The Morgue, The Medical Examiner, The Mystery

There was no shortage of doctors to choose from after I outgrew my pediatrician, but my parents selected the Cambridge coroner - he was a personal friend, semi-retired, a fellow lodge member - but I always suspected that his office being on the bus route had the most to do with it.  No one had to have their day interrupted if I needed attention, I could just hop on the bus and be on my way and back in no time.


He was about my height but round as a basketball with an unruly mop of reddish hair streaked with silver and a thick mustache.  He favored three piece tweedy suits with a watch chain - very British - and an honest to God monocle that hung (but was never actually used) around his neck like a charm.  His office and home sat directly across from the Cambridge Common in an old and once elegant brownstone turned musty and slightly faded with age.  He was exceptionally hearty with a huge, bellowing laugh and a mildly lecherous manner, his blue eyes were sharp and his tongue could be acid but I liked him all the same - he'd never much cared for my mother which I considered an advantage - and his startling resemblance to Teddy Roosevelt was as entertaining as it was cultivated.


His wife, as short and rotund as her husband and nearly as loud, with a tidy bun of hair nearly the same color, might've stepped out of a 1930's film herself.  She wore long, silk dresses with lace cuffs and high ruffled necklines, a cameo brooch neatly pinned to her low slung but ample bosom.  There was a suggestion of whispering when she walked and her blue eyes twinkled with laughter when her husband gave her a shocking but affectionate pat on her wide bottom.  They were, I thought, a comical but well matched pair, perfectly suited to the fashionable section of Cambridge with its proximity to Harvard and its sometimes eccentric residents - slightly out of step with the modern world and casually but colorfully bohemian.


At the funeral home, however, up to his elbows in autopsy tools and bodily fluids, where each session began with Body is that of a .......the doctor was completely no nonsense and to the point.  He snapped orders to whoever was assisting with absolute authority, precisely dictating his findings and tolerating none of the routine death house humor.  The dead, he often remarked, were entitled to a certain dignity and his autopsy room would be run with decorum and proper etiquette - death was no trivial thing, rites would be performed and formalities would be honored.  Not for a single moment did it ever occur to anyone to oppose him, not the young apprentices who assisted, not the often present homicide detectives, not my daddy. 


While the public rooms of the funeral home - front office, chapel, visitation - were done in quiet shades of gray, dim, muted and sadly comforting, the morgue was porcelain and steel, a cold, stark, never mentioned, and windowless room.  The public rooms carried a reassuring light scent of furniture polish and flowers but the morgue smelled of antiseptic, bleach, and second rate air freshener.  Dormitory styled living quarters were sandwiched in between for the young men who attended mortuary school during the day and were on call or keeping an eye on my brothers and me at night - they came and went with alarming regularity and the doctor rarely took the time to learn their names.


I was eight before the doctor would allow to be present at an autopsy.  My curiosity - what my mother liked to refer to as a morbidly unhealthy fascination with death - finally wore him down and instead of roaring out
Impertinent! or Inappropriate! or Out of the question!, he shrugged and gave me a glare that strongly advised it would be most desirable if I were not to be sick or worse, swoon.  


Death, he told me as he slipped out of his tweed jacket and vest and into a starched labcoat, donned a mask and drew on his gloves, comes to us all as naturally as we breathe.  But the bodies can never hurt us.