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so that she could go to work.
    For a while, for just one little while, it seemed as if the battle had been won. A miracle had taken place. Her temperature dropped to near normal. Doctors clustered around her, amazed. Ruby was smiling. I bent down to her, jubilant, and said, “Darling, how would you like to go home?”
    She looked up at me with hope and wonder in her eyes and said, “Oh, yes, yes, yes. When?”
    “Perhaps even tomorrow,” I said.
    I was quite serious. I believed then that such a thing was possible. Charlie was there, ready to drive her home. The doctors thought perhaps we should wait a bit longer. And then by nightfall it started to go the other way and our hopes were dashed. The pains had come back, the temperature had risen.
    It was a different kind of infection, a new kind in the colon, and they let us know there were no drugs for it. Only an operation on the colon could save her, and an operation was out of the question. Ruby knew little of what was happening. She was in constant pain, and they began giving her morphine, and she slipped in and out of consciousness. I sat there beside her bed holding her hand, barely conscious myself, dazed and not believing what was happening.
    Once, during this time, I heard Adraenne talking to the doctor she worked for over the phone. She had stopped going to work entirely and was in the room with Ruby day and night, and now she was trying to explain it to him.
    “I can't come,” she was saying, keeping her voice down even though Ruby was in her drugged sleep. “My mother is dying.”
    I could not hear his voice, but Adraenne told me later that he said, “I have my practice to think of.”
    “I have my mother to think of,” Adraenne said, and hung up. Afterward,after this was all over and she was able to go back to work, the pressure continued, and she had to resign.
    Occasionally, for a brief period, Ruby would awaken, and there was some recognition in her eyes as she looked at me. I was holding her hand and bending close to her, and she whispered something to me. It was barely audible but I heard it.
    “Darling,” she whispered, “don't forget to take your vitamin pills in the morning.”
    “I won't,” I promised, and forced myself to keep her from knowing I was crying.
    These were the last words we would ever speak to each other. She did not come awake again. Adraenne and I both spent that night in the room with her, taking turns during the night to lie down on the cot. The morphine dosage had been increased, and Ruby was in a heavy sleep, her breathing noisy. Both Adraenne and I were awake when dawn came. It was a gray September morning and I went to the window and looked out. Curiously, the hospital overlooked Central Park. I could see the trees and bushes beginning to emerge out of the shadows, and I remembered how much this place had meant to us, and how important a part it had played in our life together.
    I was thinking of that when suddenly Adraenne let out a cry. “Dad, she's stopped breathing. She's dead!”
    I swung around, shocked and disbelieving, and then I rushed to the bed. There she was, lying very still and white, and I kneeled down and took her in my arms and kissed her and held her.
    I was crying hard and didn't want to let go of her when the doctor and nurse came into the room. But they finally made me go out when they came for her with a stretcher. I went into the corridor and stood with Adraenne at my side, both of us crying. Charlie had arrived,and the three of us watched through our tears as they wheeled her out of the room, her body covered with a white sheet. They went past us and down the hallway to the elevator. There was a pause while they waited for the elevator to come. Then the door slid open and they wheeled the stretcher into it, and the door closed, and that was the last I saw of her.

Chapter Seven
1950
    W HEN W ORLD W AR II ENDED, BIG CHANGES TOOK PLACE IN THE country, and these changes affected my life as well as