I'll Be Seeing You

by Elizabeth Berg

  Last night I went to the symphony. I had seen an ad for music by Mozart at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and felt a surge of longing to go; then I realized I could go.

  I remember being nine years old, lying on my stomach in my bedroom next to the record player and listening to a record of Chopin piano music. I don’t know where it came from—the library, maybe. But listening to it, I got a feeling that was nearly painful. I remember, too, going with my parents to have dinner at my Uncle Frank’s house, and I would leave the table of chattering adults and go to sit at his piano and make chords. Then I put my foot to the sustain pedal so that the sound would last and last. I wanted to take piano lessons, but we had no piano. I wanted to know all about classical music, but I never did learn much about it.

  So. I bought a ticket to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In the cab on the way there, the driver (who wore a red shirt and a kind of Elvis hairdo and a pinkie ring) asked me in an accent I couldn’t identify where I was headed. “To the symphony,” I said. “I’m going to hear a little Mozart.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Yes. You listen to the music and relax. You forget about your worries and all the cares of the world.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “You know what music is the most relaxing?” he asked. “They’ve done studies. You know what’s the most relaxing music to the human spirit? Indian. Not American Indian, East Indian.”

  “The Beatles were onto something,” I said, and he said yes, they were.

  I arrived early enough to hear part of a lecture about the music we were about to hear, and the room where the lecture was held was so beautiful it was a little hard to pay attention. I kept imagining someone getting married there: a violinist and a percussionist, she Asian and a lover of flourless chocolate cake, he a blond-headed boy from Iowa who practiced drums in the barn. But then the lecturer played a little bit of a soprano singing a Mozart aria. And I swooned. At the end of the lecture, the man asked for questions. I wanted to know who the soprano was, but I was embarrassed to ask. I figured everyone else would know; I figured they’d turn in their seats to see the country bumpkin who got let in here. So as everyone was filing out, I went up to the lecturer and asked, “Who was the soprano?” He got a blank look and then said, “Oh! That was Natalie Dessay. French. She’s wonderful.” I made a note to myself to buy her CDs.

  I went out to the lobby and bought myself a bottle of Pellegrino, drank it down, and then headed for my seat, right in the center on the main floor, eight rows back. I could practically see the hair on the knuckles of the bass players, which was not particularly useful, because much of the time I closed my eyes to hear the music better. I sat in a line of three women, all of us unaccompanied. The woman next to me closed her eyes, too, but then she began gently snoring. Never mind; she was no competition to the full sound of the orchestra, to the piano played with such passion by Mitsuko Uchida, who was also conducting.

  Periodically, I opened my eyes to watch the musicians, and I also watched a couple ahead of me. They were an older couple, probably in their mid-eighties, and when the man needed to stand to make way for people going to seats past his own, he had great difficulty getting up. His wife had to help him, and it took quite a while. She was giving him quiet but urgent instructions: Walter, hold on! Hold on to the armrest! Now stand up! He stood, and I saw that he was a very tall man, with broad shoulders and a still handsome face. He was well dressed: a tweed suit, a Burberry scarf, a camel-colored cashmere coat draped behind him. After he stood, the coat slid down into his seat, and was lumpy behind him. I wanted to straighten it, but I didn’t want to embarrass him.

  We listened to Piano Concerto No. 11 in F Major, and I saw how this couple sat so close together, shoulder pressed into shoulder. We listened to Divertimento in B-flat Major, and by then he had his arm around her. During the intermission that followed, he moved slowly, carefully, to the end of the aisle, where no one else had sat, and where it would be easier for him to get out when the concert was over. But I could see them well, including the soft curls along the side of her face when she turned to look at him, which was often.

  During the second half of the concert, we heard Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major, known to many because it was used to great effect in the sixties film Elvira Madigan. During the Allegro maestoso, I saw Walter pat his wife’s arm, as though in consolation: There, there: listen!

