AN OLD MAN GONE
309
last stage of
his
existence, and if I was to see
him
at all, this was
possibly as good a time as any. My father too, though he was my
father, took his place among the dead with a kind of authority, as if,
in a sense, it belonged to him-as surely in a sense it did. In the
course of his long illness, I had often enough thought of
him
dead,
but my fantasy, when it did not entirely skip over the event itself, had
always placed
it
in a context of domestic disturbance and untidiness.
I had forgotten the undertaker, who was to make
him
"ready."
Coming now upon his actual corpse in a bare room at the Riverside
Memorial Chapel (a sign on the door said "Mr. Warshow," as
though a man and not a corpse occupied the room), I had the
feeling that I was watching him again in one of his public roles, ful–
filling-and with a grace that should not, after all, have surprised me
(and yet I was always surprised to discover he was graceful)–
some peculiarly serious function of the "adult" world. It seemed
that he was my father still, and this being dead w,as only a new form
in which he expressed his importance. When I grow up, I too will
have a funeral. . . .
I felt myself thus a participant in his dignity; but that was not
what I had come for, and I tried also, in underhanded ways, to
destroy it-he was not safe from me yet, nor I from him. There
were flowers in the room, and I wondered with real uneasiness
whether the odor of the flowers did not conceal an odor of decay:
how long did it take for a corpse to begin to smell? what would it
smell like? This led me to speculate also about the mysteries of em–
balming. What, exactly, does the embalmer do? What gross indig–
nities, greater perhaps than the indignities of illness itself, might
have gone to produce this fmal effect of ascetic withdrawal? Since
the coffin was open only at the head, I was even frivolous enough, or
unsettled enough, to wonder whether the corpse was wearing trous–
ers: what a scandal
if
the Riverside Memorial Chapel were found
to be trafficking in dead men's trousers! And one piece of private
information seemed to assume enormous importance: the body in
the coffin no longer contained a heart or lungs, these organs having
been removed for laboratory examination.
The tendency of these thoughts-their "intimacy," so much like
the forbidden speculations of a child (was it not, in away, my last
