Читать книгу Under One Roof: How a Tough Old Woman in a Little Old House Changed My Life - Barry Martin - Страница 8

I was surprised by how self-sufficient Edith seemed in those first few months. She wasn’t, however, getting by all on her own. A friend of hers, a fellow named Charlie, was coming by pretty regularly. Charlie looked like an unmade bed. Tall and wiry with long gray hair, he was younger than Edith but older than me, probably in his early sixties. He had that leftover-hippie kind of look. I’m not sure how they got to be friends, but they seemed to have that Old Ballard connection, and it went back a long ways. He did her shopping and helped around the house, although he didn’t seem to stick around much once the chores were done. He said he was a project manager on construction sites, although when I tried to talk shop with him he’d change the subject. Still, he was helping Edith out, so I figured he was an okay guy.

Charlie’s the one who first told me about the social workers, one morning in the late summer. “They’re hovering again,” he told me. Charlie had that way about him – he’d start up in the middle of a conversation, as though you’d already been talking and knew what he was talking about. It took a minute to catch up.

“Morning, Charlie. Who’s hovering?” I asked him.

“Social workers. They’re back at it again. If they think they’re going to get her to move, they’ve got another think coming.”

It took a while to get Charlie to tell the story in some kind of order I could understand, but once I got all the pieces of it, it made sense. The state had been after Edith for some time, concerned that she was not competent to take care of herself. They couldn’t make her move – they couldn’t prove that she was a danger to herself or anything – but they were apparently putting on a pretty strong push. Charlie said they kept coming around again and again, being persistent about how much better off she’d be, how much more comfortable she’d be, how much better her life would be, if only she’d let them bring her to a facility. I remembered how she used that word – facility – when she told me about her mother, how much disdain she had in her voice. It made me wince just hearing Charlie say it.

Now it made more sense to me why Edith was so touchy when guys from my office kept offering her more money to move. She must have felt she was battling on two fronts just to stay in her house – with the Bridge Group coming at her straight on and the social workers from the flank. I’m sure that, to Edith’s ears, what they were both saying was, “You’re not able to take care of yourself anymore. Let us do it for you.”

I don’t think anybody wants to hear that they can’t take care of themselves. Certainly not a tough old bird like Edith.

Charlie took off, and I knocked on Edith’s door. I wanted to ask her about the social workers, but when she called me to come in, I found her at a rickety little desk in the corner of the living room, typing at – well, I’m not sure what you call it anymore. It looked like a cross between a late-model electric typewriter and an early PC. The thing must have been twenty-five years old. It had a tiny square computer monitor and a dark gray keyboard with white keys – not like a modern keyboard, more like a typewriter – and she was pecking away at it, slowly. I saw the word Whisperwriter on it.

“Good morning, Barry,” she said. “Excuse me for just a moment. My fingers don’t work quite as well as they used to.”

The sun was glinting off the monitor, so I couldn’t quite make out what she was writing, but when she turned around she caught me looking at it, and I felt guilty for being so nosy.

“Just a little short story,” she said, guessing at what I was trying to do. “The mind still works, but the goddamn fingers don’t want to cooperate.”

It was the first time I’d heard her curse.

“So, you’re a writer?” I asked.

“Well, I’ve done my share,” she said. “There’s one of my books, right over there.”

I looked at the counter where she was pointing, and there was a doorstop of a book, a big, bulky hardcover thing called Where Yesterday Began. The title was in red script, over the silhouettes of a man and woman looking at a sunset.

“Who’s Dominelli?” I said, looking at the author’s name.

“That’s Dom-i-li-ni,” she said, correcting me. “Domilini. That was the name I wrote under. I took it from …” But she didn’t finish the sentence. Before I could ask, she was on her feet.

“Can’t write anymore, dammit all,” she said. “I’m getting a cup of tea. Can I offer you one?”

While she was shuffling off to the kitchen, I opened the book and looked at the inside cover. What I saw stopped me in my tracks.

