Nathaniel Rich - The Mayor's Tongue

Agnes's funeral is held in Elmont, Queens, at the bustling necropolis of the Bloom Memorial Gardens. The cemetery is dense with towering stone obelisks that compete for sunlight like emergent trees in a rain forest. To reach his wife, Mr. Schmitz has to step on the dewy grass sprouting from the graves of other deceased Jews. The service is quick and small. Mr. Schmitz doesn't speak. When it ends, Mr. Schmitz decides he will walk home.

But first he waits for everyone else to leave. He shakes hands with his furry-haired neighbor, the old clockmaker Moishe Zohar, whose lower lip droops sympathetically, like a beaver's; Moishe wipes away his tears with a white paper doily. Mr. Schmitz also thanks the Liza twins, Ellie and Elsa, who came over every Saturday to knit with Agnes. Mr. Schmitz had met them only once before, probably five years earlier, when he came home early from his weekly park walk with Rutherford. The twins frown at Mr. Schmitz and offer to drive him back to their apartment, but he silently declines. Just when he thinks everyone has left, a pale young girl steps out from behind an ivy-covered mausoleum, a backpack swinging from her shoulder. Though less than ten people attended the service, Mr. Schmitz did not notice her. She comes right up to him. Her thin tapering eyebrows are even with his hip. Mr. Schmitz figures she isn't more than twelve years old.

"Your wife was a beautiful lady," says the girl. Her voice is thin and piping and pauses over the long vowel sounds. "A beautiful LAY-dy," she repeats. Orange freckles dot her nose and sweat brims above her eyebrows; the tips of her long, light brown hair clump together and slowly rotate in the white sunlight.

"Thank you, dear," says Mr. Schmitz. "I'm sorry, but how did you know my wife?"

"She tutored me in arithmetic." She picks at a ragged fingernail. "I live beLOW you. In 2A. Kate."

"Agnes tutored you in arithmetic? Mhmph. I didn't think she had touched that stuff for years. Though it's true she was a whiz at mathematics, when we were young. In high school, she'd wear a protractor around her wrist like a bracelet."

Mr. Schmitz's eyes wander upward.

"Every day after the lesson she read me a chapter from my book." The child pulls a large hardcover from her backpack.

" Heidi ? The girl in the Alps? With the sheep and the old man?"

"The German girl," says Kate. "I wanted to show you the last thing she read to me from it. Just before she went to the hospital."

She opens the book and finds the spot. It reads:

The happiest of all things is when an old friend comes and greets us as in former times; the heart is comforted with the assurance that some day every thing that we have loved will be given back to us.

Mr. Schmitz studies the girl's face. She is sweating badly now in the heat. She wipes her forehead and, with a flick of her hand, casts the line of sweat to the ground.

"Please read it again."

As Kate reads the passage again, an expression of dire concentration clouds Mr. Schmitz's eyes.

"Could you read that one more time?"

And she does.

"It was nice of you to come and talk to me," says Mr. Schmitz.

"You see. . I'm in trouble."

"That's my mother." A black sedan inches up the road beside the graveyard, its opaque windows reflecting the sunshot tombstones.

"I'm in trouble," says Mr. Schmitz, pulling at his chin like a hyperactive child. "Would you like to walk with me for a bit? We can walk home together."

"It was nice to meet you, Mr. Schmitz. But my mom is waiting. Sorry."

Mr. Schmitz reaches out toward the girl's face. She doesn't move. He puts her head in his hand, softly, and then lets her go.

A moment later he is alone in front of his wife's grave. Adjacent is the plot reserved for Mr. Schmitz himself. The grass over it is neatly manicured; there's no tombstone, but otherwise it looks the same as all the other graves.

Mr. Schmitz looks up to the sky again. He registers the position of the sun and, estimating its arc, begins walking west.

The air is thick enough to chew. Mr. Schmitz proceeds down what locals call cemetery row (past Odd Fellows, Evergreen, Zion, Glenwood, and Mount Hope) to the pristine macadam of Elmont's Main Street. He feels his toes perspire. He is not paying attention, and when he crosses the street, several church-leaving cars are heading right for him. They brake abruptly and honk, but when they see the dazed, humble look on the elderly gentleman's face, they relent. It's evident what part of town he is coming from. Mr. Schmitz walks on, as though in a dream. He's dreaming of Rutherford.

He marvels that Rutherford did not come to his wedding either. Rutherford was away from New York at the time, gallivanting in Sweden — he had booked a flight to Stockholm immediately after reading in the Israeli travel magazine Gonif! that Jewish men had fallen into vogue in Scandinavia. Sure enough, Rutherford found an albino woman and ran off with her on a six-month tour of Scandinavian spas. As a result he did not receive Mr. Schmitz's wedding invitation until the week after the event had taken place (or so Rutherford later claimed, bowler in hand, to his friend). Mr. Schmitz did not forgive him, even after Rutherford sent impressive gifts — a large set of bronze pots and pans as well as a two-volume Garzanti Italian dictionary. It was clear to Mr. Schmitz that Rutherford, even though he would never admit it, disapproved of the wedding, believing that men of their age (they were both twenty-six at the time) should stay unattached. Carlita's death had left him defiant and disapproving. She had come as a fantasy but lingered on as a nightmare; she clung to him like an apparition, her shape shifting in his mind depending on his mood or fortune or engagement with the outside world.

Main Street tapers into a quiet residential lane of lawns and compact Victorian houses, which dead-ends a half mile later at a brick wall. The wall supports a freeway. Mr. Schmitz touches the brick. It is so hot that its chalk seems to stick to his fingers. A narrow pedestrian road leads off on one side, and he follows it into an asphalt no-man' s-land under the highway. The area is strewn with plastic bags, soiled clothing, and a baby's crib filled with soda cans.

Mr. Schmitz finds his way through a broken wooden fence into a patch of high, bristly grass, thrumming with insect life and, he suspects, furiously mating rodents. The highway overpass gives way to a milky gray sky. His socks grow slushy from the mud, and his shins chafe against the knee-high brush. Ahead, in the distance, he can make out several buildings clustered around a large open space, and as he stands on his toes to get a better look, his loafers sink into the ground. There is no other person within sight to observe the unusual expression that constricts the old wanderer's face. It is a mixture of contentment, confusion, and bloat — the look of a man who has just swallowed, with some remorse, an extra serving of a sumptuous meal.

He wades into a brown creek, the tails of his jacket floating like lily pads behind him. A plane flies overhead, close to the ground, and he freezes. He wonders what he looks like from that height. What would someone see, up in the sky there, when they peered down at this marshland? Would they see a man? A speck? A fat turtle, drifting down a stream?

Mr. Schmitz climbs up a small hill, crosses a dirt field, and reaches the tarmac, at which point he starts to jog. Airplanes taxi several hundred feet away on either side of him, though their engine roars are mute to him; several passengers point out their window at the strange old man jogging along the runway. Is he going to fly too? one child asks his mother.

An air traffic controller jumps when Mr. Schmitz grabs his shoulder. Mr. Schmitz asks him how to get inside the terminal. This is before squad cars and airport police and federal agents are entrusted with supervising the runway at all times, and the air traffic controller doesn't know how to handle the situation. With his semaphore he gestures to Mr. Schmitz to sit down on the ground — another plane is approaching. After the plane lands, the air traffic controller leads the confused old man into the terminal building through a service door. Once inside, Mr. Schmitz follows the signs to Alitalia airlines and walks up to the counter, wallet in hand. Weeping softly now, Mr. Schmitz marvels at how full his married life had been of solitary walks just like this one.