This is from a fictional memoir that I have been working on for a number of years. I posted this chapter on Behind on September 28, 2012.
Yes, on June 20, 1953, Heshy Perlmutter and I made our way to the I. J. Morris Funeral Parlor in Brooklyn to see the bodies of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg who had been executed the day before in the electric chair at Sing Sing. I had never seen a dead person and the prospect of seeing two, and such notorious Soviet spies, was irresistible--
When we heard that the Rosenbergs had been
electrocuted up in Sing Sing and that their bodies would be laid out and
available for viewing at the I. J. Morris Funeral Parlor just six blocks from where we lived, Heshy and I raced over so we could for the first time see some real dead people.
In my neighborhood we had seen lots of dead cats and dogs, but no dead bodies
and thus had developed an inordinate interest in death.
But a lot of others had the same idea that hot June night, and thus we wound up
near the end of a line that stretched around the corner. Since it took hours
for the line to crawl toward the entrance, we learned from what we overheard
that no one else shared our morbid obsession: We were there to see some
corpses. Everyone else was lined up to pay their respects to these martyrs of
“progressivism” and to protest not just their executions but the injustice of
the entire American and Capitalist System. We barely understood any of this—the
raging about Judge Kaufman, the abuse heaped on President Eisenhower who
refused to stay their “murder,” and
especially the fury reserved for someone named Roy Cohn, who, as a Jew, was
venomously vilified for his role in their prosecution.
“He should rot in Hell,” we heard these atheists mutter.
Heshy and I understood what they were feeling. His
father, Mr. Perly, was the local glazier and window blind maker but was better
known for wandering the streets at night talking to himself, debating some
inner furies, waving like a saber a rolled-up copy of the Daily Worker. Heshy knew that what his father was so agitated about also had
something to do with Capitalism and “surplus value,” whatever that was, and
lynchings and anti-Semitism and McCarthy and also that betrayer Roy Cohn.
More important, having Heshy with me meant that we would actually be allowed to
enter I. J. Morris. You see, as we got closer to the door, word filtered back to
us that to be admitted you had to be at least sixteen. He and I were a few
years younger than that and were worried that they wouldn't let us in and that we would have to wait for
subsequent executions before being able to see some dead people. But when we
got to the entrance, the man guarding the velvet rope took one look at me,
already almost six feet tall, and especially at Heshy’s premature beard, and
waved us in. Heshy’s nickname, you should also know, was Big Dick.
Once inside, things settled to a hush. No more sputterings about the Running Dogs of Capitalism, just the
muted sound of shuffling feet as we inched our way toward the chapel. As we
crept forward, Heshy and I were whispering to each other about what to expect.
We thought Julius and Ethel would probably just look like the dead cats—with stiff
arms and legs and bulging, staring eyes (would they be attracting flies too?);
but we grew increasingly nervous about how dead people who had been electrocuted would look. We had
never seen an electrocuted cat or dog.
What we knew from The Street was that when someone from Murder Incorporated
went to The Chair, the next
morning, screaming in six inch type from the front pages of the Daily News and
Mirror would be the headline, “Bugsy
Berkowitz Fries!” And since we knew how my mother’s fried liver looked—the closest thing to
shoe leather not worn on a foot—we were trepidiously expecting the dead
Rosenbergs to look like huge slabs of fried liver in side-by-side coffins. We
were thus rethinking the whole situation: Maybe we should wait until we were
really sixteen when perhaps someone would just die of a heart attack or
something. That would be a better way to get started with dead bodies.
But before we could reconsider and get out of there, we were pushed through the
chapel door by some grizzled shoemaker.
If we had thought about it, we might actually have been glad to have a
shoemaker nearby as we approached the leathery Rosenbergs. He again began to
spit about that “Jew bastard Roy Cohen.”
And then, there we were face to face with the dead Rosenbergs whose side-by-side
coffins were tipped forward for better viewing. Dead they were, but under spot
lights with orange faces and black hair that looked as if it had been touched
up with shoe polish. Julius’ mustache
was so blackened that he appeared more like a Semitic Hitler than a Jew from
the Bronx. It was not hard to believe, from their squirrelly looks, that they
had been spies and had indeed given away to Russia the secret to the Atomic
Bomb, which as a result caused us to have to practice taking cover under our
desks in school in case the Reds decided to drop one on the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
The undertakers moved us along quickly so we had time for just a quick but
sufficient glimpse and, in truth, a sniff because all the dead cats and dogs we
knew stank something awful. We were curious about that too. But the Rosenbergs
smelled more like the science lab in school, which was fitting since this whole
experience was more like an experiment to us than a pilgrimage, except perhaps
to Heshy who would be interrogated and lectured, we were certain, by Mr. Perly,
about more than their hair, painted faces, and smell.
