Bruce Wagner - I’m Losing You

Free to listen to Voices again — shouting from canyons and on-ramps and driveways without letup, bungling into digital potholes on Olympic, dead spots on Sunset — shpritzing from palmy transformer-lined Barrington…Sepulveda…Overland…crying from electrical voids on nefarious far-flung PCH, dodging wormholes and power poles, festinating to beat devil’s odds of tunnel and subterranean garage as one tries to beat a train across a track — prayers and incense to ROAM (where all roads lead) — trying to beat the ether. A blizzard of Voices fell from range, chagrined, avalancheburied spouses in flip phone crevasse, electromagnetic wasteland of tonal debris. Neither Alpine nor Audio Vox nor Mitsubishi-Motorola could defend against unnerving fast food airwave static: recrudescent, viral, sudden and traumatic — words dropped, then whole thoughts, pledges, pacts, pleas and whispers, jeremiads — maddening overlap, commingling barked-staccato promises to reconnect swiftly decapitated: Westside loved ones morfed to scary downtown Mex, collision of phantom couples in hissing carnival bumper cars, technology cursed, torturous redial buttons pressed like doorbells during witching hour— hullo? hullo? can you hear me? — symphony of hungry ghosts begging to be let in.

I’m losing you .

Rachel Krohn

She sat in the lobby of the storefront mortuary, nervously thumbing a Fairfax throwaway. An ad within offered membership:

ONLY $18.00 A YEAR

· Free Teharoh (washing of body)

· Free Electric Yartzeit Candle

· Recitation of Kaddish on day of Yartzeit

Rabbinical-types in white short-sleeved shirts came and went without acknowledging her; she wondered if they were apprentices. A smiling Birdie brought her back to the cluttered office.

“Your father was not murdered.”

The old woman said it without preamble, like a teacher delivering a Fail.

“What are you saying?”

“Forgive me — but something in my heart told me it wasn’t right to hide what I know. I thought it was God putting me next to you at the seder.”

Rachel was dumbfounded. For a moment, she wondered if Birdie was someone in the grip of a religious psychosis. “What do you know? What happened to my father?”

“Your father took his own life.”

Rachel let out a great sob. The old woman touched her, then withdrew. She handed her Kleenex and a cup of water, then calmly spoke of Sy Krohn’s affair with a congregant — how the “lady friend” gave him a disease (“nothing by today’s standards!”); how the cantor, realizing he’d passed the infection to Rachel’s mother, chose to die.

“You said…your husband was there?” She spoke as if reading a script from a radio show. Your father was not murdered —Orthodox film noir. “You said at the seder—”

“ Here —the body was flown back. But you know that.”

“But your husband…”

“He performed the taharah .”

“May I talk to him?”

“He will not speak to you. He was opposed to me telling what I knew.”

“Was it here that he—” The old woman nodded, and Rachel thought she would faint; this is where the body had lain. She stood, as if to go. “You said those who do the…purification — are volunteers. Is that something I could do?”

“It’s not for everyone.”

Rachel shook, flinching back tears. “But it’s for me !” The words came savagely, humbling the shomer . Rachel composed herself and said again, softly: “It’s for me.”

Birdie walked her to the sidewalk.

“You’ll call?”

The old woman nodded. “I will.”

“There’s just one other thing I wanted to know. My father’s buried at Hillside. How is it — I thought if a Jew killed himself, he couldn’t—”

“There are ways around that. It was simply said your father was not in his right mind. Which he was not.”

As she reached her car, Rachel imagined a string of women in the lobby, pending on Birdie — each with a revelation waiting, custom-made.

Sy Krohn was buried in the Mount of Olives on the outskirts of the park, across from a large apartment complex. On her way to the plot, Rachel tried remembering details — but that was thirty years ago. A worker on a tractor respectfully cut his engine as she stood over the stone. She was certain it was park policy; he even seemed to hang his head. BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER was all it said.

Rachel wasn’t ready to confront her mother, so she drove to the mansion overlooking the necropolis. That’s where the rich were interred — far away from the syphed-out cantor-suicides. Al Jolson’s sarcophagus adorned the entrance. “The Sweet Singer of Israel” knelt Mammy-style while a mosaic Moses held tablets in the canopy above. Mark Goodson, game show producer, was across the way, the outline of a television screen around his name.

No one was inside but the dead. Scaffolding stood here and there in the hallways, as if the artists painting the ceilings were on lunch break. Small rooms off the main drags were filled with stacks of thin green vases. A few employees loitered outside, tastefully — they seemed aware of her browsing, and again, she wondered if by policy they’d left their workaday posts, awaiting completion of her tour. She entered an elevator as if it were a tomb and rode to the second floor. More couches and vases and yarmulkes and emptiness. She took the stairs down, past the David Janssen crypt. There were flowers and a big birthday card signed Liverpool, England. “We cry ourselves to sleep at night,” it said. “We will never forget you.” She passed vaults of “non-pros” with strangely comic epitaphs: HIS LIFE WAS A SUCCESS; SHE LIVED FOR OTHERS. Then came Jack and Mary Benny, and Michael Landon. “Little Joe” had a room to himself, with a small marble bench. The entrance had a glass door, but it wasn’t locked. Anyone could go in.

“Who told you this?”

They stood in the hot, bright kitchen. The psychiatrist was between clients.

“What difference does it make? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I planned to,” said Calliope. “At the time, there were so many other things…I was going to wait until you were a little older, but then—”

“Well, now I am!” A mocking kabuki mask, glazed with tears.

“Do you really think you would have wanted all the details, Rachel? Could you have handled them? Can you handle them now?”

“Don’t insult me, Mother.”

“Is it any better now that you know?”

“I’m glad I know the truth .” A door opened outside. Mitch and a patient said goodbyes. “It’s so…classically hypocritical! The old cliché, isn’t it? The psychiatrist who tells her patients that secrets kill — and here we are, all these years, living a lie! Can’t you see how insane that is?”

Calliope whitened, trembling. “Your father was the hypocrite, not I! What I did, I did for you , Rachel, to protect you, you and Simon. If we had stayed here, believe me you would have been hurt. So don’t talk to me about hypocrisy.”

They heard footsteps. Mitch returned to his office. The women caught their breath, and Rachel resumed in subdued tones.

“Do you — do you know who the woman was? Is she still…”

“Serena Ribkin. She died last year. She happened to be the mother of a client, strangely enough.” She sat in the banquette, limp. “There: now you even have a name.”