A Portrait of Dorian, Gray

A Portrait of Dorian, Gray

How do you tell a true story when its truth is too poignant to ring true? Too impossibly full of pathos to come off as anything other than the figment of a Hallmark Hall of Fame scriptwriter’s imagination. And when it requires nearly a full lifetime – six decades – to reach its heartbreaking denouement. (Which isn’t even, incidentally, the death of the protagonist.)

What’s more, how do you do it if you find yourself in the last chapter of your own lifetime aware of a single, dim regret; that you failed to pursue a naive but passionate childhood dream to become a writer? To be someone who could not only conceive of such a compelling narrative but skillfully put it into written words and bring it to life.

In my case, channeling Twain’s admonition to “write what you know” and aware that reality had already done the heavy lifting, I poured a cup of strong, black coffee early one morning in my 70th year and began typing.

* Neil met my sister Dorian in 1965 when they were both 16. He played rhythm guitar, just barely and often with questionable rhythm, in “The Gang Green.” Such were the preposterous names of garage bands in the sixties. Somehow, they actually came off very cool at the time.

“There was a house in New Orleeee-ons…”

A minor.

C major.

D major.

The F major bar chord that followed required left-hand dexterity beyond his reach and the resulting sound was dreadfully muffled. But his mind was elsewhere.

Because he was completely transfixed by a girl dancing not far from the stage to the band’s obligatory rendition of House of the Rising Sun. Her rhythm was sublime and her movements so stylized that everyone within eyeshot took notice…as they did everywhere she went to dance, most every weekend. They were understated – not showy – but so seamlessly synchronized to the song that she seemed almost a part of it.

With a waifish figure and nearly-waist-length, dirty blonde hair, she looked like Tuesday Weld or Michelle Phillips, two of the era’s celebrity icons of beauty. It was a resemblance sufficiently remarkable that many friends even called her Tuesday. Her sense of the barely emerging, hippy fashion aesthetic was as impeccable as her dancing. Tight Levi bellbottoms, leather moccasins, a sweater just snug enough to flatter her petite but perfectly proportioned figure.

As the rain fell softly outside the high school gym and streetlights reflected off the slick Cleveland streets, he strummed his Sears Silvertone electric guitar absently while falling hopelessly (and never was the adverb more apt) in love.

“And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy. Dear God, I know I was one.”

*

He was from Cleveland Heights, a leafy, affluent suburb of gracefully winding, shaded streets lined with historic homes built in the early part of the century. Like many of the other Jewish boys there, his adolescence awoke in him a secret, persistent obsession with the classic shiksa goddess. It was a phenomenon common to his cohort for reasons perhaps only fully understood by Alexander Portnoy’s Dr. Spielvogel.

She was from Shaker Heights, the similarly bucolic, slightly-more-affluent next town over. Until the ninth grade, her reed-thin body, pixie hair style, cat-eye glasses and whispering shyness had conspired to ensure almost complete invisibility. And then, during the summer before high school, puberty, contact lenses and an awakened awareness of the allure of long, straight, flaxen hair caused the boys to whom she had gone through school unnoticed since first grade to suddenly swoon, en masse.

* He pulled the white,1962 MG convertible into her driveway, drew a deep breath to bolster his courage and stepped out of the car. His shoulder-length hair, fu-manchu mustache and red, white and blue shirt previewed Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider a few years hence. A guitar case stuck out of the space behind the seats and completed the look as artfully as if a Hollywood set designer had placed it there. Having summoned the courage and resourcefulness to track down her phone number via a series of intermediaries and make the initial, terrifying call, Neil wasn’t about to skimp on the details of their first date.

To the nine year old boy in the front yard, the guy getting out of the car was the very epitome of sixties, counter-culture cool. John Lennon may as well have pulled up the driveway. Moreover, the boy had just barely begun taking guitar lessons himself and had his own dreams of rock ‘n roll stardom, the outlines of which at that tender age probably looked much like Gang Green.

“Hi there! Is Dorian home?” Neil asked pleasantly.

“I think so,” answered the boy, slightly awed but still with the indifferent tone that permeated his every utterance regarding his two, much older sisters. “That’s a cool car.”

“Thanks. Maybe I can take you for a ride in it one day.” Neil paused as the two continued sizing one another up. “Would you mind letting her know that Neil is here?”

“Sure,” replied the boy and he opened the front door to yell – he always yelled – to his sister inside the house.