About The Author

E. Wilson Macefield (Domilini) was born in Oregon in 1921 and reared in Seattle and New Orleans. She served as an undercover agent during World War II. She was captured and interned at Dachau, from which she escaped, taking 13 interned Jewish children with her. She married a Yorkshire man, lived in England for thirty years, where she adopted and raised 27 children.

Following the death of her husband, she returned to the States to care for her mother. In 1984, she met and married an Old World Italian who was killed in an accident on their honeymoon. She has been writing for the greater part of her life, and has attained success in Europe.

“I cannot stop writing,” she says, “whether it is read or not. It is imbedded in the soul.” She wishes she might achieve the clarity of Maugham, and express the important truths of Locke, Lichens, and Poe.

This time, when she came back into the room, I was too intrigued to be embarrassed about my snooping. I didn’t know where to start.

“Edith, it looks like you’ve lived quite a life,” I said.

“I’ve lived quite a number of lives,” she said.

“Who are all these children it talks about here? Where are they now?”

She began to tell me the wildest story. I can’t even remember most of it now, it blew my mind so much. Apparently at some point she had come back to the States, but then was “summoned” back to England – that was her word – by a man she had met at a party. Apparently they had hit it off pretty well. He was a very rich man, and he had asked her if she had unlimited funds what she would do with the money.

“I told him there’s only one thing a moral person can do in this moment in time,” she said, her good eye focused not on me but on a spot somewhere out the window, as though she was trying to see something far away. “Create an orphanage for all the children left without parents by the awful war.” So he brought her back to England, and gave her a castle in Cornwall to start the orphanage.

“Gave her a castle in Cornwall.” There’s a sentence I bet no one I know has ever heard in their lives.

She went on, telling me how she went to Scotland and bought some sheep to raise at the castle.

Suddenly, Edith fell silent. I tried to ask her more. I mean, I had a million questions. Led an escape from Dachau? Married a Yorkshire man? Was he the guy with the castle? Was he Domilini, or was that the “Old World Italian”?

But I wasn’t getting any answers. She was done, for now. “The past is the past,” she said, and that pretty much ended it. “This tea isn’t hot enough. I’m going to go warm it up. Lukewarm tea tastes too much like piss, if you ask me.”

She tottered off back to the kitchen, her teacup rattling on its saucer. She crossed the bright ray of sunlight streaming in through the windowpane, dust motes swirling in the light, all my questions just hanging in the air with them.

The questions I had about my dad got answered that summer. He was still slipping, no doubt about it. He’d forget my sister Malinda’s name, which drove her kind of bats. Or he’d ask my mother a question, and five minutes later ask the same thing again. He was having trouble doing math in his head – something he’d always been pretty good at – and that would make him really angry. Angrier than it ought to, frankly. He’d start trying to figure something out, like what’s 15 percent of $150, and the next thing you know he’d be cursing a blue streak. As I said, it was strange to hear my dad curse, and that as much as anything made us wonder if something was up. He wouldn’t talk about it, though. He’s from that generation where you just buck up and hold whatever’s bothering you inside, so we mostly just let it go.

Except for Malinda. Malinda’s my older sister, and the pushiest of us three kids. I mean that in a nice way. She’s the one who’s going to say enough’s enough, let’s get done what needs to get done, period. And that’s what she did in this situation. It was at her urging – her insistence is more like it – that my mom took my dad for tests. They did all kinds of tests those first couple of weeks – dexterity tests, memory tests, blood tests, brain scans, you name it. My dad was none too pleased about it all, but he went along with it.

And it’s a good thing he did, because when the diagnosis came back, it was what everybody was afraid of but nobody had said.

Alzheimer’s.

It’s a hell of a blow, when you hear your dad has Alzheimer’s. It doesn’t matter how old you are; your dad is still a huge figure in your life, especially a dad like mine, who was always competent, in charge, and in control. You can’t picture him becoming disabled, forgetful, unable to care for himself. I tried not to imagine the road ahead of him too much. It was just too hard to think about.

