Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir Read online

  Uncle Guido demonstrates and my father follows, taking one step. But then he forgets the rest of the demonstration as to his other foot following suit. Uncle Guido is crestfallen. He can save an entire freezing, starving platoon’s life with weeds but he can do nothing for his closest friend.

  A year later, my father forgets how to talk. My daughter, who is now studying to be an RN, says I should bring up a topic from long ago and see if maybe he can talk after all. Okay.

  I say, Dad, remember the hope chest you bought Mother?

  He doesn’t respond.

  Did you buy it in a store or did you have a carpenter make it?

  Sternly, he says, I bought it at the furniture store on Main Street!

  I take a deep cleansing breath: This was during the Depression?

  Nineteen thirty-two.

  So how did you pay for it?

  Guy let me give him a buck a month. Fourteen months.

  It cost fourteen dollars?

  He says, That’s right. But I never told your mother I was paying on time.

  I have only recently had the beautiful, walnut, cedar-lined chest restored. The restorer, a lovely Hungarian, talks to the hope chest and calls it, old fellow, when he examines it. I tell my father all that. He is gazing into my eyes. I understand what he wants to know. I say, Guy charged me over four hundred bucks. Had to pay it all at once.

  He smiles. He says, You’re the one who’s lost their marbles.

  One day, Freddie Ravenel comes to visit him. Right after Freddie leaves, I arrive. The nurse tells me there’s been an African-American gentleman sitting in the lobby crying his eyes out.

  She says, He’d just had a visit with your father. He told us your father gave him a job when no one else would, that he filled out the loan application for his first car, that he cosigned a mortgage or he’d never have had a house, that he helped him with his income taxes every year.

  My father helped everyone with their income taxes. I never knew he helped Freddie even.

  I go down to my father’s room. I crouch next to his chair.

  Hi, Daddy.

  The noise of my voice attracts his attention, which is far, far away. But his eyes are able to find my own, not usually the case anymore.

  It’s me, Dad, Mickey.

  He concentrates. Hey, Mick.

  I kiss his cheek and then I plant my face directly in front of his to keep his gaze steady. He struggles but he stays with me.

  Freddie Ravenel was here to visit, Dad.

  That’s right, he says.

  I wait for more and he actually says more: Freddie didn’t know who I was. He kept saying, Mr. Mawse, oh, Mr. Mawse . . . But he couldn’t find me.

  Did you try to speak to him?

  I know that is too hard a question even as I’m asking it. My father looks to the light, the window, and stares out.

  For about a month, he is able to converse if I bring up old events, and then he can’t. He has a meeting with representatives from all the departments at the nursing home who are determining a new course of care. I am invited to attend. The head of nursing asks me, What is his normal weight?

  I turn to my father and say, Dad, what do you usually weigh?

  He says, One forty-two.

  I say to the staff, Could you not give up on him?

  I never hear my father speak again. His last words to me: one forty-two.

  Soon after, his aide, whose name is Rosa, and who acts as though he’s her own father—kissing him, hugging him, patting his cheek—says to me, Your father keeps saying, My son, my son.

  I want to kill myself for giving up on him. I lean down next to him and I say, Tyler is great, Dad, he’s great. He misses you a lot but he’s really doing so well at St. Mary’s.

  Now, this is a lie.

  ONCE A WEEK. I’ve been taking Tyler out to various libraries, where he goes to read the same books he owns. He’s only brought a half-dozen of his books to St. Mary’s since he’d planned to be there for a short holiday.

  We go to the libraries in Hartford, West Hartford, New Britain, Farmington, Avon, and Simsbury. We hit libraries the way barflies hit gin mills. Everybody knows our name. Tyler’s favorite is the New Britain library. He gets to check the photo file of Jean Marie Kabritsky, who is still singing and continuing to gain weight. I show him all the cards referencing my own books in the card catalog. He could care less.

  Tyler claims a table right next to the section on military history and peruses the latest two Jane’s volumes. After my mother died and my father was fairly out of commission with the onset of Alzheimer’s, it fell to me to buy the annual Jane’s books for Tyler. At Books on the Common, my local bookstore owners, the Silbernagles, out of the goodness of their hearts, ordered them for me and charged me what they paid rather than retail. Today Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft costs six hundred dollars. The service I received from the Silbernagles is not available at Amazon.