What came next happened so instantly that it barely registered in advance. The dog wasn’t big, but it wasn’t small either. Sort of a Beagle, those colors anyways. Not a purebred, in any event. And it didn’t bark, or even growl, a warning.

But with perfect timing, it flung itself through the narrow opening of the door and lunged past the boy towards Neil. In a flash, it bit him on the leg. Once? Twice? It was all so sudden that he couldn’t even tell. Then, as quickly as it had attacked, it turned and trotted contentedly back towards the house.

In the ensuing commotion, Neil didn’t even notice that both Dorian and her mother had materialized in the front yard amidst a chorus of apology and concern. “I’m SO sorry.”

“Are you okay?” “Jordan, put the dog in the backyard!”

The mother retreated into the house, then reemerged carrying a bottle of Mercurochrome and a handful of cotton. It was then that Dorian’s genetic good fortune became evident. Even in her housewife-casual attire, Maggie had a very housewifely glamour about her. She was a tall, willowy brunette with a face that inspired its own comparisons to celebrities of her era, most often Lauren Bacal. Despite having had four children and now approaching forty, she’d retained much of the sveltness that had prompted a brief sojourn to New York in search of a modeling career before marrying impulsively and starting a family twenty years earlier.

As the two women ministered to his wounds, it wasn’t lost on Neil that despite the discomfort, the episode could absolutely work in his favor. He smiled secretly to himself, reveling in their attention.

* As they do with young love, the following months passed in a blur. Tooling about in the white MG, Neil and Dorian made quite the couple. Driving out to the rolling Ohio countryside with the British Invasion on the radio, they got coffee, bought Goat’s Milk Fudge and maple syrup at roadside stands, took long walks by meandering streams and talked about their passions. She loved literature, poetry and music. He had

already begun to nurture a lifelong fascination with the writings of the great philosophers. Their conversations were deep, far-ranging and full of youthful enthusiasm.

During visits to her home, Neil’s self-effacing good nature charmed Maggie as it did most everyone…especially adults. Notwithstanding the generation gap that had forced an angry wedge between the rigidly-disciplined, Depression era parents and their privileged-but-rebellious offspring, Neil was so personable that he prompted none of the ambiguous suspicion that most other boys her age provoked in Dorian’s parents. He gave the kid brother the promised ride in the MG – indeed countless such rides – and authoritatively demonstrated chords over which he himself had minimal mastery to an enchanted pupil. Even the family patriarch, largely remote and absent in the fashion of most fathers back then, took a liking to him. Same with the boy’s slightly older brother, just embarking on a decade-long turn as the token Black Sheep every family of at least four children seemed to include. Though away at college, an older sister would prove similarly susceptible to his charms. Everyone adored Neil.

That Christmas was, for Neil, the first of what would be countless subsequent forays into a Courier-and-Ives tableau that was like nothing he had ever even experienced.

For his family of non-observant Jews, the holiday was occasion for a brief and unenthusiastic gift exchange and maybe a mid-day meal together if nobody happened to have made other plans.

The pageantry of her family’s seasonal ritual seemed to him the quintessential exercise in WASPY gentility, one that consumed the entire month of December. They mounted ladders to string colorful lights across the eaves in front of the house. They designated an evening on which to embark as a family to select and then erect a tree in the living room so large that it inevitably required removal of at least a foot of its highest branches. There were wreaths in the windows, a creche on the mantle. Each member went on multiple, furtive shopping expeditions determined to pick out – not suitable – but perfect gifts.

The day itself was defined by a rigid protocol of gift giving that lasted for hours, as festively wrapped presents were painstakingly selected and distributed by the father to be politely opened – one at a time – to their communal delight. Later, a multigenerational swarm of relatives – each more Aryan in appearance than the next – arrived for a bountiful Christmas dinner. And they all, even the grandparents whose general opinion of Jews was murky, embraced Neil’s presence with warmth and grace.

* Years later, Neil wouldn’t recall exactly when or why the romance ended. Perhaps it just ran its course in the way they often do at that age. More likely, their respective departures for different midwestern colleges were, if not to blame, at least the prime catalyst. Whatever the reason, the part of their bond that they once innocently characterized as love, was gradually replaced by something else. Something hard to define, but something sufficiently profound as to render the word friendship wholly inadequate.

In an era when even a brief long-distance telephone call was prohibitively expensive, multi-page letters took the place of drives in the country and walks by a stream. Hers were masterpieces of calligraphic handwriting and stunningly elegant phrasing. His penmanship was as crude as his guitar playing, but the letters were bursting with philosophical contemplations and references. The connection between them went undimmed by distance and the passage of time as across semesters, then years.

