 |
 |
To my Children
The Suicide letter of a Miami woman who feared old age
by Bee Baxter
Miami Herald, "Tropic" August 14, 1983
pages 11-15,
24-25
[Inside cover: "Saying Goodby by Bee Baxter. 'If
life is good,' she wrote, 'it should be maintained. If it has long ceased to be
so, why inflict it on those whom you love?' Better than most, the author knew
the pain of watching a parent succumb to senility, helpless and bewildered. She
chose an alternative. Cover Illustration by Kinmanne Uhler."]
[Page 10 photographs top left to bottom right. Beatrice Alma Light as infant
professional photograph. Bee Baxter mid 1930's before KSTP RCA A44 microphone.
Family photograph (about 1920) of Mamie left, Beatrice top, Dick bottom, and
Ruben Light, right. Rubin and Manie Light 50th anniversary photograph back yard
of 348 Woodlawn Avenue, St. Paul, MN, by Deena Hoffman June 1961). Miniature of
Tropic cover portrait from front page. Bea and Mel on the porch at Norway Camp,
shortly before Mel's death. Photograph of Bea taken as young woman (very early
twenties). Formal standing photograph of Mamie Levin, about age 24. Professional
photograph as it appeared in McCall's Magazine.]
Page 11, on
She strode into the Channel 2 newsroom in 1964 and asked for
work. She'd do anything at all. Free of charge.
George Dooley regarded the short, plump, middle-aged woman quizzically. At that
time, Miami's fledgling public TV station wasn't much" a handful of desks and
chairs, a typewriter, a secretary, a program director and George Dooley,
president. Who would want to work at a place like this -- for nothing?
Still, a volunteer was a volunteer. Dooley gestured toward a vacant cubicle in
the back. Bee Baxter smiled.
"She took possession of that office," Dooley recalls. "Got a desk and a chair
and brought in her own typewriter and began to put together a campaign for
corporate finacial support."
Through the next 18 years, Baxter was instrumental in turning Channel 2's
fortunes around. She conceived and organized the station's yearly auction,
recruited and trained hundreds of volunteer workers, personally raised thousands
of dollars in contributions. She would work the phone from the clutter of her
tiny office, cigaret dangling from her mouth, clawing through her Rolodex,
issuing hoarse entreaties for money or volunteers. She was persistent, pushy, a
harranguer, a pest. In person, she'd buttonhole her mark, maneuver him into a
corner, thump his chest for emphasis. She knew how to work your guilt, inflect
you with her spirit. "You would be force-fed the strong, scadling chicken soup
of her will and personality, whether you needed it or not," a friend once wrote.
Every morning she would take a long walk to "smell the day," as she put it.
Then, she'd go to work. When she wasn't at Channel 2, she was helping set up an
after-school activities program for poor black children in South Miami, doing
volunteer work for her church, creating the board of directors for WLRN, Miami's
public radio station. She had been a radio broadcaster in South Dakota in the
1940s and '50s, she had twice won a McCall Magazine national mike award, and she
had no intention of retiring in Florida.
"She was so inspiring, you would never do less than your best," says Petey Cox,
first president of the WLRN board. "You felt this urgency to respond. She had
everyone around her going at their peak performance. She was an enormous
intelligence."
Like many driven people, Baxter found little peace in her private life. Though
she hid it from most of her friends and coworkers, she suffered extreme swings
of mood, from elation to crippling depression, particularly after the death of
her husband in 1980.
In February, at the age of 71, but in good physical health, Bee Baxter took her
own life. Her friends were devastated.
Marilyn Manzanilla: "I didn't know she was hurting that much. She did it out of
strength. She hurt for the world, for the people in her life."
Petey Cox: "I miss her still. I guess I always will. She changed my life."
Hattie Mickens: "She did all she intended to do. She really left a mark."
Baxter also left some suicide notes addressed to her three children, and a
manuscript, written a decade before, describing the declining years of her
parents, who died in senility, a painful burden on the family.
