Victor stands in the doorway of his assisted living suite
and calls out to me as I come out of Dad’s room. The day is bright and sunny on the lush
grassy courtyard. It is nearly noon and
Dad will be up soon to join the other residents for lunch in the dining
room. Rather than wake him I sit on the
wrought iron chair under the veranda at Dad’s doorway to enjoy what is surely
the last of the mild early summer season.
Victor is wearing his usual blue shorts with suspenders over a white
tee. Varicose veins matching the blue of
his shorts look like dripping blue paint down his legs. He is one of the few of twelve residents who doesn't
have profound dementia. He lives in
assisted care because he can afford it.
Victor had been in the Navy most of his working life. He and his wife shared the spacious studio
apartment until she died two years ago. Victor
is 82, normally not talkative. He is
Dad’s new tablemate since Dad’s previous tablemate died and Victor’s previous
one was moved to nursing care after a fall.
Victor is telling me that “he’s doing better” as he points to Dad’s
door. I amble over to his doorway to
pass a few minutes of chat and he quickly invites me in. Inside is a neat and tidy suite with a queen
size bed, a wall of white cabinets and two overstuffed recliners facing a television. He points at the chair nearest the door. “She died in that chair” he says. I nod.
I tell him this is a lovely spacious room. He says he doesn't need all this room but he
doesn't want to move into a small one.
He says Dad “is getting better” and that he talks more now. Victor gives me a chatty brief synopsis of
his days in the navy. The
Aleutians. The cold sea. The outline of the Russian mainland. It is 1944.
He was a “bad boy” and sent to the cold north. It was sometimes minus 40 degrees. There were many kinds of ships on the cold
north pacific. There were days he
thought he’d catch his death of cold out there.
There were days he wouldn't trade for anything. “I was in WWII, in Korea, in Viet Nam”. “He’s
doing better” he says again. “He talks
more”. Dad is deaf but he reads lips
very well. I think he’s been deaf longer
than anyone knows but has always covered it, compensated, worked around
it. He looks for body signals. He laughs when others laugh or when he can't
come up with a usable remark. I tell
Victor this. He says he knows Andrew is
deaf. It doesn't matter. “I talk to him”. “He talks to me more and more”. I nod.
In my purse is a sheaf of papers, about twenty pages. It is a translation into English of a memoir
my father wrote in German, or was it Hungarian?
Reams of single spaced typewritten pages that he worked on all the years
of my childhood are reduced to these 20 pages.
I brought them for Dad even though I know he can no longer make sense of
writings. I tell Victor that he might
find this interesting. “Five years out
of the life of your tablemate”. Five
years of a man who was somewhere on the land called Russia that you saw from
your cold ship” so many years ago. He
nods. “I know Andrew had an interesting
life, I wondered about it” he says. I
leave Victor to go to the dining room to chat with Maria the weekend cook while
I wait for Dad to wake up. She brings me
ice tea. I tell her what I have given
Victor. She smiles and winks. “Good.
That’s good”.
