Funerals

Mrs Abelson was buried on the Monday, a week after, on Long Island, in a cemetery off the parkway where her husband was, and her parents, and her father who had stood her on a box behind the counter at fifteen to make change.

Tom went on the train. He went in his own clothes, a dark suit, the one he had bought for his grandfather’s funeral and worn twice since, and a black tie, a real one, which his mother had tied for him in the kitchen in Bay Ridge that morning because his fingers still could not, and stood back from, and looked at, and said nothing about.

He did not know where it was. He knew because of the paper.

On Thursday, when the flowers were carried down off the steps outside the station and laid round the booth, somebody had come down the Vanderbilt stairs with a sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve and taped it to the brass of the booth, at the height of a person’s eyes, among the photographs. It was typed. It said that the funeral of Ida Abelson, 71, would be held on Monday 8 May at eleven o’clock at the cemetery, and gave the name of it, and the way from the station, and at the bottom, in the same square hand as the card on the folded paper on the step, Her customers are welcome. She would have wanted to know you came.

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There were about forty of them.

He did not count; he knew. He stood at the edge of the small crowd by the grave, on the grass, in the sun, under a tree that was the same thin new green as the trees on the side streets in Bay Ridge and the trees of the park at the junction, and looked at them, and he knew. There was the family at the front, by the grave, a man of fifty with grey hair and a face like hers, and his wife, and three teenagers in dark clothes that did not fit them, and an old woman in a wheelchair. And behind them, in no order, standing on the grass apart from each other, not together, not talking, forty people.

He knew some of them by sight.

The man in the dark blue raincoat who bought his coffee at five to seven at the stand by the Vanderbilt stairs and drank it standing up. In the raincoat, though it was warm. A thin woman with very straight grey hair whom he had seen at the newsstand every morning at a quarter past eight buying chewing gum and the business pages. Two men in work clothes, from one of the trades, who had come off a job for it; they had dust on their boots. A very old man with a stick, whom he had seen take his paper from under the counter every morning at eight exactly for two years and say something to Mrs Abelson that made her laugh. A girl of twenty with a nose ring. A man in a turban. A nun.

And the small grey woman with the tartan trolley.

She was standing at the back, under the tree, in a black coat, with the trolley beside her, its handle in her hand. He had seen her go down the Lexington passage every Monday and Thursday at seven for two years, with the wheels squeaking, and never seen her come back. She had come back. She had come here, to Long Island, on the train, with the trolley, and was standing under the tree with it, and she was crying, very quietly, without moving her face.

He did not know any of their names. They did not know his. None of them knew each other’s. They had stood at the same counter every morning for years, one at a time, and taken a paper folded in half and in half again the long way from under it, and put down their money, and been told who won the hockey, and gone; and they had not, any of them, ever stood in the same place at the same time until now.

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He could hear some of it. Not the words. The rabbi was too far and too quiet. But he could hear that there were words, a voice, going up and down, low, the way you hear a radio in the next room; and he could hear, when they began to fill the grave, which the family did first and then anybody who wanted to, one at a time, with a spade, the earth.

He heard the earth go onto the box. That came through the wall. A hollow thump, flat and far off, and then another.

He did not take the spade. He watched the forty take it. The man in the raincoat. The thin woman. The old man with the stick, who could barely lift it, and the son came round the grave and put his hands over the old man’s hands on the handle and they did it together. The small grey woman with the tartan trolley, who let go of the trolley’s handle and took the spade’s handle instead, and put earth on the box, and gave the spade to the man in the turban, and took her trolley back.

Afterwards the son went round them.

One at a time. Tom watched him do it, from the edge, under the tree. The son went round the forty strangers on the grass and shook each of their hands and said something to each of them, the same thing, Tom could see from his mouth that it was the same, thank you for coming, how did you know my mother; and each of them said something back. And the son’s face, as he went round, changed. It started like a man doing a thing that has to be done. By the tenth it was something else.

He came to Tom.

He shook his hand. Tom saw his mouth. Thank you for coming. How did you know my mother?

Tom said it. He did not know how loud. He said it the way the others had, because he had seen their mouths, all forty of them, say it, and it was the right thing, and it was what he had to say.

“She kept me one.”

