The doctor could find nothing wrong with him. He had begun to see a psychoanalyst in the aftermath of his divorce, and the psychoanalyst attributed his condition to envy of a fellow art director who had just been promoted to a vice presidency in the agency.
"It makes you sick," the analyst said.
He maintained that his colleague was twelve years his senior and a generous coworker whom he only wished well, but the analyst continued to harp on "deep-seated envy" as the hidden reason for the malaise, and when circumstances proved him wrong, the analyst appeared unperturbed by his mistaken judgment.
He went to the medical doctor's office several more times in the succeeding weeks, whereas ordinarily he saw him only for a minor problem every couple of years. But he'd lost weight and the bouts of nausea were getting worse. He'd never before felt so rotten, not even after he'd left Cecilia and the two small boys and the court battle ensued over the terms of the separation and he was characterized to the court by Cecilia's attorney as "a well-known philanderer" because of the affair he was having with Phoebe, who was a new copywriter in the agency (and who was referred to in court by the plaintiff on the witness stand – aggrieved, overwrought, as though she found herself bringing charges against the Marquis de Sade – as "number thirty-seven in his parade of girlfriends," when in fact she was looking too far into the future and Phoebe was as yet number two). At least back then there'd been a recognizable cause for all the misery he felt. But this was his turning overnight from someone who was bursting with health into someone inexplicably losing his health.
A month passed. He couldn't concentrate on his work, he gave up his morning swim, and by now he couldn't look at food. On a Friday afternoon he left work early and took a taxi to the doctor's office without having made an appointment or even a phone call. The only one he phoned was Phoebe, to tell her what he was doing.
"Admit me to a hospital," he told the doctor. "I feel like I'm dying."
The doctor made the arrangements, and Phoebe was at the hospital's information desk when he arrived. By five o'clock he was settled into a room, and just before seven a tall, tanned, good-looking middle-aged man wearing a dinner jacket came into the room and introduced himself as a surgeon who had been called by his physician to take a look at him. He was on his way to some formal event but wanted to stop by first to do a quick examination. What he did was to press his hand down very hard just above the groin on the right side. Unlike the regular physician, the surgeon kept pressing and the pain was excruciating. He felt on the verge of vomiting. The surgeon said, "Haven't you had any stomach pain before?" "No," he said. "Well, it's your appendix. You need an operation." "When?" "Now."
He saw the surgeon next in the operating room. He'd changed out of the evening clothes into a surgical gown. "You've saved me from a very boring banquet," the surgeon said.
He didn't wake up until the next morning. Standing at the foot of the bed, along with Phoebe, were his mother and father, looking grim. Phoebe, whom they did not know (other than from Cecilia's denigrating descriptions, other than from the telephone tirades ending, "I pity this Little Miss Muffet coming after me – I honestly do pity the vile little Quaker slut!"), had phoned them and they'd immediately driven over from New Jersey. As best he could make out, a male nurse seemed to be having trouble feeding some sort of tube up his nose, or maybe the nurse was trying to extract it. He spoke his first words – "Don't fuck up!" – before falling back into unconsciousness.
His mother and father were seated in chairs when he came around again. They seemed still to be tormented and weighed down by fatigue as well.
Phoebe was in a chair beside the bed holding his hand. She was a pale, pretty young woman whose soft appearance belied her equanimity and steadfastness. She manifested no fear and allowed none in her voice.
