Steel Wheelchair In The Shadows

Steel Wheelchair In The Shadows

My grandmother’s house on Hoover street had a green roof. And the trim, too, was a dark deep green color, painted expertly and meticulously by nameless forgotten men back in 1931 when the house was constructed. Designed by my English grandfather, the house on Hoover street is a typical English cottage-type; the kind one might find in the English countryside nestled in the shade between myrtle trees and clear green gardens. Only this house was located sixteen miles east of LA, between two other houses on an Oleander-lined street, named after the “depression president”—Herbert Hoover.

I remember visiting this old house as a young child back in the 1950’ s and I can vividly recall the distinctive smells that lurked in the various rooms and cupboards. I especially remember the quaint breakfast room next to the kitchen, for it was in this room the family ate the day’s meals. And how could I ever forget the night in 1959 when my grandmother, Phoebe, removed her false teeth when supper was over and put them on the table next to her cup of tea. Screaming and crying hysterically, I slid under the table and pleaded with my parents to take me home.

Every morning now, as the summer of 1963 began its slow, methodical flow of time, my stroke-stricken grandmother would be wheeled into this wall-papered old room and have her cup of tea and one piece of buttered toast, and with her false teeth sitting by her cup, grandma Phoebe, whom I called “Baba,” would “gum” her toast slowly, and stare almost vacantly out of one of the six windows of the room. And every morning my mother, Pauline, would say to her mother-in-law: “What can I do for you today Phoebe?” And Baba would always answer: “Ah nuting Pauleen. Jus want a priece of bread and a crup of tea . . . life is good . . . life is good. . . . indeed.”

The kitchen was also green as was the attached service porch. Inside this service porch were two little doors on either side of this compartment which led to the outside, and it was in this little area where the milkman would leave two bottles every other morning at sunrise. Also inside this room was a refrigerator, sparsely filled with milk, cottage cheese, butter, eggs, cheese and vanilla ice cream. And next to the refrigerator was another little room enclosed by a green door with a lock on it-Baba’s water closet. As one stood inside this small single toilet with the door closed, urinating, one could tilt his head backward, and there on the small rectangular ceiling, one could look up through the vent all the way up to the roof, about 12 to 15 feet in height, and see daylight struggling to invade this dark inner sanctum. I remember back in the summer of 1963, my father, Fred, had a new roof put on the house, a beige-colored roof, and as I urinated in Baba’s claustrophobic water closet, I would always turn off the little art-deco light fixture over the door, stare up into this deep tall shaft and smell the newly applied, pungent tar that adhered the new roof tiles to the top of the house. I felt like I was alone in some strange netherworld; stuck inside Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone,” and I enjoyed the quiet, almost stifling solitude.

To the right of the water closet was another door which led to the long L-shaped hallway that connected the three bedrooms of the house. The first bedroom was Baba’s. Inside this green room was her special hospital bed complete with a crank that elevated the bed so Baba could rest with her head uplifted; guardrails so she couldn’t fall out while sleeping at night and a plastic holder at the foot of the bed for her stainless steel bedpan. Also inside this modestly decorated room was a mahogany dresser displaying old photographs of her grandchildren, and in the corner was her steel wheelchair with a worn-out black vinyl seat cushion. This room always had the same odor wafting about-Vick’s Vapo Rub mixed with urine. It was eye-opening to say the least, but I got used to it after awhile. Across the hallway from Baba’s room was the door leading down to the basement; the mysterious, scary basement where “cruel monsters lurk in the dark corners,” at least according to my Uncle Harry, who lived in this house for 30 years, and who now had recently moved out to make room for his younger brother’s family.

The basement was my favorite place to go as an eleven year old boy, for it was down there I could sit alone and think amidst the numerous canned goods and old torn furniture. As one reached the bottom of the stairwell leading down from the hallway, one could not but help notice the dozens upon dozens of cans of Del Monte peaches and pears, Green Giant creamed corn, peas and stewed tomatoes, Hormel chili beans, Dinty Moore’s stew and Campbell’s soups of every conceivable flavor; mostly bacon and bean, along with Baba’s favorite-chicken noodle soup. It was like a little supermarket down there that summer. Most interestingly, there was an old 1930’ s Philco radio record player in the basement, left there by Uncle Harry, and I would turn on the Emperor Hudson Show or Kasey Kasim on KRLA and listen to “Easier Said Than Done” by the Essex, “Surf City” by Jan and Dean, “So Much In Love” by Tymes and my favorite that summer, Lonnie Mack’s “Memphis.” It was down in that basement later in August when I first heard a “new sound” by an English group that had the weird name-The Beatles. I was lying down on the old gray sofa in the back corner when the song “Do you Want To Know A Secret” played on the Emperor Hudson Show, and I immediately liked it. And when the Dodgers would play day games back east in Chicago or Philadelphia or New York, I’d put my Dodger cap on and sit on that old sofa and listen to Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett describe the action on “Fifty thousand watt clear channel station, KFI, Earle C. Anthony Incorporated.” Sandy Koufax was unbeatable that summer, and I remember wishing I had a dime for every time he struck some hapless hitter out.

