Fear of Fifty (11 page)

“Take care of it,” she said, “keep it safe.” The book-bribe was filled with hallucinatory renderings of Papa's Odessa childhood. More memories to people my autobiography. I took it.

And the hunks carried out the lion.

Maxine bustled around, bringing groceries, announcing to Kitty that she couldn't stay because it was her birthday and she was being taken out to dinner.

Frank, Adrian, and I were left looking after Kitty, who now also wanted to be “taken out to dinner.”

“I'm buying dinner,” I said. “Where do you suggest?”

We agreed on a nearby Chinese restaurant, and Frank and I began dressing Kitty for the outing.

“Your hair's a mess,” said Frank. “Let me color it for you tomorrow night, okay?” He lovingly brushed her hair, threaded the golden earrings he had made for her through the holes in her earlobes, helped her do her makeup. Meanwhile, I went through Kitty's clothes, looking for something that wasn't torn or soiled or tattered. I found a passable sweater and skirt, no bras at all, and no panties that weren't soiled. I left her in her comfy Chinese slippers. The first thing that goes is grooming, I thought, then laundry, then life itself. But not soon enough. Life, alas, lingers in the absence of laundry as everything winds back to infancy at the end. We have no markers, no books about these last developmental stages, and no comforting rituals. At the beginning of the journey, a baby has a loving mother thumbing through volumes of Dr. Spock for clues and cues. But in the seventh age of woman, there is no loving mother (long since dead), no designated caretaker, no books. We make this backward journey all alone, in Chinese slippers.

Kitty was dressed. Frank, Adrian, and I put on our coats.

“What about
her
dinner?” Kitty said of Chloe, who still sprawled before the TV.

“Don't worry about me, I ate already,” Chloe said, the flickering TV reflected on her shiny round face.

“Aren't you hungry?” Kitty persisted, trying to caretake the caretaker—a trait that runs in my family.

“No, dear,” said Chloe. “Go have your dinner.”

Kitty's round brown eyes stared.

“But she should eat too,” she said. “It's only fair.”

“Don't worry, hon,” said Frank, “she's eaten.”

“Shall we bring you an egg roll?” I asked Chloe, to appease Kitty.

“Okay,” said Chloe.

“What did you say?” said Kitty. “I don't need an egg roll. Why does everybody think an egg roll will make a difference?”

We trudged down Twenty-third Street in the cold. Two young men, one with AIDS and one afraid to check the results of his blood tests, and an old woman who kept saying, “It's too cold, it's too cold” and “Where are we going?” and I, in the midst of my fear of fifty.

At the Chinese restaurant, I sat opposite Frank's beloved, who told me the story of his recent life.

“What do you do?” I asked.

“I'm on disability,” he said, “for AIDS.”

“What did you do
before?”

“I went to Juilliard and studied the flute, then worked as a musician and supported myself as a personal assistant to Leonard Bernstein—a difficult job,” he said.

“When were you diagnosed?” I asked.

“Oh—five years ago.”

“Did it change your life?”

Adrian's handsome, square-jawed young face grew pensive.

“I suppose it did,” he said. “I started to think about how I really wanted to live. I quit working for Bernstein because it was just too stressful—he was very demanding—and I began to play music for myself and to think and to meditate. It did change my life. I decided love was more important than wild sex. I decided I wanted to really love someone before I died.”

“Then what happened?” I asked.

“Then I met Frank,” he said, smiling at his beloved.

“Who ordered this for me?” Kitty asked when her food came.

“You did, hon,” said Frank.

“I did
not,”
said Kitty, her argumentativeness reassuring her of her existence.

“Yes you did, hon,” Frank said kindly.

“Well, I suppose I might as well eat it,” said Kitty, digging into her fried dumplings.

“You might as well,” I said. I was thinking how strange this scene was and how strange all gatherings in life are if you let yourself dwell on them. What a curious Last Supper this was. Two very young men with perhaps not long to live, my aunt with not much to live for, and me in the middle as always, observing and trying to figure out how to make a story of it. Would the story help someone? I hoped so. Even if that someone was only me.

