I was surprised; it had been a while since I’d heard about the key. “La clef, Madame Cattaui Pasha m’a donné la clef, elle l’a mis dans ma main”—the key, Madame Cattaui Pasha gave me the key, she put it in my hand, she said.
She spoke with pride and anger and a kind of wild, searing grief. As I looked at her sitting there, so fragile and careworn in that dining room in the middle of Queens, I understood her anguish, how far she felt from Sakakini and the grandeur of the pasha’s wife and that time in her youth she had cherished above all others on this earth.
Out of the blue, we heard from the Brooklyn Public Library. They were inviting Edith to the annual Christmas party and seemed anxious for her to attend. The library’s director, Larry Brandwein, was hosting the affair, and her former coworkers from the Catalog Department would all be there.
The morning of the party, I had an aide help me dress Edith in her nicest outfit. We wrapped her in a heavy wool coat and a scarf, then began the long journey from the Upper West Side to Grand Army Plaza. As Feiden drove, I kept telling her we were going back to the library—her library—but she seemed more confused than excited.
“Est-ce que tu te souviens?” I asked when we reached the vast traffic circle that she had once crossed intrepidly to get to her job. “Does this look familiar?” I pointed to the large building in the shape of an open book, once her home away from home. If she remembered, she didn’t let on; she simply stared and I could tell she was nervous. But once inside the library’s grand lobby with its familiar bronze doors and sky-high ceiling, she seemed to relax.
We made our way upstairs and then she was back—back in the cramped Catalog Department where she’d spent so many years.
Her old colleagues were milling about, drinking soda and munching on cakes and cookies. It had always been such a sociable group, cerebral as well as outgoing. I spotted Docteur Alexis, the tall, somber Ukrainian lawyer who had been her first supervisor, and was introduced to the soft-spoken Rabbi Sam Horowitz, the Hasid from Borough Park Mom had loved. Rabbi Horowitz had arrived on the scene a year or two after Edith had started at the library and they’d become fast friends: how she enjoyed consulting him on religious questions. Madame Mudit, her Latvian companion, was also there.
Then I spotted Dallas Shawkey, her former boss and nemesis, and my heart sank.
One after the other, her coworkers came over and embraced her and tried to engage her in conversation. She’d smile, but it was often a blank smile, as if she couldn’t quite place any of them, not even Docteur Alexis, or Mudit, or Rabbi Horowitz, or Shawkey, the man who had driven her out of her beloved cubbyhole.
Though her friends welcomed her back effusively, I could tell they were unnerved by her appearance. The gaunt figure in the wheelchair had almost nothing in common with the elfin woman they had known and whom they’d loved for her wit and incandescent mind. I noticed Docteur Alexis staring our way; I had expected him to be the friendliest of them all. But he was oddly distant and reserved. I was puzzled—of all her coworkers, she had loved him the most; once upon a time, not a day went by that she didn’t come home bubbling over with stories about Docteur Alexis. Was he revulsed or simply spooked?
Perhaps he was more shaken than the rest, I decided, and too honest to pretend nothing had changed.
After the last soda bottle was consumed, the last cookie eaten, and everyone had returned to their desks and their Union Catalog volumes, we had nothing to do but turn around and leave.
As we wheeled Mom out, we took the scenic route, through the library’s ample circulation rooms with their shelves of books and honey-brown wooden cases containing the catalog cards she had once typed with such joy and fervor; I was praying that simply being in these familiar chambers would spark a memory.
Suddenly, we heard someone calling, “Edith, Edith,” and a small man with blond hair came running over to us.
“It is me, Ed,” he said, as he leaned over Mom and hugged her, “Ed Kozdrajski.”
My mother frowned and then broke out into a broad smile—at last, someone she recognized amid the blur of unfamiliar faces.
“Ed—Ed Kozdrajski, is it really you?” she cried, voluble for the first time that day, and I had the sense that the shy, handsome young cataloger—the one that she’d always called “Le gentil petit Ed,” who had been among the first to welcome her to Grand Army Plaza some twenty years earlier—had finally broken through the layers of neurological damage, so that she remembered.
