He winked at me before turning and starting back. I followed him, through the arched entranceway of the clearing, along passageways, through the narrow opening, thorns grabbing at my suit jacket, until we had returned to the wide lawn. The sun was bright now and there was no mist left. Nat took off his hat and wiped his head with his forearm. “Getting hot. You had best go on up and get your eggs.”
I heard something from the patio. Some of the others were there now, Kendall, waving at me energetically, Caroline, in sunglasses, with a drink in her hand. I turned away and looked down the hill, beyond the pond to the wooded area in which sat that old weathered and burned Victorian house. From here I couldn’t see any of it, blocked as it was by the foliage, but I could feel it there, listing in its sad way.
“There is a house down there beyond the pond, in those trees,” I said. “Who lived there?”
“You did get around, didn’t you, Mr. Carl?” said Nat. “Feeling a bit frisky this morning, I suppose.” He turned toward the relic. “That was the caretaker’s house. Mrs. Shaw’s father, he deeded it for the whole of her life to the widow Poole. She lived there with her daughter until the widow Poole, she died. Then it reverted back to the estate.”
“What happened to the daughter?”
Nat, still looking down the hill, his back to me, shrugged. “She up and left. Rumor was she died in an asylum New England way. She was supposed to be demented. Caught the pox, or some such fever, and gave up the ghost. The whole family Poole sort of just withered away. I guess that’s the way of it. The good Lord’s always pruning, trying to get it right at last.”
Before I could respond he started walking away from me, down the hill, toward the pond with all those frogs.
“You remember what I said about leaving the buried be, Mr. Carl,” he said without turning. “Some patches of this earth are better left unturned.”
19
IT WAS A TOUCHING LITTLE SERVICE for Jimmy Vigs at the funeral parlor on North Broad Street. The rabbi spoke of the joy that Jimmy Dubinsky had given to his family and his friends, of the sage advice and prompt service he had given his clients, of his generous spirit in running the charity bingo events at the synagogue. A tall straw of a man with flighty hands stood up and spoke of how Jimmy was always there for him in his times of deepest need, when the fates conspired against him and OTB was closed. He was a giver, said the man, and he gave without complaint, so long as the call was laid in time. Anton Schmidt, a tie beneath his leather jacket, looking almost like a yeshiva student in his wide fedora and evident sadness, talked in soft halting sentences of Jimmy’s fairness and kindness and his facility with numbers. And then the son spoke, a young heavy man, just in from the Coast, the spitting image of poor dead Jimmy, talking of how his dad was the greatest dad in the whole wide world, always taking him to the ball game, watching sports with him on television. The son spoke of the joy they had in traveling together, father and son, to Vegas, to watch a Mike Tyson fight, and here the son choked up a bit and grabbed tightly onto the lectern before continuing. His father had taught him how to play craps, he said through a blubber of sobs, how to handicap the horses. He would remember his father, he said, for the rest of his life.
Jimmy would have liked it. And with the over and under at seventy-five and the higher than expected turnout in the chapel, Jimmy would also have liked that the over pulled through. But even with the turnout, when I arrived a little late and went to sign the guest book I wasn’t surprised to see it totally devoid of names. I was the only mourner willing to be identified.
The rabbi started reading the Twenty-third Psalm and, right at the part about walking through the valley of the shadow of death, Earl Dante slid into my pew, jamming his hip into mine. With the yarmulke neatly on his head and the white rose pinned to his lapel he could have been mistaken for the owner of the joint. Like I said before, he had that kind of face.
“Glad you could make it, Victor,” he said in his slurry voice. “We were counting on you to show.”
“Just paying my respects.”
“There was a rumor that the feds were tapping Jimmy’s phones at the end. Any truth to it?”
“How would I know? I’m just the lawyer.”
“Always the last to know, right, Victor?”
“That’s right.”
He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. “I have you down as a pallbearer. When they turn the bier around we need you to go on up and grab a handle.”
“I can’t believe there aren’t six men who were closer to Jimmy than me.”
“There are,” said Dante, leaning forward in preparation to stand. “But it will take more than six to carry Jimmy off to his final reward. There’s a limo for the pallbearers that will ferry you to the cemetery. They’ll need you there too.”
“I wasn’t planning to go to the cemetery,” I said.
He looked at me and sucked his teeth. “Take the limo.”
When it was time to wheel the coffin out, there were ten of us jockeying for position at the handles. From the other side of the coffin I caught Cressi grinning at me. “Yo, Vic,” he mouthed, bobbing his head up and down. Anton Schmidt was also there, red-eyed beneath his thick glasses. Then, with the rabbi silent and the mourners standing, we walked beside the coffin on its journey out of the chapel. At the side door, with the hearse waiting, its back door swung wide, we all tightened our grip on the handles and heaved. The coffin didn’t budge.
“Put your backs into it,” said the guy from the funeral home. “Ready, one, two, and three.”
We were able, with much grimacing, to lift the coffin and, each of us taking tiny steps, carry it, amid groans and curses, to the hearse, where it slid through on rollers to the rear of the cold black car.
Our limo was long and gray and just as cold as the hearse, though we didn’t have as much room to stretch out as did Jimmy. I sat shotgun, with the window to the back open so I could hear the conversations of the other men jammed shoulder to shoulder inside the rear benches.
“That was a very moving service,” said one of the men in the back.
“I thought the son was touching, just touching,” said a second. “When he talked about Tyson it almost brought tears.”
“If you see a McDonald’s or something,” said a third man to the driver, “why don’t you pull over. I could use a little lunch.”
“What kind of slob are you, Nicky, we’re burying a man here.”
“He’d a understood.”
“We can do drive-through,” said a different man.
“I have to follow the hearse,” said the driver.
“So tell the hearse to go too. Get an extra value meal for Jimmy. Like a gesture of respect, you know. One last stop at them golden arches.”
“Too many stops at the golden arches,” said Anton Schmidt softly, “that’s why he’s dead.”
“What, he got wacked at a McDonald’s?”
We drove up Broad Street to the Roosevelt Extension of Route 1 and then hit the Schuylkill Expressway, west, to get us to the cemetery. Buzzing past us were a horde of speeding cars and vans, swiping by each other as they changed lanes with a frenzy. I turned around and over the heads of the pallbearers I saw the long procession of cars, their headlights lit, following us slowly, and I imagined them all lined up at the McDonald’s drive-through, each putting in its order for fries and Big Macs.
“Maybe there’s a party or something after,” said Cressi. “Hey, Victor, your people, they throw wakes after they bury their dead?”
“We sit shivah,” I said. “That’s where we visit the families and say Kaddish each evening.”