Anna in Chains (16 page)

“So let's sing a song of praise now,” the handsome man said. “We have much to be thankful for since every one of us will very soon know ultimate love in Our Father's embrace. Just hang on, brothers and sisters. These troubled days are just a lightning flash on the vast skies of eternity.”

He pushed a button and a scratchy recording came blasting out of his tape player on a card table: “Jesus loves me, this I know…”

Those who could sing, joined in. Those who were unable watched the sunbeams dance in front of their eyes and imagined their deliverance. Anna saw her horizons widen. She saw her mother and father waiting for her on a cloud in heaven, their arms outstretched. The gentle face of her husband was smiling out of the blue skies at her. He waved, with the hand wearing his horseshoe ring; his eyes were sparkling with anticipation. She could feel herself in his strong arms, feel the power of the hug he was waiting to give her.

Anna reached over toward her daughter with her two good fingers. Janet grasped her hand tightly, bending her head and kissing her mother's fingers, one by one, over and over.

“Everyone here is young,” Anna whispered to her, “but I'm very old. I've lived my whole life.”

“Yes, you're very old, Ma.”

“I've had the whole thing,” Anna said, amazed. She actually felt peace descending on her, heavily, without grace, like a pelican coming to land on a rock. “There's nothing more for me to do. I just realized, darling—I'm at the very end. I don't have to worry anymore. That's all there is to it.”

Anna had sung her song, her mantra, her aria for the last five years to any one who would listen, to a world audience, bigger—she estimated—than the Pope himself commanded.

“
Shoot me, get me a gun, bring me a poison pill! I want to be dead! I want to be in my grave! I want to die
.”

When the aides didn't answer her call bell, she loudly intoned the stanzas of her libretto; when her daughters visited (then went out in the hall to get something for her from the nurse), she whispered it. In the dark of night, when the other crazies up and down the hall were singing their own songs, she chimed in with her lyric: “
Dead oh dead oh give me—dead
.”

“You don't mean it,” her roommate, The Crab, told her. “Don't be like the boy who cried wolf.”

Anna knew all about the boy who cried wolf. Like her, he had been rehearsing for the real thing, for the moment of greatest need—but no one seemed to understand that a person had to practice, had to find the right tone, the perfect modulation, the impeccable rhythm, as in any piece of music. Anna knew all about music—she was nothing if not a musician.

Besides, the reactions engendered by her litany entertained her during the endless hours of her incarceration. Just as when she used to play the old upright piano—briefly—in the chapel of the nursing home (she had only a few weeks of being ambulatory before her stroke, before her broken hip), and people used to wag their heads in awe at her rendition of the “Moonlight Sonata,” she now—when she sang her tune (“
Bring me cyanide, bring me arsenic!
“)—took satisfaction in watching all those about her rushing away in alarm.

Each tender new young Mexican aide scurried to the nurse with the desperate news: “The lady in room 615 says she wants to die.” Anna cocked her ear for the reply: “Oh—that one. She says that all the time. Pay no attention.”

“It's a sin,” one young black-haired beauty reprimanded her as she changed the wet sheets on Anna's bed. The child, angelic of face, with dazzling black eyes, was only eighteen and already had three babies that her mother cared for while she worked. “You mustn't say that anymore. You have to be patient and wait till Jesus calls you.”

“I don't know from Jesus,” Anna said. “And I don't want to.”

News of her daring got around. All the aides at the nursing home were recent arrivals from Mexico and staunch Catholics; all the nurses were Protestants; the owner was an Orthodox Jew. Those who attended Anna feared she was daring God—tempting destruction to rain down upon all of them. An earthquake might strike, a fire might rage through the nursing home. What did Anna care? She'd take death any way it came, the sooner the better. Besides, she didn't believe anyone was up there listening to her dares. She had once seen her suicidal son-in-law fling a can of beer up into the branches of a tree, screaming, “Fuck you, God!”—and
that
she had to admit was going a little too far. But the poor demented man was dead now, and God had had nothing to do with it. Her daughter's husband had done himself in with means Anna could never find the strength or technical ability to execute.

