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1
My first instinct was to look at the corpse. It's what all the Irish do.
We treat our wakes like weddings. There's much drinking and storytelling, a lot of back-clapping and hugs and shouts of hello to long-lost relatives and cousins we only see when we bring out our dead. We dress in black, for mourning, but we go out after the wake and get blind, stumbling drunk. We spend the next day nursing our hangovers, puking our brains out if we were especially close to the deceased and therefore drank exceedingly stupid amounts of alcohol, and trying desperately to sober up and straighten out for night two. We often go for three nights, particularly for popular dead people, as we did with my father. The fourth day is the funeral, and we usually mix our drinking with lunch. By then a hang-over pallor has been cast over the lot of us. We intertwine all this drinking and carrying on with equal parts wrenching sobs -- an ingredient likely missing from the aforementioned weddings.
But first we look at the corpse.
We lay our dead out in the front of the room in a coffin designed to make it look as if the deceased is merely sleeping. The funeral home even sells you a pillow for the dead person's head precisely for this purpose. It is satin and soft. My father's was ivory-colored, a sign of purity. And it cost a lot of money. More money than you would pay, for example, for a pillow you buy at Macy's that you actually sleep on. Real sleeping, not pretend dead sleeping. Funeral homes sell you lots of things, none of which the deceased is actually going to need on his or her journey to wherever it is the dead go. In my father's case, people weighed in with their opinions, the general direction of which was down.
Having seen more than my share of dead bodies, and having seen TV shows about forensics and morgues -- television for the morbidly curious, those of us who likely look at the corpse first when we walk into an Irish wake -- I know a bit about corpses. While the dead body up there in the front of the room may, indeed, look like he or she is sleeping, most definitely, the dead body is not. In fact, the dead body has had its mouth stapled shut so as not to open and allow a swollen, blue-black tongue to protrude. The body has also been drained of all its fluids and filled with preservatives. I think of this as the Big Mac approach to death. Funeral parlors line them up like so many fast-food customers at the drive-through and present to the family a preservative-stuffed something. Like fast food, which may be called food but bears little resemblance to real food, the body may look like your dear old dad, but trust me, it's the preservatives.
Which leads me to the corpse. Given the fact that my father drank his way through sixty-two years of life, he looked pretty good -- and let me do the Irish math on that. He was seventy-two when he died but started drinking daily when he was ten. So he effectively drank his way through sixty-two years of straight vodka and enough beer to satisfy the citizens of Munich during Oktoberfest. We are not talking, by the way, of a glass of beer with dinner, or a nightcap at the hour of the eleven o'clock news before toddling off to bed, we are talking about daily consumption the likes of which an ordinary mortal would end up in a hospital having his or her stomach pumped. My father had the fortunate -- or unfortunate -- ancestry to be half Irish and half Russian. He liked his vodka, liked to brood, and liked to celebrate St. Patrick's Day. That my brother and I -- though not my sister -- have inherited this prodigious talent for handling mass quantities of vodka was a great source of pride to Dad. More impressive to him than our grades in school, than the fact that, unlike some of his friends' kids, we managed to keep out of prison.
Another thing about Irish wakes. We say things like, "They did such a good job." (They being the people who do things like staple mouths shut and put waxy makeup on corpses.) "He looks good." And Dad did look surprisingly pink and robust for a dead man.
For years, my brother Tom, and I, as well as assorted sons and daughters of my father's friends, had been laying bets about when he would have to "pay the piper." Another expression. But in the cosmic scheme of things, it seemed logical to assume a guy who had murdered five people (give or take), been to prison three times, drunk his way through sixty-two years, smoked for forty (gave it up for health reasons . . . go figure), and had been on the receiving end of a few battles with bats and bricks and other assorted weapons (as well as the giving end), would, someday, have to pay for his sins. Someday he would get cancer, a heart attack or (my money riding on this at two to one odds) cirrhosis of the liver. But he never did.
Tom, who had never figured out a way to stand in the same room with my father without it leading to a fistfight, looked down at the corpse and said, "He looks good."
"Yeah. Pretty amazing." I nodded, perplexed by this seeming defiance of the laws of nature.
"Doesn't seem fair, the son of a bitch."
"No, it doesn't. But then again . . ."
"Yeah. Then again . . ."
Tom and I talk to each other in shorthand. When we are together, which is nearly always, there is an instant feeling of being home, like being enveloped in the memory of my mother's rosewater-scented arms. With Tom, I never have to explain. I don't have to try to force my world to make sense. I simply breathe, and Tom breathes, too. Usually a large consumption of alcohol is involved when we are together, as well. But this only makes the shorthand a greater convenience. When drunk, we need barely speak.
We stood over the body of this man, my father, and I thought I would cry. The entire scene was something I had pictured before, and I had imagined how I would act. I thought I would feel something leave me, like my breath or part of my soul. But, strange as it sounds, all I felt was a sense of shock that such a force of rage and power, terror and, believe it or not, humor, was actually just a hull of a body. In the end, we all are, whether we're a killer or a schoolteacher. In the end, they staple your mouth shut and give you a pillow as the consolation prize. End of the game. Thank you for playing.
Tom instinctively reached for my hand. His was clammy. "I hate this, Ava."
I squeezed his hand in return.
Our other sibling, Carol, came through the door in a burst of emotion, immediately falling into the arms of her husband and sobbing her way toward the dead body "sleeping" on the pillow in the Rolls-Royce of caskets. She collapsed onto the kneeler in front of the coffin, not even seeing Tom or me, or seeing us and ignoring us. In general, she put on a performance worthy of an Academy Award nomination.
Carol's little game is she decided a long time ago that she would leave our world to go live in her husband's. And she would never tell her husband -- not ever -- who we really were, who our father was, and why our lives had made the glossy pages of the New York Chronicle three years ago in the longest piece they ever ran -- in two parts. Or why we were the subject of a movie with "buzz." Why celebrities courted my father as if he had been somebody famous. Why a certain celebrity and I had slept together, complicating matters entirely. No, Carol liked to pretend that we were normal.
After the Chronicle article, I heard she told her husband she had no idea what Dad had done. Apparently her husband, though bright enough to earn an MBA from Columbia and be vice president of something or other, bought the myth that during Dad's stint in Sing Sing Correctional, Carol had assumed he was off working as a traveling salesman. In their polite world, where people really do drink just a glass of wine with dinner, this kind of lie passes as truth, just as in our world, saying something "fell off a truck" means you now have twenty identical Rolexes sitting in your underwear drawer.
The O'Neil family most definitely was not normal, no matter what Carol wanted to say to her husband and his family. We were the Roofer's kids. And his long shadow filled that funeral parlor, even as his shell lay in front of me.
His message was quite clear.
I ain't never paid the piper, and I'm still a beautiful corpse. And if you cry over me, I'll break your legs.
Yeah. Dad was sentimental like that.
Copyright © 2004 Erica Orloff
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