Death Wish

Still he was surprised by the number of people who put in appearances. The rabbi, who had never met Esther, spoke briefly from a simple dais in a chapel-room in the mortuary. His remarks were dutiful and i

Two couples from their apartment house came; and there were various cousins and nephews and nieces from Manhattan and Queens; and Esther’s sister-in-law from Syracuse, representing Esther’s brother Myron who had a minor diplomatic post in Malaysia and had been unable to come. He had, however, sent the largest of the floral arrangements.

Paul found himself standing at the graveside cataloguing the attendance as if there were some point giving good marks to those among their acquaintances who had chosen to appear here.

The casket had been closed from the outset; there had been no viewing. Paul had not seen her since he had left the apartment Tuesday morning; she had been following the vacuum cleaner from room to room. He felt no desire to view her remains and had suffered impatiently through the “mortuary scientist’s” obsequious explanations of why it would be best to do it this way. Boiled down it amounted to the fact that she had been mauled badly by the attackers and the autopsy surgeons had cut her up considerably, and while it was possible for the morticians to put her back together, it would be expensive and unsightly. On the way out of that meeting Paul had been surprised when Jack had made a bitter remark about “plastic surgery on the dead”; it was not Jack’s usual tone, it betrayed his strain. Throughout the week Paul had been quite alert to other people’s behavior, he had observed their reactions to the events without ever wholly observing his own. It was as if reaction was still to come: he existed in a hiatus of emotion, waiting for the explosion or the crash or the tears, whichever it was to be. He half expected to go off like a Roman candle.

Jack stood beside Carol, holding her arm. Carol was stiff in protest against all of it. Like her father she had not yet come out of it; unlike him she had withdrawn into an obvious shell. Her eyes windowed resentment more than anything else. She looked terrible, he thought: she stood with a caved-in posture, her hair hung damp and heavy against her face. Ordinarily she drew the second glance of most men but now she looked old, hard, furious: as if she were nobody’s daughter.

Possibly it was partly the result of the drugs. She had been under sedation for most of the first three days because whenever they stopped dosing her she would tighten up like a watchspring and if you touched her, her rigid body would jerk galvanically. Yesterday he had reached for her hand, trying to make contact; her hand was ice-cold and she had pulled it away, clamped her lips shut, averted her face. She hadn’t gone into total shock—she could converse quite rationally, in a voice that lacked its usual expressiveness—but Paul was worried about her. Jack had agreed she might need psychiatric looking-at if she didn’t pop out of it in another day or two. Perhaps after the funeral she would begin to loosen up.

The casket was in the grave, the ropes had been withdrawn; the rabbi stopped talking and people began to drift away. A few came by to speak to Paul or to Carol; most of them—the ones who were discomfited by other people’s suffering—left quickly, trying to look as if they were not hurrying away.

Henry Ives, the senior partner in the firm, stopped to say, “Of course you needn’t come back to work until you feel up to it. Is there anything we can do, Paul?”

He shook his head and said his thank-yous and watched Ives hobble away toward his waiting Cadillac, a bald old man with age-spots in his skin. It had been kind of him to come; probably he disliked these reminders more than most did—he was at least seventy-three.

Jack said, “We may as well go.”

He stared down at the casket. “I guess so.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather stay over here for a few days?”

“No. You don’t really have room. It’d be crowded—we’d be on each other’s nerves,” Paul said.

He sensed Jack’s relief. “Well, just the same. At least stay the evening. We’ll whip up something out of the freezer.”

In this poor indoor light somehow the bruises under Carol’s makeup were more evident. She sat down on the couch, crossed her legs and leaned forward as though she had a severe pain in her stomach. “I’ll fix something in a little while.”

“It’s all right, darling, I’ll do it.”

“No.” She was snappish. “I’ll do it myself.”

“All right, fine. Just take it easy.” Jack sat down by her and put his arm around her shoulders. She didn’t stir.

“Maybe we ought to call Doctor Rosen,” Paul suggested.

It brought her eyes around against him. “I’m perfectly all right.” She shot to her feet and walked out of the room, moving heavily on her heels. Paul heard things crashing around in the kitchen.

“All right,” Jack muttered. “Let her get it out of her system.” He looked around. “I’m half surprised the place hasn’t been ransacked.”

“What? Why?”

“Burglars always read the obituaries. They know nobody’s going to be home at the time of the funeral.”

“In broad daylight?”

“Most break-ins happen in daylight. That’s when people aren’t home. These guys that attacked Mom and Carol—that was in broad daylight.”

Paul shed his black suit jacket and sat down in his shirtsleeves. “Does she have a better recollection of it yet? Does she remember what they looked like?”

“I don’t know. She still doesn’t want to talk about it and I haven’t wanted to press her. She remembers it, of course—she’s not amnesiac. But she’s repressing it with everything she’s got. It’s only natural.”

“Yes. But the police need something to go on.”

“I talked to Lieutenant Briggs this morning on the phone. We’re going to take her up there Monday morning to look at their mug books and see if she can pick them out.”

“Has she said anything at all about it?”

“The other night she talked about it a little. When the Lieutenant came to the hospital. I was pleased how gentle he was in his questioning. He managed to get things out of her that I couldn’t. A real professional—I wish there were more like that guy.”

“What did she say?”

“Evidently there were three of them. Young men, probably teenagers. She said they—laughed a lot. As if they were hysterical.”

“Drugs?”

“I suppose so. It must have been. Either that or they were totally psychotic, but anybody who behaves like that all the time wouldn’t still be on the streets—they’d have been picked up a long time ago.”

“Did she tell you how they got into the apartment?”

“She told Lieutenant Briggs. I gather Mom and Carol had just come back from the supermarket. They got back up to the apartment and a few minutes later somebody knocked at the door and said he was the delivery boy from the market. When she opened the door this kid was standing there with a big cardboard carton. Mom thought it was the groceries so she let the kid in. The minute he was inside the door he dropped the carton—it turned out to be empty, the cops went over it for fingerprints but paper doesn’t take prints very well, all they found were smudges. Anyhow the kid pulled a knife and his two friends shoved into the doorway behind him. One of them grabbed Carol and the other two started punching Mom, demanding to know where she kept her money.”