The Arrogant Years

by Lucette Lagnado

  “Quelle vie??” she scribbled at one point. “What sort of life can I lead? It shall either be like this until I die, or else a nursing home like poor Leon. I have la strocke.” She had a feeling she couldn’t really depend on us, “les enfants”—the children—as she still called us.

  César was consumed with his marriage and his wife and young daughters. Suzette was living somewhere in Europe.

  And I was so busy, always working, always at my newspaper.

  My new job at the New York Post was a nerve-racking affair. Editors were constantly sending me out to cover the latest gory murder. I’d run out the door to get to a crime scene, hoping against hope I’d persuade a neighbor to talk about the victim or, even better, offer me a picture we could put in the paper. It was a kind of street reporting I had never done, and which terrified me. Yet it was also a relief to lose myself chasing the crime du jour.

  The Post newsroom was very sociable and convivial. Many of the reporters had worked together for years, but they were still embracing of me, a newcomer. I was unfamiliar with the gritty tabloid style but found I could ask some of the veteran journalists to help me. My favorite was a serious veteran reporter whom everyone called “Feiden.” It was de rigueur to use last names in the newsroom, but he seemed to enjoy a hallowed status, the way star reporters do. Feiden—his first name was actually Douglas—was so good-natured that even in the midst of a deadline, when most of our colleagues were harried and on edge, I could turn to him for help and he’d leave his terminal, walk over to mine, and calmly review my story to make sure it was in the requisite punchy tabloid style.

  There were times I didn’t even have money for a cab to get to an assignment. Feiden would willingly take out a wad of bills and hand me ten dollars, twenty dollars, no questions asked. Occasionally, he and the other reporters would invite me to join them for drinks at the Lion’s Head, a bar in the Village that enjoyed an almost cultlike status (though it seemed rather ordinary to me). I’d go for a while, pretend to sip a rum and coke, then race home to Mom in Brooklyn.

  One day, Donny Sutherland, the amiable and manic news assistant, called out that there was an Edith on the line. When I picked up the phone, I was amazed to find it was my mother calling, wanting to know how I was doing.

  She had found my number and then dialed it by herself—two distinct and, to my mind, wondrous achievements. We chatted about how her day and mine were going. I don’t think she realized it had been months since she had made a phone call on her own.

  I thought of the doctors’ dire prophesies, their warnings that she would only deteriorate. That night, as I shared a taxi with Feiden to the Lion’s Head, I confided to him what was going on with Mom and repeated a line I’d heard recently from a rabbi: “After the destruction of the Second Temple, only fools became prophets.” He nodded, and I had a feeling he knew exactly what I meant.

  When I came home later, I found Mom asleep in the little daybed I’d bought for her. Her skin was so smooth and silky, I noticed, a young girl’s skin. She had always been so vain about her face—boasting that she didn’t have a single wrinkle, pas une seule ride, a phenomenon she gleefully attributed to the fact that she’d never worn makeup. In the period leading up to her illness, she often seemed pale and wan, but now, after months of rest in effect, she looked prettier, healthier.

  She seemed oddly content though I’d woken her up, and she called out to me “Loulou, Loulou,” then fell asleep again.

  My shift at the Post didn’t begin till the afternoon, so we would have breakfast together, and I’d linger until the aide arrived. I had arranged for Mom to get Meals on Wheels—a Jewish nonprofit would deliver a ready-made kosher lunch and place it in her hand. After a few days, I noticed that she didn’t eat it—not much of it anyway. Instead, she would hoard the tray—after a bite or two she’d put it away carefully in the refrigerator, not realizing that she didn’t have to be so frugal, that another meal would arrive the next day.

  “Je le garde pour Leon,” she said when I confronted her; I am keeping it for Leon.

  I had begun to feel restless again, and on weekend afternoons when I wasn’t working, I would wander around the East Side. I was looking halfheartedly for an apartment. That old demon, the longing to run away, to flee, had returned to haunt me. I had also become seriously involved with “Feiden” and longed for a place where he and I could be alone.

