Uncle Ned used to complain about the depression and make a great show of pinching pennies, but he gave us a generous allowance every month, and delivered it promptly along with a stereotype lecture to my mother on the foolishness of young girls who married wastrels and drunkards before they were old enough to make sound judgments.
My father died suddenly. He was, as I have said, a young man. To me, of course, he seemed old enough, but I learned later that he was three months younger than the century. I was shielded from most of the unpleasant experiences connected with his death, and he seemed not so much to die as simply to disappear. I was first told that he was sick, and then that he was dead, and the next thing I knew he had been taken to one of the rooms behind the little chapel in Uncle Ned’s establishment, where Uncle Ned, as a concession to my mother’s sensibilities, was giving him individual attention. Before the funeral, I saw the body only once, and that was when, with my mother’s permission and in her company, I was allowed to look at my father in his casket in the chapel.
When he was alive, he had earned scant respect, and now that he was dead, he excited little regret. For that reason, it was decided to make his last rites as simple and unostentatious as possible. The funeral was private, and the casket was kept closed. However, for those who were motivated by more than morbid curiosity to look at my father for the last time, it was arranged to make the body available to the public for an hour on the evening before the day of the burial, and for another hour on the morning of the day.
During these two brief periods his casket lay open in the chapel, and friends could pass by it to the recorded music of an organ. Not many took advantage of the opportunity. In the vestibule of the little chapel there was a registry for visitors to sign, and this was later taken by my mother, who gave it to me, and I have kept it all these years, for some strange reason, and have it still. In it are less than a dozen signatures.
I was not, of course, required to compete with even this small group for a last look at my father. I was taken to the chapel early on the evening before the funeral, and there, with my mother’s hand holding mine and Uncle Ned’s arm around my shoulders, I stood briefly beside the casket.
My father’s face looked quite natural, hardly more drawn and drained than I had often seen it on the morning after a night devoted to a bottle. I could not feel any great sadness or sense of loss, and I was sorry that I couldn’t, and wished that I could. After a while Uncle Ned took me home, told me I was a good boy, and left me with a neighbor woman who had come in to watch over me.
I did not sleep well that night. I was troubled because I had been able to feel so little for my father who was, whatever else he may have been, young and dead and almost friendless. My troubled thoughts nagged me well into the next morning, and finally I decided that I should go, before it was too late, and see him again. The unnatural stiffness of the circumstances, I thought, had dulled my feelings and made it impossible for me to react properly. If I could see him once more, perhaps alone, sorrow might come to ease my guilty conscience. My mother had already left the house, and so it was an easy matter for me to slip away undetected and make my way to the chapel.
But it was too early for the final hour of public visits, and the chapel was closed. I tried the door and found it locked. Leaving the vestibule, I went around the chapel, through Uncle Ned’s office, and into the area in the rear. But all the other doors were closed, and there didn’t seem to be a soul there, which was odd and unusual; and then I heard the murmur of a voice and of another voice in apparent reply. They came from one of the closed rooms, and I went to the door and listened. The words were faint, a little blurred, but distinguishable.
“Did you get my ticket and reservation?” a voice said.
“Here they are,” another voice responded. “The reservation is for the ten o’clock train to Chicago tonight.”
“You’ll have to drive me to the city in time to catch it.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll get you there.”
“Thanks, Ned. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your kindness.”
So one of the speakers was Uncle Ned. I felt relieved, somehow exonerated of eavesdropping, and I promptly announced my presence by knocking on the door. There was, following this, a rather prolonged interval in which nothing happened, and then Uncle Ned opened the door and saw me standing there.
“Why, Calvin!” he said. “What on earth are you doing here? Come in, boy, come in.”
Entering the room. I was surprised and a little alarmed to find my mother present. I was afraid she would be angry with me for coming to Uncle Ned’s funeral parlor without permission, but apparently she was not. She smiled in a kind of abstracted way, as if she were thinking about something quite remote from my petty delinquency, and came over and put her hand on my head.
“Hello, dear,” she said. “This is a nice surprise. Say hello to Dr. Crandall.”
Dr. Crandall was the only other person in the room. He seemed to me at the time tremendously experienced and wise, but he was actually in his late thirties and had been in practice no longer than ten years at most. Besides being a personal friend to my mother and Uncle Ned, he was our family physician and had attended my father before his death, and so his presence was not unusual. I spoke to him politely, as he did to me.
“Why have you come here, Calvin?” Uncle Ned said. “You were to wait at home until we called for you before the services.”
“I came to see Father again,” I said, “but the chapel’s locked.”
“Father’s not in the chapel now, dear,” my mother said. “Uncle Ned had to bring him back here until it was time for his friends to come to see him. It’s nearly time now, isn’t it, Ned?”
“Very nearly,” said Uncle Ned, looking at his wrist watch. “I’ll take him back to the chapel in a few minutes. If you want to see him again, Calvin, I’ll let you into the chapel now. You may wait for us there.”
My mother’s comment, followed by Uncle Ned’s, called my attention to a casket resting on a mobile table against the wall. My father was obviously in it, awaiting his return to the chapel, but now that I was here, I was strangely reluctant to see his face again. It was better, I rationalized, to remember him as he had been when alive rather than try to force an unnatural emotional response. Suddenly I wished I had not come, and wanted to go home again. Compulsively, I said so.
“There’s a sensible boy,” said Uncle Ned. “We’ll fetch you later for the services.”
“You must walk straight home, dear,” my mother said. “It would be bad to cause any alarm in case you are missed.”
“Don’t worry,” said Dr. Crandall. “I have to be leaving, and I’ll be happy to drop him off. Wait for me in the vestibule, young fellow.”
My mother kissed me and patted my head again, and after I had waited a while in the vestibule, Dr. Crandall and I left together. My mother came home later, and we were fetched on schedule for the services that afternoon. There were only a few people there, the services were brief, and Father’s casket was sealed afterward in its niche in the mausoleum.
Father had not been a good man or a reliable provider, and his short life had left a residue of bitterness; but I was astonished to discover that he had recently taken out a life insurance policy in favor of my mother for $50,000. This was a small fortune in those hard times, and I was inclined to modify my harsh judgment of Father until I learned that Uncle Ned had negotiated the policy and paid the premiums in order to protect my mother in the event of my father’s death.