2001-02 Charles River Review: The Carriage of a Gentleman

The air was piercingly cold when my brother and I got out of the car and crunched through frozen snow lumped over the asphalt of a parking lot in upstate New York. The exposed skin on my face momentarily tingled, then turned numb and mask-like as we neared the small hospital building on the other end. Heat, mingled with the smell of baby powder and medication, billowed us as we entered the lobby and proceeded up in the elevator and down the hall, the route now familiar. With wet boots squeaking on the shiny white linoleum, we headed toward our grandfather's room.

My mom had called me earlier that week. "Honey, Grandpa is getting worse," she'd said, "The doctors have given him only a few more days . . . Your brothers will be here on Wednesday." We all knew it would happen eventually--he had been in and out of the hospital since October, but these last few weeks, since right before Christmas, he had changed. Before, we would call him at night and chat as we always had over the years, regardless of where he was.

"Hi, Grandpa, how are you?"

"Alinka, hello! It's so good to hear from you! How is everything? How's work?"

"Work's fine, same as always, I guess. How are you doing?"

"Oh, very good, very good. But tell me what's going on with you. Are you having fun in Boston?"

And so our conversations would go, meandering and lighthearted. He had a laugh that could best be described as a delighted chuckle, a distinctive "hee hee" that burst forth when he was happy and content, and it was impossible not to laugh with him. Our conversations were filled with it.

His autumn hospital visit had seemed no different, another short stay that would be over soon. Suddenly, though, he lost most of his ability to speak, and by Christmas Day he sat in his usual chair in the dining room, unaware of the presents before him, and only able to mumble a few words.

The fact that my grandfather's illness accelerated during the holidays was particularly upsetting. Christmas has always been the holiday when we feel the closest, when the entire family gets together, no matter where they live. In fact, there have only been two occasions in my life where we did not spend Christmas at my grandparent's house. There was always snow at their house in Gloversville, New York, a wonderful peculiarity of the elevation, since there were often times when the street next to theirs got next to nothing, while we got a foot of brilliant, magical powder. It was an unexplainable phenomenon, a wonderful embellishment that made our time there all the more special. My brothers and I would sled on the hill in the yard and build snowmen every day of vacation, barely noticing our fingers and toes getting wet and numb, our noses frozen red. Only when it was getting dark would we concede to go in, still not acknowledging one ounce of exhaustion. I was always comforted by the fact that no matter how cold it got, I was only steps away from the warmth and comfort of my grandparents' house. They were quintessential grandparents, like you read about in storybooks. Always so happy to have us there and so cheerful, it was impossible to be sad around them. Inside, we sat around the living room, playing with toys when we were kids, as Grandpa watched TV or read Popular Mechanics. As we got older, he taught us how to play chess, and epic tournaments would ensue that lasted the entire week.

For as long as I can remember, my grandfather collected cars. It was his passion. He loved cars in every shape and form, old and new, regardless of their condition. He couldn't bear to get rid of them, even the lemons. My grandmother likened it to the old days: there were men, she said, who bought horses for labor and then could not bring themselves to part with them even when they became lame and useless. "Grandpa," we'd say after he showed us yet another find, "the doors don't shut all the way on this one, and there's no rearview mirror. It smells like exhaust fumes inside." "Aah," he'd reply with a wave of his hand, trying to persuade us cheerfully but futilely to see it his way, "Little things! The engine in here is like new!" He would take us into even the oldest, most beat-up cars and show us the faded and battered interiors with bursting pride. "See?" he would say about each, "Isn't this one a beauty?"

Their yard and driveway was always filled with cars. Some of them had been bought, some traded, and some loaned, most of the business coming from my grandfather's less-than-reputable auto mechanics. Our family would try to talk some sense into him from time to time.

"Dad," my mother would plead, "you have to stop doing business with Jimmy. He's a thief and he's always trying to sell you some piece of junk! The last car you got from him can barely make it out of the driveway!"

Grandpa would concede. "Yes," he'd say, "that last one wasn't so good. But Jimmy's not a bad guy. I'm going to take it back and trade it for another one at the shop."

In spite of all the lemons he brought home, I eventually learned to appreciate his point of view about it. I particularly remember a pearly, cream-colored Mercedes convertible he got when I was in my early teens. It wouldn't run and ended up sitting in the garage for years, but what visions it stirred in me! I would sit in the driver's seat, barely 15, and run my hand over the smooth mahogany leather of the seats and steering wheel, inhaling the deep earthy fragrance, like an old horse's saddle that had permanently saturated the interior. Tracing the thick, rigid stitching until it impressed a line in my forefinger, I envisioned myself driving along the beach, top down, my hair blowing in the wind. It was a dream car.

