Authors: Katia Lief
Suddenly, sitting at my desk, I yearned to see my mother. But it was already after three o’clock and I generally liked to get home by five thirty so Nat wouldn’t have to be alone in the house for too long. If I went to my mother’s now, by the time I arrived and settled in the visit would be too short for her to have a chance to realize I was even there. My habit was to visit her for lunch on Fridays. I would have to hold on to my feeling until then.
At twenty past three, however, my cell phone rang. Nat was calling, asking for permission to go over to his friend Henry’s house to do homework and hang out. It was as if he had read my mind. I told him to go and said I would therefore go uptown to visit Grandma. I promised to be home by six thirty and asked him to also be home by that time. Then I slipped my laptop into my bag, left the office and took a subway to the Upper West Side.
The assisted living community where my mother had lived for the past three years was in a huge pre-war building, formerly a hotel, on West End Avenue. The lobby, plush with red carpeting, reproductions of antiques and a crystal chandelier, was busy this afternoon with the usual combination of attendants and the elegant elderly New Yorkers who lived here. The Alzheimer’s patients were sequestered on the seventh floor where a key was required to summon the elevator. I had my own key and was allowed to come and go as I pleased. My mother, like the other patients, did not have a key and could leave only in the company of family or staff. People with Alzheimer’s tended to wander and this safeguard was for their own protection. Sometimes I took her out but more and more our visits were contained on the seventh floor, where she was comfortable and would not be confused by the unfamiliar.
Arriving during the time between afternoon snack and dinner, I first looked for her in the common room where she often sat with some of the other residents, chatting or staring through a particular window where a separation between two buildings revealed a slice of the Hudson River. Today she wasn’t there and so after greeting the others – three women and one man who had met me dozens of times and acted as though they’d never seen me before – I found my mother alone in her room down the hall.
She was lying on her bed, propped up by pillows, with her eyes closed. But she wasn’t sleeping. She opened her eyes as I came near and looked at me blankly, her only child, for what felt like too long. She seemed to wonder who this visitor was – until finally she smiled. Every time I visited now I wondered if this would be the time it happened: when my mother wouldn’t recognize me. I dreaded it with visceral revulsion. And it would happen; it was inevitable.
The disease had been stealing my mother’s mind bit by bit by bit for seven years now. At first it had been manageable at home with live-in attendants but eventually that arrangement became too tenuous. She had needed round-the-clock specialized care. I was living on the Vineyard at the time and wasn’t around to supervise the help or visit often and so I found her this home, which had been wonderful. I had long grown used to the sense, when I stepped off the locked elevator, that I was entering an alternate universe. Even Nat accepted the radical shifting of expectations one experienced in this place. A patient might walk up to you and say anything. Or you could tell someone your life story and a minute later they would ask your name as if they had never met you.
My mother reached up her arms and I leaned down into them, resting my cheek against her velvety skin. Her familiar smell was instantly comforting,
a
unique perfume of musky body odor and baby powder. Then she lay her head back down on her stack of pillows, soft puffs of white hair fanning out behind her.
“You’re a little bit late,” she said with that marvelous smile that always warmed her face to counter a criticism.
“Just a little.” I didn’t bother pointing out that the visit hadn’t been planned.
“Do you have much homework today?”
“Not much.”
“Good. When you’re through you can help me make dinner. Think about what you’d like to eat.”
“I will. How are you feeling today, Mom?”
“Fine. I have nothing to complain about, do I?”
“No, you don’t.”
“There was a picture there, on the wall. He took it down when they repainted. I asked him to put it back up but he still hasn’t done it. Will you ask him? The one with the courtyard and the staircase.”
“I’ll ask him.” But
he
was my father and the picture was something I had never seen. She had mentioned it a few times lately and I assumed it was something from her life before I came along, possibly from her own childhood. I had thought of hunting down some picture that fit the bill – courtyard and staircase, how hard could that be? – to see if I could trick her into thinking my father had
finally
rehung it. But what was the point? If not this absent picture, then some other phantom item would dematerialize to justify her sense that something was missing. Something
was
missing: her memory. More of it was gone every time I came to see her and lately I struggled against the sense that I had already lost her. I had to remind myself that I hadn’t, not quite. She was alive, right here next to me. I held her hand as she drifted off to sleep.