Bee Baxter said she didn't want to be such a burden.
Her writings are excerpted here with permission of her children.
The Letter
To my beloved son and daughters:
This is written in love and no apology....
It is very obvious and has been for a long time now, that there is not enough
pleasure in living to make it worthwhile....and I much prefer to leave you while
I am still capable of making decisions -- even though this one may in your
opinion be that of a coward.
I haven't been able to figure out for all these years whether trying to live a
life I haven't wanted is more cowardice than giving it up while it was my
decision to make.
It isn't necessary for me to go into a nursing home -- I need only to look at
some of the old people I know and have known, to have continuously wondered what
in hell is the point? It seems ridiculous to me to continue to invest time and
money into beginning to put pieces of old people together...if life is good, it
must be maintained. It it has long ceased to be so, why inflict it on those I
love as much as you know I love all of you....
You know what deep and valid fear I have have long had about becoming as my own
parents became in their eighties....
I don't want any sloppy sentimentality over this whole thing -- my death,
although taken earlier than any of you might have expected it -- is a natural
condition. I have never wanted to live past joy.
Mom.
The Reason
Mama comes to the kitchen and makes washing motions with her hands against her
body and this is how I understand she wants a bath. As I run her tub she leans
over me and says why should you bother darling I can do this and then stands
immobilized by the baffling buttons of her dress which she has put on backwards
over her backwards slip. The empty lace pockets of the slip's barassier hang
behind her thin back. Later she she has redressed, I will unbutton and swing her
around and she will say when they were little you had all this (she means she
had us as children) and now they are little you have all this (meaning we have
her and Papa as our children). And I will answer intending it to be gentle but
it will have the edge of bitterness that I have had the privilege of being both
mother and daughter.
Give me something for my hands, Mama says, and we bring out the ironing board
and the stack of napkins and handkerchiefs and she is grateful and busy ironing
and folding. How strange that of all the ways in which her hands were deft, only
two are left, dish drying and ironing. When she first came to us I put a crochet
hook in her hand and a ball of bright red yarn. She held the hook but could not
take a stitch, this my mother who had knit our babies their dress clothes way
into grade school.
I am going to the library. Mama is lying down. Would you like to come I ask her
not because I want to because I do not and yet I feel some change in place and
movement might please her. On our way back I will stop to buy her a chocolate
ice cream stick and it will be a celebration. Flavors are fresh and new and
daily unremembered by her and all the way home my mother will force bites and
licks on me and I will say no thanks and no thanks darling and Mama will say
have some and have some and I will have some rather than no thanks darling.
Mama's eyes are still a sharp bright blue. Good morning she says as I look up
from the paper. Don't stop, don't do that for me she says, my son is still not
dressed. When she says my son she means Papa. Sometimes she calls him my friend
and when she wants him quickly and suddenly it is Ruben. Ruben with the "n"
sharp and hard between her teeth. She sits up at the breakfast bar, surprised
every morning to find her breakfast waiting. Too much she says. I answer hm hm.
Have some she says. Yes, Mama, hm hm. She waits. This stuff, she points to the
cereal or the egg, delicious. Food is new every day. Every meal. I look at the
paper again. The headlines and paragraphs run together. Ruben my mother screams
suddenly. He'll be here soon, Mama, relax.
My father hoists his new fat belly up to the breakfast stool. Mama hands him a
piece of her toast. She would throw it away, Mama says, looking at me with
something less than affection. Use it. If she throws this out I will be very
angry, she is extravagant, Mama says.
Good morning my father says in his gravelly Litvak Yiddish accent. He stares at
his breakfast. Here, Papa. First your pills. First every morning your pills
first. Every morning. The pills. Here. In front of your plate. Papa picks up the
pills carefully, one at a time. Watching Papa pick up the tiny pills in his
thick, awkward fingers is like watching a bear handling a sugar cube. I watch
the lift slowly, slowly of each pill to his mouth. In. Done. Now Papa says about
the pills that his father couldn't do it but his son would make it work. In
translation this means that what old Dr. Pepper couldn't do for Papa's
constipation, his son could do. Papa says to be sure to tell him he's for sure a
better doctor with his yellow pills, two a day and no more cramps or at least
not so many and no more extra physics. Good for you, Papa. Hurray for young Dr.
