Paradise Home

Forty minutes later I was inching through the traffic down Fairfax Avenue to the Paradise Home Convalarium.  From the front, it looked like an ordinary retirement home. 

You could still see the old roof-line, but the modest residence had been gutted and remodeled, the front porch stuccoed over, to give the appearance of a medical building. 

It sat bravely on the now-commercial street between a live-nude-model studio and a limousine service. 

Inside.  Another world.         

Father had been fortunate to find the place.  Paradise Home was only for patients with Alzheimer's.  All the residents were free to walk around, go into any of the rooms, watch TV, or stroll outside in the well-fenced patio.  The rooms were safety-proofed as if for toddlers.  Techs and aides roamed the halls answering plaintive questions.  

The procedure for visitors was well established.

You entered the lobby and reported to the admittance clerk.  While she went to find your loved one, you stopped in to chat with the Director, Dorothy. 

She would update you on your relative, explain any new rules, review the bill. 

The patient was almost always unchanged.

The bill came due the first of the month. 

Dorothy told me that Father had pre-paid for the month of August.

That day, the new development was that visitors had to take their own toilet tissue onto the ward.

 Albert, one of the patients, had been going around the bathrooms collecting the rolls of paper, imagining they were rolls of greenbacks.  So the administration was only issuing toilet paper on an as-needed basis to the nurses.         

Visitors were provided with packets of Kleenex.

At the side of the small lobby was the locked entrance to the patient rooms.  The Director let me in.  MotherName=Violet Summerland; HotwordStyle=Frame;  was sitting in the shade in the patio with two patients I recognized:  Albert, the t.p. bankroll man, who had once been a "cooler"—playing piano between movie features—and Norris, a nonstop yarn-spinner who swore he'd made millions on furs in Alaska.

My mother looked beautiful, neatly dressed in a baby blue jumpsuit, her face turned to the sun.  The two men were conversing, not quite with each other.  Mother smiled and nodded.  As soon as Albert saw me, he forgot Norris and Mother and began trying to sell me the chaise lounge.  

Mother looked happily up at me and said, "Where's Jack?"

I asked permission of the two gentlemen to take her for a walk.  They were agreeable, and followed us faithfully as we made the circuit of the patio, side yard, and breezeway. 

There had been pots of flowers when the home first opened, but the patients liked to eat them.  So the geraniums had been taken away and replaced with juniper, presumably less tempting.

Mother likes to walk like this, I believe. With my arm around her, I can feel how strong her muscles are.  She is as healthy as a 30-year old; only her mind is crippled with snarled traffic and broken intersections. 

We walked like that, me chatting along, and everything just like it used to be, except that her replies, amiable as ever, were a mosaic of shattered syllables.  When she tries to talk, sometimes, she seems to be counting on her fingers, over and over, as though the letters and words she seeks can be brought to hand.

I told her about the funeral.  How nice it had been.  Which of their friends had come.  I told her that even the lawyer, Mr. Caballero, had been there, and that I had made an appointment with him.

"Where's Jack?"

      "Very treasure."

      That afternoon, when I returned to the house, all seven veils of smog had fallen on the city.  The sky was a deep gold. 

      My heart ached for my mother.  What songs, I wondered, were singing in her ravelled mind?

      How did she endure?

      She knew me, I was sure of that, even though she had not spoken my name.  Through what process did a sudden,

coherent word emerge?

"Where's Jack?"