesting that maybe,
maybe
they pay with a credit card or something less shady than wads of sweaty cash, Tony accepted their money and quickly wrote up a receipt. He went from looking like a scared virgin about to get his first lap dance to a smooth-talking businessman in two seconds flat. After the women left, I asked Tony who the hell they were—and where they got that kind of money. He alluded to the fact that they might be mob-related, although there was no way to know for sure. Not that it mattered, anyway—paying in cash might have seemed shady, but it was hardly illegal.

The whole scene got me thinking about the difference between good business and dirty business—and everything in between. These women—and their mobster husbands—might have been skirting the law in one way or another, but they certainly weren't the only ones.

I was at Crawford when Bernie Madoff was arrested for losing billions of dollars of his investors' money in a Ponzi
scheme. The I-bankers and traders, though they weren't breaking the law, weren't exactly keeping it clean either. New York was money hungry, and even guys like Tony weren't immune to it. I wasn't naïve enough to think that he'd refuse the women's business; money talks, and in Manhattan, it screams. But he didn't even hesitate when they pushed the bills into his palm. Tony was no Bernie, but he was willing to cash in and not ask questions. But I suppose I didn't ask any either.

SEVEN

Holy Shit

I
see ghosts.

It sounds crazy. I know. But the truth is, my mom and I have always had “visitors,” and we've never been much bothered by them—in fact, they can be quite comforting. My mom's father died when she was a girl, leaving her without a dad for most of her life. Except she always saw him . . . in her closet. Not in a scary way or anything, just kind of standing there, making sure she was okay. When my parents moved into their Upper East Side apartment and Mom told Dad that her father was hanging out in the closet at night, he thought she was nuts. I was only a few years old at the time, and they never mentioned any of this to me. Then one morning after I had crawled into their bed, I looked at both of them and casually asked, “Who is the man who lives in your closet?”

Dad was officially spooked after that.

The weird thing was, I never saw ghosts at Crawford. I only felt them—and I wasn't the only one.

After the promotion, Monica had stopped talking to me altogether—so I was surprised the day she came running out of the bathroom, and, seeing as I was the only one around, grabbed my arm. “You have to see this,” she said, pulling me down the hall with her. Bill had told me that Crawford was haunted—presumably by the wife of Mr. Crawford, although with all the dead bodies going in and out, it was hard to say. I didn't believe it at first—ghosts didn't usually hide themselves around me—but during my late-night shifts, I
did
notice that the lights would inexplicably flicker, and the blinds would go from up to down, or vice versa. You know, little stuff that makes you scratch your head and gives you goose bumps but doesn't necessarily convince you that Casper is going to pop out from behind the curtains.

When Monica and I got upstairs, we saw the doorknob to the bathroom turn, and then the door closed. “Did you see that shit?” she said, her eyes wide. She was actually clutching on to my arm, which might have been our first point of physical contact, well . . . ever.

I nodded. “Should we check it out?”

Monica stood behind me as we inched our way toward the bathroom. My heart raced as I turned the knob, and I felt a chill run up my back as I opened the door to reveal an empty bathroom. Something about the room felt sad and
cold. I thought of a story that Bill had told me, about a man who had killed himself in that bathroom. It had happened years before. The man had come in to plan his wife's funeral and said that he'd like to prearrange the same exact service for himself—right down to the last detail—for when the time came. Tony was apparently happy to make a double sale, and even though it sounds pretty morbid, it wasn't that unusual. After the man signed on the dotted line and handed over the payment, he politely excused himself to the rest­room, where he
shot himself in the head
. Just like that. Tony called the police—what else can you do?—and called the family. When they got to his apartment, they found that the man had laid out a suit that he wanted to be buried in. With his wife gone, he just didn't want to be here anymore. He wanted to be with her. Although maybe, he also wanted to be in the Crawford bathroom, where Monica and I stood, trying not to girl-scream at the turning knob.