  The concert was a huge success: the orchestra received a standing ovation. As people stood enthusiastically applauding, I saw Walter’s wife unfold a walker and help him into his coat. She got him positioned for the long walk up the aisle, and then there they went. He moved very slowly, but he moved, and as he and his wife passed by me, I saw what I thought was the peace of the music in their faces.

  Three times, the conductor was called back to take her bows. She stood in triumph upon the stage, her hand over her heart, and dipped down, over and over again. Walter and his wife walked slowly, slowly up the aisle, it seemed literally inch by inch. From here and there in the audience came exuberant cries of “Bravo!” “Bravo!” I know those cries were not for Walter and his wife. But in my mind, I made them be.

  JANUARY 30, 2011

  I woke up this morning with a moral hangover.

  Last night, my sister called to tell me that she had taken my parents to a facility that has independent living, assisted care, and a “memory center.” So if you are living with someone who gets Alzheimer’s, he or she can be moved, when the time comes, to a building that is connected to your own, and you can visit them anytime, without even going outside.

  “So how did it go?” I asked.

  “Dad liked it,” she said. “He said, ‘I would live here.’ ”

  “Really!” I said.

  “And Mom said she wanted a two-bedroom, but all that’s available now is a one-bedroom.”

  “They could take that and then move when a two-bedroom opened up,” I said, and she said, “Well, exactly. I told them to talk it over, but they should decide soon, because those places go fast. They don’t even advertise.”

  My sister told me about the various things she and my parents had seen: the apartment itself, the dining room, the library, the little on-site grocery store, the solarium. She said my father would be allowed to ride his mobility scooter there; she said there were cribbage games going on all the time that he might like to go to.

  My sister also said that in the car on the way over, Dad said his parakeets talk, but they stop whenever anyone comes into the room. They talk the way people talk, he meant—intentionally, conversationally, not imitatively. “They speak very well,” he said. “What do they talk about?” my mother asked, and my father said, “I don’t know.”

  My sister also said that our father is continuing to have paranoid fantasies that someone is looking in his windows, especially the bedroom windows, and that it might make him feel better to be up higher, as he would be if they moved. She said she tries to tell him that these things are only in his mind, but when she does, he gets mad. “And then his cheek starts going, you know,” she said and I thought, Yeah, I know. I remember that cheek going in and out. I will never forget it. It happened when he got mad; it was what you saw before he yelled at you or hit you or both. It’s funny how a phrase like his cheek starts going brings it all back, that feeling I had of something caged and weighty in my chest, and the chronic despair that came with it, the feeling that I would never be out from under that kind of fear, not only of him, but of the world.

  When I was in my mid-thirties and had two children of my own, I finally confronted him. I told him I’d been scared of him all my life, and that I had not one memory of him ever saying he loved me or was proud of me, and he was so surprised. He was surprised! And after that day, things changed between us, so much so that he and I became very close, and it was hard to reconcile the way he used to be with the way he was now.

 
And here we are at a new now, my dad and my mom and my sister and me. I awakened today feeling like a bully, feeling like I am forcing my parents to do something that will break their hearts. I lay in bed in gray light imagining my father coming into the kitchen this morning to sit in the banquette opposite his wife. I imagined him saying, “So?” and her only nodding. Wanting, perhaps, to cry, but only nodding. Their world has narrowed so; their options are so few. As much as they may dislike it, surely they must see that the most practical way for them to carry on—the only safe way for them to carry on—is for them to make this move. They know they don’t need to do anything but go over and try it for a couple of months; it rents month-to-month. They know I’ll pay for it, and that they need not sell their house, that they can rent furniture and just bring clothes and a few other things and try it out. If they hate it, they can come back home, and it will be spring and my mother’s tulips will be coming up in the garden. I guess it’s unlikely that they would come back, though. I guess that’s what they imagine, too. You set foot in a certain kind of river and you know that as soon as you do, the current will have you. I’m so sorry, I want to tell them. But I also want to tell them what I’ve heard happens so many times: people are dragged kicking and screaming into these kind of places, and then they end up loving them and saying they should have moved there years ago. Still, I’m so sorry, I want to say. But this is the time for me to say nothing. This is the time for me to simply wait and let them decide what they want to say.

