My Brother And His Wife

I was never close to my brother growing up, he was too much older, too butch, too athletic, but when he came back for a surgery residency after his army duty, and married with a small child, and I was nineteen, we became friends through the medium of his wife, younger and closer to my age, and at first needing help in setting up living in the university student dwelling, a sort of Quonset hut affair.  He had met her in his hospital sojourn in Cleveland; she was a nurse on the floor.  Our mother sniffed at her plebeian origins, her father worked in a factory, as I remember.  She met my mother far more than half way, taking mother's lording it over her with instructions on how to set the table, and on and on, with sincere gratitude since she recognized that as the wife of a surgeon wherever they finally settled she would have to inhabit the world my mother knew full well.  She learned recipes from mother as well, bringing along in her own repertory jello salad with marshmallows--how mother shivered in horror!  Years passed and she was the mother of four, retired from helping out with private duty nursing when my brother became almost immediately a big shot surgeon in a medium sized Iowa town, and they had a big house on the edge of the golf course.  She always answered the phone with "Dr. Beye's residence" as though she were the office nurse and it was a professional call.  She was devoted to his position and understood medical hierarchy.  I rarely saw them since I lived in the East, a part of the country my brother loathed, "too snobbish," "too many Jews,""nothing but foreigners ."  He found me mysterious having heard of all my teenaged gay shenanigans, and then standing in the church when I married my wife.  Shortly thereafter a tremor in his arm caused him to retire at 57. Very happily as his son told me, since he had taken up surgery to placate my mother, who wanted him to replicate our father, and much preferred sailing.  After retirement they sold the house on the golf course, bought a two or three masted sail boat and cruised the Caribbean, putting the boat in dry dock for the summer and coming back to a house and a smaller boat on a kind of lake formed from a damned up section of the Mississippi.  They both loved to sail, and when they were not doing that they watched football on television.  She had been a cheer leader in high school and knew all the moves of what I have always considered one of the world's most boring games.  Later on when a heart attack precluded all that sailing and they settled down in a house in Florida, they had a television room where they cheered and rooted and argued over strategy.  Sailing was in their blood, and they went out on a small diesel powered boat and then came home to martinis and football.  She did needlepoint and he often sat on a footstool at her side as she demonstrated what she was doing.  They were truly in love, you couldn't miss it.  And then her mind began to go.  Clear eyed, and straight forward and ever the nurse, she told us the  tentative diagnosis of Altzheimers when we came down to visit.  By the next year she would come into a room, laugh and say "This damn disease!  Who knows why I came into this room?"  Another year and my brother stood behind her when she emptied the dishwasher and told her where the cleaned items were to be put.  She wanted to keep in the game as best she could.  They went out on the boat and she performed simple tasks, they went for walks, they had fun, he told his jokes, and she got a little hazy much of the time (I remember a plate of hors d'oeuvres at a Super Bowl party that looked like a child of two had put the stuff together but their friends loved her and loved the dish she had brought to the potluck).  Then she had trouble with her digestive juices when she slept so my brother made their bed rise up at an angle sharp enough to prevent that.  He cooked the food and told her what she was eating.  They watched more football, and she was silent as she watched the game.  My daughter and I went out to visit once and while at dinner, she sat next to me, and was silent, only to say, eventually "I think you are Charlie," and when we left to go back to the car, she asked us quietly how she was to get into it.  A couple of years later she fell and got pneumonia and died.  Although I said nothing I considered it a blessing.  My brother was devastated.  He loved her so much, they had done everything together, even now when the lights had gone out for her, they were still inseparable.  And now she was gone.