The harder part was in the
not
seeing. When I paused talking to my mom in the kitchen of our country house once, she just shrugged and said, “You saw that, too?” referring to a ghost outside of the window. Neither of us was scared. Same goes for when I moved into my own apartment, only to find the ghost of a guy I had never met sitting on my bed, feet hanging over the edge, looking at the wall. It was just that one time—I never saw him again. Although I always wondered why he had stayed in the first place and if he'd ever come back.

I always hoped a little that my dad would come back to me, Mom, and Max, and he did. Except he was much less obvious about the whole thing. Max swears that Dad continues to steal his tuxedo studs as an ongoing joke. Once, while getting ready for a wedding, Max searched his whole room up and down and couldn't find them, even though he always kept them in a box, in a safe. He had just worn them to an event the week before and was meticulous about putting them away. He called me and my mom in hysterics: “Dad gave them to me,” he said, crying. “I wouldn't lose them. I
know
I put them away.”

My mom felt bad for him and said she would search her apartment—although it was really just a gesture to make Max feel better. When she opened her closet door, her eyes went toward a handbag on the shelf . . . and, I swear to God or whoever else might be listening, the studs were on top. Mom hadn't seen Max in a month. There was no possible way the studs could have made their way onto her purse. And yet, there they were.

I had had a similar experience in Italy. After a week of traveling alone, I was in a cab on my way to the airport in Milan when I realized that a gold pin my father had given me—and that I brought everywhere—wasn't in the velvet jewelry pouch along with my diamond earrings. I knew I had put the pin in there the night before, and I had triple-checked that morning. I was beside myself and struggled with my basically nonexistent Italian telling the driver he had to turn
around and go back to the hotel. They hadn't cleaned my room yet—it was only five a.m.—so I was allowed back upstairs to ransack the room, turning over every cushion and every pillow. Nothing. After sobbing the whole forty-­five-minute drive
back
to the airport, I dug into my bag to get my sunglasses to cover my red, puffy eyes. And that's when I saw it: the pin, resting right on the “nose” of the sunglasses case, staring right back at me. I was relieved, but then it hit me: The weather in Milan had been cold, gray, and rainy the whole time I was there. I never once had put my sunglasses on. I threw my hands in the air and looked up. “Are you
trying
to give me a heart attack?” I said. Then, I grabbed my suitcase and headed toward the terminal.

What I'm saying is: my dad was very much still with me after he died. I could feel him—and I still do. But does that mean there's a heaven? I don't know. Unlike most of the staff members at Crawford, who were
very
Catholic, I'd always considered myself more of a spiritual person . . . but not necessarily religious. Gaby and Ben liked to push me into deep conversations about what happens after we die, and while I tried not to think too much about an afterlife (wasn't the whole point to live
this
life to the fullest instead of hedging our bets on some never-never land?), I believed my father was somewhere.

“Well, scientifically, he has to be,” said Ben one day, eating Twizzlers on my couch.

“What do you mean, ‘scientifically'?” I asked.

“Conservation of energy,” he said. “Einstein. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed; therefore, there needs to be some sort of afterlife. Otherwise, where does someone's energy go when they die?”

Ben's logical explanation brought me a lot more comfort than any religion. I may have studied different faiths at the Gallatin School at NYU—I even minored in the study of the Quran—but it all seemed more cultural to me than spiritual. My professors and I talked about death on an academic level; it wasn't about
my
beliefs, but rather, other people's philosophies. Knowing so much about how different cultures view death definitely made “the end” less intimidating, but it also made it less emotional. Look, I sure hope there's a higher power. But I'm just not convinced. Blame it on the watered-down version of Catholicism I was raised with, or maybe I'm just another skeptic. New York City seems to be filled with those.

I MAY
NOT
have been the most amazing Catholic, but when Tony called a staff meeting to announce that a cardinal would be having his wake at Crawford before a procession to St. Patrick's Cathedral for the funeral, even I got a little excited. I was
technically
part of the church. My mom had made sure Max and I were baptized, and she made us go to Sunday school (which was actually on Tuesdays) so that we could get the other sacraments. I was a bit of a disaster:
When I was five, the Sunday school teacher gave me a coloring book displaying heaven and hell. (Kind of intense for a bunch of kindergartners, but I digress.) I asked her what heaven was, and she said, “Where all happy things are, and everyone you love. But only good Catholics go to heaven.”

