“Of course,” said the man. “Well, we do have a spot on Sunday afternoon.”
Aaron was zipped up in a black bag and placed on a wheeled stretcher, then steered out by two silent men, the discrepancy in their heights comical, their clothing almost theatrically grim: shabby black suits, white gloves like footmen. One wore a fur cap; the other, the little one, a yellowed straw fedora with a grimy brim and stained brown hat band. Ernie, the doorman on duty, had come up to say goodbye; the grumpy super, too. He was a fine man, said the super. A gentleman, said the doorman. They stood with bowed heads while the family wailed in anarchic waves of hysteria and grief that emanated from every side of the room, then bounced back from the walls, rolling, echoing, as the little girls clutched their mother’s waist and Coco said shrilly, desperately, “Who wants cake, I brought cake.”
That was how Molly remembered it. Joy didn’t remember it at all.
Wanda and the hospice nurse stripped the hospital bed. They pushed it against the wall. Joy refused to go into the room. The room did not exist without Aaron.
She went into the hall bathroom, which Aaron had used as his own. Wipes and pads and pouches in boxes. Creams and lotions and powders. Tubes and rubber gloves. Where would she put them? Aaron was in a refrigerator on Madison Avenue, but what about all of Aaron’s supplies? They would not be buried with him, he was not King Tut and they were not treasures. They were garbage. Expensive garbage. How sad that she had all these costly medical supplies and no one to use them. Most of the boxes had not even been opened.
“Daniel, quick! Look on your phone. Where can I donate? I have colostomy pouches. Perfectly good! Someone needs them! Hurry! I have to donate!”
That was what Joy remembered.
She rushed to the phone and said, “Operator! Dial the hospital. I have urgent equipment to donate.” Daniel took the phone from her hand gently. “The operators aren’t there anymore, Mom. No more operators, remember?”
“She’s in shock,” Molly said.
“Should I slap her?” Cora asked.
“That will not be necessary,” her father said.
Ben came in the unlocked front door and saw immediately that he was too late.
“He’s gone,” Molly said. “Oh, Ben, he’s gone.”
He put his arms around her and they both cried.
Joy called her friends to let them know. Natalie first. She always called Natalie when something happened, good or bad. Sixty-five years of good and bad, and now this, which was very bad. She called Natalie to tell her, just as she had called Natalie when she was married to a man who was alive instead of to this man who was dead. She told Natalie Aaron died. She listened as Natalie said such nice things about Aaron. She stopped listening and took comfort in the voice, the same voice, hoarse with cigarettes, that had been bossing her around since college, that had bossed her around during all those days and weeks and months of Daniel’s illness, through the depths of Aaron’s financial ruin, through chemo appointments, the voice that inevitably called to cancel lunch dates and dinner dates and any date that involved the pleasant, the unnecessary, the routine encounters of a social life, but never failed her when things got tough.
“Oh, them,” Natalie said when Joy mentioned the funeral home where Aaron now lay. “They’re crooks. They’re all crooks. I plan to be cremated and set in a tin box on my own mantelpiece next to my mother and father and dog and two cats in their tin boxes. Now, let me think. I read something. A nonprofit funeral home on the West Side. Community-based and nonprofit…”
Joy imagined a community center, a rec room with Ping-Pong tables and battered metal folding chairs. “That sounds horrible. Like they hand out cheese sandwiches. Oh, I don’t care anyway. He’s gone. What does it matter?”
As soon as she said it, Joy knew it did matter, that it was all that mattered, there was nothing else. The funeral was Aaron’s funeral, the last thing she could do for him. She had to do it properly. Not just properly, but perfectly, in just exactly the way she suddenly and clearly visualized it: “There will be a violinist. The violinist will play klezmer as people file in.”
“It’s not a wedding,” Molly said.
“Never mind your sarcasm, Molly.”
“I know what you mean, Mom,” Danny said. “Sad, beautiful, Yiddish melodies.”
“Why not get a string quartet? They could wear white tie,” Molly muttered. “While you’re at it.”
For a fleeting moment Joy saw the string quartet, three men in evening dress and a woman in a black gown—the violist, probably—before the tone of Molly’s voice registered, and Joy began to cry.