Molly made up with her mother within minutes. Of course she did, and she didn’t need Freddie to open her eyes in that exaggerated way to get her to apologize, either, for heaven’s sake.
Joy was now in a terrible state, trying to decide whether or not to change funeral homes. Another friend had been to the rec-room funeral home and said it was lovely, the downstairs chapel in particular, all wood, like a Reform synagogue from the sixties.
She decided to move Aaron. They had been so happy on the West Side. When the Madison Avenue funeral home told her what they would charge even if the West Side funeral home came and got Aaron that afternoon, Joy said, “That’s highway robbery. I would not bury a fly at your funeral home,” and arrangements were made to strike camp and head to the West Side.
The funeral director on the West Side extolled the virtues of a nonprofit funeral home just as if he were selling them a fur coat. Ladies, ladies, he said, when Molly took Joy there to take a look, we will take care of everything. Our reputation is how we survive. A plain pine coffin? Of course, of course, every size, immediately available. A rabbi? Naturally a rabbi, and not just any rabbi, a wonderful man, tops, a top rabbi.
“It was very sudden,” Joy said, “and yet not sudden at all. Do you understand?”
The funeral director sighed and looked at that moment not like a funeral director or a furrier but like a human being. “I do,” he said. “I’m afraid I do.” He put his hand across the desk, across the price lists to be perused and the papers to be signed, and he patted Joy’s hand.
Her eyes full of tears, Joy gave a small smile. “You will have a coatrack,” she said, “in case it rains?”
25
Some people had implied, even said outright, that it would be a relief for Joy when Aaron died. Tactless, Molly had thought then. But now that her father was gone, she wondered. The stress of looking after Aaron had been so fierce. Without it, Joy seemed calmer, softer. Even on the phone from California, Molly could sense it, as if her mother’s voice, her whole temperament, were gently muted.
Daniel, who went to see Joy every day after work, confirmed this.
“How is she?” Molly asked him. She often called when she knew he would be at the apartment.
Daniel, phone to his ear, poked his mother, who sat beside him at the dining-room table. “Mom,” he said, “Molly wants to know how you are.”
“As well as can be expected,” said Joy.
He nodded. It had been three weeks. “As well as can be expected,” he said into the phone.
“Oh good!”
He wasn’t sure what was to be expected in three weeks, but he did not say that to Molly. It was hard for her, being so far away. It was hard for him, too, being so close.
Joy had been quiet in those three weeks. She didn’t complain. It was almost as if Aaron’s death were a liberation, once the funeral and all the hubbub associated with it were over, if a sad smile and general acquiescence to everything Daniel said or proposed meant liberation. He hoped it did. Yes, he was sure it did.
When he told his mother he had to get home, he saw her panic for a second. Then she said, “Off you go.”
“Sorry I can’t stay for dinner.”
Joy looked confused, as if dinner were a rarely performed ritual.
“Maybe tomorrow,” Daniel said.
“Tomorrow?”
Joy shuffled in her slippers to the front door.
“Mom, are you okay? Really?” He held both her hands and kissed the top of her head from what appeared to him a great distance. She seemed to have decreased. Not just in height, but in volume.
“Absolutely.”
“Oh. Okay. Good. You’re a trooper.”
“Absolutely,” she said.
26
Molly called her mother every day, which was admirable, Freddie thought, and often inconvenient, happening when they both got home from work and should, theoretically, have been talking to each other. Freddie called her father, of course, but not as frequently. Often, when she did call, he wasn’t in his room. He was a social person and he had found several of the ladies of Green Garden willing to be social with him. Her father was so social, Freddie told Joy, that the social worker at Green Garden seemed to devote a good portion of her working life to him. So when Freddie got a call from the social worker telling her that Duncan was feuding with a woman in a room down the hall, Freddie was not surprised.
“He’s become verbally abusive,” the social worker said.
“Oh, that.” Freddie breathed a sigh of relief. “Yes, he told me there’s a lady who shouts at him when he walks by her door.”
“His language is out of bounds.”
“Did he call her a crusty botch of nature? That was always one of his favorites.”
“I don’t think you understand how serious this is. It’s disturbing the entire facility.”
“But that’s from Troilus and Cressida.”