Phoebe knew plenty about physical misery because of the severe headaches that she'd dismissed as nothing back in her twenties but that she realized were migraines when they became regular and frequent in her thirties. She was lucky enough to be able to sleep when she got one, but the moment she opened her eyes, the moment she was conscious, there it was – the incredible ache on one side of her head, the pressure in her face and her jaw, and back of her eye socket a foot on her eyeball crushing it. The migraines started with spirals of light, bright spots moving in a swirl in front of her eyes even when she closed them, and then progressed to disorientation, dizziness, pain, nausea, and vomiting. "It's nothing like being in this world," she told him afterward. "There's nothing in my body but the pressure in my head." All he could do for her was to remove the big cooking pot into which she vomited, and to clean it out in the bathroom, and then to tiptoe back into the bedroom and place it beside the bed for her to use when she was sick again. For the twenty-four or forty-eight hours that the migraine lasted, she could not stand another presence in the darkened room, any more than she could bear the thinnest sliver of light filtering in from beneath the drawn shades. And no drugs helped. None of them worked for her. Once the migraine started, there was no stopping it.
"What happened?" he asked her.
"A burst appendix. You had it for some time."
"How sick am I?" he asked weakly.
"There's a lot of peritonitis. There are drains in the wound. They're draining it. You're getting big doses of antibiotics. You're going to pull through. We're going to swim across the bay again."
That was hard to believe. Back in 1943 his father had come close to dying from undiagnosed appendicitis and severe peritonitis. He was forty-two with two young children, and he had been in the hospital – and away from his business – thirty-six days. When he got home, he was so weak he could barely make it up the one little flight to their flat, and after he'd been helped by his wife from the entry-way into the bedroom, he sat on the edge of the bed, where, for the first time in the presence of his children, he broke down and cried. Eleven years earlier, his youngest brother, Sammy, the adored favorite of eight children, had died of acute appendicitis in his third year at engineering school. He was nineteen years old, having entered college at sixteen, and his ambition was to be an aeronautical engineer. Only three of the eight children had got as far as high school, and Sammy was the first and only one to go to college. His friends were the smartest boys in the neighborhood, all of them the children of Jewish immigrants who met regularly at one another's houses to play chess and to talk heatedly about politics and philosophy. He was their leader, a runner on the track team and a mathematics whiz with a sparkling personality. It was Sammy's name that his father intoned as he sobbed in the bedroom, astonished to find himself back among the family whose provider he was.
Uncle Sammy, his father, now him – the third of them to have been felled by a burst appendix and peritonitis. While he drifted in and out of consciousness for the next two days, it was not certain whether he would meet Sammy's fate or his father's.
His brother flew in from California on the second day, and when he opened his eyes and saw him at the side of the bed, a big and gentle presence, unperturbed, confident, jolly, he thought, I cannot die while Howie is here. Howie bent over to kiss his forehead, and then no sooner did he sit down in the bedside chair and take the patient's hand than time stopped, the present disappeared, and he was returned to childhood, a small boy again, preserved from worry and fear by the generous brother who slept in the bed beside his.
Howie stayed for four days. In four days he sometimes flew to Manila and Singapore and Kuala Lumpur and back. He had started at Goldman Sachs as a runner and quickly went from relaying messages to top dog on the currency-trading desk and began investing for himself in stocks. He had ended up in currency arbitrage for multinational and large foreign corporations – winemakers in France and camera makers in West Germany and automakers in Japan, for whom he turned francs and deutsche marks and yen into dollars. He traveled frequently to meet with his clients and continued investing in companies he liked, and by thirty-two he had his first million.
Sending their parents home to rest, Howie joined with Phoebe to see him through the worst of it and prepared to fly out only after receiving the doctor's assurances that the crisis was over. On the last morning, Howie quietly said to him, "You've got a good girl this time. Don't screw it up. Don't let her go."
He thought, in his joy at having survived, Was there ever a man whose appetite for life was as contagious as Howie's? Was there ever a brother as lucky as me?
He was in the hospital for thirty days. The nurses were mostly agreeable, conscientious young women with Irish accents who seemed always to have time to chat a little when they looked in on him. Phoebe came directly from work to have dinner in his room every night; he couldn't imagine what being needy and infirm like this and facing the uncanny nature of illness would have been like without her. His brother needn't have warned him not to let her go; he was never more determined to keep anyone. Beyond his window he could see the leaves of the trees turning as the October weeks went by, and when the surgeon came around he said to him, "When am I going to get out of here? I'm missing the fall of 1967." The surgeon listened soberly, and then, with a smile, he said, "Don't you get it yet? You almost missed everything."
