Lady B and Her Memory Box

By James Pumpelly

Ranging from the film noir world of shadowy figures and mysterious events to real-life Hollywood personalities and glamourous encounters, Lady B's story spans six decades of life in the fast lane of theater, modeling, period design and décor, and the ever-changing challenges of success in the food and entertainment business. Meditative, playful, concise, and expansive, Lady B spends her final weeks in a nursing home excavating memories from diaries, newspaper clippings, photos, and personal correspondence. Dying from Parkinson's and crippling arthritis, she regales her hospice nurses and adoring priest with memories of both tenderness and alienation. Engrossing, lucid, and complex, her storied life speeds the book along like a bestselling thriller, a plot you don't want to end.
The novel is a composite of the author's experiences caring for family members suffering from Parkinson's, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Alzheimer's, and Covid, all of whom died from their afflictions. Compelling and powerful with first-hand accuracy, Lady B and Her Memory Box speaks for any who have witnessed a loved one waste away in the throes of a slow and dehumanizing disease; but with a surprising finish - death can be a camouflage for new beginnings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667855080

Book preview

cover.jpg

© 2022 James Pumpelly

DISCLAIMER

This is a work of fiction. Excepting historical characters, renowned places and events, public officials, published authors and photographers, the names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-1-66785-507-3 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-66785-508-0 (eBook)

All rights reserved.

Cover art by Prebble Bonett

Novels by James Pumpelly

The Girl with the Pendant Pearl

Twice Melvin

Lord Byron’s Ring

Moonwater

Lady B and Her Memory Box

To Melissa, the unsung angel who assisted me through this book by sharing her memories of two aunts lost to Parkinson’s. Death - the last voyage, the longest and the best, wrote Thomas Wolfe; a truth on which Melissa kept me focused.

By her light, I found my way through the tunnel and into the joy of Lady B’s new beginning. When the heart weeps for what it has lost, the soul laughs for what it has found.

Contents

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

XL

XLI

XLII

XLIII

XLIV

XLV

XLVI

XLVII

XLVIII

XLIX

L

LI

LII

LIII

LIV

LV

LVI

LVII

LVIII

LIX

LX

LXI

LXII

LXIII

LXIV

LXV

LXVI

LXVII

LXVIII

LXIX

LXX

LXXI

LXXII

LXXIII

LXXIV

LXXV

LXXVI

LXXVII

LXXVIII

LXXIX

LXXX

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

I

Call me Lady B.

If that reminds you of the narrator’s introduction in Moby Dick - Call me Ishmael - it’s because I, too, have always warmed to a good story. A classic – which is how many of my friends describe me. Or did. For having suffered these last four years in a nursing home cubicle, classic is no longer pertinent, unremembered more harshly germane. Ill fortune, especially by the death notice of declining health, soon separates fawning acquaintances from devoted friends, the first forgetting you with facile alacrity, and the latter adroitly avoiding the rude reminders of their own mortality, the final warnings we euphemize as nursing homes. Too ominous the balding frails and diapered grandfathers drooling in untended chairs, their vacant stares portending what awaits us all. A destiny best left to others.

Parkinson’s is my Angel of Death, Arthritis his aide-de-camp. Between them, they’ve whittled my 5’2 down to 4’9 and pilfered my shapely 118 pounds to a skeletal 89. And as if that weren’t sufficient to force my surrender, they’ve contorted my spine into a treble clef, its creaks and groans a grating horror film soundtrack, one only mellowed by the siren timbre of Norco painkillers and the hammering timpani of heated massagers.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry, mused Yeats. And poetry I am, despite my absent friends’ acknowledgment. I see my life as an integral part of the universe, a great mystery unsolved unless you know the right questions to ask. But once asked, your vision expands, accomplishment mounts, and meaning comes into focus. Early on, meaning was the seminal key to my future. The meter to which I danced, the poetry to which I swooned. The men to whom I gravitated.

