Death Wish

Jack said, “At least they could talk to us. Damn it, how much would it cost them to send someone out here for a minute and a half to tell us what’s going on?”

Paul stirred. “You’re sure they know we’re out here?”

“I talked to the doctor when we got here. He knows.”

“Well, I suppose he’s got a lot of emergencies back there.”

“He could send somebody.”

It was childish and Jack seemed to realize that; he subsided. Paul slumped back against the wall and watched smoke curl up from the cigarette. “What’s this doctor like?”

“Young. I suppose he’s a resident.”

“I wish we could have got Doctor Rosen.”

“They’re always out of town when you need them. The son of a bitch is probably playing golf in Putnam County.”

“In this heat?”

Jack waved his cigarette furiously; it was his only reply.

Paul had taken a long time to warm to his son-in-law; he still felt uncomfortable with him. Jack came from New Mexico, he regarded the city as a reformer’s personal challenge, he approached everything with humorless earnestness. What a strange way to think at a time like this. If ever there was a time to take things seriously.… Perhaps it was because he needed an object for his rage and Jack was at hand.

Carol had sprung Jack on them: an elopement, the marriage a fait accompli. Esther had always set a lot of store by ceremony; her unhappiness had fueled Paul’s dislike for the young man. There had been no need for them to elope, no one had prohibited the marriage; but they had their own ideas—they claimed they’d run away to save Paul and Esther the expense of a big wedding; actually it was more likely that they simply thought it a romantic thing to do. They had been married by a Justice of the Peace without friends or family present. What was romantic about that?

Carol had gone on working as a secretary for the first three years to support them in a Dyckman Street walkup while Jack finished law school at Columbia. It had made things hard for Paul and Esther because there was no way to be sure how much help to give them. They had the pride of youthful independence and accepted things with graceless reluctance as if they were doing you a favor by accepting help from you. Perhaps they felt they were. But Paul had spent twenty-three years being unapologetically protective toward his only child and it wasn’t easy to understand her cheerful acceptance of that Dyckman Street squalor. The kind of place you couldn’t keep cockroaches out of. Fortunately when Jack had passed the Bar exams and got the job with Legal Aid they had moved down to the West Village to be nearer his office; the apartment was one of the old railroad flats but at least it was more cheerful.

Jack had the zeal of his generation. His dedications were more compassionate than pecuniary; he was never going to be wealthy but he would support Carol well enough; probably in time they’d buy a small house on Long Island and raise babies. In the end Paul had accepted it all, accepted Jack—because there was nothing else to do, because Carol seemed content, and because he began to realize it was lucky she hadn’t taken up with a long-haired radical or a freaked-out group of commune crazies. She had the temperament for it: she was bright, quick, pert, impatient, and she subscribed to a good deal of anti-Establishment sentiment. Probably she had tried various drugs in college during her two years of student activism; she had never volunteered a confession and Paul had never asked. She had a good mind but her weakness was a tendency to be sold by the last person who talked to her: sometimes she was too eager to be agreeable. Jack Tobey probably exercised exactly the kind of steadying influence she required. It would be silly to hold out for more than that.

Jack wore glasses with heavy black frames across his beaky nose; he was dark and shaggy and he dressed with vast indifference—most of the time you found him in the jacket he was wearing now, a hairy tweed the color of cigarette ashes. Scuffed brown shoes and a bland tie at half-mast with his shirt open at the collar. Paul had seen him in action in the courtroom and it had been one of the few times he recalled seeing the kid in a business suit; afterward Carol had explained that Jack made the concession to decorum only because he had got to know the judges and their habit of exercising their prejudicial sarcasms on unkempt young defense attorneys.

… A plump young man in white appeared at the door and it made Jack stiffen with evident recognition. The doctor located him and came forward. “Your wife will be all right.” He was talking to Jack.

Paul stood up slowly and Jack said, “How’s my mother-in-law, Doctor?” in a voice that presupposed the answer.

Paul cleared his throat. “May I see her?”

The doctor’s head skewed around. “You’re Mr. Benjamin? Sorry, I didn’t know.” It was an apology without contrition. The doctor seemed jaded; his voice was rusty, tired beyond any expression of emotion. He seemed to need to ration his feelings.

“I don’t——” The doctor’s round young face tipped down. “Mrs. Benjamin is dead. I’m sorry.”

4

At the funeral he was still in a dark fugue, a dulled pervading unreality.

It was the wrong day for a funeral. The heat had dissipated, the inversion layer had gone somewhere; it was a mild day filled with sunshine and comfort. Funerals had a rainy association for Paul and the chiseled clarity of Friday’s air made the incidents even less real.

That first night—Esther had died Tuesday—they had sedated him and he only vaguely remembered the taxi ride to Jack’s apartment. Jack had given him the bed and in the morning Paul had found him in the living room on the couch, smoking, drinking coffee; Jack hadn’t slept at all.

Paul had emerged from his drugged sleep neither rested nor alert. The unfamiliar surroundings heightened his sense of existential surrealism: it was as if he had been born fully grown half an hour before, into an alien world of meaningless artifice. He had forgotten nothing; but when he found Jack in the living room and they began to talk, it was as if they were actors who had sat in these same places and said the same lines so many times that the words had lost all intrinsic meaning.

The city coroners had sent someone around to obtain Jack’s signature on an autopsy-permission form which Jack disagreeably pointed out was a senseless absurdity since in crimes of violence that resulted in death it was automatic to perform a postmortem examination. The Medical Examiner had a

Trivial mechanical details. Decisions to make. Should there be a religious service? If not, how did you go about conducting a burial ceremony?

She had not been religious; neither was Paul. They both came from religiously indifferent backgrounds, nominally Jewish, effectually disinterested. Even their political causes and charitable interests had been nonsectarian; they had never supported Zionism or the Temple or the B’nai Brith.

But in the end Jack had telephoned someone and got the name of a rabbi.

They did it because it was the easiest solution and because Esther had always been comforted by ceremony. “It’s the least we can do,” Jack had said somewhat obscurely—what more could be done for her now?—and Paul had acquiesced because he had no reason to object, and no energy for dispute.

You preserved a modicum of sanity only because there were so many idiotic decisions you had to make. When was the funeral to take place? The burial? Whom should you ask to attend? In the end he found that the funeral director took care of most of the details and the rest sorted itself out: their closer friends telephoned, and after accepting their condolences with as much grace as he could produce, Paul told them the services would be held Friday at two-thirty, gave them the address of the funeral home and listened numbly to their repeated expressions of sympathy.