Last Respects Read Free

of day-to-day life with which most of my neighbors were coping. A taxi seemed a sensible extravagance.
    Even on sunny days in the summer I have to walk several blocks downtown, and move east toward the river, before I can get a taxi to stop for me. The day my mother died was not sunny. It was gray and cold. The sort of day in which, the Brontës seem to have spent their lives. The sky was sullen. I remembered skies like this during the bad days of the blitz in London. I remembered that in those days these skies reduced even my pleasant thoughts to vague, shapeless fears. My thoughts were not pleasant as I moved downtown and eastward, keeping my head down against the wind. How could they be? A man who wants to laugh when he receives word of his mother’s death is at least a son of a bitch, probably worse. Pleasant thoughts indeed.
    At the corner of Lexington Avenue and 77th Street, on my way toward Third, the traffic light changed to red. I stopped. So did a taxi heading down Lexington. I stepped quickly down from the curb, wrenched open the taxi door, plopped onto the rear seat, and pulled the door shut with a bang.
    “Merry Christmas,” said the driver. “Where to?”
    “Merry Christmas,” I said. “The Peretz Memorial Hospital.”
    “You mean in Queens?” the driver said.
    The tone of his voice told me at once I had not made a friend.
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Jesus,” the driver said.
    “What’s the matter?” I said.
    “What’s the matter?” the driver said. “It’s an empty ride back, for Christ’s sake, that’s what’s the matter.”
    “I guess you haven’t been there for a long time,” I said. “I’ve been there every day for the past four weeks. Every time I get there, on the front steps there are a dozen people fighting to get a cab back into Manhattan. You won’t ride back empty.”
    “That’s what you know,” the driver said.
    “I tell you I’ve been there every day this whole past month,” I said.
    “Yeah,” the driver said. “But it’s pretty damn early in the morning, and besides, this is the day before Christmas, buddy.”
    “What difference does that make?” I said.
    I could hear the cutting edge in my own voice. I did not feel we were buddies.
    “People don’t go bucking visiting hours in hospitals the day before Christmas.”
    The light changed. The cab lurched forward.
    “Hoddeyeh wanna go?” the driver said.
    I didn’t answer. My mind had been absorbed in controlling the hatred for this stranger that I could feel mushrooming inside me. Now my mind had been jolted into an examination of his remark about the times when people visit hospitals.
    “Hey,” he said. “You hear me?”
    “Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t listening.”
    “I asked which way you want to go?” he said.
    I looked out the window. The street sign indicated we were passing 76th and Lexington.
    “As long as we’re heading downtown,” I said, “how about across the 59th Street bridge, then out Queens Boulevard to Union Turnpike? The hospital is two blocks further down.”
    “I know,” the driver said. “One thing a taxi driver learns in this town. You learn the places people get sick in. Christ, this is one hell of a long trip.”
    It was longer than he thought, but of course he had no way of knowing that. Even I had not known, until early that same year, when my father died, that my mother had been born in Soho. I had always assumed she had been born on the farm in the Carpathian mountains of Hungary from which she had come to America shortly before the First World War.
    A month before this day before Christmas on which my mother had died, when I was filling out the forms in the Admissions Office of the Peretz Memorial Hospital, it had seemed wise to me to forget about Soho. I listed my mother’s place of birth as Berezna in Hungary. This checked with the records of the Department of Justice in Washington.
    Only I, and the government, of course, knew that my mother had a police record. It