A future now bleak, leaving me no choice but to fashion a new one from dreams of my youth, my midlife successes, my varied careers as a model, decorator, designer, stage director, restaurateur, and compassionate ear to my love-starved peers who seemed ever pining at my gated door. In retrospect, I must have glowed with that enviable mystique that innocents mistake as wisdom. But within the tomb of my heart, I was a seeker, too; and if I claimed any wisdom at all, it was the savvy to not admit it. A savvy meaning had taught me the hard way.

Lady B? My ward’s morning nurse calls out with saccharine briskness, a latex-gloved hand appearing from behind the dividing curtain of my semi-private room like the opening act of a mime, a small plastic cup, dotted with pharmaceutical venom, rattling a snake tail’s warning. Time for your meds, sweetheart.

I know the routine but question the familiarity. Sweetheart? I mouth rhetorically. Do I know you? I follow with vapid mirth.

Your guardian angel, her big eyes boast, as though she’s my wish fulfilled. Here, darlin’… take your pills. You know I can’t leave until you swallow.

For these big eyes, I swallow. But on the night shift, I sometimes manage to tongue the Norco into the pocket of my cheek, preserving it for extraction after the male nurse hurries off to yet another pleading mouth. It’s for my Memory Box…bottom drawer…buried behind the Z file. That’s where a half-empty paperclip box hides my emergency supply. My ticket to paradise.

But I haven’t told you about my Memory Box –

If you can’t live forward, live backwards, I’ve decided. I call it re-live. Relive your best yesterdays. Despite all I’ve lost in my withering decline, I’ve kept my memories sacrosanct. Literally. I call it my Memory Box, though it’s not a box, but a tall, four-drawer file cabinet crammed into the corner of my seven by ten-foot curtained cubicle. When I first squeezed in, I was forced to make the choice between my file cabinet Memory Box, or an 18-inch wide, pressed-board clothes closet with a bottom drawer for personals. I chose my memory box, cranking up my hospital bed to shove two shallow plastic containers of clothes underneath. To have done otherwise would have left me with clothes I can’t enjoy, in place of a life I can read through with the idyllic eagerness of the unimaginable. A choice, like many before, that has proven me, if not perspicacious, then at least prudent.

My Memory Box is as fastidiously organized as the life it records - by calendar years, by business ventures, by popular recipes for my restaurants, by exotic travels, by famous acquaintances, by degrees of infatuation, and, most memorably, by the cards and letters from the many professional men who shared their ardent passion for me – though sadly, none plucked the poet’s lyre within. Some for my avowed beauty, some for my perceived mind, some for my exotic lifestyle, some for my business acumen, and some with a solipsistic desire to control all four as though I were a bird to be caged and hung in their gilded foyers. A tonic, indeed, when the only eyes for me now are dulled by the furrowed brows and grimaced faces of over-stressed healthcare aides. I’m not yet so dowdy as to make a diamond pendant swing ill at ease, but what aesthetic can blind the man who empties one’s catheter bag, or the woman who wipes the custard from one’s bib? None but a mother’s love, I say, and my mother’s been dead since before I could fathom the need of her succor.

And as I began my intro with a classic line, so I end it; this one from what is arguably the most famous closing line in American literature, F Scot Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. I identify with this struggle, memories of yesterday relating to dreams of the future, my solitary boat struggling against the current, unable to move beyond the past.

Frailty, thy name is woman -

Shakespeare’s Hamlet

II

The Norco is working its wicked magic, enough to allow a slide from my bed, into my wheelchair, and a slow, arduous turn to the treasures in my tall, metal Memory Box. This morning, I choose a spiral notebook from the file marked 1963, the year I ran away from the sum of my life in Houston. A high school grad, duly educated by two summers of secretarial work and tri-weekly night classes in drama. I’m joining a school friend in Washington DC who promises meaningful connections and a place to sleep. What else can a dreamer need? Back in bed, with yellowed notebook in hand, I depart, like bellied sails in a summer wind, as Greyhound hums me the answer.

I turn to a dogeared page to read my scribblings, what I judged important on Wednesday, November 20, 1963: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock -T S Eliot’s poetic expository on the problem of man’s guilt, I write. His need for expiation through his personal responsibility for the sin of humanity. This is what poets and playwrights have been fumbling for in their hopes to put poetry into drama, drama into poetry. I should discuss this with Robert! I conclude, underlining the suggestion.

