Fear of Fifty (12 page)

“Promise me you'll shoot me, darling,” says the maestro, “before you have to put me here.”

And yet the residents seem happy—depending on how you define the word. On the Alzheimer's unit, an old lady with a blue beret, a staring man with a checked shirt and disheveled hair, a sullen old woman with a jutting chin, sit at a table in a room that synthesizes a homey sitcom kitchen. But none of them interact with one another. This is not even parallel playpen play. Blue beret rummages with old clothes. (“You see, they use up their energy that way,” says the maestro. “It's therapy.”) Checked shirt picks at the food on his tray. Jutting chin mutters—to no one in particular—“I'll see that you get in trouble! I'll call the governor. He knows me! I run a very major company! I'm worth millions! I'm no one's fool!”

Sometimes old age strips away the veneer of civility, leaving only the hostile and aggressive residue of human nature; sometimes it leaves the social graces intact until someone gets served food first or takes away your hat. (“That's my hat!” says another resident, snatching at the blue beret. “It is
not!”
) This reminds me of watching two-year-olds in the sandbox—except that two-year-olds are much cuter. Chubby cheeks and pink fingers go a long way toward softening our view of aggressive behavior. When a face is full of wens and sprouting hairs, even the most enlightened of us find it less than adorable. Snow angels seem a better solution. All these well-heeled ancients are using up resources that could feed and educate whole cities. Is that a good decision for the human race? Easy to ask such a question but harder to answer it. I only know I am not about to float Kitty out on an ice floe or push her down in the snow. Perhaps this place exists to salve the consciences of rich and powerful relatives, but it nevertheless remains a marvel. The Warhols and Picassos and Ertés are testimonies to our guilt.

And the director is our stand-in, our surrogate.

“You know why I could never have a love affair?” he asks, rhetorically. “I'd be checking into the motel and someone would see me and say, ‘Hey, Jake—how's my mom?'”

The youngest of a brood of children, the maestro is a born caretaker, the designated nurturer in his family. Nobody gets a job like this by accident. He is a virtuoso of caretaking, conducting that vast symphony of guilt, denial, and fund-raising that makes a place like this exist.

“Most of them are incontinent,” he says, “yet there's no smell of urine. How do we do that? We scrub
all
the time, that's how.”

And, indeed, the place smells fresh and clean, the smell of money. Like Daisy Buchanan's voice, the Hebrew Home for the Aged is a testament to all that money can do. Delighted as I am that such a place exists, I am also troubled. Even in doddering old age, there is no equality. Especially not then.

I go home with a letter from the nursing home, promising that Kitty will be admitted.

Mission almost accomplished. But there's still the Chinese judge to convince.

 

What do I remember about Aunt Kitty before her life came to this peculiar pass?

I was never allowed to see her much because of the mysterious enmity between her and my mother. But still, I remember certain things.

I remember going to her sun-flooded apartment facing West End Avenue and looking through her things: her little armatures for modeling in clay, her African masks and carved amulets, her library of fascinating books.

It was Kitty who introduced me to Colette, giving me
Chéri
and
The Last of Cheri
to read when I was fifteen and much too young to understand the passion of a forty-nine-year-old woman for a beautiful man in his twenties. Like a lot of people who have no biological children, Kitty didn't really understand kids. But that was also freeing. She treated me like an adult—unjudgmentally and without the protective prudishness of a parent. Years later, when I was in my forties and suffering over the love of a very young man, I reread the copy of
Chéri
and
The Last of Chéri
that Kitty had given me. At last, I was grateful for the gift. It had to wait a long time on my shelf for my life to catch up with it, but somehow Kitty must have known that too.

On Fire Island, in East Hampton, in the houses Kitty shared with her friend Maxine, there was always an antic spirit. It wasn't just the nudity or the fact that the two women slept in the same bed. There was plenty of nudity in the home I grew up in too, but what was more liberating in Kitty's house was the omnisexuality all around. Couples came in all flavors. My mother muttered darkly of “bad influences,” but I found my first taste of freedom in that house. It was a world not governed by the rules of bourgeois life, a world where men flirted with men and women flirted with women, a world where life was somehow richer and more full of possibility. It was an eccentric summer camp for grown-ups—and it smacked of freedom for me: freedom from convention, freedom from family ties. That antic spirit gave me a part of myself, confirmed me in my anarchism—sexual and otherwise.