Pepper. Eat your breakfast, Papa. Eat.
By this time Mama has walked behind me and is already at the sink. Please, Mama,
please. You can dry later. Please, I'm not ready. Oh says Mama, then I can fix
these things if the woman isn't coming today. Is she coming? No, Mama, I say
about Hattie. Good, I will fix these things. Papa looks up from the pleasure of
bananas and cereal. Things? Our things, Mama says. She goes toward their room
happy to be on her way to work and bed making and clothese rolling. In a minute
she is back again making sweeping motions. I what -- where is --and so I ask, do
you mean the broom, Mama? The mop, Mama? Not necessarily, she says. I try again.
The broom? She puts her head to one side. Her eyes are so blue. She grins at me.
That might be something to consider she says, precisely, but reserves judgment
until she sees what I mean by the broom. I remind Mama that Hattie cleaned her
room thoroughly yesterday, but her hands keep sweeping. I take the broom from
the kitchen closet. She is delighted with it. My father puts the third or fourth
spoonful of sugar into his coffee, stirs and stares, stares and stires. I finish
the dishes and begin to clean out the refrigerator. Papa sits and stares. Not
really at me, but at something moving. Each motion I make is some -[Center of
page: You should only live to be a hundred, Mama says. I reach over to kiss her
in the guilt of what I answer. God forbid. Like you, Mama? God forbid.] thing to
watch. My fingernails curl inward. Ruben! The call is imperative, commanding.
Moma comes as quickly as the sound of her voice. I need you. Now. How clearly
she says what she needs to say sometimes.
But at 4 o'clock this morning she came into my room. I'm a sick woman, she said.
Her hands fumbled with the buttons of her gown. Always so modest, she does not
remove her underpants until she steps into her tub, now she was tugging her
gown, anxious to show me her disease. I am going to die, she said clearly. Are
you in pain, Mama? Do you hurt my darling? Let it be quick. Let it come fast.
Mama, do you hurt? She pressed her hip bones. Here, she said. Lumps. Lumps
growing. I felt the bony hips through the soft, sagging skin of her so mach.
These are hip bones, Mama. Everyone has them. That's it, Mama said. Lumps
growing. I am sick. I urged her back into her room. Softly, softly. Lie down,
Mama. She pulled up her gown and caught my hands. Here, she said, Lumps. I said
Mama, you're fine. The doctor was here last week and he says you're fine. If
this is so I am grateful, my mother said precisely. You know? You're sure? Yes,
I said. Yes, I know. I am sure. It's so. I patted her. Ah ah ah, baby. Ah ah ah
, baby. Ah ah ah, baby. She slept.
Now I ask how she is this morning. She says fine. Papa asks what happened. I
tell him. Mama's eyes are blue and clear and interested. She listens to the
story, wanting to know what happened next. Papa says don't you remember, Mamie?
No, I don't remember. I don't remember. I don't remember my son's children nor
my daughter's children nor my son. I don't remember my husband's brother. In
another world these people, my mother says. Some days are worse than others,
Mama says. Don't ask me about these things. But her eyes fill with tears. There
is no reason at all to get up, she says softly. My throat clogs. But I am nearly
cried out. I have been in mourning for my mother since she came to me. I mourn
for her. I mourn for me.
My mother says you are my life. I protest. No, Mama. No, my love. I don't want
to be your life. No please, Mama. No.
Mama talks to my father. Her voice is his companion. The sound is his 56 years
of marriage. She tells him he must stand up like a man and find them a place of
their own to live. He knows she doesn't realize he can't. He knows she doesn't
know he can't dress and attend her. Tell me, he asked when they first came to
live with us, are there no things to hold up women's stockings? Garters, Papa.