The next room one encounters while traveling down the L-shaped hallway is the green-tiled bathroom. Walking into this room is like walking into a Frank Capra film, with an old fashioned king-sized white bathtub, a 1930’ s wash basin with a mirrored medicine cabinet above it, a walk-in shower stall, again, tiled in dark green, and finally, a good-sized white toilet with the same black toilet seat my grandfather installed back in 1931. I remember watching my mother wheel Baba into that very green bathroom every morning, and with the patience of Florence Nightingale, she would wash Baba’s afflicted worn out body with soap and a washcloth, and every morning my mother would dutifully put Baba’s gray hair in braids, all the while, listening to Baba’s somewhat incoherent ramblings about missing blankets from her bedroom closet, supposedly “stolen” by my uncle Harry’s wife-my Aunt Gene, when they moved out in late May. But my mother didn’t take these senile diatribes too seriously and would reply: “Now Phoebe, why would Gene steal some old blankets?” And then there were times when a sad-toned Baba would almost soliloquize, as if alone on a stage, about “that day,” in 1941, when her husband, Francis, “dropped dead on the floor there.” I remember sitting on the green carpet of the L-shaped hallway and watching Baba point to the black tiled floor in front of the old wash basin, evidently the spot where my grandfather collapsed on the morning of May 2nd, 1941 and died. “Nuting I could do bout it,” Baba said with a faraway look in her eyes. “He were dead ‘fore he hid the floor. . . . poor soul.” And my mother would always tell her: “It must’ve been hard Phoebe. But he’s at rest now.” At the end of the hallway are the doors to the other two bedrooms, one to the left; my brother’s room, and one to the right, my parent’s.

And beyond my brother’s room was another much smaller room-the den, which was now my bedroom. Formerly my grandfather’s private “cave” back in the Depression 30’ s, I loved having this small, two-windowed room as my own room because unlike the other bedrooms of this house, my room had a door leading out to the backyard. And everytime that I lay my head down upon my pillow in that small room at night, on that long ago summer of 1963, I could almost smell the presence of my pipe-smoking grandfather, silently sitting there, a benevolent ghost at rest with no regrets. On the other end of the hallway, toward the front of the house, is the dining room with an imposing chandelier hanging from the ceiling. It was inside this room where Baba served up her legendary Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts back in the 30’ s and 40’ s: Oven-cooked Mackingflap bulging with raisons; Potato Dish with heeps of onions and peas; twenty to twenty five pound turkeys engorged with her moist, sage and onion-laced bread crumb stuffing, and her specialty-Plum Pudding, which she doused with rum and set afire when unveiling for the family on Christmas evening. But now as the heat slowly intensified in those late June mornings of 1963, Baba would sit inert in her steel wheelchair in that same dining area, listlessly gazing out the wide window of the room, and on many occasions I wondered what thoughts she entertained within her collapsing enfolding memory. Then there were times when she would talk to herself in muted tones, saying “life is good . . . life is good . . . where be me beans . . . Can’t cook ‘em till thar be me beans”

To the left of the dining room was the front sitting room; a rectangular light green parlor, which in 1963, included a gray sofa, a faded chestnut coffee table, Baba’s old rocking chair and a 1958 Emerson black and white television console. On the south wall, there was a painting of a vase of flowers that had been hanging there since 1937, when the picture was given to Baba as a Christmas gift by her best friend, Mrs. Burchell, now long dead. Also inside this room is a fireplace made with brick and white plaster, and traversing this fireplace is a smoothly finished fireplace mantle made of solid oak, and in the middle of it is a small open recess into the plaster, wherein a black clock of about five inches high, had been loyally keeping the time since 1931. As a young child in the 1950’ s, Sunday evenings were always set aside for visits to Baba’s house, and it was inside this cozy parlor room that I would begrudgingly give Baba a slight kiss on her ashen cold cheek when I entered into the house. And then I’d silently sit on the sofa and watch the Ed Sullivan Show. Baba would sit in her rocking chair, and generally, she would not react to the jokes of Martin and Rossi or Wayne and Shuster or Henny Youngman, or the serenading skills of Perry Como or Pat Boone or Rosemary Clooney. But I do remember seeing a noticeable reaction come from her when the little Italian mouse Topo Gigio came on, and she would laugh and smile enthusiastically, showing the grayish whiteness of her false teeth. Looking back on it now, there was something magical, something quintessentially “American” about those long ago Sunday nights in Baba’s parlor room watching Ed Sullivan. It was as if time had stopped, and the family was securely together-Uncle Harry and Aunt Gene, my parents, my brother, Baba and me-culturally connected and spiritually bonded by the glowing cathode-ray tube in the dark.

