Portrait: Ralph and Mary

Although this piece has aged a bit, it speaks to me on a new level as I try to sort through my own accumulated clutter and remember Mary’s struggle to determine what to keep and what to let go.

Portrait:  Ralph and Mary—- published in The Seattle Weekly

It’s not that I’m not a supporter of the arts.  Believe me, some of my best friends work for museums.

And I’m glad for the bold move of putting the Seattle Art Museum downtown—for a building that will make art more accessible to the masses, will perform with sophisticated new temperature  gauges and allow more room for storage.

It’s just that I moved Ralph and Mary out of the Second Avenue Hotel, and it’s the Second Avenue that’s being razed where downtown will house art—the Second Avenue above the old Harris-Conley golf store, a couple doors down from the University & Second Avenue Building.  Who the heck wants Ralph and Mary hacking around in Plexiglas, immortal hieroglyphs, fields of jade?

Don’t get me wrong.  The Second Avenue ain’t no prize.  The night before they moved, a chunk of ceiling, heavy with radiator sludge, fell at the foot of Ralph’s double bed—capable of killing more than a 90-pound Mary, who was luckily engaged on the plastic pot in the middle of the room. And that packing-up week, Ralph eased roaches off our grilled cheese—all 5-feet-5 of him, a bald spot in the small field of strawberry- gray on his head—eased them off with “sprezzatura” (as they would have said in the old, courtly days)—spooned Mary her crushed egg and buttered toast, bore her insults, her shrill anxiety: to move at her age, one hipped with a bad heart; to relocate at 83 to a place she’d never seen—who could bear that after thirty years? We assured her, Ralph and I, that the new place was safer, cleaner, featured the Space Needle in a row of kitchen and studio windows, that she could float in her own bath tub now, did not need Ralph to bear her down the hall to the tub endlessly deep, griffin-toed, the one that everybody used and that a peephole looked into from the men’s and that you could hear what was going on over there.

Most of the rest of the boarders disappeared quietly, caught in a passive sense of their worthlessness—the unemployed, the old, the lightning-struck from Tennessee, the limbless, the jangled, the boozed beyond the heebeejeebees, the simply lost after long fishing trips to Alaska.  The plan was to move Mary the heck out and then the rest of the stubborn citizens would move on, too.  Who could stay without Queen Mary, the cornerstone, the cursing sputtering hub?  Mary’s leaving would mean defeat, inevitability, freewheelers from the streets slipping up the stairs in the middle of the night clubbing the lone survivors, the ones huddled in their cots against the lonely hallways, piles of discarded clothes.

As for me, I was hired to do a single job for a middleman bunch of social workers, assigned to pack up the old girl, to move her through the ineluctable with the least pain, to sit her down in the room next to Ralph’s so that she could sort through her past, her cigarette equipment, her hula art, so that she could decide what was valuable enough to cart along, to compress into the studio that she and Ralph would share—and what she must leave behind to posterity.

*                      *                         *

There was the story Mary told over and over again as she sat up in the vibrating chair of her streetfront room—a story of guilt and blame and helplessness.  It wore me out, the endless cackle about Ralph’s forgetting to close the door one afternoon, how she slipped on the rug endlessly, broke her hip endlessly in a room of linoleum, called out for him endlessly, while Ralph quacked with his buddies down in the communal kitchen.

After many reruns, Mary settled down into small noises.  I fed her precious objects:  plastic chopsticks, teakwood boxes, stones from Oregon, shells, bric-a-brac, scissors, shrines and elephants from India, brass vases, plastic horses, dolls from Taiwan, from the tops of dressers, vanities, bureaus—the radio where a dollie’s breasts lit up with off/on and volume—the  room a stuffed menagerie of 30 years’ packratting, boyfriends, discarded golden finds.

“These?” I’d ask.  “Which of these nail clippers can you use over there in your new place by the Space Needle?  Want all these buttons?  Can you let go of this National Geographic?  We can’t take it all.”

“That’s what you think,” Mary said, presiding at her de-accessioning like the curator-in-residence.

*                      *                  *

Mary would get stuck on an old Cover Girl compact, turn it over, polish its ebony to a high luster, refuse to relinquish it—do the same with a cedar box, a book of browned-out medical facts, dead lipsticks and cosmetics, cigarette rollers—until in the end, she sat engulfed in a heap of her own making, could abide by no decisions at all, had given up, strangled by her objects.  The last two days she would not go to her room, but lay in bed watching Ralph wrap his railroad books with the New York Central, the Milwaukee Road Hiawatha, all his glittering old engines—watched him wrap them one by one in newspaper, put them in a suitcase.