  Ours was a courtship on the fly, squeezed in between deadlines and assignments and my attempts to care for Mom. Feiden was a creature of New York, but a New York I didn’t really know, that hadn’t figured at all in my upbringing. He was an habitué of dim sum joints in Chinatown and pizza parlors in the South Bronx, and he was known to linger till one or two in the morning in various bars around town. He loved Little Italy because of a strangely affectionate bond he enjoyed with John Gotti, the formidable mobster and Mafia chieftain. Feiden had covered Gotti for the Post and was one of the first journalists to report on his notorious criminal exploits. He had dubbed him rather fancifully the “Dapper Don” in his stories and the moniker stuck. Feiden was fascinated with Gotti and proudly loved to show me all of his hangouts. On one of our early dates, he invited me to Taormina’s, a restaurant Gotti frequented on Mulberry Street.

  I didn’t realize I was being taken for an audience with the Godfather.

  When we entered, we spotted Gotti almost immediately. There he was, the legendary crime boss who looked like a movie star, enjoying dinner with his favored lieutenants. He was even more striking in real life than in the news photos; in his beautifully tailored silk suit, he made me think of Dad in his old salad days. Gotti’s hair was perfectly groomed and his manner was oddly amiable for a thug and an outlaw.

  I noticed that he was eyeing us—me—carefully. As we ordered dinner, a waiter materialized with two glasses of sambuca he told us were on the house. We looked up to see Gotti smiling and tipping his glass our way. I am not sure what I found more thrilling—being out with Feiden or getting a smile from the intensely charismatic, handsome Dapper Don.

  I had the feeling I was being introduced to someone Feiden considered deeply important, someone whose blessing he sought.

  Feiden and I were from the start inseparable. We worked closely together at the Post newsroom—though as a senior reporter he enjoyed all the prestige and confidence I lacked. After deadline, we’d go out either alone or with a group of other reporters for drinks and dinner. Come midnight, the first editions of the Post would reach the local newsstands and Feiden would run to get one and together we’d look for our stories and bylines. If one of us had the front page, or “the wood” as it was called in tabloid lingo, we’d be especially jubilant and stay out even later, until he’d escort me back to Brooklyn.

  Loulou with Douglas Feiden; the two were married on New Year’s Eve, 1996.

  There was my life with Mom and my life with Feiden, and somehow the two increasingly didn’t seem compatible.

  At home on Sixty-Fifth Street, I was getting into running arguments with my brother Isaac. He constantly pointed out faults with aspects of Mom’s care, and I was worried that his critiques were a prelude to a greater, more sinister goal—he was going to find some way to force Mom into a nursing home, exactly as he had done with our father.

  That was the American way—cold, ruthless, practical.

  I rented a small studio on the East Side and continued to come home when I could—after work, on weekends. I persuaded myself I could keep a close enough watch to make it possible for Edith to stay at home—that I could supervise her aides, her meals, her medicines, her moods, even as I held on to my job at the Post and carried on a romance. I was no different than millions of self-absorbed, misguided American children, I suppose, who think they can have it all—that they can go on with their lives, hold on to their independence, flourish in their jobs and careers, even as their parents age and crumble and break apart with no one on hand to put them together again.

  I may have been deluding m
yself; Mom wasn’t.

  One day, as I leafed through her diary, I found an entry that left me shaken.

  She began, as was her wont, by noting that she’d taken her evening pills. Then she launched into one of her familiar tirades against the latest home health aide. She referred to her as “la bonne”—the maid—as if the woman Medicaid paid to care for her was one of the servants she’d hired and fired once upon a time on Malaka Nazli Street.

  She had been to the nursing home that day to see Dad and had come back agitated. My father hadn’t wanted any of the fruits and cakes she had offered him, and that seemed to throw her into despair.

  “Quelle affreuse vie,” she scribbled—what a horrible life—“et bientôt ce sera la mienne”—and one day it will be mine. The entry was painstakingly neat and clear as if by some miracle of rehabilitation, she had finally recaptured some of the lost art of penmanship.