Then get some, he said. She has some, Papa. They're on her girdle. Girdle?
Pants? Brassiers? Buy some more of everything, Papa said. She should have plenty
because every morning I can't find anything. Dresses, slips, underpants, belts,
sweaters, robes -- all of them are rolled tightly against each other in her
dresser drawers. Mama is busy many times a day removing and rerolling. Dresses
from the closet. Papa's underclothes. Rolling neatly and stacking. But again and
again the sound of her voice goads him and he comes to me with Mama and tells me
she wants him to leave. My mother laughs at him. He's crazy, she says. I have no
complaints. These are pleasant people here and our things and our place and he's
crazy. Pay no attention, Mama says.
Before they came, Papa went with my uncle to look at the Jewish Home for the
Aged. A grave, a prison, he said and told me maybe when his apartment lease ran
out in six months, I should fix up a room in our house. How do I say don't come
Papa. How should I not want my father? How should I not want my mother? How do I
say I am not ready, their only daughter, to be their nurse and keeper? Of
course, Papa, I say, we will get a room ready. We will move our Debby to another
room. I'll pay, Papa says. Whatever it is, I'll pay. But even before the new
beds, the new spreads, the clean motel room look was ready, they were here. My
mother was thin and frightened and clung to me. I love you. You are my life.
Papa said she wanted to come. She cried. She wanted to come.
My brother came from South Dakota. He said you can't do this to them and they
shouldn't have this as the end of their life and they mustn't leave their
beautiful apartment to come way out here in the country with you. They need
people around them and they must go to the Jewish Home. And my hands caught up
my throat and I said I cannot take them there and he said you must and you must
come with me and visit and bring them to see for themselves.
And the sun shone into the patio and round and round the silver-haried people
circled, those who walked slowly and those in their wheelchairs. Around and
around the patio. The grave, the end of the road, Papa said. Put me in my grave,
kill me and send me here. I am a dead man. I am in hell. And I said, never Papa,
if you don't want to come here and Mama said brightly there are nice people here
by why are so many of them so old and so sick? But my brother signed the
submission for admission papers and the social worker said why do you want to
come here, Mr. Light to Papa. And Papa said who wants to come? And the social
worker looked at me suspiciously, quite sure I was railroading my poor parents
and I protested that this was not my idea but of course the social worker has
heard this many times and his smile is cool and measuring. But then my father
said we will tell you what you want and maybe I'll come and maybe again who
knows?
But when we were all all through answering questions the social worker said he
would have their psychiatrist interview Mama to see whether she is qualified,
whether she can cope? If she were able to cope why should she be here, my
beautiful mother? And the psychiatrist said after their visit, no she can't
come, she can't cope, she isn't eligible. If we take them capable and later they
become like your mother they can stay, depending on the fine print in the
agreement. But we cannot take them here when they are already like your mother.
When we came back home, Mama cried. And Papa said furiously, my money they'll
take, all my money, every last cent they'll take, but not my wife. And who wants
them? Who needs them? A grave.
The quiet of our street lends little for their eyes. Papa takes his morning walk
and looks for a friendly face. Young women hang out their clothes. Children
play. No one talks of old times or how my father built his business and we take
my parents to the nearby community center and Papa says nothing.
Ruben talk with somebody, my mother pleads. And he shakes his head and says
there is nothing here for us. He is right. Such places are for the capable old,
for card players and the machers, those who can run things, direct things, make
speeches, take up collections, serve coffee, listen to speeches.
Papa says they don't do nothing here and the next time we want to take them,
Mama says, no, darling, no. I'm tired. For at the beginning she looked up with
pleasure, speaking brightly with anyone near her but there was no meaning to her
words and the welcoming old sat a little while near her but were baffled and
moved away. My parents sat alone.
