A couple of weeks back I saw that a concert was to be given by The International String Quartet of Yucatan. My friend Ben and I went, and honestly, I was not expecting much of anything. I had, earlier in the year, gone to the Merida City Ballet and that proved to be such a disaster that I simply found myself skeptical concerning things referred to as 'classical' in Merida. The ballet was so profoundly disappointing that at one point during the performance I found myself looking around the theatre to see if anyone else was laughing. It was a real Candid Camera type of performance. Ballerinas falling on stage, male dance partners spinning ballerinas around so violently that I held my breath half expecting them to be flung offstage...ballerinas being spun because they weren't able to pirouette on their own. It was really spectacularly awful.
All the rows in my near vicinity were occupied by people with smart phones filming the performance; not one thought turing off their phone during the performance might have been a customary behaviour. Everyone yelled out 'Bravo' and clapped with enthusiasm. It was a free concert so I suppose anything free can not be scrutinized in the same manner as a Nureyev or Baryshnikov performance might be. But having seen both these Russian men dance, and while being positive that they are not the norm, I certainly do not find it acceptable to see dancers falling or having a need to be held up on stage, free or otherwise. Mistakes happen, but too many of them begin to make me cringe, feel embarrassment, and eventually I too feel the need to call out 'bravo', because it does, indeed, take a considerable amount of courage to perform with enthusiasm when you have no talent. God bless the feebleminded.
The International String Quartet of Yucatan was actually advertised as a trio and the concert was dedicated to the jazz musician Dave Brubek. Trios usually make me think of a piano and two other instruments of some sort, but the dedication to a jazz musician and the word 'international' caught my attention and piqued my curiosity. Off Ben and I went.
Four empty chairs waited on stage which only meant one thing: Someone can't count or someone thinks 'trio' and 'quartet' might be interchangeable. This oversight dampened my enthusiasm and an inaudible groan could be heard inside my head.
And then the musicians, a quartet, came out and began to play, and with the first stoke of the violin I began to weep uncontrollably. I wept through Albinoni's Concerto Grosso, op. 9 No.1 and Mendelssohn's Pieces For String Quartet, op. 81, but it was during Grieg's Quartet in G, op. 27 that I practically had to put my head between my knees. This quartet was stupendous. I know they were stupendous because Blanche, out of nowhere, showed up and sat down to my right, and we listened to that concert together. My entire five years spent with her showed up in that concert hall and I wept. I wept thankfully for what I had received, and I wept because I loved and missed her. I wept because I had the inclination to attend this very concert because of my relationship with her. Ben slept.
Blanche died on February 10th, my birthday, 2011. I was asleep in New York and suddenly at around 3AM I was startled awake by her. I knew she was gone or about to go. Two days later I received a phone call informing me she had passed. My very last conversation with Blanche was my request that she come look for me when she got ready to go. I had knelt beside her bed in the wee hours of the night and told her of all the things she had meant to me. I knew I would never see her again in this life.
I met Blanche having seen an ad in the paper requesting a companion to a 90 years old active choir conductor. The ad actually read 'chorale' director but I had read it incorrectly and thought I was interviewing for a random senior woman who conducted the church choir. I thought that for about three or four months into the job. Upon my hiring, I received an e-mail from her son stating what the job would entail and also his heartfelt hope that I could and would become a real friend to her. I tend to be a literal person, and thinker, so when I read that he wanted me to be her friend, it seemed to me at the time, such a funny thing to say. How could one take a job as a companion and not like the person? Of course I would be her friend. Who hates old people? I had to make her coffee and toast a croissant every morning and show up with a smile. Easiest job in the world!
For those five years with Blanche I was simultaneously in weekly therapy for issues pertaining to my own life; a life which I believed to be separate from hers. My entire five years of therapy in Brattleboro, VT were shared with her and discussed. During one session with my therapist, I yelled at him for entering the waiting room each week to collect me for my session, in such a manner that I described as "being after someone". Each week I knew he was coming and each week when he opened the door I jumped out of my skin. I ranted to him that Blanche never jumped when I entered her home even if she were engrossed in a music score or at the sink messing about with her endless supply of flowers. It maddened me that I was jumpy and this older woman never jumped. Everyone fears coming upon an older person and causing them to suffer a heart attack but nothing I ever did caused her to be startled. Why was this? I watched her endlessly and could never figure this out until I was informed that people like me jump in anticipation of terror. Blanche did not grow up with terror. I got to live with a woman who had lived a life free of terror and her life is what my life might have looked like otherwise. So I learned. It's rare that I jump now.