  · 19 ·

  The Woman Against the Wall

  It was the bow everyone noticed—the enormous, shocking pink satin bow artfully positioned on the halo of dark hair. Some did a double take, pausing to look more closely at this triste elderly woman in the faded blue hospital gown who couldn’t talk or move or even breathe on her own. Why on earth was she wearing such a festive accessory in a hospital room?

  By the early 1990s, Mom had become a fixture at Mount Sinai—not in its rehab unit, but in its vast, hopeless wards. The doctors-prophets-fools had been vindicated, I suppose. Edith had deteriorated in ways that I couldn’t seem to control, no matter how hard I tried. With the loss of her faculties, her body would also break down so that she kept getting sick, developing mysterious fevers and viruses and infections, and there was no option but to take her to the hospital. I would ride in ambulances with her and then ride back in ambulances.

  I learned to find comfort in the sound of a siren.

  Mom’s own prophecy, carefully noted in that makeshift diary, had come true. She and Leon now led parallel lives, neighbors in an assortment of nursing homes and hospitals. There was nothing more they could do for each other and nothing more that she could do for him.

  When César or I visited them, we’d put their chairs together side by side, but they still ignored each other.

  Both now lived at the Jewish Home and Hospital, one of those large institutions that had proliferated in the second half of the twentieth century to meet the needs of an increasingly fractured America—an America where children moved away and parents and loved ones were left to fend for themselves.

  Billions of government dollars were pumped into nursing homes like Jewish Home to provide the care families no longer did. No matter that in reality these institutions provided perfunctory care, and the people forced to live within them suffered at the hands of indifferent nurses, overworked aides, and arrogant administrators.

  These institutions loved to brag about how large they were, as if size signified quality. They referred to themselves as five-hundred-bed nursing homes, never as “five-hundred-patient” or even “five-hundred-room” nursing homes because that would have meant the elderly were the priority, when it was in fact only about beds—filling beds, then refilling beds when they became empty, which happened constantly since people were always dying.

  I was still waging the war that had begun in Sinai’s rehab unit back in the summer of 1987. It was now more a form of guerrilla warfare, where I’d lob grenades into an immense black hole of a system that seemed impervious to my attacks. I fought on two fronts: in the wards of Mount Sinai and at Jewish Home, where Edith was sent back whenever she was deemed “stable” enough to leave the hospital.

  My fiercest attacks were leveled at the nursing home. My brother Isaac had chosen it—Jewish Home was located close to his Upper West Side apartment—and I had been unable to stop him. Besides, he seemed so sure of himself as he touted its Manhattan standards of efficiency and care.

  These were the standards.

  Every morning, my mother would be woken up at dawn, at six in the morning or earlier, forced out of bed, bathed, and dressed. Then she’d be made to sit in a wheelchair in the hallway until breakfast was served, hours later. Of course, she’d be asleep by then—most of the patients were—too tired to drink the watery, tasteless coffee they served.

  Why, I demanded, did Mom have to get up at such an ungodly hour—why not let her sleep a bit more? Impossible, I was told—the night shift left in the morning, and part of their job was to pave the way for the morning shift. This meant that patients had to be roused out of their sleep and washed to lessen the workload for the next group of aides and nurses who trooped in.

  That is when I grasped the fundamental truth behind nursing home life—it was driven entirely by staff convenience. There was a cruelty to it all—a viciousness—emblemized by the routine of waking fragile old people every morning at dawn for no purpose, simply to have them sit in a row in a long hallway.

  Yet Jewish Home, perhaps more than other nursing homes, was masterful at maintaining a façade that hid the bitter reality. A large poster-size photo of Diane Keaton with an elderly resident hung prominently in the facility. “Diane Keaton loves it here,” I was told, and I did indeed catch a glimpse of the actress one night, furtively coming to visit a patient who had also been a performer.

  It was all so seductive, like the gleaming fish tanks in the visitors’ area, and the make-believe coffee shop whose fare was nearly as dreary as what patients were forced to eat upstairs, and the library that was invariably empty. These gimmicks worked for a time on us, too.