But oddly enough, for my dad, it was just the opposite. I went up to see him right after the diagnosis came through, and I could see right away that he was a lot calmer. It was almost like his frustration wasn’t about forgetting things; it was about not knowing why he was having the problem. Being given an answer, a name for the problem, seemed to make him feel better. He was always a problem-solver; give him a situation and he’d figure out what to do. Now that he knew what the problem was, it was almost like he was saying, Oh, well, why didn’t you say so? Now we know what we’re dealing with so we can figure out how to deal with it.

We knew it wouldn’t always be that easy, of course. But at least some of the steam had gone out of the pressure cooker.

As I drove home that evening, I found myself thinking about going fishing with my dad when I was a kid. There was one time up in Canada, the first time he taught me how to start a fire. We’d gotten rained off the lake, and climbed up on a hill, on a game trail under the trees. There were a bunch of us there, huddled together: my dad, my brother, some friends of the family – all guys, that morning. The women were more fair-weather fishing types, and had stayed back at the campground. I watched carefully as my father gathered up some pine needles, put a pine cone right in the middle of them, and leaned some dried sticks from dead branches on the pine cone. He lit the pine needles with a match. While the fire was starting up, he found a piece of willow, or maybe it was maple, and cleared the bark off it. He gutted the trout we’d pulled out of the lake before the rain started, and stuck the stick through the back of the fish, and out its mouth, and held it over the fire. Maybe it was just the moment, but that trout tasted about ten times better than it ever could have tasted at home. I can still taste the crisp skin, the buttery flesh, the feel of the oils from the meat of the fish sliding on the sides of my tongue.

It was usually a family affair when we went camping, and sometimes another family went with us. But as I continued my drive home that night, my thoughts drifted to the time I got to go fishing with my dad, just the two of us. I was probably about twelve. My mom had taken my brother and sister to visit some relatives in North Carolina, but I couldn’t go, because I had a paper route. So that weekend, my dad took me fishing over to Nason Creek, near the Wenatchee National Forest. To get there you drove over Stevens Pass, which was really cool, especially for a twelve-year-old. Up there in the mountains, you felt like you could see a thousand feet down to the bottom, to where there were boulders, vine maples, and the beginnings of a river. On the opposite side, near the bottom, there’s an old highway and a train rail. The rails had a shed roof over them to try to keep the snow off, and whatever else an avalanche would bring down. It was abandoned a long time ago because it was too hard to maintain, so now it just sat there, and as we drove by it looked like an old toy train set that someone had just gotten too old to play with.

It was really special, having my dad all to myself. He was a soft-spoken guy, but a jocular one, and as we came down off the mountain and glided along those long, curvy, tree-lined stretches of Route 2, the sky big and high around you, the clouds puffy and still, he was doing what he always loved to do, which was give you little brain teasers, stuff to make you think. Like coming up with oxymorons. “I got one,” he said. “Jumbo shrimp.” I don’t know why, but at the time that struck me as about the funniest thing I’d ever heard.

We slept that night in a camper on the back of his pickup truck, and as I was falling asleep, my dad started telling me fishing stories. I’d caught more fish than he had that first day, and he said, well, he was just waiting. “I don’t like to mess with the little ones, the way you do,” he said, just a hint of that jocular tone in his voice, like you couldn’t tell how serious he was. “I’m waiting for the big one. You’ll see.” We went out early the next morning, and sure enough, about an hour before it was time for us to head back, his line went tight, and he landed the biggest salmon I had ever seen. He needled me about it the whole ride home: “Don’t you worry, Barry, those little fish you caught will taste pretty nice too,” or “Well, I guess it’s good that you didn’t try to land any big fish this trip; wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself.” I pretended to be ticked off when he razzed me, but he could tell by the look on my face that I was about as high as the clouds. I gave him a playful punch on those big strong arms of his, as he steered the pickup back into the setting sun, headed home, just my dad and me and a big old cooler full of fish.