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

on.
    â€œThat’s the thing all the mystics, the prophets, the saints, whatever you want to call them, all agree on, no matter what religion they come out of: you have to get past your ego, past what you want. It’s a
technos
, a set of instructions. If you don’t just say it, the prayer, if you stop at each separate point and really take it in, it’s like reversing the poles of the usual, like an electric current or something. It’s like life has us all turned inside out like a sock back from the wash, and the prayer is a set of instructions for turning yourself right side out again.” Now they both looked concerned. I was concerned myself; I felt a little light-headed. And then a terrible self-consciousness gripped me. “Anyway,” I said, and moved my hand dismissively in a way I instantly recognized was my father’s.
    â€œCan I get you anything? Coffee? Tea? Water?”
    â€œNot for me,” Joe said. I shook my head.
    The funeral director rose. “Shall we go then? To choose a casket?”
    Some were closed, some open. Some were wood. Some aluminum, some steel. Some were fine furniture: walnut, maple, cherry. Silks and satins inside: white, powder blue, silver, or rose. In only a moment I was overwhelmed. Joe asked, without quoting a figure, what she had in “a kind of midrange one.” She showed us a deep-plum-colored steel casket with a buttery satin lining. And a muted silver model, blue inside. And a coppery one. I wasn’t especially decisive, I just wanted this over with. “I think this one. What do you say, Joe?”
    He shrugged, pursed his lips, nodded. We’d chosen the darker one. It had a little work where the railing was attached all around for the pallbearers.
    â€œVery well then. Now, Richard, I understand that you would like to spend some time with your father?” I nodded. Back at her office she gave me a card. “Your father’s at our other location, on Fourth Street. Do you know where that is?” I nodded again. “The address is there on the card. I’ll call to let them know you’re coming. You understand that our aesthetician hasn’t finished with him yet, hasn’t finished his work. I want to be sure you understand that.”
    It was perfectly appropriate that she was so businesslike and accommodating and I wished she was something more, although just what I couldn’t say.
    The other funeral home was across town, in a neighborhood near where I’d gone to high school. It was alive with bodegas, hoagie shops, travel agents, restaurants, fruit markets, and, at that time of day, kids coming home from school, the boys wearing ties and white shirts, the girls in their plaid Catholic jumpers. Whenever my father got on one of his rants about how the city was falling into ruin, my brother would tell him to come off it, that if he spoke Spanish, he’d think it was a great place to live.
    I had been gripping an upright of the steel shelving, hard, a red crease in my palm. I moved toward my father. I touched his face and stood looking at him.
    The expression on my father’s face was odd, a kind of self-satisfied smirk. Maybe that’s too strong a word, smirk. It’s hard to describe because although I’d seen the expression thousands of times, it was always fleeting, the prelude to a wisecrack, or laughter, or his saying, “Aw, go on!” incredulously, a slight movement of the lip—except that now it wasn’t a movement—on its way to something else. In the next instant surely he would say something.

    The day before, I had set out as soon as my brother called to say that he’d taken my father to the emergency room. Traffic was heavy on the interstate. My brother called a couple of times to let me know what the doctors were saying. The next time he called he said, “Well, you didn’t make it. And neither did he.” The hospital staff wanted to know how far