See: Enclosures

by Martha Wiseman

Collage by Anthony Afairo Nze.

But who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried? Who hath the oracle of his ashes, or whither they are to be scattered?
Sir Thomas Browne, Urn Burial

        

The father or mother, like a king or queen, is deposed, then disposed, though that is not what we say: we talk of repose, we create repositories for remains. He or she is now forever indisposed. The ghosts laid. The bodies laid to rest. The words, the game of them, are cloying, tricky.
        The king and queen, now ghosts, are—were—my father, the actor Joseph Wiseman, and my stepmother, his wife of forty-four years, the dancer and choreographer Pearl Lang. She died in February 2009, he in October of the same year, their bodies enclosed in death-boxes. But the apartment-box that had held their decades-long drama was still crowded with relics. The show had played its final performance; the furnishings and props remained onstage, waiting to be struck.

        

An X of yellow tape criss-crossed the door at the end of that long, stuffy, dimly lit hallway on the eighteenth floor. The apartment had been sealed by the police because no relative had been with my father when he died, only an aide. Now, accompanied by two cops, my husband and I had fifteen minutes inside the apartment to find a suit to bury my father in. A suit it had to be; as my cousin, my father’s niece, had once joked, her uncle Joe was born in a Brooks Brothers suit.
        What about socks? shoes? Did they matter in a coffin? But then, did any of it matter? Did we decide on a tie or a bowtie? We made our choices, and we were escorted out of the apartment, and the yellow tape was reattached. We would return in a few months, with the proper court papers, for the final clean-out.

        

My father said he wanted to choose—he meant he wanted me to choose, pending his approval—the clothes my stepmother would be buried in. He knew, surely, that dressing her corpse in anything but a plain shroud went against strict Jewish law, which the Orthodox rabbi he’d insisted on of course adhered to. Rabbi Lowenstein looked the part: old, frail, complete with scraggly long white beard and a rebbetzin who assured me that my stepmother had been “a very Jewish woman.”
        That may well have been, but I was more concerned with fulfilling my father’s desires than obeying the rabbi’s edicts. After some deep dives into two overstuffed closets, I pulled out a dark-red velvet outfit, to which my father immediately assented. “Yes,” he said, through tears, “that’s right.” The funeral home agreed to substitute the blood-red blouse and skirt for the shroud without letting the rabbi know.
        Thus clothed, enclosed, and sealed in her coffin, my stepmother was lowered into the ground, the rabbi and rebbetzin (she was perched at a safe distance from the grave on a folding stool) none the wiser.
        Eight months later, it was my father’s turn. His fleshly container was washed, suited, boxed, and buried next to his wife’s, and the earth was filled in above him. Time to deal with their earthly goods (though they could both now be called the same) whose shelf life had for the most part long expired. Time to dismantle the set.
        Everyone who has ever cleaned out a deceased parent’s, grandparent’s, relative’s, or friend’s home knows what’s involved—the sifting, the giving away, the donating, the throwing out, the saving, the boxing, the labeling; the waves of anger, or sadness, or nostalgia, or impatience, sometimes all at once. You attempt to distinguish between imposition and legacy. You attempt to separate your story from that of the dead, just as you also seek to understand their story as melded with your own. You try to shuffle off the mortal coil that is their story, even as you know it is also yours. The finality is relative, death an ending only for the dead.
        I had one week. Their perhaps-eternity was my time-trap. The goal seemed impossible. The week would be over, and the work, I feared, would not. I’d never breathed easily in that apartment. Now I was gasping.
        I did have help—the help of good friends and my husband. We attacked all fronts at once. Do you want this, Martha? Do you need to keep that? What do we do with this chair, that table, the 13-inch white plastic television? Maybe you’d like it? Give it away. Throw it away. Keep these papers, shred them? Yes, no, sure, I don’t know. We didn’t proceed in any particularly logical fashion, but my memory moves from one area to another, from one archaeological site to the next.
        Things within things within other things. The apartment as Russian doll, boxes within boxes within boxes.

        

The narrow kitchen: I could not stomach keeping anything within it, not the dishes my father and Pearl had used routinely year upon year, not the who-knew-how-old bottle of Asti Spumante, now turned to vinegar, not the flimsy cookware (my stepmother was a hapless cook), nor the nine boxes of dead rotary and push-button phones. At least the drawer which had the previous year contained hundreds of empty orange plastic prescription bottles, a near-archaeological cache of medicines of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century elderly, had been cleaned out by one of my father’s aides. When I’d suggested to Pearl that the empties could be discarded, she’d recoiled, “How else can I remember what medications your father and I have taken? I need to keep them.” No more keeping.

        

I love the idea that papers once considered of temporary use can become collectible and are then known as ephemera, as if the rest of our belongings, as if our bodies themselves, as if the furniture and the buildings that house us and the flimsy records of our lives, were not also ephemeral. But because my father and stepmother had been, at least at one time, well-known artists in their fields, even if only in the relatively small world of New York theater and dance, I thought some of their papers could be of consequence. I had to separate the wheat from the chaff, a task which required a radical reassessment of what my father and Pearl considered “important,” for them apparently an all-encompassing category. If everything is valuable, where is the value?
        On the narrow top of the Swedish 60s-style drop-leaf teak secretary, layers of framed photographs perched precariously on display: a well-known portrait of Pearl, her right hand in a dancerly gesture beside her face; a sepia print of Pearl’s mother as a young woman in Russia (was it Minsk or Pinsk? That’s not a joke—I can never remember); a color shot of me at nine, planted in my striped full-skirted dress on the grass in my father’s mother’s tiny backyard. Snapshots were stuck into these photos’ frames or leaned, sliding and curling, against them and one another. Within the desk, besides the unidentifiable sets of keys, dried-out pens, orphan envelopes, dead rubber bands—what anybody might find when clearing out a home–my father had stored various versions of his and Pearl’s wills, most of them out of date; numerous photocopies of his vital statistics scrawled on graph paper; receipts for plots at King Solomon Cemetery; seemingly every card, postcard, and letter I’d ever sent him over the course of more than fifty years; and a substantial stash of pale-blue nearly transparent airmail letters from Pearl, dating from what I imagine to have been the beginning of their affair in the late fifties, most of them in Yiddish, which I cannot read. Batches of these papers were held together by the waistbands, with their immediately recognizable thin stripes of red and blue, from my father’s discarded briefs—one of his thrifty organizational tricks.

        

The books, a wall of them in the hallway. Lifeless for a number of years before their owners’ demise, the books had become a cardboard and paper background to two artists who had once been moved by the printed word, by the paintings and photographs the volumes celebrated. Dust coated the shelves and everything on them; tiny black kernels of roach excrement and occasionally a dead cockroach fell off the tops of the books as we reached each one down. Any surviving dust covers were mostly torn; the spines tended to be cracked and crumbling. First editions of books by my father’s one-time friend Elie Wiesel, signed by the author, had not been protected any more than standard-issue Modern Library collections of Ibsen’s works or Best Plays of the Modern American Theatre or a book of photographs of Masada.
        Each volume had to be wiped down, shaken out. Almost each, we found, was a repository for more ephemera, in both senses of the word. My father and stepmother had treated the volumes like safety deposit boxes for whatever struck them at a given moment as useful or meaningful. Letters, holiday cards, and postcards from family members, the famous, not-so-famous, and the generally unknown, opening-night telegrams, addresses, phone numbers, lists and memoranda of every sort, from groceries to pieces of music, had all been slipped between the pages of the books. Newspaper and magazine clippings had left ghost images of themselves on the pages they’d been clamped between, as if the books had absorbed the performances and books reviewed, the deaths reported. Folded yellow legal sheets, used envelopes, and corners of napkins bore evidence to my father’s obsessive attempts at translating some of Itzik Manger’s Yiddish poems into English; in his almost violent hand, he’d scrawled version after version of a single stanza or an individual line, often differing by only a word. In one book, I discovered a large, oddly shaped piece of thin blue cardboard on which he’d scribbled some verses in pencil; on the reverse side, a seated woman showed off her stockinged legs. The cardboard came from a package of pantyhose.
        I suppose you could say that my father and stepmother had practiced a literal form of intertextuality. I was now trying to read between the lines.

        

I knew what I would find near the telephone on the low teak chest of drawers in my father and Pearl’s bedroom: a graveyard of names and contact information. Here were the familiar bulging address books and daybooks spilling out of flimsy cardboard boxes; scrawled-over memo pads from the Jewish Orphan Girls’ Home in Israel, orphans now themselves; and taped to the wall above, scraps of paper covered with scratched-out and rewritten phone numbers, a palimpsest of the codes of two lives. I couldn’t imagine how in their last years either my father or my stepmother could read these names and numbers, many of which I suspected were no longer valid; they were likely to have been attached to friends, acquaintances, and business contacts who’d moved away or died. A mausoleum of one-time connections.
        I’d once offered to consolidate all the information into one new, legible address and phone book. Pearl said, with a derisive little laugh, “That would be marvelous, but not now. I just can’t do it now, I just don’t have the strength.”
        “But,” I said, “that’s the point. I’d do it all for you.”
        She looked at me in horror. “You can’t know what’s important and what isn’t! You can’t know what we need to keep! I have to do it. You don’t know what you’re asking of me.”
        On the small chest of drawers on Pearl’s side of the bed, another archive: a stack of newspapers about four feet high—the Jewish Daily Forward in Yiddish. Pearl had sworn she would, that she needed to, read each issue. Over the years, my father would glance at the pile and shake his head briskly, in irritation and disbelief. Sometimes he’d jerk his chin toward the newspapers and say through gritted teeth, “Pearl, when are you going to read those papers?” And she’d answer, “I’m going to get around to it, I need them there, where I can get at them, these are important documents”—her habitual response to any criticism or suggestion about her hoardings (“I need…”) and her habitual descriptor for anything she kept (“important,” a designation only she could make). My father would shake his head again, a little more violently. But he never dared touch that tower of increasingly outdated news in a language he and Pearl both loved.

        

No bodies needed anything left in the two bathrooms—ancient creams, ointments, toothbrush collections, perfumes, razors, shampoos, eye drops, soap ends.
        What my father and stepmother had secreted and crammed into every conceivable space seemed endless but clearly marked an end. Two ends. All this stuff—there’s no other encompassing word, and the stuff literally encompassed them: they must have somehow intended it to tie them to the lives they’d once lived, to the space they’d claimed. I was ruthlessly untying that knot. Did the stuff also serve to bury parts of themselves they could not cope with? For their “effects”—including the hundreds (perhaps more) of professional and personal photographs—seemed to smother any image of them I tried to catch, just as I had felt smothered in that apartment while they lived and as I still felt now that they were dead.

        

The closets were deep. Spelunking was required. Excavation. The archaeology of a life in dance, a life in the theater, lives ever uncertain of work and money. Everything we dug, dragged, and lifted out was padding against once and future crises.
        Paper and plastic bags stuffed with scarves, gloves, hats, and lengths of fabric hung down like stalactites. Bags and boxes, crammed as in a rush-hour subway car beneath and behind coats and clothes, filled with more scarves and gloves and years’ and years’ worth of bank statements and canceled checks, climbed upward like stalagmites. We dredged up at least ten years’ worth of Pearl’s cheap purses, the size of tote bags, that she’d packed with the essentials of her life—tights, leotards, sweatpants, legwarmers, bandages, snacks, bits of material, receipts, checks, cassettes, videotapes, lists—and lugged every day from apartment to studio or theater and back again. The bags’ handles had torn and been repaired with black electrical tape, their zippers were broken, their inner compartments ripped and gaping, their fake leather flaking. One closet shelf was piled with pair after pair after pair of dirty, scuffed, once white or pink ballet slippers, witnesses to the hard work her feet had done for so long.
        The crowded closets and dresser drawers—the dressers were either teak or cheap white particle board—kept yielding evidence of Pearl’s particular version of plenitude, nurtured by her generational bent toward thrift, and, as the daughter of tailors, her pride in her sewing skills. Skirts cut from blouses (sometimes one skirt from two identical blouses) and half-completed blouses created from a skirt hung among her strangely dowdy clothes, along with costumes from her dances—many she’d designed, many she’d probably sewn herself (part of Martha Graham’s legacy). More costumes had been stuffed into long cardboard boxes, shoved in turn onto high shelves. From drawers we pulled scraps of fabric, brittle hem tape, string, boxes of sequins and buttons, seemingly endless packets of needles and spools of thread, loose and still-carded hooks and eyes, ever unseeing, fifteen pairs of scissors, and tangles of variously colored chiffon scarves like coils of gaudy intestine.

        

What had been my room when long ago I’d lived in the apartment now harbored, as it had for a number of years, the chaotic detritus of Pearl’s life and career. It was her sacred-dumpster room, the most blatant embodiment of a life’s leavings, of her refusal to let go, to cede power, of her pathological hoarding and at the same time of her premature burial beneath what she clung to.
        After her death, I talked occasionally about delving into the haunting, haunted jumble with a friend, a generous man who had selflessly helped Pearl and continued to help my father. But we realized that any such activity could disturb my increasingly frail and unhinged father, whose psychotic rantings we did not want to exacerbate. It was also true that neither of us wanted to face that room until we were forced to. Then we were forced to.
        To be dealt with: stacks of film reels, including a never-finished film of Pearl’s evening-length work The Possessed, based on The Dybbuk. A fleet of portable tape players; slag heaps of audio cassettes, like those we’d found among the books, like Pearl’s no-longer-playable LPs—all music for dances, real or imagined—consigned with a clatter to a realm without music; more dance bags stuffed with papers and practice clothes and bits of costumes; loose papers everywhere. We relied on the most rudimentary categories: useless to the living, questionably valuable, and probably valuable. More trash bags, more boxes, sturdy and sealed, destined for a storage facility, from which we hoped they would find their way to the Library of Congress Dance Collection. After some back-and-forthing, they eventually did. I never handled those materials again.

        

Into thirteen boxes went relics of my father’s professional life—Playbills, programs of readings, working scripts, theater reviews, publicity shots, letters from theatrical friends. I packed up all the letters and cards of mine that he had so scrupulously saved—there was something touching about his having held on to these tokens for so long, tokens of my pride in him, my desperate need in my early teenage years for his assurance and guidance, my later efforts to maintain a connection and to practice my embattled love. I saved the correspondence between my father and Pearl, thinking that someday I would have the Yiddish translated. (I have yet to do so.) I saved a samovar that in my memory had never been used but had stood on a low cabinet near the dining table, ready for the next production of Three Sisters or Uncle Vanya. I saved anything that I could not decide about in the moment. More boxes, more labels, awaiting the next phase of revision. Of resurrection, or oblivion.

        

After all the sifting and sorting, after all the trips down from the eighteenth floor to the basement dumpsters with a trolley of bulging black garbage bags and all the trips back up again, after papers had been shredded and decisions made, after the wheelchair and the wearable clothes had been donated, the linens given to neighbors, the small collection of works in Yiddish to a collector, usable pots, pans, and dishes to a charity, the still-decent furniture to a friend (except for the dining chairs, which my cousin brazenly asked a cleaning person from another apartment to hold for her and never claimed)—after all this, waiting like squatters to be turned out, the scratchy tweed sofa where on afternoon visits I’d fallen tensely asleep, the broken-down armchairs, the worn-through rugs, and the lamps with torn shades remained. I paid—bribed, really—the building superintendent to deal with these. I also left behind some twenty boxes of water-stained, roach-infested mass-market paperbacks, which I’d run out of time to dispose of.
        And so the week came to its own end. I pulled the heavy metal door to and locked it for the last time and turned in the keys. And breathed.

        

Their earthly abode returned to anonymity, my father’s and Pearl’s now-permanent habitations had still to be marked, so that their enclosed remains, soon anonymous beneath the earth, would not be unnamed above ground.
        The unveilings would reveal the gravestones and further consecrate the burial places. Unveiling: I thought, perhaps inevitably, of the “Dance of the Seven Veils,” Pearl dancing, shedding her veils, revealing herself, carrying a head on a platter, though I wasn’t sure whose.
        I struggled with what Pearl’s gravestone should say. The obvious struck me forcefully; whatever words appeared there could never unveil her complex reality. No matter what is engraved in a stone (note the incorporation of grave in that action; both words come from Old English, Old Low Frankish, Old High German, Old Norse, meaning “to dig” or “to carve,” and sometimes “to bury”), we are left with the most rudimentary information about a life, which might at least satisfy our fundamental need to categorize. Perhaps, I thought, the minimalism is appropriate; we know one another so very little. The words I chose for Pearl’s marker might have little meaning except as a signpost, a matter of “Here lies…” so that other ghosts, or God, would be able to find her.
        Tradition, my bond with my father, and basic humanity demanded some words that honored a relationship, honored a life. I knew that I couldn’t get away without a “Beloved something.” (“Beloved Stepmother” would be a mythic oxymoron.) I settled on “Beloved Wife”—deeply if pathologically true—and, in memory of her career and in a fantastical nod to its continuing in eternity, “She dreams, she dances.”
        And on my father’s headstone—but I cannot remember what I chose for his epitaph. Cannot remember. I’ve looked through files marked “Joseph/Pearl: Funerals, monuments,” but I have found no record of correspondence about his stone. I have a photograph from Sprung Monuments of Pearl’s marker, but no evidence, written or photographic, of the words carved under my father’s name and dates on a flat stone in the King Solomon Cemetery in Clifton, NJ. And no, since we buried him, I have not been back.

        

On my bookshelf sits a battered brownish box, the size of one of those old-fashioned rectangular cosmetic cases that formed part of every luggage set. Its leather covering, with stripes still visible on the back and front, is pockmarked with mildew discolorations; on top where the handle was once attached are only four holes; long ago, all of its edges had been reinforced with wide brown electrical tape. The lock is rusted, the clasp no longer capable of clasping. I found the box at the back of a closet, behind my father’s suits, shirts, sweaters and sweater vests, all navy blue or gray and full of moth holes. It is, or was, my father’s theatrical makeup case. That he kept it, and that it is old and hard-worn, was shoved out of sight, buried: these facts are telling.
        Discovering the case marked a strange culmination of the week’s efforts, and a further end to my father’s career. It speaks to me of his life as an actor, his aspirations as an actor, his willingness to hide and reveal himself, as an actor must. It is a reminder that he was difficult to truly know, without a script, without a mask. Far more than grave or gravestone, it is for me a kind of memorial.
        The case when opened gives off a musty, slightly sweet, not unpleasant smell. Within: an inset tray with a tube of Wildroot hair dressing, a face-powder brush, a comb, a pot of rouge, Stein’s lining color stick, a round of jade eye shadow, “Duo” Surgical Adhesive, a single-sided razorblade, and a small tube holding makeup pencils and three fine paintbrushes. Below the tray: a large tin of Stein’s face powder, a powder puff, and Helena Rubenstein Silver Touch New Glamorous Hair Make-Up! There are Band-Aids and a wadded Kleenex, a box labeled Toupee Plaster holding false eyebrows and moustaches, a hairbrush, a mirror, toothbrushes for makeup application, a grubby once-white fold-over detachable collar (a Duncan Roll Front, by Arrow, size 15¾). There is a small box that slides open to reveal a miniature painted figurine of an East Asian man, something he must have been given when he played Chu-Yin in Eugene O’Neill’s peculiar Marco Millions for the Lincoln Center Repertory, which would date at least some of the contents and their use to 1964. Slipped in at the back of the case: Stein’s Make-Up Chart for Straight & Character, a pamphlet that time has torn into three, and a booklet by Leichner, with its own chart and lists of products, introduced with a hymn to the actor and his need for excellent makeup: “The actor’s art lies in the ability to present personalities to the eyes and to the mind of the audience—to make the audience believe in the existence of these particular characters. Stage lighting, the distance between artist and audience, and the need to create a physical resemblance all demand a carefully planned, perfect make-up.” Finally, a blank postcard from the Mayflower Hotel, Seattle, Washington, whose significance I cannot know, and what looks like a card advertising world travel, on the back of which is writing in Yiddish, probably from Pearl.
        At the bottom of the case, I find an ancient thick-paper luggage tag, with string still attached. Peering at the very faded handwriting, I make out, in my father’s block printing,

        JOSEPH WISEMAN
        3800 SPUYTEN DUYVIL PKWY
        NEW YORK 63, N.Y.

This was where my mother and father lived when they were first married. And beneath the address, in even more faded red-grease pencil, oddly, both his wives’ names: NELL. PEARL. And below that, what looks like “MAMARONECK,” the last place my mother, he, and I—in theory—lived together.
        The essence of my father’s life, boxed.

        

Before the coffin was sealed, before he went to earth, I wanted to see him. My father.
        I hadn’t expected to want this. I was not with my father when he died, nor had I expected to be. Now I needed to see the deadness, the absence. I had seen my mother dead in her nursing home bed and attended to her; I had held, very briefly, the box containing another box containing a plastic bag containing bits of my mother, handed to me by the man from the crematorium. But I had never seen a body in a coffin.
        I stroked my father’s face, very lightly, all the clichés drifting in—waxen, icy. The funeral attendant had warned me, as I reached toward my father’s cheek, that his skin would be very cold. Cold—yes; Lear and Cordelia, reversed. But I felt no welling of emotion, no shock. I thought: Here is the final enclosure.
        Dutifully, willingly, I performed my small ritual, a ritual that acknowledged the intimate distance we had practiced all our lives. Performed, without artifice, as he would have wanted me to. He would, I think, have approved.