Everyone in the family begged him to get rid of it. They even found a buyer several years later, a 20-year-old kid who bought old Mercedes and fixed them up. He offered eight thousand dollars for it, a lot of money for a car that needed a new engine and some sort of repair on virtually everything else. When they told Grandpa, however, he scoffed. "Eight thousand? Please! That car's book value is $20,000 at least. Look at it! It's in mint condition!" By then everyone knew it was virtually useless to argue with him. It wasn't the car's actual condition that awakened my grandfather's adoration, it was its history and its potential that made it perfect. For all its faults, each one of his cars had something special in it that made him admire it and love it, that made up for its negative qualities, erased them, and transformed it from being shoddy to brilliant, from average to magnificent.

My grandparents lived through World War II, survived the Holocaust, despite being in Poland, the center of the cauldron. They both grew up there--my grandmother Catholic, my grandfather Jewish. When the war began, they did not want to leave and abandon their families, all the people they loved and had grown up with. Eventually, of course, they had to go. Several of my grandfather's 12 siblings had already been sent to concentration camps--it was only a matter of time before he was hauled off himself. In the years before they left, however, they were exposed to the horrific brutality of the war. They saw the German troops march in and take control of their village and the countryside, experienced the disappearance of friends overnight--there one day and vanished the next, either murdered or carted to the camps. They saw whole families herded into the town square and shot in the head, every one, even the children, for teaching the Polish language, or for giving a Jew some food or a blanket. They hardly ever talked about it with us. I don't recall Grandpa ever saying one word to me about the war. The fact that they were given this second chance in a new country, the ability to start afresh with all the horror behind them, well, wouldn't that be enough to make anyone an optimist?

Looking back, that was one of the best things he taught me, to see the good in things and overlook the bad. That was the thing about my grandfather, what made him so unique, his never-ending optimism. He was an optimist to an extreme, in fact (I suppose there can never really be a perfect balance in things), and sometimes that led to problems. He had probably been taken advantage of hundreds of times--a constant source of annoyance to those close to him who witnessed it. But to be any less generous and open-hearted would have corrupted what was so wonderful about him. He was an ideal example to me of the goodness that is possible in people's hearts, of the ability to hold on to the wonder of a child, something that in his 90 years he never lost.

As we entered my grandfather's hospital room, the smell, familiar after a few days yet still distinct upon entering the building, had stopped assaulting our nostrils and was fading into normality. It is a peculiar odor, that hospital smell, composed of so many different sources, yet easily identifiable no matter where you go. It is a blend of sterility and uncleanliness, a thin cloth composed of wafts of medications and powders and a heavier current of cleanser and disinfectants, all working hard but still only barely disguising the real body of the odor, the stench of urine and feces and bile that permeates the walls and can never fully be masked. It has always inspired apprehension in me, a reminder that I smell it because something is not as it should be.

Grandpa was given a single room across the hall from the nurses' station. It seemed vast for the one patient it contained, giving the impression that a single spoken word could travel and bounce off the walls and ceilings indefinitely, a continuous echo. It was a wash of institutional white, with two windows on the far side looking out onto the parking lot and stretches of bare January trees and fields beyond it. Everything was barren, inside and out. His bed was set squarely in the middle. A semi-circle of chairs surrounded it, a mark of our weeklong family vigil. He was a small mound under the crisp sheets, shrunken and pale, a trace of his former rotund self.

As we walked through the door we saw the stout head nurse by my grandfather's bed. She looked up when she heard us.

"Good morning," my brother and I both said, smiling tensely, out of habit. Then cautiously, "How is he?" It was an unnecessary question. There was no good news to be heard. We knew that much from the past few days.

She smiled back professionally, her manner calculated to inspire calmness. "Well, he's having a harder and harder time breathing," she told us. We had heard it immediately. His shallow breaths now included a steady wheezing that hadn't been there the day before. "The infection is spreading to his brain and interfering with its functions. As you know, there's not much more we can do, aside from making him comfortable," she added, offering another consoling smile.

We did know. It had been my grandfather's request years ago when he was still young, long before he suffered his first heart attack, that if he ever got really sick, where it would not be possible for him to live a normal life without machines, to let him pass in peace. Although he loved his cars so much, beautiful to their beholder as broken and bruised as they were, he did not want to become like them--a shadow of the past, a burden in the present. Thus, there were no machines in this room, blinking and blipping, not even a heart monitor. Nothing to aid his breathing, to patch him up temporarily, to increase the time he spent here.

