CHAPTER 50
Maggie
The coffin is small and white with gold trim. Inside it is the body of a three-year-old girl who died of scarlet fever and whose hair I styled into corn silk curls held fast now by white satin bows.
She is such a little thing. Papa won’t need his hired man for this one. I will be able to help him move her.
Most of the time Papa relies on a fellow named Gordon Luddy, a man who delivers milk in the early mornings but who is free the rest of the day, to help him do what I cannot. Gordon helps Papa transport the caskets from the parlor to the hearse and assists him at the cemetery with getting the coffin to its place near the freshly dug hole in the ground. Gordon is not here yet, but it does not matter. I push the short casket on its cart down the hall to the rear entrance. I help Papa carry it down the four steps to the hearse’s opened back end so that he can deliver it to the church for the memorial and then to the cemetery. It is the eighth of September and the early afternoon is warm and humid as I push the hearse door closed.
“Don’t wait supper on me,” Papa says as he heads for thedriver’s-side door. “And there will be plenty of people able to help me get the casket back into the hearse and out again at the cemetery. You don’t need to come down later.”
“All right.”
I watch him leave with the small casket and the little girl named Lucy inside it before I head back inside.
Preparing the very young for their funerals has been the hardest thing to get accustomed to since I’ve become Papa’s assistant. It is difficult to find a snippet of beauty in preparing a child or an infant for burial. The only word of solace I can whisper to these little ones as I cover up the pallor of death is that my mother and brother are there in heaven, that Mama is sweet and kind, and that her name is Pauline, so that if they want to, they can find her there.
“You don’t have to do this,” Papa had said when I told him two years ago that I wanted to be his official assistant.
I had been nearing my graduation from the academy, and Papa’s full-time apprentice at the time, a man named Wilbur with a pronounced lisp, had just gotten married and moved to Virginia to be closer to his new wife’s family. I’d never had the college aspirations that Evie did, and while I could easily have set my sights on a position behind the perfume counter at Wanamaker’s or courses at a secretarial school, those pursuits had never interested me. I was already doing the hair and makeup at the end of the preparation process, but Papa and Wilbur did the embalming and suturing and restoration work. They did all the important repairs. My contributions were nothing compared to what they did. I wanted to do more.
“But I want to. It’s what I want to do,” I’d said.
We had been going over the ledgers in the little office off his bedroom. He had been smoking a cigar from a box that Grandad had sent him. Business had been steady for us. More and more people had been discovering they much preferred the embalming of their loved ones to take place at the mortician’s place of business rather than the beloved deceased’s bedroom. And fewer people all the time had large parlorsin their homes for viewings. We offered a homelike atmosphere for both, with all the up-to-date conveniences of a modern-day mortuary. Papa was officially a mortician now, not just an undertaker. He’d enrolled in a special school to become licensed in what he pretty much already knew how to do.
“It’s not the most cheerful room to work in, you know,” he’d replied. “The things we do and see...” He hadn’t finished the thought. He was right in that we saw our share of tragic circumstances, day in and day out. There were some cadavers Papa flat-out refused to let me view. The human body is amazing and wonderful but so delicate. And there are so many ways for a person to die, especially if the death has had something to do with a crime or gangsters. There had been more murders since Prohibition was enacted. A lot more. Papa said it was because when something is illegal but people still want it and will pay for it, there are other people who will do whatever it takes to provide it. They will even fight over who is going to be the supplier. They will kill to be the one who controls the supplies. Sometimes there is not even a body for Papa to embalm. Or not much of one.
“But it isn’t all sad, what we do. Part of it is needful,” I’d answered. “Part of it is... pleasant.”
He’d smiled as he stroked his chin. “Now, there’s a word we didn’t hear much in mortuary school.”
“But it is,” I’d replied. “It’s the only part of death we can control. The farewell.”
He’d puffed on his cigar, thinking on this.
“You have your own life to consider, Maggie,” he’d said a moment later. “Marriage, children.”
I hadn’t met Palmer yet, and my heart was still tender toward absent Jamie Sutcliff. I had written him many times at postal boxes provided to me by Dora. One in Missouri. One in Colorado. One in California. He had never written back. I’d finally stopped writing at that point even though I hadn’t forgotten about him. And as far aschildren went, I had Alex. He was my brother, true, but he was more than just my brother.
“I’m only seventeen, Papa,” I’d answered. And then to put him at ease about my future, “There’s still plenty of time for all that.”
He had tapped his cigar onto an ashtray, contemplating a thought that he then voiced. “Do your peers find it distasteful, what you do?”
After changing schools following Jamie’s return and then escape, I’d been surrounded by new classmates and had to make all new friends. Evie was there only the first year, and then she graduated early and was off to the university. The next two years at the academy, I had a circle of friends who enjoyed my company and I theirs, but I spent most of my after-school free time with Ruby, who still clung to me, even though we were no longer attending the same school. She never got over losing Sally. Ruby also never wanted to hear any details about what I did at the funeral home, which didn’t bother me because there were always plenty of other things for us to talk about. I hadn’t known what my academy classmates thought about what I did because I didn’t tell them and they didn’t ask if I helped my father in his business. It likely never occurred to them that I did.
So when Papa had asked me this, I’d said that my peers didn’t care, which hadn’t been a lie.
After I graduated from high school and Wilbur left, if Papa needed help lifting someone heavier than I could help him handle, he’d call for Roland Sutcliff to come over or he’d wait for Gordon to finish his milk route to help him. There were—and are—plenty of times he and I could handle a body just fine.
Now, three years after high school, I help Papa with just about everything. Not with the embalming so much, but with the restoration work and helping families choose a casket and getting the flowers ready in the viewing parlor and sometimes just putting an arm around a grieving widow or mother or lover and letting her cry.
Occasionally, when I’ve an arm around someone in a half embrace, he or she will ask if I have ever lost someone. When I tell them I lostan infant brother when I was a child and that I said good-bye to my dear mother in that very room, they will invariably lean into me and cry a little harder. They will always later thank me for that excruciating moment. Always. This is something Gordon cannot do for them: stand beside them—in every sense of the phrase—in their loss and grief.
Palmer isn’t put off by my occupation. If he were, he’d say so. Palmer always says what he wants to say. But I know he sees my work with my father as temporary. To him, this is what I am doing right now, not what Ido. I think he might be hoping I will fall deeply in love with him and that when that happens, I will leave all this behind like it was someone else’s life.
There are times that scenario woos me. But it’s only the part about being deeply in love that has me intrigued. I could choose making a beautiful life with someone over making someone’s dead body beautiful if there were that kind of love between us.
I could leave behind the embalming room if I had that.
I do want to fall for Palmer. I do. But I also feel a tugging to stay upright, to remain where I am with my feet planted. A pull to keep from pitching forward and tumbling into a world I don’t know.
Perhaps this is how it is for everyone who stands poised to unite her heart and flesh to another. Or perhaps this is just how it is for me. I am not one to step off a ledge and trust there is a net in good repair to catch me.
I am not one to let herself fall.
The hearse is gone from view now.
I head back into the embalming room to put away the curling rods and hair ribbons and all the other traces of a little girl gone too soon.
