Never Too Late for Love
She was old. He was older--and just the right height for kissing.
The day Frances rang from California, she sounded at most 25. “I’ve got the most wonderful news!” she trilled. “I’m getting married. He’s handsome and funny and just the right height for kissing. And he’s bought me a grand piano!”
Just like Frances to melt for a piano. Diamonds, to her, were everything she’d left behind a couple of lifetimes ago.
Frances wasn’t looking for a man when she got a call from the newly widowed husband of a friend of hers. He was hosting a tea for the women who had loved his wife. Each guest was to choose a memento. Some picked costume jewelry, others ornamental spoons. There might have been a candy dish, and a silk scarf or a dozen. An African violet that required a knowing touch. The lovely remnants of a life all found takers.
Frances took the husband.
She mentioned his age in passing, as if it mattered no more than what he used to do for a living. This handsome charmer, this King of Kisses was her senior by 15 years. All very well for a woman of 25, or even 50, but Frances was past 70. She had buried two men she loved, and a good many friends—among them my mother, several years gone. I still ached to call my mother with snippets of news she would have relished. The thought of her old phone number—someone else’s now—made my fingers twitch. On bitter nights, to my husband’s quiet dismay, I wore her granny gown, which buttoned to the neck. I’d never been a hugger but I liked being wrapped in her flannel embrace.
Why couldn’t Frances see how this escapade would end?
When I first met Frances, her insouciance charmed me. She clumped into the bistro on a cane, a two-time widow whose shoebox apartment was all she could afford. I felt sorry for her but sorrier for myself—my mother on her deathbed, my 40th birthday soon to plunge me into middle age. As coffee arrived, I asked Frances, “What was the best time of your life?” I hoped she’d say her 40s.
She answered, as if it should be obvious, “Why, right now, of course! I’ve got no one to look after anymore but myself. I have my poetry group, a big stack of books and my exercise class. I’m still doing splits.”
Splits. Good grief, she had me beat. Five workouts a week, and I still couldn’t touch my toes. And I had nowhere to go but down into the years of decrepitude. I must have mentioned my birthday once too often. Frances laughed, waving her hand as if a fly needed batting. “You’re a baby! You’re just getting started. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you!”
She mothered me that day. Now she was heading to the altar with a man approaching 90. The time had come for me to mother Frances. I had to speak up: “Aren’t you afraid he’s going to die?”
Not long ago I asked my friend Charlotte, “Do you ever wonder which of us will be the first to go?”
We’re the same age, early 70s. The age Frances was when she announced her engagement. The age when hardly anyone has a living parent and everyone has grown accustomed, if by no means reconciled, to a torrent of loss.
Charlotte replied with a shudder, “Of course not!”
I’ll never again raise the matter of the first to go, except with my husband, who has a lifetime of practice shrugging off melancholy Rona-isms. Just because I bite my tongue doesn’t mean I don’t mull the question. If you and I are friends or family, I wonder while we sip our coffee, “Which of us will be the first to go?” Let’s face it, won’t leave this world together in a puff of smoke. And yet until somewhere in my seventh decade, I didn’t consider the truth that hovers unseen between any two people: One will be left to mourn the other.
If I didn’t know this in my whole being, I would not have dragged myself out of bed at 3 a.m. for a journey of more than 20 hours to my sister’s 70th birthday party on a lake in Guatemala. Lights twinkled, stories flowed with the wine. I nearly missed that party. Getting there seemed too complicated by half. But the sister left to mourn will remember that I made the trip.
Thirty years ago, the phone at my ear and Frances all aglow with romance, I had only my mother to miss. One life-changing death seemed almost impossible to bear. Of all the things I wish I’d never said, the most bone-headed might be “Aren’t you afraid he’s going to die?”
Frances chuckled as a first-grade teacher might while reassuring an over-anxious child. “Oh, Rona! When you get to our age, you don’t ask how much time you have left. We just want to love each other while we can.”
It’s no mystery why she called me out of the blue. She missed her friend, my mother; I was the stand-in. My mother, who knew the English canon by heart, would have quoted the most poignantly juicy love poem in our language—Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress:”
Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour Than languish in his slow-chapped power. Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball, And tear our pleasures with rough strife Through the iron gates of life: Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.
I had a career to plan then, a son to send into the world. The next time Frances popped into my head, years had passed. Was she a wife, a widow or blowing in the wind? There’s no one left to tell me how it went with the King of Kisses, but I figure that time—be it years, months or weeks—was the best of her life. Love, a stack of books and a grand piano. Maybe even splits. I wouldn’t put it past her.
Your turn now, friends. Do you have a mentor whose actions and words inspire you? Doesn’t have to be anyone at work or school. Some mentors, like Frances, pop into our lives for a resonant moment or two. Total change of subject: Have you ever said the wrong thing with the best intentions in the world? You’re good at answering your own questions; I’ve seen you do it time and again. So dive in. Let’s talk about life, love and mentorship.
Oh, I almost forgot. If you know someone who’d enjoy this post, I’d be grateful if you’d share it.
I love 'just the right height for kissing'. I am 5' (actually slightly less as my spine has been shrinking) and my husband of 60 years is 6'. He is a great believer in kissing every day (he read somewhere that every couple should kiss for seven seconds every day - he believed it before he read it, but used it as back-up.). The only way we can do this is lying down, sitting down or using the stairs. It works, but I have often wondered what it would be like to have it built-in. Great story, well told as usual - I love "Frances took the husband".
The Chagall painting is exquisite and so is your essay. I loved it. And I love Frances for her love of love. The line, "Frances took the husband" reminded me of the Dorothy Parker line when her nosy neighbor asked if there was anything she could get her after her husband died, Parker said, "A ham and cheese on rye." What a great post Rona!