By this time Debbie had turned to the coffin. After bending low enough to kiss the corpse on the lips, I thought, though to be perfectly honest it may have been on the forehead, she commenced a one-way conversation with her father, pitched too low for me to make out any words but “Daddy” and “up there.”
“Doesn’t he look fine,” Aunt Bess told rather than asked us. “Just like himself in life.”
The most corroborative response Gwen was able to give was a head nod with a faint smile. Aunt Bess showed not the slightest indication of sensing her niece’s least reservation.
Clasping Gwen’s free hand, I stood on the other side of her and pressed reassuringly against her. For some obscure yet, I’m certain, perverse reason, I forced myself to look down at Oscar dead. Like the minister and most of the male mourners, he was dressed in a black suit and white shirt. The tie he had on was neatly knotted. In keeping with the event in which he was the center of attention, it should have been a solid dark color; it was striped sky-blue and white, colors chosen perhaps to suggest Heaven and innocence. For Oscar, I was sorry there wasn’t a stripe of red as well. The black patent leather shoes on feet pointing straight up glistened in the bright light playing on him. Undefiled, their tan soles indicated they’d never been walked on. Comb marks in his coarse gray hair, in which a part of chalky white scalp showed, separated the thick locks, two thirds on the right side, one third on the left. What had been great shaggy eyebrows had been trimmed.
A layer of some sort of powder changed the complexion of his clean-shaven face, which in life had been slate gray, to a sickly hue, some color between tan and candle tallow, suggesting that at the instant of his transformation he’d been afflicted by hepatitis. His pale thin lips had been touched pink, making them look fleshier than they were. As though staring upward, doubtless toward his new home, his marble-gray eyes were wide open. So hollow were his cheeks that he seemed to be sucking them in. The great hump of his nose looked as if it were about to blast out a mighty snort. Yet the cosmetic attempt to disguise the fact that Oscar was now in the state of not being, to present him as still in the world of is even as he was about to enter one his Father’s mansions, gave me the sense I was beholding a mannequin that had fallen face-upward onto a single bed in the bargain basement of one of those no longer existing department stores.
Given all that to take in and digest, my eye was grabbed and held by Oscar’s hands, crossed at the wrists in obvious symbolism, the right on top of the left. Either the sleeves of the coat he had on were too short for his long arms, or the sleeves of the shirt were too long. White broadcloth cuffs covered his hands halfway to the knuckles. Even for a man who still stood a couple of inches over six feet, the hands were the size of ham hocks, with fingers that, despite their length and because of their circumference, had absolutely no taper. Had they been shorter, it would have seemed plausible that the first joint had been chopped off. The knuckles of Oscar’s fingers resembled knobs protruding from the limbs of an ancient oak. In what was just visible of the tops of the hands were large purple blotches, suggesting that the skin covering his gigantic appendages had worn thin and that the blood vessels inside were hemorrhaging. As I gazed at those hands, I had no doubt that they could palm a basketball, rounded as it was, could haul in a spiraling football, could grasp and swing the heaviest bat in the rack and knock a baseball on a line drive over the center-field fence. Or for that matter, could squeeze the throat of a “dirty yellow Jap,” until his face turned red, white and blue.
“Debbie,” Aunt Bess suddenly half-said, half-wept, and now tears were streaming down her cheeks, “I’ve changed my mind. As I think about it, I believe your father would want me to keep and cherish his wedding ring. If it goes into the ground with him, it won’t be seen until we’re joined again at the resurrection.”
After a pause in which Debbie made no response except to increase the volume of her sobbing, Aunt Bess went on, “Our rings bound us together on this earth.”
By this time only the family, including scarleted Sarah in self-imposed exile at the foot of the coffin and niece and nephew-in-law, made captives by the unwritten law of propriety, remained in the space where the coffined corpse was put on display. Thereupon to my astonishment Aunt Bess let go of Gwen’s elbow, raised herself on tiptoe—she was a good foot shorter than her husband when he was upright and at least a hundred pounds lighter—placed her left hand on the outer edge of the coffin, leaned over and, taking his wrist, wrestled Oscar’s left hand out from under his right, as if she were insistently about to read his pulse.