“Who ordered these?” Kitty asked again.

“You did, hon,” said Frank.

Later, when Kitty was tucked in bed, and Frank was reading to her, I took a cab uptown, clutching Papa's book of drawings.

“You're late,” my daughter said. “Was it horrible?”

“Actually, it was less horrible than staying home and thinking about Kitty and doing nothing. She's still a person. But her memory is threadbare in places, like the knees of your jeans.”

“Ugh—depressing,” said Molly. “I'm glad I didn't go.”

“That's the way you feel at fourteen—but not at fifty,” I said.

“You're not fifty,” said Molly. “You're thirty-five and holding. Yeah—that's right. I was born when you were twenty-one.”

I hug her very tight, hoping she never has to do for me what I am doing for Kitty.

My best friend and I have a plan. We will take handfuls of sleeping pills, then trudge out into the snow near her ranch in Carbondale, Colorado. While the elk and caribou stalk the pure white snow, while Venus rises over Mount Sopris, we'll make snow angels and quietly expire of hypothermia, sparing our children the mess and fuss of caring for us. Planets and stars will twinkle in the crystalline Colorado air as we peacefully and painlessly freeze to death.

But will we
really?
Who knows? By then we may forget how much trouble we are. Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.

 

At midnight, my husband finds me in my study, looking through the book of Papa's drawings.

Here is his mother, my great-grandmother, laid out after her death from typhus. Her bier turns into ripples on the ocean; caught in its waves are the faces of her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren. The matriarch is going back into the sea—a sort of reverse Venus. Next come a series of India ink sketches of the galloping horses that always obsessed my grandfather's pen. Some are galloping into the sea; some are being attacked by wild dogs; some are spurred on by Cossacks wearing huge fur hats, who brandish thunderous cudgels at wretches cowering beneath the horses' hooves.

This was the rough Russia my grandfather crossed on foot as a boy of fourteen. He walked across Europe when Europe was much larger than it is now. And he braved its harshness to make a soft life for us all in America. His mother had just died of typhus when he set out across Russia and Europe. Unsparing as Goya or Hogarth in his willingness to confront human inhumanity, my grandfather was always sketching his past as he lived his present. That was the legacy he left to me. Just keep sketching. Try not to ask why. There may not be an answer.

“What a wonderful artist he was,” Ken says, looking over my shoulder. I feel Papa's presence in the room as I riffle through his sketches. He is also the reason I am taking care of Kitty. He guards my life somehow, so I also guard the lives that mattered most to him.

“Kittinka,” he would have said. “Poor Kittinka. Look out for her now that she's too foolish to look out for herself.”

“Let's go to bed,” I say. And Ken hugs me.

“You had a rough day,” he says.

“Watching the lion being carried out was the roughest part somehow. I'd rather not have seen that.”

“You'll write about it,” he says.

“Does that redeem it? Does it make any difference to the pain?”

“It makes it bearable,” he says, “the way Papa's sketches made his life bearable.”

I close the book of memory. It comforts me to know it is there to be reopened.

When we wake up the next morning, the city is in the grip of a storm that threatens to make Manhattan an island again. Pelting rain and gale-force winds, flooded subways, and tidal waves in the streets.

Ken and I make our way to court somehow, but we are the only ones who do. Kitty and Frank get soaked and turn back. Maxine begs off. And the other two lawyers arrive so late that there is no time to resume the hearing. Again my testimony has to be postponed. Another date is chosen.

Leaving the courthouse in the furious rain, Ken and I see crowds of huddled people with torn umbrellas waiting at bus stops. The subways are stopped; the city has come to a halt. Offices are closing early. New York has the feel of disaster—as if the ultimate tsunami has arrived and all the soaring skyscrapers are about to be felled by flood.