  Tyler walks the stacks and finds a couple of new acquisitions—a book describing the struggle for Kwajalein, the other the route General Hobart’s Desert Rats took from Mersa Matruh to Berlin.

  Tyler talks to his books while he reads. His unseen antenna diverts him from the books when a child comes by. Then he grabs his forty-year-old Brownie box camera. My mother had hid the camera when he started taking pictures of children walking up Nilan Street, but I have since found it. I remember the day my mother hid the Brownie hoping he’d stop hanging out the front door and asking passing kids to pose, but he switched photographic equipment and utilized his View-Master. I have been dismantling the house on Nilan Street; I found the old Brownie in the basement and gave it back to him. He grinned at it and held it all day long and I retired the View-Master. Now at the library, he aims the Brownie at the child, and whispers, Say cheese.

  Before my father was rendered psychotic by Alzheimer’s, he was the one to take Tyler on his weekly library jaunt. He did not demand Tyler whisper in the library. However, he did insist that Tyler take a picture of only one child, not every single one of them. That is the compromise our father worked out with Tyler. Tyler got his pictures and my father only had to deal with one angry parent per library visit.

  When I come to be Tyler’s library chauffeur, I tell him he has to keep his voice to a whisper at all times, and then he can take all the pictures he wants. This means that the children don’t hear his instructions—Say cheese—and since a Brownie is held at chest level as opposed to pressed up to his eyes, the children generally don’t notice he is photographing them.

  The question arises: Why not explain to Tyler that he shouldn’t take a strange child’s picture because the child might become frightened? Tyler, incapable of empathy, has always ignored such advice. I can come down harder and tell Tyler there will be no library if he takes children’s pictures with his Brownie, but that would break his heart. Not that he’d bite on his wrist—the fluoxetine and the heroic Dr. MacDougal at Yale–New Haven have taken care of that—but I’m not going to have his heart broken either.

  We stay at the library for a couple of hours. When Tyler gets up to select a new book, I try to get him to keep his damn kishing to a minimum. He goes back and forth to the shelf three times, kishing away. Fluoxetine only takes you so far. I say, Tyler, please kish more quietly. He tries, and to compensate for that effort, which proves disruptive to his rounds, he must add something new, so he begins winking his right eye then his left, three times. This requires a great deal of physical effort and manipulation since he’s never tried winking before: His facial muscles contort outrageously just as a two-year-old’s will who attempts to wink. I whisper, Tyler, what the hell are you doing?

  He says, I’m imitating the signal at a train crossing when the train is approaching the guard rail. If I do that, I’ll be able to whisper.

  Do I want the winking or the kishing? Doesn’t matter what I want. Tyler’s kishing is soon back to its annoying decibel and guess what? There will be a train approaching the crossing every fifte
en minutes from here on in.

  While Tyler reads, so do I. Sometimes, other patrons sit down at our table. When they do, Tyler takes up his Campbell’s soup can, which he carries with him in the Brownie camera bag, and calls into it, Enemy approaching, men. Keep low.

  Our new neighbors look at their watches like they’re late for appointments and scurry away. Every once in a while, a patron will stay, smiling at me to show he understands. A fairly large problem arises when Tyler has to go to the bathroom. Then he will stand, salute, and announce in a General Patton kind of voice, Urination time!

  Once, after I accompany him to the men’s room and back, a kindly woman sitting at our table coincidentally reading the bathroom chapter in Martha Stewart’s How to Decorate, leans over and whispers to me like I’m a lifelong friend, As soon as he said that I had to go, too!

  Tyler looks at her with some curiosity. Then he whips out his Brownie and tells her to say cheese. I whisper to her, He’s from People magazine.

  She is suddenly late for an appointment, too, having realized I’m just as demented as the general.

  On one library day, when it is time to return to St. Mary’s, Tyler decides to exit by the service door instead of the front entrance. As we pass a Staff Only door, he hangs back and then scurries out before I can grab him. I dash through and then clamor down the metal stairs behind Tyler. A librarian opens the Staff Only door above and calls out, You can’t go that way!