  It is twelve noon on a Sunday. I am still in my pajamas. I read the paper this morning. I made blueberry buttermilk pancakes and pepper bacon for breakfast. While I was cleaning up afterward, I noticed my dog, Homer, sitting by the back door, staring intently out. That door, which is mostly glass, is his television. He watches for squirrels in the yard, he watches the birds at the feeder, he monitors the comings and goings of my neighbors. “What are you looking at, pal?” I asked him. He looked quickly over at me, then away; he didn’t want to be disturbed. I sat down on the floor beside him and put my arm around him. We sat there for some time, looking out together at the falling snow, the red cardinals, the swift flight of the rabbits who see something that scares them and run away to safety.

  FEBRUARY 9, 2011

  When I was growing up and my military family was living in the states and not overseas, we used to come “home” to Minnesota for a couple of weeks every summer. (As an Army brat, I never really felt I had a home anywhere, but Minnesota was the place my parents came from, and where their siblings lived. Close enough.) Whenever we visited, we three kids would get split up, and in the early years I would stay with my Aunt Lala, she of legendary cleanliness and excellent meatloaf and nightly washups in the kitchen sink using a big metal pan and Ivory soap, and don’t even think about skipping your ears. I remember once coming to Aunt Lala’s late at night and being shown to a bed she had fixed up for me with sheets that smelled like leaves and the wind; I remember I lay there with the fabric over my nose, thinking I was so happy to be out of the car and here in this place with the toilet with the chain pull and the wooden columns that separated the living room from the dining room and the five children who lived here and were my cousins. I remember Lala’s husband, Roy, whose nickname was French, and how his extreme handsomeness always made me a little nervous: black curly hair, a chiseled face with high cheekbones, a dimple in his chin. I remember standing by Aunt Lala in the basement, watching her use her terrifying wringer washer, and how she told me you had to be careful not to break the buttons when you put the shirts and blouses through the moving rollers that squeezed the water out. Had to watch your fingers, too.

  I remember neighborhood kids coming to the backyard, and the way that, rather than knocking on the door, they called out the name of the person they wanted. So you might hear, decrescendo, Ohhhhh, Diannnne, and then the cousin I hung around with the most would bang out the screen door to play with her friends, and she would let me, the shy interloper, come, too. Once, a friend of hers whispered, “Can’t you ditch her?” and Diane said no. I am grateful to this day.

  When I was fifteen, I began staying instead with Aunt Tish, described by her son Tim as the world’s oldest teenager. Tish had a great zest for life, an abiding curiosity, and unmatched generosity, which translated to a kind of general willingness. She also had a great sense of humor, which I enjoyed tremendously, except for the time she made fun of my Simon and Garfunkel album, insisting on calling the duo Simon and Garfinkle, just to get under my melodramatic skin (I who lay on her living room floor mooning over my faraway boyfriend and listening to “Kathy’s Song” over and over). Tish was the kind of person who could draw little kids out, asking a five-year-old, for example, “Do you have a girlfriend?” If the answer was no, she’d say, “Oh. So no plans for marriage yet, huh?” She used to eat ice cubes while she lay out in the sun on her chaise lounge, tanning, even though her dentist had told her chewing on those things would ruin her teeth. She was a wonderful cook, and she made things like monkey bread, which I loved both for its name and its taste. Her late husband, my uncle Bob, was nuts about her. Tish was engaged to another man when Bob met her—Bob had come back from the war to the insurance company where she worked, and, in the accepted way of the times, she was training him to take her job. After a week of working together, my uncle left a note on her desk that said, “You don’t know it yet, young lady, but one day you’re going to marry me.” Eight months later, she did.