When she raised the arm, his hand flopped, as would a fish that was being picked up by the tail. The sleeves of his suit coat and shirt went up his arm, and the thick round, silver-plated (I’m sure) old railroad watch he always wore on his left wrist emerged. My guess was that it had been wound and was still running. Aunt Bess pulled the hand, wrist and arm toward her, as though she were tugging him up out of the coffin to bring him back from isn’t to is. A loud sob, so high-pitched it qualified as a screech, issued from Debbie, a sound she might emit if she were watching a strangulation in a horror movie or being choked herself. Still holding on to Gwen’s arm, I felt her shudder, whether at what Aunt Bess was about or at her cousin’s unearthly outburst I was uncertain.
With the tiny skeletal fingers of her right hand, Aunt Bess seized the fourth finger of Oscar’s left hand, which, looking large and heavy, seemed to be resisting. So suggestive was the imagery I couldn’t prevent a vulgarity from flashing into my inner eye, though to my credit I immediately censored it by concentrating all my vision and attention on the flesh and blood spectacle exhibiting itself before my outer eye—Aunt Bess’ effort to slip off the gold band from the finger she was grasping.
Finding she was unable to pull the ring over the gnarl of the knuckle, she began turning it. Although it moved freely, it wouldn’t clear the bony bump. I was watching the struggle in fascination, as I assumed Gwen was too. Muttering something to Debbie that I couldn’t make out, all at once Aunt Bess released the finger she’d been at work on. Oscar’s hand fell as if it were the iron head of a mallet. Unfortunately, rather than return to the crossed position it had been in, it slammed down on Oscar’s chest, landing in a posture that made it seem he was saluting the flag or clutching his inert heart. Aunt Bess took a step aside.
Evidently having been asked to sotto voce, which, given that Gwen’s and my eyes were witnessing what was happening and that the Ancient Mariner’s ears were no longer admitting sound, seemed unnecessary, Debbie stationed herself in the place Aunt Bess had assumed. After a moment of hesitation, which suggested some reluctance to touch her father’s cold still flesh, she took hold of Oscar’s limp wrist with her left hand while her right tried to pull off her parent’s wedding ring. Enjoying no more success tugging than had her mother, she too resorted to turning, adding the refinement of twisting while the ring revolved. As she went on with these futile maneuvers, I had the urge to whisper to Gwen, “It seems the old bastard insists on holding on to what’s his legal possession.” Out of a conditioned respect for the corpse, any corpse, and grudging admiration for both wife and daughter in overcoming their squeamishness in working on the lifeless member of their husband and father as he lay in his final resting place, I swallowed the glibly offensive words.
While Debbie went on struggling, out of the corner of my eye I noticed that her scarlet sister was striding down the length of the coffin like a model on the runway as a candidate for Miss Something or Other. When she reached Aunt Bess, to my surprise and I suppose Gwen’s too, Sarah, AKA Goneril, flung her silk-covered arms around her mother, pulled her against herself, kissed her on the forehead, and said loud enough for me to hear, “Sorry that Daddy’s gone, Mummy, and that you’ll have to go on without him.” The phrasing of Goneril’s consolation definitively dismissed Regan. After she pulled her head back out of her mother’s face, I saw that she’d left a crimson print of her
lips on Aunt Bess’ forehead. Her mother’s response was to clutch Sarah’s naked shoulders and, with her forehead buried in the cleavage of her wayward daughter, recommence weeping. For what seemed like minutes neither would let go of the other. They resembled two wrestlers at grips with each other, both struggling for the advantage that would allow her to best her opponent.
It was Sarah who finally broke free. Without another word, using her hip, she nudged her sister out of the place where she was at work on her father’s fourth finger, bumping her hard enough to make her drop the hand of the finger she was toiling over. It flopped onto the belly of the corpse. Catching her balance, Debbie, AKA Regan, went into a crouch, as might a member of Felis catus about to spring. Had Aunt Bess not somehow been able to wedge her meager little body between her daughters, I had no doubt that Goneril and Regan would have gone at it tooth and nail beside the coffin in which the stubborn-knuckled corpse of their father was lying.
“Over your father’s dead body!” Aunt Bess wailed through gasping sobs. “For shame!” Her voice, naturally soft, almost a murmur, must have taken on enough volume to send half a dozen black-suited men grouped at the other end of the small room into a hurried retreat into the vestibule, between the leg and boot of the mortuary. The vestibule led to the parking lot.