  Tyler ignores her and, therefore, so do I. Tyler is now lumbering along at a fairly good clip, favoring his artificial leg only slightly. Once he reaches the service area, a custodian is at the bay shooting the breeze with the UPS man. He gapes at Tyler and says to him, Sorry, pal, you can’t go out this way.

  The custodian and the UPS man form a phalanx, not wanting Tyler to fall off the delivery ramp. Then the security guard appears. He’s come to know Tyler. He looks at me.

  I say, Sorry. I couldn’t stop him.

  He says to Tyler, Listen, Commander, we have to go upstairs and use the front door.

  Why?

  The loading platform is dangerous. You could fall off.

  I won’t.

  See, it’s a matter of insurance.

  Tyler grows curious instead of single-minded. The fluoxetine.

  The guard says, The insurance company’s rule is that patrons can’t use this entrance. If they do, they won’t cover the library. Then the library will have to close.

  Tyler asks him, Are you a commissioned officer?

  The security guard says, I certainly am.

  Tyler salutes and says, Good man, and heads back. I salute the security guard, too. He says, You’re a saint.

  I say, Don’t I fucking know it.

  He laughs.

  Our next stop is the West Hartford Barnes & Noble, where I follow in my father’s habit of buying Tyler one book and two magazines each month. Tyler goes along with this rather than three books per month because his room at St. Mary’s has only three shelves and he won’t agree to the idea of putting his new books in St. Mary’s library, which could easily use a few extra editions.

  Tyler picks a book called Destroyers. Fifty bucks, not bad. One of the two magazines he picks is Wings. I explain that Wings is actually a soft cover book, not a magazine, and costs twenty dollars, which will put him over budget.

  He says, It’s a pulp. He calls magazines, pulps.

  I say, No, not arguing price because he has no concept of what money is as it holds no interest for him.

  He says he has to have Wings. I tell him to pick out two magazines and put Wings back. He picks two magazines and holds on to Wings hoping I won’t notice. I do. His wrist comes up to his mouth. This tells me that he truly can’t manage without Wings even though the fluoxetine is doing all it can.

  I say, Listen, Tyler, next week is September. Wings can be your September book. We’ll buy just two magazines for September so you can have Wings on our next library day.

  He says, Buy it today. Please, Sister, please.

  Sister Barbara, one of the head nuns at St. Mary’s, finds it’s so adorable that Tyler thinks I’m a nun too.

  I relent. I’ll compromise. I say, Okay, I’ll buy it today but you’re not getting it until your September book day.

  He smiles. His smile is one of those thousand-watt jobs.

  I take out my MasterCard.

  He keeps the Barnes and Noble bag in the backseat with him. I say, Tyler, take Wings out of the bag and put it on the seat next to you and I promise to bring it next time. I don’t back down on my promises and you know it.

  He giggles. Not getting away with a form of thievery continues to amuse him. He puts Wings on the seat next to him.

  In the parking lot at St. Mary’s, as he’s pulling himself out of the car, getting his artificial leg caught as usual, he eyes Wings wistfully. I almost grab the damn book and say, Here, take it. But I don’t because if you give Tyler an inch, he takes a mile. He will start demanding extra books. I’ve got two adolescent kids. Once you give into a demand such as hundred-and-fifty-dollar sneakers, you’re cooked. Tyler learns from people like General Hobart and his desert rats; teenagers learn from their strongest influence, each other.

  I see Tyler back to his room and he doesn’t respond when I say, Good-bye, because he’s already plopped on his bed engrossed in Destroyers.

  I walk down the hall, past the nursing station, and wave to the staff. One of them says, Tyler so looks forward to his trips to the libraries with you.

  Yeah, he does. Then I hear Tyler call out, Sister!

  I turn. He’s standing in the hallway outside his room. What, Tyler?

  Sunday is September first.

  I know.

  It’s the new month. He says, Bring me Wings on Sunday and we’ll get the two magazines on our next bookstore day.