  Once, when I was staying there, Tish and Bob went to the movies to see My Fair Lady. When they came home, Tish ascended the staircase in a pseudo-dramatic fashion, saying she was going to bed to dream about Rex Harrison. I saw Uncle Bob standing at the foot of the stairs looking after her with what I believed was a kind of simmering jealousy that he knew was ridiculous but was there just the same. But then, everyone loved Tish; everybody wanted to be the one she focused her attention on. She was the kind of person who offered you a safe landing, no matter what you said to her. And she was interested in you in a non-phony way, whether you were a five-year-old or a ninety-year-old. She was interested in just about everything. Once, as she lay out on her chaise on a warm summer night, she looked up at the stars and said to her sixteen-year-old son, “Tell me about the stars, Tim,” and he didn’t roll his eyes in that teenager way; instead, he did what his mother asked him to. He opened with “Well, the sun is a star,” and when she said, “Really?!” he seemed to grow an inch right before my eyes.

  My mother was always close to her five sisters; now she has two left. For some time they relied on Tish to get them out and about, since she was the only one who could drive anymore—though, as her daughter, Patty, has said, she would never make a left turn when three right turns would do. But then Tish fell and broke her arm. She had surgery for it on Tuesday. She sailed through the operation, a great feat for a woman who’s eighty-six years old, and we were all so relieved. Then, the next day, she had a stroke. She had surgery again to clear a carotid artery, and a brain scan afterward yielded positive results. (Awesome results, was the way the doctor described it.) Tish was having some problems breathing, though, and after a lengthy discussion with her children, she was moved to intensive care and put on a ventilator. When I heard this news, I paced around and around my house. Then I called Amtrak and got tickets to go…well, home. I wanted to see Tish, and I figured that, while I was there, my sister and I could go with our parents to see the facility where we thought they should move. The appointment was for the next day.

  The train I took left the station four hours late. In the waiting area, there was a greatly pregnant woman. She lay sprawled in her chair, her top raised to expose her belly, and she slathered lotion on it again and again. She also spoke loudly, saying repeatedly to anyone who cared to listen, “I’m so tired! I’m due any day!” I don’t think I was alone in worrying that she would deliver onboard. She was traveling with two young children who were extremely well behaved, a
boy and girl aged maybe four and six, and they were a study in how to pass the time. They ignored the mindless shows on the television, which was turned up much too loudly and served as the auditory equivalent of stale cigarette smoke. Instead, they quietly played with each other, making up fantasy games and never complaining about how ridiculous this delay was. The pregnant woman was also traveling with a markedly overweight female companion who, after listening to her complain for an hour or so, pointedly went to sleep, her head back, her mouth gaping open.

  I’d been scheduled to arrive at 10:30 that night, so after I finally got myself settled on the train, I called my mother and told her not to wait up for me—we were going to be a good four hours late. At three-thirty in the morning, I was asleep on the train when my cellphone rang. “Where are you?” my mother said, and I said, “What are you doing up? I told you to go to bed!” “But where are you, though?” she asked, and I looked out the train window and said, “I don’t know.” The train was not moving. I had a little conversation with the man across the aisle, who told me there’d been some incident and the police had closed the tracks for six miles in either direction. No one knew when we’d move again. I told my mother I’d be there sometime in the morning, to go to bed. Then, seeing the car attendant, I asked him what was going on. He acted very mysterious and self-important and repeated the fact that the police had closed the tracks. “But why?” I asked, and he said, “That’s all we know,” but it seemed clear to me that he was lying. I called the police in the town we were closest to, and they knew nothing. I called the state police and they knew nothing. The train attendant passed by again and I said, “Hey, Jeremy, are you nervous at all?” “No,” he said, and so I went back to sleep. At eight-thirty in the morning, the train pulled into the station, ten hours late. At nine in the morning, the cab I took pulled up to my parents’ house, and I had breakfast with them and told them all about my great adventure. I’d found out that a freight train had hit someone.