American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [80]
Grandma Lo’s night table was filled with an assortment of things I longed to inspect. There was a black Bible with her mother-in-law’s name—L. E. Clapp—stamped with gold into the leather; a white linen handkerchief with an embroidered, pink ballerina; a slender flask with a cascade of lilies down its side; a row of brown vials; a hypodermic needle; three rectangular bottles with cork stoppers and scribbled labels; a wooden ring; a spool of lime thread.
I took in these details as I listened to my grandmother’s labored breathing. From time to time a shudder rippled through her as if some unseen creature were darting down the tunnels of her body. When, eventually, we backed out of her room, my mother’s face was swollen with sorrow.
I realize now how little I felt for Grandma Lo. She was not the vibrant, commanding figure of my abuelita, the sort of presence I would have expected from a woman of her generation. I studied the photographs of her in those apartments, looking for some sign of my other grandmother’s brio, but all I saw was a mild sweetness unlike anything I had encountered before. Even in photographs taken in younger, healthier times, Grandma Lo was an unassuming woman. She used little makeup, dressed modestly in starched white medical vestments, did not dye her hair. She was only three years older than Abuelita and had a prettier face, but there was no vanity to her. As if she didn’t want undue attention from the world.
“Stomach cancer,” my grandfather said plainly when we joined him in his office waiting room. We had heard Mother say those words before. A hat and sheepskin jacket hunched on the coat stand behind him, confirming the grimness of his message.
Hungry for distractions, George and I began exploring Doc’s bookshelves and cabinets. Dentures grinned back at us. Miniature curios had been fashioned from dental enamel: a shiny white bear with his claws in the air, an Indian in full headdress. As we marveled at these, Grandpa Doc explained to my parents how my grandmother’s illness had advanced.
For the more than ten years since they had come to Rawlins, she had been his nurse, secretary, and accountant. He had performed the surgery; she had passed him the tools. He had thrown the X-ray switch; she had held the film. He had built the practice; she had kept the books. But in recent years, he said, he would chance upon her in a corner, overcome with pain, or doubled over behind a door, so that a patient wouldn’t see.
I hardly knew who Lolelia Brooks Clapp was, but I could see that my grandfather loved her. Her dying was breaking his heart. He was a man of few words, but as he talked, and as George, Vicki, and I gathered at his feet to listen, a hazy picture of their life emerged. She had given him four daughters. She had been the compliant partner, tolerant of his caprices before he’d settled down to doctoring: his land deals, rodeo-impresario days, bridge-building businesses. She had been a lover of books, had persuaded him to stretch out on the waiting-room sofa between appointments to listen to her read Coleridge, Whitman, Kipling. She had played the piano to his violin. She had lounged in his canoe as he fished in Lake Seminoe, crooning sweet verses about happiness to come. But what had come, in the end, was punishing—pain, shrinkage, a flickering in the world.
He told Mother that he had driven her out to a hospital in Denver. He had flown in specialists from the East. He had devoured every medical journal he could find. Now, steeled against the inevitable, all he could do was sit in his own waiting room, marking time.
His life did have distractions, as we came to learn. Grandpa Doc was raising two teenage grandsons in the Ferguson Building—Huey and Nub—sons of two of his other daughters, my Aunt Erma and Aunt Helena. He was also minding an ancient mother, Lucinda Ellen Clapp, who, we’d soon see for ourselves, was