Anything but Still Lives: The Worlds of Edward Hopper

in the Times seemed to bring them back out of their burrows.

  And, Stanley. Oh, he was funny. Would tell me to sit and read in the lobby at every opportunity, especially in the early evenings – good for business, he’d say, for passing trade to see.

  You wouldn’t believe the number of books I’d go through! (which was a Godsend – oh, how I loved to read – still do in fact – but these old eyes get mighty tired real quick nowadays. Katie’s a good girl. She’s been my eyes more often than not over the past few years. I miss her though, now she’s off in college).

  Yes, the books. The New York Central Library like a revolving door for me. Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Dickens, Hardy, all the classics of the previous century. They became my escape from war. Jenna was seven by then, doing her schoolwork upstairs, listening to the radio, or following the maids around, helping set tables for next morning’s breakfast, plumping pillows before bedtime, that sort of thing. I could just read and read and read. And forget that old war with all those glorious words.

  Such lovely guests, we had. I remember old Mr and Mrs Barnesworthy best. Younger of course than I am now, but at that time they seemed quite elderly. Maybe it was also in the manner of their dress – very formal, hats, furs, you know the drill. Came down regularly from Long Island to take in a Broadway show or visit the museums. Often they’d sit with me in the lobby in the early evenings, patiently waiting for a taxi downtown or to one of their favourite restaurants on the Park.

  Stanley always offered to ring up to their room once the cab had arrived. But each time they graciously declined to enjoy, instead, the ambience of the lobby. A woman quietly reading, a Beethoven symphony on the gramophone, the occasional ring for service, the soft clink of depositing keys or rustle of collecting mail. Low murmurs, the hums of civilised life, while the plinths of the reception desk held the whole establishment together, strong and undaunted.

  ‘You could forget there’s a war on,’ Mrs B specialised in saying each time they checked out. And, ‘Thank you.’ Which you knew they meant. Appreciating this little oasis from the everyday. Stanley ran an essential service all right. To my mind a much better use of his time than pushing paper for Eisenhower.

  But that’s enough of reminiscing. Here comes Katie. The car door’s just banged and now there’s the run up the porch steps and – ‘Granny, Granny – happy birthday!’

  My, how she can jump in over the top of my thoughts. And now this shower of kisses. What’s this thrust under my nose? ‘Roses?’ I guess.

  ‘Yep – 90 of them! Dad and I went down to Jamaica Markets. Look – they’re all in fall colours. Can you see? Aren’t they beautiful? And take a look at the size of this bucket!’

  Yes, it is large.

  ‘So heavy!’ she continues.

  ‘How do they smell?’ I manage, leapfrogging her soliloquy.

  ‘Exquisite!’ is her exuberant reply.

  I take a heady sniff, then another and another. ‘Ah Katie,’ I tell her. ‘You’re my battery charger.’ We hug through a mass of blooms before she humps them to the coffee table so I can focus better. Yes, she’s my thoughtful loving energy booster. Plug me into the source and I’ll zing-zing-zing all day.

  Of course I’ll only see her on odd weekends now, since she started as a freshman up at Yale this summer. In the Forestry and Environment School, she tells me. But it won’t change our relationship. It’s like we’ve had this pact for years. One day, we just locked eyes, not soon after she was born. The old and the new. And that was it. a forever-connection forged right then and there.

  She’s the middle one, see. The forgotten one. They say the eldest is most responsible, the youngest most spoilt, the middle most forgotten. Which is perhaps why she sought me out with those eyes of hers. A passive vessel for her stories and angst and hopes of future bright. Because I take the time to listen, and to tell. When she asks me things, I tell.

  It really firmed up – this asking and telling, this ongoing conversation about old and new, past and future – when I moved in with Sandy and the family ten years back. Sandy, Mario, and the three girls – Shelly, Kate and Molly. It’s something you don’t see much of in the States these days, we elderly living with our families. I couldn’t have imagined closing this life chapter any other way, though. And I can thank Mario for his own commitment and cultural upbringing to helping bring this about.

  ‘With my Nonna,’ he told, ‘there is also no question. She is cared for by the family in Sicily, you are cared for here. And when Jenna also wants to live with us, there is again no question.’

  But Jenna’s only a sprightly seventy with a new man and an apartment at Jackson Heights. Her rose bucket can’t have been quite so heavy back in spring.

