Authors: Philip Roth
“The embalmer didn’t arrive until seven-thirty. The funeral director had described him to me—with a trace of Dickensian enjoyment such as you might not be likely to hear from a funeral
director anywhere other than in the British Isles—as ‘tall, with thick spectacles, and quite witty.’ But he wasn’t merely tall when he appeared in the dusk at the downstairs door; he was huge, a giant strongman out of the circus, wearing the thick spectacles and completely bald but for two sprigs of black hair that stuck up at either side of his enormous head. He stood in the doorway in a black suit, bearing two large black boxes, each sizable enough to hold a child. ‘You’re Mr. Cummins?’ I asked him. ‘I’m from Ridgely’s, sir.’ He might as well have said he was from Satan’s. I would have believed him, Cockney accent and all. He didn’t look witty to me.
“I led him up to where the corpse was tucked in under her eiderdown. He removed his hat and bowed slightly to Nikki, as respectful as he might have been were we the royals themselves. ‘We’ll leave you alone,’ I said. ‘We’ll take a walk and be back in about an hour.’ ‘Give me an hour and a half, sir,’ he said. ‘Fine.’ ‘May I ask a few questions, sir?’
“As Nikki was sufficiently astonished by his hugeness—by his hugeness on top of everything else—I didn’t think she’d need to hear his questions, which could not be anything but macabre. As it was, she couldn’t lift her gaze from the large black boxes, which he’d now set down. ‘You go outside a moment,’ I told her. ‘Go downstairs and get some air while I finish up with this guy.’ Silently she obeyed. She was leaving her mother for the first time since she’d gone to the toilet the day before and returned to find her dead. But anything rather than to be with that man and those boxes.
“Back inside, the embalmer asked me how the corpse should be dressed. I didn’t know, but instead of rushing out to question Nikki, I told him to leave her in her nightgown. Then I realized that if he was preparing her for the funeral and the cremation, her jewelry should be removed. I asked if he would do that for us. ‘Let’s see what she has on, sir,’ he said and beckoned for me to examine the body with him.
“I hadn’t been expecting that, but as it seemed to be a matter of professional ethics for him not to remove valuables without a
witness present, I stood beside him while he pulled back the eiderdown to reveal the corpse’s bluish stiffened fingers and, where the nightgown had hiked up, the pipe-thin legs. He removed her ring and gave it to me and then he lifted her head to unscrew her earrings. But he couldn’t manage by himself, and so I held her head while he worked the earrings. ‘The pearls, too,’ I said, and he slid them around on her neck so that the catch was turned to the front. Only the catch wouldn’t come undone. He struggled in vain with his inordinately large circus-strongman fingers while I continued to hold the weight of her head in one hand. She and I were never physically cozy together and this was by far the most intimate we had been. The head seemed to weigh so much dead. She is so dead, I thought—and this is becoming insufferable. Eventually I took a crack at opening the catch myself and after a few minutes of fiddling, when I couldn’t do it either, we gave up and drew the pearl necklace, which was a very tight fit, over her head and her hair as best we could.
“I was careful not to trip as I stepped back between his black boxes. ‘All right, then,’ I told him, ‘I’ll return in an hour and a half.’ ‘You’d better phone before, sir.’ ‘And you’ll leave her exactly as she is now?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ But then he looked at the windows that faced onto Ned’s garden and the rear windows of the houses on the street opposite and he asked, ‘Can they see in from over there, sir?’ I was suddenly alarmed about leaving this attractive forty-five-year-old woman alone with him, dead though she was. But what I was thinking was unthinkable—I thought—and I said, ‘You better pull the curtains to be safe.’ The curtains were new, a birthday gift from Nikki bought the year before and hung only during the last week of her mother’s illness. Her mother had insisted that she didn’t need new curtains, refused even to unwrap them, and had only accepted them when, at her bedside, Nikki, lying, said to the dying woman that they had cost her less than ten pounds.
“At Rena’s, where we were staying, Rena and I tried to get Nikki to bathe and to eat. She would do neither. She would not even wash her hands when I asked her to after a day of fondling
her dead mother. She waited silently in a chair until it was time to go back. After an hour passed, I phoned to see how far the embalmer had got.
“‘I’m finished, sir,’ he said. ‘Is everything as it was?’ ‘Yes, sir. Flowers beside her on the pillow.’ They hadn’t been when we left; he must have taken the flowers that Ned had picked earlier in the day and moved them. ‘Had to straighten her head,’ he told me. ‘Best for the coffin.’ ‘All right. When you go, just pull the downstairs door shut behind you. We’ll be right over. Can you leave a lamp on?’ ‘I have, sir. The little lamp by her head.’ He had arranged a tableau.
