Fear of Fifty (10 page)

We have come to this court case because of the impossibility of our making a decision about Kitty's welfare without it. Court, in our society, is often the last resort of stubbornness.

Just about a year ago, Kitty began to give increasing warnings of her inability to live alone. She collapsed and was hospitalized God knows where, while we all tried in vain to track her down with the help of various police precincts. When at last we found her in a small hospital on East Sixteenth Street, she insisted she was fine and wanted only to be released. Though she was still good at charming everybody, the social workers and psychiatrists warned us that she had “serious memory deficits” (as they called them) and should not be left alone. A nursing home was recommended, but nobody could make Kitty enter it. I visited the home, made celebrity love to the admissions director, brought my aunt pictures of her possible room-to-be, whereupon she adamantly refused even to visit. One night she simply walked out of the hospital, returned to her loft, and informed us that she intended to stay there forever.

I was relieved. Still not ready to face the finality of a nursing home, I deluded myself about her competence. And Kitty did get by at home for a while. Frank visited her every day and Maxine took her to the Hamptons when conscience overwhelmed her. Still, Kitty's memory had so deteriorated that she could remember neither outings nor phone calls, the names of relatives nor when to take her medicine. It became clearer and clearer that this expedient would not last long.

“Don't you have an extra room for me?” she'd plaintively ask. And I wondered guiltily why I didn't. I had a room for my daughter, for my husband, for guests, but Kitty's neediness would have taken over my life, and I simply could not do it.

Alzheimer's does not stand still. Memory unravels, and people without memory seem to forget they are memoryless. One evening Kitty brought a homeless drunk up to her loft and shared her keys with him. Frank found him there, making himself quite at home. When Frank warned Kitty of the danger, she became furious and ordered him to “butt out” of her life.

This went on for a while. Things disappeared from the loft. Friends were reluctant to go there for fear of being set upon by strangers. Kitty struggled on. She knew she was lonely, but not much else.

The street people, the drunks and drug addicts of Chelsea were her people. “They're just lonely people,” she said, which was, of course, true. But when she started picking fights in various local pubs, there began to be places where she was no longer welcome. Increasingly, she was perceived as mad. (What is “mad” anyway but unpredictable, memoryless, inappropriate?) By the time she got to Lenox Hill, everyone knew another solution would have to be found. What do you do with the memoryless old in this brutal city? It's hard enough to live here
with
a memory.

A powwow was held at my apartment. Maxine agreed to bring a petition to have Kitty declared incompetent. But the weekend before the hearing, she lost her nerve. With a petition and no petitioner and Kitty in the psycho ward at Lenox Hill, Frank and I agreed to serve. We had no choice.

And so the court was called to order. I sat with Kitty, holding her hand while a psychiatrist, called as an expert witness, rattled on about the state of her memory, the diagnosis of Alzheimer's, senile dementia, and related phenomena.

“Is he talking about
me
?
”
Kitty asked. “And why? And where
are
we?”

She had come straight from Lenox Hill to participate in this hearing. And she was still a bit drugged with the tranquilizers they had given her for lack of any brighter ideas about her care. Dazed by the oddness of finding herself in court, she kept repeating, “Are they talking about
me?”

It must have been a nightmare. To wake up in court with one's sanity being mooted and not to recognize anyone—this is the stuff of Kafka novels. But who can make a decision for another person—even when her memory is gone? Without memory, who are we? Kitty wasn't sure. Nor was I.

The truth is, we should have been able to care for her without such court shenanigans, but since her next of kin, my mother, would not participate, and since her former life-partner and heir would not take the responsibility for putting her in a nursing home, we had no choice but to take the matter to court. Law, clumsy as it often is, is sometimes the way people are forced to face what they otherwise refuse to face. Law at least has the advantage of bringing all the concerned parties into the same room. By dragging the dubious authority of the state into a family matter, sometimes the family is forced to reclaim its own authority—if only in rebellion.