But now in the summer of 1963, Baba wasn’t as interested in the Ed Sullivan Show, for now on these drawn-out twilight evenings, she would retire to bed with the sun still shining, and the rest of us would watch reruns of Candid Camera and The Ed Sullivan Show with her rocking chair vacant. And as I lay upon the green carpet in front of the television console, I sensed an emptiness in the room; an emptiness as tangible as an empty discarded shoe, and it saddened me a little, for I knew deep inside my soul that time was running out for my aging grandmother. As one exits the front door entrance of my grandmother’s house, one finds himself inside the front porch, enclosed by a brick wall of approximately four feet in height. And to the right are many windows; the six windows of the breakfast room, and the wide rectangular window of the dining room. And festooned from those windows were lacy white curtains which hung like garlands in a mortuary chapel; at least that’s how I remember them to be. It was inside this front porch area that Baba would sit on her canopied swing, and wile away the afternoon hours watching the cars go by. Occasionally, I would sit with Baba on those lazy hot afternoons, and together, we would swing with the warm breeze in our faces, and Baba would repeat: “Life is good . . . life is good. . . . indeed.” In front of this porch is the plush green dicondra lawn, divided into halves by the front cement walkway, with two oleander trees rooted next to the street. In fact, the entire street was lined with oleander trees that were fully mature in 1963, and were crowned with numerous pink blooms giving this old avenue an almost mythological, dream-like quality. Again, something one might see in an old Frank Capra movie, with perhaps a tall, lanky Jimmy Stewart mowing his lawn up a ways . . . in the oleander shadows.

The driveway of this venerable house was a narrow long one, probably created by those same forgotten dead men back in ‘31 for the Model A’s of the late 20’ s and early 30’ s. But now, my father’s ‘63 Chevy Impala was too wide to drive the 100 feet of cement and stones to the detached, green garage out back. As in the style of the 20’ s and 30’ s, the middle section of this long driveway was neatly inlaid with tens of thousands of small, smooth white stones, reminding me of monstrous spider eggs from some crazy 1950’ s sci-fi movie I had seen on channel 9’ s Million Dollar Movie. At the end of this driveway was a bougainvillea plant, fully in bloom, and, of course, the 3 car garage, that, as the summer of ‘63 began, was still filled with Uncle Harry’s possessions: hundreds of Life and Look magazines from the 30’ s, 40’ s and 50’ s; an old pool table with torn green felt; a warped ping pong table and a huge cabinet filled with his hundreds of magic tricks. To the right is my grandfather’s old work bench, expertly nailed and integrated to the entire side of the garage, replete with old tools, dozens of jars with screws, nuts, nails, bolts and washers, and other various and sundry items one might find in any garage. And painted in sloppy white paint right above the work bench lamp is the scrawl: “Harry 1939.”

Directly to the right of this workbench was a single door leading out to the rose garden, and neatly scribbled into the cement walkway at the foot of this door is “Phoebe 1953.” Attached to the side of the garage is a decrepit old wooden ladder leading up to its flat roof, and I remember spending many hours that summer sitting up on that roof and just thinking about the vicissitudes of life. Eventually I dragged my old telescope up there and, perched on its tripod, I would point it in the direction of downtown LA, sixteen miles to the west, and I remember feeling smugly satisfied to actually be able to find and see the City Hall building from up there, unobstructed by the suburban sprawl.

The night Dick Nen hit his pinch-hit homerun over the right field pavilion in old Busch Stadium to win the final game of the series for the Dodgers, my grandmother, Baba, died in the hospital. But it wasn’t until the following morning that I found out. My mother came into my room, roused me from my sleep and whispered “Mickey . . . wake up Mickey. Your grandmother died last night. She died peacefully in her sleep. . . . Baba’s gone now.” I remember I yawned, said nothing and turned on my clock radio like always. I remember Bobby Vinton was singing “Blue Velvet” as I cleared my mind and thought back to the night Baba had her final stroke.

