(Diana and Endymion)

In the evenings, coming home from work, I sometimes would see the nurse who had visited my mother in her final days. She was always at a distance, turning a corner or too far ahead for me to greet her, but she was unmistakable with her long determined stride and the large backpack she always wore.

Often, she would drop that backpack onto one of my mother’s delicate silk covered chairs and I would wince, but never say a word. There was a certain piney essence to Vita, something suggesting Vermont or New Hampshire woods and no nonsense. We were fearfully dependent on her and her equipment, her ability to reach the right agency with a single call and provide us with, if not solace, at least some hope that we were doing the right things.

Her brusque competence filled my mother’s small apartment, her alarming yet helpful presence drained the rooms of air and there was always a sense of relief when she was out the door.

The Upper East Side was her territory and the evenings and night were her time there, her time to unpack the blood pressure equipment, the charts encased in metal, all of her medical mysteries. She would lift my mother’s small wrist, turn her gently to look for a single bedsore (her enemy and our failure should one appear) and then, all her tenderness spent, instruct the caretaker and then me or my brother with military precision.

For months, I was afraid to look at her until, towards the end, I did, and saw the bright blue burning of her eyes. They were clear of doubt and full of purpose and almost impossible to look at. Their blue was that of the outer reaches of the sea.

I knew that some of the homes she visited were very fancy, but she never seemed to look around at them. The paintings, the antique furniture and books might as well have been invisible. For Vita there was only the patient in the bed, the patient in a chair or pushing a walker slowly to the door. Her job was to check the vital signs for waning life, to talk and assess how much remained of the mind, to listen to the heart for failure and the lungs for any sign of pneumonia that would deliver the patient from her and then from life.

As Vita, encumbered, walked down the halls, around the corners in all weathers, death was creeping past the doormen and elevator men, up the back stairs and settling on the old porous bones to wait as long as was necessary. So Vita did not waste her smiles on us. She was not from hospice, she was not a government angel. She took nothing, not even a sip of water or a cookie. To me and the caretaker she seemed tireless or, in another way of putting it, relentless. With a puff of cold or heat, she brought the outside in on her large gray sneakers. She did her work, made her notations, raised the watch looped on her belt to check the time and was off. She always walked away quickly as though her backpack—the kind on a frame for treks and camping—weighed nothing at all.

I have forgotten to say what she looked like except for the eyes. She was tall and not exactly thin but thin seeming. Under her belted army jackets there could have been a womanly body. She had short curly hair, the incongruous hair of a cherub or putti somewhere between brown and gray, untended, unbothered with in any way, washed and let go so that she might get on with her duties. No wedding ring. No mention of family. No sharing of stories of other patients, no charm left for us. I was comfortable with lesbians and suspected that she was not one of them. Now I think that to be true because of the incident.

My friend Jane stopped me on the street and, with a peculiar expression, asked if it wasn’t a nurse called Vita from the Visiting Nurse Service who had taken care of my mother.

“Yes, of course. She was very good. We called her “The Major,”Major Vita…” I said remembering her fondly despite the terrible days.

“Let me buy you a coffee at Via Quadronno, we are almost there,” Jane said, touching my arm and giving me a little push towards 73^rd street. I knew a story–probably upsetting—was on the way. Jane loved to share whenever dreadful things happened to those we knew.

“Let’s make it a drink.”

We went off to the Bemelmans bar at the Carlyle where we both had martinis.

“No fruit,” Jane said meaning no peels or olives so she might get more gin into her system. I quite understood.

“You know Wendy’s son, that incredibly beautiful boy—he’s home now after the accident. In a coma…

“I’m afraid where this is going…”

“Of course he has nurses, a whole sick room filled with equipment beeping away, his doctor there every day, sometimes twice, teams of people and Lord knows they have the money and space. They did not need that Vita at all and yet the doctor had her come by and then she never stopped coming. You must know how she is.”

“Yes, I do,” I felt a cooling despite the jolly room and the warmth of the drink.

“Sammy kept his beauty even in the coma. His face is not slack, there are no tubes to see, just that pale skin with a bit of boyish stubble and the eyelashes half way down his face…

“You saw him?”

Jane nodded, looking satisfied in the way certain New York women get when they know they have scored. Above us were the Ludwig Bemelmans murals of Central Park through the seasons with his character Madeline there. My mother had read me the first Madeline book when I had my appendix out at three and she collected his work. A Bemelmans painting of a glowing restaurant interior hung over the table where Vita always talked to me about my mother’s care and the timing of her fate, which no one knew for sure.

“Sammy’s in a dark room with these whooshing sea sounds playing and this moony light. Wendy let me visit for just a moment because the boys were in school together though, don’t tell anyone this, they were not really friends…”

“Vita?” I was remembering how much I did not like Jane and thinking back a bit on the purity of Vita, how she belonged somewhere else camping and hunting rather than taking pulses on the Upper East Side for the parents of people like Jane.

Wendy told me she kept coming by at all hours of the night and she would sit by his bedside. No one thought anything of it. I mean they all thought she was a dyke, stomping around like some camp counselor with a lanyard and a whistle.”

“More a safari guide,” I said. “So?”

“First, one of the nurses saw her kiss Sammy.” How pleased Jane looked with the release of this first arrow and the expression on my face.

“I don’t believe it. You mean kiss or really kiss?”

“Wait, I’m not through.”

Through the window, I saw the remnant of a tall quick shape crossing Madison against the traffic. I scooped up a handful of mixed nuts and threw them in my mouth. I looked up at the rabbits lost in the innocence of Bemelmans’ park.

“They found her in the bed with him stroking his forehead and looking gooey eyed. I mean, in all her dirty outdoor clothes, on the bed!”

“That really does not make sense.”

“She said she was trying to rouse him by touch. Of course, they threw her out and told her not to come back. Wendy was going to report her, but she says Vita gave her such a look that she was frightened. So there it stands. I thought you might want to know.”

I said nothing then so Jane and I chatted a bit about politics and the mayor in particular until I called for the check. I did not let her split the bill.

I wondered where Vita was from, where she might go when she retired, what systems of protection she had surrounding her, if the other Visiting Nurses liked and supported her. And there was Sammy, the beautiful boy asleep, the face pricked with stubble, drowning in ocean sounds, somehow her sudden temptation.

 

It was months later that I saw Vita a block ahead trudging through the snow, still strapped with the backpack. I called her name and had to half run to catch up with her. She looked annoyed at having been stopped and fingered the watch hanging from her belt loops.

“Some night,” I said.

She looked at me vaguely and brushed the snow from her wet hair. I’m afraid that I then had to remind her of who I was. She did remember my mother and her case.

I was about to tell her of Sammy who still slept on, but I stopped myself just in time. Why would I know anything about that, about him and her having been there and her trespass? We stood for a moment uncertain.

“Yep, some night,” Vita said and put out her glove so we might shake hands to say goodbye.

Diana (Hecate /Artemis), virgin goddess of the moon, once loved a mortal. Crossing the night skies, she saw the young shepherd Endymion and paused her chariot to come to earth and kiss him. Finally she put him to sleep,  immortal, in a cave.

“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing”

—From “Endymion” by John Keats

 

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