Remembering Wana's Birthday

January 6, 2010

It was my Aunt Wana's birthday today. She is the archetypical grande dame of Manhattan, New York, living in a large flat of rooms on a  top floor of a  Park Avenue  apartment with a view of Central Park. She's daft, and lonely, and brittle, and problematic,  ...and I see my father in her every time I visit her. She's absolutely convinced that her husband, my Uncle Frank, has been delayed at the office since 1985, the year he died,  and has  even called recently. She's expecting him home momentarily. He died away from home, due to complications of diabetes. The news was published on the front page of the New York Times in the same year I graduated from college. He was an impressive corporate lawyer, and the chairman of the board of the Union-Pacific Railroad for many years. 

Wana, herself, had danced on the Broadway stage before her trophy-wife years, and was no slouch in the Manhattan-glamor Department.  The two of them, Wana and Frank, troubled to host my sibs and me at their home for every Christmas I could remember prior to age 12. They were like people sculpted from ivory or alabaster; grand, imperious, and somewhat unreal. 

My cousin, their daughter Pamela, was, however, warm, and fun as a young woman, and very gracious with her poor relations. Their apartment had wall-to-wall carpeting throughout which must have had those NEW nylon fibers, because it seemed capable of building a static charge in a 6 year old boy capable of triggering convulsions every time I touched a door-knob or faucet handle. Synthetic carpet static was the taser of the age. Pam saw me looking twitchy and nervous, and took the trouble to explain to me how to ground out the sparks by carrying a metal key in my hand, and touching it to the doorknob before gripping it myself, to avoid the shock.  It was a small kindness that I remember to this day.

Sadly, Pam has pre-deceased her mother.

Wana has now reached that gentle place where memory and the day-to-day sensory are all stirred up together. She may see an old movie on tv, and believes Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable still live, and are as young as they appear in the film. She doesn't imagine herself to be young, but expresses pride at the accomplishment of attaining her age. Somehow, ageless classic movie stars who yet live in a 1930's Hollywood are entirely possible in her universe, alongside the ivory Park Avenue tower, where she ages slowly, but with certainty, like a Lady Wizard in a mystical castle turret. 

She has no regrets for having traded her singing/acting/dancing career for her tower with Frank. She told me, in confidence, that she wanted nothing to do with the contract MGM offered her in the 40's. "Those bastards would simply buy you on the cheap, and you'd be pulling an oar in their barge ever after..."  Indeed, for financial stability, she did better with Frank. She hasn't signed a check or paid a bill for herself in the last 10 years that I know of, and doesn't seem to wonder about the plinth or underpinnings of her world, but I do. 

Wana has already outlived the ability of her trust monies to support her lifestyle in New York, but her guardianship is in other hands, and the hope is that she may live the rest of her years on a reverse mortgage placed on her home, and repaid by its sale after her time on earth. The place is valuable enough, even in the present real estate market. I hope she may live there forever. In my mind, she will, but on newer, kinder, less shocking carpets.