The Amsterdam House

Across the breadth of Amsterdam Avenue, facing the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, sits a curious hybrid of a building. The façade on the Amsterdam side is a rough representation of the pre-war apartment buildings typical of the neighborhood. All best intentions aside, it cannot help but look like new construction. Even the latest of technologies cannot falsify the age of a building. The sum of all the life experienced in and around older buildings, even over many generations, gives them a luster as unique as a fingerprint or a snowflake. The proud structures inherit a patina of serene endurance. Like an ancient range of mountains whose prime is past, their shoulders rounded and their crags softened, and altogether too proud to crumble to the sea.

The building to which the façade is attached is the precise antithesis of the image the façade seeks to portray. Built in 1976 it is a prototype of the worst form of modernism as expressed in architecture. Ponderous grey brick. Horizontal bands of clouded glass. Or perhaps I judge it too harshly; my perceptions warped by the pull of emotional tides. No, it really is a butt-ugly building and always has been.

The building is called The Amsterdam House. It is a nursing home. My Paternal Grandmother spent the last months of her life there. Where the new façade now stands, there used to be a pleasant garden. Small, but cleverly laid out with planters and flower beds and benches to provide the illusion of a more pastoral retreat. Somewhere where the cloying fumes from the uptown Amsterdam Avenue Bus wouldn’t be wafting through the air in competition with azaleas, lilacs, and hydrangeas. Come to think of it, that’s not much of a competition at all, is it?

Anyway I used to walk with my grandmother through this little garden. The last photograph I have of us together was taken in that little garden. In the black and white photograph I am young, smiling, and protectively taking the frail woman’s arm, a pleasant boyish face into the lens. Inside I was terrified even to touch this trembling remains of a human body lived beyond its reasonable utility. The gradual departure of her mind settled me not at all, but intensified my nameless fear. I feared not my beloved grandma dying. I had been conscious of the passing of her husband years earlier. What I feared was this phantom who seemed to look right through me when she saw me, or when she did see me - think I was someone else.

Often she mistook me for my father as a boy. I don’t know who that hurt most – my Father, not recognized for who he had become, but for who he once was; or myself, for being recognized as someone else entirely. I had become my own father’s mirror, and into that glass did she smile like the prettiest lass in town. Or sometimes she might mistake one for someone from her Home. From her Ireland.

She too gazes into the lens, but her visage is remote and severe and interrogatory. She seems not sure what is expected of her at this moment, but she knows it should be something obvious and familiar. It occurs to me, all these years later (at just this very moment as I write this), that what I as a boy interpreted as the vacant stares of a flown intelligence was simply just deeper concentration. Trying to remember the faces, the words, the places and to reach out and grasp them as they all spin and spin around her. I guess that runs in the family.

I would go stand again in that little garden, in that same spot and pay my respect and love to her. But that spot is under a building now, and she rests somewhere out in Queens now, near her husband, my grandfather.

So I’ve nothing to do but walk alongside the building where I find no respite but instead I am drawn into sharp vivid memories. Memories I had thought buried over and lost in the deeper recesses of my logged experience long ago. That is untrue. I have always remembered these things, I just never liked to remember them very much. The dining hall for the facility is on the ground floor, and one can watch through the window. As I stand there I swear it is the same old women clustered around on oversized chairs. But that’s impossible, being over 30 years ago.

My grandma used to spend most of her time down here, sitting with the other old women like dear old friends who never really knew each other. My father and I, or my mother and I would enter the dining hall, scanning about for a sight of her frail form. It always took a few moments for her memories to kick in so she could identify us.

“It’s me, grandma!” I used to present myself until she would recognize me. She still might not recall my name, but she damn well knew she loved me, and so did I.

Then would come what I called The Gauntlet. I would be introduced one by one to all the sweet old ladies there, who would pinch my cheeks, kiss my brow, touch my blonde hair, or take my hands tenderly into theirs. And they smiled so very wide to me. Some, by design or by circumstance, would take me for their own flesh and blood, and hug me to them tightly. I would hug as tightly back as I dared while answering questions and gossiping of people and places I never knew and were more than likely all dead. I would only pass on the good news.

We would spend some time with grandma then. Up to her room, drop off some supplies she might like, the flowers my father and I grabbed at the corner bodega on our way over. On some days we’d sign her out with the burly African American woman at the front desk. A big scary lady. I’d bet no frisky octogenarian ever tried to make a break on her watch. Perhaps she's a resident now. Look for the large woman with tapioca pudding on her chin. In her condition, grandma couldn’t walk far, or very fast, and we had to have her back at very specific times. So we would always walk down the block to Tom’s Restaurant.

After lunch (I seem to recall grandma always having toast and tea, a pleasure I am indebted to her for having passed on), we would take grandma back.

Those awkward moments saying goodbye. The first couple of times I looked behind me as we walked away, and watched her tiny body recede into the distance, in a chair too large. As if we’d never been there. That would break me. I learned that if I didn’t look back I could make it out into the street before I broke down in wracking sobs, snuffling and subconsciously constantly wiping my eyes with my forearms. I cried for my grandma. I cried for the phantom in that building. I cried for all my grandmothers inside there and the desperate love they showed me, a stranger who was their blood.

On 112^th Street, off Amsterdam, I would cry and my father would be right there, his arm around my shoulders, holding me tight. We’d walk that way together down the street, back towards Broadway. Away from the Cathedral, away from the Amsterdam House, away from age and death and fear and the smell of ammonia.

We left all these things behind us as we slid into the booth at the corner diner. The bustling white-shirted waiter approached, carrying two menus beneath his arm.