The old man was dead, at last. The doctor let the grayish-yellow hand fall back at the side of the dead man and, after putting his stethoscope on the living room table, went into the kitchen to wash his hands. They were all a little frightened by the twisted expression of agony on the withered lips and the wild glaring eyes that had hardly moved for the last hour, and they tried to keep their own eyes away. There was little show of emotion, not even very much from the old woman who walked up and down at the foot of the bed, making her knuckle joints crack as she pulled distractedly at her fingers. Sarah, the youngest, a heavy blond woman of forty, cried, “Oh, my poor father, how you have suffered!”
Nobody else betrayed any feeling. He had been so long in dying, he had been in such pain, especially during the hot days of late June, that it seemed hypocritical for them to cry, even if the tears came. They stood awkwardly about near the bed, wondering what they should do.
It was Old Jonah, the sexton of the synagogue to which the dead man had gone for almost a half century, who now pulled the old man’s eyes shut and covered the face. Feeling as if a weight had been suddenly placed on his head, Max, the oldest and the only son, watched Old Jonah. The sexton said not a word, but Max sensed the grief in the tired eyes and the bowed head with the beard that seemed cut in granite.
Jonah helped Max roll up the threadbare red carpet in the living room so they could place the body on the floor, and reminded the old woman to get the shrouds ready. With the old woman’s help (Max had instinctively drawn back when Jonah had motioned him to take hold of the feet) the sexton lifted the dead man onto the floor and placed the lighted candles. Then he went to the synagogue to call more men to chant psalms and watch over the body during the night.
While Old Jonah was away, they kept standing silently in the living room. When he returned, leading the other old men in, they all went into the kitchen. “How can you breathe in here?” Tessie said. She flung the single narrow window all the way up from the bottom and pulled a chair near it. She draped her slim figure against the window frame as if, even at a time like this, she were reproaching her sisters who were eternally dieting.
Sarah carried the two chairs at the kitchen table into the living room for the watchers. Lena watched her sourly, then spread a handkerchief on a wine barrel and half sat on it. In loafers and a peasant skirt and blouse, she looked darkly handsome and affectedly young. And yet her heavy pancake makeup could not entirely hide the crows’ feet which were creeping up around her eyes.
Max chewed on an unlit cigar and looked out across the tangle of clotheslines. Through a break in the brown-gray tenement houses he could see a cluster of tall buildings that seemed to be crowding towards the East River over near the Williamsburg Bridge. In the late afternoon sun the buildings glowed a soft pinkish red. “Housing projects,” he said, a trace of bitterness in his voice. “Now even the poor have clean new houses. When we came to America, we lived in a stinking yard property with the toilets in the hall and no bath. And Papa lived out his life right here.”
As he turned from the window, his eye caught an old japanned box lying on a shelf. He took it up and stood for a moment fingering its worn edges. “Papa’s snuffbox,” he mused.
“The way it looks, we should have bought Papa a new one a long time ago,” said Tessie.
“I was with Papa when he got this,” said Max. “He bought it from a pushcart peddler on Hester Street. I was a kid about the same age as my Seymour then. And the years have gone by and Papa is dead. Look, can you find a hair on my head not already gray?”
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Sarah sighed. “Max,” said Lena, her eyes narrowing, “we got other things to think about now. The funeral—”
“I expected it would happen today. I let the society know already,” said Max, still looking at the snuffbox in his hand. “Tomorrow morning at ten o’clock they’ll send the hearse and one car.”
“All right, that you’ve taken care of,” pursued Lena. “But after the funeral, someone will have to sit here the whole shiva week with Mama. Right now let’s decide who’ll do it. If I didn’t have to see the kids off to camp tomorrow, I’d stay. So it’ll have to be Tessie.”
“Why me?” exclaimed Tessie, the veins whipping out on her thin neck as she moved away from the window to face her sisters squarely.
“Your children are grown and your husband is already used to having you away in the summer. You’ll stay,” said Lena blandly.
Tessie purpled and cried, “Since when do you tell me what to do? Why don’t you pick on Sarah? Her husband can’t be without her?”
“After the funeral we can decide who’ll stay,” said Sarah.