And this is what happened here. The judge, being Chinese, and having a cultural bias in favor of the dignity of the aged, seemed to close his ears to the psychiatrist's testimony and to see only the tableau of a group of grasping relatives trying to incarcerate a sweet old lady.

After the psychiatrist's testimony came Maxine's. Rattled by anxiety and guilt, she kept insisting that she didn't want anything of Kitty's. These protestations made the judge suspicious. The lawyers appointed by the city were also of little help. First the preening, bow-tied male lawyer made it clear he saw Kitty as his mother and could not face her mental deterioration. And the young woman lawyer appointed to advocate Kitty's civil rights waffled and covered herself, giving no impression of the danger her client was in. Throughout all this legal folderol, I sat with Kitty, glad that she could not really hear everything being said before the bench, the reduction of those prized treasures, her selfhood and identity, to lawyers' and psychiatrists' cant. Her sole offense was having lost her memory (and therefore being presumed to have lost her mind).

Court proceedings take a long time, and judges tend to keep punctual hours. We adjourned at five sharp, and I was delegated to take Kitty back to Lenox Hill. Maxine had vanished right after her testimony, but both the court-appointed lawyers loitered about uselessly, making lawyer noises. The point was that nobody really was prepared to take on the twenty-four-hour job Kitty had become. Maxine had her real estate business; Frank had his job as a landscape architect and a lover dying of AIDS; I had a daughter and a book deadline; my husband had other cases, which, unlike this one, would pay his overhead; my father had to go home to my mother and pretend not to have been where he had in fact been because my mother, as in a time warp, still accused her sister of trying to seduce him. How amazed she might have been had she come to court! My aunt did not remember who my father
was.
She could not even put a name to this face she had known for sixty-three years.

Returning from court, I drove in a hospital van with Kitty and her private nurse.

“Can we stop and have a drink?” Kitty asked. “Can we have dinner somewhere, at least? Can I come home with you?”

In two hours I was expected at a formal dinner honoring a friend, but suddenly I wanted to bring Kitty with me or not go at all. Impossible. She was exhausted, confused, and wearing whatever odds and ends of clothes Maxine had bothered to bring (a stained silk blouse, shoes that didn't fit, torn stockings, a moth-eaten fur coat). So it was back to the hospital for the night. Tomorrow I would bring her to her loft, arrange a home health-care worker for her, and then we'd see what we would see.

Back in the ward (which Kitty didn't realize
was
a ward), I took off her shoes and rubbed her sore feet. “God bless you,” she said. And then: “What's the name of this hotel?”

“Heartbreak Hotel,” I said.

“What a funny name,” said Kitty.

“Where's the phone?” I asked the nurse. She stared at me as if I were crazy.

“This is the psycho ward,” she said impatiently.

“It just seems like a hotel room to me,” Kitty said.

I was really late by now, but I just could not leave.

“Let's have a drink,” Kitty kept saying over and over and over. Every time she said that, I laughed. Laughed so I would not cry. It is the repetitive demandingness of the memoryless old that makes them so difficult. We take their repetitions as insults, which is silly of us. If only we could let go of ego and live moment to moment as the very old and the very young do. Imagine existing in a state where you repeat and repeat because every second is unrelated to every other.

“Let's have a drink,” Kitty said yet again. This was her evening ritual, and she hung on to it as a life raft even when all other markers were gone. No use to tell her that drink had helped destroy her memory. She wouldn't care—nor even remember what it was like to have a memory.

Dinner in the cuckoo's nest. Patients shuffle into the cafeteria to get their trays. “Hi, Kitty! How ya doin'?” blusters a lopsided, wall-eyed man in paper slippers.

“Meet my niece, the famous writer,” she says to everyone and nobody in particular. My cheeks prickle with embarrassment. Even with her unraveled mind, Kitty can demand recognition for my celebrity. What a joke to invoke something as fickle as fame in the midst of all this human mutability.

Nothing saves us from growing old, I think. Not celebrity, not talent, not personal charm, not wealth, not wit. The absurdity of trading on my fame shamed me somehow. In this nuthouse, I felt fused with Kitty: Her gaffes were also mine.

