TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

A Revelation For The Ages

ADVERTISEMENT

By DUDLEY CLENDINEN

The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 4, 2008

This is an excerpt from "A Place Called Canterbury," Dudley Clendinen's account of his mother's time in Canterbury Tower, a geriatric apartment building in Tampa.

I began to spend more time at Canterbury. One afternoon, as I took the Tower elevator down, a white-haired woman with glasses got on. Almost all women at Canterbury have gray or white hair and wear glasses. She smiled. We said hello and began to descend. Then the elevator stopped again. A mild, white-haired man with glasses got on. Almost all men at Canterbury have white hair, spare hair, or no hair, and wear glasses. The men sometimes complain that they can't tell the old ladies apart because they all have white hair and glasses. The women sometimes say the same thing about the men, but not so often, because there are fewer of them, and the added feature of male baldness helps to sort them out.

"Well, nice to see you, Fred," the woman said, in a neighborly way. He smiled. She paused, then asked, "How's Helen?"

He blinked, and continued to smile, but didn't answer. He appeared to be thinking about something. She waited. Not everyone at Canterbury hears well.

"How's Helen, Fred?" she asked again, a little louder, as the elevator dropped slowly down.

He looked uncertain, as if preoccupied by some other question.

She tried a bright smile and more projection. "I was asking about your wife, Helen," she said, propelling the words as she leaned toward him.

He was silent a moment, and then quietly - with an expression that suggested he found this uncomfortable - replied, "That's not her name."

"Oh, I'm sorry," she said, recoiling with a small gasp and a rueful look. "I've gotten so bad with names, Fred. Forgive me. What is her name?"

He looked at her absently, as if he were trying to make up his mind about something. The elevator was descending. She glanced up at the floor numbers flashing above them - 4, 3, 2. She wanted desperately to get the name right next time, and they were almost at the lobby.

"Your wife, Fred. What's her name?"

The doors opened.

"I'm thinking," he said.

On a different day, I headed into the elevator in shorts and a T-shirt for a long fast walk along the sidewalk by the bay. (I used to run for miles down that concrete, which is probably what happened to my knees. Now I walk.) I heard steps coming down the hall, so I held the elevator door and the Duchess came in. It is an earned title. In the funny nomenclature of Canterbury, the residents are "inmates," a name they give themselves in acknowledgment of the fact that once paid in, they probably will never leave. It would cost them money. But they also give each other nicknames, and the Duchess is what her inmate friends called Marguerite Dressler, formerly of Jacksonville, in honor of her sense of style.

The Duchess had an eye for things, and as she stood next to me that morning - a tall glossy vision in black and white, with her big signature earrings glinting boldly at the neck - she was eyeing me. "You stay in good shape," she said approvingly, her large dark eyes roaming beneath arched, dramatic eyebrows. "You look real fit. You exercise, don't you?"

I felt, under her gaze, sort of like a lamb chop. It felt nice. "Well, I try," I said.

"I thought so," she replied, her long fingers and lacquered nails sliding over her silver-headed cane, the eyes still moving up and down. "You're nice and lean. You've got curves in all the right places."

I have male friends who would kill to start their days like this.

"Thanks," I said with rising feeling. "You're looking pretty smashing yourself." With her mass of silver hair, her long cheekbones and good skin and big sexy jewelry, she did, especially for a dame in her early 80s with a weak heart and osteoporosis. We stood there a moment, warming in mutual regard. Then the elevator hit her floor. She threw me a wink and sashayed out, leaving us both feeling better - foxier, more desirable - than before.

Some months later, as Ms. Dressler reclined in a chair in a nearby salon, having her toenails cut and polished and painted to complement her shoes, the pedicurist looked up and realized that her client had departed. The Duchess's inquiring but tired heart had stopped. Things then got very busy. This was Florida. It was a good salon. The pedicurist had training in cardiopulmonary resuscitation. She started mouth-to-mouth. Someone called 911. An ambulance came screaming to the door. For two weeks, lying in a stationary hospital bed with monitors beeping and an oxygen tube up her nose, the Duchess made no sense.

"This ship isn't moving," she declared, when her Canterbury neighbor, Martha Cameron, then 83, went to see her. "We must be in the Arctic Circle." She had been there on a cruise ship with her sister Millie, the widow of a bank chairman. But Ms. Cameron, the nurse, one of the first women ashore at Utah Beach after D-Day, knew that her friend was reacting to the cold oxygen flowing up her nose. The Duchess thought she was stuck in an ice floe.

Ms. Dressler still doesn't remember the events of that day. But gradually, with therapy and care in Canterbury's nursing wing, her strength, and the twinkle in her eye, returned. She moved back into her apartment, and one night, at dinner at a table looking out over the bay, after cocktails upstairs at her friend Colonel Cameron's, she sat in a long black sheath with a slit up the left leg and a huge red silk rose from Saks Fifth Avenue at her breast, and said that she had made a decision: "I always saved for later on," she said, a true child of the Depression. "But later on is now!"

Dudley Clendinen is a former national reporter and editorial writer for The New York Times. He is the son of the late James Clendinen, the long-time editorial page editor of The Tampa Tribune.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT