Mr. Greeley, the undertaker, had come to take my brother’s body away when I was still at the Hendersons’ house. He was a man of dreadful stature and horrifying countenance which consisted of a pair of lifeless eyes set in deep, dark pits, a long nose which had deviated markedly to the left, and a set of long and murky teeth behind a walrus mustache. He relished his profession. His parlors were situated in isolation on the road towards the hospital. The yard behind his sprawling, tacky yellow house was planted with tombstones, for he was a merchant as well as an undertaker and a licensed embalmer. When Mr. Greeley learned that we had no money and that Ivan was to be buried as a pauper, he could not conceal his disapproval from my mother and Mrs. Henderson. “For a child,” he reproached them, “I have such a nice choice: one sandstone group of angel, lamb, two doves, another along classical lines in which the lily motif is used. My real prize is waiting for a little child, a granite headstone with an all-over design of cast-iron roses.” He went on to complain that a child should not be sealed into the ground without the services of either Father Mulcahy or Pastor Ferguson. The grave would be unmarked, he said, and we would never know where my brother lay.

Mrs. Henderson, repeating his words to me, assured me that he was not an unkind man but only tactless in his disappointment at being cheated out of a ceremony. But she deplored his effect upon my mother, who had become almost hysterical, had declared that she would die of shame if she could not buy the cast-iron roses for her son. And she had implored the undertaker to wait a few days before he buried the child, for we would surely be able to find some way to have a decent and proper funeral.

Exhausted, my grief still tightly coiled as the kernel to my shock at seeing him die, I was vexed and said heartlessly to the neighbor woman, “Oh, why can’t Mamma leave well enough alone!” for I felt that now I could not bear to hear her lamentations, which I knew would be forthcoming if the gravestone had become, as I believed it had, a fixed idea.

Mrs. Henderson replied, “She will forget, Sonie. Never you fear. She’s upset, poor thing, but she’ll get over it.”

“You don’t know Mamma,” I said irritably.

“Oh, I’m not so sure. Here, you take her this bit of upside-down cake and see if you can’t get her to take a little nourishment.”

To my surprise, my mother did not mention the funeral that evening, and in the morning when she spoke of it, I was sufficiently relaxed to feel my loneliness and to think she was right in wanting something better for Ivan than an anonymous grave in a potter’s field.