Twenty-two years passed. Twenty-two years of excellent health and the boundless self-assurance that flows from being fit – twenty-two years spared the adversary that is illness and the calamity that waits in the wings. As he'd reassured himself while walking under the stars on the Vineyard with Phoebe, he would worry about oblivion when he was seventy-five.
He had been driving to New Jersey after work nearly every day for over a month to see his dying father when he wound up badly short of breath in the City Athletic Club swimming pool one August evening in 1989. He had gotten back from Jersey about half an hour earlier and decided to recover his equilibrium by taking a quick swim before heading home. Ordinarily he swam a mile at the club early each morning. He barely drank, had never smoked, and weighed precisely what he'd weighed when he got home from the navy in '57 and started his first job in advertising. He knew from the ordeal with appendicitis and peritonitis that he was as liable as anyone else to falling seriously ill, but that he, with a lifelong regimen of healthful living, would end up as a candidate for cardiac surgery seemed preposterous. It was simply not how things were going to turn out.
Yet he couldn't finish the first lap without pulling over to the side and hanging there completely breathless. He got out of the pool and sat with his legs in the water trying to calm down. He was sure that the breathlessness was the result of having seen how far his father's condition had deteriorated in just the past few days. But in fact it was his that had deteriorated, and when he went to the doctor the next morning, his EKG showed radical changes that indicated severe occlusion of his major coronary arteries. Before the day was out he was in a bed in the coronary care unit of a Manhattan hospital, having been given an angiogram that determined that surgery was essential. There were oxygen prongs in his nose and he was attached by numerous leads to a cardiac monitoring machine behind his bed. The only question was whether the surgery should take place immediately or the following morning. It was by then almost eight in the evening, and so the decision was made to wait. Sometime in the night, however, he was awakened to discover his bed surrounded by doctors and nurses, just as the bed of the boy in his room had been back when he was nine. All these years he had been alive while that boy was dead – and now he was that boy.
Some sort of medication was being administered through the IV and he vaguely understood that they were trying to avert a crisis. He could not make out what they were mumbling to one another and then he must have fallen asleep, because the next he knew it was morning and he was being rolled onto a gurney to take him to the operating room.
His wife at this time – his third and his last – bore no resemblance to Phoebe and was nothing short of a hazard in an emergency. She certainly didn't inspire confidence on the morning of the surgery, when she followed beside the gurney weeping and wringing her hands and finally, uncontrollably, cried out, "What about me?"
She was young and untried and maybe she had intended to say something different, but he took it that she meant what would happen to her should he fail to survive. "One thing at a time," he told her. "First let me die. Then I'll come help you bear up."
The operation went on for seven hours. Much of that time he was connected to a heart-lung machine that pumped his blood and breathed for him. The doctors gave him five grafts, and he emerged from the surgery with a long wound down the center of his chest and another extending from his groin to his right ankle – it was from his leg that they had removed the vein from which all but one of the grafts were fashioned.
When he came around in the recovery room there was a tube down his throat that felt as though it were going to choke him to death. Having it there was horrible, but there was no way he could communicate that to the nurse who was telling him where he was and what had happened to him. He lost consciousness then, and when he came around again the tube was still there choking him to death, but now a nurse was explaining that it would be removed as soon as it was determined that he could breathe on his own. Over him next was the face of his young wife, welcoming him back to the world of the living, where he could resume looking after her.
He had left her with a single responsibility when he went into the hospital: to see that the car was taken off the street where it was parked and put into the public garage a block away. It turned out to be a task that she was too frazzled to undertake, and so, as he later learned, she'd had to ask one of his friends to do it for her. He hadn't realized how observant his cardiologist was of nonmedical matters until the man came to see him midway through his hospital stay and told him that he could not be released from the hospital if his home care was to be provided by his wife. "I don't like to have to say these things, fundamentally she's not my business, but I've watched her when she's come to visit. The woman is basically an absence and not a presence, and I have no choice but to protect my patient."
