A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [53]
He looks delighted. This is his pet topic, clearly. And yet he was willing to listen to anything I had to say. He would have heard me out.
“Think so?” he says. “It’s all a question of presentation, that’s what I say. Presentation is All – that’s what I believe. Everybody knows a product has to be attractively packaged – it’s the first rule of sales – isn’t that so? Well, this is a little tricky in my line of trade, as you can well appreciate.”
“Yes. Yes, I can see your difficulty.”
“It’s not so much a difficulty as a challenge,” Hector says. “What you got to decide is – what am I selling? I mean, really, when it comes right down to it, in the final analysis – what am I selling?”
“Death?”
“Come, come,” he says disgustedly. “Who wants that?”
“Well, a denial of death, then?”
“Who can deny it?” Hector says practically. “It happens.”
“That’s so. All right, I give up.”
“Basically, I sell two things,” Hector says, holding up two fingers. “These are as follows. One: Relief. Two: Modified Prestige. That is where I am different from the other two funeral directors in this town. They don’t know what the hell they’re selling.”
“Relief? Modified Prestige?”
“You don’t get it?” he says happily. “Right. I’ll explain. You take the average person, now. What’s their first reaction when one of their loved ones kicks off? Can you tell me?”
“Grief? Remorse? Sorrow?”
“Sure, sure, but all that comes later. Their first reaction, take it from me, Rachel, is panic – what’ll we do with the body? Just like they’d murdered the guy. Or lady, as the case may be. The prime purpose of a funeral director is not all this beautician deal which some members of the profession go in for so much. No. It’s this – to take over. Reassure people. Leave it all to me. I’ll handle everything, from the hospital or home removal right down to the last car away from the cemetery. The family doesn’t have to worry about any of the details, see? Relief. You got to get this across to them. You take Calder’s Funeral Home, now, at the other end of town. He actually tells people how nice he can fix their dear ones up, and all that, and he goes through the coffin catalogues with them. Depressing, I call it. Of course it does have some appeal to the older type of person. It’s the old-fashioned approach. Some people still go for it. My clientele are mostly the more modern type of person. They want to know that everything’s been done properly, of course, but the less they have to do with it, the better.”
“Death’s unmentionable?”
“Not exactly unmentionable, but, let’s face it, most of us could get along without it.”
“I don’t see how.”
I’m laughing more than seems decent here in this place and yet I know it’s absurd to hold back, as though there were anything hushed or mysterious here.
“Well, sure,” Hector says, nimbly bouncing down from the gruesomely hygienic table and re-filling my glass, a lot of whisky and a little water. “Sure, I get what you mean, but you take your average person, now. It’s simply nicer not to have to think about all that stuff.”
“The skull beneath the skin?”
“Well, you might put it that way, I guess. Relief, see? You can rest assured, I tell them, that every last detail will be taken care of. You don’t have to decide on a thing. I give them three price ranges, and after that, it’s out of their hands. None of this unpleasant business of having to dicker between oak or pine, or will it be velvet-lined or only nylon shining? A package deal is the answer to that.”
“You have it all taped, Hector.”
He gives me a hurt glance, his pudgy face reproachful.
“I’m not callous,” he says. “But when all’s said and done, if you’re gonna stay in business, Rachel, you got to think businesslike.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply –”
“Skip it,” Hector says, dangling his legs in their crumpled brown over the edge of the surgical table. “It’s okay.”
“What about modified prestige?”
How surprised I am at how easily I’m talking to him. Yet in all the years he’s been here, I couldn’t have carried on more than a dozen conversations