We helped Mom into the car and began the drive to Manhattan and Jewish Home, where none of us had any desire to go.
I arrived one morning to find Edith in her usual spot against the wall. She seemed to be asleep as always except that she also looked extremely pale and when I tried to wake her, she didn’t respond at all; her eyes were also out of focus, and I started to scream—she was either having a stroke, there, in front of us, or had already suffered one, and no one had even noticed.
The nurses and the aides had simply walked by her the entire morning, pushing their medicine carts, doling out pills and juice, without even realizing that one of their patients was critically ill. I shuddered to think of the possibility that an aide had roused her out of bed and forcibly dressed her even when she was in the throes of a major seizure.
The charge nurse was in the station, still intent on her paperwork.
She didn’t even look concerned when I confronted her. She’d no doubt have simply kept on doing her paperwork if I hadn’t ordered her to get an ambulance at once, if I hadn’t screamed at her at the top of my lungs.
At Sinai, the seizures continued for days and nights on end. Mom was placed in a special neurology intensive care unit. It became my home. I would sit there and watch the doctors walk in and out. Nothing the house staff was trying seemed to work. Couldn’t one of these distinguished-looking physicians make the seizures stop? Couldn’t they please make them stop? I was so desperate I took to grabbing doctors I didn’t even know as they came in, and I begged them to please, please take a look at Mom.
It took days for her to stabilize and when she did, she was even weaker—more “compromised” as doctors said—than before. This latest blow left her unable to breathe or swallow. The hospital suggested a feeding tube, because it was now too dangerous to let Mom eat or drink. Then, later, I was told she needed a tracheotomy, because she couldn’t breathe on her own either. Ultimately, she became dependent on a respirator.
As the days stretched into weeks, I took to coming early in the morning to the hospital to get her dressed: Sinai was more liberal—more human—about visiting hours than the nursing home, and I was free to come and go pretty much as I pleased and stay almost as late as I wanted.
One morning as I was helping the nurse get Mom ready, I decided to put a pink satin bow in her hair. Bows were in style, and street vendors on every corner were hawking them. I did it at first simply because I thought she looked so pretty wearing it. Then I realized that it helped her to stand out, and it became a powerful weapon in my arsenal, a way to get Mom the attention she needed.
Suddenly Edith was transformed; she was no longer merely another patient—she was now “the lady with the pink bow.” The bow became a conversation piece as did she. Nurses seemed enchanted by her, and in the midst of their harried shifts, they gave her extra doses of TLC. Doctors came to check on her, and some actually stayed for a while, struck by her loveliness, her sweetness, which the bow brought into relief. That is when I realized that the disease we were fighting, the illness that had consumed her memory, her mind, her ability to walk and talk and even breathe, had left her with one crucial quality that no one could take away and would yet help her survive—her wondrous and bountiful charm.
Why not take Edith home? As Mom lingered in the hospital and fell prey to countless mysterious infections, we were assigned a new social worker, an earnest young woman named Cathy who became my friend and confidant. I told her what had happened at Jewish Home—the countless assaults on my moth
er culminating in that last awful day in the nursing home hallway.
The thought of taking her back there was unbearable.
Besides, it wasn’t even clear she could return. The horrible irony of nursing home life is that some patients become too sick to live in the average institution. Once they become dependent on a respirator to breathe, for example, they stop being desirable.
“Why not take her home?” Cathy said one morning.
The question hung over the dinner table at the restaurant where Feiden and I retreated after a long day at the hospital. He repeated Cathy’s question, then added his own suggestion: “Don’t let her return to the Jewish Home and Hospital—let us take her home.”
He had recently bought a small duplex for us on the East Side. This meant Mom could have her own room upstairs while we would have our own private living area below her. Only a small spiral staircase would separate us, so we’d keep a watch on her at all times.
