Tin Pan Alley

The son never came to visit. If there was a son. A Catholic family like that you'd think there'd be a son, or six sons and maybe four daughters. But Teddy, Tadeuz, always sat by himself in a morgue-ish silence, last room on the left, the noise of the nurses pushing the med carts on the soundtrack of his dreams. You couldn't really tell what he was dreaming or thinking except for the occasional wry smile. Teddy didn't say anything, couldn't speak. He was a stroke patient. One morning, he was sitting on his porch in Chicopee yelling to a guy in the street he'd known for sixty years about how the Sox were bullshit and would never break the Curse. They didn't have it in them. They were losers and weaklings....when he just fell off his plastic lawn chair and started rolling into the gutter like an errant bowling ball. The ambulance came and brought him to Bay State where a team of doctors from who knows where worked him over, but in the end all they could do was stick a feeding tube in his belly and assure him he'd be well cared for at Rolling Meadows. This was four years ago.

He lay in bed until his aide, Aisha, a powerful Jamaican, lifted him out every morning and sat him in his chair.
"How you doin', T?" she asked him. "You dream sweet dreams last night? Pretty girls visit you when it get dark and nobody lookin'"?
She handed him a plastic bottle to pee in and wheeled him to the bathroom sink so he could brush his teeth and throw some water on his face. Teddy had the use of his upper body, his arms and hands, his head. So he could turn toward Aisha and smile. Then, he could do what he did every morning. Lift his right hand to his mouth in a charade of drinking a cup of coffee, his heart's desire.
"No sir, T. No way. You drink coffee, you could aspirate it right down the wrong pipe into your lungs."
Teddy had learned that word. Aspirate. One nurse or another, one aide or another was always using it to threaten him. His brain had forgotten how to swallow. He couldn't speak and he couldn't eat or drink. If he drank a cup of coffee, the sweet hot stuff would go down his windpipe. He'd end up with pneumonia and it would probably kill him. The only thing that could go in or out of his mouth was air, the stale stink of the nursing home.

After she served him breakfast, some beige slop that went through the tube in his belly, the aide propped him up and handed him the Herald sports section. Then, she sashayed out of the room into the hall where a small party of other staff, painted latinas, skinny white girls, Caribbean women with outlandish hairdos, was taking a spontaneous break. Telling affectionate stories about some residents, complaining about others.
"He keep pinchin' my ass."
"She used to be a opera singer."

They all loved Teddy. He must have had something before he got old and stroked out because they all flirted with him. There was a satisfaction in saying something a little racy or dancing around in front of him, getting his blue eyes to twinkle, making the corners of his mouth turn up a fraction of a millimeter. He hadn't been with a woman in so long. None of the men had except O'Connell who used to be in the bed on the opposite side of the room before he had a heart attack and got wheeled out on a gurney. O'Connell had a wife who came in Tuesdays and Fridays to give him a hand job. The other men listened. They looked forward to it.

There was a new aide on the floor. She couldn't have been more than twenty, blond with curls tied back in a pony tail. When she walked out of the room after she fluffed up the pillows on Teddy's bed and changed the sheets for his roommate, Kirby, Teddy watched her hips rock back and forth slowly. Sandy, her name was, and she was in no kind of hurry. He knew her name was Sandy because he read the little tag she wore, but he hadn't talked to her yet. Or, rather, she hadn't talked at him yet. After a while, a decent interval he thought, not all in your face like some of them,  she came by and asked.
"You a Sox fan?"
He nodded "Tough for you to be in here all cooped up and not even have a decent ball team to root for."
He noticed she didn't wear a wedding ring. There were so many questions he wanted to ask. Have you every been married? Do you have kids? How come a beautiful woman like you is all alone? Do you like to sing? She came in and out every day, helping him change out of his pajamas, sponging him down and getting him into a clean shirt in the morning and just visiting a bit in the afternoon before she left at 3. Teddy couldn't tell if he was special or if she was just a good person.

When she came in the morning, he did his coffee charade just like he did with all the other aides. Sandy didn't tell him he was going to aspirate it. She just got this plaintive look on her face and shook her head.
"I'm sorry," she said.
When she came in the afternoon, she sometimes read to him from the paper. He'd already read it all by that time, but that didn't matter. He loved to listen to her read and make comments about the Sox or the Patriots, depending on the season, or about the crooks in Boston, the ones on the street and the ones in the mayor's office.

One day, she was just kicking back turning the entertainment pages before heading home when she started humming "Summertime." Sandy loved show tunes. Teddy chimed in. "Fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high." She looked up from the Herald and stared at him, but she didn't say a word. Didn't make a big deal out of it. Just went on singing. They sang together "Your daddy's rich and your mama's good lookin'...hush little baby, don't you cry."

Teddy couldn't talk, but it turned out he could sing like one of the old crooners, like Sinatra, like Tony Bennett. Nobody knew that but Sandy. She looked it up on the internet. Found out that the music comes from a different place in the brain. Even the words in the songs. The words in the songs were coming from a secret place where they lay in wait hoping for a chance to come out.

It was hard for Teddy to pick out a song, but if Sandy started singing, he jumped right in. They both knew all the words. "The falling leaves, drift by the window, the autumn leaves of red and gold." For a while now, he had stopped doing his coffee charade when it was Sandy's shift. He didn't want to repeat himself with her every day the way he did with the other aides. He wanted to feel the freshness, the newness every day. Teddy could see out the window that winter had come to Westfield even though it was always the same inside Rolling Meadows, like a casino in Vegas. Outside, the trees were bare. Flurries fell from a mean sky. How he would have loved that hot coffee warming his hands, his throat and his belly. And another thing. Sandy wanted to sing Christmas carols, but Teddy wouldn't have any part of it. She didn't know why, but she didn't push it.

Don't give me baby Jesus and all them kings and lambs hanging around, he thought while he shook his head no. Jesus doesn't give a shit about me. Didn't bring back my legs or give me a ham sandwich for lunch. Let's stick to "Winter Wonderland." "Sleigh bells ring, are you listening." Sandy listened. She tried to get a feel for what songs Teddy was in the mood for. Some days, he seemed to want upbeat. "The Sunny Side of the Street," as if he was feeling some gratitude for the life he had, even if the pleasure wasn't enough to fill a shot glass. Some days were dark, dead of winter dark. It was January now and Donder and Blitzen were coming down from the windows. Next thing you know, they'd be putting up the Valentines. Wives would be coming in with boxes of chocolates for the old guys, even if they were sons-of-bitches before they ended up in Rolling Meadows. Teddy's wife had left him one January. One drunken brawl too many. He didn't look up at Sandy when she came in at the end of her shift. She was singing "Unchained Melody." He kept his eyes closed while a tear came down his face. After a few minutes, she squeezed his hand and turned to leave for the day. The next morning, after she got him up and into his recliner, he raised his right hand to his mouth and threw his head back to drink his imaginary cup of coffee.

She asked "milk?" Teddy nodded yes. "How many sugars"? He raised two fingers.
She went out and came back with a steaming white mug. It was early and no one else was awake in the room. No one was working the floor. It was just the two of them. Teddy took a sip of heaven and beamed back at Sandy. He felt the heat and the sugar and the caffeine and the love. Teddy coughed as she was walking out of the room. Sandy wasn't sure she'd done the right thing. He might aspirate the coffee, but he might not.



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