Her sister bodily out of the way, Sarah began her assault on her father’s wedding ring by grabbing and jerking up his left hand. Both of her predecessors had proceeded very much more gingerly. Seizing the targeted finger, she vigorously massaged the obtruding knuckle, apparently in an attempt to smooth the craggy surface and thus eliminate part of the obstruction. This tactic proving ineffective, she separated her feet, which had been placed together as they’d be on a diving board before springing, then lifted Oscar’s limp left arm, straightened it, and tugged on the ring as well as the finger that wouldn’t yield the band of gold. Using all the strength she could muster, she yanked so hard that her hand came flying off the finger into the air, which sent her careening body crashing into Debbie, still in a crouch behind her.
“Off, woman,” Debbie hissed, as she helped her sister comply by giving her a mighty shove. Her command was issued loudly enough, I felt certain, to be heard by the men who had retreated to the vestibule, if they were still assembled there, waiting. Debbie’s injunction clearly was suggesting that the offending body of her sister carried a contagious disease, venereal probably, certainly moral, which the recipient believed would contaminate her by mere touch.
Relinquishing her hold on the resistant finger allowed Sarah to grab the side of the casket in order to prevent herself from going down on top of her crouching sister. After regaining her balance, she muttered something I couldn’t make out but whose tone let me know it was unacceptable for coffin-side use. Unable to hear any further sound from Sarah, I concluded that the concealed speakers from which canned hymns were flowing had not yet gone dead. On this occasion it was good fortune that Aunt Bess’ hearing was failing. And it was certain that, no matter the volume or the degree of depravity of the utterance, the puritanical ear of Goneril and Regan’s father, whatever it might surely have been exposed to in his seafaring days, could not possibly be affronted.
Sarah’s sudden letting go of her straining hold on the fourth finger allowed the Ancient Mariner’s upraised arm to fall heavily. His hand landed protectively on his crotch.
Then occurred one of those frozen instants of time in which, for some reason during a moment of crisis or incredulity, there comes a sudden realization or recognition of what had been ignored. All at once I became aware that Gwen had taken hold of my hand and her fingers were squeezing mine, not tugging on one as if to remove the wedding ring I’d never worn but as if to prevent herself from falling over the deep drop of a cliff on the lip of which she was standing, leaning outward. No wonder. To behold her aunt, of whom she was fond, and two hostile cousins wrestling with their lifeless husband and father in a futile effort to remove a ring he refused to surrender, even in death, would make most sane human beings believe they had gone mad, were not dreaming a nightmare but were conscious and hallucinating. I, a disinterested eyewitness of the unimaginable, found myself imagining I was actually present for the action that would give rise to a primitive myth that an Aeschylus or a Shakespeare centuries later would turn into drama. The only way I could come to terms with the incredible event happening before my eyes was to fall back on vengeance by wishing the schizoid minister—who at one moment offered poetic consolation, at the next a vicious visitation of God’s wrath—were coffin-side to witness the effect of his preachings. Then, as time began to move for me again, without realizing I was coping with the unbelievable, I found myself falling back on flippant comedy by turning inside out the well-known, oft-used title of Kaufman and Hart’s play as I muttered so softly that even Gwen couldn’t hear it, “Who says you can’t take it with you?”
The curtain had not yet dropped on the comic-horror drama. From either the vestibule or the parking lot, where it seemed he’d been waiting for a sign the ritual was over, a stocky, strong-looking man, with a suspicious flush of red on his forehead, cheeks and nose, dressed in a black suit and carrying a black derby, came striding toward the little family of mourners. The man looked as if he’d just stepped off a vaudeville stage or left the brass rail of a bar. Without waiting for his arrival, Goneril broke ranks and went sashaying toward him.
“Hi, there, dude,” she sang out with remarkable cheer considering the occasion, “how ’bout giving us feeble females a hand?” Then she quickly added as an afterthought, “You are with it, aren’t yuh?”
“Sure am,” the rosy-faced man replied with a businesslike nod of his head. “Thass whad I’m here for, ta give a hand, so to speak.”
