Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground by Steve Stern

she’d served as an excuse for a party, today Grandma Zippe provided an opportunity for a community excursion. But that’s not what it looked like. What it looked like was a neighborhood that had turned out en masse to give my grandmother a send-off in high Pinch style.
    At the forefront of the line of cars was Mr. Gruber’s pride and joy, a regular jewel box of a hearse. It had polished brass sidelamps and chromium everything else: hubcaps, S-handles, ornamental winged diety on a louvered hood. It had windows like an oversize fishbowl through which you could view the anomaly of a rough-hewn wooden casket. This was the single concession to the traditional affair that old Isador had envisioned; it was a compromise between no coffin at all and the grand sarcophagus that Uncle Morris claimed he could get at cost. In the bed of that fancy hearse, however, the knotty pine looked like it was incubating, about to transform itself into something worthy of such a vehicle.
    Parked directly behind the hearse was a freshly waxed Packard limousine, its elliptical rear window framing the unhappy face of my cousin. She looked all the more pained for having twisted her neck a good hundred and eighty degrees to peer out. How was it, I wondered, that on such a pleasant morning Naomi could still manage to look like the victim of a kidnapping? Like she expected that you should personally arrange for her rescue—but from what? Just seeing Naomi was enough to put a crimp in your day, let alone the nuisance of having to unstick your own eyes from her sullen tarbaby stare. It took the sudden outbreak of a ruckus in front of the storefront funeral parlor to break the spell.
    A discordant delegation of worried-looking neighbors had burst forth from Mr. Gruber’s crepe-hung door. In their midst was Uncle Morris, puffing portentously and clenching his chubby fists, flapping his jowls. Despite their strident efforts, neither Mr. Petrofsky the grocer nor Sacharin the fishmonger, Alabaster the tinsmith or the otherwise internally battling Mr. and Mrs. Rosen, could appease him. He was threatening to have the undertaker’s job. When he saw my family approaching, Uncle Morris held his hand up palm-forward like we should cease and desist.
    â€œKeep your shirt on, Solly!” he cautioned my father, who had yet to say a word; meanwhile my uncle’s own sweaty shirt-front was bunching out of his vest. “Everything’s under control,” he assured us, groping at his breast for his heart or a monogrammed hankie with which to mop his brow. He would have us know that he was phoning certain parties who had their own way of taking care of business. Pressure would be brought to bear on the office of the mayor himself, we could count on it. Don’t worry, the place would be drained by noon.
    Good-naturedly, as if they were playing a game that he thought he might like to join in, my papa asked if someone would please tell him what was going on.
    Everyone spoke at once, fracturing the morning’s tranquillity with a babel of cross-purposes, until Mr. Gruber interceded, stepping forward to hush them with his imperturbable graveside manner. His eyes were demure, his bald spot (when he bowed) a yellow egg in the nest of his oily hair.
    â€œThe cemetery is under water,” he patiently explained. “I been to the site myself. The headstones look like bell buoys. You can’t bury no Jews there today.”
    On my mama’s arm Grandpa Isador let go his most bloodcurdling “Vay iz mir!” He tore the lapels of his caftan, leaving them to hang like a pair of vestigial fins. Some of his cronies from Jake Plott’s shuffled over, but instead of offering conventional words of comfort, they joined my zayde in his moaning desolation. Think of an Old World version of barbershop harmony. The rest of the neighbors, competing with Uncle Morris’s renewed fulminations, jockeyed for openings wherein they could offer