Too Much and Never Enough, стр. 41
“What’s up, Honeybunch?” I sometimes wondered if either of my uncles actually knew my name.
“Dad’s going to be cremated, right?” I had known for years that that was what Dad wanted. He had felt so strongly about not being buried that it was one of the first things he had told my mother after they were married. His insistence upon it bordered upon an obsession, which was why I had known about it before I turned ten.
“Right.”
“And then what? He’s not going to be buried, is he?”
A look of impatience crossed his face. It was clear he didn’t want to be having that conversation. “I think he is.”
“You know that makes no sense, right?”
“That’s what Dad wants.” He picked up the phone. When he noticed I wasn’t moving, he shrugged and started to dial.
I turned to climb the back stairway. On one end of the long second-floor hallway was Elizabeth’s corner room with Maryanne’s on the other side of their joint bathroom; on the other, Donald and Robert’s shared bedroom was outfitted with blue-and-gold bedspreads and matching window treatments. My grandparents’ much larger master bedroom stood right next to theirs and included Gam’s separate dressing room with mirrored walls. In the middle of the hallway was the Cell. Dad’s cot had been stripped, exposing the thin mattress. His portable radio was still on the small bedside table. The door to the closet was ajar, and I saw a couple of white button-down shirts hanging askew on wire hangers. Even on such a sunny day, the only window let in little light, and the room looked austere in the shadows. I thought I should go in, but there was nothing for me there. I went back downstairs.
The wake fell on the first night of Rosh Hashanah, but many of Dad’s fraternity brothers still came. His friend Stu, who had often attended dinner parties and charity events at Jamaica Hospital with his wife, Judy, probably knew my family better than any of Dad’s friends other than Billy Drake. Stu saw my grandfather standing alone in the back of the room, and he walked over to pay his respects. The two men shook hands and, after offering his condolences, Stu said, “It looks like real estate isn’t doing so well. I hope Donald’s okay. I see him in the news a lot, and it looks like he owes the banks a lot of money.”
Fred put his arm around his dead son’s friend and said with a smile, “Stuart, don’t worry about Donald. He’s going to be just fine.” Donald wasn’t there.
My brother gave the only eulogy (or, at least, the only one I remember), written on a sheet of loose-leaf paper, probably on the plane ride from Orlando, where he was a sophomore at Rollins College. He reminisced about the good times he and Dad had had together, most of which had occurred before I had been old enough to remember them, but he refused to shy away from the fundamental reality of my father’s life. At one point he referred to Dad as the black sheep of the family, and there were audible gasps from the guests. I felt a thrill of recognition and a sense of vindication—at long last. My brother, who had always been so much better at negotiating the family than I was, had dared tell the truth. I admired his honesty but also felt jealous that he seemed to have so many more good memories of my father than I did.
As the wake drew to a close, I watched as people began to line up, walk past the coffin, pause with eyes closed, hands clasped—sometimes kneeling on a low cushioned bench that seemed to have been put there for the purpose—and then move on.
When my aunt Elizabeth’s turn came, she began to sob uncontrollably. In the midst of all that stoicism, her display of emotion was jarring, and people looked at her with muted alarm. But no one approached her. She placed her hands on the coffin and slid to her knees. Her body was shaking so badly that she lost her balance and fell sideways to the floor. I watched her fall. She lay there as if she had no idea where she was or what she was doing and continued to cry. Donald and Robert finally came from the back of the room, where they’d been talking to my grandfather, who stayed where he was.
My uncles lifted Elizabeth from the floor. She limped between them as they pulled her from the room.
I approached the coffin eventually, tentatively. It seemed impossibly small, and I thought that there must have been a mistake. There was no way my father, at six feet two, could have fit inside that box. I ignored the bench and remained on my feet. I bowed my head, concentrating hard on one of the coffin’s brass fixtures. Nothing came to me.
“Hi, Dad,” I finally said under my breath. I wracked my brains as I stood there looking down, until it occurred to me that I might be standing at the wrong end of the coffin, that the conversation I was trying to have with my father was being directed at his feet. Mortified, I took a step back and returned to my friends.
There was no church ceremony. The coffin was transferred to the crematorium, and we met briefly in the chapel next door—oddly sun-drenched and bright—where a minister of no specified denomination demonstrated both his utter lack