Everyman

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 di

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 a