“I’m like Jimmy Carter,” Ralph said, working on Mary’s prunes.  “We both collected arrowheads on this river in Georgia.  Now, wait a minute, I can’t remember….”

“Oh, what’s the matter with you, Ralph?  You can’t remember anything,” Mary would say.  “How did I get hooked up with you?  I don’t even know if it’s a man or woman in bed with me.”

Ralph stirred the prunes, crept to the toaster, shook out the bugs, the crumbs:  “The Flint River.  That’s it.  The Flint River.”

In the end, I hand-packed about everything in the collection:  pictures of her mother in Scotland—little Mary in a fleet of sunny fishing boats—a green and blue oil painting of the Firth of Forth and cottages; a velvet tiger from south of the border; musketeers with Moorish harem drapes; 30 years of dust; photographs of Mary’s froglike beauty, more vamp than lady;  Mary, with this fella, that soldier; Mary on a bus tour in Hawaii; little Mary, spoon in hand, cooking for desperados in Alaska, hadn’t a guy come right through the wall from the bar; six Bibles, tons of dried rouge, lip gloss, feather ticklers, her mother’s crocheting in a flood of knick-knacks, kewpie dolls, doo-dads, cotton balls.

“Don’t throw that away,” Mary screeched.  “That’s important!”

My job, in the Space Needle studio, was to make a home, hang a Japanese lantern, arrange the international dollies on their doilies, dust off mother for the pink chest of drawers, plug in the chord organ, put Favorite American Songs on the rack, make the black chair vibrate, make Mary’s world as it was and ever would be.

*                      *                      *

They are 83 and 77, these two, Ralph just a young guy with good legs, longshoreman- type arms; Mary with a cataract, a couple of ears that hear and don’t—depending.  It’s January 1983.  My final task is to prepare Mary for the reality of uprooting, to repeat day by day, the hour, the minute of our parting.

“Monday, at 11, the cabulance comes.”

I talk through cataracts, plugged ears.  Mary’s rolled in an S-curve under the covers.

“How about Monday, 11 A.M. on the dot?”

And once again, “At 11, the cabulance will come,” not fearing overkill so much as nothing getting through.

And “What are you going to wear, Mary?”

She looks at me, her head cocked sideways, her aslant eye a sparrow’s regarding me in moving flicks, her bigger nose, shrunken head, old-woman-white hair cupped around her head in a baby’s cap.

“What are you going to wear, Mary?” I ask, wrought up with my sense of duty.

“Me?” she shrieks.  “Me?  Nothing.  I’m going naked.”

*                      *                      *

Monday morning at 9, I knock on the door.  Ralph peeks, unchains, welcomes me in.

“I’m so glad you’re here.  You don’t know.  Poor little Mary.  We got to get her out of here.  Plaster fell down at 5 and she didn’t sleep a wink before then.  Two hours all night.  Poor little Mary.”

Mary screeches from the bed, “You expect me to eat this?  Don’t you even remember, after all these years, how I like my toast?  Do you even remember my name?”

Ralph shrugs his shoulders, picks up the toast, wipes the jam.

“No jelly ever on the first piece.  You know that!”

“Want coffee?” Ralph asks me.

“Sure, Ralph.  You guys going to be ready?  Should I start dressing her at 10?”

“Nobody’s dressing me, thank you.  He’s never been here when I need him anyway.  I don’t know why he’s here now.  I’d be walking out of here alone today if he wouldn’t have left my door wide open.”

At 10:30, Ralph brings her a slip, panty hose, a green suit, a hat shaped like half a croissant, a red wool coat with grime on the shoulders.  Mary pulls on the panty hose, one leg at a time, over hairless frog legs.  A tattoo, its pointillist precision shot, beams off her left thigh.  Rose?  Mermaid?  Something else?  It’s killing me to know, but I will not allow myself to stare.

“No one’s dressing me,” she yells as Ralph tries to assist with the strap on her slip.  She pulls the beige, arm by arm, over the wrinkled buds on her chest.

Mr. Cabulance comes at 10:55, a tall sturdy farm-boy guy with sandy hair and an easy laugh.  Mary smiles and flirts in her hat and white gloves, her fur-tipped rubber boots.

“Well, you’re set, little lady,” the driver says.  “I’m Charlie.”