By this time Howie had arrived. He had flown in from Europe, where he'd gone to do business and also to play polo. He could ski now, skeet-shoot, and play water polo as well as polo from atop a pony, having acquired virtuosity in these activities in the great world long after he'd left his lower-middle-class high school in Elizabeth, where, along with the Irish-Catholic and Italian boys whose fathers worked on the docks at the port, he'd played football in the fall and pole-vaulted in the spring, all the while garnering grades good enough to earn him a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania and then admission to the Wharton School to earn an MBA. Though his father was dying in a hospital in New Jersey and his brother recovering from open-heart surgery in a hospital in New York – and though he spent the week traveling from the one bedside to the other – Howie's vigor never lapsed, nor did his capacity to inspire confidence. The sustenance the healthy thirty-year-old wife proved incapable of providing her ailing fifty-six-year-old husband was more than compensated for by Howie's jovial support. It was Howie who suggested hiring two private duty nurses – the daytime nurse, Maureen Mrazek, and the night nurse, Olive Parrott – to substitute for the woman he'd come to refer to as "the titanically ineffective cover girl," and then he insisted, over his brother's objections, on covering the costs himself. "You were dangerously ill, you went through hell," Howie said, "and so long as I'm around, nothing and nobody is going to impede your recovery. This is just a gift to ensure the speedy restoration of your health." They were standing together by the entrance to the room. Howie spoke with his brawny arms around his brother. Much as he preferred to appear breezily superior to the claims of sentiment, his face – a virtual replica of his brother's – could not disguise his emotions when he said, "Losing Mom and Dad I have to accept. I could never accept losing you." Then he left to find the limo that was waiting downstairs to drive him to the hospital in Jersey.
Olive Parrott, the night nurse, was a large black woman whose carriage and bearing and size reminded him of Eleanor Roosevelt. Her father owned an avocado farm in Jamaica, and her mother kept a dream book in whose pages, each morning, she recorded her children's dreams. On the nights when he was too uncomfortable to sleep, Olive sat in a chair at the foot of the bed and told him innocent tales about her life as a child on the avocado farm. She had a West Indian accent and a lovely voice, and her words soothed him as no woman's had since his mother sat and talked to him in the hospital after the hernia operation. Except for the questions that he asked Olive, he remained silent, deliriously contented to be alive. It turned out that they'd caught him just in time: when he was admitted to the hospital, his coronary arteries were anywhere from ninety to ninety-five percent occluded and he'd been on the verge of a massive and probably fatal heart attack.
Maureen was a buxom, smiling redhead who had grown up something of a roughneck in an Irish-Slavic family in the Bronx and had a blunt way of talking that was fueled by the self-possession of a working-class toughie. The mere sight of her raised his spirits when she arrived in the morning, even though the postsurgical exhaustion was so severe that merely shaving – and not even shaving standing up but while sitting in a chair – tired him out, and he had to return to bed for a long nap after taking his first walk down the hospital corridor with her at his side. Maureen was the one who called his father's doctor for him and kept him informed of the dying man's condition until he had the strength to talk to the doctor himself.
It had been decided peremptorily by Howie that when he left the hospital Maureen and Olive would look after him (again at Howie's expense) for at least his first two weeks at home. His wife was not consulted, and she resented the arrangement and the implication that she was unable to care for him on her own. She particularly resented Maureen, who herself did little to hide her contempt for the patient's wife.
