Lucente was short and wiry. His face was tobacco brown and he had white hair cut in a to-the-bone crew cut. No nonsense there. His eyes were powder blue and bloodshot. I thought that he must be in his seventies or eighties, but he looked strong enough and still full of beans. When I didn't say anything, he looked annoyed. He sat down behind the desk.

"You wanna sit down?"

I sat, and we looked at each other for a while. He clasped his hands in the middle of the desk and nodded, more to himself than to me. I watched his eyes and realized that they were too small to contain all the life that was behind them.

"Yes now, sir, so what can I do for you?" He slipped open a desk drawer and brought out a long yellow pad and a yellow Bic pen with a black cap.

"Nothing, Mr. Lucente. I, uh, I mean, nobody's died in my family. I'm here to ask you a few questions, if I may. About someone who once worked here for you."

He uncapped the pen and began drawing lazy circles on the top of the paper, one overlapping the next. "Questions? You wanna ask me about someone who worked for me?"

I sat up straight in my chair and couldn't find anyplace to put my hands. "Yes, you see, we've discovered that a man named Martin Frank worked here for you years ago. Around 1939 or so? I know that that's quite a long time, but I was wondering if you'd remember him or anything about him. If it's of any help, not long after he was here he changed his name to Marshall France and later became a very famous writer."

Lucente stopped drawing his circles and tapped the pen on the pad. He looked up once, expressionless, then turned in his chair and yelled over his shoulder.

"Hey, Violetta!"

When there was no answer, he scowled, dropped the pen on the desk, and got up.

"My wife's so old now she don't even hear the water running no more. I gotta turn it off for her half the time. Wait a minute." He scuffled to the door, and I saw for the first time that he was wearing a pair of plum-colored corduroy bedroom slippers. He opened the door but didn't go into the room. Instead he screamed for Violetta again.

A steel-wool voice rasped back, "Wha'? Whadya want?"

"You remember Martin Frank?"

"Martin who?"

"Martin Frank!"

"Martin Frank? Ah ha ha ha!"

Lucente was smiling crazily when he turned again and looked at me. He pointed off into the dark room and shook his hand as if he'd just burned it on something.

"Martin Frank. Yeah, sure, we remember Martin Frank."

6

The long train ride back gave me a lot of time to think about Lucente's story. Violetta, who I assumed was his wife, never came out of the other room, but that didn't keep her from yelling things to the old man. "Tell him about those two midgets and the trains!"… "Don'a forget the butterflies and that cookie!"

Apparently the first day on the job, Lucente brought in some man who'd jumped off a building and who'd been scraped up with a shovel and shoved in a box. According to the undertaker, his new employee took one look at the body and threw up. They tried it a few more times, but the same thing happened. However, Mrs. Lucente was a cripple, so they put him to work in their apartment cleaning and cooking and doing the laundry. Needless to say, it pretty depressing at first to hear that the author of my favorite book in the world was kept on at the job because he cooked a mean lasagne.

But then one day Lucente was working on a beautiful young girl who had killed herself by overdosing on sleeping pills. He was halfway through the job when he stopped for lunch. When he returned, the woman's arm was on her stomach and she held a big chocolate-chip cookie in her hand. Next to her on a small side table was a glass of milk. Lucente thought it was a great joke – this kind of black humor was traditional in the funeral business. A few weeks later, a mean old woman from down the block died in her sleep. A big yellow-and-black butterfly was taped to her nose the morning after they brought her to the funeral home. Lucente laughed again, but I felt differently: perhaps Marshall France had been creating his first characters.

The new apprentice not only got over his nausea, but he soon became a highly valued assistant. He bought a copy of Gray's Anatomy and studied it constantly. Lucente said that after six months Frank developed an extraordinary ability to model an expression on a face that was as lifelike as any the old man had ever seen.

"That's the hardest thing, you see. Making them look alive is the hardest thing there is. Did you ever look in a casket? Sure, one look and you know they're dead. Big deal. But Martin had it, if you know what I mean. He had something that made even me jealous. You looked at one of his jobs and you'd wonder why the hell the guy was lying down in there!"

While he was in New York, Frank spent most of his time with the Lucentes, either at work or in their apartment behind the funeral home. But on Sunday, every Sunday, he went out with the Turtons. The Turtons were midgets. He met them when he happened into their candy store one day. The three of them loved trains and fried chicken, so every week they'd have a big fried-chicken dinner at a restaurant and then go over to Grand Central or Penn Station and get on a train to somewhere nearby. The Lucentes never went with them on these jaunts, but when Frank returned in the evening he would tell them about where they'd gone and what they'd seen.

Lucente never really understood why Frank quit. The longer he worked, the more fascinated he seemed by the job, but one day he came in and said that he'd be leaving at the end of the month. Said that he was going out to the Midwest to live with his uncle.

One of the kids on the hall was standing in front of my apartment when I got home. "There's a woman in your apartment, Mr. Abbey. I think she got Mr. Rosenberg to let her in."

I opened the door and dropped my briefcase on the floor. I kicked the door shut and closed my eyes. The whole place smelled of curry. I hate curry.

"Hello?" a voice called.

"Hi. Uh, hi. Saxony?"

She came around the corner carrying my old wooden stirring spoon. it had a few kernels of rice stuck to it. She was smiling a little too hard and her face was very flushed. I guessed it was half from cooking, half from nervousness.

"What are you up to, Sax?"

The spoon had moved slowly down to her side, and she stopped smiling. She looked at the floor.

"I thought that since you were in the city all day, you probably didn't have much to eat, with all that racing around…" Her voice petered out, although the spoon came up again and she waved it around in the air like a sad magic wand. Maybe she wanted it to finish her sentence for her.

"Oh, God, look, never mind. It's really nice of you!"

We were both totally embarrassed, so I beat a hasty retreat to the bathroom.

"Do you like curry, Thomas?"

Halfway through the meal my tongue was a five-alarm fire, but I winked back the tears and nodded and pointed my fork at my plate a couple of times. "… love it." It might have been the worst meal I'd ever eaten in my life. First her banana bread, then the curry…

In his mercy, God made her buy Sara Lee brownies for dessert, which, after three glasses of milk, calmed the fires in my mouth.

When the dishes were cleared, I began telling her about my cabdriver experience. I had gotten to where Tuto ordered me out of his car when she bit her lip and looked away.

"What's the matter?" I was tempted to say something like, "I'm not boring you, am I?" But by then I knew it was wrong and unnecessary.

"I…" She looked at me, then away, at me, away. "I was really happy here this afternoon, Thomas. I came over right after I talked to you on the phone. I was really happy being here, cooking…. Do you understand what I mean?" Her glare dissolved back into lip biting, but she was watching me very carefully.