She reflected on the suicides that had passed through her history. In 1933, a first cousin of hers named Bertha had secretly married an Italian bartender. For the first year, too ashamed to tell her family she'd done the forbidden thing and married a non-Jew, she lived at home with her parents and only met him once a week, in the back room of the bar where he worked, to have sex with him in the storeroom among the liquor bottles. When one day Bertha's mother discovered a wedding band hidden in her daughter's box of sanitary napkins, she locked Bertha out of the house. After the young bride had moved in with her Italian husband, it turned out he found Bertha too dull and demure for his loud family gatherings. One Sunday morning—as the story went—he told her he didn't want her coming to his brother's wedding, he would have more fun without her. As soon as he left the house, she stuffed towels in the cracks under all the doorways, put the cat out, and turned on the gas.

Gert, Anna's younger sister, told the story repeatedly as a cautionary tale, as a warning against intermarriage, and as purely ghoulish gossip. In fact, Gert had always had a fascination with suicide. She often recounted the story of her best friend, Tessie, who was in love with a dentist. The dentist had given Tessie an engagement ring and convinced her “to go all the way” before their marriage. But he broke the engagement when he fell in love with one of his patients. (Gert relished adding: “And this ‘patient' had a bust bigger than Jane Russell's. Men are animals, they can't control themselves.”) Tessie, as Gert told the story, climbed up onto his fire escape one night, knocked on his window, and slit her wrists. The dentist wasn't even home—all Tessie's efforts were for naught. The dentist, putting out some buttermilk to cool on the fire escape the next morning, found her there, dead, with her blouse open and a suicide note in her brassiere.

Gert had always kept a little Swee Touch Nee tin tea box in her handkerchief drawer filled with yellowed newspaper clippings about suicides. Anna thought about her sister, now rich as a queen, having buried two husbands, the last one of whom had squirreled away half a million dollars. He'd bought Lane Bryant stock in its early days, correctly predicting that women would keep getting bigger and fatter and would keep buying Lane Bryant clothes. Gert lived now in a fancy Beverly Hills retirement home, from which she never stirred to come and visit Anna. Anna's daughters pled excuses for Gert: the hour's ride was too much for her, she suffered from arthritis, she soon needed cataract surgery, she had to stay near her bathroom because her bladder was so weak.

Anna was not impressed. Her sister, always busy doing good work for Jewish causes (for which she always got medals and plaques at donor dinners to hang on the walls all over her apartment), didn't have the kindness of heart to come and visit her helpless, paralyzed, invalid sister. To do a “mitzvah” for her own flesh-and-blood was beyond her goodness of heart.

The truth had been evident from their childhood on—Gert had always been jealous of Anna. She had always wanted everything Anna ever had—including Anna's husband and Anna's daughters. Luckily for Anna, there wasn't a single thing about Gert that Anna had ever envied.

One rainy afternoon, after the nurse had pumped the afternoon medications into Anna's feeding tube (she could feel the pulverized pills, diluted by water, rise up cold and sour into her throat as the nurse shot them into the tube with a fat syringe), a tall, unshaven, toothless old man, wearing a bathrobe and blue nursing-home slippers, padded into Anna's room. He was carrying a Bible. His skinny wrist was decorated with colorful plastic bracelets including a red one (like one Anna wore) indicating “Do Not Resuscitate!”

“I understand there's a woman in here who keeps saying she wants to die,” he announced. “Is that you?” he demanded, sticking his grizzly face a foot away from Anna's.

“What's it to you?” she said.

“I came to save you,” he said, brandishing the Bible. “You won't want to die if you accept the Lord.”

“
Beethoven
is my lord,” Anna said. She gestured toward the plastic bust of Beethoven she kept on her side table, the only decoration she permitted, whereas her roommate had junk everywhere—fake flowers, stuffed bunnies, crucifixes, leprechauns.

“Him! That deaf German? He can't give you everlasting life, Lady. Do you know Satan hears your wishes? He's going to
have
you if you're not careful.”

“So let him have me,” Anna said. “I'm no bargain.”

“Do you ever think about the devil?” the old man demanded.

“No,” Anna said. “Never.”

“Well,
he thinks about you
.”

“Oh, go away. I ought to know what I want to think about,” Anna said fiercely. “I'm eighty-eight years old, as old as there are keys on a piano.”

“You could be saved! You should find the Lord!” the man said, wild-eyed, beginning to back out of the room.