I remembered as a child studying this hand, thinking it perfect with its squarish palm and strong fingers. Her blunt fingernails painted red had reminded me of rosebuds as a little girl and I would gather them together into a bouquet. Then I would spread them out and place my small hand in her larger hand, press our fingers together and say, “See? Our hands are exactly the same size.” She always agreed with me even though it was obviously untrue. I never questioned, until I got older, why she didn’t remarry. We loved each other so powerfully that I didn’t see why she would have a need to love anyone else. Later, a mother myself, I understood that this would be the fantasy of any child and asked her why she had never even dated after my father’s death. Her answer: “I never met a man good enough to replace him.” But she also never looked. I suspected that after my father’s suicide she didn’t want to do anything to diminish our bond. She recognized its
importance
to me and knew her abnegation allowed us to live for each other alone … until I grew up and left her.
I left her
. Her hand in mine now felt weightless. Grey and veined, every bone revealed by fragile spotted skin. Seven years of college and work in Boston, then fifteen years living on the Vineyard. Twenty-two years I lived away from her with just occasional visits.
Well, now I’m back, Mom. We’re back together
. But was it too late? I wanted so badly for her to tell me what was happening inside her mind so I could understand her journey. And I wanted to share my own challenges, to tell her about Abe Starkman and the bones, about Joe Coffin and how he’d been bothering me, about Nat and his glorious performance yesterday. I wanted to tell her I’d met a new man I liked and that his name was Rich. Everything. But I knew from experience that sharing details from my life only confused her. We could talk about events that were long past but lately she had lost whole decades of shared memory. She could not grasp that I had ever married much less that my husband had died or that I was a widow or that I had a son who was thirteen or that I now worked at what had been her daily newspaper. I had tried to tell her that I was a staff reporter for the
Times
, knowing that ten years ago she would have been very proud of me, but it slip-slid through her
consciousness
so fast it was as if I hadn’t told her at all. Being with her, it was as if none of the past events that had shaped my life had ever happened. Sometimes it was liberating to pretend with her but I could never sustain the fantasy for long. I always crashed back to earth while she continued to float above it.
I couldn’t tell how much of the past her failing memory had obliterated. For instance, did she remember the camps? She never mentioned them. I knew she remembered my father and their early marriage but she seemed to have forgotten his death. She had lost most of the last thirty years. It was a helpless, progressive form of memory loss much like a picture that fades from the top down.
As she slipped away, I found myself wishing that the eraser would reach deeper and wipe out not just her latest memories but the worst ones. If this was happening – and it was, undeniably – then why deposit her back in her childhood? It would be a cruel trick if her disease landed her in her earliest years when she was orphaned in one of the darkest nightmares humanity had ever suffered. Sitting beside her now, holding her frail hand, I prayed she would die before that happened. But if she didn’t, if her illness forced her to return to that abysmal time, I would be right here with her, holding her hand, a connection to the present, in the hope that some part
of
her might realize that she not only survived but went on to find safety and love. Aside from caring for and loving Nat, staying present as a living reminder to my mother of her survival was the most important commitment of my life.
Seeing the bones today had touched the core of this fear: that my mother had also seen the bones. Different bones. That
the echoes
, as she called those memories, might have come back upon her like a tsunami and submerged what was left of her mind.
But sitting with her now as she slept, I felt reassured that it hadn’t happened yet. She was still safe. I stayed another hour before kissing her forehead and quietly leaving.
Walking down the deep canyon of West End Avenue, I had a change of heart and decided that instead of going directly to the subway at 72nd Street I would turn around and detour to Zabar’s on Broadway and 81st. Nat wouldn’t begrudge me the extra half-hour and I would be able to pick us up a delicious dinner not to mention some treats from their bakery. I turned around – and there he was.