I looked at him, unconscious, eyes shut tight and mouth slightly open, his lips dried out and coated with white mucous. I barely recognized these hollow cheeks, this pallid complexion. I turned back to the nurse, and the pain, the bewilderment, must have been reflected in my face, because she paused on her way out, walked over to me, and touched my arm lightly.

"He's not going to be with us much longer," she told me softly. I nodded, afraid to say a word for fear the tightness in my throat would burst and push out the hot tears welling in my head. "If anything changes," she continued, "let us know." I nodded again, trying to smile, and turned back to the bed as she padded out of the room.

My brother and I passed the hours by watching TV, reading and talking, waiting for my mother and grandmother to relieve us from our post. The days of watching over him, waiting for what would inevitably happen, were emotionally exhausting, so we all took turns. A few family members stayed at the hospital at a time until the next shift replaced us and allowed us to rest. We relived fond memories of the past while we were there. Christmas vacations spent playing in the snow, summers of waking up and running outside while the dew was still wet and cold on the grass, exploring the yard until the afternoon, when hot sunshine had dried the lawn to a field of dry, crunching spears. We talked about my grandparents' past, about how they came over to the States, what it must have been like to arrive here and begin again. We re-hashed stories my mom had told us about when she was little--about their camping trips and beloved family pets. My neck became achy for sitting up in the hard plastic chair for so long, and my hand tingled from angling through the metal rails of the bed to hold my grandfather's arm. It seemed like a routine that could go on forever, one day fading into the next. I could not, or did not want to, envision an end to it.

I did not expect to be the one who was with my grandfather when he died that afternoon, but there I was, alone in the room with him. My brother had gone downstairs to call my mom and tell her to hurry over. Grandpa's breathing had changed, was stopping and starting erratically. At the moment it happened, I was intensely scrutinizing his arm. The skin was surprisingly, remarkably, smooth. When exposed from beneath the blanket it was hairless and white, softer than my own, and cool to the touch. Somehow it appeared foreign, not dry and crinkly as I expected . . .it was flawless. And so I focused on this young arm, on the healthy resilience of it, even as it became salty and slick with my tears, and I waited for the rest of my family to get there.

A recent, small event always comes to mind when I think about my grandfather, which represents to me a culmination of everything I admired in him. A couple of years ago, we were at a rehabilitation center visiting a family member. There was a rather large group of us--my parents, grandparents, and brothers. As we were leaving, we saw what had become a familiar sight in these places. An old man in his late eighties, about my grandfather's age, was being pushed toward us in a wheelchair by his middle-aged son. The old man was trying to say something, but was not able to speak coherently. His mouth moved but all that came out was stuttering and wheezing. His inability to communicate frustrated him, and he grew more and more agitated, raising his voice and gesticulating with his arms. His son rolled his eyes behind him in exasperation, embarrassed at the scene that was developing. "Shh!" he said to him sharply, as if scolding a disobedient child. "You're going back to your room now."

They were coming toward us from a perpendicular hallway, and stopped at the intersection to let us pass. We walked by quickly, averting our eyes to the dingy gray linoleum floor, embarrassed ourselves by the shame and hopelessness of the scene. My grandfather walked behind the group, more slowly. As I turned to check on him, I saw him slow down at the sight of the other old man. He walked toward the wheelchair, stopping directly before it. "Hello," he said amiably to the old man, tipping his hat and nodding his head in greeting, just as he would to a friend on the street. "How do you do?"

The old man stopped in mid-gesture, visibly surprised at being spoken to. He paused a second longer, then looked straight at my grandfather and nodded respectfully in return, moving his mouth, struggling to answer the unexpected salutation. The son, meanwhile, stared at the proceedings, dumbfounded it seemed that somebody would voluntarily engage his father in conversation. The two old men continued to exchange a friendly glance until the son regained his composure and wheeled the chair away, saying over his shoulder, "He's fine, thanks."

And that was my grandfather's gift, his magic. With a few words, one small gesture that to most would seem too insignificant to even bother to attempt, he momentarily transformed the world of a helpless, wheelchair-bound man. Lightly, effortlessly, he changed the dynamics in a gloomy rehabilitation center from those of patient versus visitor and healthy versus sick, to those of just people--simple and equal. After my grandfather died, a tearful man appeared at his wake. He paid his respects to the coffin and then turned to us. "He was a grand old gentleman," he said. Nothing could be truer.