“Well, here’s the scoop. My mom, like thought she sorta wanted her husband buried with his wedding ring on, but just now like she’s changed her mind, a woman’s privilege as they say, and kinda decided she wants to keep the ring, sorta in memory of him. We’ve tried but to save our souls, or whatever, we can’t get the damn thing off his finger. Like he doesn’t wanna let go. Seein’ how yur in the business, I wonder if yuh might bail us out. We’re stuck, see.”
“You can bet yur kitchen sink I’ll give it a try, ma’am,” he answered with a jerk of his head that exuded self-confidence. The way his face, with a pug nose and a cleft chin, was set suggested that even when obliging he was forbidden to smile. As he headed for the casket with short brisk steps, Aunt Bess and Debbie moved aside. Sarah, towering over him in her heels, assumed a place beside him at the coffin.
Tucking his derby in his left armpit, without the least hesitation the man snatched Oscar’s hand. As Aunt Bess, Debbie and Sarah had done, he tugged on, turned and twisted the ring for a couple of minutes.
“Sorry, ma’am,” he murmured, as if to keep the corpse from hearing, and he carefully laid the ring hand back on top of the right, still lying on Oscar’s crotch, “but if I yank any harder I’ll rip the whole arm outa its socket,” making Beowulf’s disarming of Grendel pop into my head. “Looks ta me like that ring’s really on there ta stay. See, my job’s actully not ta handle ’em. I help carry the box and drive the hearse. Tell yuh whad I’ll do, though. Mr. Beckett’s in his office, so I’ll fetch ’im for yuh. See whether he’s got some hocus-pocus that’ll work. Not a matter of strength. Anyway, the sooner we can close the box, the sooner we can get off for the cemetery.” With that he pivoted and headed for the vestibule. Seen from the back, he waddled like a duck.
The uneasy truce between Goneril and Regan persisted while we waited in a neutral silence. Before long a man dressed in gray-striped trousers and a frock coat emerged from the vestibule and, taking long strides, came heading toward us. Tall and heavy-set as he was, his shiny bald head still looked too large for his body. The furrows in his brow were delved deep and his lips were fleshy. Apparently, as the proprietor of the business, he allowed himself to smile, broadly
at us. I decided he was wearing dentures.
“Good afternoon,” he sang in a basso profundo that was respectfully modulated while letting you know it could boom when volume was called for. His lips seemed to work mechanically, like a ventriloquist’s dummy’s. “Guido here tells me you’re having a bit of difficulty removing a ring from the deceased. My name is Beckett, Percival Beckett.”
As he spoke the name of the stocky man, who was taking two steps to his signeur’s one, Guido followed him as would a squire his knight. Blinking his eyes behind the thick lenses of his black plastic-framed glasses, Percival Beckett gave Guido a backhanded flourish that said “halt.” “Let’s see what we can do.”
Taking hold of Oscar’s fourth left-hand finger, he gave the ring a single powerful tug. The ring wouldn’t come off. Pressing his left palm on Oscar’s breast, Mr. Beckett sustained a long pull on the ring. His fat lips were mashed together. The Ancient Mariner refused to surrender his treasure. Seeing Mr. Beckett and him vying for possession of the ring was like watching a big strong human male wrestling with a stone sculpture that was lying prone.
Mr. Beckett signified his capitulation by replacing Oscar’s appendage across his groin, fisting his own right hand and coughing into the top of it. Blinking his eyes at the rate of an automatic being fired, he addressed Aunt Bess, whom it would seem he recognized from an earlier transaction, in a voice as soft and gentle as a dove’s coo.
“I wonder whether you ladies might mind moving a few steps away from the casket. And turning your backs.” It seemed obvious he was sparing the weaker sex exposure to the violent combat he was about to engage in with Oscar.
Without hesitation Gwen and Aunt Bess, followed by a more reluctant Debbie, retreated eight or ten steps from the coffin and turned toward the vestibule. Then after a hesitation that made me believe I was about to witness a battle between the sexes, to my surprise Sarah, who was standing tellingly apart from her sister and mother, also complied. Given that Mr. Beckett obviously entertained Victorian notions about the inability of woman, in contrast to the strength of man, to endure the sight of whatever grisly action he was about to engage in, I concluded that his request-command did not pertain to me and therefore held my ground.