  Look now. Katie is rushing around helping get things ready for the party. She’s going to bake a Torte della Nonna, she calls from the kitchen.

  ‘Have you had any practice?’ I say, teasing from an easy chair swamped by roses.

  ‘No.’ Framed in the doorway she stands, between there and here. Hair long, dark, full-hugging a face of earnestness and delight. Those black eyes twinkle, those lips twitch to a smile. She sees my teasing. ‘I looked it up on the Internet,’ is her counterattack. ‘Plus, Dad’s here to help.’

  This Internet thing! Touché, my dear.

  I must have dozed off (these things tend to happen) and now I find Katie stirring the cake mix by my side. It seems quite a heavy mixture. ‘There’s apples, raisins and pine nuts,’ she says as she stirs. She’s pulled over a dining chair from the table and is sitting over her task with me and the roses as witness.

  ‘You were humming,’ she says. ‘What was the song?’

  I try to think. ‘Sorry, no clue’ my reply. ‘I didn’t even realise.’

  ‘Maybe it’ll come back later,’ she says. ‘It sounded pretty.’

  We start to talk about life at Yale. I haven’t seen her since orientation. ‘I’ll only come down on weekends if I can car pool,’ she says. Sharing emissions, that’s how she calls it. Orientation was a wonderful experience, apparently. ‘Cool,’ is how she describes it. ‘Awesome.’ Three weeks of cool and awesome. Now that would be something to see. ‘You know, Granny, we just went out into the forest. And had to listen to the trees. Our orientation was to learn to respect the earth. That’s the frame of mind we need to enter the program. Isn’t that cool? Isn’t that awesome?’

  She continues to chatter. About what she’s learning. About the environment. What makes it tick. And what doesn’t. The whole class went to see the documentary about Mr Al Gore. ‘Do you remember him, Granny?’ she asks. ‘He was the Vice-President to Bill Clinton back in the 90s.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I say, ‘I remember.’ (I’d read a review in the paper and seen a picture of him in front of the world.) ‘He’s put on a lot of weight,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, but he’s telling everyone about global warming. And about what’s going to happen if we don’t sort it out.’

  ‘Well he’d better look after his own health,’ I interject, ‘otherwise he won’t be around to tell too many more people.’

  She’s not listening. ‘If we don’t quit all this bigger is better stuff, and keep sucking up oil like it’s water, we’re history,’ she declaims. ‘In America, we’re the worst … did you know,’ she fixes me with unblinking eyes, ‘the way we live today, using up all the world’s resources, we’d need three planets?’

  ‘Maybe Arnold Schwarzenegger should sell his Hummer,’ I propose.

  ‘We don’t have three planets!’ She fizzes like bicarb of soda in a pudding mix.

  Things aren’t so simple, I want to tell her. Living simply so others can simply live. Black and white dissolve into a spectrum of greys once you start looking deeper. Who decides right from wrong, truth from fiction? Who says what is a need, a want, a selfish desire? Who says enough is enough?

  ‘If there’s no planet, there’s no us!’ she protests.

  ‘No,’ I disagree. ‘This old planet will surv
ive. It’ll take a lot more than our bumbling around to destroy Mother Earth – but maybe humankind won’t be around to see it.’

  I watch her some more. One minute animated. Lit up. Like she has all the answers. The next darkened by sadness. Consumed by her own black and white, a single right, one overwhelming wrong. All painted on a canvas of innocence – because nothing bad has ever happened to her. Or to anyone she knows.

  At the same time, it’s an un-knowing tinged with knowing that it could happen someday. That something could be around the corner, something bigger than any, than all of us. Something that she can’t change alone, that she’ll need help with – a big group of helpers, all with the same purpose. All with the same conviction.

  ‘You know,’ she says, ‘Al Gore talks about you – that you were the last great American generation – living with and through the Depression and the War, everyone playing a role. And that ever since your generation, American life has just been focused on the me-me-me stuff, the cult of ego, consumerism as a panacea for everything. Blunting, deadening our sense of caring, for something bigger than our own narcissism. We’ve lost our sense of purpose, of community. But, he says the time has come, with this huge problem of global warming, to bring people together, to have a shared sense of purpose again.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ I say.

  She tells me of all those kids she sees who don’t