Ninnie
I suppose in most households it's an old-fashioned sort of insult, ninny. But not in my family.
That's because when my dad and his brothers were very small they had trouble with the "J" sound in their Aunt Jenny's name. Whether my grandmother's chosen orthography for her elder sister's resultant nickname reflects a certain sibling rivalry is more than I can speculate on responsibly.
Ninnie's real name, as she always told it to me, was Janet Frances Tyrrell. Frances for her father Francis, she explained. She didn't explain that this was a name she'd given herself, but as her birth certificate seems to have been issued on June 14, 1904 for one Jane Eta Tyrrell, my guess is she used her Catholic confirmation to adjust her name and reflect her own preferences a bit more, just as I did.
I have lots of great aunts (more than I can reliably count, anyway), and I have no idea how many grand-nieces she could claim, but I know it's plenty. Even so, there was never any question in my mind that she was Mine, and I was Her Girl.
After all, it was only when I had come along that she retired from running the emergency room where she's been soothing young patients and terrorizing young doctors since time immemorial. They pretty much built Good Samaritan hospital around her, but by time I was toddling she had given it all up and begun coming down to my house to take care of me during the days, while my parents worked.
"Come on Queenie," she'd say, "Here's your chariot," and into the stroller I'd go for our daily trip to the park. We said hello to the blind man on his bench. We looked for Myrtle the Turtle in the duck pond. We brought peanuts and put them in interesting places where the squirrels might be happy to find them. We brought pieces of bread for the ducks. We listened for the noon whistle, which meant we should head home, and sometimes we talked to the park man, who had a little green vehicle just for driving around the park. There were swings, too, and Ninnie would push me until my feet looked like they would touch the flagpole.
Once, when I was throwing sticks in the river, my mitten flew off with the stick. They were puppet mittens, twin little girls with blond braids, and I couldn't stop crying long enough to explain what was wrong until long after one of the twins had floated off downstream. For years after that Ninnie would try to point out a duck in the winter who'd taken to wearing my mitten; I never looked in time to see it.
Once when we went to the train park and she rode the kiddie train with me, she got stuck in the seat. Then she couldn't stop laughing long enough to find her feet and twist her way up and out of the tiny train. I was downright alarmed, but she cheerfully said she could just live there from now on, and I could come and wave at her when she went by on the train.
When we got home, she'd bump the stroller lightly against the steps up to the house and cry "End of the Line." She'd put me down for my nap and say she'd be right outside, and I'd hate thinking I was in the house all alone, wondering what she was doing outside without me. Years later, when I asked her, she explained she'd meant she'd be right outside my room. Oh me of little faith.
Ninnie was in her early seventies then; she piled her masses of (beautiful) genuinely snow-white hair into a bun held up with silver combs. More than once I had her rushing around so much that the combs fell out, and we had to search the park for them. I always seemed to be the one who triumphantly spotted them. It took me years to consider that she must once have had some other hair color- she was in fact a gorgeous redhead, I've been told, but I have yet to see a good color photograph from then. Maybe there aren't any. When was color film popularized?
I wonder a lot about the long lifetime she had before she even met me. Long after the early baby-sitting days, when I had to go off to school she still came down regularly to visit after school, her cream-colored car loaded with gifts. Strawberry Shortcake Skates. A bracelet with my name spelled out on it. We called her "Mrs. Santa Claus." This is probably how my little brothers first remember her. She called me Angel-face, and she gave me an angelface rosebush to plant in our front garden. Every year I sent her a homemade valentine signed "from your Angel-face." She may be the only person who ever convinced me she thought I was beautiful. She complimented my dimples; I told her I thought wrinkles were as good as dimples, and I did think so, but it made her laugh.
I knew Ninnie was old, but I only gradually realized how old. The elderly monsignor at our church remembered her from the ER when he'd had his tonsils taken out as a young seminarian. That was pretty impressive. She'd served in World War II as an army nurse, and she still had strange army pamphlets from her time in China, with instructions on what not to say to Chinese people or "How To Tell A Jap," filled with bizarre, stereotypical cartoons. She's been in India too and flown in a little plane over the Himalayas. Even back then, she'd had to lie about her age, because according to regulations she was already too old to enlist as a nurse.
She would tell stories about her childhood in Massachussetts: how they'd sneak into the nearby vet's barnyard and climb onto the unsuspecting recuperating horses for rides; how her father would recite poetry; how they'd listen to Scottish music on the grammophone; how when her mother went out, he had them all make candy, and then hid the mess of pots in the oven, saying "I'm no scullery maid." Somehow, she said, no matter how old she got, she still got stuck with chamber-pot scrubbing as one of her weekly chores.
She never married. Family gossip says she was engaged twice- once to a non-Catholic (maybe even Jewish) doctor, though her family told her they'd disown her if she married him- and once to someone in New York, though it was the depression, and they could not find a place they could rent as a married couple. Whether these family objections or financial problems ended the rumored engagements, no one seems to know. She outlived her numerous siblings, and I'm not sure any of them knew anyway. My mother once said to Ninnie, after they'd known each other some forty years, that she'd never really heard the story of Ninnie's engagement(s); Ninnie replied, with cheerful defiance, "And you never will."
