The Funeral (1971)
DIED: MARCH 13, 1971
SHERMAN, BENJAMIN, ZION
beloved husband, father and brother

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It all seems so long ago, the day everything changed for the ones in the first limousine leaving Riverside Chapel, going to the burial ground. After this death the long line of fathers and grandfathers--tyrannical, despotic and loving--was over. The position of patriarch would remain unfilled in this family; the son-in-law refusing, the brother-in-law incapable and the grandsons too young.

But first must come this ride through a grey March day of snow, blowing wind, grey felt-lined limousine following a hearse rehearsed at other funerals, presidential assassinations and gang murders--in real life movies and T.V. Now the reality; slipping through traffic, along super highways, over bridges, through tunnel tubes on well-greased, smooth-riding, hushed pearl grey light of upholstered, snow-lit day like a Mafia boss, government official or sheik; seeing through a snow white background that makes black more black, the back end of the funeral wagon from Riverside Chapel; the square back window showing in outline the mahogany coffin in its ritual journey, its last moments above ground.

"Oh, what I lost!" Aunt Belle moaned. She was the youngest of my father's seven brothers and sisters.

"What do you mean 'what you lost' I'm the widow!" An indignant flush rose on mother's cheek. But she subsided quickly, conserving energy for the ordeal ahead.

Banal conversation in the car was strangely soothing. Mother checked everyone's clothing, noting with approval my daughter Anne on the jump-seat wearing a grey sheep-skin coat, embroidered, edged in white lamb's wool, bought in New York, left in her closet when Anne is in Vermont wearing hiking boots, farmer's overalls and an old army jacket. Next to Anne on the other jump-seat was my 14 year old son Edward wearing his one good, year-round, zipped-in-lining trench coat bought for occasions. For once mother does not mention his long hair. My sister, Barbara, sitting next to mother with red-rimmed eyes, was stylish in a new navy, polka-dot midi length dress and high-heeled, crisscross laced boots. She was cracking her usual wise-guy jokes.

"God: did you see Aunt Helen's hair? One more streak and she'd be a sunset." She laughed her hearty woman's laugh that is like a signature -- strong and bawdy, it always ended in a smoker's wheeze. Nevertheless she too is subdued -- a symptom perhaps of the breakdown and three-week Payne-Whitney residence that will come after seven days of sitting for the dead; the Shiva. For now she has lost her last chance to overcome the dead father's disapproval of her flamboyant life in movie business, theater and T.V.

My husband and the Rabbi were in the front seat next to the driver talking quietly together. Obligatory remarks about the deceased already had been made followed by the inevitable discussion of who came to the service, who sent letters, fruit baskets, candy and how many obituaries appeared in the New York Times to show respect, paid for by charitable organizations, the American Legion Post, the Jewish War Veterans, the YMHA, the synagogue and companies on whose boards he sat.

Sitting next to me in the back seat was Aunt Belle, high cheek bones, red-veined eyes, Buchenwald, Sherman face, telling stories and sigh-heaved jokes so clever it's hard to believe the family "old maid" has made them -- always getting to them through the back door. For instance the following anecdote was preceded by a sigh, then a comment on how her devotion to her father and brother Ben had kept her from marrying. Their standards, she explained, were so high that their rigid code of behavior chased away all the would be husbands. This remark was interrupted by a small explosion from mother's corner; an indescribable sound that said so much more than words. Mother's genius and tactical brilliance ranged from sarcasm to expletive. The tribal battle between these two had been going on for years and even now when the prize over which they had fought was gone, they still continued to gnaw at the bone of contention as though by continuing the quarrel they could resurrect the dead.

But now Belle, as if proving the passive-aggressive style to be a masterly defense against officiousness, went on with her story.

"This is an example of how my father chased all my beaux away," she began. "One night a young man came to call about eight o'clock. We were going to Coney Island but first my father made this young man sit in a chair opposite him and questioned him as though he were taking an examination at cheder. Where did he work? Where did his people come from on the other side...what lantzman organization...where did he go to shule? Whenever there was a pause my friend tried to stand up so we could leave. But then papa would come back again with another question...at his Bar-Mitzvah where did he read from in the Torah? Finally it was nine o'clock. We got up to go. 'Where are you going?' papa asked. 'Coney Island,' we said. 'At this hour!' he shouted, barring the door with his body, beard blazing like Moses."

Oh those foxy Sherman's hiding deep-souled, yearning intellectuality in ordinary, sometimes squalid lives of receptionists, filing clerks, book-keepers, furriers, drunkards, patriots, salesmen, Communists and women with faces like mournful sheep. All the Shermans with characteristic bony, sunken cheeks, death's-head eyes of prophets, suicides, Marxists and Anarchists.

