ABSTRACT

On the day of her funeral, Eda awoke at six o’clock in the morning. I shall give myself the grandest funeral anyone has ever had, a grand funeral to enjoy. Instead of a dozen black coaches with blinds drawn and sniffling relatives, I shall have a cortege of subway trains, trolley cars and buses, the elevated, taxis and ferry boats, loaded with jabbering and laughing New Yorkers, riding behind my corpse. The Italians tread slowly behind the hearse for a few blocks, while a uniformed brass band blows out the funeral march. The Episcopalians get it over with in the chapel of a fashionable mortician and purr out to the family vault. The Catholics go in for a church ceremony and, shrouded in formal mourning black, drive out Queens Boulevard in state and enter a graveyard inhabited by stone angels. The Jews, rich and poor, go to Brooklyn. But I shall have the longest funeral procession of any, from the Battery to the Bronx, from the Hudson to the East River. I shall be the only living corpse, by grace of God, Metropolis, and a special act of the New York Board of Aldermen, permitted to attend her own funeral. A grand funeral to enjoy.