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 in which he had done so—close enough to plant the seed of misery but distant enough to provide no comfort whatsoever. Stone would be reciting the ancient chant only out of guilt; useless obligation, carried along through generations of blood, minted onto his DNA like a brand, the need to soothe the irresistible force tormenting him. But he was not a good son, and could never be a good son. His father was gone—he had missed his chance. Stone could barely form the words of the Kaddish. Burning skeins of acid rose up his throat; his eyes filled with tears. He stopped, trembling in fear, his chest heaving, scarcely human sobs bursting from his open mouth.
Later, after night had fallen, he stared at the boxes that seemed somehow as mysterious as the pyramids of Egypt. Who was his father, after all? Stone knew the broad strokes, the highs and the lows, the triumphs and disgraces, but he did not know why the Judge had been so distant, shattering, in his dismissive treatment of him. He did not understand why he was lionized by so many or what he had still planned to do before the cancer struck him down. An accomplished life, Stone thought, but incomplete.
His father, Walter Joseph Stone, would be forever remembered as the “jurymandering judge,” the New York State Supreme Court justice who had presided over the controversial Court Street Riot trial and been forced to resign over improprieties regarding jury selection. When Stone was younger it had felt like sweet revenge, his father devoured by the hungry media out for blood, but now he was left with nothing but sadness for his father’s tarnished legacy. Stone finished off his joint and mused: Would things have turned out differently if he had, instead of celebrating his father’s disgrace, done something to help ease it?
He knew his father had been born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, son of the notorious gangster Julius Stone. His father had enrolled in Columbia College at the age of fifteen after graduating at the top of his class at Brooklyn Technical High School, and completed Columbia Law School at twenty before becoming the state’s youngest assistant district attorney at the age of twenty-two. He had even been honored by Mayor Robert F. Wagner in a public ceremony for his exceptional service before joining the army’s branch of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps during the Vietnam War.
It was remarkable how different his father was from Julius Stone, reputed trigger man for the crime syndicate Murder Incorporated. It couldn’t have been easy for the Judge to escape Julius’s toxic influence, the violence, the intimidation.
Stone slipped the Judge’s robe on again and closed his eyes: an entire life in thirty-six boxes. He leaned against a stack of boxes, knees pulled to his chest, rolled another joint, and lit it. As the weed took hold of him, Stone knew he wanted to do something, even if it only meant walking down the street to buy a newspaper. He wanted to get up off the ground, to put on clean clothing, to stand up and shout, but his voice would not come. He wanted to do something important, but he was frightened. Stone had even been afraid to open the boxes to learn what was inside—he knew there were old photo albums stacked between the books, photos of him as a child, his father as a young man and then, later, as the force of nature he had become. Perhaps his mother was in those albums