The son looked at him. At his face; at the dressing on his neck; at the bandage on his hand, which the son was still holding.

He said something. Tom did not catch it. Then he said it again, close, and loud, because he had seen the dressing and understood, and Tom caught it.

…every one of you. Every one of you has said that.

He held on to Tom’s hand for a moment longer. Then he let go and went to the next.

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Nico was at the gate.

He was outside it, on the pavement by the railings, where the road came in from the parkway, with his fiddle case at his feet, not open, and he was in a white shirt and black trousers, the way somebody would dress who wanted to look right and did not own a suit. Tom saw him from the path as the forty came down it from the grave in ones and twos, not together, towards the gate and the road and the station.

Nico saw him too. He lifted one hand.

He did not come in. He waited until they had all come down the path and out through the gate, the family last, the son pushing the old woman in the wheelchair; and when the family had come out onto the pavement and stopped, by the cars, Nico knelt down and opened the case and took out the fiddle, very carefully, the way you put a child in a cot, and stood up, and tuned it, two strings, four, with his head on one side, and looked at the son.

The son looked back at him. He did not know who he was. Then he looked at the fiddle, and at the boy’s white shirt, and seemed to understand something, and nodded.

Nico put it under his chin.

He played the third one.

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Tom heard it.

Not all of it. Not the high part. He heard the low strings. He heard the place where it went down, a long way down, into the bottom of the fiddle, where it sounded like a man’s voice; that came through. Flat, and far off, and through a wall and down a long corridor, with the edges gone. But it came. The first music he had heard since a quarter past twelve on the first of May, when the band behind the old red banner had been playing something old, faintly, behind him and Frank at the steward line.

Then it went up. He watched it go up. He watched Nico’s bow arm go and his fingers go up the neck of the fiddle, very high, and stop there, and hold, and he could not hear the note at all. Not a sound. He watched Nico hold one note on the fiddle, outside the gate of a cemetery on Long Island in the sun, for a long time, so long that the forty strangers on the pavement who had been going towards the station stopped and turned round, every one of them, to see what had stopped, and stood there, and did not move; and he could not hear it. He could see it in their faces.

Nico took the bow off the string.

Nobody put money in the case. Nobody laughed. The son stood by the car with his hands on the handles of the wheelchair and looked at the boy with the fiddle for a long time, and then he came across the pavement and shook his hand too.

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Dwyer was buried on the Tuesday, from the church in Woodside where he had been baptised.

The City buried its own the way it always had. Tom had been to two before, as a probationer, in the back, and had not understood them, and understood this one. The street outside the church was closed, and lined, both sides, the whole length of it, with the City’s police in their dress uniforms, the dark blue tunics and the white gloves, a thousand of them, from every house in the city, standing in two lines facing each other across the empty road at attention; and in the middle of the road, in front of the church door, the pipes and drums, in their kilts and their bonnets, the men from the society, with the pipes under their arms and the drums on their chests, waiting.

He stood in the line. The Fifty-First Street house had the place nearest the door. Teresa was beside him, in her dress uniform, with her white gloves, very straight.

The hearse came up the street between the lines, slowly. It stopped at the church door. The doors at the back of it opened.

He could not hear the pipes.

He saw them start. He saw the pipe major’s mace go up and the pipers’ arms go in on the bags and their cheeks go and the drones on their shoulders, and he could not hear one note. But he felt the drum. The big drum at the back, on the chest of a man of fifty with a face like Costello’s, and the beat of it came up through the road, through his shoes, through his legs, into his chest, under the dress tunic, slow, one, and one, and one, like a heart, and he stood in the line at attention with his white gloves at his sides and felt it beat in him.

Six men lifted the coffin out of the hearse. It had the City’s flag over it, the blue and white and orange of the old Dutch city with the seal in the middle, and Dwyer’s hat on top of it, his dress hat, with the badge.

Costello was one of the six. At the front, on the left. He was the shortest of them by a head, and the coffin sat on his shoulder lower than on anybody else’s, and his face like a fist did not move at all as they carried it up the steps between the lines and into the church, slowly, in step with the drum.

Behind the coffin, Dwyer’s mother. A big soft fair woman of sixty with Dwyer’s face, in black, on the arm of a man who must have been his father, and behind them, in a wheelchair, pushed by a nurse in a Beekman uniform, with one leg out straight in front of him in a cast to the hip and his dress tunic on over a hospital gown, Ostrowski.