“Is he so stupid that he's
lost
?” Anna yelled after him. “Just stay out of here, you lunatic. You…nothing. You…no one!”

“Are you my children?” Anna said to her daughters when they next visited her.

Anna's daughters exchanged a glance. “Yes, we're your children, Ma,” they both said at the same moment. They pulled the two pink plastic chairs allotted to visitors closer to her bed.

“My memory is losing me,” Anna said. “What did my husband die of? What did he look like?” She really couldn't remember. “Do you girls have any children?”

Her daughters began their patient, extended explanations. One had three daughters, one had two sons, one of the sons had two babies, a boy and a girl—the names swirled around Anna's head. These descendants of hers meant nothing to her—did they ever come and visit? She let her daughters talk and took none of it in; while they set the record straight she would have a little time to rest and think about what pleased her.

On the other side of the curtain, Anna's roommate, The Crab, mumbled, “blah blah blah.” She hated when Anna's daughters visited, because apparently they all talked too much for her taste. So what? The Crab always had a rosary in her hands—let her commune with the Lord if she felt neglected.

After a while Anna said, “That's enough about family trees. What else can you tell me?”

Her daughters exchanged another glance. This time an alarm went off in Anna's head. She caught something in their look—they were keeping something from her.

“What is it?” she demanded. “What happened? Are one of you sick?” Her girls were no spring chickens. If one of them had cancer, Anna would kill herself! Under no circumstances did she intend to outlive her children.

“It's about Aunt Gert,” her older daughter said finally.

“What about her?”

“She's been very depressed lately,” her younger daughter said.

“What could she have to be depressed about!” Anna demanded. “She lives in some fancy Beverly Hills place where they take them on tours to see movie stars' houses and the shark from
Jaws
.”

“She's old, Ma. She lonely, she's widowed, like you. She's sick, her back hurts, she's going deaf, her eyes are failing.”

“So? I can't walk! I can't eat! I'm paralyzed. I'll never play the piano again. Do you see me being depressed?”

“Never mind. Maybe we shouldn't talk about this.”

“Let's talk about it. So what else about Gert?” Anna felt a sense of alarm that Gert was about to gain some critical advantage over her.

“Well, the truth is, we think she tried to kill herself.”

“How, by eating pork?” Anna asked.

Her daughters were silent.

Anna had to think about this. Finally she said, “Is she dead?”

“No. It seems she took too many sleeping pills. When she didn't come down for breakfast, they sent someone up to her room, and found her there.”

“So what happens now? She's not going to
live
with one of you girls, is she?”

“No, but the fact is we'll have to visit her more often, keep a close eye on her.”

“I wouldn't bother if I were you,” Anna said. “All she wants is attention.”

Anna's daughters exchanged the “Let's get going look.” She saw them both stand up at once.

“Okay, Ma. We'll be back to see you soon.”

“Gert should have had children of her own if she was going to need so much attention. I hope she knows she isn't going to get it from
my
children.”

“Don't worry. We know we belong to you. You never let us forget it.”

All night Anna was distraught. She hadn't felt this worried in a long time. Gert, even without an Italian husband, without a dentist or a fire escape, had almost accomplished what Anna most longed for—oblivion. Now Gert would probably have a fancy psychiatrist (a luxury Anna had never had in her entire life), and the next time she took too many pills they'd take her to that hospital in Beverly Hills where all the movie stars went—George Burns, Elizabeth Taylor. This was not acceptable.

Anna considered her options. Even if she had pills, she couldn't take them by mouth. She would need a mortar and pestle to grind them up and then would have to bribe someone to shoot the mixture into her feeding tube. If she had a gun, even if she knew how to use one, she was righthanded and her right hand was paralyzed. What were the words of that Dorothy Parker poem? Anna had memorized it in her youth—about how razors pain you, rivers are damp, acids stain you, drugs cause cramp—and the rest of it, gas smells bad, nooses give, guns aren't lawful, you might as well live. Dorothy Parker was only playing with words—she'd had something to live for, all that fame and money, till she drank herself to death. If Anna had some Manischewitz wine here, she would gulp the whole bottle down at once. (She could still
use
her mouth, she could still swallow. She simply chose not to, she let the feeding tube do all the work.)