The Hart of the Matter
written by: Pamela Ebel
January, 2021
Hart Island Cemetery
New York City
Just as the sun appeared, twenty-four pine caskets were loaded onto a box truck and carried to a landing where a fifty-eight-year-old steel ferry’s crew helped the truck to board. The half-mile voyage to the island took only 10 minutes, and then the truck rumbled precariously off the short mechanical docking device. Following a map, the truck, with its mostly anonymous passengers, finally arrived at a mass grave site set far apart from the rest of the graves in the one hundred thirty-one-acre cemetery.
Located only half a mile from the Bronx, on the other side of the sound, the twenty-four caskets joined 1,141 identical pine boxes. When the workers finished routering a name, if known, and/or a number on the top of each, they piled the caskets three high and two wide in a trench.
A backhoe disturbed the quiet as it covered the jagged hole. The workers stood silently for a moment and listened as a Chaplain read the names and casket numbers of those being buried. Then he intoned:
“Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no Evil; for thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
Then everyone left the site of another sad, pro forma sendoff of those who had been called and moved on with no one near to claim them for a traditional burial.
All, except for one.
Because standing unseen in a grove of Cedars, a man who had come to all of these burials for thirty years knew that today would be anything but pro forma. He wrote a name and casket number on a notepad, then stood at attention and reflected as always.
I wonder what that truck driver would think if he knew this land was created to train Union soldiers during the Civil War? I wonder if he knows the city purchased this island in 1868 and built all these crumbling brick buildings to lock away those deemed ‘undesirables?’ First came a lunatic asylum; then a sanitarium for those suffering from TB. Oh yeah, and we can’t forget a workhouse for drug addicts; a boys’ reformatory, and finally a missile silo.
Now the best use of the land is to get rid of those who obviously are ‘undesirable’ because they died and no one came to care for them. You did great, City Fathers and Mothers. First, you buried thousands of the over 100,000 citizens that died of AIDS in the late 80’s and 90’s in a part of the cemetery far, far away from the other dead and much deeper because you feared they could still share their ‘undesirable’ breath and lifestyle with the living. My son was one of them, and it took me a year to find him.
And now, faced with a pandemic, you pack those unfortunate SOBs in hospital rooms and leave them to die alone. Then stick them in refrigeration trucks we use to house frozen meat, and then finally, send them off to Hart Island. But this time is going to be different for one person. I promise her.
January 10, 2021
“John, it’s Catherine. Have your heard from Dorothy? I keep calling her cell phone, and she doesn’t answer.”
“No, I haven’t. But you know Dot is ‘bug’ averse, and all this damn talk about the virus and death numbers has her spooked. I’ll call and see if I can find out what she’s up to.”
“Dot, it’s John. Catherine and several others of our group are hounding me because they can’t reach you. Now, either pick up this call or return it before I’m forced to scurry out like a rat in a mask and come over there.”
In the silence that followed, he picked up a silver frame from his desk. A seventy-five-year-old black and white photo of a smiling woman stared out at him. If the photo had been in color, he would have seen her coal-black hair and cobalt blue eyes set in cream white skin. But she was even more beautiful in the original photo because Dorothy Crane commanded the Silver Screen when there were no Technicolor films.
His great-aunt had been beloved by all her fans and shunned by her family, including his grandmother and mother, who considered her lifestyle an Anantha to their mid-west upbringing.
Still, when John wanted to try acting after a degree in Theatre Arts, the Queen of the Silver Screen, having moved on to the Great White Way, gave him a place to stay and the introduction needed to get his foot in the door and finally both feet on the stage. He stared at the mementoes he had conned out of her and the shrine that he had created.
She was almost speechless upon seeing it.
“Really, John, one only goes to this bizarre length for someone who has passed, and like Mark Twain, you can assure everyone that ‘the report of my death is an exaggeration.’ I do appreciate your efforts, my dear boy.”
Aunt Dorothy had become feebler in the last two years as she entered her nineties. The Pandemic had caused the germaphobia she suffered from after hearing the dire stories shared about the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918, and having lived through the panic when a strange disease, finally diagnosed as AIDS, started killing young men, many of her friends in the theatre, to increase and for her to start limiting appearances in large groups.
By the time the world and New York City put a name on the scourge taking lives by the hundreds in 2020, she was a recluse. A situation that only added to the mystique and legend.
The next day, after several more calls went unanswered, John walked several blocks to the rent-controlled condo where Dorothy lived. After doing battle to get the bellman to let him into the lobby and offering identification, Mr. Galichic, the building super, appeared.