“A cab!” Ken screams. Is it a mirage or is it really a yellow cab down at the bottom of the courthouse steps? We clatter down the flooded stairs. Just as we reach the cab, another couple attacks the opposite set of doors. Suddenly Ken is fencing with his umbrella, trying to get rid of the interlopers.

“I ain't taking
none
of youse!” the driver shouts, emerging from the cab. He shoves Ken down into the flooded gutter.

“I'm writing down your license number,” Ken screams, scrambling up and trying to enter this madman's taxi.

“Are you insane?” I say. “I'd rather walk.”

But Ken drags me into the taxi and we ride a block or two, with the driver cursing at us.

“Take us to the police station,” Ken shouts.

The driver is swerving all over the streets and cursing like a maniac. At the first red light, I open the door and pull Ken out.

“I don't know what got into me,” Ken says.

“The storm—and Kitty.”

“How about a noodle shop in Chinatown?” asks Ken, and we set out in search of Hong Fat. The wind howls, the rain pelts down. All nature is out of joint, sympathizing with Kitty.

Stranded in New York for the first weekend in years, we watch the storm reduce Manhattan to a floating spar in an engulfing sea. As the storm grows, Kitty grows worse too.

With the tranquilizers wearing off, she turns bellicose. She throws Chloe out of her loft, rages at Frank when he comes to dye her hair, and refuses to let the nitroglycerin patch on her chest do its work. She keeps forgetting
why
it is there and tearing it off in a fury. “What's this? What's this?” She picks at her chest.

The storm rages and so does our Lear.

My younger sister and I visit by turns. Finally we persuade the agency to send another home-care worker. What on earth can we do while the court case drags on? Kitty is not fit to be home even
with
someone to attend her. We will have to find a nursing home for her and persuade her to enter it. The judge won't be happy, but at least Kitty will be alive.

I didn't need to be told that most nursing homes were bone-chilling. I had seen them. But there was one, friends said, that was exceptional. It was a model facility—clean, beautiful, full of art. But the waiting list was long: to get a place would take forever, I was told. The application process was like trying to get your kid into a fancy private school. Only pull and connections could even get you an application. Pull and connections were what my father-in-law liked best. He was down in Florida, running the Jewish philanthropic underground by phone and fax. He was the head of the Palm Beach Stern Gang.

“Get me the board of directors list, darling,” he said. And two days later I was being picked up in a chauffeured car by the white-haired director of the Hebrew Home for the Aged.

“Maestro,” I said, when the door to the car opened. For Jacob Reingold, the director, looks like the conductor of a European symphony. A shock of white hair, a weather-beaten mountain climber's face, a warm smile, a conversational style spiced with
mamaloschen.
³
We talked about music, art, Europe, Japan, mountains, seas—everything but Kitty. It was a courtship. The object was a bed for Kitty, but I would be the dowry.

The Hebrew Home for the Aged is crammed with modern master-pieces (donated by eager relatives who want to dump their grannies), full of inventions—sinks and tubs that levitate—designed especially for the infirm old. There are beautiful views of the Hudson, hair salons, gyms, art studios. This is the next stop after the spa! Except that here we do not hope that fitness will make for a future of well-ness. This is the end of the line. This is the place you come to if you are rich enough or famous enough to merit state-of-the-art senility.

“Get out of here, you big black thing!” screams a woman shuffling along after her walker in the Early Dementia unit. The attendant in question has a faraway look, as if concentrating on lunch, or remembering last night's loving. She has been trained to ignore these ravings.

“She doesn't know where she is,” says the maestro. “A lot of them don't.”

Only the great and near great are welcome here—or so it seemed to me on that visit. This is a holding camp for all the ex-moguls and ex-movers and ex-shakers whose relatives don't want them.

There are the mad uncles of media barons, the sisters of movie stars, the mothers of famous diplomats. Rudolf Bing is in Early Dementia and Nat Holman in Regular—the unit for people whose only disease is old age. Is it better than snow angels in Carbondale? Who knows? By the time you get here, you can't say.