At seven o’clock the next morning she was awakened by Larry’s little hand shaking her shoulder. “Mama, Mama, Papa’s had a fall.”
They found Isaac sprawled on the bathroom floor. It took the combined effort of Nathaniel and the chauffeur to move the freezing, stiff body, which had become as heavy as lead, and lay him out on his bed. They tried to keep Lillian from seeing him, but she pushed everyone out of the room, shut the door, and did not open it again until she had finished washing her husband’s corpse slowly, rubbing it with lotion and cologne, closely examining every detail of this body that she knew better than her own and loved so much, surprised to see it had not grown old in any way but was exactly as she had always seen it, the same tall, strong young man who could lift her in his arms with a laugh, tanned from his work in the garden, the same shock of black hair as when he was twenty--five, and the fine hands of a good man. When she reopened the door she was serene. Although the family was afraid that without him Lillian would soon shrivel up with grief, she showed them that death is not an insurmountable obstacle to communication between those who truly love each other.
Years later, during his second therapy session after his wife had threatened to leave him, Larry evoked that image of his grandfather in a heap on the bathroom floor as the most significant moment in his childhood, and the image of his father in his funeral shroud as the end of his youth and his forced landing in adulthood. He was four years old on the first occasion, and twenty-six when the second occurred. The psychologist asked, with a hint of doubt in his voice, whether he had any other memories from when he was four, at which Larry proceeded to reel off the names of all the staff in the house and of his pets, the titles of the books his grandmother used to read to him, and even the color of the dressing gown she was wearing when she suddenly went blind only hours after her husband’s death. Those first years protected by his grandparents were the happiest time of his life, and he had stored up all his memories of them.
Lillian was diagnosed as having a temporary hysterical blindness, but neither of these adjectives proved to be true. Larry acted as her guide until he entered kindergarten, and after that she managed on her own, because she didn’t want to depend on anyone. She knew Sea Cliff and everything in it by heart; she got around without hesitation and even ventured into the kitchen to bake cookies for her grandson. Besides, Isaac was leading her by the hand, as she said half jokingly and half seriously. To please her invisible husband she began to dress all in lilac, because that was the color she was wearing when she met him in 1914, and because it solved the problem of being blind and having to choose what to wear every day. She did not allow them to treat her as an invalid or give any indication that she felt isolated due to her lack of hearing and sight. Nathaniel reckoned that his mother had a gun dog’s sense of smell and a bat’s radar to help her find her way and to recognize people. Until Lillian’s death in 1973, Larry received her unconditional love, and according to the psychologist who saved his marriage, he could not expect the same from his wife; in marriage nothing is unconditional.
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