At home it was more than three weeks before the exhaustion began to diminish and he felt ready even to consider returning to work. After dinner he had to go back to bed for the evening simply from the effort of eating sitting up in a chair, and in the morning he had to remain seated on a plastic stool to wash himself in the shower. He began to do mild calisthenics with Maureen and tried each day to add another ten yards to the afternoon walk he took with her. Maureen had a boyfriend whom she talked about – a TV cameraman whom she expected to marry once he found a permanent job – and when she got off work at the end of the day, she liked to have a couple of drinks with the neighborhood regulars in a bar around the corner from where she lived in Yorkville. The weather was beautiful, and so when they walked outdoors he got a good look at how she carried herself in her close-fitting polo shirts and short skirts and summer sandals. Men looked her over all the time, and she was not averse to staring someone down with mock belligerence if she was being ostentatiously ogled. Her presence at his side made him feel stronger by the day, and he would come home from the walks delighted with everything, except, of course, with the jealous wife, who would slam doors and sometimes barge out of the apartment only moments after he and Maureen had swept in.
He was not the first patient to fall in love with his nurse. He was not even the first patient to fall in love with Maureen. She'd had several affairs over the years, a few of them with men rather worse off than he was, who, like him, made a full recovery with the help of Maureen's vitality. Her gift was to make the ill hopeful, so hopeful that instead of closing their eyes to blot out the world, they opened them wide to behold her vibrant presence, and were rejuvenated.
Maureen came along to New Jersey when his father died. He was still not allowed to drive, so she volunteered and helped Howie make the arrangements with Kreitzer's Memorial Home in Union. His father had become religious in the last ten years of his life and, after having retired and having lost his wife, had taken to going to the synagogue at least once a day. Long before his final illness, he'd asked his rabbi to conduct his burial service entirely in Hebrew, as though Hebrew were the strongest answer that could be accorded death. To his father's younger son the language meant nothing. Along with Howie, he'd stopped taking Judaism seriously at thirteen – the Sunday after the Saturday of his bar mitzvah – and had not set foot since then in a synagogue. He'd even left the space for religion blank on his hospital admission form, lest the word "Jewish" prompt a visit to his room by a rabbi, come to talk in the way rabbis talk. Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life, and he found all religions offensive, considered their superstitious folderol meaningless, childish, couldn't stand the complete unadultness – the baby talk and the righteousness and the sheep, the avid believers. No hocus-pocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him. There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us. If he could be said to have located a philosophical niche for himself, that was it – he'd come upon it early and intuitively, and however elemental, that was the whole of it. Should he ever write an autobiography, he'd call it The Life and Death of a Male Body. But after retiring he tried becoming a painter, not a writer, and so he gave that title to a series of his abstractions.
But none of what he did or didn't believe mattered on the day that his father was buried beside his mother in the rundown cemetery just off the Jersey Turnpike.
Over the gate through which the family entered into the original acreage of the old nineteenth-century cemetery was an arch with the cemetery association's name inscribed in Hebrew; at either end of the arch was carved a six-pointed star. The stone of the gate's two pillars had been badly broken and chipped away – by time and by vandals – and a crooked iron gate with a rusted lock hadn't to be pushed open in order to enter but was half off its hinges and embedded several inches in the ground. Nor had the stone of the obelisk that they passed – inscribed with Hebrew scripture and the names of the family buried at the foot of its plinth – weathered the decades well either. At the head of the crowded rows of upright gravestones stood the old section's one small brick mausoleum, whose filigreed steel door and original two windows – which, at the time of the interment of its occupants, would have been colored with stained glass – had been sealed with concrete blocks to protect against further vandalism, so that now the little square building looked more like an abandoned toolshed or an outdoor toilet no longer in operation than an eternal dwelling place in keeping with the renown, wealth, or status of those who'd constructed it to house their family dead. Slowly they passed between the upright gravestones that were mainly inscribed with Hebrew but that in some cases also bore words in Yiddish, Russian, German, even Hungarian. Most were engraved with the Star of David while others were more elaborately decorated, with a pair of blessing hands or a pitcher or a five-branched candelabrum. At the graves of the young children and infants – and there were more than a handful, though not as many as those of young women who'd died in their twenties, more than likely during childbirth – they came upon an occasional gravestone topped with the sculpture of a lamb or decorated with an engraving in the shape of a tree trunk with its upper half sawed away, and as they headed in single file through the crooked, uneven, narrow pathways of the original cemetery toward the newer, parklike northern spaces, where the funeral was to take place, it was possible – in just this little Jewish cemetery, founded in a field on the border of Elizabeth and Newark by, among others, the community-minded father of the late owner of Elizabeth's most beloved jewelry store – to count how many had perished when influenza killed ten million in 1918.