When I went off the California for grad school, we telephoned and wrote to one another. Eventually, she couldn't hear well enough on the phone, so we just wrote. I would rush up to see her a few hours after my red-eye got in and spend the late morning and early afternoon curled up on her bed, talking and yawning. She complained about how bad her handwriting was getting, but it didn't seem too bad to me. Then it got too hard for her to write. I wrote into a void, asking my mother if she knew whether Nin was reading my letters. Her thoughts drifted more and more to her childhood. We couldn't still talk about the current decade with ease, but I could listen to her vivid memories of the Navy Yard in Lowell, ninety years earlier. I would visit, and she would ask me when I'd be done with school and come home from California for good, but already she was starting to mix up many of our countless similar-looking male Torpey relatives with one other. When I moved home for good, she seemed happy about it, but she couldn't remember it: she was always asking me when I'd have to go back to school again.
Then there was a day where she didn't know me when I first arrived, though she was welcoming enough. When she suddenly recognized me, she was tearful and horrified: "I think about you all the time," she said, "and then you're here and I don't know you!" It was awful, but it was also the only time that happened. Soon, she didn't know me at all and seemed at peace with that. I fed her her lunch; perhaps she did the same for me once, and I don't remember that either. I held her hand. I brushed back her hair from her forehead and kissed it. I talked to her, though I didn't think she could hear me. I sang to her sometimes too. Why not? And I told myself, "it's over now; she's not really here anymore, but I'm just checking to see she's not lonely, she's not in pain." But it was so hard to give up imagining- with all the intensity of a prayer- that maybe this Tuesday she'd look at me again and say my name and know me.
She died Saturday morning. It was, I'm sure, long past the time that she would have chosen to pull the plug, if there'd been a plug to pull. She had more than fifty year's experience as a nurse, and she knew what she didn't want. I last saw her on Monday the 16th; her eyes followed me around the room, but she didn't say a word. My parents are arranging everything; they have an outfit picked out for her, and they're borrowing back a pin she gave me, because it matches the outfit, and probably also because there's nothing of hers left that hasn't been given to me: she'd been giving things away so naturally for so long. I'd visit her in the hospital, and she'd try to give me the soda or cake from her dinner tray. My brother is picking me up from work tomorrow so that we'll make it to the evening wake, and then we'll bury her Tuesday in St. Peter's graveyard in Haverstraw, a place straight out of Our Town, with High Tor above it and the Hudson below.
And no one can ever look at me the way she did. And I will never love anyone else the way I love her.
That's because when my dad and his brothers were very small they had trouble with the "J" sound in their Aunt Jenny's name. Whether my grandmother's chosen orthography for her elder sister's resultant nickname reflects a certain sibling rivalry is more than I can speculate on responsibly.
Ninnie's real name, as she always told it to me, was Janet Frances Tyrrell. Frances for her father Francis, she explained. She didn't explain that this was a name she'd given herself, but as her birth certificate seems to have been issued on June 14, 1904 for one Jane Eta Tyrrell, my guess is she used her Catholic confirmation to adjust her name and reflect her own preferences a bit more, just as I did.
I have lots of great aunts (more than I can reliably count, anyway), and I have no idea how many grand-nieces she could claim, but I know it's plenty. Even so, there was never any question in my mind that she was Mine, and I was Her Girl.
After all, it was only when I had come along that she retired from running the emergency room where she's been soothing young patients and terrorizing young doctors since time immemorial. They pretty much built Good Samaritan hospital around her, but by time I was toddling she had given it all up and begun coming down to my house to take care of me during the days, while my parents worked.
"Come on Queenie," she'd say, "Here's your chariot," and into the stroller I'd go for our daily trip to the park. We said hello to the blind man on his bench. We looked for Myrtle the Turtle in the duck pond. We brought peanuts and put them in interesting places where the squirrels might be happy to find them. We brought pieces of bread for the ducks. We listened for the noon whistle, which meant we should head home, and sometimes we talked to the park man, who had a little green vehicle just for driving around the park. There were swings, too, and Ninnie would push me until my feet looked like they would touch the flagpole.
Once, when I was throwing sticks in the river, my mitten flew off with the stick. They were puppet mittens, twin little girls with blond braids, and I couldn't stop crying long enough to explain what was wrong until long after one of the twins had floated off downstream. For years after that Ninnie would try to point out a duck in the winter who'd taken to wearing my mitten; I never looked in time to see it.
Once when we went to the train park and she rode the kiddie train with me, she got stuck in the seat. Then she couldn't stop laughing long enough to find her feet and twist her way up and out of the tiny train. I was downright alarmed, but she cheerfully said she could just live there from now on, and I could come and wave at her when she went by on the train.
When we got home, she'd bump the stroller lightly against the steps up to the house and cry "End of the Line." She'd put me down for my nap and say she'd be right outside, and I'd hate thinking I was in the house all alone, wondering what she was doing outside without me. Years later, when I asked her, she explained she'd meant she'd be right outside my room. Oh me of little faith.