  I sigh. That will mean on our next bookstore day he will try to schnauzer an extra book. Also, I hadn’t intended to visit this Sunday—it’s Labor Day weekend. I’d be at Chalker Beach in Old Saybrook. But Tyler is standing there looking so hopeful, so earnest.

  Okay, Totsie, I say.

  He grins at a fixed point over my head and turns back into his room.

  I call out, What do you say, Tyler?

  His head appears. He says, Fanks.

  From St. Mary’s, I drive to Trinity Hill Health Care Center to visit my father. He is in his Gerry-chair at the end of the hallway gazing out the window at his car. I tell him about my adventure with Tyler.

  He stares past me out the window but he doesn’t really see the car. In fact, he doesn’t know why he’s looking out the window.

  In my own car, heading home down I-84, I feel happy because even though I won’t have my father much longer, I’ll still have the Tyler I’ve always known, that he’s safe. Then I feel guilty for all the times I thought: Why can’t Tyler be normal? Why can’t he be a scholar-athlete? Why can’t he be a student at Trinity College and fix me up with one of his frat brothers? Now I have to smile to myself; I’m thinking the frat brother might have been George F. Will.

  At ten o’clock that night, I get a call from Tyler’s charge nurse. I am at the cottage at Chalker Beach and I have just come from Burgey’s Barn, which my Uncle Ray and Auntie Margaret bought for a thousand dollars in the sixties. My Auntie Margaret, my husband, my cousin Rita, and I have been playing some setback. Auntie Margaret is nearly as cutthroat as my mother, but unlike my mother, she is able to tolerate her two nieces’ poor playing abilities. As for my husband’s setback skills, Auntie Margaret can’t control rolling her eyes.

  The nurse on the phone says to me, Mary-Ann, Tyler fainted this evening.

  By law, in Connecticut, a nursing home must notify family if a resident has had an emergency. The previous time they called to notify me of an emergency was when Tyler pulled the fire alarm. He felt no one would guess the perpetrator’s identity since there were so many residents at St. Mary’s. A fire at a nursing home is a very big deal, so the firefighters
from West Hartford, Hartford, and six surrounding towns stormed St. Mary’s in full gear from helmets to axes. When the first firefighter arrived on Tyler’s floor, he shouted, All hands on deck! Kamikaze attack!

  Staff was able to figure out that Tyler preempted the battle.

  Tonight, on the phone, the nurse goes on: Tyler fainted as he was heading to the library, right in front of us at the station. (St. Mary’s had come to keep the library open at night for Tyler since that’s when Tyler chose to use it. His head nurse, Anne Marie, argued for his right to do that. She said to the board, St. Mary’s is Tyler’s home. He should be able to go to the library whenever he damn well pleases. Case closed.)

  The charge nurse says, Mary-Ann, he regained consciousness immediately. And he persisted in telling us he intended to go on ahead to the library so we knew he was fine. All the same, we talked him into going back to his room and getting into bed. We told him he’d fainted and when you faint—that’s the rule, back to bed. An order from the commander-in-chief, we told him. The doctor came in just a little while later and examined him. He told us Tyler just needed a nice glass of orange juice and a little rest—fifteen minutes—and then he could go to the library. Tyler was very happy to hear that. He told Doctor that I’d already given him orange juice and that he was resting. This doctor is such a nice fellow. He saluted Tyler before he left.

  Then she says, An aide had a peek at him five minutes ago to see if he felt well enough to go back to the library. Mary-Ann, I’m so sorry. Tyler died. The entire staff is devastated.

  I am calm because I am convinced there is some kind of mistake. That my father died, not Tyler. I look up at my husband, who is staring at me.

  I say, Tyler died.

  Hearing the words come out of my own mouth, I know it isn’t a mistake. I see that I am holding a phone. I speak to the nurse again. I say, Thank you.

  THE NEXT DAY, I bring Tyler’s September book, Wings, to Fisette’s Funeral Home and ask Mr. Fisette to put it in the coffin with Tyler. He tells me there is no problem there. He is looking at me, though, in a strange way. I say to him, What’s wrong?

  He says, Mary-Ann, I have bad news.