Their reunions remained the first thing that they both committed to in return visits to Cleveland at holiday breaks. Even more curiously, Neil’s presence at the family’s annual Christmas celebration was still as assumed as that of any biological member of the family. Nobody asked if he would be there. More probably, someone said “Let’s wait for Neil,” if he had not yet arrived when they prepared to begin unwrapping gifts.

Even after the family’s deceptive perfection fractured spectacularly in an unhappy divorce a few years hence, a new dual yuletide format – parallel celebrations at each parent’s new home – both still nearly always featured an appearance by Neil.

* And so it went between Dorian and Neil. For years. Then decades. Each took other lovers, though neither married nor had children. She lived with someone for a few years, though it was clear to all – and likely to her – that it was not the relationship of her destiny. Neil fell, if not in love, at least into something approaching it a few times, too. And the general promiscuity of the era found them together in bed together once or twice, but like so much sex back then, those moments were somehow almost irrelevant.

She surrendered, unhappily, into a series of numbing corporate jobs, ultimately rising despite her disdain for the mundaneness of it all, to a senior level at a technology company. He pursued a doctorate in philosophy, while waiting tables at one trendy eatery after another. His affability ensured robust tip income and won legions of friends in the local restaurant scene. It did not, however, propel his academic aspirations.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, his standard reply to inquiries about them – “I’m working on my dissertation” – took an ironic tint. Eventually, it came to be delivered as almost a punchline with the same self-effacing good nature that endeared him to most everyone.

A master’s degree marked the culmination of the dream and adjunct professor roles at local community colleges just barely paid the rent.

And through it all, his presence was a given not only at the series of Christmas rituals that evolved to replace the original, but at milestone birthdays, weddings and any other occasion at which family presence was assumed. When one of the dreary jobs took her to the east coast, she fell into a relationship that would continue for more than 30 years there, though she never married, or even moved in with a man known only to her family by his first name. And even during those years, every visit to Cleveland on which she was unaccompanied by “Mark,” upon arrival, a reunion with Neil was a given. During the decade when Maggie and Dorian’s father – and their second spouses – all passed away one-by-one, Neil grieved and celebrated their lives alongside the rest of the family. Whether Mark was or wasn’t in attendance, nobody else gave Neil’s presence a second thought. When my own children grew old enough to ask me “Is that Neil guy a relative, or what?,” I replied with understatement “Kind of…anyways…he’s a very close friend of our family.”

* In the aftermath of the family’s unraveling, I moved across the country, returning to Cleveland only sporadically on 48-hour visits for those same milestones. At some point though, I began my own occasional correspondence with Neil. Gradually, I, too, began making a coffee date with him a feature of some of my brief drop-ins. We shared recollections of past holidays and a still-intact family, reflections on aging and the ache of ambitions unrealized. A friendship – parallel to but no longer predicated on the one he had with my sister – took shape.

Just as “I’m working on my dissertation,” had taken on its sardonic tinge, “I’m biding my time until Dorian realizes we’re meant for each other,” slowly crept into his repertoire. It was always offered in the lighthearted tone of a joke, but my insight into their history saw through the irony. Though geography and the one-named “Mark” seemed obstacles as insurmountable as those that had stymied his dream of a doctorate, it was understood between us that he wasn’t kidding – at least not completely – whenever he said it. Which, at least once every time I saw him, he did.

* I dropped 35 pounds during the first six weeks of my treatment for throat cancer. The protruding tube surgically implanted in my stomach enabled me to absorb enough calories to keep me alive, but just barely. The misery of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation was constant and crushing, to the point where even casual conversation was simply too much to contemplate. Friends offered to drop by for a chat, a kindness that my wife declined on my behalf. Care packages of food that I was unable to so much as look at arrived as well. I spent five full months of my sixty-sixth year bedridden.

Word of my illness having reached him, Neil sent a text of reassurance that arrived during my darkest hours. Like other such messages, it offered whatever support or assistance might be needed, acknowledging the sense of helplessness felt by the sender. But Neil’s offer came with certain features that made it unique. First, geography mandated that it would be virtual, not in person. Not having to rouse myself from bed made the notion of taking advantage of it less unthinkable.

