Table Talk

   The table was in the kitchen of my childhood home, the place where I lived until I was 27 years old, and the place that's still the home to most of my dreams. The people at the table were my mother and Helen.  They'd evidently been in deep and somber conversation when I walked in through the old kitchen door next to the refrigerator.  As soon as I entered the room, Helen turned to me and said, "Will you promise not to let them put me in the home?"  I answered that I would, would not let them do that.  I was thirteen years old then, young and unworldly, but I always had felt that I had an adult mind.  I wanted her to feel reassured but I had no idea how I would keep her out of the home. I was further disquieted by my mother's silence, she who I still depended on to furnish the answers to  such life determining questions.
    Helen was born in 1900, so she would have been then about 52 years old.  But her mother had died the year before, and Helen, as the oldest surviving daughter, had been  the designated one to care for her mother.  Just as Matt, the only surviving son, was the one to provide support for both  women, his mother  and unmarried sister.  If the brother and sister had continued as they were, any unsettling problems and decisions would have been far in the future.  But fate inserted itself,  in the form of a woman who, late in life and on the verge of desperation,  had set her sights on securing her own future, and that meant a  husband, and Matt was targeted as that husband.
    From what my childhood recollections were, from the heard and overheard, she had found there was a single man, of Irish heritage, a necessity to her in those times, who was living on the winding dirt road of a family she knew.  She arranged to live with that family for a while, and would wait for Matt to drive past her temporary residence on his way to work, and be roadside when he passed by.  Now Matt was a good-looking man, tall, lean and muscular, had a good job and drove his own car.  He'd had other women companions, but seemed content to bypass any permanent  relationships, citing, most likely, his commitment to his mother.  Inevitably, though his mother died.  In November of 1950, and it didn't take long for the roadside romantic to take action.  He was reluctant to enter into marriage at that point in his life, but that reluctance turned to submission when she told him that if he didn't marry her, she would throw herself in front of his car when he drove past her house.  So they were married.
   It was a small wedding. I'm not sure who attended.  I think Dorothy did; to keep Helen company, she used to occasionally spend weekends with Helen and Matt in those early years.  I did not. I had a job in the store next door.  Every day, 7 days a week, from 6 to 7 every evening and 1 to 2 on weekends and school vacations and in the summer. It really cut into any social life, except for those who came to the store.
    Matt had been revered as the Irish son, and was used to being in control of his life, but that was to change in  dramatic fashion. His new wife was shrewd but emotionally damaged, and perhaps mentally as well. She was one of 8 children and her mother had been committed to and died in a mental institution, in Poughkeepsie as my childhood memory recalls.  So Matt in his innocence and hopes had thought the two women, his sister and his wife, could live happily in their isolated home, keeping each other company while he was at work.  Not only did that hope not work out, it was a dismal and catastrophic failure, of dimensions almost unimaginable.-----So Helen came to live with us.
   I didn't know how I could keep the promise I made.  I only knew that any home she would have gone to was synonymous with "poorhouse."  The County Home.  The place where people without loved ones ended up.  Alone and forgotten. There were not many "homes"  back then.  The wife, or designated spinster daughter, of the family did not work and so was home during the day, able and so destined  to care for any aging or disabled family members.  A different world.  So as a young teen, I accepted the responsibility.  I suppose I wished it far into the future because I knew I had no skills, no money, no car, no prospects at all.  As it turned out, my mother died in 1983.  I owned her house for a while after that and Helen died 12 years later, still living in the same house, and except for the last 4 days of her life still sitting every day at that same kitchen table.