Robert is a freelance journalist and novelist who lives in the four-story Victorian my girlfriend and I share with resident intellectuals - or so we wish to admire them. The drafty old mansion has long been partitioned into efficiencies and one-bedrooms, none of which are cramped enough to capture the heat hissing through the cast-iron radiators cringing under uncaulked windows covered by knife-carved pasteboard and taped like the whistling wind is a cat burglar. Which it most definitely is, and with criminal intent! Or so it seems up here in the attic where four of us girls share two efficiencies.

Robert, and his across-the-hall neighbor, Jim – Julliard trained, a violinist who travels with the city symphony as the string section’s first chair - both live on the ground floor, and pay for the property’s only two parking spots, located noisomely next the garbage-festooning dumpster. Aside from that defining upgrade, Robert and Jim are seldom here at the same time; which is fortunate for me due to their singular interest in yours truly. Interest I feel obliged to acknowledge since Robert got me a job doing makeup for a DC theater cast, and Jim sometimes allows me the use of his Peugeot 403 if I am kind enough to drive him to and from Washington National for his frequent concerts out of town. These two obvious favors rank me as available by all the other females trekking the threadbare carpet up and down the center stairway of our sheltering abode. Only my girlfriend defends me, and even she is showing signs of doubt.

I envision my almost nineteen-year-old self a fortunate recipient of noblesse oblige, a form of charity further emboldened, commensurate with my willingness to be ogled – and occasionally, in shadowed corners, caressed. A small price for the erudition afforded, the largess of experience these fatherly figures so willingly wish to impart – both Robert and Jim at least 15 years my senior, though each, in his own way, contrives to comport himself otherwise.

I have always been attracted to power, thrilling to tales of empires conceived in the corruption of bedrooms like they were the latest gossip in the National Enquirer – that salacious tabloid’s headlines a mere two months ago reading I Cut Out Her Heart and Stomped on It (September 8, 1963 – I still have the edition in my Memory Box!). But unlike many of my aspiring peers, subjugation and illicit wealth count least among my alluring magnets. I’m drawn to intelligence, talent, a passion for life, the admixture of which is often evidenced in playwrights, poets, authors, philosophers, musicians; even the haunts of these storied men calling my curiosity, honing my hungry mind.

But enough backstory! See how a single entry can entertain? Can take me back to immortal days and, dare I say it…amoral nights? Come along with me to a previous page - you can see I’ve been here before - a desperate self-enquiry I had the foresight to jot down for an old lady’s reflection. It reads:

What am I to do? Jim is the perfect gentleman, controlling his natural urges, redeeming the occasional slip of a hand on my knee, or a heated wish in the blush of his cheek, with sugared compliments. He makes me feel an equal, which is my license to search his mind, his very life for nuggets to enrich my own. Recently, I’ve unearthed a secret, one only he hadn’t known: that he needs a mate, a chatelain for his castled heart. Last night, on the way back from the airport, he seemed different, quieter than his exuberant norm, throwing questions my way and answering them before I could muster response. Want to have dinner with me…I know a quiet little place with a friendly hearth, he says, one beautiful artist’s hand managing a slow brush of my knee – his bow drawing pathos from a weeping Stradivarius. Coquille St Jacque if you prefer your scallops luscious and sauced…or Steak Diane. I recommend the scallops, he goes on, as if I’ve already acquiesced - succumbed to his magical music. "And tomorrow, if you can spare time from backstage, I’d enjoy your company…no…yes, your company, but also your critique of Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon in His Study. The National Gallery is one of my favorite haunts. My impression…my very favorable impression of you is that we are likeminded in the arts. Tomorrow could prove me right…which I usually am."

And now, on to my journaling the following night:

What am I do? What am I to do? Jim wants a relationship with me. A sexual relationship. I tell him that two people should love each other first…should allow their hearts to lead them to bed. But he says he’s already certain of love, and that over time, his love will foster mine. My door is open, but I’m hiding behind it. I feel I shouldn’t step through. What if my love can’t be fostered? What will that do to me? Will my heart be scarred?

