Last Respects Read Free Page A

was almost half a century old. There was probably very little chance that the Peretz Memorial Hospital would have been interested in the information. But Medicare, which was going to pay her bills, is a federal organization. So is the Justice Department. Even though my common sense told me one could not possibly affect the other, I had learned my common sense from the woman whose dead body was now waiting in Queens for the authorization that would permit Herman Sabinson to perform an autopsy. I knew what my mother would have wanted me to do. She had spent her life in the shadow of an adage of her own invention: “If you keep your mouth shut, nobody will know as much about you as you know yourself.” After half a century I suddenly found myself wishing I knew less about her than I did.
    “So where the hell are they?”
    I came up out of my thoughts. The irascible voice had come from the front of the cab.
    “Where the hell are who?” I said.
    “These dozens of people,” the taxi driver said. “That you say they’re all the time standing around here, fighting to get a hack back to Manhattan.”
    I looked out the window. The cab had stopped at the top of the low concrete rise that surmounts the crescent driveway in front of the Peretz Memorial Hospital. My first reaction was a sense of astonishment. The trip by cab from Manhattan takes approximately forty minutes. Two or three times during the past my taxi drivers had made it in thirty-five minutes. One giddy afternoon, in half an hour. The driver, a bit giddy himself, had said it was the Pope. His Holiness was on a brief visit to the United States and every automobile in the Borough of Queens, the driver had said, was chasing the Pontiff’s entourage, which was heading for God knows what, but happily the what seemed to be in the opposite direction from the Peretz Memorial Hospital. It seemed to me now that I had stepped into this taxi at Lexington and 77th only minutes ago. Yet here I was at the Peretz Memorial Hospital. At least a half hour must have gone by. I did not understand how I could have been unaware of the passage of this amount of time. It was obviously due, I felt, to my feelings about my mother’s death. Which made me suddenly wonder what my feelings were.
    I knew with certainty only one: a feeling of relief that it was all over. But there were other feelings. There had to be. Even if I didn’t know my mother as well as I should have, I know myself better than I would like. I could feel the worry about those other feelings mounting slowly and inexorably inside me.
    “They must have heard you were coming,” the taxi driver said.
    “What?” I said. I said it irritably. By now I hated him.
    “See—I was right. Those people you say they’re all the time out front here fighting for cabs,” he said. “They must have heard you’re coming. Let’s make this guy look like a liar, they must have said. And they all beat it back to Manhattan by subway so I’ll have to ride back empty.”
    I wondered. Could the driver have been right when he’d said nobody goes to hospitals on the day before Christmas? On East Fourth Street, where I had been born and raised, we had never done much about Christmas. It wasn’t exactly an East Fourth Street holiday. But we always went to see sick people on the day before Yom Kippur. I remembered vividly being sent by my mother to deliver jars of chicken soup to ailing neighbors on the day before Passover. The recollection thrust me into a moment of witless generosity.
    “What does it say on the clock?” I said. “I can’t read it. I forgot my glasses at home. Three seventy-five?”
    “Three eighty-five,” the driver said. “And a quarter for the Triboro toll.”
    “Here’s ten,” I said. “If you do have to ride home empty, don’t be sore at me.”
    The driver, taking the ten-dollar bill, looked pleased but also uneasy. As though he felt he was getting the money not because he deserved it but because his sullen