An Undying Love ... just an old love story.
I try to remember if I saw the gardener this past Wednesday, his usual day to mow and blow. Who will notice if Roy’s plants die now? Not Roy who is sick in bed. Not Martha who uses a walker and rarely ventures outside. Roy told me once that Martha wouldn’t allow him to get her a wheelchair. She couldn’t stand the idea of looking like an invalid. That sounds like Martha, the kind of woman that old-fashioned words like proud and stubborn apply to. Too proud for her own good.
Martha’s second cousin comes up from Orange County every few weeks to look in on the couple. He has a daughter, Deana, who lives in Santa Monica. I’ve never seen her but I know she does their weekly grocery shopping even though she has a full-time job and a little one to look after. Roy and Martha have no children of their own.
###
Peeking through their front window, I see that a hospital bed has taken the place of the polished dining table with its Hummel figurine centered on the white lace doily. The table itself has been shoved into a corner.
I’d brought up the subject of bringing in a hospital bed a few days ago when Eveleen, the woman who’s been cooking and looking after the both of them since Roy got sick, asked if I could help her get Roy propped up in bed. He didn’t have the strength to sit up by himself and, at gone one in the afternoon, she hadn’t been able to get him upright either. He needed to eat.
Going around to the other side of the double bed, I’d kicked off my shoes and scrambled to a kneeling position on Martha’s half of the mattress. Trying not to notice that he looked like a sack of bones lying there in nothing but a thin white undershirt, his long bare legs splayed out from an adult diaper, I got hold of Roy under his arms and tried heaving him up. At six foot three, he was an awkward, unwieldy bundle, and for all our pushing and pulling, Roy’s head and shoulders were barely higher than when we’d begun.
“Have you thought about bringing in a hospital bed?” I’d asked, catching my breath, looking from Martha to Eveleen and back. I hated to say the words, hospital bed, seeing how the idea of it made Martha feel but Roy had to eat.
“You’re right. We need it. I told Angel so,” Eveleen said, nodding toward Martha.
I was glad Martha was somebody’s Angel.
Eveleen continued, her thick Jamaican accent strong in the small room. “I been doin’ everyting myself an’ I don't mind tellin’ you, it’s hard work.”
Roy broke in, in a crotchety old man voice I’d never heard from him before—
“I’m not up high enough. I can’t eat like this.”
“I’m going to get Mark,” I said. “He’ll be happy to help.”
“What’s that?” Roy was fiddling with his hearing aid.
“I said I’m getting Mark to help lift you up. Okay?”
Roy was shaking his head, still fumbling with the clear plastic of his hearing device.
“I’ll just get my husband,” I said.
“What?” Roy said again, his hearing aid ringing shrilly.
“She’s going to get her husband to help,” Martha yelled from the foot of the bed.
“Who?” Roy yelled right back.
“Be back in a flash,” I called, escaping out the door.
Mark had breezed into Roy’s bedroom and, as if he saw old men sprawled semi-naked in bed every day, casually leaned in and lifted Roy up while Eveleen adjusted the pillows behind the old man’s back.
###
And now the dreaded hospital bed has made its way into the house, if not the bedroom. Of course, Roy isn’t in the bed. Otherwise, the drapes would have been drawn or the sheers pulled to shield the scene. Martha would never allow Roy to be on display like some figure in an exhibition: Prostate Cancer Patient At Home. Circa 2000. Like in one of those dioramas at the Museum of Natural History with their neat little framed white cards posted nearby.
I know Martha is the one fighting moving that bed into their room. She wants that old man to stay beside her in the same bed they’ve shared for over sixty years. Even though his illness keeps them both from sleeping much, at least he’s there next to her, just like always, an arm’s reach away.
###
I have to circle around the bed and walk through the kitchen to get to the small den in the back of the house where Martha sits in her avocado green vinyl chair, head resting on her hand. I squeeze her gnarled fingers in greeting, gently but firmly. I’m almost half her age but have the same arthritic knots on my knuckles. Heberon’s nodes they’re called, as if they’re some exotic islands Ulysses might have discovered instead of the ugly, swollen joints they really are. It’s not as bad as it looks except when my little boy needs help tying his shoes.
I feel guilty seeing Martha just sitting there without even the radio or television on to keep her company. While I’ll gladly pick up a bag of cookies or a can of coffee when I’m at the grocery store— “It’s no trouble” I insist, and mean it—I know what Martha really wants is company.
°°°
“Martha,” I offer tentatively, “Mark can help Jack move the bed into your room the next time he comes up. If you want.”
“Thanks, honey,” she says. “I’ll let you know.”
“Okay, Martha, remember… call me anytime and I’ll have Mark run over.”