I never let myself love Kitty openly, because my mother made it clear that she considered it disloyal. Still, Kitty's way of life was a part of my education. Her way of life told me there were alternate universes, other voices, other rooms.

In some sense, I think my mother hated Kitty for the freedom she permitted herself. My mother too had started out a bohemian, and then was captured by bourgeois life. How much of her old feud with her sister was homophobia? And how much was love gone sour? My mother had adored Kitty once, and her virulent hate was too fierce not to be passion gone awry.

 

We live in a world divided into “gay” and “straight.” We have balkanized our sexual culture. But why? Is it all a question of politics? And doesn't politics conflict with our humanity? Clearly, gay people cannot claim their civil rights unless they organize as groups. Clearly, they need the same rights to inheritance, marriage, health care, and child custody as everyone else. But this division of worlds into “gay” and “straight” goes against what I know of human nature. There may be homosexual loves, but does that mean there are homosexual
people?
Does love necessarily have a gender? The greatest loves change gender. The greatest lovers take turns being male and female. And what do “male” and “female” mean? Aren't they
qualities
rather than people?

Only when I was young and brainwashed and knew myself badly did I imagine the penis was the only instrument of love. The men I have loved best in my life have always had a nurturing quality about them, and the women I have loved best have always been fighters.

In a sane society, women and men would try on genders and loves as simply as they try on clothes. It was Kitty who taught me all this somehow, and my mother's rejection of her taught me about the existence of a puritanism I never wanted to be mine.

Kitty's road was different from my mother's. Yet, in many ways, she was as marked by her sexual choices as my mother was by hers. She may have loved women, but she also loved
like
a woman. She gave up power for the life of the homemaker and artist, and when she was old and sick, no one was there to take care of her. No one but me—imperfect as my care was. I had come halfway along in my life to discover that I could find room for both writing and caretaking.

It's more important to be a human being than to be a writer. Or should I say that writing matters only if it somehow ripens your humanity?

About a month after Kitty is admitted to the Hebrew Home for the Aged, I make a visit to her. The court case is still on hold, thus unresolved. Kitty looks as well as I have seen her in years. Her cheeks are rosy, her hair cut and coiffed.

“This is my best friend, Pearl,” she says, “my roommate.”

She introduces me to a thin white-haired lady with blue eyes who pushes a walker.

“That's my best friend, Kitty,” Pearl says. “I love her.”

Kitty and I go to sit down in a lounge overlooking the river. The Hudson sparkles in the winter light.

“I came to visit one day and I liked the food, so I stayed,” Kitty says. “But I worry about my apartment.”

“Don't worry, Kitty, I'll check on it.”

“I have to leave one of these days, but for some reason that makes me upset.”

“You look awfully well.”

“I'm sleeping well here. And the people are nice. What time is it, honey? I don't want to miss my supper.”

I look at my watch. It's almost 4:30. Supper here begins at teatime, as in the nursery.

I walk Kitty to the dining room and sit down with her.

This is the Early Dementia unit, and the residents are at different stages of memorylessness.

We sit down at a table for four with a woman named Blanche who keeps licking her lips, and a woman named Brenda whose chin meets her nose.

“Meet my relative,” says Kitty, probably not remembering my name. “Isn't it nice that she came?”

“You're the big-shot here,” says Blanche.

“I am
not,”
says Kitty.

“Yes, you are,” says Blanche.

“There's a cabaret tonight,” says Brenda.

“Can you stay for the cabaret?”

“I don't think so,” I say.

“That's too bad,” says Kitty.

Meals are starting to be served to the residents. I am offered juice, which comes promptly. I look around at the autistic old who seem sunk into themselves. One woman is wearing a huge black hat with an ostrich feather. Another is wandering from table to table staring with great fixity at nothing in particular, inspecting the other residents' meals. Now she staggers over and reaches for my cup of juice.

“What are you doing
that
for?” says Kitty. “Don't take my niece's juice!”

