THENEWYORKER,M AY4, 2020 45
masks and bandannas appeared. Now,
from a distance, they looked less like
racers and more like a frieze, a proces-
sion moving in a stately way across the
beautiful screen of the West Side tow-
ers beyond. They were moping more
than moving, just like the rest of us.
At 6:55 p.m., on the top floor of an East
Village walkup, John Fredericks, a
restaurant beverage director, was set-
ting up cables and an amp on the fire
escape of the apartment he shares with
his wife, Karly, a designer, and their rat
terrier, Mudd. Their building is near
St. Stanislaus, a Polish church, and
Trash and Vaudeville, the punk-rock
leather-pants-and-studded-jacket em-
porium, whose legendary longtime
manager, Jimmy Webb, had died the
day before, of cancer. Near the win-
dow, Fredericks tuned his electric gui-
tar—a teal-blue Bobkat with a Stra-
tocaster neck. For the past three weeks,
during the city’s nightly cheer for
health-care workers, he had been play-
ing a Jimi Hendrix-style “Star-Span-
gled Banner,” good and loud, for the
neighborhood. He’d wanted to cele-
brate medical professionals; Freder-
icks’s two brothers and his father are
E.R. doctors, and Karly is pregnant.
When he began the new tradition,
Fredericks said, the claps were just start-
ing in the East Village. “The first night,
somebody yelled, ‘Do it again tomor-
row!’” So he did, and then he kept doing
it. When he skipped a night, “people
were looking up at our fire escape, and
they were, like, pissed.” As the hour
approached, he climbed out the win-
dow. Golden light from the west illu-
minated his hair and his teal guitar.
He clapped, and others cheered from
windows, fire escapes, balconies, the
sidewalk. Two cars had stopped on the
street below, the passengers looking
up. At 7:01, Fredericks began to play.
As the sun set, Kim Zambito, a funeral
director at Sherman’s Flatbush Me-
morial Chapel, in Midwood, Brook-
lyn, entered through the mortuary’s
back door, wearing jeans and a base-
ball cap. “I’m back,” she said. “Where
are we going to put this one?” Bodies
kept coming in—a dozen by the early
evening, and counting—half of them
from house calls at apartments across
the borough and the rest from the hos-
pital morgues. In the parking lot, next
to Zambito’s van, which held the body
of an eighty-three-year-old man, two
hearses already contained caskets for
the following day.
In the main lobby, Chris Kasler, who
is fifty-four, the son and grandson of
funeral directors, sat at a plastic fold-
ing table covered in death
certificates. He checked the
master calendar, with his
mask pulled down below his
nostrils. Dozens of burials
were scheduled in the com-
ing days, each annotated in
a dense, inky hand listing
the name of the deceased
and the cemetery: twenty-
two interments on Thurs-
day, twenty on Friday. But
no bodies had gone out for funerals
that day—it was the end of Passover,
and most of the cemeteries were closed.
“It causes a backup, because the re-
mains are still coming in,” he said.
Kasler and Zambito walked down
the hallway to a door with a sign that
read “No Admittance.” Usually, the
room was reserved for embalming; they
were looking for someone with an up-
coming funeral to put into a casket
and move to a different room, freeing
up space for the latest arrival. Inside,
four tables held eight bodies, some of
them in scuffed orange pouches from
the hospital, others in clear sleeves no
thicker than garbage bags.
“Nothing here,” Kasler said, check-
ing the schedule. In the storage room
next door, Sherman’s refrigeration unit,
which held nine more bodies, was also
full. They had better luck in the chapel,
a large carpeted space with wooden
pews, where one of the bodies was
swaddled in a white sheet. Kasler and
Zambito brought in a casket on an
aluminum dolly, and bent over the
corpse, lifting it delicately at both ends.
Kasler rolled the casket to another
room, while Zambito returned to the
van for the stretcher.- At 8:30 p.m., Dr. Heather Jones and
her patient Lisa Cintron decided to go
ahead with a C-section. Cintron had
been at Brooklyn Methodist Hospital,
in Park Slope, for two days after visit-
ing her ob-gyn on Monday morning,
wondering if her amniotic sac was leak-
ing. It was not, but her blood pressure
had been high. Since she was close to
her due date, and there was an open
slot at the hospital, her doctor sched-
uled an induction for Monday night.
The process was slow. Cintron spent
hours dilating, sucking on ice chips and
trying to nap. She had tested
negative for COVID, which
was a relief: she was an op-
erating-room I.T. specialist
for Memorial Sloan Ketter-
ing Cancer Center, and she
knew how common it was
to be asymptomatic. She’d
been working from home,
taking breaks to wash and
fold baby clothes and set up
the nursery—dove gray, with
darker gray trim, and a baseball decal
with the baby’s name, Christopher, on
the wall. But for the first day and a half
at the hospital she’d hardly slept, and
she hadn’t eaten anything. It was hard
to relax with a mask on.
“Just think about the big picture,”
her husband kept telling her. “We’re
going to have so many stories to tell
this kid.” Cintron’s mother walked to
the hospital and stood outside, waving
to her through the window. Her sister,
who’d had five children at the same hos-
pital, told her, on the phone, that she
was in good hands. The nurses were at-
tentive and cheerful. Dr. Jones, too, her
dark eyes peeking out behind a face
shield, was kind as she explained that
Cintron was still not sufficiently dilated.
Cintron was wheeled into an operat-
ing room and hooked up to monitors—
she heard how fast her heart was racing
in the skitter of beeps. She was given an
epidural. Her husband was allowed in,
wearing a mask and gloves and a hair-
net. Cintron was shaking uncontrol-
lably, and numb from the neck down.
Then she felt a hard tug, and heard cry-
ing. She still couldn’t open her eyes. Her
teeth were chattering. Shortly after 9:18,
she heard her husband taking the baby,
saying that he was a miracle.- As the evening shoved on, and all the
surfaces were Lysoled, all the dishes