I had entered this cult of death as the result of being most responsible for
taking care of the family plot in Mount Lebanon Cemetery. We couldn’t afford
Perpetual Care for the graves so unless we were willing to let them become a jungle,
someone had to go there regularly, spring through fall, to cut the grass and
pull the weeds that were indigenous to that part of Queens. As the most
dexterous family member this truly awesome responsibility fell to me. So clip
and pull I did with barely disguised eagerness.
As I would work my way among the headstones that multiplied through the years,
as I drifted further from the bench where my mother and aunts sat huddled,
talking silently to their deceased mother and father, I began to think about
more than what was growing above
ground. What, I wondered, was happening below
the ground? That was not a question I could openly ask about poor Uncle Hyman
who, I had been told, died of a heart attack before he was fifty. The weeds, by
the way, were thickest at his grave.
In the spirit of experiment, when one day Chirps
my parakeet died, rather than leave it to my mother do whatever she did to
dispose of our dead pet birds and guppies. I suspected the guppies got
flushed away, I absconded with him, found an empty Hellmann’s Mayonnaise jar,
washed and dried it thoroughly, put Chirps inside, screwed the top back on
securely, and buried him in a shallow hole of a grave in the vacant lot next
door. Thinking I would dig him up periodically to see what was happening to him
in that jar, interred as I imagined he was, not so unlike Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Hyman at Mount Lebanon. That would finally answer my existential question.
A week later, when I exhumed Chirps, he looked a little dried out, sort of what
an apricot left too long in the sun begins to look like, with his flesh now
sucked tight against his tiny bones. The second week it appeared that his eyes
had disappeared. Where they went I couldn’t figure out—though I turned and
shook the jar they didn’t seem to be in there anymore. This was getting
profoundly interesting, and mysterious.
But when I went to unearth him for the third time, about a month after he died,
I couldn’t find him or the jar. I had marked his place with a distinctive stone
but couldn’t find it; and without that, I couldn’t remember precisely enough
where he was buried. And so over the course of the next week, I dug up
virtually the entire lot, which must have been 30 feet wide and 75 feet deep.
My mother wanted to know what I was doing out there at all hours. I reminded
her that in the past I had planted a successful, even legendary vegetable
garden and was thinking about doing that again.
She said, “But it’s November.”
And thus I gave up on Chirps, but not on my quest.
Next came my obsession with Egyptian mummies. Even before I was aware of King
Tut and all the stories surrounding his discovery and his treasures, from
Richard Haliburton’s Complete Book of
Marvels, a huge and enthralling book given to me one birthday by my
well-traveled Aunt Helen, I learned about the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World,
which included the Pyramids at Giza. And how they were in reality giant tombs for the most famous pharaohs. And
that the dead pharaohs, turned into mummies,
were sealed in those pyramids.
So when our public school class went on a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, I managed to sneak away from the group and got “lost” for an hour in the
labyrinth of the Egyptian Hall where, secured in glass cabinets in open
coffins, what the Ancient Egyptians called sarcophagi,
I could see actual mummies, dead pharaohs’
bodies that were more than 4,000 years old.
I was getting closer to the real thing. But there was still a problem—I couldn’t
actually see the pharaohs’ bodies since they were so tightly wrapped in cloth
shrouds. But the fact that I could sense more or less full bodies obscured within those
wrappings suggested to me that both Chirps and Grandpa and Grandma might still
be recognizable if somehow I could only get to them. After all, if the mummies
were in such good shape after 4,000 years, Grandpa and Grandma and Chirps might
still be quite like I remembered them.
Little did I know that before very long I would have a close encounter with a
dead body, right in my own family, when one of Aunt Madeline’s husbands killed
himself by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.
I barely knew him because they had been married less than six months. He seemed
nice enough to me. Minimally he was the first of her husbands who wasn’t bald
and, even more important to her, was taller than she and thus a better dance
partner. Stories circulating in the family suggested that after living with
Madeline for a few short months, he took the “easy way out” by killing himself.
Though he may have had enough
of her, from her carrying on after his death, she appeared to have lost the
love of her life. In fact, things were so bad with her, and his ten year old
son from a previous marriage, that it took her brothers’ and their wives’ total
attention to console her.
Perhaps because of my experience weeding the family plot, I was assigned to
help make arrangements for his funeral.
My primary responsibility was to give the mortician a suit in which to bury him.