Nineteen eighteen: only one of the terrible years among the plethora of corpse-strewn anni horribiles that will blacken the memory of the twentieth century forever.
He stood at the graveside among some two dozen of his relatives, with his daughter at his right, clutching his hand, and his two sons behind him and his wife to the side of his daughter. Merely standing there absorbing the blow that is the death of a father proved to be a surprising challenge to his physical strength – it was a good thing Howie was beside him on the left, one arm holding him firmly around his waist, to prevent anything untoward from happening.
It had never been difficult to know what to make of either his mother or his father. They were a mother and a father. They were imbued with few other desires. But the space taken up by their bodies was now vacant. Their lifelong substantiality was gone. His father's coffin, a plain pine box, was lowered on its straps into the hole that had been dug for him beside his wife's coffin. There the dead man would remain for even more hours than he'd spent selling jewelry, and that was in itself no number to sneer at. He had opened the store in 1933, the year his second son was born, and got rid of it in 1974, having by then sold engagement and wedding rings to three generations of Elizabeth families. How he scrounged up the capital in 1933, how he found customers in 1933, was always a mystery to his sons. But it was for them that he had left his job behind the watch counter at Abelson's Irving-ton store on Springfield Avenue, where he worked nine a.m. to nine p.m. Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and nine to five on Tuesdays and Thursdays, to open his own little Elizabeth store, fifteen feet wide, with the inscription in black lettering on the display window that read, from day one, "Diamonds – Jewelry – Watches," and in smaller letters beneath, "Fine watch, clock, and jewelry repair." At the age of thirty-two he finally set out to work sixty and seventy hours a week for his family instead of for Moe Abelson's. To lure Elizabeth's big working-class population and to avoid alienating or frightening away the port city's tens of thousands of churchgoing Christians with his Jewish name, he extended credit freely – just made sure they paid at least thirty or forty percent down. He never checked their credit; as long as he got his cost out of it, they could come in afterward and pay a few dollars a week, even nothing, and he really didn't care. He never went broke with credit, and the good will generated by his flexibility was more than worth it. He decorated the shop with a few silver-plated pieces to make it attractive – tea sets, trays, chafing dishes, candlesticks that he sold dirt cheap – and at Christmastime he always had a snow scene with Santa in the window, but the stroke of genius was to call the business not by his name but rather Everyman's Jewelry Store, which was how it was known throughout Union County to the swarms of ordinary people who were his faithful customers until he sold his inventory to the wholesaler and retired at the age of seventy-three. "It's a big deal for working people to buy a diamond," he told his sons, "no matter how small. The wife can wear it for the beauty and she can wear it for the status. And when she does, this guy is not just a plumber – he's a man with a wife with a diamond. His wife owns something that is imperishable. Because beyond the beauty and the status and the value, the diamond is imperishable. A piece of the earth that is imperishable, and a mere mortal is wearing it on her hand!" The reason for leaving Abelson's, where he'd still been lucky enough to be collecting a paycheck through the crash and into the worst years of the Depression, the reason for daring to open a store of his own in such bad times, was simple: to everyone who asked, and even to those who didn't, he explained, "I had to have something to leave my two boys."