Joe.
Definitely
Joe. He was about half a block behind me and until I turned around he had been following me. I was sure of it. For a moment we were face to face. Mine must have registered the shock I felt. His also looked surprised: to have been caught. For a moment his expression appeared
suspended
between shame and the possibility of a quick-save greeting. The pupil of his gimpy right eye widened as if to drink me in, and then …
He turned and ran,
ran
, in the opposite direction.
“Joe!” I went after him. He couldn’t follow me and pretend he wasn’t. Following me was wrong but pretending he wasn’t was even worse. And what was running? Cowardly. Idiotic.
He was a fast runner. Young. With my bag of laptop, books and other stuff weighing down one shoulder, I couldn’t keep up.
“
Joe!
”
My voice trailed him as he disappeared around the corner in the direction of Riverside Drive. When I reached the corner, I couldn’t see him anywhere. He might have ducked into the lobby of one of the buildings. Or sped up and made it into Riverside Park.
Panting, I ran partway down 74th Street in the direction of the park before giving up. “Joe!” I called again, and stood there, listening helplessly to my voice reverberating down the street. What did he want from me? Why was he following me? How could I make him stop?
CHAPTER 4
IN JANUARY 1945
my father survived the infamous death march from Birkenau, Poland, by escaping into a forest so dense with snow – snow piled on the ground and snow relentlessly falling – he was able to hide in it. Because he was small and thin, a twelve-year-old boy weighing sixty pounds, he was able to conceal himself from sight behind the trunk of a tree. He waited all afternoon and through the night, his feet frozen in ice-socks that had formed inside the boots he had taken off a camp-mate “who was not so lucky” which was how he’d put it. My father felt lucky, and in the context of the moment he
was
lucky, to be hiding behind a tree trunk in the freezing snow for hours as tens of thousands of skeletons marched along the nearby road. These skeletons who were his comrades and whom he had abandoned
with
the certainty that at the end of the road would be more death.
Alone in the German countryside, with the last of the thunderous footsteps receding up the frozen road, he finally stepped away from the tree. “I was hot with fear,” he said. The fear warmed him as he headed into the woods in the opposite direction from which they had just marched over three days. He ignored his frozen feet, hoping his fear would radiate into them and also warm them. The goal was to get back across the border into Poland and if he was
really
lucky meet up with the Russian liberators from whom they had fled at Gestapo-gunpoint.
He spent five more days alone in the snowy woods, avoiding the road, unsure what direction he’d pursued in reality or what country he was in. He might still have been in Germany or he might have crossed back into Poland; he had no way of knowing for sure. Without food or water, he lived on melted snow and the hope that his older sister – the last member of his family he had seen alive back at Auschwitz before she was transferred to a women’s camp – had survived and they would reunite. She had not; they would not. But he didn’t know that then. He trudged through the pillow-white frozen woods aware that the enemy could be anywhere and that if he was seen he would instantly be shot and killed. Which to a certain way of
thinking
would be a kind of luck. Because what he came to fear most was neither being killed nor failing to reach safety but suffering a slow demise alone in these woods.
To deal with this terrible fear he pretended he was already safe. He pretended there was no enemy. He pretended he had not been held captive and starved and degraded for three years, that he had not lost track of or possibly actually
lost
his entire family. He pretended he was simply walking through the woods. “The imagination,” he always told me, “is a powerful friend.” It was for him.
He did find his way back into Poland and he found the Russian army – or they found him: delirious at the edge of the forest. A couple of kind soldiers installed him in the home of a local farmer sympathetic to the Resistance. Thus my father found the end of the war in a feather bed and a plate of stuffed peppers. He never found his family – father, mother and two sisters – whom it turned out had all died, also alone, in various crematories. But he did, eventually, find Eva Gertlestein, my mother. They recognized each other across a crowded subway in Manhattan in 1952 and married soon after, joining forces in more ways than met the eye.