A Visit With Frances

Posted on September 9, 2002 in Encounters

Listening to Frances yesterday was like watching foam drifting down a creek. She often swirled silently in a narcotic euphoria, bumped over some stone in the way of her memory, and, when prompted by the right question, flowed rapidly, telling us about her grandchildren and the childhood that she, alone of those present in the yellow-tinted hospital room, had seen. I imagined her drifting voice to be the same colors as the linoleum floor: gray with pink, turquoise, and cerulean flecks. She lay flat on the bed, her legs spread out, and her whole body covered by successive layers of sheets, a pink blanket, a milk one, and a white towel.

“The good news is that I didn’t break the pelvic bone,” Frances told us once she found her mind which had gone a wandering under the influence of the pain killers they gave her. She crossed her arms behind her head, showing off the bruises that had been deathly black last week but now lightened to burgundy. Ignoring the yellow and pink hospital band that slid down her arm, she told us that the ball had merely jumped from the socket, tearing the cartilage. The surgeons had only to replace the lining of the joint. She never remembered to tell us the bad news.

We could guess what it was. The pain in her groin was horrible. Her cheerful demeanor turned to a grimace when I mentioned to Lynn the rehabilitative therapy that the nurse said she must undertake. “I can’t stethup at all,” she slurred.

Against the lingering insult of the incision in her thigh and the blinding painkiller she pressed to tell us the stories of her family. Lynn crouched sideways in a smoke blue recliner, her legs pulled up as she listened and sometimes faded into a nap of her own. I sat in a swivel chair I’d borrowed from the nurses’ station and allowed myself a few rich glances at the cars moving along palm-shaded California Street. Occasionally I caught of glimpse of something special: a Rolls Royce or a Corvette or a vintage Roadster rebuilt and polished to a high shine.

I learned that France had been born in Escondido. She didn’t remember much of that time or the name of the parish. We caught a glimpse in her words of her father, the future Episcopal Bishop of Los Angeles, bicycling between the two churches that he served. She confused people. Lynn’s brother Andrew became Ace and vice versa. She swapped their wives, giving Andrew Ace’s West African bride and Ace the shy quarter Asian his brother/cousin had married. “We’re a mixed up family,” she told Lynn. “Your mother married a Greek –” and then she forgot the rest of marriages.

She recalled to us weddings; the things children (who were now various ages) said; the strange secretiveness of one of our sisters-in-law; the Easter dinners she used to hold back in Menlo Park, the ecstatic way her African descendants embraced American life; and the alleged family line running back to William the Conqueror that I believe the compiler of the Beckwith Book either bought from a peerage house or invented to suit his aspirations to nobility. Some of her utterances mystified me: she spoke of some ancestors who’d come to America via Canada, “crossed the country”, then came down the Ohio River and the Mississippi to end up in California. Throughout our visit, she ramble for a bit, sputter out, gape silently for a few minutes, and then suddenly rush back to some topic she’d begun earlier. Her voice, when resumed, sounded like a weak wail, as if she put all her energy into a feeble shout because she knew the power she’d need for her regular voice could only manage a whisper.

Lynn would try to help her along. “What did the church look like?” Frances stared into the space and then found the tail of some other topic she’d started earlier on. We accepted that as our answer. It was good to hear Frances’ voice staggering along, undeterred by the morphine or the interrupting burble and hum of the life support monitors.