Her mother looked frightened. “But Grandma Helene said my grandfather was an engineer.”
Annie wondered if her mother had listened to a word she had said. “I don’t doubt he was an engineer, Mother, but not an employed engineer. Your grandmother didn’t know he couldn’t find work. He was too embarrassed to tell her. He went out looking for a job every day until he realized no one would hire him.”
“If all that’s true, why didn’t my mother tell Grandma Helene?” she said almost defiantly. “Grandma said the most awful things to Mother, and she never said anything about this.”
“Because Great-Grandpa Reinhardt was her only friend in this house. If she told your grandmother the truth, what would that have accomplished? She might have avenged herself on your grandmother, but she would’ve shamed your grandfather in the process. So she kept silent. She thought everything would turn out all right when your father came home. Do you remember what happened? When the war ended and your father came home, your grandfather signed the house over to him. Why would he do that, Mom, if what Grandma Leota said wasn’t true?”
Her mother closed her eyes. “I can remember the night that happened. Grandma Helene was screaming and crying and calling my mother a whore and a thief. She said my mother was unnatural because she didn’t want her children. George and I hid under our covers and cried.”
Annie’s heart broke for the frightened child her mother must’ve been.
Her mother let out a shuddering breath. “And my father. I was terrified of him. I was so little when he went away, I didn’t know him when he came home. He was so tall and broad and blond, and he had the coldest blue eyes. Just like one of those German Aryans you read about.” Her face was white, her expression distant, remembering. “Once he got so mad, he put his fist through a wall. That one, right over there by the kitchen door.” Her mouth curled. “He was always losing a job because of his temper. And then his drinking. He turned into a lazy drunk.”
Annie uttered a broken sob at the description. She had never met her grandfather, but her heart ached for him. “Your father was a master carpenter whose life was shattered by the war. His parents asked him to look for family members when he got to Germany. He did. And he found some.” Oh, Lord, help her hear this and walk in her father’s shoes long enough to understand. “They were working for one of the concentration camps. They were supplying the soldiers who were exterminating Jews. Your father was a translator in his unit. When his relatives begged for mercy, he and another in his unit shot them down. Grandma Leota said he talked about it only once to her and never discussed the war again.”
Her mother’s face was white. “I remember Grandma Helene asking him questions in German, and he said he found nothing.”
“Did he ever speak German again, Mom?”
Her mother closed her eyes tightly. “No. Grandma asked him once why he wouldn’t, and he said he wanted to forget he was German.”
“He was ashamed. He didn’t understand that Germans were not the only race capable of atrocities. It’s mankind. Beneath the veneer of civilization, the flesh is weak and given to all manner of sin. There, but for the grace of God, go we all.”
“I never knew any of this!” her mother cried out.
“Grandma Leota said they weren’t her secrets to tell. Great-Grandma Helene must’ve found out because Grandma Leota said she changed shortly after your grandfather died. He must’ve finally told her before he died. If not all, at least the part about Grandma Leota paying for the house. I don’t think anyone but Grandma Leota knew about what happened in Germany. Whatever your grandfather told Grandma Helene, after he was buried, she never spoke another unkind word to Grandma Leota. They made their peace. Grandma said they loved one another in the end.”
Her mother cried bitterly. “I feel as though Grandma Helene poisoned me.”
“Maybe she did. Just as you’ve tried to poison me, Mother.”
“Don’t say that. Please don’t say that.”
“It’s time you faced it. Show some compassion! All the things Grandma Helene told you out of ignorance about Grandma Leota, you’ve repeated to me. Not once, Mom, but over and over, year after year. This is your opportunity to change things between you and Grandma Leota. You won’t have her around forever.”
Grief flooded her mother’s eyes, shame as well. “Why didn’t my mother tell me all this years ago?”
Annie was filled with sorrow. “Oh, Mom, all you had to do was ask.”
The medical technician delivered the vials of blood he had taken from several patients to the downstairs laboratory. Another technician was looking through a microscope. She straightened, rubbing the back of her neck, and glanced up at him with a smile. “How’s it going, Hiram?”
“Busy day.” He would go off duty in another two hours. “I’m taking my dinner break. I think I need a good jolt of caffeine.”
She went back to looking through the microscope. “Bring me a cup, if you think about it. And a brownie if they have any.”
The cafeteria was almost empty, which suited Hiram just fine. He needed to be alone to think. Walking along the glass-fronted counter, he picked meat loaf, mashed potatoes, corn, a piece of apple pie, and coffee. Finding a table in a back corner, he made himself comfortable. From where he sat he could see a full view of the room. He liked to be able to see who was coming in and going out.
He’d found the time and opportunity to read over Leota Reinhardt’s chart. Having a premed major in college, he’d always dreamed of being a doctor. Unfortunately, his grades hadn’t been high enough to get him into medical school. Furthermore, he’d had to drop out of college the last year and help his mother take care of his father, who had developed Alzheimer’s. They’d finally put him in a convalescent hospital.
Every time he took his mother to visit, she came home in tears because his father’s mind was so far gone that he didn’t even remember who she was. It broke his mother’s heart. Maybe if he’d gotten along better with his father, he would have felt the same.