And the woman turns robotically and limps away.

On the wall is a sign with the residents' birthdays that occur in January. Below that is a poster in which WINTER has been spelled out in cotton balls. Below is a cotton ball snowman. This is a kindergarten for the very old. But they seem contented here. And my aunt seems secure and happy. I have never seen her so peaceful, waiting for her tray of food.

“I like the food here,” she says. “Do you want some?”

“No, thanks,” I say. “I have to go out to dinner.”

Am I afraid to eat for fear that, like Persephone in Hades, I will then have to stay?

By 5:30, I am racing out of there, promising, of course, to return soon.

To be a Jew in the twentieth century Is to be offered a gift.

—Muriel Rukeyser, “Letter to the Front”

News of America travelled quickly around the European shtetls. Word was that even if the streets of the “Golden Land” weren't paved with gold, at least a Jew had a chance.

—Jeff Kisseloff,
You Must Remember This

 

 

The older we get, the more Jewish we become in my family. My mother's father declared himself an atheist in his communist youth, so we never belonged to a synagogue or had bat mitzvahs. But we wind up in Hebrew homes for the aged and in cemeteries with Hebrew letters over the gates. Thus does our heritage claim us—even in America, our promised land. In my family, if you're still protesting that you're Unitarian, you're just not old enough. (I refer, of course, to one of my ex-husbands, who, having married a shiksa, worships at the local Unitarian church. That will change, I predict.)

My father, on the other hand, sends money to Israel and carries around a card that supposedly will expedite his admission to Mount Sinai Hospital and, after that, heaven, identifying him as a Big Donor. This is the sort of thing he would have done riffs on in his vaudeville days. Now Molly does those riffs. The young are cruel. They have to be to supplant the old. The old are such a burden, so territorial, so inclined to hold on to their money. The young have to be tough to grow up at all.

After all, what does the ritual of circumcision say to a Jewish son?
“Watch out. Next time I'll cut off the whole thing.”
So Jewish boys are horny, but also full of fear about whether their cocks will survive their horniness. Alexander Portnoy is the archetypal good Jewish boy. The good Jewish boy and the bad Jewish boy inhabit the same skin—if not the same foreskin. Jewish girls are luckier. Their sexuality is less damaged—whatever those jokes about dropping emery boards may imply. Girls are allowed to be sexual as long as they keep it inside the family. Marriage is sacred as long as you marry an Oedipal stand-in. Jewish adultery is an oxymoron. We read Updike for that. Jewish men who cheat end up like Sol Wachtler or Woody Allen. In big trouble. Even Jewish lesbians are required to have silverware and bone china from Tiffany's. Jewish lesbians are required to fall in love with women who remind them of their mothers. And, in today's feminist times, are doctors or lawyers.

How did I get to be Jewish? I with no religious training? Jews are made by the existence of anti-Semitism—or so said Jean-Paul Sartre, who knew. And despite myths to the contrary, there is
plenty
of anti-Semitism in America (otherwise we'd be saying “Next year in Oyster Bay” or “Grosse Pointe” instead of “Next year in Jerusalem”). But American anti-Semitism takes the clever form of class snobbery. Let me show you what I mean.

We say that America is a classless society, but really it is not. It's just that our class distinctions are so much subtler than those of other countries that sometimes we don't even see them as class distinctions. They are uniquely American class distinctions and they follow us all our lives. We go happily into the Hebrew Home for the Aged, having learned that where aging and death are concerned, only our own kind
want
us. When we're young and cute, we can hang out with goyim—but as the sun goes down, we revert to knishes and
knaydlach.
We do mitzvahs—of the sort that I have done by getting my aunt into the Hebrew Home. We suddenly remember that—like “community service” in high school—we have to rack up 613 mitzvahs to be considered good Jews. At fifty, we take those mitzvahs seriously—unlike community service in high school. How much time, after all, do we have? Not much. Better get busy—women especially. We're not exactly shooins. The Orthodox rabbis still won't let us pray at the Wailing Wall, so why do we assume they'll let us into that obscure heaven of the Jews? If men need 613 mitzvahs, I figure women need 1,839.