Chapter Twenty-One

As a reporter, I knew how to find sources, and there were plenty of potential sources with whom I could talk about my father. At the top of my list was Gramma. But she lived with Aunt Roz now, and I suspected that if Aunt Roz knew I wanted to talk to my grandmother about my father, she would put an end to it before I got started.

I took this picture of Gramma while I was in a photography class at Syracuse University. She was probably in her mid to late 80s.

I hadn’t seen my aunt since April, when Gramma was in the hospital with congestive heart failure. It was so serious that my cousin Cindy, Aunt Roz’s daughter, called Amy in Milwaukee to tell her if she wanted to see Gramma alive, she should come to Boston right away. Three weeks earlier Amy had given birth to her first child. I was actually supposed to fly to Milwaukee that day to see them, but instead, Amy canceled my ticket and bought one for herself and Liza to fly to Boston. Mom drove in from Utica. We picked up Amy and the baby at the airport on Friday night. First thing Saturday, we drove to the hospital.

Aunt Roz took one look at the four of us and informed us that we couldn’t see Gramma.

“That’s okay, we can wait,” we said.

“You can’t see her at all. She’s sick. She can’t have visitors.”

“I saw her yesterday,” I reminded Aunt Roz. “And the doctor said she was getting better.”

No amount of logic could persuade Aunt Roz to change her mind. We appealed to Uncle Henry, a quiet, soft-spoken man whom I’d always thought of as reasonable. He wouldn’t listen to us, either. Nor would the nurses. When we called the doctor, he hung up. Aunt Roz had gotten to him first.        

What made the situation more painful was realizing that Mom, who had been invincible for so long, had no power here. This was Aunt Roz’s territory and she was using the most lethal weapons in her arsenal: control and revenge.