  Edith, enfeebled by several years of strokes and seizures, couldn’t cope with the harshness of her new surroundings. She rapidly deteriorated and whether I came in the morning or at noon or in the evening, I would find her slumped in her wheelchair, fast asleep. She spoke to no one and barely ate or drank.

  My mother had lost any semblance of an identity; she was simply a woman against a wall.

  I was actually banned from coming too early. My visits were disruptive to the staff, I was told, and so most often I had to wait till lunch to see her. I’d tap Mom lightly on the arm to get her to wake up, then coax her to eat whatever lackluster offerings were on her tray—some sips of lukewarm soup, a couple of bites of the kosher TV dinner we’d insisted the nursing home, Jewish in name only, it often seemed, provide for her.

  Edith was often made to sit near the nursing station, where she could presumably receive more supervision and attention. But I realized it didn’t really matter. I would usually find the head nurse absorbed in her paperwork. Aides would walk in and out of the station and simply ignore her.

  She wasn’t even human to them, my exquisitely human mother.

  She was only a patient in a wheelchair, exactly like all the other patients in wheelchairs.

  I felt powerless to make any changes in her life. The nursing home tended to dismiss whatever complaints I made because I was “the daughter” and they expected daughters to be difficult and had learned to tune them out and to keep doing exactly what they were doing.

  At least Dad in his chair in another hallway—the nursing home didn’t put him together with Mom—would scream at the nurses and the aides, defy them, insult them, use choice Arabic curse words to make his displeasure and anger known. But Edith, the porcelain doll of Sakakini, raised from a tender age to be sweet and obedient, simply sat there slouched in her chair against the wall, unable to fight back.

  Sometimes we simply grabbed her and fled. I became a master at demanding, and obtaining, day passes and afternoon passes and overnight passes from the Jewish Home apparatchiks. Together with Feiden, who now lived with me, we’d bundle Edith up in our rented car and take her somewhere—anywhere—far from the rancid air of West 106th Street. He would chant “Precious cargo, precious cargo” as he helped tuck Edith safely in the backseat like a little girl, like the child we didn’t have.

  We’d go for drives, picnics in the open air, to Fort Tryon Park and the Cloisters, to the Hudson River, loca
les she once loved and we thought would cheer her, but she was so quiet on these journeys. She’d watch silently from her window seat, a bit anxious, a bit on edge. I’d sit with her in the back and try to reassure her.

  “Isn’t Douglas an excellent driver?” I’d ask, and she would perk up and reply that yes, “Dooglas is an excellent driver.”

  One morning, we set out for Columbia University, which I hadn’t visited since that year as an exchange student. The main entrance on Broadway was always closed to traffic, yet when we explained to the guard that Edith couldn’t walk, he took the unprecedented gesture of opening the heavy metal gate and allowed us to drive into the campus.

  Once inside, we put Edith in her wheelchair and pushed her around the quad. As we pointed out Butler Library—la Bibliotheque—and other grand buildings, she seemed happier and more animated. We sat on the steps, near the statue Alma Mater, and parked her wheelchair. Students kept stopping to chat—they seemed to find Mom utterly adorable. She basked in the attention and answered them as best she could with a trace of her old verve, and I knew that she was brought back to those joyful days when I was a student, and she’d come visit me and bring me groceries and supplies, and life made sense.

  Loulou with Edith on a visit to César’s house, Queens, late 1980s.

  It hadn’t made sense in so long.

  One Saturday, César invited us for lunch and we took Edith and drove to Queens. Once at my brother’s house, we placed Mom in a chair at the end of the dining room table. She seemed so sad, and I tried to draw her out by talking about Cairo and L’École Cattaui. Even a mention of the school was usually enough to put her in a more cheerful frame of mind.

  This time my little ploy had the opposite effect. Mom became intensely agitated. She sat up ramrod straight in her chair and her hands were trembling. Her voice rose as she began to talk about the key—the key to the pasha’s library.