Lavinia

“Come in,” she said, waving me in with a low hand. I caught the door, and she turned around in a measured pivot, giving me her back and talking as she walked toward the living room.

“I don’t know why you want to see an old lady like me,” she said as she hobbled away from me. I could see she was bent over. She had that smallish hump in her back many old people have, and it seemed to weigh on her heavily.

I laughed self-consciously. I didn’t have a reply. I followed her, experiencing all the excitement, nervousness and tension you feel when you give yourself over to a new person.

I was being polite, too, trying to appear well bred. I wasn’t sure how to do that in a brief walk from her foyer to her living room. I decided walking softly was the best way. I was also trying to take everything in. Her apartment was modest, but pleasant, though somewhat dark. The window in the living room faced to the back of her building, an unglamorous structure on Greenwich Village’s Eight Street, between Fifth Avenue and Broadway.

“Sit. Sit,” she said when we were both fully in the living room.

Her eyes flickered toward the only couch in the room. She sat in a tall dark chair behind her desk and immediately lit a cigarette.

“So, you’re Mr. Goodman,” she said, as if by saying my name things could now begin.

“Yes, but please call me Richard.”

“All right,” she said. I waited for her to return the gesture. She didn’t. She took a long drag from her cigarette and then tapped the stalk on the ashtray. Later, after I had visited her a few times, I asked her if I might call her by her first name, Lavinia.

“Of course!” she said. “Such a silly name, isn’t it?”

“Well, no….”

“Oh, it is. It’s Latin. The name of some third-rate Roman goddess. I think Mother had just read Bullfinch’s Mythology when she had me. I’ve never liked my name.”

Her full name was Lavinia Russ. Even now, when I put it down on paper, she emerges from the fog of time to greet me once again. Lavinia. La-vin-i-ah. A honey-sounding name.

“They,” she said, waving a hand somewhere, “they didn’t say too much about you. But you look like a nice man.”

At first, I had no idea what “they” she was talking about. I looked wildly in the direction of her extended hand for a clue. Suddenly, I realized that they were the Village Visiting Neighbors, a nonprofit organization in New York City’s Greenwich Village. They brought people together with older people who needed errands done for them, or who simply wanted someone to visit them to quell the loneliness. It was they who had matched us together. In all the time I knew her, Lavinia never spoke the actual name of this organization. So, here I was. On my first visit.

Lavinia

“Well, I want to warn you,” Lavinia said as she took a quick puff of her cigarette, “I’m losing my mind.” She cast a half glance my way but avoided actually looking at me.

“Oh,” I smiled, trying to think of something to say to counteract that.

“I can’t remember things anymore.” She struggled with the words. “Words and names I used to be able to pluck out of the air at will. I find as I get older, I simply can’t remember them.”

“But that doesn’t mean th….”

“I must be going…what do you call it when old people lose their memory?”

“Senile!” I said brightly.

“Senile! Yes. Thank you. Alec used to say—you don’t know Alec, but he was a great friend of mine—he used to say, ‘Lavinia, for God’s sake, you never could remember those things anyway.’”

“But I forget things all the time, too. All the time!” I said.

“You do?” She sounded like she wanted to believe me, but she was tentative.

“Yes! I’m constantly forgetting things. I even forget what city I’m in.”

This brought a deep rolling laugh from her. At its height, it was accompanied by, then evolved into, a wet smoker’s cough, the kind that sounds alarmingly like splitting wood.

“No, really,” I said, mildly alarmed at her cough but satisfied at my ability to make her laugh, “I’m not kidding. I do forget things.”

“Well, that’s awfully nice of you to say that, but I don’t quite think it’s the same thing.” She stabbed her cigarette out, then immediately reached for another from a long lime-colored pack. “Old age,” she snorted, as her hand trembled with the lighted match.

And so it was, old age. That and so many other things we talked about in the two years I knew Lavinia. Many many things we discussed, but old age came back again and again and pushed its way to the front of the line, like a rude, bossy tourist, demanding to be served first. Now, some thirty-five years later, as I enter that harsh land myself, I think of those years, and of her, again and again. She taught me so much.

