When Barry Martin took on the role of construction
supervisor of a huge Seattle shopping complex, he never imagined that he would
end up caring for Edith Mcefield, a stubborn 84-year-old who had refused $1
million from the developer to move house. Here he describes their unlikely
friendship
Stubborn: Edith Macefield's Seattle home, around
which a five-storey shopping complex was built. She refused a $1m offer to move.
I
was nervous, that first day on the job, walking up to her house. I’d heard so
much already. The developers had bought every inch of a block to build on,
except for this one ramshackle house, so they were having to build around it.
If anyone tried to talk to her, she was more likely to bite their head off than
give them the time of day.
Edith
was tending to her garden when I walked up to her and introduced myself. ‘Miss
Macefield, I just want to let you know that we’re going to be making a whole
lot of noise and mess, so if you need anything or have any problems, here’s my
number.’
‘Well,
that’s very nice of you,’ she said, taking my card and holding it close to her
one good eye. ‘I’m glad to have you here. It’ll be nice to have company.’
Edith’s
gate was just 40 feet away from my trailer, so whenever I saw her outside I
found myself wandering over for a chat. Then one morning she rang my mobile and
asked if I would mind driving her to the hairdresser. I was surprised by the
request as she seemed to value her independence above everything else. Whenever
I went to check that she was OK, I had to make it look like I just happened to
be there, otherwise she’d get angry. At the appointed time I stood next to her
1989 blue Chevy Cavalier. It was a sturdy car with a dent in the front. She had
a booster seat on the driver’s side so that she could see over the steering
wheel. I sat down on it and hit my head on the inside of the roof.
‘I
guess you’re a little bit bigger than me,’ she laughed.
‘Yeah,
and getting wider every year, too.’
Edith house from another angle
When
I dropped her home after her haircut she thanked me.
‘Not
a problem. Let me know if you need anything else. And Edith, your hair looks
really nice.’
As
the weeks went by, I found it easier and easier to talk to Edith, yakking about
everything and anything. But then, six weeks later, I went to collect her to
take her to the hairdresser again and she was furious with me. ‘I just want you
to know I didn’t appreciate that call this morning. You boys keep on hounding
me to move – well, I’m not moving, so save your breath!’
I
had no idea what she was talking about. ‘Your friend over there at the
developers, he tried to sound all polite but I know what he was up to.’
Edith in 1947 with the instrument that her cousin,
the clarinetist Benny Goodman gave her
‘Listen,’
I replied. ‘I work by the hour and it makes no difference to me whether you
stay or go but let me ask you one question: why don’t you want to move?’
She
looked out of the window. ‘Where would I go? I don’t have any family and this
is my home. My mother died here, on this very couch. I came back to America
from England to take care of her. She made me promise I would let her die at
home and not in some facility, and I kept that promise. And this is where I
want to die. Right in my own home. On this couch.’
She
seemed so frail and so strong at the same time. So vulnerable and needy and yet
so fiercely independent. I was moved by what she had told me and felt strangely
protective of her. It was such a simple request. At another meeting the
developers offered to bring someone in to take pictures of her house so that
they could build an exact replica somewhere else. They mentioned the $1 million
[over £600,000] again and said they would buy a new house for her. ‘I’m not
sure why I need $1 million,’ said Edith. ‘If I get sick it probably won’t cover
the medical bills and if I don’t get sick I don’t need it. And if you’re going
to make the new place look just like this one, well this place already looks
just like this one, so why should I bother?’
Edith’s
house, which looked a little sad and lonely to begin with, looked even sadder
once all the buildings around it were torn down. It resembled some last outpost
of a bombed-out village after the Second World War. Before long I was taking
her to doctor’s appointments as well as to the hairdresser. Then I was
scheduling her appointments myself. On one of our drives home she was wondering
out loud what she might make herself for lunch. I told her that one of the boys
was going out for hamburgers and she said that sounded good. I told them to
bring her back a vanilla shake as well. That was the day I learned what a sweet
tooth Edith had. She would stick the straw into her mouth and not stop until
the shake was gone. Then she started calling me about once a week to ask for ‘a
hamburger and one of those vanilla things’.
It
wasn’t long before I was making her a TV dinner, too, before I went home. One
evening I noticed a picture sitting on the dusty bookcase in the living room.
It was Edith wearing wire-rimmed glasses and holding a clarinet, looking for
all the world like the great jazz musician Benny Goodman.
