Bertha Sandberg

Her Life

    She emerged from that eternal sleep of the past into the light of the present in turn of the century New York City. Her home was a shabby walk-up whose windows gave upon the noisy, pungent, teeming, pushcart streets of the Lower East Side. Her mother, a mean and spiteful woman, dropped three additional children ─ another girl and two boys ─ before shuttering her womb to further depredations. Her father, a placid, hard-working man whom Bertha loved, died quietly ─ perhaps gratefully ─ several years after the youngest child’s birth.
    Bertha was beautiful, brilliant, and talented ─ an accomplished pianist, an artist, an expert calligrapher. She attended one of the city’s elite high schools, graduated at 16, enrolled in Hunter College, quickly earned a teaching degree. She was a suffragette, an opera-lover, a raconteur, an intellectual, a free spirit. She made money in the 1920’s stock market, bought a leopard-skin coat, filled her West End Avenue apartment with sumptuous oriental carpets and ornate Victorian-era furniture (never linking them to the dreams and fantasies of her childhood).
    She met Harry while shopping in Saks Fifth Avenue; fell in love, took him into her home, was pregnant within a year, gave birth to a daughter and, several years later, to a son. The marriage (common-law) deteriorated. Harry left after a sequence of violent arguments occasioned perhaps by his infidelity, perhaps by her menopause.
    In addition to charm and beauty and talent and intellect, Bertha had certain peculiarities of personality ─ an inability to forgive or forget, an unremitting self-righteousness, an intolerance for other people’s weaknesses, and an explosive and uncontrollable temper that at times bordered on insanity. As she grew older, these defects intensified. She broke with her family over some real or imagined insult. She excised Harry from the Book of Life, told her children that their father was dead, kept an ever-lasting candle of hatred for him burning within her bosom. She eventually broke with her daughter over a trivial incident at a downtown Manhattan church. Soon after, she broke with her son over an even more trivial incident at his home.

 

  Bertha with her parents and siblings.. Bertha is at far right. She ripped her image from the photo just as
  she ripped herself from her family. Bertha’s son repaired the damage as best he could after her death

    By the time she was 70 she had freed herself of family and of friends and had retired from her teaching position at Bryant High School. She now lived as she was fated to ─ as she secretly longed to ─ alone in her Woodside, Long Island, row house with her stray cats and lush garden and the gaudy furnishings of her youth and the hot comfort of unforgiven hatreds.
    Her son was vacationing in Cape Cod with his wife and children when he received the call. "Your mother is sick. I think you should see her." The call was from the woman who had helped raise Bertha’s two children after Harry left.
    He arrived at his mother’s house the next day. She was seated outside her front door surrounded by her overgrown plantings, her right foot, naked and grotesquely swollen, resting on a cushioned stool, exposed to what she fancied were the healing rays of the sun. The interior of the house was filled with the suffocating stench of cat urine and cat excrement from the many strays that wandered freely in and out. Excrement covered the elegant rugs.
    Her face was no different than he remembered (she had always seemed old to him, even when she was younger and still had some of her former beauty). Her brown eyes still flashed fire, her voice, a source of great pride, was still rich and strong, But he knew at once that she was dying.
    Doctors, biopsies, and hospitals followed in traditional fashion. The heel of her foot had disintegrated ─ a "neoplasm" the doctor explained using one of those obscene euphemisms cultivated by the medical profession. It had metastasized from an intestinal cancer. Amputation was essential. Bertha refused.
    "I’ll go to my grave whole," she told the doctor.
    Her son visited her in the hospital. "I want to go home," she said. "I want to have a good night’s sleep again." She shifted her body under the narrow sheet, unwittingly exposing the shaved pubis from which he had emerged so many years ago. He turned away.
    "Can you get me some sleeping pills?" she asked.
    They both knew what she meant.
    "I don’t think I can, ma," he said. Then he said, "Why don’t you stay with us in Westchester? We have plenty of space, an extra room."
    She stared at him, stunned and silent. "No," she said at last. "I want to go home." Then she said something strange, something she had never said to him before: "Thank you."
    They took her back to Woodside the next day. Her son arranged for a day nurse. "I’ll see you tomorrow, ma," he said.
    She looked at him, her brown eyes both tender and fierce amid the decaying flesh. She spoke after a long silence. "Maybe I was wrong," she said. "Maybe I was wrong about everything."
    They were the last words she ever spoke.
    The nurse found her the next morning floating face down in the bathtub.
Her Death 

