Today is my ninety-ninth birthday. It will be a quiet celebration – lunch with Tessa and Emil at a Greek restaurant in South Milwaukee, back to my room for cupcakes.
Tessa and Emil are my only two regular visitors. Becky and Will have been living in New York City for three years. Will was offered some high-level, high-salary position in the Department of Pediatrics at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. With both boys away at college, there was no reason for Will not to accept the job. Becky needed some convincing. As a teacher, she had endured the worst of the pandemic and was happy to be back in the classroom at last, back with her defiant and stimulating sixth-graders who badgered and loved her. And she and I both enjoyed our visits, the little excursions to our frozen custard place, to Mitchell Park and elsewhere. In the end, Will persuaded her that there were students in New York City who would challenge her every bit as much as her sixth graders. And with her mother and Emil now living in Milwaukee, I would not be without family nearby.
I do miss Becky terribly, but we still talk every Saturday. For someone as free-spirited as my granddaughter, she is regimented about our Saturday phone calls – a routine that began when she was in college almost thirty years ago. I remember that, even after her wedding, on her honeymoon with Will, the call came at exactly eleven o’clock in the morning, Wisconsin time.
I didn’t expect you to call, I say.
But Grandpa, I always call you at this time.
But you’re on your honeymoon, I say.
Will is taking a shower. We’re going out later for dinner.
What time is it there? I ask.
Grandpa, can we stop talking about time?
What else is there? Did I say it then, or am I just thinking it now? I can hear the shower running in the background – across the miles, across an ocean.
Now, Becky and Will have made lives in New York. Becky says that she misses me, and Milwaukee, but she sounds happy.
Jordan and Peter navigated college together, both graduating from UW in four years. Jordan’s decision to take the year off after high school turned out, Becky believes, to have been a blessing. It allowed the boys to experience together everything about university life, the good and the bad, and it brought them closer. When they graduated last year, they both moved to Boston, rented an apartment together and found jobs – at different companies, but both of them, I am told, having something to do with computers and medical laboratories.
The pandemic upended everything at the nursing home. Janusz was one of eight residents who died from the virus. I knew three of them. Nearly half of the staff left within a year, some of them because they did not want to get vaccinated, which became a requirement for employment. With everything that I have seen, I cannot understand how anyone who works in this place could refuse the vaccine. Mrs. Platt has left, for entirely different reasons. The Milwaukee newspaper ran a story last year that our bookkeeper had been writing checks to herself for several years, and that Mrs. Platt knew and did nothing about it. She left without any farewell communication to the residents. Maria, who still works as a nurse in our unit, allowed privately that she was not unhappy to see Mrs. Platt go. But the new administrator has not yet won over the staff, and business seems to carry on as before.
Oliver and I had the room to ourselves for four months after Janusz died. But when the partition dividing the room in half was finally removed, I felt my friend’s absence more acutely than ever, so I offered no protest when a new resident was installed. I have now had three different roommates over the past five years, all of them younger than Janusz. The first had a heart condition to which the nursing staff was constantly responding. He died in his bed within a year, alone. His family was not here, and I slept soundly through the night. My second roommate, after Janusz, had late stage lung cancer, which eventually required hospitalization. The third was perfectly healthy until he fell and broke a rib. After surgery, he developed an infection of some kind. He was shuttled off to the hospital several times, always returning looking older and more frail than when he left. He died in the hospital, with his son and daughter-in-law bedside. His final words to me, when he left the room for the last time, were these: I’ll see you in the next life, Julian. If you tell me that a normal person cannot know when their final hours are at hand, I will have to disagree.
So once again, Oliver and I have the room to ourselves. For someone who never had a pet, and who certainly never wanted to share my accommodations with a cat, I have become surprisingly attached to Oliver. I have no idea how old Oliver is. He seems rather ageless to me, basically unchanged from the day I first moved into this place. But I realize that all living things age and all living things eventually die. Oliver may outlive me, or he may not. As for any future human roommate with whom I might be assigned, I have resolved not to get close to them, not to share too much information about my life and not to ask too many personal questions. The prospect of losing one more person close to me is simply not something I can bear.
