Fun with Dick and Helene

Lynn, my mother's chief caregiver/secretary/computer tutor, also known as Lynne 1 to differentiate from Lynne 2, who usually spends nights, stands in the hallway outside my mother's hospital room. Lynne has Valkyeric presence: tall, with long, rippling blonde hair, she's a gentle persistent force, invaluable to Mom. Lynne gets things done.

At times, I'm fairly certain Mom considers Lynne to be the daughter she never had, even though she already has three daughters, but that is just a thought.


"We've been banished," she tells me, grinning.


"Banished?"


"Your Mom is on the phone with Dick."


Dick is an old flame of my mother's. Once, long before my father proposed, Dick asked Mom to marry him. My mother received lots of proposals in those days, and a few engagement rings, which she returned. She kept notches on her hairbrush. I knew about some of these suitors, but this was one about whom she'd kept mum. She had said 'no' to Dick, and they had each married other people.

Then, a few years ago - when she was in her mid-80s - his name came up. They'd been in contact. I was stunned. 

"What are you talking about?" I demanded. "Who is this Dick?"

"He's a very successful newspaper publisher who lives in New Jersey, a dear old friend. He knew me when I was a girl at Saranac Lake."


"Oh, brother," I said.

"I've always felt badly, somehow, about saying 'no' to Dick," she said wistfully.


"What about Dad?" 


"Oh, I would never have married Dick, and I loved your father, it's just..." she trailed off.


"No one but Dad would have been able to stick it out," I muttered.


"What was that?"


"Nothing."

Mom and Dick wrote letters, and talked on the phone. "He's a Democrat," she complained. "A liberal."

Once, she visited the liberal at his home in New Jersey.


"How did that go?" I asked, with the dubious fascination of a rubbernecker passing the scene of an accident.


"He doesn't own a computer, and it felt as though the bed I slept in hadn't been made up in years. There were clothes under the bedspread."

"Whose clothes?" I asked, half imagining lacy lingerie from the 30s.


"I don't know whose clothes, his, I guess. He's been a bachelor for several years ever since his wife, my old friend Franny, died...but, I can't get over the fact he doesn't have a computer!"


When Dick, lanky and stooped, visited Mom, things didn't go so well. He couldn't figure out how to put my mother's Lexus in gear, and a neighbor had to come out and help.


"He got so mad," my mother reported. "He said, 'I'm not going anywhere when I don't know how to drive the car.'"


Nor did he compliment her on her appearance. My mother was swift to retaliate.


She ignored him at that night's dinner party at the club. She talked to the man on her left, leaving Dick to talk to Ethel, who did go on. And on. Then, my mother left him there, cane in hand.


"Why did you do that?" I asked.


"I didn't want him to think I was after him for his money," she said.


"What?"


She giggled. "I said to him, 'I think the big important business man can find his own way back to the house.' I was dreadful, really."


Yet Dick persisted. He went to visit Mom in Florida, but he, as she put it to me later, "lacked enthusiasm." He preferred to sit on the couch and chat. My mother had organized enough activities to fell Porfiro Rubirosa: bridge games, dinners, luncheons, concerts, cocktail parties, musical theater. At one point Dick appeared to be having an anxiety attack. He required medication.

"Also," she admitted nervously, "He wanted to have a little kiss."


"Ah!" I interrupted. I batted her words away with my arms. "I don't need to hear another detail!"

"Oh, Amy," she laughed, "Don't be so silly."

See Dick and my mother, Helene - both in their 90s. Dick has recently suffered a partial stroke. Helene is in the hospital, recovering from a nasty fall that left her looking like the survivor of a bar fight, stitches, black eye and all. Dick still doesn't have a computer. He continues to be a Democrat. Helene still doesn't want him to think she's after his money, so she hangs up on him regularly.

"Lynne!" My mother bellows.


We enter the domain that is her hospital room.


"So, how's Dick?" I ask, smirking.


 "Well, it wasn't much of a conversation," my mother reports.


"Mostly, I yelled, "What? I can't hear you!"

"And mostly, he said,"Dammit, I can't hear you either!"