Wilt Ging, the chief embalmer and restoration man for DiGregorio’s, was with Alphonse’s body. He looked deep in despair, lost in his own sad thoughts, his brown eyes — the left one peering slightly off towards the wall — floating in a watery residue of broken veins and impending cataracts. His nose was the nose of a drinker, pockmarked and swollen, looking more like a fatty red tumor waiting to explode. If this were the first time you were meeting Wilt you would assume that he had been crying for hours, maybe days, and that Alphonse’s death was a profound personal loss.
In reality, Wilt always looked as if he was in mourning and in the midst of an overbearing gloom. In all the years I’d known him, I never saw him smile or heard him laugh. Even the way he walked smacked of sadness. He was an inch or so over six feet, but he had a bent, hunched gait that made him seem much smaller and older than his fifty-four years. He trudged along like a beaten down, old gorilla lost in the jungle, his thick arms, too long for his body, hanging limply at his side.
Wilt was a functioning alcoholic who hid his disappointment in beer. Tyler said he drank a case a day, but that he never missed a day of work, never screwed up while working on a body, always did his drinking in the privacy of his home and never disgraced DiGregorio’s. As Alphonse himself was a steady drinker, he was forgiving and under-standing and Wilt respected him for it. Wilt was also friendly with Nolan, each bailing the other out when either was under the weather or out of town or overwhelmed with bodies. They came and went into each other’s Embalming Rooms borrowing chemicals and supplies as naturally as two neighbors using tools from each other’s garages.
“How you doing, Wilt?” I asked.
He nodded in bewilderment. You got the impression that he was always surprised that someone would actually say hello to him.
“I’m glad you’ll be taking care of him,” he mumbled softly. “It would’ve been hard, Del. I would’ve done it if the boys asked me. Tyler did the right thing.”
“I know. Is he upstairs?”
Wilt nodded yes, adding “They all are.”
I knew that by “all” he meant Mrs. DiGregorio, Tyler, Gordon and their wives.
“Let me say a quick hello and I’ll be back in a minute for the body, okay?”
“I’ll be here with Alphonse,” he said and I headed upstairs to the main residence where three generations of DiGregorios had lived while presiding over their Home.
The door was closed, but I knocked, then opened it, much like I had done as an adolescent when Tyler and I had first become friends, and stepped inside. Mrs. DiGregorio was on the couch, surrounded by her two daughters- in-law Jeanne and Helen. She was barely five feet tall and a hundred pounds, but looked even smaller, almost childlike. Tyler and Gordon stood off in a corner. Gordon noticed me first and acknowledged my arrival with an insincere grin and overly enthusiastic wave. He whispered something to Tyler who turned in my direction. I walked over to them. Tyler hugged me. Gordon shook my hand and patted me on the back, saying, “You’re looking good, Del and I really like your shirt” as if he was about to try and sell me a car. I smelled gin on his breath and cigarette smoke on his clothes.
“Thanks, Gordon.”
“Come say hi to my mother,” said Tyler, pulling me towards Mrs. DiGregorio and away from Gordon for which I was grateful. “Mom, Del’s here.” I bent over, kissed her on the cheek and said how sorry I was. She was a pathologically shy, old fashioned, deeply religious Italian wife and doting mother to her sons. Her shyness prevented us from ever having a meaningful or truly personal conversation, but she’d always made me feel comfortable and welcome. Almost from the day I met her she never failed to ask me the same question whenever she laid eyes on me: “How’s your mother?”
Today was no exception. “How’s your mother, Del?”
“Good.”
“Do you think she’ll ever come back to Dankworth?”
“Other than to visit me, I don’t think so.” My mother had remarried eight years ago and moved with her husband, Ken, to Albuquerque.
“Are you calling her regularly?”
“Every Sunday and sometimes during the week.”
“That’s important to a mother,” she said, then without skipping a beat she said, “You take good care of Alphonse. These last few weeks, the cancer took away his looks. Make him look good in the coffin. Alphonse always liked to look good. His hair needs a trim and his color is bad.”
“Don’t you worry, Mrs. DiGregorio,” I said reassuringly.
Tyler and I spent a few minutes going over the funeral arrangements. Though my Home would be providing all the services, they would provide the coffin. They chose a top of the line mahogany that retailed at nearly eight thousand dollars. As for the burial, it would take place in the family plot in Elm Grove cemetery. We would handle the embalming, preparation and visitation. Tyler had an expensive gray suit, white dress shirt, necktie, tie pin, T- shirt, underpants, shoes and socks waiting for me, all folded neatly as if prepared by a professional laundry. He walked me downstairs to Wilt, saying only “I’ve counseled so many people through this phase but I can’t say anything to myself to make me feel better.”
“Well, since I am the Funeral Director of record, I’m available to talk.”
He shrugged, then went back upstairs.
Wilt was standing over Alphonse’s body. He helped me guide the gurney outside. “They’re going against Alphonse’s wishes. This whole elaborate funeral. He wanted to be laid out in a simple pine box and buried in the ground with nothing covering him, not even a plain old sheet. He wanted to be one with nature from the start.”
“Why aren’t they doing what he wanted?”
“His wife. She’s stuck in that old guinea tradition.”
As I opened the rear door I glanced forward and noticed that Quilla wasn’t in the front seat. Wilt and I slid the body inside and I shut the door.
“Alphonse was the executor of my will, Del. Now that he’s gone, I’ll have to change it. I’m thinking of asking Nolan to do it. One way or another though, I want you to know what I want with my remains. Do you mind?”
“Of course not.”
“Once I’m dead, pick me up from where my body’s found and take me straight to the crematorium. Direct disposal.”
“Whatever you want, Wilt.”
“I appreciate it.” He nodded, then looked into the car at Alphonse’s covered corpse.
“You’d think that after all the death I’ve seen, I’d become immune to it.” He shook his head back and forth. “It’s much better being on the business end than what I do.
Good thing you’ve got Nolan there.”
I nodded in agreement because I knew what he meant. Nolan was like a machine when it came to his work. He could embalm anyone without the least bit of emotion. He knew Alphonse DiGregorio, not as well as I and definitely not as well as Wilt, but they were competitors for over thirty years. I knew that once he began to work on the body he would have the emotional distance as if Alphonse had been someone he’d never met in his life.
Wilt and I shook hands and he walked back to the Home. I got in the station wagon only to discover Quilla crouched down in the seat.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I didn’t want to get you in trouble. You said there’s a law against having a passenger in the car with a body.”
“Thanks for being so considerate.”
I started the ignition and we drove out of the lot.
“So where do we go now?” she asked almost playfully.
“Now I take the body to get it ready for viewing.”
“That’s what that Nolan guy does, right?”
“Yes.”
“Can I watch?”
“No. That’s illegal. I’m taking you home now.”