. . . That night my mother served salad as usual. With red French dressing. Paul was seated next to me as usual and I noticed he was in a bad mood, for my mother had told him he couldn’t go over to Steve Hope’s house that evening to work on Steve’s new car. And like every evening that summer, Baba had been wheeled into the quaint breakfast room and she had actually nibbled a little on her salad while staring admiringly at my brother. But Paul was sitting in stone cold silence with his chin in his hand, pouting with an angry scowl on his face, and he refused to touch his salad or the spaghetti my mother had prepared. With venomous sarcasm, my intensely annoyed mother scolded Paul for being “an immature baby,” and to “act your age and eat your dinner!” Whereupon my brother retorted with his own growl of sarcasm by saying: “ No. Babies don’t eat salads!” Then more loud angry words were exchanged with my mother finally saying: “I want you to get up and leave this room now! Get out!” So, with bristling alacrity, Paul stormed out of the tension-filled, but quaint, breakfast room, and that’s when I noticed a very upset and weeping Baba spitting up bits of salad and red French dressing onto the table and her flowery blue bib. “Take me out . . . take me out . . .” she pleaded to my father. “I’m ill!” And so he did with a disturbed look on his face. A few minutes later he returned to the breakfast room and said: ‘She’ll be alright . . . just a little upset. She’s in bed now” “Fred,” my mother said, while taking a big bite of her spaghetti, “you know she’s putting on. I don’t believe she’s ill at all.” My dad just silently ignored his wife’s cynical remark, and for ten minutes the three of us ate our meal in tense peacefulness. Then suddenly from within her bedroom, where the L-shaped hallway bends to the center of the house, we heard Baba screaming hysterically; it was a cry that literally took my appetite away.

Baba’s casket was beige. I remember thinking if Baba could somehow know that she would be spending eternity in a beige casket, she would have a massive stroke at her own funeral. The reciting of the Rosary took place on an overcast Wednesday night at St. Mary’s Church. Baba’s casket was open up by the communion rail, with my dead grandmother lying in icy repose wearing a new gray sweater. Her hair was in braids and I remember seeing a new shimmering rosary looping through her fingers as both hands were joined, as if praying, at her chest. In a strange way, her face, though sunken in, had more color in it than usual, for it was not ashen or wrinkly. I remember staring at Baba from the front pew as we repeated all those “Hail Marys” and “Glory Be’s.” and I was watching carefully to see if maybe, just maybe, she would flinch a little, perhaps sit up and smile at everyone and say: “Fooled you!”

While praying for Baba’s departed soul, I remember noticing all the glowing red candles over by the Blessed Virgin Mary statue. There must have been a hundred of those red novena candles flickering wildly in the corner like a hive of crazy fireflies from the mouth of Hell. And I remember staring into the calm peaceful eyes of the Virgin Mary and in my mind those eyes were saying to me: “Be not afraid . . .” but on that day in the presence of sunken death, I was afraid, and it unnerved me to have to kneel there and endure all those hushed frozen recitations from the bereaved. And Baba wouldn’t budge. . . . no matter how hard I implored her to move from within my mind. She was as motionless as a rock. And then it hit me: Death is final. Just cold empty blackness. Nothing. Total finality. The end of the end. As the rosary concluded, I remember the church was saturated with pungent smelling frankincense and everyone who attended this invocation had the opportunity to walk up to the casket and say a final good-bye. I meekly and nervously approached Baba, and as I looked closely at her face, I felt a chill inside my stomach and, not enjoying this experience, I quickly moved on. Behind me was my Aunt Gene who started sobbing loudly when it was her turn to say her final farewell. Her loud sobs echoed throughout the huge church like some lost soul in an asylum. Affectionately she put her hand on Baba’s cheek and then she began to wail like a baby. It was so bad, she had to be escorted out of the church by her sister, Francis. It was quite a spectacle, but I didn’t think it was strange or unreal. Her loud sobbing continued even outside the doors of the church. “Oh, she looked so pretty . . . so pretty,” my Aunt Gene repeated, wiping her tears with a Kleenex. “I’ll miss her so much . . . so much.”

I’ve always wondered why my Aunt Gene was so emotionally distraught that night while everyone else, including Baba’s own children, were so stoic and poised. I knew that the two of them had spent countless hours together in the quaint breakfast room during the 40’ s and 50’ s, sipping tea, eating toast and indulging in female banter and repartee. So it didn’t surprise me to see Aunt Gene so emotional. And furthermore, I was also aware that Baba and Gene had not been on speaking terms with each other since May. And then, I thought about those missing blankets from Baba’s bedroom closet, and it occurred to me that perhaps there was something to Baba’s incoherent story from the early days of the summer, and now I felt I was witnessing the “face of guilt” trying to cleanse and wash itself of all responsibility.