Later and lonelier, as if it had never happened before, Papa said find me a
place. What can I do with my life in hell? A man must live somewhere. Mama must
have nursing care we say and although we do not say it, so must you, Papa. But
now it is Papa pushing for life who asks us to shop for a place and we look
through the phone book and we walk through the agencies and we walk through
endless corridors and rooms and patios and we find a nursing home nearby.
We bring Papa in to meet the director. He is delighted. Papa likes the director
who ingratiates and welcomes him. He is a social worker owner. He woos Papa. He
invites my parents to come as his guests for noonday dinner. A Jewish chef. The
food is good and there's so much.
But today when Papa and Mama come to dinner, the friendly man who greeted Papa
yesterday leaves them with the others. They are fully of need to tell of their
loneliness and sickness and across the patio from the dining room the thin high
sickness [Center of page: "I have been in mourning for my mother since she came
to me. I mourn for her. I mourn for me."] of screaming rises higher and higher.
Papa comes back to our house. His time of hope is gone. Buy yourself some
liquor, he tells my husband. Papa remembers he has called our home hell and he
wants to erase the words with presents. Buy yourself something. Keep me.
My uncle David, his brother-in-law, comes to see Papa. Please, Dave, Papa says,
you say you want to help me. Find me a place. Now I am sick with dislike for my
father. I have become my father's jailer when he pleads find me a place, David.
My uncle says he will look around at retirement hotels and he winks at me and
says maybe we can find a woman there to help Mama. My mother sniffs. Help me?
Who needs help. My son and I can take care....
The next day I speak about such hotels and Papa says, I saw, I saw, who can live
in such places? Cockroaches. Lice. We don't know how to live like that. And Mama
says, Ruben find us a place. Tomorrow we'll feel better and I can take care of
you.
My father holds his stomach and goes to bed. Mama covers him with one of her
little dresses and a bathtowel and sits with him. She is very still and able.
She pats him. Ruben, she says in her lovely voice and careful diction, when you
get old you must adjust, you must accept. She is my mother with the shining mind
and quick wit. This is Mama. Papa comes to her bed and she lies down with her
thin arms around him. I cannot bear to look. I am their child and I am and
keeper and their jailer and I am their prisoner.
Papa and Mama are in their chairs in the hot late afternoon sun when I get home.
They rise and Mama says I was so worried. I want to fix something to eat and I
don't know and it's so long and where were you? Love me. I love you. Kiss me.
You are my life. No, Mama, no.
But see how little I learn: You are my heart, I tell my daughter Debby. At 17
she says, no thank you. It's too much. Please. Mom, close my door. You are my
life, Debby. No thank you, Mom.
My chest bones rise in physical pain of rejection and pity when I see Papa and
Mama sitting together on my mother's bed, waiting to be called to dinner. We
pour the wine and hand them a snack to fill the long afternoon waiting and we
clink glasses and Mama says, L'chaim, to life. You should only be well and live
to a hundred, Mama says. I reach over to kiss her in the guilt of what I feel
and what I am going to say and I answer God forbid. God forbid. Like you, Mama?
God forbid.
At the table my father says nothing. His eyes straight in front of him, he
waits. He smacks his lips at the short ribs, the chopped liver, the fish paste
spread on thin Norwegian snack bread. My father is newly a slave to his growing
belly.
I will do the dishes, Mama says, and carefully empties all the rib bones into
the soapy dish water. Please, Mama. Darling. Leave it. Please Grandma, Debby
says. Please, please, please, my mother repeats sharply. I can see your mean
face.
You are still my wife, Papa says and his tears spill over his fat cheeks. Your
mother can still dry a dish. Yes, Papa. But look, Papa. Now Mama has carefully
filled it with little orange juice glasses.
Papa says never mind. I will put them away and carries them carefully over to
the refrigerator. Debby asks Grandpa, why are you putting the glasses into the
refrigerator? Oh, he laughs and stands with them in his hands until we take them
away from him.