With his usual flair for words, he proposed transforming our apartment into “a hospital-free zone.” I wasn’t sure what that meant exactly but it sounded exciting, if sobering: We’d be re-creating a medical intensive care unit in our living room, stocking it with a hospital bed, IV poles, oxygen tanks, gauze bandages, blood pressure kits, saline solution, whatever Mom would need.
I worried at first about my siblings—would César and Isaac and Suzette go along with my plan or put up a fight?
I realized it didn’t matter. I was driven by one goal—never to see Mom in a chair against a wall on West 106th Street again.
Cathy suggested an attorney who specialized in the elderly and knew how to fight entrenched American systems. Of course, my brother Isaac hired a lawyer of his own to stop me. In the past that would have been enough to make me cave, but now I braced for war. With Feiden and the social worker and the attorney on my side, I was ready to take Edith where she had always longed to be: at home with me.
I would finally try to rebuild a hearth—a fragile, antiseptic hearth perhaps, but still a place where we could be together again.
But how?
I started by going on a shopping spree. There was a Woolworth’s on East Eighty-Sixth Street near my house that reminded me of the cherished dime store of my childhood. It even had bins with sale items in the basement. In a surfeit of optimism, I bought sheets and pillowcases and rugs and towels and a pink-and-yellow flowered bedspread. I planned Mom’s homecoming by shopping with abandon and foraging through every bin, as she and I had loved to do.
Mom came home in early December, on the eve of Hanukah, the festival of lights, the holiday of miracles. Years earlier, in our house on Sixty-Sixth Street, instead of lighting a traditional menorah, she would take a set of juice glasses, fill them with water and oil, and insert a floating wick into each. Then, at night, we would light the wicks in the glasses, which we arranged in a semicircle. Edith would put her hands over her eyes and whisper a prayer as we took turns lighting them. She was always so thrilled when the flames lasted through the night. “Nes,” she would declare in Arabic, “A miracle.”
We would find ourselves staring and staring at the flames reflected in the water, as if they contained a divine message.
There were no floating wicks on the Upper East Side, but I did buy an electric menorah from Woolworth’s. It was plastic with small orange lights. That was the last purchase I made prior to her homecoming, after the boxes of surgical gloves, the syringes, the medicines, the cans of liquid nutrition, the creams and salves I’d realized were necessary to rebuild a hearth.
· 20 ·
An Earthquake in Cairo
It was as if the real world didn’t matter anymore—not to me and certainly not to Edith.
We hunkered down in the little duplex Feiden had purchased. He and I stayed in the basement bedroom while Mom’s retinue of doctors, lawyers, nurses, aides, physical therapists, medical equipment salesmen, oxygen tank dispensers, and Medicaid fraud investigators roamed the living room and garden and small kitchen.
They would come and go, come and go.
Home felt like a way station these days. I would arrive and find four or five people standing around Edith, talking intensely, taking notes on a clipboard, inspecting her bed, her feeding tube, her.
Yet we were in our own way intensely lonely. Except for César who came every day and Isaac (less so), none of our visitors were friends or relatives—they were strangers who were paid to check on us, and they’d usually beat a hasty retreat after accomplishing their mission.
In spite of the stream of passersby, we were oddly isolated.
I didn’t dare confide in friends that I had brought Edith to live with me. I was leading in effect a secret life—by day, a working journalist, a professional, and then at night caring for my mom. The few times I’d told people I knew, their reactions had unnerved me—they seemed to think it was all rather strange, bringing a sick mother home. It simply wasn’t done, not in the solipsistic culture of Manhattan’s East Side in the early 1990s, where everyone was intensely focused on their work and on themselves and not much else.
Even at temple on Saturdays, I failed to find the empathy I craved. On Sabbath mornings, I would bundle Mom up and together with an aide, we’d put her in her oversized wheelchair, her little oxygen tank tucked away in a back pouch, and call an ambulette to take us to a nearby synagogue. It took effort, but as my mother retreated more and more into her own world, getting her to a cozy synagogue to hear the chants and melodies she had once loved could only help her.