Twice his father had gotten pneumonia. Both times, he tried to convince his mother to tell the hospital not to go to heroic measures to save the old man. “I can’t do that. He’s my husband. He’s your father.” Not anymore, he’d wanted to say. Whatever part of the man that had been his father was long gone. Hiram had begun to hate going to that convalescent hospital. He’d begun to hate the sight of that sick old man who was just the shell of a human being.
He felt sorry for Leota Reinhardt’s family. She was half-paralyzed from a stroke. Add cancer to that, along with congestive heart failure, arthritis, and a few other minor problems like borderline anemia, and her life wasn’t worth living. If she did live, her granddaughter, a real beauty, would spend the next year or two or more working night and day to take care of an old woman who wouldn’t even be able to carry on an intelligible conversation with her. Considering how the rest of the family was reacting, it seemed the old woman hadn’t been all that nice anyway. No one but the granddaughter would miss her.
Every year there were more elderly. People were living longer and longer. All well and good if they were healthy, but, unfortunately, most weren’t. Every year he saw more old people coming into the hospital, filling up the beds, and using up tax dollars he and his generation paid. He’d read that almost 30 percent of the Medicare dollars were going to the care of people during their last year of life. Thirty percent! He’d read that by the year 2040, 45 percent of the expenditures would be paid out to let these people cling to life for a few more months.
It didn’t make sense.
In fact, it seemed cruel to him. Cruel to make the old live longer. Cruel to make the young pay for it. You only had to look at the relatives’ faces after a visit to see that it was agony watching a loved one slowly break down and die. Didn’t he know it from personal experience? Some of his patients reminded him of moldering corpses that, by some accident of nature, still drew breath. They smelled of decay.
They put animals
to sleep. Why not human beings?
He hated to see people suffer.
People ought to be able to die with dignity.
If the government could fund abortions for drudges and welfare recipients, why not extend death with dignity to the old? It made perfect sense to him. The arguments were the same. He carried the thought further, rolling it around some more. If people didn’t want to shell out money to support crack babies or babies born into poverty or babies born with handicaps, why would they want to finance long-term care for people who couldn’t pull their share of the workload anymore?
It ticked him off how much money he had to pay in taxes every year. The more he made, the more the government took. And where was it all going? To drones. How long had it been since Leota Reinhardt had held a job and paid taxes into the system? Two decades? Besides that, how many thousands of dollars of taxpayers’ money were going to be spent keeping her alive for a few months longer?
Benefits and burdens should be measured.
It wasn’t right to prolong life. He’d seen people suffer agonies untold with cancer and emphysema and diabetes, where bit by bit the body died off. And family members suffered right along with them. Like he had. Like his mother had. All the talk about dying being a part of living . . . If that was the truth, then what was the big deal in helping the process along?
He’d overheard enough of the shouting in that waiting room to know Leota Reinhardt didn’t want to end up in a convalescent hospital. The family didn’t want to be responsible for in-home nursing care, except the girl who didn’t know what she was getting into. And the guy shouting didn’t want to see the entire estate siphoned away by private in-home nursing care that might last as long as the old lady did.
That beautiful girl ought to be out dancing and having a good time instead of saddling herself with a sick old woman who wasn’t ever going to get any better.
One injection. That’s all it’d take. And all Leota Reinhardt’s suffering would be over.
No one even had to know.
He looked up and around the room, vaguely uncomfortable, defensive. Sometimes he felt as though someone was watching him . . . as though someone could read his thoughts. A pity he couldn’t say what he thought without risking his job. He was more compassionate than most; he cared about patients, and he hated watching people suffer. Why should he feel apologetic for wanting to help a patient die with dignity?
It had been hard the first time. He’d felt sick for days afterward. Sick with guilt, sick with fear, sick with feelings he couldn’t even identify. But he’d gotten over it. He thought about it all the time and the reasons why he’d done it. It was right; he knew he was right to do it. He had made the decision after overhearing the patient’s twenty-year-old daughter, hysterical and screaming at the doctor, “Can’t you do something? Why does she have to suffer like this?”
The doctor hadn’t had the guts to do what should’ve been done weeks earlier. But he had. During the quiet hours of the night shift, when all the visitors were gone and the nurses were working on charts and counting meds, he’d gone into the room and given the patient an injection. She hadn’t even opened her eyes. She had died with dignity.
The second time had been a little easier, and with each one after that he’d spent less and less time feeling anything but relief. He’d helped ten patients in a hospital in Southern California, most of them with cancer or emphysema. Then he worked in San Francisco and, over a period of three years, helped twenty more with AIDS. Seeing all those dying patients had gotten to him. All that suffering, not to mention the cost. Thousands and thousands of dollars a month, just to keep one patient in medicine. How insane was that?
He had several vials of morphine and succinylcholine chloride in his locker, given to him by one of the nurses he’d gone out with in San Francisco. He wasn’t alone in the way he felt. There were others, and the numbers were growing.
There were so many who needed help. After all, where was the dignity in being incontinent, slobbering, and half-paralyzed?
If he were in Leota Reinhardt’s place, he’d want someone to show a little mercy.
