Read Online Love and Fury by Richard Hoffman - Free Book Online Page A

She opened the door.
    One side of the door, the side toward me, was the rich paneled mahogany of the walls of the place, but when the undertaker closed the door, I saw the illusion: the door was metal-painted to look like wood; on this side it was painted a flat institutional olive like the rest of the store room. Gray steel shelves floor to ceiling were stacked with paper goods, supplies, cleaning products. Here and there on the floor were steel drums of something labeled with skull and crossbones POISON warnings. Daylight was filtered through frosted-glass windows and further baffled by the many tiers of shelved goods. Unlike the rest of the place, the room was not air-conditioned.
    I stopped just inside the door. My father’s body lay on a rusty metal gurney in the middle of the room, in the aisle between the shelves, covered to his throat with a stained yellow blanket. I was wearing a sport coat; leaving the house I thought I should wear a sport coat at least, even though it was what my father would have called a “stinkin’ hot” day. Now the jacket added to the scene’s absurdity. Why had I come here? I was losing my bearings. The room vibrated a bit and darkened from a truck going by in the narrow alley and I caught a little bit of salsa on the radio as it passed. There were sounds from within the building, too, on the other side of the door at the far end of the room, water running and, faintly, the sound of something like a dentist’s drill. I looked at my feet, at my new black shoes. My father, it seemed to me, was waiting for me.
    Earlier my brother and I had met with the funeral director, providing her with information for the obituary, picking the design for a funeral card. From the laminated pages of a three-ring binder, over and over, grisly images of the Crucifixion or the gates of heaven framed by billowing clouds. I chose the only one neither saccharine nor grotesque, a stand of trees with sunlight streaming down; on the reverse, the prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi:
    O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek
    To be consoled as to console;
    To be understood, as to understand;
    To be loved, as to love;
    For it is in giving
    That we receive;
    It is in pardoning
    That we are pardoned;
    It is in dying we are reborn
    To eternal life.
    â€œIt’s about the only prayer I can abide,” I said. My brother nodded.
    â€œHave you thought about a casket? I’ll take you to our showroom when you’re ready.”
    Whether I was stalling or needed to insist that I had at least some kind of spiritual life, or just needed to hear myself talk, I went on. “That’s the prayer that was on the stained-glass window at St. Francis. I came on it years later in a different context and it made sense to me. I used to sit in church and look at that window. You know the one, Joe. St. Francis has his hands up—like this—and the sun is in the upper corner with the rays coming down and there are birds flying around and a little deer by his feet. I never understood why he had holes in his hands and feet until one of the nuns explained about the stigmata, how it was a miracle, that Francis was so Christ-like that he carried the bloody wounds of the Crucifixion. I used to wonder about that. It seemed so painful. Like if he was such a saint, why was his reward to be wounded like that? Later on, when I came across the prayer again, I saw it as a kind of step-by-step way to slip out of your ego. I don’t think there’s anything Catholic about it. Hell, the Church couldn’t stand the guy while he was alive. They thought he was a pain in the ass.” I thought I saw a look pass between my brother and the funeral director:
Uh-oh.
I could be wrong; in any case, I knew I was stuck in this monologue and had to finish it. I imagined the funeral director was used to people behaving weirdly in this situation, and my brother seemed similarly forbearing, so I went