And then there’s Robert. Given Jim’s obvious ardor for me, I can never divulge Robert’s quest in the arts. His expression is unlike any I’ve ever read, if read’ is even the proper word, felt" nearer the truth. What Robert writes to me from his lonely hours on assignment, or sometimes, from his home in upstate Maine, is powerful. And I love power. The power of love. Letters like this one I received yesterday, typed on onionskin. Onionskin? Even the paper’s going out of style! But his passion? Never. At least, not for me. Not for me, until I found out he was married. Oddly, after first blush, it didn’t change a thing! He writes:

The bad news first: Possibly, Katherine has skipped out on me with our kids. Harold, my lawyer, is working on it. That much is good…HE is good.

While I was home, I picked up my bust of Mark Twain. He sits here reading this as I write in my Chicago hotel. A most sincere critic.

What the hell am I to say of what is past? What am I to say of what is not past, of what is now and of what is to come? I wept the day I left DC – with you in it – and knew the next day I wouldn’t. Weep, that is.

I have been trying to note you in my new novel, and it doesn’t note because it’s not near an end. I can not look back. There is none.

Slower, did you say? Slower than what? Than I? Do you know speed? Is speed a pleasurable thing? How can one measure the term of a lifetime? This poetry which you know is now, and this which you do not know is now.

You talk of Virginia Woolf. I, too, saw the film. Burton and Taylor are so much the actors, and Albee is so much the ass! Burton is miscast. He should never be George…Oh God! I am insane with heat for you!

At the bottom of all art is the sense of humor which makes us each laugh at ourselves. And the laughter gives us further understanding that we are each, each other. All of us are me, and I am all men.

To make love to you right now would make me forget that I haven’t partaken of food in two days. You would be my food. I would nurture at the veil my lips bring to fire, bathing my blushing face in juices that leave you in molten porcupine needles.

R

After reading this - my shaking hand folding the onionskin back into the envelope and inserting it behind the open page - I ask myself:

What power-hungry Aquarian-Age woman doesn’t want this kind of control?! I haven’t even kissed this man and he’s raging with need! Makes me think of my mother - sweet lady she is, but weak. I once overheard a conversation with her best friend, my mother lamenting she’d given birth to three daughters and had never experienced an orgasm. She wears the marks of a doormat! At least I have orgasms!

Out of the wreck I rise – Robert Browning

III

I must look like a corpse, the gasp of Father Black, peering round my cubicle curtain, alerting me to his presence. Funereally dressed and aptly named, Father Black visits me every week, rife with ungently employed seminary semantics, his tragically defunct phrases falling athwart of his titled purpose; or I should say, my purpose, because I granted him permanent permission to counsel me every Wednesday - my inventive way of insuring a visitor!

Come in, I half-whisper, as though my 70 square feet on God’s earth can count as a dwelling, …sorry I can’t offer you a seat. This, as I furtively cover the spiral notebook from my Memory Box with the unused napkin from my untouched breakfast.

Aaaah, his exhalation soft against the coo of mourning doves in the unpeopled courtyard outside my unopened window, …for a moment there…

I see at once what he means. It’s written in his wise old eyes, a look full of irony and laughter, of sardonic complicity, an amused and empathetic consciousness of how precious the unspoken is. A look as old as the original link between human acknowledgment. What day is this? I ask, hoping he’s in error, that it’s he who embodies confusion, not I.

Miss B, one nervous hand smoothing a wrinkle from the end of my blanket, you know what day this is. I always visit you on Wednesdays.

It’s a new day, I cover, it’s a new life…and I’m feeling good! My response as ineffective as a round-tip screwdriver, Father Black lacing his fingers under his chin with the apathy of a sated lion, his averted eyes staring at the wrangle of wires and tubes disputing their rights to the wall behind my head as though his acute intelligence is perusing the grand design. I smile, as best I can, because Father Black is a rather grim looking man with a long nose, a learned man one might judge, at first glance, to be an extreme sceptic. Only his kind and well-intentioned counsel convinces otherwise.