As you might imagine, at twelve, though tall for my age, I was not fully
prepared for this. So I just grabbed the first suit I saw from his closet and
spent the rest of my time hoping that at the service they would have an open
coffin so I could at last . . .
To my considerable disappointment they didn’t. But at the chapel, the funeral director to
whom I had given Morty’s suit, pulled me aside and directed me to a very
private corner where he whispered so as not to disturb anyone, “Was that his suit you gave me?”
“Certainly,” I said, “It was in his
closet.”
“Are you sure?”
“I think so,” I stuttered, my certainty now eroding, “Why are you asking?”
“Because it looked as if it was a suit for a ten year old.”
I looked over to where Morty’s ten year old son was sitting and saw that he was
in casual clothes. He was not wearing a suit.
The undertaker rasped in my ear, “I can’t
tell you what we had to do to get it on the body.” I was cringing,
“But we did,” he added with a twisted smile.
And so, on that day when I got to see the Rosenbergs, I was reminded of the
guilt I felt about what I had inadvertently done to poor Morty. But more, I couldn’t stop thinking about what
the I. J. Morris needed to do to get that suit to fit.
My education and interests took some new directions as I began to grow into my
body. And though a total failure at Hebrew School, where I was presumably to
receive a religious education, in spite of my lack of facility for things of this kind, I
begin to think about what one might call “spiritual things.” Adolescent meaning-of-life questions—Where
did we come from (not Facts of Life kinds of matters)? And where were we going
(and I didn’t mean Mount Lebanon)? Heshy, under the influence of Mr. Perly and
his surging hormones, was ever the materialist and said, non-biblically, that
we’re just a bunch of atoms and molecules and thus to a version of dust we
shall revert, if we're lucky, after a life of feeling up the Siegel Twins in the school coat
closet.
By then I was also into atoms (remember the A Bomb), but the dust-to-dust thing
didn’t work for me. I had begun to think there were higher issues and meanings
to being human. I saw a very different place in the world for us as compared to
Chirps, the neighborhood cats, and my guppies.
* * *
Many years later my father, well into his eighties, began to fail. He had
always been such a force of nature. I know to children fathers often seem to be
that powerful and arbitrary, but my father was truly tectonic. When he raged,
all trembled; when he commanded, all obeyed; what he expected, we did; and when
he acknowledged and in his own coded-way loved, we were smitten. So when
his big body was being reduced by time and he could no longer move forward but
was afflicted by what the medical people called “retrograde movement,” which
meant he fell backwards when he attempted to move ahead, I saw this to be a
metaphor for his decline—he was heading backwards, even while attempting still
to cut his way through life.
To see him like this raised many more questions about the meaning of life, at
least the meaning of a life.
The answers I came up with were not comforting. Everything seemed to reduce
itself to biology—eating and
pissing and shitting was the final summing up. Not so different from what Heshy
had been saying some years earlier.
Dad lived in Florida and we in New York; and so when my mother called to say, “Come down,” we got on a plane to Fort
Lauderdale. We immediately lost our way from the airport to the hospital,
grinding in frustration that we would miss the end. From my mother’s voice and
her deserved fame as the family “witch,” invariably perceiving the future, we
knew there was very little time and every missed turn made it less likely that
we would find him still alive.
But with a sense of the miraculous, the hospital appeared just as we were about
to make another futile U turn. We skidded the car into the parking lot and
raced up the steps afraid that even to wait for the elevator would make us
fatally late. We found his room and him in bed, unconscious, breathing with
obvious final distress.
I sat beside him and held his withered hand, saying what I knew would be a few
last words. There was no way to know if he heard me as I attempted to sum up
what I had by then come to conclude about us (contested), his life
(contradictory), and life itself (still imponderable). I longed to feel even a
reflexive squeeze from him and perhaps there was one or at the very least a
last spasm to let me know he understood, and that was what he too had come to
understand.
And then all was utter, utter stillness.
I closed his quickly cooling eyelids and put my hand to his chest as he had
done so many times to me when he would say to me as child and adult, “Such a
good boy. Such a lucky boy.”
And then he was no longer there. Even during his last unconscious moments it
was apparent that whatever he was
was present but then that was
gone. Just gone.
I looked at his body to see if I could perceive his spirit depart or whatever
it was that was him.
But all there was was just a body.
Labels: Atomic Bomb, Brooklyn, Cold War, Death, Electrocution, Ethel Rosenberg, Fathers, Julius Rosenberg, Meaning of Life, Sing Sing, Soviet Union, Spies