But there were other differences, perhaps harder to explain but maybe even more germane. My wife was the only person not a doctor to see firsthand and know completely the true depths of my suffering. Even my teenaged children were shielded from the ugliest of it, restricted from interacting with me more than once or twice a day and only when I was at my best, however piteous my best was. The prospect of being asked innocently by well-intended friends or family members anything to the effect of “How are you holding up?” was for me a deal breaker. Because so all-consuming was my misery that I was sure I was incapable of any answer other than “I’m not holding up well at all…I’m in hell…and I can’t even remember what it feels like not to be in hell.”

And here’s the thing. The desire to not ruin everyone else’s day by inflicting the emotional wreckage of your own ruined day on them is (unless you are the sort of

person for whom that is your very personality) pretty strong. Maybe I was assuming too much self-importance, but I imagined them hanging up the phone in total despondence because of a conversation with me. And coupled with the monumental effort required to have a conversation at all, it was enough to make me shun contact with nearly everyone.

And Neil’s outreach came with other features that made it uniquely viable. His status as an honorary, but not actual, family member made burdening him with my pitiful misery seem less objectionable. Finally, our friendship was sufficiently tertiary that somehow the possibility of ruining his day with a candid confession of my hopelessness didn’t seem so distasteful. So, alone among the countless such proposals, I accepted his.

Twice during the nadir of my suffering, I spent the better part of an hour regurgitating without censorship the morbid details of just how inconceivably awful I felt. Holding nothing back, I admitted how indifferent to the prospect of even death my misery left me. And like a good therapist, Neil just listened and acknowledged me. Nothing more. He didn’t try to cheer me up or remind me of the statistical likelihood of my survival. He just let me talk and quietly acknowledged my words. As a result, those calls were invaluable. Nearly sixty years after awing me with his arrival in my driveway he provided an emotional port in the most harrowing storm of my life.

* Eventually, I recovered and rejoined the world of people not confined to bathrobes and bed and able to eat solid food by mouth. Three years later, Neil surprised me with a call revealing that he was coming to Los Angeles on a short visit to see a distant cousin.

We enjoyed a meal together, after which I proposed a stroll. Now in his early seventies, he walked more slowly and made it clear before the first step was taken that it would be a short walk and, inscrutably, he preferred not to cross any bridges. We laughed at that and other such foibles and I noted that age had not degraded his self-effacing good nature. I took the opportunity to thank him for his essential support during my illness.

And as always, our meandering conversation eventually led to a place that permitted him to chuckle, “I’m just biding my time until Dorian realizes that we’re meant to be together.”

* “We need to have a conference call,” my oldest sister wrote to my brother and me in an email. Something is wrong with Dorian.”

It didn’t catch me totally off guard. I presume it was her lifelong fondness for literature that compelled Dorian to write even the most casual thank you note with not only her trademark calligraphic precision but also an obsessive commitment to perfect grammar, punctuation and elegant syntax. Even text messages typed on an i-phone were composed with a writer’s attention to detail and narrative. In fifty years, I don’t believe I had ever encountered so much as a misplaced semicolon in anything she wrote.

So when, from time to time, she failed to capitalize a proper noun in an email, I noticed it. But however anomalous the minor errors were, I didn’t give them much thought. The increase in frequency – and the errors themselves – were subtle. Plus, I was preoccupied with my re-acclimation to the world of the living, packing my kids off to college and otherwise resuming the busy cadence of my own life. Still, looking back at some of those early harbingers, I’m mildly ashamed that they didn’t provoke more concern on my part.

My sisters, though, had a much closer relationship with one another than they did with either of their brothers. Gender and six years of difference in age with even my older brother were likely equally responsible. They spoke on the phone several times a week and overcame their mutual aversion to air travel to ensure they got together at least once a year, sometimes even two or three. What’s more, Sharmon, an Ivy educated lawyer with a decidedly type A personality had, since their childhood, regarded the notquite two years that separated them and Dorian’s innately sweet and passive nature as obligating in her a sense of lifelong vigilance and oversight. I guess in retrospect it was precisely that sense of hyper protectiveness that explains why she was the first among us to become appropriately alarmed.

*

It seems that nearly everyone I know has had to shepherd a relative – typically a parent – down the sad road to nowhere that is Alzheimer's disease. Each execrable journey, though unique in duration, seems to include many of the same mileposts. Impossible conversations forcing the victim to acknowledge a condition of which they themselves are either ashamed and-or unaware and or in desperate denial. Immersion into the world of maddeningly-hard-to-acquire appointments for neurologic scans, cognitive tests, imprecise expert opinions and elusive medical clarity. A frantic and futile search for pharmaceuticals, homeopathies – or anything – that might halt or at least slow the decline. And eventually the forcible forfeiture of the most elemental features of personal agency; car keys, apartments, credit cards.