And there was rage too, an element strongly intertwined in this family with melancholy. Those who inherited this trait were also marked with the high cheekbones that gave early warning signs of a tempest as a mottled flush strayed across Russian bone structure and gave Tartar features and small blood-shot brown eyes a Dostoyovskian cast. You thought of words like splenetic, of portraits of an old Testament prophet with bolts of lightning darting about his head and violent thunder claps. And I thought of my cousins Shirley and Ben, vengeful Sherman faces bearing down upon me at the funeral parlor before the funeral service, my father in the open coffin nearby. They were furious that I hadn't gone to the funeral of their father, the eldest brother, some months before. I was so stunned by this attack in the midst of quiet handclasps, muffled sobs and embraces of condolence that I didn't explain my father hadn't told me of his brother's death, sensing, perhaps, that I would soon be grieving for him. Really, I thought Ben and Shirley were paying back past hurts administered by my mother's anti-communist, anti-intellectual tongue. Now for the first time I thought maybe my mother was right after all. That behind her complaints about intellectual snobbery and politics was a fear of Sherman arrogance exhibited that morning with heads flung high and darting tongues.

Now a sudden lull in conversation in the car, only the fat rubber wheels over roads of ice leading to the inevitable rendezvous; to umbrellas under the blowing snow, gloved hands slipped under winter coats and furred arms; the family clinging together in March gale winds, crying in the snow while the Rabbi intones the Kaddish for Ben Zion ben Elijah over open, empty earth hole.

At last I brought to unwanted consciousness thoughts of what was lying in his best suit in the brown mahogany box that soon would be lying in that earth hole. My father, that impeccable man, on his deathbed; toothless, a catheter dripping urine, tubes piercing collapsed veins, the rasp of fluid filling his lungs, his voice wheezing, singing, "Sunrise, Sunset" calling for his...three wonderful women," whispering a refrain about one-hundred-twenty-five pairs of shoes--coming to himself to apologize about breaking wind, smelling bad, promising not to worry about anything anymore. Finally the last glimpse of something I'd been trying to forget, corrected by morticians but seared into my head--the memory of my father--leathery, twisted, like mummy figures we used to see when he took me to the Brooklyn Museum when I was a child--cheeks collapsed under the cheekbones, jaws forming a round, black hole as though his lips and mouth had been burned with acid--a Guernica figure, a battlefield victim, a medieval corpse--my dead father. No more need to fear his wrath, his nervous irritability, his phobias, his compulsive, tense personality. No more trying to reach through to the old laughing father of my earliest childhood, to the poet of the early-morning shaving glass, to the somber, vicious defender of abnormal, touchy neurotic pride. At 75 he died too young for all Sherman's were famous for their biblical years. The patriarch Elias, his father, had hung on until he was ninety-six.

"Grandpa didn't want to go on living." Anne had said. Anne the wise.

"It wasn't his world anymore. There was nothing left he understood or wanted."

Was she right? Was it too much for him to bear, this old line Democrat and veteran of the trenches of 1918 with a Purple Heart and mustard gas lungs? A block captain in the thirties he thought there was nothing better in the world than helping people with patronage jobs, fixing tickets, getting sons out of jail and policemen's widows their pensions. On Sundays in my childhood a small crowd lined the stairway of our apartment building and waited patiently outside our door as I had seen others wait on breadlines. He worshipped Jim Farley, Governor Lehman, Franklin Roosevelt and his ward boss, Kenny Sutherland. Then in the early forties, his tear-filled eyes grieving every Yom Kippur over stories of death camps, Krystal Nacht killings, Warsaw and Lidice. Now his two grandsons with their shot-gun Bar-Mitzvahs--agreed to only on his behalf--wore long hair and marched against an American war. One was a draft-card burner, FBI wanted, New Left radical who left his parents' home at eighteen to live on the lower East Side, "...that I left when I was a boy," my father had shouted in passionate disbelief, "...besides that slum killed my mother!" and his granddaughter a hitchhiker, a farmer, a communard. How he hated the turmoil, the anarchy, noise, and the disrespect. Now it was Allen Ginsberg instead of Spinoza, dirty mystic religions and buggery. And what about things he didn't dare ask, things he didn't really want to know--free love, drugs, and most terrible of all maybe his children and grandchildren supporting Arab causes...?

The Rabbi broke into the grieving silence that had overtaken passengers of the car gliding home like a death ship in the early winter dark.

"I went home last year, to Poland--to the village of my boyhood. Communist authorities said, 'you have to have a special pass to go to the countryside.' I had two weeks waiting in Warsaw. Two nights before I was to leave Poland I still had no permission. Finally I went to a taxi-cab driver, "I will give you one hundred American dollars to take me to my boyhood village.' 'Give me fifty dollars!' the driver said. 'I will take you. I am Jewish too.' We drove out of Warsaw, hiding on side roads when we saw a cordon of army trucks. Finally there was a sign. It was the right name of my village but something was wrong. There were no chickens scratching in the dirt, no cows, or old wooden houses of the shtetl, just repainted, fixed up, no longer-Jewish houses. It was like the American suburbs. Only the name was the same. I stood in the road and tried to remember but it was no use. Nothing is left of that old Yiddish life."