“The first thing I saw—”
It was
Sabbath
he had meant to smash on the head. Of course! It was Sabbath he had set out to catch desecrating his mother’s grave! For weeks, maybe even for months now, Matthew, on night patrol, must have been observing him from the cruiser. Ever since Sabbath’s monstrous exploitation of Kathy Goolsbee, Matthew, like so many others in the affronted community, had come to lose his respect for Sabbath, and this he made clear, whenever his car happened to pass Sabbath’s on the road, by failing to acknowledge that he recognized the driver. As he drove around, Matthew ordinarily loved to throw a salute to the folks he’d known as a kid in Madamaska Falls, and he was still well known in town for being lenient with townsfolk about their infractions. He had been ingratiatingly lenient once with Sabbath himself, when he was just a few months out of the academy, not very wily yet, and driving a chase car with the traffic squad. He’d gone after Sabbath—who was moving along well over the speed limit after a joyous afternoon up at the Grotto—and forced him, with his siren, to the side of the road. But when Matthew strode up to the driver’s window and looked inside and saw who it was, he blushed and said, “Ooops.” He and Roseanna had become pals during his last year at the high school, and more than once (drunk she said everything more than once) she’d remarked that Matthew Balich was among the most sensitive boys she’d ever had in a class at Cumberland. “What did I do wrong, Officer Balich?”
inquired Sabbath, seriously, as every citizen is entitled to do. “Jesus, you know you were
flying
, sir.” “Uh-oh,” replied Sabbath. “Look, don’t worry,” Matthew told him, “when it comes to folks I know, I’m not your typical gung-ho trooper. You don’t have to go telling people, but it just isn’t in me to be that way toward somebody I know. I drove fast before I was a trooper. I’m not going to be a hypocrite.” “Well, that’s more than kind. What should I do?” “Well,” said Matthew, grinning broadly with that noseless face—exactly as his mother had earlier in the afternoon, coming for the third or fourth time—“you could slow down, for one thing. And then you could just get out of here. Go away! See ya, Mr. Sabbath! Say hi to Roseanna!”
So that was the end of that. He could not dare visit Drenka’s grave ever again. He could never return to Madamaska Falls. In flight not just from home and marriage but now from the law at its most lawless.
“The first thing I saw when we got back was that the vacuum cleaner was out of the closet and in a corner of the larger room. Had he used it to clean up? Clean what up? Then I smelled the awful chemicals.
“The woman under the eiderdown was no longer the woman we had been with all day. ‘It’s not her,’ Nikki said and broke into tears. ‘It looks like me! It’s me!’
“I understood what she meant, insane as her words first sounded. Nikki possessed a severe, spectacular variant of her mother’s refined good looks, and so whatever resemblance there had been before the embalming was now even chillingly stronger. She walked back to the body and stared at it. ‘Her head is straight.’ ‘He straightened it,’ I told her. ‘But she always carried her head on the side.’ ‘She doesn’t anymore.’ ‘Oh, you’re looking awfully stern, manoulítsa,’ Nikki said to the corpse.
“Stern. Sculpted. Statuelike. Very officially very dead. But Nikki nonetheless sat back down in her chair and set about resuming the vigil. The curtains were closed and only the little light was glowing and the flowers were on the pillow beside the embalmed head. I had to suppress an impulse to grab them and
throw them into the wastebasket and put a stop to the whole thing. All her fluid self is gone, I thought, suctioned into those black cases and then—what? Down the toilet bowl at the back of the shop? I could just see that giant in his black suit tossing about the naked body once it was the two of them alone in the room with the curtains drawn and there was no longer any need to be as dainty as he’d been with the jewelry. Evacuating the bowels, emptying the bladder, draining the blood, injecting the formaldehyde, if formaldehyde was what I smelled.
“I should never have allowed this, I thought. We should have buried her in the garden ourselves. I was right to begin with. ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked. ‘I’ll stay here tonight,’ she said. ‘You can’t,’ I said. ‘I don’t want her to be alone.’ ‘I don’t want
you
to be alone. You can’t be alone. And I’m not going to sleep here. You’re coming back to Rena’s. You can return in the morning.’ ‘I can’t leave her.’ ‘You have to come with me, Nikki.’ ‘When?’ ‘Now. Say good-bye to her now and come.’ She got out of the chair and knelt beside the couch. Touching her mother’s cheeks, her hair, her lips, she said, ‘I did love you, manoulítsa. Oh, manoulítsamou.’
