by David Winner
Unusual circumstances have given me an odd relationship with bodies, with nakedness. My father wouldn’t have been caught dead at a nude beach and would have been utterly perplexed if anyone described him as a nudist but tended to walk around the top floor of our Charlottesville home with his lower half exposed. Which only made me all the more modest about my own body until a coop lottery landed me in a nudist dorm at Oberlin College where suddenly boy and girl bodies were staring me in the face. Decades later, in my thirties, my friend, Louis Lucca, started driving me out to Jersey to the gay end of Sandy Hook’s nude beach where all sort of young, old, ugly, pretty physiques presented themselves to me.
But this writing is also about a very different body, a very old woman’s, that of my Great Aunt Dorle, who died in 2002 at 101.
I remember her old fashioned New York accent, right out of 1930’s movies. I remember the tiny grey hairs that peeked out from her upper lip, the few remaining teeth, the halitosis that was comforting in its familiarity, in its organic assurance that she was still with us. But I also recall her body. When those we love near the ends of their lives, sometimes we encounter their physical selves. My father’s was unfortunately already all too familiar, but I can’t forget his small, pale, wrinkled buttocks peering out from hospital gowns, nor my father-in-law’s thin haggard form in only underpants, and Dorle’s long, thin breasts springing like arms from her torso when I would undress her for bed.
When I was a child, Dorle was in her seventies and hardly seemed old. A publicist, a record producer, a thrower of enormous cocktail parties, she only seemed to age when her husband, Dario, died in 1980. Having recently been introduced to death – my two grandfathers and now Dario – I began to think that Dorle’s might be in the wings, but by the time of the memorial concert for Dario six months later, she’d rebounded, comforting a weeping Leonard Bernstein but back to being unflappable herself.
That was about when I stopped listening to chamber music and watching Murder She Wrote with my parents and started going out with my friends, some profligate notion of drugs and rock and roll. During college and grad school, my early adult life was a self-centered blur. I hardly focused on Dorle except to seek occasional comfort in her continued presence, her sister, my grandmother, and everyone else of her generation in my family, having died.
But in 1992, back in New York after adventures and misadventures, I forged an adult relationship with her, a decade-long tradition of Friday cocktails and dinners. By then, Dorle was in her nineties. Her eyes, ears and short-term memory were petering away though she still walked vigorously using a cane that she referred to as her stick.
After training from Brooklyn to her Midtown Manhattan apartment, I would sit next to her in her expansive living room across from the out of tune baby grand. I would light her cigarettes and make her gin and tonics, and we would chat for an hour or so before strolling out to the street to eat at one of her restaurants. After dinner, I would walk her back to the front of her building and kiss her goodnight.
As time went on, I had to scream louder and louder into her ears. Conversation grew more difficult, and we initiated a sort of game. Listing twentieth century figures, I would ask if she’d met them.
Jacqueline Onassis: Yes
Frank Sinatra: No
Franklin Roosevelt: No
Pope Paul: Yes
Our rituals changed as her needs progressed. I started dropping her off at her apartment door rather than the front of the building, and soon I began to follow her inside. She did not object, and, without comment from either of us, I started escorting her down the short hallway from the foyer to the bathroom and taking her inside. I listened to her sounds from outside to make sure she was okay: peeing, often groaning as she’d reached that point in old age in which everything hurt.
Once she was done, we’d take the few short steps from her bathroom to her bedroom. Steadying her with one hand to keep her from falling, I would help her take off her sweater, her blouse, her bra, her underwear. Then I would place her nightgown over her shoulders and carefully pull it down her body.
From the time we entered the apartment to the time that the nightgown was on, we made no conversation. I was a silent helper, sort of a mechanical aid. My silence allowed her not to feel shy or self-conscious about the role her grandnephew had taken in her life. But once she was “decent” again, and I was about to depart, we would say goodnight and kiss each other on both cheeks like the Europeans we were not.
Needing so much help in the evening, I wondered how she was managing during the day. Badly. Leaving the gas on while lighting cigarettes, leaving her bathtub running, creating a flood in the apartment below.
My father, her nephew, came to New York to speak to her. In dour, serious tones, he informed her that professional help was required. Which brought Novelette Ewbanks, a black woman from Jamaica, into our lives.
A conventional liberal of a much earlier generation, Dorle contributed to the defense funds of the Scottsboro Boys and managed to eradicate her building’s racist policy after black soprano, Leontyne Price, was forced to take the service elevator in the 1960’s. But as Novelette moved quickly to around the clock care, Dorle failed in any way to acknowledge her existence except on occasion to erroneously refer to her as “my maid.” Some of it could have been embarrassment like her silence when I undressed her, but clothed or unclothed, on the toilet or at the breakfast table, Dorle never seemed to address her directly.
Recently, I rewatched The Caine Mutiny, a mid-fifties Bogart movie taking place on a rickety old ship. In several scenes, the all-white officers are served not so much by black people but black hands. So deeply were the black characters thrust into the background that we could not even glimpse their faces. Which sadly seemed like Novelette’s situation with Dorle.
On July 7, 2002, I returned home to Brooklyn to find a message breaking the edict that bad news must be imparted in person. Dorle had died, my father announced, and I was to make my way immediately to her apartment.
I expected to be hugged and comforted upon my arrival, but Novelette, unsentimental about the ancient white woman who’d failed to grant her basic humanness, took me immediately into the bedroom where Dorle lay to show me that what she’d told my father was true.
Determined that no fuss be made, no heroic measures attempted, my father forbade the calling of 911 under any circumstances. Obediently following his directive, we rang Dorle’s doctor instead, a man she’d never met as all medical care had been stopped a few years before. What the doctor was supposed to say was unclear. There was no assistance he could render a corpse.
Then Novelette and I took care of Dorle’s body. The lighting of her cigarettes, the pouring of her drinks, the taking off her clothes had reached its logical conclusion.
Together we did what Novelette felt to be appropriate. Silently, we placed a blanket around her as the dead should not be cold. We closed her eyes as best we could with our hands. We tried to shut her mouth as well, but it refused to stay closed. Every time we shut it, it sprang open again as if she had more to say. Finally, Novelette tied it closed with a scarf.
When the doctor finally rang back, he told us to call 911. However old and dead someone may be, that remains the directive. As the sounds of sirens filled 55th Street, we removed the scarf lest it be seen as somehow suspicious.
The moment it was off, Dorle’s mouth sprang open again, rejecting that final act of caretaking to which, like all the others, she had never agreed.
The EMT pronounced her dead, and, later that evening, Jewish undertakers came to take her away. Before they put Dorle in a black bag and wheeled her out of the apartment in a trolley, I briefly placed my hand on her shoulder, my last contact with her body.
*
A decade or so after Dorle’s death, Louis of nude beach fame, started inviting me to peculiar gatherings.
Upon entering his home way out in Brooklyn in Dyker Heights, we stripped ourselves of our clothes, listened to bad music, smoked powerful weed and consumed Louis’s grandiose seafood meals. Affectionately, I remember the bodies of Louis’s friends: from young to old, from fat to thin, from Black to white and different skin tones in between.
But I want to end this writing with Louis’s own body, voluptuous, roly-poly, not quite fully naked because of an odd sort of G-string like a loin-cloth he would wear. Louis died of multiple myeloma at the very beginning of the pandemic, and I miss him terribly, my memory of him often leading me to my memory of his body. Sexual attraction is just one of many ways that we can react to bodies. I was not in love with Louis nor did I lust for him. I did love him, though, and I loved his body.