The Grievers

  ALSO BY MARC SCHUSTER

  The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom & Party Girl

  Don DeLillo, Jean Baudrillard, and the Consumer Conundrum

  The Grievers

  MARC SCHUSTER

  Copyright © 2012 by Marc Schuster

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  For information, address:

  The Permanent Press

  4170 Noyac Road

  Sag Harbor, NY 11963

  www.thepermanentpress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Schuster, Marc—

  The grievers / Marc Schuster.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-57962-263-3

  eISBN 1-57962-308-5

  1. Male friendship—Fiction. 2. Friends—Death—Fiction. 3. Funeral rites and ceremonies—Fiction. 4. Bereavement—Fiction. 5. Interpersonal relations—Fiction I. Title.

  PS3619.C48327G75 2012

  813'.6—dc23

  2012004249

  Printed in the United States of America.

  For Wei Han Chu

  and Dan Barry

  CHAPTER ONE

  The telephone rang a second time, and Karen turned up her hands like a martyr revealing stigmata. The gesture was meant, I imagined, to imply that the pasty clumps of grayish glue and gooey shreds of wallpaper clinging to her rubber gloves rendered my wife incapable of dealing with the outside world—a silent argument that left me no choice but to counter her position with the irrefutable evidence of my own.

  How am I supposed to answer the phone from all the way up here? I all but demanded, waving my trowel and heat gun at the stepladder beneath me. Besides, this is serious business. Can’t you see I’m using a power tool?

  A heat gun is hardly a power tool, Karen’s raised eyebrows seemed to imply. Climb down from your ladder and pick up the phone.

  Hardly a power tool? You plug it in, don’t you? It makes a noise, doesn’t it?

  I conveyed these questions by scrunching my nose and curling my mouth into a sneer. Regardless of whether we were reading each other correctly, the conversation had, in the space of a heartbeat, gained enough momentum to erupt into a full-blown battle of frowns, shrugs, and eyepopping grimaces when the telephone rang a third time and reminded us why we were arguing in the first place.

  Conceding defeat with an aggrieved sigh, Karen raced to the kitchen and answered the phone. When she returned a few seconds later with the gooey receiver pressed to her chest, I knew it was a call I didn’t want to take.

  “It’s Mrs. Chin,” she whispered.

  I lowered my trowel and laid my heat gun on the top step of the ladder. The last time I’d seen Billy Chin was on New Year’s Eve. We spoke for ten minutes before I noticed the line of stitches running from the heel of his hand to the dark recesses of his sleeve. Six months later, I received a note from his mother informing me that he had died. When I wrote back, I said she could call me anytime, night or day, if she wanted to talk. The offer looked great on paper, but as I climbed down from my ladder and reached for the phone, it dawned on me for the first time that the words might mean something.

  “Charley Schwartz?” Mrs. Chin asked.

  All I wanted was to hear that Billy’s death had been an accident—that he was driving home from work one night when a tire came loose from the back of a truck and crashed through his windshield, or that he’d been held up at gunpoint or died pushing a child from the path of a speeding car, or, worst case scenario, that he’d uncovered a scandal at the health clinic where he’d been working and was permanently silenced by hired assassins. Part of me was even hoping that cancer was the culprit and that Billy had faced the disease with grace and elegance. I didn’t need him to be a hero, exactly. A victim would have been fine, an unsuspecting pawn caught up in circumstances beyond his control. What I didn’t want to hear from Billy’s mother was what I already knew, so I clutched at my most elaborate fantasies even as she told me the particulars of her son’s suicide.

  He walked three blocks from home and jumped from the Henry Avenue Bridge, she said. A friend of the family identified the body. Like both of Billy’s parents, the old man was a doctor, and his wife had taken care of Billy when he was a baby. When Billy’s mother told me this last detail, her breath caught. He was always a happy boy—kind and generous, she said, like I’d written in the note I barely remembered writing. When the old man who identified the body asked why Billy jumped, those were the exact words his mother had used: because he was kind and generous, because he was thoughtful and polite, and he didn’t want to burden his parents with the responsibility of coming home to an overdose.