Mama says, come Ruben. We'll take a walk. But it's bitter cold tonight. Over her
little shift, Mama carefully buttons a sleeveless chiffon blouse inside out. I
say no, Mama. Take a sweater. She comes with me to look at the miracle of how I
find so many sweaters in her dresser drawer. You are so clever to find them, she
says. Whose are they? Yours, Mama. If you say so, she says.
-----
My parents walk the block together in slow and measured steps. They are
beautiful. Her arms are linked to his. Their white hair shines in the sun. She
speaks to him and he inclines his head toward her. The little children of the
block sometimes get out of their way or once in awhile look up and smile.
Papa stops anywhere for a child. Mama looks for a moment but is quickly
impatient at children, too often in our driveway or at the door. Sometimes they
are pests she says and the children don't return if they see Mama at the door.
Ruben, she calls. Enough! We are sad but angry too when our friends the
neighborhood children stay away.
Today we prepare to go to the park and pool of Matheson Hammock. I have seen
many old people in the grove of trees north of the pool, and I hope my parents
will see a friendly face and hear a welcoming word.
At the park we are invited to share a table. Mama smiles. A gracious lady.
Haven't I met you somewhere, she asks friendly old Mary. Mary laughs. I met you
here and I met you many times at the Club, yes, and I met you already a lot of
times.
Mama reaches for a handkerchief in her sleeve, her belt, her pocket, the neck of
her dress. It is never where she needs it and now I open her purse to see if the
one I put there is still there and I find a rolled up slip and two pairs of
socks with it.
Mama's eyes are sharp on me as I finger the rolls of clothing in her pocketbook
and Mama is proud. In case it's cold, she says. In case the sun goes behind on
this 88-degree day. Mama. You will bind on your slip and bounce the balls of
your socks. But I do not laugh and I do not cry and my husband laughs and that
is his sanity.
-----
I see her come in to breakfast this morning, her hem hanging and fastened in two
places with thin gray pairpins and I choke with sadness and anger that each sign
of my mother's unreality should gouge at me so. I keep telling myself I have
accepted it. But how can I? Her words hold the sound of remembered intelligence
and wit. And charm. No, not her words. But her voice. The voice of my mother,
the voice of love and authority. Beatie, what did you do? Did you buy fudge with
the grocery change? You mustn't eat candy darling, you're too fat. Give your
brother the candy. Play the piano for the company Beatie. That's beautiful.
Clementi, Czerny, Kuhlau.
When her fat child made music, Mama glowed with pleasure. When Papa went
bankrupt in New Haven, my piano was the only piece of furniture they shipped to
our new home in South Dakota and Papa and Mama kept up their payments until the
Horace Waters upright belonged finally to us. Mama shipped it to me when I was
married.
Mama. Mama. You were always reaching and trying. First for yourself then for us.
You went to work in a notions factory when you were 13. When Papa met and fell
in love with you, you were a forelady. Firm, meticulous, precise and neat, but
funny and witty, quick-tongued and sharp-tongued. Cutting, too. Sarcastic and at
the same time, loving. And not a pincher. A wide armed swatter. But your body
was there, interposed, when Papa pulled off his belt to spank us with a sudden
rage.
I never doubted that if she had to, Mama would kill for me, would always love
me. Did I doubt it? Even when I thought I was adopted because my thin brother
was given the candy and sat with his gray eyes wide and beautiful under his
golden curls and my brown Dutch bob hung so straight. Did I think I was loved
then? And if I thought I was loved, whe did I sneak under the table and cram my
mouth full of food, while all the time calling here kitty, here kitty and
stuffing my own mouth?
Why haven't I forgotten the night in back of Mama's little store in Connecticut
when her friends from New York came into our bedroom to look at my brother,
golden haired in his crib. I listened. And waited. The lamp was first held over
Dick's head. A man's voice said, an angel, a reggelah angel.
When they came to look at me, I felt the heat of the lamp on my face, against my
closed eyes. The same voice cooled. A nice little girl, it said.