“I opened a window to air the place out. I began to clean the refrigerator at the kitchen end of the parlor. I poured the milk that was in an open carton down the drain. I found a paper bag and put the contents of the refrigerator into the bag. But when I came back to Nikki, she was still talking to her. ‘It’s time to go for tonight,’ I said.
“Without resisting me, Nikki got up from the floor when I offered to help her. But standing in the doorway to the stairwell, she turned back to look at her mother. ‘Why can’t she just stay like that?’ she asked.
“I led her down the stairs to the side door, carrying the garbage out with us. But again Nikki turned around and I followed her back up into the parlor with my bag of garbage. Again she went up to the body to touch it. I waited. Ma, I waited and I waited and I thought, Help her, help her out of this, but I didn’t know what to do to help her, whether to tell her to stay or to force her to go. She
pointed to the corpse. ‘That’s my mother,’ she said. ‘You have to come with me,’ I said. Eventually, I don’t know how much later, she did.
“But the next day it was worse—Nikki was better. In the morning she couldn’t wait to get to her mother’s and when, after dropping her off there, I phoned an hour later and asked, ‘How is it?’ she said, ‘Oh, very peaceful. Sitting here knitting. And we had a little chat.’ And so I found her at the end of the afternoon when I came to take her back to Rena’s. ‘We had such a nice little chat,’ she said. ‘I was just telling Momma . . .’
“On Sunday morning—finally, finally, finally—in a heavy rain-storm, I went around to open the door for the hearse that had come to take her away. ‘It’s another twenty-five pounds,’ the funeral director warned me, ‘to get the staff out on Sunday, sir—funerals are expensive enough already.’ But I said to him, ‘Just get ’em.’ If Rena wouldn’t pay, I would—and I had then, as now, not a dollar to spare. I didn’t want Nikki to come with me, and only when she insisted that she had to did I raise my voice and say, ‘Look, start thinking. It’s pissing rain. It’s miserable. You’re not going to like it at all when they carry your mother out of that room and into this storm in a box.’ ‘But I must go to see her this afternoon.’ ‘You can, you can. I’m sure you can.’ ‘You must ask them if I can come this afternoon!’ ‘Whenever they have her ready, I’m sure you can go there. But the scene this morning you can skip. Do you want to watch her leave South Audley Street?’ ‘Maybe you’re right,’ she said, and, of course, I was wondering if I was and if watching her mother leave South Audley Street might be just what she needed for reality to begin to seep in. But what if keeping reality at bay was all that was keeping her from coming completely apart? I didn’t know. No one knows. That’s why the religions have the rituals that Nikki hated.
“But at three she was back with her mother at the funeral home, which happened to be not far from the flat of an English friend I had arranged to visit. I had given her the address and the phone number and told her to come to his house when she was finished. Instead she called me to say that she would stay until my
visit was over and that I should then come to pick her up at the funeral home. It wasn’t what I’d had in mind. She’s stuck, I thought, I cannot unstick her.
“I had lingering hopes that she would show up at my friend’s anyway, but when it got to be five o’clock, I walked over and, at the front door, asked the on-duty officer, who appeared to be alone on a Sunday, to call her. He said that Nikki had left a message for me to be brought to where she was ‘visiting’ her mother. He led me along the corridors and down a long stairway and into another corridor, lined with doors, which I imagined issued onto cubicles where bodies were laid out to be seen by relatives. Nikki was in one of those tiny rooms with her mother. She was seated in a chair drawn up beside the open coffin, working at her mother’s knitting again. When she saw me she laughed lightly and said, ‘We had a wonderful chat. We laughed about the room. It’s just about the size of the one in Cleveland the time we ran away. Look,’ she said to me, ‘look at her sweet little hands.’ She turned back the lace coverlet to show me her mother’s intertwined fingers. ‘Manoulítsamou,’ she said, kissing and kissing them.
“I think even the on-duty officer, who had remained in the open doorway to accompany us upstairs, was shaken by what he’d just seen. ‘We have to go,’ I said flatly. She began to cry. ‘A few more minutes.’ ‘You’ve been here for over two hours.’ ‘I love I love I love I love—’ ‘I know, but we have to go now.’ She got up and began kissing and stroking her mother’s forehead, repeating, ‘I love I love I love I love—’ Only gradually was I able to pull her out of the room.