Nora stopped trying to defend herself and listened. Annie stopped lashing out and accusing and began to relate everything Leota had told her about those early years. For the first time in her life, Nora began to see things through her mother’s eyes, and it hurt.
Oh, how it hurt.
She kept seeing that dream image of her mother on her knees in the garden looking toward the house with such longing in her eyes. Had it been a dream? Or had she seen her mother like that time and again while she was in the kitchen doing her grandmother’s bidding, soaking up the bitter words and letting them take root in her soul?
“She loves you, Mom.”
“She never said so.”
“She showed you by working.”
“I would’ve liked to have heard the words.”
“Maybe you did, but you weren’t listening.”
Nora started to cry. How many tears had she shed in her lifetime? Gallons for herself. And now she was weeping for her mother, feeling the pain as though it were her own. And wasn’t it? “I don’t know what to do!”
Annie was crying, too. “Help me, Mom. I want to bring her home.”
“The doctor said she needs to be in the hospital. She’s so sick.”
“The doctor said she needs extensive care,” Annie said, determined.
“But you’re giving up your whole life!”
Annie leaned forward, her hands open, pleading. “Mom, she doesn’t have a lot of time, and I want to spend every day I can with her. Don’t you want that now? Don’t you want the chance to get to know her? You never did before. You never saw her or who she really was.”
Nora was afraid, so afraid, of making the wrong decision. How many times in her life had she been wrong? So many times she couldn’t count. And this time it mattered. It mattered so much. “I could spend time with her in a hospital. There are excellent ones, you know. There’s one not far from us, isn’t that so, Fred? You could come home, Anne-Lynn. We could go together and visit her.”
“It wouldn’t be the same and you know it, Mom. If Grandma had a choice, when the Lord calls her home, she’d want to be on a chaise longue in her garden.”
Nora felt torn. Fred put his hand over hers and squeezed gently. He was looking at her, the tenderness of his expression encouraging her. You know what’s right, Nora. You know in your heart what your mother would want. Wouldn’t you want the same thing? To have your family around you . . . to be in your own home?
“All right, Annie,” she said in a broken voice. “I don’t fully agree that this is best, but I’ll help you.”
“We’ll bring her home tomorrow.” Relief filled Annie’s eyes, eyes so warm and thankful. Nora had never seen that look in her daughter’s eyes before—at least, not for her.
“Tomorrow might be too soon, Annie,” Fred said. “The doctor said she’s very weak. Maybe it’d be better to wait a few days.”
“Mom, please.”
Nora let her breath out slowly. All the wasted years of bitterness. Maybe this one act might pave the way to a new relationship with her mother, however brief it might turn out to be. “I’ll help you bring her home tomorrow morning.”
Leota dozed. It was difficult to sleep with all the noise and activities of the hospital—nurses coming and going, a patient in the next bed moaning until she was given another shot that eased her pain and made her sleep so soundly she snored like a man. Then there was that medical technician who seemed to hang around. He’d just a minute ago stood in the doorway, then moved on when a nurse had said something to him.
Her mind drifted back to the years just before the war, when Bernard had been whole. She could see him in that dance hall, watching her. She could remember the wind in her face as they sat in the rumble seat riding home.
The tune of “Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me” ran in her head. She could see Mama
Reinhardt knitting socks for Bernard. She remembered the air-raid sirens going off and the block warden in her hard hat knocking on the door and telling them they had to black out the windows better because light still showed through. They’d saved everything for the war effort. Bacon grease for making ammunition, toothpaste tubes, tin cans, glass jars, newspapers and magazines when she’d finished reading and rereading them a dozen times. Nothing was wasted.
How her victory garden had flourished! She’d grown enough rhubarb, lettuce, cabbage, tomatoes, peas, corn, beets, carrots, and potatoes to keep the neighborhood fed. Mama Reinhardt had canned hundreds of jars of cherries, plums, apricots, and applesauce.
She could still see that Jewel Tea truck come around the corner, selling everything from hairpins to crackers. And the Borden’s milk truck and the Swedish bakery truck. She used to sell some of her vegetables to old Toby, who came around with his pickup. He always ran out of produce long before he ran out of customers.
She thought of Cosma, her dear friend. She’d never forget the permanent Cosma gave her. She said I looked like Rita Hayworth with all my red-blonde hair in wild curls. We went shopping in San Francisco, and the sailors whistled, and all I could do was cry because I kept wishing Bernard were home to see how nice I looked. Cosma took a picture of me in that one-piece sunsuit I wore all summer long in the garden. I struck a Betty Grable pose. Bernard wrote back and said the guys in his unit told him he’d married a “dish.” I wonder what I did with that sequined beret? I used to have a straw hat with giant roses and a chapeau with a barnyard of feathers. How funny I must have looked!
She let her mind fill with memories of Eleanor and George when they were little. She loved the tiny curls on the back of George’s neck, the smell of soft skin in the curve of Eleanor’s baby neck. And those chubby legs.
“Mama.”
Let me dream about those far-off days as though they were near again. Lord, let me remember what it was like to have a whole man looking forward to a bright future and two babies, healthy and happy. Don’t let my mind drift to the dark years.