“I’m Mary.  I manage the Second Avenue.”

We roll up First Avenue, me and Mr. Cabulance in the front seat, Mary and Ralph in the rear, Queen Mary, as Ralph calls her, perched up high in the wheelchair as a brief moment of winter sun flickers over her face.  Mary smiles.

On the other end, Charlie totes Mary up a flight of red shag, across the threshold of 206, as if she were a new bride.  He sets her loose in the chair that vibrates, plugs in a black cord. A fuse blows.  Ralph sits on their new-used double bed wrapped with bleached sheets and a bedspread imprinted “Savoy Hotel.”  How did I do this, Mary asks me, make it all look so much like home—mother framed above, Scotland on the wall; taxidermied dolls ranged along another single bed; a teak tea-house, lacquered and miniature across the room with clappers, bells, Eastern brass.  There’s barely room to turn.  The hall closet is stuffed to infinity with Ralph’s tool box, paintings, a Seth Thomas clock, jackets, dresses, high-heels; chests, loose drawers, boxes, canes, umbrellas, hats, railroads crisscrossing the country, the Hiawatha roaring out of the closet.  In the kitchen, there’s silverware service for 80, the drawers clogged with overflow spoons, forks, can-openers.  Only the bathroom stands free—a toilet, a tub, those chicken-coopy-wire-looking tiles of pristine gray and white.

Charlie kisses Mary on the cheek, pulls the door behind.

“So exhausted,” Mary says, collapsing forward in her chair, fading in the black vinyl. “So, so tired.”

In the kitchen, a hyped-up Ralph bangs pots.  I sit on the chord-organ bench and take Mary’s hand, a cold little white thing, between my two big paws.

“I put up such a good front, didn’t I?” Mary says.

Her crushed beige hat, her white gloves remain in place.

She cries down her stringy neck, her greasy red shoulders.  Ralph brings her a chopped-up egg.

“I can’t eat this shit,” she screams. “What do you think I am, a baby?”

She throws the plastic bowl into the kitchen behind her.

Later, when I return from lunch, Mary is still sitting in the chair with dress and coat and shoes, fingering a pair of chopsticks with abalone chips.  Ralph says he can’t find anywhere to cash his check, anywhere to buy fresh meat.

Mary nods off while Ralph and I sort through boxes of graters, beaters, bowls, and cups.  I wash the newsprint from Mary’s Wedgewood plates, arrange her pieces in a mahogany case.  Roaches squeeze out of cardboard seams, old newspapers, though we sprayed at them back in the hotel.

“So much junk,” Ralph says, “Why can’t she get rid of all this junk?”

At 4:30, I say to Ralph, to the Space Needle pasty with winter and northern light, “Well, I think I’ll go.  Just get the manager if you get in trouble.  And remember Jack and Rose are down the hall.  I’ll come back Thursday.  Maybe we can have a house warming.

“I’ll get the Jack Daniels,” Ralph whispers.

He brims with loose energy, casts his eyes up and down, giggles under the bristles of his bald skull.  He reminds me of a cartoon character, a friendly buzzard with hunched shoulders, hunched feathers, rumpled wings.

“No, you won’t!” says Mary, suddenly awake.  “No drinking in this house.”

I hug 120 pounds of  Ralph.  Mary pecks around my cheek, squeezes my hand with iced fingers, begins to cry again.  By the door, hangs a glass lantern with an Asian motif.  Packing it, I’d broken one of the vertical panes, so the lantern lists with open air in the back.  I hope to God Mary will not notice, that it will remain perfect for her until the day she dies.

*                      *                      *

The last time I saw Ralph, he asked me take something of  Mary’s to remember her by—maybe a brush or comb from the vanity, but I refused because I’ve got more than enough—a plastic apple bank with a worm that comes out to gobble a coin, a brass globe that opens at the equator, chopsticks with inlaid opercula, some velvet midnight dancing girls.

“You know,” Ralph says. “It’s like taking an animal away from what it’s used to.  She was too old to move.”

The smoke alarm over the door beeps intermittently, signals a dying battery.

“At first, I thought that noise was Mary coming back, her ghost, that first night,” Ralph says.  “Twenty-two years….”

Mary’s ashes reside in an urn in Lakeview Cemetery.  Ralph isn’t sure if she died two months ago or May of ’83.

“She wanted to be cremated and sprinkled over Alaska where her husband went down in a plane,” Ralph says.  “Quite a little gal, that Mary.”