Tessa and Emil took their European honeymoon, although it was much delayed. They had agreed, after Janusz’s memorial service, that they would rather not make the trip during the summer months. In the fall, Tessa found herself occupied with trying to sell the house the Elmhurst, while Emil looked for a place where they could start their new life in Milwaukee. They finally booked their honeymoon for the spring – a full year after the wedding. Our Greek-American friends, when word about the wedding reached Sheboygan, had collected money to send Tessa and Emil to Greece. Leander insisted that he was not behind the plot. But Tessa graciously declined the gift, suggesting that they use the money to throw themselves a party, being sure to toast the newlyweds with glasses of Ouzo. Whether or not the party ever took place I do not know. If it did, the venue would have been somewhere other than the Atheneum, which never reopened after the pandemic. Leander has tried unsuccessfully to sell the place. When he does finally sell it, I imagine that the new owners will want to simply tear the place down so they can erect condominiums or an office building. The Atheneum stood for a hundred years, but like everything else it ages and dies, and the land is now worth more than the building that, for the moment, occupies it.
The first stop on the honeymoon trip for Tessa and Emil was, of course, Poland. They flew into Warsaw, rented a car and drove down to Lublin. Janusz had told Emil the address of the place where he had lived with his parents, and they found their way there without difficulty. As expected, everything old had long since been replaced, so there was no apartment building, no apartment steps where Janusz had learned about his mother’s abduction, no place meaningful to disperse the ashes. Instead, on a whim, they drove until they came to a small lake on the south edge of the city, where they parked and walked to a little wooden gazebo. They stood there together, and Emil recited a short Polish prayer that he had learned, and then they let the wind carry Janusz’s ashes off into the water.
They had planned to drive to Auschwitz. Emil thought that it would be important to see the place where his grandmother had died. But they stood in the gazebo for a long time, silent, and Tessa somehow knew that the trip to Auschwitz had become unnecessary. They were in Lublin, where Janusz and his parents had lived their lives. This felt like enough.
After Poland, Tessa and Emil drove to Prague, then Berlin, then back to Warsaw. If they make a second trip, Tessa says she would like to see Italy and Greece. I hope they do.
Once every two or three weeks, I hear from Jordan. I still have the computer, but I use it less frequently than I once did. I prefer the phone. The last time Jordan called, we had a puzzling talk about Artificial Intelligence. It is a strange phrase, like Remote Learning or Virtual Learning, and it is one more thing that makes me glad I am close to the end of my life. Jordan tells me that Artificial Intelligence is able to think and scheme, plan and execute, create something fully formed from scraps and bones. Soon, he says, many human functions will be obsolete. Soon, Artificial Intelligence will exceed human abilities. I listen without arguing, but I do not understand how the Created can ever be wiser and more powerful than the Creator. If this is possible, can man eventually exceed the powers of God? I do not know if I am finding religion again, at this late stage in life, but I have definitely grown too old for this world.
I have stopped watching television. I listen to the radio, but only to stations that play music. I still read, but my eyes tire after a few minutes. So what I do, much more now than when I first moved into this place, is sleep. I can fall asleep in my recliner at all hours, with Oliver on my lap. When I nap, I rarely dream. But when I fall into a deep sleep, I often dream about Nicholas. We are always in Sheboygan, in my dreams, always together. Occasionally, we are not alone. Father Gregory makes an appearance. Red Mullen. Lynette Markey. Kenneth Cobb. Sergeant Hawkins. Noah Aaronson. Vic Yarborough. Max Farley. One and then another, making their brief appearances like old friends who need no invitation to visit.
When I dream about Mama and Papa, they are always at their stations in the restaurant, along with Nicholas and me – we boys leisurely busing dirty dishes into the kitchen and washing pots and pans without a care in the world. Mama slips in and out of the kitchen – checking on Papa, looking wistfully at Nicholas, reminding me that I was born precocious.
I dream, of course, about my children – and in my dreams, this is what they usually are. Children. Maggie visits me most often, perhaps because there are so few occasions for us to have actual, physical visits. Invariably, she is ten or eleven or twelve, already challenging and arguing with me, always good-naturedly. I can hear her childhood voice. You and Mom just see the world differently from me and Tessa and Leander. Your experiences are not going to be our experiences. It’s not your fault.
More and more, though, I dream about Thea. In my dreams, we are living in our small house on the west side of Sheboygan, which looks out into that field of yellow flowers. It is spring, and Thea is planting bulbs. I am sitting in a lawn chair watching her. Then she pulls off her gloves, walks over, sits down next to me. We sit together, watching the birds in the field. It is spring, and we are young, and the world awaits.
THE END