“You’re so sweet,” she says, hugging me tightly.
“Nah.” I wave the compliment away. “It’s the least I can do.”
And we both laugh at my volunteering my husband to do the work while I take the credit. It’s a wife thing.
The following Sunday afternoon, the sky outside my window is bright with the promise of spring, I’m on the phone with my mother. We’re talking about our Easter plans for the following week when I see a tall scrubbed-faced blond coming up our front walk. In her mid-thirties, she’s athletic-looking in jeans and a white t-shirt, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. Talking to my mother the whole time, I watch my husband as he answers the door. His shoulders sag a little and his lips compress into a grim smile and I know then that the woman at the door is Deana and I know why she’s come.
“Sorry, Mum,” I say when I can speak. “I’m going to have to call you back.”
When I go next door, the hospital bed is still there crowding the dining room. It’s never been slept in. I still have to circle around it to get to where Martha sits in her green chair in the back room. Jack is there. He tells me in a grave and quiet voice that Roy died in the night, peacefully, quietly, in his own bed. Martha had been sleeping right next to him just as she’d done for their entire lives together.
###
“What will I do now?” Martha asks me when the well-attended gathering for Roy has wound down.
All Roy’s Ham radio operator buddies came to pay their respects, crowding the immaculate storeroom where he kept his tools and did most of his broadcasting. Relatives—brothers and cousins and nieces and nephews on both sides—flow in and out, mingling with the rest of the friends and neighbors who have come to say goodbye. Outside, the tables and chairs set out in the garden so everyone can admire Roy’s cherished roses, and his view, are starting to empty.
It’s been over sixty years since Roy and Martha moved to Mar Vista. Theirs was the first house on the hill, surrounded by farmland and orange groves at the time. Looking out at the sea of prime West-Side real estate that crowds the landscape now, the neighbors all know precisely how much this little house is worth today. They all wonder discreetly if Martha will sell, but they wonder also, where would she go?
A little boy, a great-nephew, sits with my son on the couch and the two of them talk Pokemon for a while. Someone— Jack probably—has set up a ramp leading from the back porch steps out to the yard but Martha never moves out of that avocado green vinyl chair.
When I go over to say hello a couple of days later, Eveleen says they counted over seventy-five people in attendance.
“Where have you been honey?” Martha asks me. “Did you go out of town?”
It's only been a couple of days.
I try to stop by two or three times a week, simply to sit in the den and make small talk with Martha for half an hour or so. I don’t know what else to do. Outside the window we watch the April showers come and go, this spring brings alternately sunny mornings and cloudy afternoons.
“So, what’s new?” Martha asks and I make conversation about my husband and our son. It’s just a bit of chatter, some small fluff designed to break up her days.
“How are you doing, Martha ?” I ask.
“I’m all right, I guess," she shrugs, “‘Bout as well as you’d expect, I imagine.”
She looks out the window where Roy’s whirligig blows in the breeze. Beneath it lies a bed of roses: American Beauties, Blue Girls, Camelots, and Queen Elizabeths. “I miss my husband.”
“I know.” I hug her firmly and pat her back. It feels so ineffectual. “I know.”
“We’re going away for the Easter holiday,” I tell her a few days before Good Friday, “but I’ll stop by and see you before we leave.”
On the morning of Good Friday, just before we take off, I go over to give Martha an Easter lily. There are some cars in her driveway. A red truck that I think is Jack’s. But there’s also a blue Datsun and a man I’ve never seen before, leaning against its hood.
Now I’m not sure what to do. She has company and I feel a little shy.
“You must be Eveleen’s husband.” I walk over to the man leaning against the Datsun and introduce myself. “I live next door,” I say, shifting the lily and shaking hands awkwardly. I’m afraid to ask but I do anyway.
“Is everything okay?”
“Martha 's gone,” he says quietly.
I stare at him. “What!?” Not pardon me or excuse me, just What?
“She passed away last night.”
###
The summer I was nine years old I got hit in the stomach with a baseball bat. I’d been standing too close to home plate, waiting my turn when the kid ahead of me threw his bat. It hit me so hard that it knocked the wind right out of me. I couldn’t talk. I sat right down on the field and cried.
That’s what I do now, sit right down on Roy and Martha’s front steps and cry. Eveleen’s husband goes to find his wife.
“It’s so soon,” I say in baffled protest, but I’m not really surprised. I knew she couldn’t live without him.
“I tink Roy has been callin’ Angel to come and join him,” Eveleen says.
And Martha, like the good wife she’d been for over sixty years, couldn’t bear to make him wait. I leave the Easter lily sitting on Martha’s steps. I hope she knows I stopped by to say so long.
THE END
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