I did not know Blanche in her youth but I get the distinct feeling that some of those that surrounded her never saw her as a woman with her own needs and concerns but rather saw her as some sort of comet that needed to be placated. There was often a lot of ass kissing that transpired with her which I never understood, but now, years later, I suspect had to do with presence. I mean this in the sense that despite ones aging some people fail to see the aging and instead still see the powerhouse. I received all kinds of crazy calls from adults asking me if she was in a good mood, or if it was a good time to do this and that. It was like they could not see her. But perhaps this was so because they were dealing with her on a professional level and all of that nonsense was nonexistent for me.
The first time I called her Blanchee Blanche it was said with all the affection in the world but the look that crossed her face for a moment, and which ended in her robust laughter, told me that in all her years no one had had the chutzpah to refer to her in such a homemade humble manner. That someone, in her long life, had found a nickname for her seemed to amuse and warm her. I got the best years of her life for I got the years when she was ready to be Blanche the woman and not Blanche the performer. We developed a relationship which I felt that galled and infuriated some but which I knew was the best thing to have happened to us both. Outsiders to the relationship often saw me as 'The help' and too often called various family members to complain of something they overheard me say to her. I discussed everything with her. I asked her what crazy friend she might have had that would complain about the way I treated her resulting in her and I laughing about the many times I was supposed to have beaten her or pulled her hair. I was reprimanded by strangers for calling her Blanchee Blanche, for asking for a raise, for having an attitude when crazy people, who thought themselves important to me, called on my day off. She had an opinion about every one of the people in her life, and I shall take those opinions to my grave, but it was those opinions that guided me to being her friend rather than someone who fell into, and became blinded by, the glare of her fame. I was 'the help' and not a family member or friend in some sense, but I was given a job to do that inadvertently crossed a line over into unmarked territory and I had to make a very personal decision. I could see it as a job and conduct myself with a clear distinction between myself and Blanche or I could forgo what others might have wanted in favor of what she wanted and in spite of what sometimes felt like, an endless barrage of grievances flung at me. After a long discussion with Blanche I chose what she wanted and we never talked about it again.
I have known many famous people; mostly their offspring. As an outsider to fame, not being famous myself, I can say one thing with certainty. It's not all cracked up to be what it might seem. We hold some of these people in awe never allowing them to be anything but famous. We insist upon this spotlight being trained upon them, but where do they go when the the light is turned off? What do you suppose your life might be like if you are forever referred to as the child of someone famous and never seen for yourself? That people befriend you not because of you but because of something else they want? I don't think it is enviable on all fronts. But it is a life that is given, through no choice of ones own, that must be lived nonetheless.
Blanche was my friend and she could come over when she pleased, but random people with bloated egos were never welcome. I had been asked to be a friend to her, which I had done. And friends argue, say stupid things, and continue on if the things that transpire are not hurtful or mean. I got the mother I never had and she got someone in the throes of learning to be sturdy that she could lean hard upon and who never faltered for her. She got the benefit of my own therapy, resulting in my having self understanding, when she openly wept about things that concerned her. She got the comfort she needed when in the dead of night she would crawl into bed with me because she said she didn't want to be alone. I got to be affectionate and loving to a woman I never felt terror from. I, for the first time in my life, felt unconditional love.
There were many times that I wanted to leave her. I wanted to leave for personal reasons - having recently graduated from graduate school, I felt eager to start my own life. But I stayed two years past my own goals because each potential replacement for me was nuttier than the last. They ranged from women who openly hated her to ones that woke me up at three AM to go fetch her cats because they had forgotten to close a door or a window and the cats had gotten out into the Vermont wild, or worse, they allowed her to fall. And then Donna came, and I knew I was leaving her in good hands. Donna took her to the end.
When she learned of my leaving she came to my house with the most heartbroken look upon her face. It was a look that broke my heart in return, for it was me that put that look upon her face. But is was because of my therapy that I understood well that should I stay until the end it would be good for her but an increasingly horrible time for me. I was with her for a few more months, and I had been asked by her family not to tell her I was leaving, which I respected. She never once said anything to me about my eventual departure and I wondered if she in fact really knew that I was leaving. Then one night, standing on the third step up, on her lower staircase, in her pajamas, thus making herself taller than me, she said the following: I love you like my daughters and it is good that you are going. You need a life better than this. And that is when I wept in the arms of someone who gave me the world in love.
I can't tell you how many letters I have written since her passing, each one buried somewhere and quickly dismissed, as not right somehow. I couldn't speak of, or express, what my relationship with her has meant. And then I attended that concert and all my sorrow and joy visited me, along with Blanche at my side.
She once described her feelings about classical music as being of such a high order that it allowed us to be bigger and more noble that we imagined ourselves to be. I am paraphrasing of course. That the music of Bach, say, offered us an opportunity to reach and strive for higher, nobler attributes. I strove to be the best I could be with her and her personality allowed for that to transpire. She strove to be a human being before her death. She wanted to be a person who felt loved for herself rather than as a performer. I like to think, and I feel certain, that both of us attained that sentiment and reached a nobler place, higher than we could imagine, through a most unlikely friendship.
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