  Mrs. Chin spoke in a quiet, fragile voice.

  I listened without saying a word.

  There had been a girl in his life—a Japanese grad student who left Billy to take care of her mother in Osaka. Though Mrs. Chin said she could hardly blame the girl, the edge in her voice betrayed a hint of scorn. The same edge crept into her voice when she mentioned Billy’s funeral. Of course I couldn’t have gone, she said, because she wanted to keep the event small, keep it dignified and manageable, and therefore didn’t invite anyone but family. Now that it was over, she wished I could have been there—that any of his friends from the Academy could have been there.

  “He always loved the Academy,” Mrs. Chin said.

  I didn’t know how to respond.

  Founded in 1851, Saint Leonard’s Academy was one of three schools in the greater Philadelphia area that could legitimately call itself the city’s oldest prep school. Though no one at the Academy ever spoke the names of the other two institutions aloud, the official line was that one of them had relocated just beyond city limits after a fire in 1964 and that the other closed its doors for three months during the influenza pandemic of 1918. These accidents of geography and history allowed Saint Leonard’s to use the phrase “under continuous operation in the city of Philadelphia” in ways that no other school could dream of. An informal poll of the young men who attended Saint Leonard’s, however, revealed an altogether different, if not entirely subtle, distinction between their institution and the others. To wit, the other schools were full of pussies.

  “It was a wonderful place,” I said, omitting the fact that the unearned swagger of newly minted Academy grads had, over the years, led some to refer to the school as the Bastard Factory. “For all of us.”

  There was a long silence that I wanted to fill with anything but the sound of my own breathing, but all I could think about were the black stitches running up the inside of Billy’s wrist and how I never said a word about them to anyone.

  “You were a good friend,” Mrs. Chin said eventually.

  Though I suspected the opposite was true, I let it go. After we said goodbye, I hung up the phone and went back to work. Was I okay, Karen wanted to know as I climbed my ladder and reached for my heat gun?

  I nodded and felt a lump growing in my throat.

  “He jumped off a bridge,” I said.

  “Oh, Charley.”

  Karen stripped off her gloves, and my finger twitched on the trigger of the heat gun. The couch was shrouded in dirty sheets and plastic drop cloths, but Karen sat down anyway and motioned for me to join her.

  I hated to stop working.

  I wanted to plough forward.

  I needed to put my house in order, but I couldn’t get the image of Billy’s stitches out of my head, couldn’t stop thinking about his last desperate seconds, couldn’t stop wondering if there was something I could have said or done, so I climbed down from my ladder, curled up next to my wife, and cried.

 
; CHAPTER TWO

  Saint Leonard de Noblac was a sixth-century monk whose prayers saw the queen of France through a difficult pregnancy. By way of compensation, King Clovis the Magnificent promised him all the land he could traverse via donkey within a nine-day period, and to sweeten the deal, the king also gave Saint Leonard the authority to free any prisoners he stumbled upon throughout the remainder of his life. At least, this is what I gathered from the slideshow I watched along with a hundred other awkward, pimply teenage boys on my first morning at the Academy.

  “Make a goofy face when they do the class picture,” the kid next to me said as a wizened Noblac friar extolled the virtues of Saint Leonard’s faithful donkey, Maurice. “Trust me on this.”

  “Sure-footed and loyal,” the friar said, barely audible over the clatter of slides as they cycled through the carousel. “Headstrong and determined, but never to the point of obstinacy.”