God—it was late. My friend, my child, my husband, all awaited me. As usual, I was torn by conflicting demands, and felt I fulfilled none of them adequately.

In the elevator, a woman began to talk to me, as women will. “My best friend,” she said, “had another attack. Tried to commit suicide again. She's back in here again.”

“My aunt,” I said, “has Alzheimer's.” The woman nodded in sympathy. Nobody was famous here. Just two women, caring for two other women, as is often the lot of women. “Good luck,” she said. “The same to you,” I said.

The moon was full and ringed with light and the night was icy. I wrapped my scarf and coat around me and ran down Lexington Avenue toward my apartment.

A free woman—but for how long? Someday I would not be able to walk out of hospitals on my own either. And then, what would become of me?

I didn't want to think about it.

The court was supposed to resume Kitty's case the next day, but another case jammed the calendar. This enabled me to call for Kitty at the hospital and take her home. Plenty of people advised against it, but I found I had to keep my promise—whether Kitty remembered it or not.

It is always easier to place old people in nursing homes from the hospital than from home. So I was burdening myself by keeping this promise, but keeping promises often means burdens. By teatime, I was back in the hospital to liberate Kitty, her paperwork, her prescriptions, her ragtag possessions. I brought her home to her loft in Chelsea with a plump Haitian health-care attendant named Chloe.

The loft was a mess, the kitchen filthy, bare spots on the walls where paintings had once been. The apartment appeared to have been partially ransacked. Odds and ends of my grandparents' furniture—a Stickley bookshelf, my grandfather's paint-spattered easel—stood around the room. Kitty's giant, luminous seascapes, which once had dominated the loft, had been picked over, and many were gone. Kitty noticed none of this. She was genuinely glad to be in a place she still identified as home.

Chloe at once sprawled on the couch and turned on the TV, making it clear that she did not consider anything else her bailiwick. Just for fun, I asked her to get some prescriptions filled for Kitty and to help me clean up the kitchen. She resolutely refused. “We're not supposed to do
that,”
she said. She was a babysitter—nothing more—though at rates that would make a babysitter blush. What would a Martian think if she came to earth and saw doddering old white women being “minded” by robust young black women who sat and watched TV—and the clock? What a curious way humans arrange their society! “Blow it all up and start again!” a compassionate goddess might say.

Kitty wandered tentatively about, afraid to take off her coat. I sat her down, made her put on comfortable shoes—Chinese cloth slippers—and drink a cup of tea.

Presently Maxine bustled in with Frank and his lover, Adrian, and two handsome hunks from the Hamptons.

“Hello, darling!” Maxine said to Kitty. “We have a van downstairs. We're just going to take some paintings so we can have a show for you out there.” With that, the two Hamptons Hunks began carrying out canvases, portfolios, a life-size lion that had stood in Kitty's loft as long as she had lived there. (Kitty is a Leo, so this roaring lion is her talisman.)

“What are you
doing
?
”
she asked Maxine. “That's
my
lion.”

“No, darling, it's my lion,” Maxine said.
“I
bought it.”

“You did
not,”
said Kitty.

“I did too.” Suddenly I remembered all the Sturm und Drang of a dozen years ago when Kitty and Maxine “broke up” and Maxine expelled Kitty from the two homes she had helped to build and renovate—one in Chelsea, one in Southampton—buying her this modest loft and pensioning her off.

“Don't take my lion!” Kitty said. “It's all I have.”

“I'm only keeping it
safe
for you, darling,” Maxine said, as the hunks carried out this last symbol of Kitty's selfhood.

Aghast at the blatantness of it all, I was shocked into silence.

“I know you're her heir, but I wish you'd stop acting like she's already
dead,”
I wanted to say. Or, “For God's sake—this can wait, can't it?” And Maxine, who felt my disapproval, picked up a huge book of my grandfather's pen-and-ink drawings and placed it in my trembling hands.