My Grandmother Dora was now living with us on 52nd Street. She was ill with high blood pressure, so my mother moved her from the brownstone to care for her. An extra bed was put in my parents’ room. My grandmother rarely spoke. When she did it was in Yiddish or occasionally Russian. She was not as tall as her daughters, but she was taller than I was, and slender. She had a classically beautiful face and light blue eyes. With four highly educated children, I’m sure she was ashamed of her lack of English. Her husband had schlepped off to create a Palestine for the Jews and left her. I never saw her with a friend she could just talk to. Neither Fremo nor my mother spoke Yiddish. It was clear, though, when Fremo came home from her late dates with various men and my grandmother flung farshtunkena and other strange words after her as she went up the stairs of the brownstone that she had an effect on her daughters. She was remote out of self-consciousness, but she deeply cared about them.
One bright day, I ran into the apartment after a meeting. A big, young, uniformed policeman was standing in the small hallway that led to the bedrooms. My mother huddled on the living room couch moaning, her hands clasped tightly in her lap. “Mother is in the bathroom. I can’t. Would you go?” I walked past the policeman and down the small hall. The bathroom door was open. My grandmother was standing on her head in the tub. Dead. Her head at the drain, her legs extended up to the showerhead. Her nightgown had pooled around her head, revealing her naked body to me for the first time. The sight was so cruel and so bizarre that it didn’t seem possible. I pulled her light nightgown down from her head to her legs and called to the policeman. “Could you please carry my grandmother to the bed?” I pointed to the bedroom. I couldn’t watch. I went and sat by my mother in the living room. Her teeth were chattering.
“What happened?” I asked.
“She went to throw up. She felt sick, and she got a stroke that hurled her into the bathtub.” Such indignity. So shocking, so mean.
“She’s on the bed. Do you want to see her?”
“I can’t, I can’t.” I think my mother was in shock. I went to my grandmother. She lay rigidly still. Her blue eyes were open and fixed, like a doll’s. Old doll’s eyes, I thought. Only her beautiful wavy hair was still lustrous and alive. I passed my fingers through her hair. I’d never seen it loose and spread out on a pillow before. I studied her features, frozen in midflight, surprised. I kissed her cool cheek and closed her light blue eyes.