Or maybe not so cozy.
Typically, we went to the Fifth Avenue Synagogue on East Sixty-Second Street, which housed an Oriental-Jewish service for Levantine Jews and we also tried the Gates of Prayer, an elegant Reform temple nearby on East Seventy-Ninth Street. I felt uneasy and not especially welcome at either congregation. No one ever came over to ask how we were doing. No one came over to us, period. I suppose that we were a jarring sight for the well-heeled worshippers. Mom’s wheelchair was a bulky affair, and it was hard to enter the sanctuary without attracting attention. I was intensely conscious of all the stares. Worst was the Gates of Prayer; I arrived there one morning with Mom in tow and was wheeling her toward the large sanctuary when one of the ushers raced over to say we had to sit in the back. He pointed to a dimly lit corner in the last row. I felt so humiliated it didn’t even occur to me to ask him why we were being relegated to the back—surely it must be some mistake.
I had heard of black churches in Harlem and New Haven—some catering to the poorest families—that set the first rows aside for the disabled and wheelchair bound, placing them in front of all other congregants, and yet my own faith, whose rabbis preached a reverence for the frail and elderly from the pulpit, apparently hadn’t thought of doing the same.
I suppose that it could have been different if I’d had friends in those congregations—people who knew me and would have made my mother and me feel at home—but in the years of my parents’ illnesses, I had stopped being part of a community. I had become an itinerant worshipper. My childhood habit of going to temple Saturday mornings hadn’t stopped—it is simply that I prayed at whatever hospital or nursing home Mom or Dad happened to be at on a particular week or month or year. I went to small anonymous services attended by people who were ill and frail and passing through, and whom I’d never see again.
I was haunted by memories of the Shield of Young David, where Mom and I had been embraced from the start and made to feel so welcome and loved: Wasn’t that how a house of worship should be?
Ah, the synagogues of the Upper East Side—so upscale, such avatars of affluence and style, that prayer seemed almost beside the point.
They were our lone excursions outside the house, these forlorn trips on Saturday morning. The service at Fifth Avenue at least was tolerable—people were neither friendly nor unfriendly. But we never returned to the Gates of Prayer—I couldn’t bear the thought of being relegated to the back.
The duplex on East Eig
hty-Ninth Street became our whole world.
There were those who were willing to join us, to help abate the isolation we felt, and those who wanted nothing to do with us.
I learned to depend on the bon docteur, that breed of physician who is both proficient and humane. Though house calls had long vanished from American medicine, several of the doctors who had taken care of Mom in her pink bow at Mount Sinai expressed a willingness to monitor her at home. They were specialists, with busy practices outside the hospital, yet I liked to think they came because they felt a genuine bond with my mother—though nearly mute and effectively motionless, she had captivated them somehow. They must have felt the intense life force within her, the will to hold on despite the blows that came raining on her one after the other. They were willing to apply their powers to keeping her if not well, then well enough to be home with me.
There was charming Dr. Stacy, our dapper Yale-educated neurologist, who visited us promptly every week. Dr. Kornbluth, a tall sober Orthodox Jewish gastroenterologist, was so meticulous when he examined Mom, as if she were a delicate flower that required all his skills. Dr. Dziedzic, our internist, had befriended us at Sinai and was our all-round, all-purpose medical sounding board, who took charge in a crisis. Her pulmonologist, Dr. Adler, came over to make sure her muddled lungs were clear and that she was getting plenty of oxygen. He spoke to her so tenderly I could swear she both heard and understood him.
She returned all their caring by a flicker of a smile, a gaze, or the lone word she could still say: “Okay.”
“How are you, Edith?” Dr. Dziedzic would call out when he arrived. He was cheery and down-to-earth, devoted to his patients and to us. At first Mom would look at him bewildered, her wonderfully expressive eyes widening—who was that scary man? Then, reassured by his kindly manner, she would mouth, “Okay,” her lips still slightly twisted from the aftereffects of all the strokes, the sound barely coming out.
The Arrogant Years Page 29