“No! We’ve got to settle it right now,” demanded Lena, pursing her lips so that a crisscross of wrinkles appeared at the corners of her mouth. “We’ll have other things on our hands after the funeral.”
“You mean like whether we’ll send Mama to an old-age home,” said Max. His back was towards them. Slouched against the window, he was looking across the yards.
Lena ignored her brother’s remark. “Why did this have to happen just as I’m shipping the kids off to camp?” she said. “Otherwise would I think twice about sitting with Mama?”
“Oh no, not you,” sneered Tessie.
“By the time I was fourteen I was working ten hours in the shop,” said Max. “Every time our kids sneeze, we wipe their noses and take their temperatures.”
“Don’t mix in, Max,” warned Lena. “It’s between Tessie and Sarah. One or the other will stay.”
“I still say this is not the time to—” began Sarah, but she was interrupted by a deep cry from her mother. Unawares to them, she had been dumbly listening by the kitchen door. She ran into the living room where the dead man lay.
“My children, my children,” she sobbed with such bitter emphasis that, for the moment, shame overwhelmed them all.
Suddenly she threw herself on her dead husband, upsetting a candlestick at his head and pulling the black covering away. They dragged her up and replaced the candlestick.
Sinking down on the fruit crate which one of the watchers was using as a seat, she began to pinch her dried-out cheeks with her fingers. She swayed from side to side and moaned, “Oh that I were lying there with him! Many were the times that we quarreled and cursed each other. Why did I not know that he was the crown of my head? I was a woman as fine as my daughters with him. Without him what am I but a hated worm?”
Sarah tried to comfort the old woman, but she tore herself away and went into the empty bedroom. They could see her taking the medicines from the bureau and arranging the little table.
Max and his sisters went back into the kitchen. In the fading light of late afternoon the somber drabness of the flat depressed them. Here the slow decay of the years lay like a cold, clammy hand.
“I wish it were over already,” said Lena. “Everyone dies. Why is it so much sadder with us Jews?”
“I agree with you,” said Max bitterly. “A Jew has no right to die. He ought to live forever.” Still biting on the unlit cigar, he took up the old snuffbox again and stood looking at it.
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“What’s eating you, Max?” asked Tessie. “Since when have you turned holy? You just talk good, that’s all.”
“You said it,” Lena agreed. “We got our families to think of. They come first.”
“Now that my heart gives out when I climb a couple of steps, I’m beginning to understand,” said Max. “You remember how Papa used to pray on Yom Kippur, Forsake us not, O God, when we are old? A man struggles his whole life for a piece of bread and when he dies, his children can’t afford a couple of days to sit shiva with their mother.”
“Stop talking like a rabbi and come down to earth,” said Lena.
All at once Max remembered a day many years back when Lena had been in trouble at school and her teacher had demanded that a parent come to see her. “Please, Max, you come to see my teacher. I’ll die if she sees
Papa or Mama,” Lena had pleaded. He had taken a morning off from work and gone to the school. He had saved his sister from the disgrace of having the teacher find out that their father was a shabbily dressed pants-presser who couldn’t speak English. And after all the years Max felt suddenly ashamed that he had given in to his sister.
It was silent in the kitchen as the darkness deepened into evening. There was a knock on the door. Sarah switched on the light. Max saw his son Seymour come in. The boy’s face was solemn, but his tall athletic figure seemed to Max to fill the little room with an essence of youth and hope.
The boy put his hand on his father’s shoulder and said, “I’m sorry, Dad. He was a good old guy.”
With his son’s gesture a hardness that had sat stonelike within Max dissolved and he felt the tears come. Suddenly he threw the tortured bit of cigar away and cried, “I will sit shiva here with Mama. And then she will come to live in my house.”
“Max, there’s time yet. We’ll discuss—” began Sarah.
“It’s decided,” he said quietly. Holding the old man’s snuffbox in his hand, he scraped the bottom of it with his stubby fingers until he could bring a tiny pinch of snuff to his nostrils.
His sisters looked on in wonder. The furrows in his face had gone. In their place was the tranquillity of thoughts which had already left death and gone beyond.
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