Having never married or had children, the burden of Dorian’s decline fell not to a spouse or offspring, but instead to her three siblings. The one-named partner faded quickly from the scene. A saintly brother-in-law, long one of Dorian’s most ardent admirers, stepped in to complete a four-person sibling support group that dubbed itself “Team Dorian” in managing the entire, depressing affair. In weekly Zoom sessions, we gradually concluded that Dorian, like it or not, would move back to Cleveland after 38 years and a spot was secured in the city’s premiere “retirement community.” The agenda of each week’s meeting was robust; powers of attorney, condo and car sales, furniture moving, income taxes, utility shut offs, cable box returns, portfolio oversight. Each of the one million administrative details that comprise the dismantling of a once-high-functioningperson’s life was delegated to one of the mercifully-still-high-functioning attendees. All the while, Team Dorian’s namesake beneficiary reluctantly, but unfailingly, thanked her loved ones for robbing her of every trace of her remaining autonomy.

Though horrified and bereft by the news of her diagnosis, Neil must have privately acknowledged the obvious silver lining in Dorian’s impending return. What’s more, their frequent telephone conversations during the six-or-so months prior to her move to Cleveland were so minimally disrupted by her condition that it was nearly – and sometimes completely – impossible to discern. Although she occasionally failed to remember details from their previous conversations, still very much present was her impeccable sense of irony, intuition and conversational elegance. Even a mildly diminished Dorian was still Dorian. Moreover, she had retained her stunning good looks, flawless figure and walked with the same, silky and rhythmic stylishness that had characterized her dancing a lifetime earlier.

Their first interactions upon her return were infrequent and brief, as demanded by Team Dorian. Although she had acknowledged her condition and the reasonableness of the move back to Cleveland where family support was more practical, she had done so with understandable reluctance, was fragile emotionally and intermittently, deeply

depressed. Though casual interactions with her revealed nothing of her condition, the siblings had insight into the degree of her actual decline that was informed by multiple MRIs, clinical assessments and increasingly erratic emails and text messages that provided visibility into her degraded “executive functioning.” With the best of

* intentions, we carefully micromanaged her orientation into her new environment slowly and painstakingly, managing her calendar minute-by-minute as would the personal assistant of a pampered CEO. What’s more, it was often hard to tell whether her stubborn resistance to engage with her new neighbors or participate in the Judson “community’s” countless social events was a function of her lifelong solitary nature or her disease. She remained most of the time in her expansive apartment in the “light assist” sector of the facility, venturing out only occasionally for walks in the surrounding, leafy neighborhood, ironically located a mere two miles from the home in which Neil had grown up. Attempts to persuade her to engage and participate, essential to optimizing her condition according to her neurologist, were usually rebuffed. She even declined most offers from Neil to drop by for a chat, offers that were themselves filtered by the team in its quest to force Dorian to forge the new friendships and social interactions recommended as essential by her doctors.

* “I’m afraid that he’ll want something that I don’t want,” Dorian told me tentatively. “I’m afraid he’s hoping for romance…and I’m not. And I don’t even want to have that conversation. It would be so awkward.”

The confession was prompted by an inquiry assigned to me by Team Dorian. As the only member with a relationship with Neil semi-independent of our sister’s, it seemed sensible that I might be uniquely positioned to assess the appropriate degree of interaction Dorian desired – and we’d permit – as we navigated the delicate process of her resettlement. For his part, Neil had gracefully waited patiently upon her return,

appearing with flowers of welcome but deferring to us to signal if and when more interaction was permissible. I guessed his restraint to be admirable and agonizing as I felt certain he was eager to both help and avail himself of the long-awaited pleasure of resuming in person the dialogue they had begun 57 years before.

“What if I had the conversation for you?” I asked her gently. “Would you enjoy seeing him from time to time if he understood that romance was out of the question?”

“I think I would. Yes. No, I mean I definitely would.”

