away forever, the Judge had, with monumental effort, motioned to a thick book on his bedside table. Stone had propped it on the pillow for him and opened it. The Judge moaned. Wrong page. Stone flipped to another page and then another, until finally the Judge was calm. His father’s eyes moved across the page. Stone thought his father was reading out of habit now, barely registering the words. Soon he drifted in and out of consciousness, his voice destroyed by the cancer, muttering the words of the Shema and “God Bless America,” the languages mixing and blending. Stone went to move the heavy book from his father’s chest, but the Judge gripped it with surprising strength and Stone relented. And now the Judge, alert for the last time, recited the Aramaic words of the Kaddish, enunciating every syllable of the ancient recitation with crystalline clarity before slipping back into delirium.
Stone wanted to call someone, anyone, to fix what was happening to the Judge. A chill of panic rushed up and down his spine, but then he realized there was no cure for death, and it was making its appearance at last. As if scrolling through the major players of his life, the Judge called out the names Daddy, Bunny, Abi, and Matthew, three generations of his family. He also called out the name Henry, a name Stone did not recognize. When he asked the Judge, “Who is Henry?” the Judge did not answer.
Could it be that Walter Stone had had another son Stone did not know, a son who had not failed to disappoint? Stone figured anything was possible, but why the insistence, and why now, when he had never said the name Henry out loud before?
Soon Stone no longer understood what the Judge was trying to say, as if he had already passed over into the other world and was speaking its timeless language. He muttered “Seligman” in his sleep and awoke with fright in his eyes, repeating the name, “Seligman, Seligman,” and then in the same breath, “Henry.”
When Stone asked again, “Who is Henry?” the Judge mumbled some words, something about “the numbers.”
He asked, “What numbers?”
“Which, which,” the Judge said with difficulty, and Stone realized to his horror that even now, with communication so tenuous between them, the Judge was correcting his grammar. He dabbed water on his father’s lips for the last time, and the Judge said with difficulty, “Seligman. Seligman.”
Then the Judge was silent, and Matthew Stone was alone with the corpse of his father.
He stared in awe for a moment, barely comprehending that his father, speaking just moments earlier, no longer existed on the earth. Stone reached for the book spread open on his father’s chest. It was volume two of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, open to page 1,613, the section discussing the succession of Greek emperors of Constantinople. The words at the top of the second paragraph were underlined in red. He read out loud, as if they had to be spoken to be understood: “After the decease of his father, the inheritance of the Roman world devolved to Justinian II; and the name of a triumphant lawgiver was dishonored by the vices of a boy.”
THE GRAVESIDE PRAYERS were over now, and someone handed Stone a shovel. His father’s casket looked so small and inconsequential down there in the ground as he hefted a shovel full of dirt into the air. He tossed the first clots of earth onto the plain pine casket and it sounded like his own bony knuckles knocking on the door of eternity. It was almost impossible for his mind to accept this was happening, like comprehending with absolute certainty there was no God and we were alone in the universe, and it struck Stone with a sudden panic. He was sick; he knew for certain he was sick in the mind, sick in the body, his blood feverish with approaching death, his nerves vibrating with the contagion of his condition. He thought about climbing down into the hole and throwing his arms around the casket and embracing his father at last. Instead he shoveled, and shoveled and shoveled, until Ehrenkranz placed a soft hand on Stone’s, bringing him back to the world. Ehrenkranz took the shovel from Stone’s hand and Stone realized he had been crying.
“It’s all right,” Ehrenkranz said. “There will be a time when you will understand the purpose of your pain. Right now, you need to find a place to put the pain.”
As the crowd dispersed, Stone shook hands with dozens of strangers, deaf to their words, blind to the pitying expressions on their faces, embarrassed, not for his tears, but for the fact that his only suit was torn.
A young bearded man in a knitted kippa approached Stone and offered his condolences. Stone responded automatically and turned to head back to the limousine where Pinky held court, cracking up the driver with some inappropriate joke.
The man was in his early twenties, squat and pear-shaped with a patchy ginger beard. “Matthew, wait a second.” He held a cellular phone in his hand and offered it to Stone. “Someone would like to speak to you.”
Who could possibly be calling him at this moment? He did not recognize the pear-shaped man, and his blank expression told him nothing. Stone took the phone in his own hand and sucked in a deep breath. “Hello?”
“Matthew,” the familiar voice said, “I am so, so sorry for your loss.”
In an instant, Stone was gasping for breath, suffocating: his father’s voice. He was silent. Was he losing mind? This could not be happening; his father was dead and buried in the ground beneath his feet. But his father, so competitive, so driven, could not bear the thought that his useless only son had outlived him. He had focused his incredible will, gathering all his rapidly dispersing energy to make this phantom phone call, to destroy his only son, who had wept at the grave like a weak child.
The voice continued, “It is never easy to lose a parent. But your father will be the first in line when redemption comes. Baruch Hashem.”
It wasn’t his father’s voice. The voice was similar, Stone realized, but it was not the same; it reflected similar upbringing, similar age. It was Seligman.
“Matthew, are you there?”
Stone was silent again for a moment. His father’s old friend had not made the trip from Israel. It was natural he would call to offer his condolences.
“Uncle Zal,” Stone said. It had been a long time since he had called him that, a long time since he had considered Seligman with anything other than revulsion.
“I understand you will not be sitting shiva for your father. But you should not be alone at a time like this.”
“I have no place to host.”
“I understand, but it is important that you say the Mourner’s Kaddish for your father.” Seligman’s voice, thousands of miles away, digitized into bytes and codes through fiber-optic lines, reconstituted as a ghoulish facsimile of a man’s voice, free of any warmth or humanity.
“As the only surviving son, it is your obligation, your duty. You understand your responsibility, don’t you? Now tell me, where will you be saying Kaddish?”
Stone’s worst fears had been realized. Seligman was an emissary sent by his father from the other world to belittle him and make him feel small, the way the Judge had done his entire life. The finish line was always being extended, just out of his reach. He would never be free.
Alone in Pinky’s apartment, surrounded by cardboard boxes filled with his father’s most prized possessions, Stone tried to mouth the words of the Kaddish prayer. He hated Seligman for shaming him, especially for the manner