He went past Tom in the line. He looked up at him from the wheelchair. Small and dark and from Greenpoint and the most silent officer in the house. He did not say anything. He lifted one white-gloved hand off the arm of the wheelchair, and turned it, flat, palm down, and moved it a little from side to side, the way Dwyer had said he would, on Monday morning at twenty-five past six, under the rota, delighted. I’ll wave at your brother.

Then he was past, and in.

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Afterwards, on the street, when the coffin had gone to the cemetery and the lines had broken up, there was a cart.

It was at the corner. A silver cart with a striped umbrella over it and a steaming tray, and a man in it of about sixty, in a transport workers’ union jacket, with a paper hat on, and in front of the cart there was a queue, of the City’s police, in their dress uniforms and their white gloves, a long one, all the way back down the street.

He gave each of them a hot dog. For nothing. Tom saw him do it.

He saw Teresa see it. He saw her face.

He went and stood in the queue. When he got to the front the man in the paper hat looked at him, at the dressing and the bandages and the white gloves, and gave him a hot dog, in a bun, with mustard, without asking, and said something.

Tom did not catch it. The man saw that, and leaned out over the tray, and said it again, close, loud, and Tom heard it.

…BECAUSE IT ANNOYS THE STEWARDS.

At the edge of the crowd at the corner, three men in work jackets with armbands on their sleeves, stewards, from the transport column, who had come to bury a constable who had walked beside their march every first of May for nine years and taken their hot dogs, looked at the cart, and at the queue of police in front of it in their white gloves, and one of them laughed, out loud, with his head back, and put his hand over his face, and did not take it away.

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Walter Odom was buried on the Thursday from a Baptist church in the Bronx, a brick church on a hill with white wooden doors and a sign outside with movable letters on it that said WALTER ODOM 1948 TO 2006 HE CARRIED THE BAGS.

The Red Caps were there. All of them, Tom thought; every porter AmRail had, from Grand Central and from Penn and from the stations up the river. They sat together, in the front pews on the right, forty or fifty of them, in their dark jackets with the crest on the pocket, and every one of them had his red cap in his lap, with the badge facing up.

Tom sat at the back.

He could not hear the choir. He could see it. Thirty people in purple robes on a platform behind the pulpit, swaying, with their mouths open and their heads back, and the whole church swaying with them, every pew, the Red Caps in the front swaying, and he sat at the back and could not hear one note, and he could feel the floor. The old wooden floor of the church on the hill, moving under his feet, very slightly, with the weight of three hundred people swaying on it at once, in time.

Mrs Odom found him afterwards, on the steps.

She was a small round woman of fifty-five in a black dress and a black hat with a veil on it, which she had put back, and she came down the steps through the people towards him, straight at him, the way his mother came down a corridor, and stopped in front of him and looked up.

She knew who he was. He did not know how. She looked at his face, and at the dressing, and at the bandage on his hand, and she put her own hand on his arm, on the sleeve, where Frank’s fist had been, and Dinny Shea’s, and the porter’s at Bellevue, and Mr Hrynko’s, and said something.

He pointed at his ears.

She looked at them. Her face did a thing. Then she reached up and pulled his head down, a long way down, with her hand on the back of his neck, until her mouth was at his left ear, and said it there, loud, in an accent from an island in the sun, and he heard it.

…he RANG me.

He waited.

…TEN PAST TEN. MONDAY. FROM THE TELEPHONE BY THE LOWER LEVEL. She held his head down. …THIRTY-ONE YEARS HE NEVER RANG ME AT WORK. NOT ONCE. HE RANG ME TO SAY THE KNEE WAS BETTER. HE SAID SHE WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE ICE. A breath. …HE SAID THE YOUNG POLICEMAN LET THE FIDDLER PLAY.

She let go of his head.

He straightened up. He looked at her. She was looking up at him, with her veil put back, and her face was wet, and she was not doing anything about it, and she was not going to.

She put her hand on his arm again, and patted it, once, flat. Then she turned round and went back up the steps of the church to the Red Caps, who were waiting for her at the white wooden doors in a row with their caps on now, all of them, straight, with the badges facing out.