  The friar’s name was Brother Timothy, and he cinched his brown robe at the waist with a coarse length of braided twine. Though he frequently referred to himself as a historian, Brother Timothy was only ever scheduled to moderate study halls and, when necessary, to sub for missing teachers. This was most likely due to the fact that his lectures invariably turned to the adventures of Saint Leonard and his donkey-cum-sidekick, Maurice. If the swim team defeated a major rival, Brother Timothy recalled a time when Maurice and Saint Leonard crossed a raging river to deliver food to starving orphans. If the football team went down in defeat, Brother Timothy reminded us that Saint Leonard had been beset by wolves on more than one occasion, but had, by the grace of God, escaped with only minor cuts and bruises. And when a member of the custodial staff passed away in the spring of my sophomore year, Brother Timothy suddenly recalled that Saint Leonard was not only the patron saint of prisoners, blacksmiths, midwives, donkeys, thieves, travelers, good fortune, and the wheel, but of janitors and food-service personnel as well.

  “Just as Christ rode a donkey into Jerusalem mere days before the crucifixion, so too did Saint Leonard pass through life on the most faithful of beasts,” Brother Timothy droned that first morning as photographs of donkeys, many shot from conspicuously low angles, flashed across the screen behind him. “By the same token, so too do we expect you, the Raging Donkeys of Saint Leonard’s Academy, to meet your destinies, both in the classroom and beyond, with fixed and firm dignity and aplomb.”

  “Raging Donkeys?” I said to the kid next to me.

  “It’s the name of our team,” the kid said, clearly disgusted by my ignorance.

  “Yeah, but why Raging?”

  “Are you kidding? Have you seen the dicks on those things?” the kid said, raising his eyebrows in the direction of the stage where Brother Timothy stood silent behind a wooden podium, the thick lenses of his eyeglasses shining in the white glare of the slide projector. Behind him, more donkeys paraded across the silver screen, their undercarriages rendered more menacing with each shot by the photographer’s growing fondness for the close-up. “Like the man said, fixed and firm.”

  The kid’s name was Frank Dearborn, and except for his crooked nose, he looked like he’d be as comfortable shouting Sieg Heil at a Hitler Youth rally as he was pumping his fist and chanting the school’s initials when the senior class president replaced Brother Timothy behind the podium and informed us that, as Raging Donkeys, we were nothing short of God’s gift to the world.

  “Check out that guy,” Frank said, nudging me with his elbow as the houselights came up in the auditorium and the remaining chants of S-L-A! S-L-A! S-L-A! fizzled out like embers in a dying fire. “What’s he doing here?”

  I followed his gaze to one of the tallest people I’d ever seen in my life, a skinny black kid whose arms were a good six inches too long for his blue blazer. A white sticker over his heart read Hi! My Name Is DWAYNE COLEMAN. That no one else in the freshman class was wearing a name-tag meant that the kid must have recently worn the same jacket to some other event that did, in fact, require name-tags and had forgotten to take it off. That no one bothered to tell him about it meant that the joke was on him and would be for the foreseeable future. Tall and black were beside the point. To me, anyway, he’d always be the only guy in the room wearing a name-tag.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “I thought this school was segregated.”

  “Segregated?”

  “Yeah. My dad said there were no blacks here.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Where’d he get that idea?”

  We were filing out of the auditorium now, and a doughy white kid whose heavy, labored breathing had been audible throughout Brother Timothy’s presentation turned to me and explained what Frank was getting at.

  “I believe he’s referring to the fact that Saint Leonard’s Academy is run by Noblac Friars,” the doughy kid said. “In other words, your friend was expecting to see Noblacs today. Or, to make an obvious and perhaps unfortunate play on words, no blacks.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “We’re going to make funny faces when they take the class picture.”

  “I think I’ll pass,” the doughy kid said. “I don’t want it biting me in the ass somewhere down the line.”

  “So, what?” Frank said. “You’re running for president or something? Make a funny face for Christ’s sake.”

  “My political aspirations are none of your business,” the doughy kid said, shuffling away from us when his row started to move. “But, yes, one day you will see me in the White House—perhaps not as president, but certainly as a high-ranking aide-de-camp to whomever happens to be in office at the time.”

  “It’s Packer, right?” Frank said.

  “Correct,” the doughy kid said.

  “As in fudge?”

