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April 1993
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RAIN EXAGGERATES MY tendency to see double. It’s difficult to distinguish the reflection of images on water, through glass, or on wet pavement from the blurred images resulting from my weakened ocular muscles. I turn away from the window where rivulets of water are playing tricks with my eyes, melting the pane, and leaving me suspended between worlds. It’s been like this for eight years now, ever since Bessie died. On clear days I can tilt my head twenty degrees to the left and bring faces, signs, and scenery into focus, but on rainy days I confuse reflections with diplopia, my double vision, and become perplexed. My thick corrective glasses and cocked head make me look like a myopic spaniel, but they allow me to look people in the face and see just one nose, just two eyes. I can look at my son, Michael, and see a busy man with graying hair and sagging jowls, and not someone who wobbles back and forth between adolescence and middle age every time I blink.
Most people aren’t aware of my disability. Sometimes even I forget because there are days, even weeks, when things come into focus. The past and present don’t seem so blurred and muddled. Before Bessie died there’d been another kind of doubleness. There’d been two of us, a pair, coupled for nearly fifty years. Double meant increase, abundance, joy. Afterward it meant distorted vision, ocular fatigue, and cold dinners in front of a television with an oscillating horizontal.
There’s a brochure on my desk from Bayside Manor Retirement Home. Michael left it for me even though he knows I can no longer read small print on shiny paper. No matter, I know what it says. It says, old man, you’ve had it. You’re done. Pack up and move along, you’ve outlived your welcome in the world.
A small incident set him off, a minor mishap he’s blown out of proportion. I was out walking after dinner a few weeks ago and, preoccupied, I missed my turn. Nothing odd about that, but by the time I realized what I’d done the sun had set and I was wandering around in the dark. With better eyes I could have managed, but, well, I got lost. Whichever way I turned I only got further afield until I was exhausted. I must have been stumbling about because a policeman stopped to ask if I needed help. “I’m fine, just fine,” I told him. “But I seem to have misplaced my apartment.” It was a joke. I thought he’d laugh and point me in the right direction. Instead, he drove me home then notified my son. Ever since then, all Michael talks about is, wouldn’t I be happier living with other people who’d cook my meals and see that I was safe?
If Bessie were still here she’d give him what for. No one ever pushed my Bessie around. I’d like to see anyone try to tuck her away in a warehouse for the doddering and incontinent. Sadly, I don’t have my wife’s fighting spirit, but I do have all my marbles and a tidy bank account and I’m not going anywhere if I can help it.
Who could have imagined that sweet little Michael would grow up to become my nemesis? I can still see him toddling around our Finchley flat dragging Nimi, his stuffed monkey, behind him by the tail. Whenever I read him a story, I’d have to show the pictures to that monkey, and I’d have to kiss them both good night when he went to bed. My God that was a long time ago.
Lately, I’ve been thinking more and more about the past and the years I spent growing up in England. I can’t remember the last time I went back to Alwoodley, and I probably wouldn’t know a soul there now, but in memory I can still saunter down Mount Road, wave at Mr. Friedman, and continue down Goodrick to the reservoir. It’s always a perfect morning in late May and I’m always heading for the water. You wouldn’t think a Jewish boy from Leeds would have such an affinity for the sea, but there you are. I made small wooden boats and launched them into the reservoir until the momentous day my father bought a Chris Craft runabout, and we began spending weekends on the River Aire.
I don’t think he really cared for fishing, but his doctor told him to relax, to get away from the office, and boating appealed to him more than golf. I’d pilot the boat while he sat in the passenger seat reading The Times, eating salami sandwiches, and grumbling about Bolsheviks and anti-Semites. Those days were the happiest of my life, at least until I met Bessie and discovered an entirely different magnitude of joy.
I crossed the Mediterranean any number of times when I was younger and working on my doctorate in Classical Archaeology, but after Bessie there was only one great voyage, the passage from Southampton to Halifax just after the war. I was in my late thirties and Bessie in the bloom of early motherhood, that lovely softness belying her genius for organization and efficiency. The woman was a trooper. I’d expected her to balk when I was offered a professorship in Canada. Instead, she packed up for a new life in the Great North without a murmur of dissent. It’s embarrassing to remember, but we both imagined Toronto perpetually buried under snow and surrounded by forests teeming with bears, and yet she said yes, just like that, and we were off. The army should have conscripted Bessie instead of me. We would have won the war in half the time.
We booked passage on a Holland America vessel, the Veendam. The ship had been taken hostage by the Germans then bombed half to death by the allies, but by the time we stepped aboard she’d been completely refurbished and was a thing of beauty, the most elegant ship we’d ever seen.
Bess and I both came from hard-working middle-class people. We’d never known hardship, but we’d never been exposed to great luxury either, so the ship was a revelation, a floating palace. Even in Tourist Class we were treated like royalty, allowed access to everything but a few first-class lounges and the first-class dining hall. We were served three meals a day on immaculate white linen by impeccably trained waiters who seemed to have no concern but our comfort. Bessie and Michael spent so much time in the ship’s pool that she joked they were swimming to America. Of course, she joked about everything. We were always laughing. There was entertainment every night, then music and dancing and a midnight buffet, and the night Bess dressed up as Carmen Miranda and mamboed with a turban of bananas on her head. My God, that trip was a wonder.
My apartment is pleasant enough, more than large enough for one old man. It’s an easy walk to Forest Hills where I buy lunch at the Village Diner and flirt with Kaleisha, the Jamaican waitress who won’t serve me corned beef or pickles since learning I’m on a low-salt diet. There’s a grocery, a hardware store, and a pharmacy nearby so I rarely go downtown. I have my books, my television, my old recliner, and the chesterfield we brought from the house we sold when Bessie decided we needed to downsize and simplify our lives. As usual, she was right. What would I do all alone in that big house now, and how would I pack it up and move without her?
I don’t want for anything. Life is comfortable enough, but lately I’ve been feeling landlocked. Something’s made me restless and I’m remembering sailing trips to Crete, glorious summers boating on the River Aire and that great transatlantic voyage.
So, it’s occurred to me that I have options. One of the world’s great lakes is only a streetcar ride away. I could buy a small boat and go out fishing or sail to one of the Toronto islands. I can almost feel the wind in my hair and smell the open water. A man who can pilot a boat can certainly manage his own meals, pay his own bills, and is in no way ready for an old age home. Even Michael will have to concede that much. That’s why I’m circling ads in the paper. I’m shopping for a boat.