Of course I was adopted. I knew it. And Hershey kisses spoke to my mouth of
hidden love. I stole them from the counter. Later I stole ice cream from the
freezer of our restaurant and one Sunday afternoon when I was 10 and we stopped
to visit a man and his wife we knew who rank a Kewpie doll concession stand at a
beach near New Haven, I walked around to the back of the stand and found a
skillet full of cooking salami and eggs and reached out to scoop up a great hot
mass of it in my hand and cram it into my mouth, hot and choking. Why haven't I
been able to forget this?
You're so mean and yet you're a good girl my mother says and yesterday when she
spent the whole day in bed, I bathed her and bought her food on a tray, and she
smiled with love and grasped my hand and kissed it. The tears came so hot and
fast to my eyes. I choked. How could I bear to have her show such total love and
gratitude to the fraud I know I am. I was think when she was so ill, that
perhaps now she will begin to die. Now. Oh please dear God, no. But she is 83.
In the morning she is better and we have once again begun her daily blood
pressure pills. I think suppose I don't given them to her. But I do. Daily. And
after a few weeks on these new pills, the young doctor comes and says
congratulations. Your mother's pressure is much better than yours and three
weeks ago it was very high. He nods in a complimentary way and says some people
have come to me about investing in a nursing home. I should send them to you to
run it. Thank you doctor. Don't bother. I am already in the business.
My father asks me why I am crying so early in the morning. Nothing, I answer and
point to his pills, butter his toast and sugar his coffee. Nothing. But I have
just come into the kitchen from my bedroom where I screamed I can't stand it, I
can't stand it. For today as every day, the soft uncertain sound of Mama's steps
began my morning. As I picked up the paper, she came round the screen of the
breakfast bar and said as she says every day, don't stop, I can wait for my son
or my friend and then patting me she sat down immediately in front of her plate
and as she does every day instantly began her breakfast, anxious for her food in
the morning and life again and there she was, old, old, my lover and my jailer
and my victim.
I bite back sound until finally, sick at my own cruelty of thought, so much
worse somehow than any open action, I read a headline aloud to her. Mama perks
up and answers in many words of no meaning and almost freed of a moment in
self-forgiveness, I lower my head again to the silence but my tears come and I
run into my room.
I am afraid to think of this fall when Debby will be going away to college and I
will be locked in this silence. [Center of page: Oh God I cannot stand it. The
soft uncertain sound of Mama's steps began my morning. There, she was, old, old,
my lover and my jailer and my victim.] I am afraid of many things. I am afraid
of my hours, unwilling to be with Papa and Mama. I am incapable of being away.
No away is far enough, for if we leave and go to the beach or park without them,
I can only think of how they could be with us and perhaps enjoying themselves.
Today, then, here in the park, I leave them after I have given them lunch and
brought their lounge chairs over to the card players so they can watch. But my
husband walks over and stands beside me, as I read near the pool some distance
from where I have seated them. He tells me we might just as well have left them
at home. They can't join in with the old card players or the old talkers. People
say hello and ask a question or two and Mama answers and soon the people look at
each other and walk away.
But my husband is wrong. The physical difference between being here at the park
and dull daily forever hours at home gives them a pleasing change. At least it
helps me think so. I need to think so. I need to believe there is something I
can do, some action I can take. This business for a moment deludes me into
thinking I am giving them pleaseure. Pleasure? Even I can't tolerate such
overstatement. It is only I involved, keeping busy in order to excuse myself for
leaving them and walking away to be free a little while. If only Mama wouldn't
keep saying darling, smile at me. Give me something for my hands. Give me
something for my love. Smile at me.
Papa sits withdrawn. Is this the beginning or something began years agao? Is it
because it was always Mama who approached and spoke and charmed and joked. Poor
Mama, her enchanted systers have always said, so quick, such fund, so bright and
Ruben a mouzik, a bad tempered Russian, a screamer, a curser.