Baba’s casket was closed during the funeral mass the following morning. A skinny silver crucifix lay upon the top of her beige casket, and I remember feeling very important that day, for the church was filled to half capacity with family, friends and other acquaintances, all dressed in dark hues of brown, black and blue. And everyone stared at us, the grieving family, as we followed Baba’s casket up the center aisle at the beginning of the Mass, pushed tortuously slow by two unsmiling men dressed in black suits. Never in all my eleven years had I seen so many sunglasses adorning so many puffy, arcane eyes, and there were black hand gloves everywhere I looked. Again, Aunt Gene lost her composure during the seemingly endless sermon, and like last night, she had to be taken outside by her sister. The Mass, as usual, was long and boring and reeked of incense.

The best part of the day, however, was the ride to Calvary Cemetery in a long black limousine. For thirty minutes we followed Baba’s black hearse nonstop through strangling traffic, sixteen miles to east LA, being escorted by three funeral cops who drove their motorcycles like manic Marlon Brandos, weaving in and out of traffic with complete disregard of their or anyone else’s safety. It seemed everything about Calvary Cemetery was big. It appeared to be an old cemetery, for there were huge old fashioned tombstones everywhere with death dates going back to the 1880’ s and 1890’ s, and some of the tall tombstones actually had photographs of the deceased imbedded into the stone next to their names. When the funeral procession first arrived at the front entrance gate, there was a brief pause and I happened to look out the limo window and see a giant Jesus on the cross with the two thieves hanging by him, and behind this gate was this vast yard with hundreds of big thick tombstones casting monolithic shadows in the morning sun. It all seemed like a dream to me. . . . like I was in a Boris Korloff movie with unspeakable monsters watching us unseen from behind those sculpted granite and marble monuments.

And somewhere inside all that acreage, my grandfather, the one who dropped dead in the bathroom back in 1941, the grandfather I never had a chance to know, was six feet below the rolling calming surface, now just a skeleton that once breathed the same air I was now breathing, as I exited the limo at the grave site. Throughout the cemetery I noticed numerous white statues of weeping angels and various grieving saints and hundreds of white urns and crosses of all sizes. And there were thousands of trees and plants and flowers interspersed everywhere adding palpable life to this land of the dead, and I recall there was an odd stillness all around us as we slowly followed the beige casket from the parked hearse to the gaping hole in the ground by a big chestnut tree. And next to this hole, there was a mound of dirt covered by a large green tarp, and there was a green tent set up over this deep hole with folding chairs and several sprays of iridescent flowers.

I remember it being a warm September morning and all my relatives, relatives I hadn’t seen in a long long time, were sniffling back tears as the priest, the black haired Father Elliot, blessed the casket and the grave. And as he doused Baba’s beige casket with holy water, I remember he wiped a bit of perspiration from his forehead, and then gave the skinny silver crucifix to the eldest of Baba’s four children-my uncle Dint. And then, when all was said and done, Father Elliot removed his black stole, grimly walked back to his creamy white Chevy Impala, and slowly drove down the lane to the front entrance where Jesus and the two thieves keep silent watch over the voiceless multitudes. We stayed by the grave for only a short while and I remember studying my father and his siblings to see how they were handling their grief, and I can recall thinking: “Strong people. . . . Baba’s children. Nothing seems to bother them.” And as we all stood around the casket hugging and patting each other on the back, I remember hearing the screeching of brakes from many cars on the streets surrounding this inner city graveyard, and the intermittent honking of horns in the bustling distance.

And even though Baba was dead and gone, I knew life must go on and that we would all get over the death of this 82 year old invalid very quickly. Back at the beige house after the burial, my mother served a big ham for the grieving family. I didn’t have much of an appetite that day, and instead, I walked around the house in a bit of a daze, trying to come to terms with Baba’s death. It hadn’t really sunk in yet. I remember going into her bedroom while everyone was eating. Baba’s hospital bed was now without sheets or a bedcover, and her stainless steel bedpan was now missing. There was just a faint odor of Vic’s Vapo Rub in the air, and for at least ten minutes, I sat in Baba’s steel wheelchair and stared out the back window. The bougainvillea blooms were rustling in the afternoon breeze, and I remember thinking about Baba’s false teeth and her daily “crup of tea” and her dark brown eyes that, once upon a time, had nothing but joy and laughter in them. And I remembered the night she had her final stroke when the house was lit up like a pumpkin. And then I realized I never had the chance to say good-bye to her when she was alive. In my mind I could see Baba, plain as day, sitting in front of the dining room window, like she had done so many times that summer, and just staring outside. “Bye Baba,” I remember saying, as I silently sat in her steel wheelchair. . . . in the shadows.

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