“Mr. Crane, I’m so very sorry. I didn’t have a number for you. Madam Crane was found dead in her apartment three weeks ago. When she wouldn’t answer her phone or door, I called the police, who entered with me. She was sitting in her Queen Anne chair, her cat still on her lap. She had been dead for at least two days, and I couldn’t leave her any longer. They took her to the morgue at Queens Hospital. I kept calling around to locate you.”
“I changed my last name from Crane to Torres for stage purposes. Can I please see her apartment? I need to know what her last wishes were.”
Upstairs, the apartment sat silent, yet filled with Aunt Dorothy’s aura. The smell of Chanel #5 still lingered.
In an antique secretary, which John opened with the key she had given him several years before, he found all of her photo albums; movie and stage posters in neat rolls; reviews pasted carefully in order of the years written, and a set of diaries penned in her clear cursive hand.
A sealed envelope with his name on it sat atop it all.
“My dearest nephew. If you are perusing what is left of my life, then I have moved on without being able to say goodbye. Something I desperately did not wish to happen. Just know that I lived a wonderful life, in part because you chose not to abandon me and allowed me to share your wonderful life.
The will in this envelope leaves everything to you, and I have only two requests. First, please take care, Errol Flynn, for me. He has been a good and faithful companion, and there is a bequest to care for him until he joins me.
Secondly, please have me cremated and entombed in the Cypress Hills Mausoleum. I will be in great company with Mae West, Victor Moore, and Harry Houdini. After you put me in a vault, go to the Algonquin Hotel and throw a party at the Round Table. You will find me there with another Dorothy, Ms. Parker, and Woolcott, Benchley, Bankhead, and the rest of the Vicious Circle. Don’t let me down and ‘I’ll be seeing you.’
Your loving Aunt Dot.”
“Where’s Errol Flynn?”
“I have him downstairs. The wife wanted to send him to the pound, but something told me not to.”
“Thanks so much. I’m going to box up these mementoes, and then I’ll be down to get him. Did they say what she died of?”
“Yes, sir. She had a heart attack. The coroner said it was quick, and she didn’t suffer.”
John went through the apartment and made a note of clothes and costumes that Catherine and crew could find good homes for. Then he took the elevator to the first floor and found the super holding the carry cage. Erroll Flynn’s large Tuxedo face stared out at John with a look that said, “What took you so long?”
It took two more weeks before John discovered that his aunt had been deemed unclaimed and, needing the morgue’s refrigeration space, had been placed in a pine casket and sent to Hart Island. Though he fought numerous road blocks because to the magnitude of the Pandemic he finally secured the location of Dorothy Crane’s remains when he received an anonymous letter providing the exact spot and casket number. Then he secured a court order for her exhumation.
On February 7, 2021, the backhoe and the same group of men who buried Dorothy Crane there a month earlier began their search for Casket 632-1. Dropping down ten feet, the men, covered in the now familiar hazmat gear, started digging in the trench occupied by 1,165 caskets. Shortly, three came into view, one being 632-1. Carefully, they retrieved the casket as John, and the silent observer in the Cedar trees, watched, and then Dorothy Crane returned to earth, no longer anonymous.
February 14, 2021
As per his aunt’s request, John traveled to Brooklyn in the hearse that carried her cremated remains. She was placed in a vault in the Cypress Hills Mausoleum near her acting friends Mae West and Victor Moore. After a few minutes of silence, John headed back to the city.
At the 4:00 pm cocktail hour, he met Catherine and the other members of the ‘Dorothy Crane Fan Club’ in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel. Since Valentine’s Day was Dorothy’s favorite holiday, John carried a dozen white roses, a huge heart-shaped box of chocolates, and a bottle of her favorite champagne, Piper-Heidsieck.
“I still don’t understand why Dot would pick this hotel, John. She didn’t come here often.”
He smiled as the manager directed them to the Walnut Room entrance. The rope sign indicated it was closed, but the manager nodded.
“I really enjoyed your performance in A Streetcar Named Desire, Mr. Torres. Please go on in, she’s waiting for you.”
As John and friends entered, Dorothy Crane stood up from the ‘Round Table’ and waved. Next to her were Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Tallulah Bankhead, and Harold Ross.
“My dear nephew John and my ‘fan club’ have come to celebrate my revival. Oh, you brought Valentine’s gifts. Please, all of you, pull up chairs and grab glasses of Piper-Heidsieck and listen to our stories.”
And so, they did.
- The Hart of the Matter - February 14, 2026
- A Twelfth Night Flight of Fancy - January 6, 2026
- The Thrill is Gone? - November 1, 2025