‘Edith,
how old were you when you started playing the clarinet?’ I asked.
‘My
cousin Benny gave me one of his old clarinets, that’s how it started.’ It was
the second time she had mentioned him and it got me thinking. Was this actually
true, or was this just an old lady with a few loony tunes? So I started
flipping through her Benny Goodman albums and sure enough one was signed ‘to my
cousin Edith, with love, Benny’.
As
the shopping centre was beginning to rise up from the ground I got my first
call from Edith’s social workers. They didn’t think she was capable of staying
in the house by herself. Could I help convince her to move? What if something
happened? And I said that something could happen anywhere and I was just 30
seconds away and would keep checking on her. ‘Well, if something goes wrong,
you’re going to be responsible,’ they told me.
At
that point something welled up in me; it was the first time I understood how
much I was learning about growing old from Edith.
‘How
am I responsible? I’ll check on her but she’s a grown woman and she can make
her own decisions. She’s perfectly capable of knowing what she can or cannot do
and if she wants to take that risk because it means staying in her own house,
well that’s her right. People have rights you know.’
I
was beginning to understand how much we do things for old people just to make
things easier for ourselves. We don’t always listen to what they are trying to
tell us. Every time Edith swatted my hands away as I tried to help her wipe her
mouth or tie a shoelace, she would roar, ‘I can do it myself.’ Just as with a
child, you try to convince them to let you help them, not for their sake but
for your own, just to get through the day a little quicker. Dignity is a hard
thing to let go of, especially for someone who had lived the kind of exciting
life that Edith seemingly had.
That
autumn, as the days grew shorter, I had given up all pretence that there was
some separation between my life with and without Edith. I wasn’t spending
weekends with her but during the week I was in and out of her house from dawn
till way after dark, making her meals, taking care of the bills and the chores,
the shopping and the laundry, as well as watching TV with her. On the days when
I’d make it home before dark, more often than not Edith would call me on the
mobile with some problem or other, some excuse to make me drive back. I’ve had
an accident, she’d say, or you forgot to leave water for me – I swear she’d
take the jug of water I left on the table and struggle over to the sink to pour
it out just to get me to come back.
I
wonder, looking back, how my wife Evie coped with all this. She’d get
irritated, of course. With two teenagers at home, there was always too much for
one person to do. But when I asked her about it all she would ever say was that
she was proud of me: ‘It takes a special person to do this.’
Edith
fell down a number of times that winter. Too often I’d come over and find her
on the floor. But still she wouldn’t let me bring in any help and she was
getting more and more demanding of my time. It seemed like every time I tried
to leave she manufactured some kind of crisis. One night she called me at home
and told me she’d fallen. Evie was really starting to get irritated by these middle-of-the-night
calls, but I still got a Thermos of hot chocolate and a kiss goodbye as I
headed out of the door.
It
was probably the first time that she had got close to saying thank you. I
leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. ‘I love you, old woman. Now get
some sleep.’
Edith
seemed more fragile every day. I knew something was wrong. No one could eat as
much as I was feeding her and keep losing weight. Finally she agreed to go to
the hospital for tests. The news was not good – she had pancreatic
cancer. I guess when a woman reaches 86 you’ve got to at least consider
the possibility of what she might be facing. But Edith was so self-assured, so
in control that I never wanted to look around that particular corner. I had
come to love her in the same way I loved my family. For a long time, Edith had
been in a long dark tunnel, incontinent, unable to read or write. Now at least
we knew why and she seemed at peace with the news. For Edith the darkness had
been lifted even though it revealed a horrible truth. Now she knew what the future
held.
EDITH'S STORY
Edith (right) was born in Oregon and told Barry stories from her past that seemed so extraordinary
that he was never sure whether or not they were true. She said that she had been
recruited by British intelligence as a music student and sent to Germany to spy
on the Nazis.
That she was arrested and sent to Dachau concentration camp, but
escaped, taking 13 children with her to England.
She said she had a son who died of meningitis at the age of 13, fathered
by her lover, the Austrian tenor Richard Tauber (right), and that she
went on to marry James Macefield who had a plantation in Africa where they
spent months at a time.
‘Was she making all this up? It didn’t help Edith one bit if I figured
out whether or not these stories were true,’ says Barry.
PN: Barry chose not to sell Edith's home to the developers either but to a man who wants to
preserve Edith’s spirit of resistance.
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