There were two upright shovels with their blades in the large pile of earth to one side of the grave. He had thought they had been left there by the gravediggers, who would use them later to fill the grave. He had imagined that, as at his mother's funeral, each mourner would step up to the hole to throw a clump of dirt onto the coffin's lid, after which they would all depart for their cars. But his father had requested of the rabbi the traditional Jewish rites, and those, he now discovered, called for burial by the mourners and not by employees of the cemetery or anyone else. The rabbi had told Howie beforehand, but Howie, for whatever reason, hadn't told him, and so he was surprised now when his brother, handsomely dressed in a dark suit, a white shirt, a dark tie, and shining black shoes, walked over to pull one of the shovels out of the pile, and then set out to fill the blade until it was brimming with dirt. Then he walked ceremoniously to the head of the grave, stood there a moment to think his thoughts, and, angling the shovel downward a little, let the dirt run slowly out. Upon landing on the wood cover of the coffin, it made the sound that is absorbed into one's being like no other. Howie returned to plunge the blade of the shovel into the crumbling pyramid of dirt that stood about four feet high. They were going to have to shovel that dirt back into the hole until his father's grave was level with the adjacent cemetery grounds.
It took close to an hour to move the dirt. The elderly among the relatives and friends, unable to wield a shovel, helped by throwing fistfuls of dirt onto the coffin, and he himself could do no more than that, and so it fell to Howie and Howie's four sons and his own two – the six of them all strapping men in their late twenties and early thirties – to do the heavy labor. In teams of two they stood beside the pile and, spadeful by spadeful, moved the dirt from the pile back into the hole. Every few minutes another team took over, and it seemed to him, at one point, as though this task would never end, as though they would be there burying his father forever. The best he could do to be as immersed in the burial's brutal directness as his brother, his sons, and his nephews was to stand at the edge of the grave and watch as the dirt encased the coffin. He watched till it reached the lid, which was decorated only with a carving of the Star of David, and then he watched as it began to cover the lid. His father was going to lie not only in the coffin but under the weight of that dirt, and all at once he saw his father's mouth as if there were no coffin, as if the dirt they were throwing into the grave was being deposited straight down on him, filling up his mouth, blinding his eyes, clogging his nostrils, and closing off his ears. He wanted to tell them to stop, to command them to go no further – he did not want them to cover his father's face and block the passages through which he sucked in life. I've been looking at that face since I was born – stop burying my father's face! But they had found their rhythm, these strong boys, and they couldn't stop and they wouldn't stop, not even if he hurled himself into the grave and demanded that the burial come to a halt. Nothing could stop them now. They would just keep going, burying him, too, if that was necessary to get the job done. Howie was off to the side, his brow covered with sweat, watching the six cousins athletically complete the job, with the goal in sight shoveling at a terrific pace, not like mourners assuming the burden of an archaic ritual but like old-fashioned workmen feeding a furnace with fuel.
Many of the elderly were weeping now and holding on to each other. The pyramid of dirt was gone. The rabbi stepped forward and, after carefully smoothing the surface with his bare hands, used a stick to delineate in the loose soil the dimensions of the grave.
He had watched his father's disappearance from the world inch by inch. He had been forced to follow it right to the end. It was like a second death, one no less awful than the first. Suddenly he was remembering the rush of emotion that carried him down and down into the layers of his life when, at the hospital, his father had picked up each of the three infant grandchildren for the first time, pondering Randy, then later Lonny, then finally Nancy with the same expressive gaze of baffled delight.
"Are you all right?" Nancy asked, putting her arms around him while he stood and looked at the lines the stick had made in the soil, drawn there as if for a children's game. He squeezed her tightly to him and said, "Yes, I'm all right." Then he sighed, even laughed, when he said, "Now I know what it means to be buried. I didn't till today." "I've never seen anything so chilling in my life," Nancy said. "Nor have I," he told her. "It's time to go," he said, and with him and Nancy and Howie in the lead, the mourners slowly departed, though he could not begin to empty himself of all that he'd just seen and thought, the mind circling back even as the feet walked away.