* My dread of the impending Come to Jesus with Neil was palpable. I didn’t know exactly what his expectations were, but I did have unique insight into how madly he had adored her from afar…and for how long. I’m just waiting for Dorian to realize we were meant to be together, like a mantra, rang repeatedly in my ears. The prospect of being the one to dash any romantic aspirations he might still harbor after so long made me wince. When the moment arrived, carefully choreographed to occur at a musical event to which he invited me, my oft-rehearsed attempt to broach the subject was rendered clumsy and stilted by the sudden, backslapping appearance at the absolute most sensitive moment of a guy I’d known in high school but not seen in 50 years.

Turning back to Neil, I explained how delicate Dorian’s emotional state was and how much effort we were expending trying to balance her doctors’ recommendations for invaluable social interaction at Judson with her emotional instability and inherent reclusiveness. Time she might spend with him would be time and effort not allocated to forming the new Judson friendships her doctors urged us to encourage. I belabored each point terribly, weaving around the central purpose of the meeting in a meandering trajectory of avoidance.

Having exhausted every possible tangent, I at last arrived at the explanation of Dorian’s wishes as they related to him. In retrospect, I again feel a pang of shame at not having assumed the complete purity of his motives. But knowing as I did his enduring obsession with her and owing to my solemn promise to Dorian to clear the air of any remnant romantic ambition, I forged ahead.

Neil listened, as always, patiently. After a thoughtful pause, he answered. “I’m 75 years old,” he said softly in a soft tone of sad resignation. “I’m too tired most of the time to even contemplate a relationship.” Air quotes diplomatically implied physical intimacy.

“I’m beyond deluding myself that anything romantic remains between us.” His eyes moistened. “I don’t want to complicate your family’s efforts for her. I just want to offer my friendship and help in whatever way I can.”

* And so he did. Nearly sixty years after falling hopelessly in love with her, then carrying that torch through his twenties, then his thirties, forties, fifties and sixties, they resumed their relationship – no air quotes needed here – much as they had left it a lifetime ago.

No longer governed by policies imposed by Team Dorian, he began visiting her several times a week, then almost daily, then every day. His old Honda Civic stood in for the white MG as they went for coffee and movies, visited museums, lunched and strolled arm-in-arm by ponds and streams under the canopy of broad oak and elm trees.

At first, her disease was often nearly imperceptible. Their lively conversations were virtually identical to the ones that had inaugurated their friendship decades earlier. Her contributions to them only very rarely included a question repeated from moments earlier. And when it happened, she unfailingly followed up with a laugh, “Oh right, I already asked that!”

Until she didn’t.

Over time, repeated questions occurred more and more frequently and were less and less likely to be followed up with the lighthearted realization that she’d already asked them. The most articulate person he’d ever known began searching for the elegant words that had once infused her vocabulary with a literary richness. Inevitably, the retrieval of even simple, single syllable words grew challenging. With admirable guile considering her condition, she maneuvered to the rear of the elevator in her apartment building so that pushing the button for the correct floor would default by proximity to him.

Even when he called her at 4:30 every day to remind her that he’d soon arrive to share dinner, she answered the door with delighted surprise when he knocked barely thirty minutes later.

When Team Dorian notified him that the staff at Judson was concerned about her falling weight, he took it upon himself to begin strategically rearranging the dinner they delivered to her apartment. He alone knew how essential the aesthetics of a meal were to her willingness to eat. And he alone knew that the very sight of too large an entree would preclude her eating at all. So delegating to her – and distracting her with – the responsibility to arrange place settings on TV trays with what little agency she retained, he painstakingly reduced the scale of the portion on her plate and cut it into small pieces as one might for a child.

By the first anniversary of their reprised relationship, conversation had evaporated to a fraction of what it had been upon her return. The same episodes of Dateline and 48 Hours were streamed endlessly as they sat silently and she picked, bird like, at the carefully curated dinners.

“Did he kill her?” she asked again of a marriage-gone-bad murder mystery they’d already watched 20 times.

“I think so, but I’m not sure,” he’d reply in a tone of feigned uncertainty, not wanting to make her feel lost.

His offers to venture out for coffee and movies were rebuffed more and more. On occasions when she consented, they were often abruptly concluded when she grew overwhelmed. The familiar confines of her apartment seemed to be her only reliable refuge.

What remained, though, were their walks. Less ambitious now, yes. And increasingly sporadic as Cleveland’s inclement, late fall weather offered her a convenient excuse to demur. But still somehow as magical as the moment he first laid eyes on her almost exactly sixty years earlier. Their arms entwined, they walked wordlessly – she with the rhythmic, stylish gait of runway model; he steadily but with less rhythm, under trees shedding their colorful autumn leaves in the waning light of the ever-shorter days.

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