Last Respects Read Free Page B

remarks had blackmailed a nervous passenger into doing something the passenger would not have done ordinarily. Which was exactly what had happened.
    “You don’t have to do this,” he said. There was not much conviction in his voice. “I’m what they call every year during the transit strike negotiations a common carrier. You want to go to Queens, I gotta take you to Queens. All you have to pay is what it says on the clock.”
    “It’s Christmas,” I said. “Buy something for your wife.”
    “I’m not married,” he said. I laughed. The driver said, “What’s funny about that?”
    “It’s the sort of thing my mother would have said.”
    It was, too. Among the things about her that were unexpectedly appearing in my consciousness like litmus-paper tests was the realization that I had never heard my mother tell a joke. Yet I was all at once intensely aware that she had always been able to make me laugh. Her humor had obviously been unintentional. It occurred to me, as I walked into the Admissions Office of the Peretz Memorial Hospital on this dismal morning before Christmas, that the same word applied to my mother’s whole life. She had been too shrewd to arrange the almost nine decades of her existence the way she had been forced to live them. Given a chance to control things, I felt, she would almost certainly have done better. Unintentional was the word, all right.
    “Can I help you?” said the girl in nurse’s uniform at the desk behind the Information window.
    “Mrs. O’Toole?” I said. “I’d like to speak with her.”
    “About what?” the girl said.
    I examined the several ways I could have answered her question. A darling little old lady who has just cashed in her chips after exceeding by almost two decades her biblical allotment of three score years and ten? Or: a savage old bitch who has finally, thank God, fallen off my back? Or: the Jewish Eleanor of Aquitaine?
    “Some papers I have to sign to authorize an autopsy,” I said. “Dr. Herman Sabinson called me about an hour ago. He said Mrs. O’Toole would be expecting me.”
    The girl up to now had looked bright, intelligent, and sexy. Now she changed abruptly and completely. She looked exactly like the young nurse behind the Information window of a hospital in a TV soap opera who is confronted by the middle-aged son of an elderly lady who has just Gone to Meet Her Maker. I restrained my desire to reach in through the window and slap her.
    In a sympathetic whisper she said, “One moment, please.”
    It is a phrase to which during the past many years I have, now and again, given a certain amount of thought. Do people who use it really mean one moment? I own a wristwatch presented to me by my two sons on my last birthday. They chipped in and bought it in Switzerland for a modest sum. It tells what time it is now in Calcutta and, among many other things, how long you should wait before taking the second pill. As the once sexy but now loathsome girl left her desk to find Mrs. O’Toole, I pressed the appropriate knob on my sons’ birthday gift. Seven minutes and fourteen seconds after the One moment, please I had been asked to wait, the girl came back. Not alone.
    “This is Mrs. O’Toole,” the girl said.
    It was like hearing a cicerone on a bus in the nation’s capital say, “This is the Washington monument.” What else—no, who else—could Mrs. O’Toole be? She was tall. She was slender. She had white hair doctored by a blue rinse. She wore the uniform of a Red Cross Gray Lady. She had the emaciated, elegant face of a once famous but now forgotten actress who had been sent over by Central Casting to play the cameo role of Edith Cavell in a documentary about the First World War. She held her hands clasped in front of her as though she were trying to prevent the escape of a rebellious butterfly. She had not even the hint of breasts.
    “Dr. Sabinson told me you were coming,” she said.
    The possibility that he would not tell her had