Yes…yes, it is. Every day is a new day, he repeats, thoughtfully omitting my claim of feeling good. He is at least that wise – a crackling smile stretching tendons in his neck. "Are you familiar with Robert Browning’s poem Ixion?"

This is where he shines. As do I. For once again I’ve chosen prudently. My visitor of choice is well read. Yes, I am, I assure him – his hairy earlobes dimpling with pleasure. The myth of Ixion is often referenced in classical literature, Ixion personifying man’s deceitful dalliances and subsequent damnation to the underworld.

Precisely! my cherished visitor reacts with an almost breathless impetuosity. that’s why I asked…because Browning decided that rather than allowing his subject to suffer forever, Ixion should learn from his mistakes, repent for his actions, and ultimately find redemption! he finishes with hands upraised and clasped in worshipful gratitude. No matter how many wrong turns we take, Browning implies, we can always find hope, grace, and renewal.

Now he’s got me. I can’t suffer him to feel his failure. The man is…shall I say…convinced of his mission, as well as its efficacy. A passion I share, albeit a different calling. You move me, Father Black, I tell him, without explaining I’m referencing the poem’s famous line, Out of the wreck I rise. I feel no chagrin for misleading him, rather a complimentary joy: Father Black for his message of mercy, and I for the memories invoked.

Are you an admirer of James Whistler’s art? I ask, mentally thumbing the register of artists without changing the subject.

"Arrangement in Grey and Black comes to mind."

"As it should…Whistler’s Mother the colloquial name, a title more akin to your profession, his expressionless face revealing. Mother Mary?" I try again.

Oh…I see, he obliges, in obvious search for words.

I recall how Whistler once said that the greatest lie is the truth cleverly told. My fleeting thought, a pointing finger at what I’ve just done to my dear trusting man. But, as Father Black admonished, God forgives. And with that my guilt assuages.

In past visits, Miss B, you’ve expressed your doubts regarding the Blessed Mother-

Excuse us, please. Excuse us, Father. Two aides jerking the cramped room’s dividing curtain spasmodically in a coded signal for privacy. Sorry, but we have to give Barbara here a bed bath and a diaper change. Visitors aren’t allowed in the room…not even God’s appointed, Father Black, the older of the duo jests.

Want me to come back? Father Black’s narrowing eyes pleading agreement.

Every Wednesday, I reply with genuine warmth. But not today. What they are about to do for Barbara…well…our room is unpleasant for a while. That’s why I didn’t touch my breakfast…thought they were coming earlier.

She’s right, Father, the younger aide joins in. Miss B is the one who suffers, because Barbara isn’t here…if you know what I mean.

All of God’s children are worthy of respect, young man…even those too young to see an old lady’s beauty, the good priest scolds, as he bows himself to the door. "If Barbara could hear, or think, or speak…she’d say, like in I, Too, a poem by Langston Hughes, They’ll see how beautiful I am. And be ashamed."

How do I love thee, Father Black, I muse in awe, let me count the ways!

I saw the angel and carved until I set him free – Michelangelo

IV

Odiferous has only four syllables. It would take forty to describe the miasma of human waste in my cubicle right now. All odors are particulate - the very thought making me nauseous. I’ve pressed my call button a dozen times, but no one comes. They know why I’m calling and are not to be blamed.

If only I could raise my window….

Suddenly, I remember another escape – I reach for my spiral notebook.

Thursday, November 21, 1963

I drove Jim to Washington National this morning. Something is happening between us. I felt it at dinner last night: oak logs glowing in the hearth, the ridiculously expensive French Chablis, the candles flickering to the music…no wonder he goes there. Mozart rules! And so does Jim…if I’m counting among friends. Wish I could have accompanied him to the National Gallery, but the emergency call to replace a sick violinist in Philadelphia changed his plans. My plans, too. I could see disappointment in his eyes when he took the call last night. How did they know he was there? I wonder.

Time will tell me what it is; what has started between us. Or my heart. Better it be my heart because time cannot be trusted! What did Blasé Pascal say? something about the heart has reasons of which reason is unaware? And that was in the sixteen-hundreds. See what I mean about time? The