CONTRIBUTED BY PETER ORNER (San Francisco, CA)
Detroit, 1946
It’s said Grandpa Leo got deranged a few years after FDR died. They had to put him in the Home for the Jewish Aged on Petoskey Avenue. He despised the place with a wrath he’d never shown towards anything else in his life. Once or twice a week he’d escape and wander down Petoskey or Livernois until someone, usually the police found him in a ditch or an alley still wearing his union suit. He’d claw at the police, the orderlies at the home, his daughters, everyone but Barbara. More old than crazy people said, but it was hard to know for sure. Most of the family wished he would simply die so they could get on with the business of honoring the humble mechanic he’d been, the man they all loved and respected.
And this is what motivates Barbara, the cousin my mother still wonders about in quiet moments, the one who disappeared, six months pregnant, in the late sixties. (Just about killed her husband Howard. How many years did he spend looking, waiting, hoping?) It’s Leo’s forsaking. It’s not literal – lord knows everybody in the family came to pay homage to him. Him strapped down on that bed everyday. A greasy king, the man he used to be, padlocked to the steel bracers. He would have chucked the cakes they brought him across the room if he could have lifted his arms. To Barbara it’s abandonment pure and simple, no matter how much they all fawn. Even so her plan is modest. Her idea is not to help him escape, but not to return him so quickly when he does get out. The best time is when Tomas, the fat laughing night-shift orderly, takes him to the bathroom. Come now Mr. Leo, don’t tell me you’re running again? For an old man he moves fast down corridors.
Her own escape came later but whose to say the two aren’t related?
So at night in the long year of Leo’s imprisonment, she often takes her father’s flashlight and goes out and looks for him. And more than once she finds him. It’s a fifteen block walk from Curtis Avenue to Livernois. See her? Barbara ten years old and moving along the dark streets, calling his name like Grandpa Leo’s a lost cat. And him raving, muttering, zigzagging along somewhere, one shoe off, sock dragging, waiting for her to find him again and pluck the hair out of his eyes. Maybe she’ll also feed him chocolate with her little fingers and steer him farther, farther away from that accursed building, that coffin the size of a battleship. But even Leo knows there’s only one place left to go, and he hopes in vain because even Barbara can’t carry his burden there. He’ll go alone. It doesn’t matter how crowded the street he’s wandering when it happens.
And Barbara? My mother still wonders.
