“We need five,” Ben said, “maybe more. The floor sample, the two in the basement is three.”
“I’ll call Gutterman-Musicant, but if they won’t give me a wholesale price, well, I’m afraid you’ll have to absorb the cost, plus, of course, our legitimate profit.”
A young man was walking among the caskets. He was red-eyed, unshaved. He looked as if he had a cold. One of Riverside’s salesmen walked along silently beside him. The man stopped beside a dark walnut coffin. “This one?” he asked, his voice breaking.
The salesman, who wore a bright plaid-patterned suit, glanced at the coffin, at the young man in blue jeans. “The price is at the foot.”
“Thirty-five hundred dollars? So much?”
“It’s walnut. There are no nails. As I explained, the price is inclusive. You get the preparation of the body, you get the use of our chapel. The cheap coffins are down this way.” The salesman moved off.
“This one is beautiful. It’s like a, like a bed. Like a berth the porter makes up on a sleeper. It’s beautiful. My mother loved beautiful things. Me you can burn up, but my mother—thirty-five hundred dollars.” He looked toward the salesman, who was standing beside a stained pine box. The young man went toward him.
“Take the walnut,” Ben Flesh said thickly.
The boy turned around. He looked at Ben. “It’s thirty-five hundred dollars,” he said.
“I own the franchise,” he said. “Sons don’t have taste like yours today. We’re discontinuing the model. I just told my funeral director, Mr. Weinman.”
“Look, I don’t want to bargain,” the boy said.
“Who’s bargaining? It’s a sin to give a discount on a coffin. It’s against our religion. I just told you. Take it. It’s free.”
“I can’t…”
“You can’t?” Ben roared. “You
can’t
? You can’t, get out. Your mother loved beautiful things and you can’t? It looks like a bed made up on a sleeper, and you can’t? You
can’t
? You can’t give Mom a ride in the dirt? You
can’t
?” He turned to the salesman. “Burn it.
Burn
it! He don’t want it, burn it. I told you yesterday we were discontinuing. He don’t want it for nothing, everything all inclusive, the preparations, the chapel, the flowers, the death certificate in triplicate, the notice in the
Times
, the hearse and limo, burn the goddamned thing.”
“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.
“Yes, and your dropout always your best bet, battered children from broken homes and alcoholism in the bloodlines like a thoroughbred’s juices. Bringing on line entire generations of those who live with expectations lowered like the barometric pressure, who neither read the fortune cookie nor spell out even their own horoscopes in the funny papers. Can you
imagine
such indifference? Not despair, not even resignation finally, just conditioning so complete you’d think bad luck was a congenital defect or a post-hypnotic suggestion. Yes, and the statistical incidence of failure Euclidean, pandemic. These are the people I work with, who work for me, these are my partners, the world’s put-upon, its A.W.O.L.’d and Article 15’d and Captain’s Masted, its chain-ganged and undesirably discharged, all God’s plea-bargained, all His sharecropper’d migratory-worked losers, His scummy, heavily tail-finned Chevrolet’d laid-off. Last hired, first fired. This is company picnic we’re talking, Softball, bratwurst, chug-a-lug’d beer. The common-law husbands of all high-beehived, blond-dyed, wiry waitresses and check-out girls.
“And I as fairy godfather to them as Julius to me. Having to talk them into it. Having to talk them into even talking to me, talk them into listening to my propositions, who think at first I’m just some queer—and that itself working to my advantage, because they think I’ll buy them beers and they’ll pretend to go along with me, thinking: Afterward, when he makes his move, I’ll hit him on the head, roll him in the alley—looking for action, rough trade, God knows what. And using even that, their low opinion of me—always kept to themselves, always suppressed and even, in an odd way,
polite
, not ever, you understand, condescending, simply because I’m well dressed and well spoken and outrank them good-luckwise, which they mistakenly take for a sort of talisman or voucher,
Good Housekeeping’s
Seal of Approval, the earnest money of my faggot-or-no-faggot superior humanity—confronting them with it, hitting the nail smack bang dab on the head like the palmist or astrologer they don’t go to, not because they’re not superstitious—they’re superstitious: Catholic saints on their fundamentalist Protestant dashboards, rabbits’ feet, dice adding up to seven whichever way they’re turned—but because they don’t believe they have a fate, and behind that, the bottom line of that, not really believing that they even have a life—such patient people, such humble ones—laying it all out for them, their plans to rob me, to knock my head even as they maintain a genuine respect, for me, for the clothes I wear, so that afterward what they’ll remember of the knockabout won’t be the body contact but the feel of my wool suit and silk shirt and rep tie and felt hat and the soft leather of my shoes. Second-guessing their plans and conspiracies, an armchair quarterback of my own muggings and beatings. And all that just to get their
attention!
“And only then, when I have it, hitting them with what even they can see is just good business, no scheme, no wild-ass proposition, no sky-high pipedream, but a plan. Plain as the cauliflower on their ear, true as a calendar.
“That who was there better in this world to bet on than guys who have nothing? References? I don’t want references. If anything the reverse. Records let them show me. Strange, unexplained lacunae in their
curriculum vitae
. Bad write-ups from Truancy, Credit, Alimony Court. Then convincing them that they can do the job, a lead-pipe cinch for persons like themselves who had, some of them, actually
used
lead pipes, or anyway pickaxes, handles, the tough truncheons of the strikebreakers, the ditch digger’s hardware, who’d horsed the unskilled laborer’s load, and done the thousand shit details, all the infinite cruddy combinations. ‘Putz,’ I’ve said, “you’ve hauled hod and worked by smells in the dark the wing nuts of grease traps. What, you’re afraid of a pencil?’ ‘I never got past the fifth grade,’ they’d say. ‘Terrific,’ I tell them, ‘then you know your multiplication tables. Long division you can do. Calculus there’s no call for in the Shell-station trade.’ ‘But I ain’t no mechanic,’ they object. ‘Who? You? No mechanic? A guy who jumps wires and picks locks? You’re fucking Mandrake. Look, look at the hands on you. Layers of dirt under the nails like shavings from the archaeologist’s digs. Enough grease and oil in the troughs of your knuckles to burn signal fires for a day and a night.
You
? No mechanic? You got a feel for leverage like Archimedes. Don’t crap me, pal. Don’t wear my patience. You’re a bum, you know character. You can hire trained mechanics from the Matchbook Schools of Repair. I’m making you Boss, you can sit back and interview guys who take jet engines apart.’ ‘But why me? I’m a nobody. Why would you give
me
this chance?’ ‘Because you’re a nobody. I raise your expectations like a hard-on. Where else can I buy the loyalty and devotion I’m looking for if not from a nobody like you?’