“What about Jewish people?” I said, thinking of my dad.

She paused for a minute, let out a deep sigh, and said, “No. They don't get in.”

I proceeded to cry until my mom picked me up.

Anyway, the cardinal. Crawford was buzzing with energy, with calls coming in from the Vatican (yes, the freaking Vatican) with instructions. Even though I wasn't religious, I hoped to earn some points with whatever God might be watching by making sure the wake went off without a hitch. Plus, Tony was about to lose his mind. He was Catholic—and just about the last thing he wanted to do was screw up the funeral of someone a lot closer to the Big Guy than him.

“Liz, there's a package coming in from the Vatican,” Tony told me. “You need to keep an eye out for it. We need to make sure every single thing is taken care of.”

We handled personal items for people all the time, so I didn't see what the big difference was. But I gave Tony a serious nod—this was no time for joking around—and listened to the messages to make sure I had everything correct. “I wonder who else from the church will be here,” I said to Monica, who was already back to hating me after our short-lived ghost bonding session.

“I thought you were Jewish,” she said flatly, before going to find one of the other receptionists.

When the package finally arrived—it was more like a giant case—I couldn't wait to see what was inside. The first thing we pulled out was a golden scepter, like the thing Ariel's father waves around in
The Little Mermaid
. (I may or may not have hummed “Under the Sea” while setting everything up.) There was also a white robe and an ornate hat that looked a lot like a crown.

I spent most of that afternoon in the embalming room with Bill. He had received specific instructions about how to prep the body and dress it, and while that was normal—­especially for religious services—there was something about this that felt even more sacred. This particular cardinal had meant a lot to New York City: On September 11, then-mayor Rudy Giuliani had summoned him to drive downtown to help with a disaster. According to reports, the cardinal—who was, at the time, the archbishop of New York—had no idea what was happening in lower Manhattan. Not, at least, until he found himself standing in a church near Wall Street, where he waited, painfully, for the bodies to be brought in. He spent days down there, anointing the dead and giving out rosaries, sometimes wearing a gas mask so that he could breathe with all the dust and debris. Uptown, I was in a classroom with a bunch of other eleventh graders, many of whom had parents or older siblings who worked near or in the towers. A bunch of us had just gotten
back to school from getting bagels when a girl in my class came in and, sounding confused, said, “A plane just flew into a building or something.” My first thought was small plane, small building—an unfortunate accident in a different borough. Then we all were called to an assembly, where the dean of the school, Mr. Allen, broke the news and offered to let students use the school's landlines, since nobody was getting cell service. He was a friend of my family, and so he scooted me into his office so I could dial my mom, first thing. Before I could get a word in, Mom said, “Put Mr. Allen on the phone.” She told him that she was coming to get me, and as many other kids from the neighborhood as would fit in her car. Even though the school was just a mile across town from our apartment, it took two hours to get home because the cops had shut down Central Park, blocking off key roads to get across. We huddled up with Max's buddies, desperately waiting for calls from friends and family who worked in the World Trade Center to come in. A few never did.

After the attacks, the cardinal led funerals—many of which were for policemen and firefighters who had died trying to rescue others. He even consoled former New York City mayor Ed Koch, who was Jewish. As the story goes, the cardinal saw Koch crying at St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. When he asked why he was crying, Koch allegedly told him that he'd heard that a fire department chaplain had been killed—one of the people he knew from being in office.
The cardinal was happy to finally share some
good
news: The chaplain had actually survived. He was okay. One small moment of joy in an otherwise tragic day. “Here was a Jewish former mayor crying over a monsignor after having lit a candle at St. Patrick's Cathedral. Where but in New York?” the cardinal later told the Associated Press.

Bill spent hours stressing over every detail with the cardinal's body. Upstairs, Tony was busy getting the casket in order. The Vatican had very specific rules about that, too. The casket, which had to be special-ordered, had to be lined with red velvet. I helped Tony double-check the order, since each rank in the Catholic Church has its own casket requirements, and we
both
wanted to make sure that we got it right.