Ninnie was in her early seventies then; she piled her masses of (beautiful) genuinely snow-white hair into a bun held up with silver combs. More than once I had her rushing around so much that the combs fell out, and we had to search the park for them. I always seemed to be the one who triumphantly spotted them. It took me years to consider that she must once have had some other hair color- she was in fact a gorgeous redhead, I've been told, but I have yet to see a good color photograph from then. Maybe there aren't any. When was color film popularized?
I wonder a lot about the long lifetime she had before she even met me. Long after the early baby-sitting days, when I had to go off to school she still came down regularly to visit after school, her cream-colored car loaded with gifts. Strawberry Shortcake Skates. A bracelet with my name spelled out on it. We called her "Mrs. Santa Claus." This is probably how my little brothers first remember her. She called me Angel-face, and she gave me an angelface rosebush to plant in our front garden. Every year I sent her a homemade valentine signed "from your Angel-face." She may be the only person who ever convinced me she thought I was beautiful. She complimented my dimples; I told her I thought wrinkles were as good as dimples, and I did think so, but it made her laugh.
I knew Ninnie was old, but I only gradually realized how old. The elderly monsignor at our church remembered her from the ER when he'd had his tonsils taken out as a young seminarian. That was pretty impressive. She'd served in World War II as an army nurse, and she still had strange army pamphlets from her time in China, with instructions on what not to say to Chinese people or "How To Tell A Jap," filled with bizarre, stereotypical cartoons. She's been in India too and flown in a little plane over the Himalayas. Even back then, she'd had to lie about her age, because according to regulations she was already too old to enlist as a nurse.
She would tell stories about her childhood in Massachussetts: how they'd sneak into the nearby vet's barnyard and climb onto the unsuspecting recuperating horses for rides; how her father would recite poetry; how they'd listen to Scottish music on the grammophone; how when her mother went out, he had them all make candy, and then hid the mess of pots in the oven, saying "I'm no scullery maid." Somehow, she said, no matter how old she got, she still got stuck with chamber-pot scrubbing as one of her weekly chores.
She never married. Family gossip says she was engaged twice- once to a non-Catholic (maybe even Jewish) doctor, though her family told her they'd disown her if she married him- and once to someone in New York, though it was the depression, and they could not find a place they could rent as a married couple. Whether these family objections or financial problems ended the rumored engagements, no one seems to know. She outlived her numerous siblings, and I'm not sure any of them knew anyway. My mother once said to Ninnie, after they'd known each other some forty years, that she'd never really heard the story of Ninnie's engagement(s); Ninnie replied, with cheerful defiance, "And you never will."
When I went off the California for grad school, we telephoned and wrote to one another. Eventually, she couldn't hear well enough on the phone, so we just wrote. I would rush up to see her a few hours after my red-eye got in and spend the late morning and early afternoon curled up on her bed, talking and yawning. She complained about how bad her handwriting was getting, but it didn't seem too bad to me. Then it got too hard for her to write. I wrote into a void, asking my mother if she knew whether Nin was reading my letters. Her thoughts drifted more and more to her childhood. We couldn't still talk about the current decade with ease, but I could listen to her vivid memories of the Navy Yard in Lowell, ninety years earlier. I would visit, and she would ask me when I'd be done with school and come home from California for good, but already she was starting to mix up many of our countless similar-looking male Torpey relatives with one other. When I moved home for good, she seemed happy about it, but she couldn't remember it: she was always asking me when I'd have to go back to school again.
Then there was a day where she didn't know me when I first arrived, though she was welcoming enough. When she suddenly recognized me, she was tearful and horrified: "I think about you all the time," she said, "and then you're here and I don't know you!" It was awful, but it was also the only time that happened. Soon, she didn't know me at all and seemed at peace with that. I fed her her lunch; perhaps she did the same for me once, and I don't remember that either. I held her hand. I brushed back her hair from her forehead and kissed it. I talked to her, though I didn't think she could hear me. I sang to her sometimes too. Why not? And I told myself, "it's over now; she's not really here anymore, but I'm just checking to see she's not lonely, she's not in pain." But it was so hard to give up imagining- with all the intensity of a prayer- that maybe this Tuesday she'd look at me again and say my name and know me.
She died Saturday morning. It was, I'm sure, long past the time that she would have chosen to pull the plug, if there'd been a plug to pull. She had more than fifty year's experience as a nurse, and she knew what she didn't want. I last saw her on Monday the 16th; her eyes followed me around the room, but she didn't say a word. My parents are arranging everything; they have an outfit picked out for her, and they're borrowing back a pin she gave me, because it matches the outfit, and probably also because there's nothing of hers left that hasn't been given to me: she'd been giving things away so naturally for so long. I'd visit her in the hospital, and she'd try to give me the soda or cake from her dinner tray. My brother is picking me up from work tomorrow so that we'll make it to the evening wake, and then we'll bury her Tuesday in St. Peter's graveyard in Haverstraw, a place straight out of Our Town, with High Tor above it and the Hudson below.
And no one can ever look at me the way she did. And I will never love anyone else the way I love her.