What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [18]
“I’ve never known anyone whose name was more fitting than hers,” he said, speaking slowly and with a deep tone that gathered each word into the faintest of English accents. “She was a gem. She was so beautiful in my eyes, but not just to look at her. It was her whole manner. She wanted me to be a writer, too. She would willingly have me stay home and write while she went to work. It was a remarkable marriage. I can’t remember one dull or one boring moment. Even when we didn’t talk, it was good to be with her. She was always smiling. She was always optimistic, never brooding or gloomy about anything. After she died, I think I died, too.”
Harry did not die, but he sank into a grave depression after Ruby’s death from leukemia on May 3, 2002, ten days after she was diagnosed. For months afterward Harry was punished by a brutal loneliness. Living alone for the first time, he considered suicide and gave serious thought to the ways and means of committing it. Nearly a year after Ruby’s death, his daughter, Adraenne, a nurse practitioner, shook him out of paralyzing self-pity, saying, “Dad, you have lost a wife, but we have lost a mother, and you are the only one left us and we need you.”
Soon Harry sat down to write again. He knocked out a first-person essay that asked how, at ninety-four and without the possibility of future romance, he was supposed to move on with his life without his friend, companion, lover, and soul mate. He submitted the piece to Newsweek, which—much to his surprise—published it as a “My Turn” column in October 2007. It provoked an unusually large and emotional response, including at least a couple of marriage proposals from younger women. It also restored Harry’s confidence in his writing.
Emboldened but still depressed, he sat down at the small typewriter stand across from his bed and began to pound out words on the IBM Selectric typewriter that Adraenne had recently given to him. “I turned to writing because I wanted to fill the void. At first, writing was a sort of therapy. When you’re old, it can seem as if you have no place to go. It seems as if you have no future. But I soon found that reliving the past made the present more tolerable because I could immerse myself completely in it and just forget everything.” Even more, he felt gladness in returning to the memories. “It gave me a feeling that I was closer to Ruby than I had been able to feel. You know, when someone dies, they seem to go so far away. Death is so remote. Suddenly, she had disappeared. But by bringing back the particulars, I had the feeling of being close to her and it helped me.”
It helped his writing, too. It came easily. He began without notes or outline, and effortlessly unearthed the vivid details of his past—the color of a dress, the smell of rotting fruit, the expression of a face, Mrs. Turnbull’s bitter voice. Often, at night, he would lie in bed sleeplessly, recalling and dwelling in a scene until it was completely formed in his memory. Then, and only then, would he rise at whatever hour and start typing, as if the words were dictated. Memory and imagination merged. “Can anyone remember every word that was said? Is that possible? No. I must confess there is a certain amount of what I call embroidery. I do not remember exactly what was said. I remember certain phrases, like when a bully taunted from across the street, ‘Bloody Jews who killed Christ!’ ”
Harry easily recalled the working-class neighborhood where he grew up in the town of Stockport, with its sad rows of soot-blackened houses, their stubby chimneys “jutting out of slate roofs into murky skies.” He recalled, too, the quickening staccato rhythms in the evening of men with empty dinner pails and women wearing striped petticoats returning home and the doors shutting behind them on the strictly divided street.
Besides their poverty,