As Lavinia talked, I stole glances at her, trying to drink in this new being, this fresh face. She had very pale, almost sallow skin. She had wrinkles, true, but not the deep Lillian Hellman-like slashes. Hers were thinner, and not as profound. I guessed she might be seventy-five. (It turned out she was eighty-one.) Yet she had the most vibrant hair. The color was an appealing blend of russet and wheat, with tinges of gray. It was cut fairly short and flowed in supple waves.

Because her body was simply no longer up to it, her eyes, and, naturally, her voice, were the major ways in which Lavinia communicated her considerable variety of moods and emotions. Lavinia’s eyes, though somewhat cloudy—she was eventually to have two cataract operations—were formidable. They could, and often did, in a single hour’s time, definitively express surprise, remorse, sadness, anger—this occasionally, but what a fearsome sight!—skepticism and worry. I felt I always had to look at Lavinia’s eyes, for fear of missing something dramatic and essential.

In intimate partnership with those stagy eyes was a voice that was frayed and prone to fatigue but which, on any given day, could find its full measure and have you on the edge of your seat. Or, perhaps closer to the mark, could reach out and grab you by the scruff of the neck, as if you were a wanton cat. Just as it did now.

“The thing is,” she burst out, “I don’t like old people. I can’t think of anything worse than sitting in a room with a bunch of old people.” She shuddered. “They’re always complaining.”

“And so you don’t want to be like them?” I was cautious. I was leaving myself the option of retraction.

“No,” she said, “I don’t.”

No, she didn’t. She did everything in her power not to be jettisoned into that general bin labeled old. I’m sure that was one reason why she contacted Village Visiting Neighbors. It was to have some young blood flowing through her days.

“I mean,” she continued, “have you seen those television commercials with that what’s-her-name woman talking about diapers?”

She had stymied me. “Johnson and Johnson?” I said. I named a brand, because I had no idea what woman she was talking about.

“I don’t know,” Lavinia said, not hearing me correctly, “but she used to be in all those college musicals in the 40’s. Small. A little too cute for me.”

“Oh! You mean June Allyson!” My outburst about a somewhat obscure movie star sounded a bit too enthusiastic to me. I toned myself down. I suddenly knew what commercial she was talking about. It was for protective undergarments for old people.

“Yes! That’s the one. And they even talk about incontinence.” She shuddered as if asked to eat something unspeakable.

“I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing one of those,” Lavinia said with bitterness in her voice. “I’d rather urinate in public. So humiliating!”

“Yes, I have to agr….”

“Now, dear,” she said, ceremoniously placing her cigarette down on the ashtray, “I want to hear about you.”

I blurted out a few things. Job: advertising copywriter. Marital status: single. Age: 45. And so on. As I tossed off this necessary but hollow-sounding data, I realized one of the things that was so exciting and yet bewildering about this, my first visit with Lavinia. The fact was that, aside from relatives, I didn’t know any old people. True, I saw them in the street. I jostled up against them in lines. I watched them being picked up Sunday mornings to go visit their children and grandchildren. But I didn’t have any friends who were over sixty.

“….of those advertisements on television are so clever. I adore those commercials with that man who sells chickens.”

Lavinia startled me out of my reverie.

“Oh, you mean Frank Purdue.”

“I don’t know, but they’re awfully clever.”

“Yes, they are,” I said. The truth was, my heart wasn’t in my profession. But that was another story. “Did you know he act….”

“Now, dear, before you go.” Lavinia had a short list in her hand, and she began speaking about it without looking at me. “If you can’t get the peach, then any kind will do. And for this I need the small-sized carton—not the big one, please. The last person they sent couldn’t manage to get that straight. And here’s the money.”

Was the visit at an end? I put my coat on and went out, and in a few minutes bought her what she needed from a delicatessen nearby. When I returned, Lavinia was at the door to meet me.

“Thanks very much, dear,” she said as I handed her the grocery bag. “Now, you go home now.”

“It’s been very nice.”

“Yes, it has,” she said.

“I’ll telephone you soon, all right?”

“That would be nice. Goodbye.” She smiled. Her eyes, even squinted against the outdoors, were bright and alive.

I walked home, excited and enthusiastic, as if I’d just had a first date. And I suppose, in a way, I had.