By chance, I met a ninety five year old woman at a state preserved landmark bed and breakfast on the California Coast. She resided there under the care of the proprietor, her rather chilly and self-serving daughter.
The old lady was the first and only person I had ever met that actually saw and heard Adolf Hitler in person. I had to know more, so I prodded her. She traveled way back, seventy seven years: “I was attending a school for experimental dance in Berlin. One day, there was a big commotion throughout the campus, everyone just getting up and leaving their classrooms in the middle of lectures. I asked what it was all about and they said the Chancellor was down the road at the pavilion about to give an address. Not from the country and not one that paid any attention to politics, I was not familiar with him, but I went along with the throng down the street. Once we settled in, I was just twenty feet from him.
What I remember most is the group of Americans standing behind me. When Hitler’s speech started, they were not expecting much, even negative about him. By the time the speech was over, those Americans were saluting him and chanting, ‘Heil, Hitler!” with the thousand others packed into that pavilion. Everyone was excited.” Moved by her account, I asked if she would be willing to let me photograph her. She was surprised, but absolutely giddy. She recalled her glory days as a runway model in New York back in the 1930’s and 40’s. She puffed up with a bit of bravura as she relived the memory. I said I would prepare the photo shoot and call on her after dinner.
When I arrived, she was still trying to apply make up. Perched on a rickety chair, she pried herself up from her usual hunch and took command of a thrift store vanity. It was both heart wrenching and adorable how she shakily applied an off-shade of pale pink lipstick. Seventeen again, she turned to see if I approved of her handiwork. The lipstick was wildly crooked and drew down the right side of her bottom lip. Sad clown and faded model came to mind and I almost cried right there. I escorted her down the ancient stair case arm-in-arm and she beamed. I did too. Seventy seven years had passed, but the runway model was back on the scene. I set her up on the landing and she lived the old part—until reality set in.
Her emotional melt down seen in this photograph erupted out of nowhere. She asked how she looked just as I hit the shutter. I said beautiful and she lost it. I immediately pulled the plug on the twenty second photo shoot. She sobbed and wailed how she was no longer beautiful and she would commit suicide that night by drowning herself in the West Coast surf just one hundred yards from us. The rest of my time spent with her was to reason why she was valid and worthy of living. No matter the rationale, no matter the soothing, she was finished. I would not be her night in shining armor.
Alarmed, I told her daughter, the bed-and-breakfast inn keeper, what her mother planned. She was cold and scolded the old woman for acting so childishly. She kept suicide watch over her that night and, unbeknownst to me then, made the call bright and early the next morning. That day I saw nothing of the old woman.
I rose the following morning to hustle and bustle outside. I looked out the window below and the old woman sat in the back seat of a plain white car. They had come for her, they sure the hell did. She would be living exactly where she feared she would be sent if her suicide attempt were unrealized. I could hear the surf in my head and desperately wished for her that she had succeeded. Cavernous was my guilt for having derailed her plan. It was her life and she had the right to do with it as she saw fit, especially if she would feel sterilized, marginalized and imprisoned in a strange place controlled by strange people whose only connection to her was their scant paychecks from milking her miserable last days.
My heart raced and I ran downstairs to say goodbye; but as I called to her and waved from just five feet away, she just smiled dumbly through that segregating car window. We were a trillion miles apart. She did not remember me at all. The surf roared in my head, she, already dead. But the surf, who should have been responsible, could not take credit. The car rolled away with the final moments of an old woman’s life written on her face. I lumbered up the old stair case and cried in my wife’s arms.