But this was never all of it nor of him. He always lover her more than she knew
or consciously accepted. The family called him the Greenhorn. Mama went to the
Catskills for her vacation and he sent a card deocrated with an overstuffed,
perfumed red satin rose. Beneath it he wrote in his incongruously beautiful
flowing script: Mamie, smell from her. Her friends roared, teasing and crowding
around her. Smell from her. Smell from Mamie.
But the Greenhorn, my father, was very strong and angry and bright. Apprenticed
to a glove cutter by his mother at 13, he learned his craft with hate for his
mother who had refused to send him on to school. In New York, he became a pants
cutter, an elite craftsman, a union organizer, a striker.
From some unkown source, my mother and her motherless sisters and brother Sam
had learned to speak a distinct, unaccented English and to sing and to enjoy
life. They were gay and laughing and Papa was for awhile their Greenhorn Boarder
when their new stepmother, Aunt Lena, wanted to add a few dollars to the money
Mama's father made in his grocery store.
One day Mama flung back Papa's engagement ring. Their tempers clashed, their
courtship was squally. But later Papa came to her in tears. He had just heard
that his father had been murdered in Russia. Bandits stole his wagon. His body
was never found. Of his whole family, Papa loved only his father. Mama comforted
him. She took back his ring and married him.
When I was 2-1/2 and my brother Dick an infant, Mama pulled Papa away from New
York to Connecticut. She demanded fresh milk and country air and the end of
garment workers' strikes for her babies' security. Papa, set to peddling from a
wagon drawn by a half blind horse, screamed his rage and pride. I am ashamed to
peddle. I am ashamed to beg, he said and went to work in Worcester at his trade.
Later he opened his own pants company in a New Haven loft. How proud he was. And
how ashamed when he wasn't making what he considered a good living for his
family and Mama had to help him.
When things were bad with us a few years later in South Dakota, I thought it was
that Papa hated Mama when he yelled so loudly at her, chained together as they
were in our little restaurant.
It is only now when I scream as loudly at my husband out of my own anger at
myself, that I have begun to understand where Papa's screaming came from.
At their fiftieth anniversary dinner, my father's brother Nathan, the mandolin
player, said he never though it would last, But by God they fooled us.
Now in the fifty-sixth year of their marriage when Papa leaves for a little
outing with my husband and does not remember to tell Mama they are going to the
market or wherever, my mother walks and walks and takes to her bed, her eyes
frosty with anger and fear. When he returns I remind him he mustn't ever leave
without telling Mama. She misses you Papa. She can't stand being without you.
And my father, his strange new belly resting on his short thights, says after
all, a marriage of 56 years makes a mark on a man.
Later he will cry to me and plead to be free of her. He will tell me that he too
must live and that he wants a chance to live and that he can't talk to Mama.
That she can't talk to him. That she's meshugeh. And even when he says the word
"crazy," his light brown eyes darken with shame and pity and he cries and says
he should bite his tongue.
But he pushed me until finally I try briefly to separate them with Mama in a
nursing home. She walks through the night and crawls into any bed and all beds
in any room with an open door, looking for Papa. She doesn't cry. She just keeps
walking. And every day Papa demands to go and see her. He says nothing to her
but he sits with her and he turns to me and says what am I do to" How will I
live? But this will be later. I could not bear this time at all. Papa pleaded to
bring her home after a week.
But now I am here in the sun near the Matheson Hammock swimming pools and behind
me in the grove of trees I will find Papa and Mama as I left them. They will sit
and wait and wait and sit and when I come to her my mothers' blue eyues will
light up and I will bend down and touch her hair and kiss her hair and kiss her
face and she will laugh and turn to anyone near her and say, have you met my
sister and she will smile proudly about me at them and I will bend down quickly
and cup her face in my hands and kisss her blue eyes shut so she cannot see my
face. Perhaps ever again.
Epilogue
Mamie Light died in the summer of 1967.
Ruben Light died in the winter of 1971.
Bee Baxter killed herself, with pills from her medicine cabinet, on Feb. 4,
1983.