  The doughy kid ignored the question, and though I didn’t catch the reference, I laughed when Frank nudged me with his elbow.

  “Get it?” Frank said. “Fudge Packer?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Fudge Packer.”

  “What about you?” Frank said to a skinny Asian kid who was shuffling out of the row behind the doughy kid. “Are you a fudge packer, too, or are you going to make faces at the camera with us?”

  The Asian kid glanced back at us but kept walking.

  “Yeah, you,” Frank said. “Rice Dick.”

  A few seconds too late, I figured out that Frank’s fudge packer reference probably had something to do with anal sex. That combined with his calling the quiet Asian kid Rice Dick made me wonder whether I should distance myself from the guy before anyone assumed we were buddies.

  “You’re still going to do it—right, Schwartz?” Frank said, perhaps sensing a lack of resolve on my part as we filed into the gymnasium and Brother Timothy set up his camera on a tripod in front of the bleachers. “Make a weird face, I mean. You’re cool with that, right?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Awesome,” Frank said. “I knew you were a good one.”

  Christ, I thought. It was like the guy was speaking a different language. Everything he said took forever to sink into my brain, and by the time I got it all decoded, I’d already agreed to hand over my lunch money, my good name, and anything else of value that I might have had in my possession, tangible or otherwise.

  “A good what?” I asked, struggling to follow.

  “A good Jew,” Frank said.

  “Oh,” I said. “But I’m not Jewish.”

  “Hey, I’m not judging or anything,” Frank said.

  “I didn’t think you were,” I said, though he obviously was. “But, really, I’m not Jewish.”

  “Relax, Schwartz. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “I mean, I wouldn’t be—if I were Jewish. Which I’m not.”

  “Then why are you getting so bent out of shape?”

  “I’m not getting bent out of shape,” I said, my voice rising a full octave.

  “Whatever, Schwartz. Your secret’s safe with me.”

  We climbed the bleac
hers, and Frank wandered off, his campaign to convince other kids to make faces at the camera kicking into full gear. Three weeks later, a poster-sized black and white photo of the freshman class was hanging in the foyer outside of our cafeteria. Jaws set, lips pursed, gazes fixed defiantly on some distant, manly horizon, my classmates did their best impersonation of serious adulthood while I stood in the front row with my eyes crossed and my cheeks puffed out like a blowfish.

  “Mazel tov, Schwartz!” Frank called across the marble foyer as I stared at the photograph, cheeks burning, the only fool to fall into his trap. “Nice picture!”

  “I believe I warned you about this,” the doughy kid—whose name, I’d since learned, was Greg—said, breathing heavily as he made his way through the early morning crush of groggy boys and their overstuffed backpacks. “Now you’ll never amount to anything.”

  “It could be worse,” Billy Chin said, caught up in the crush. “Everyone could call you Rice Dick.”

  I hated Frank. I hated Greg. I even hated Billy at that point, despite the fact that I barely knew him. This wasn’t the first humiliation in my life, but it was my first at the Academy, and it was a big one. All through grade school, my thick glasses and propensity for big words made me the target of boys who were much bigger than I was and who thought that professional wrestling was real. As a result, I suffered three black eyes, a chipped tooth, a broken nose, a dislocated shoulder, a scrape running from the inside of my elbow down to my belly button, two near drownings (one in a swimming pool and one in a toilet), a mild concussion, and countless noogies, wedgies, Indian burns, and wet willies, all between fifth and eighth grade. But I was never bitter—or not entirely so—because at the end of it all I knew I’d be the only kid from my graduating class who was moving on to Saint Leonard’s Academy. To my mind, this meant starting over in a place where nobody knew me. It meant that I was making a fresh start, that I was forging a new identity, that I could turn myself into someone other than the geeky kid who talked funny and cried when other kids held him down on the ground and pressed his face into the mud. But now? After the class picture? Forget about it. Dwayne Coleman’s name-tag was barely a blip on the radar by comparison.