    She struggles out of bed, manages to drape her depleted body in a flowing and richly embroidered white satin gown, picks up a bottle of cognac from her bedside table, crawls down the narrow hallway past her treasured Victorian chest of drawers with its white marble top. She reaches the bathroom at the end of the hallway with its pink sink and pink bathtub and green-tiled shower stall. She drags herself, grunting and sweating and filled with pain, into the bathtub, flops, panting, onto her back, turns on the taps. As the tub slowly fills with warm water she slugs down a shot or three of cognac, coughs as it burns its way down her throat.
    The tub is now full and the time has come for that final, unavoidable exam that she has studied so hard for all her life ─ the ultimate test of her indomitable will. She relaxes backward into the water’s comforting warmth, then turns over so that she is face down. She tentatively dips her face into the water, tries breathing in through her nostrils and mouth. She jerks her head up screaming and sputtering as she coughs up water and phlegm.
    "Oh God...Oh my God...Oh my God..."
    Gasping and weeping, she sticks her face back in, this time all the way under, and sucks the water deep into her bursting chest; choking, gagging, puking.
    "Oh God, will it never end? Please God, let it be over. As there’s a God in Heaven, Harry, let it be over."
    Five minutes, fifteen minutes; an instant, an eternity. But even eternities end (or else none of us would be here) and gradually, suddenly, the agony of dying and the agony of living fade into the shadows. The gossamer eyelids flutter shut, a faint smile drifts over the ruined countenance, lightens the unremitting line of her mouth, smoothes away the wrinkles etched by the malevolent years. And once again, for a moment, for a dream second, she is young and beautiful and her life lies spread out before her like grass in a meadow,

It is midnight on Fifth Avenue in the rain just yesterday so long ago and she is dressed in her chic garments with a broad-brimmed hat perched coquettishly on her wavy black hair with the black asphalt gleaming with streaks of yellow beneath the glare of street lights and the slanted rain and the elegant men with their secret longings and sidelong eyes watching the sway of her hips beneath her leopard-skin coat and silken dress and the click of her patent leather heels as she walks past Altman’s and Bonwit Teller and Tiffany and Cartier and FAO Schwartz where she used to take her children at Christmas and the yellow-brown smell of roasting chestnuts and the huge starlight headlights of chauffeured limousines that cut the smoky air like moonbeams in a forest. Sweet Bertha, gentle Bertha, a graceful fallow doe with wide brown eyes and rouged cheeks and the secret scent of damp summer evenings and the spice of wild roses and bayberries flavoring her perfumed breasts and the musky nest between her cushioned thighs and the hot gazes of the men in their tailored suits and cashmere coats and shining top hats burning into her as she touches the dull gold ring on her delicate finger, the last remnant of the man she loves and hates.

    By the time her son arrived the next morning her body was ripening in a gray soup of disintegrating flesh. The flowing material of her gown, like Ophelia’s, blossomed around her bloated corpse like the petals of a lily.
    He stared briefly, thankful her face was hidden, then waited in the living room for the police and coroner.
    And thus, after all those years of passion and anger, of laughter and hatred, of bitterness and tears and feline fury and unrequited love, Bertha had at last triumphed ─ for that white satin robe with its intricate embroidery was the bridal gown that in life had been denied her. But her dashing lover was not Harry. It was Death.

* * *

    I am Norman Benjamin Mack.
    I am Bertha Sandberg's son.
    She was the bravest person I have ever known and I will carry her memory with me until I, too, am forced to leave this beautiful earth.


Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

 

 

Posted by dome of glass at 9/16/2010 8:00 AM
Categories: Biography, Remembrance
Tags: anger bravery love passion hatred beauty
 

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  • 9/21/2010 3:45 PM Loren wrote:
    My God.

    Thank you for writing this. I've been waiting a long time.

    Love you.
    Reply to this
  • 9/21/2010 4:12 PM Anonymous wrote:
    Harry, I thought it was Henry. God I'm a dumbass.
    Reply to this
    1. 9/22/2010 4:18 PM Norm Mack wrote:
      Harry and Henry are somewhat interchangeable. My mother always called my father Harry. In Shakespeare's play when Prince Hal (King Henry V) kills Percy Hotspur, Percy's dying words are, "O, Harry, thou has robb'd me of my youth..."
      Do you have a name other than "Anonymous?" Let me know what it is.
      Reply to this
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