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like a cloth draped ineffectively over a canary cage, warbled prayers as unrelenting as the rain. Uncle Morris came and went, preceded by a paunch that strained the limits of his corsetlike waistcoat, blustering all the while as if he believed that God could be bribed. His stale cigar competed with the carbolic acid and atomizers of cheap perfume, deployed by the ladies in their futile efforts at fumigation. Compared to all this, the pawnshop was a regular safe haven. And it wasn’t fair that my father, with whom I’d endured a trial by hurricane, should keep the benefits of his sanctuary to himself.
    She died toward the end of the week. I knew it even before Dr. Seligman, sloping out as I entered, gave me his sympathetic cluck of the tongue. I knew it before I saw Mama being fanned by the Hadassah ladies as they coaxed her to take a cup of tea. I knew it the moment I opened the door and for once my stomach didn’t churn or my eyes smart from the smell. For once you could inhale the fresh challah that the Ridblatts were baking downstairs. You could identify garlic and orange pekoe, molasses and rising damp, all the odors that had surfaced since their yoke of oppression was lifted. Whatever the corruption that had occupied old Zippe’s brittle anatomy, it had finally fled. It had escaped, presumably along with her soul, into the great out-of-doors—which smelled, as I’d sniffed it on the trolley ride home from the shop, unmistakably of fish.
    When I came in, my mother excused herself from her ministering ladies to ask in an accusatory tone, “Where’s your father?” The question was of course rhetorical, since where else would he be but in the pawnshop, where I’d left him not half an hour before. Nevertheless, she succeeded in making me feel guilty by association, as if I might be covering up for something unseemly. As if, instead of attending to business, my father and I had been lying doggo, afraid of facing the music of Zippe’s inevitable end.
    In the midst of gloating over my discomfort, Mama suddenly unsmirked her lips. She rolled her eyes and slapped her forehead theatrically, maybe for the sake of the ladies, then recalled aloud, silly her, that in her shock she had forgotten to phone her husband. It was not an oversight you’d have expected of Mama, for whom the telephone was ordinarily an extension of her arm.
    Uncle Morris (had she telephoned him?) was already at hand, saying “There, there” as he escorted Grandpa Isador out of the sickroom. Leaning on his stout son, the self-appointed rock of our family, the old man was weeping buckets. Between wrenching sobs, he managed to insist on the traditional exequies: the body sponged in Jordan water by tenth-generation lavadors, laid out on the floor facing east with six-foot candles at either end. It must be interred without a coffin, in a sailcloth winding sheet smeared with Jerusalem mud. To all his demands Uncle Morris responded with approving nods of the head, which he alternated with conspiratorial winks at my mother.
    Changed out of the rumpled clothes that he’d slept in all week, old Isador had wasted no time in donning the accessories of mourning. He was wearing the silk-trimmed caftan that reached to his knees, below which his legs were bare but for his gartered socks. On his head was the molting fur shtreimel that Papa used to say was standard issue at the Wailing Wall. For a hat, he said, it had a lot in common with the rotary brush of a chimney sweep. But Grandpa Isador was obviously convinced that mourning became him. Moreover, so absorbed was he in his tearful vision of the perfect funeral that he failed to notice the arrival of the undertaker, Mr. Gruber.
    This was the less surprising, as the long-faced Mr. Gruber was anyway almost invisible with unobtrusiveness. With a knack for being present without occupying space, he seemed to hover above the carpet as he conferred with my mother. Then,