Maia
The woman who survived my father
I
I only met Maia twice: once in Connecticut during an impromptu “family reunion.” And the second time before my father’s funeral in Florida where his ashes were to be interred next to his second wife, Alice.
Maia lived in the same concrete block, wall to wall carpeted “Villa” complex in Florida where my father had wintered for over two decades. There he had moved, semi-retired, with my mother, his first wife. Five months after my mother died, my father married Alice, though to hear him say that he was past grieving and willing to “move on,” cast me as the subversive son, still ‘wallowing in my loss,’ as he put it.
Alice, also a widower, lived in the same apartment complex, died after three years of marriage, and shortly thereafter my father took up with Maia. That he didn’t venture past his apartment community to seek companionship spoke to his age and imagination. His pastime, his life, really centered around the apartment community and its pool which he regularly frequented at cocktail time.
For Maia the complex seemed less a community than a roosting place, between where and where one was not sure. To say she “took up with my father” is probably inaccurate. Maia kept her apartment; Maia held onto her memories.
Maia was like that. An emigre from the Netherlands, Maia exuded memories and history. You could see it in her eyes: they stared at you from a distance, yet taking you in at the same time. Her accent was still present, an endearing acquaintance. She remembered my mother and shared that she was fond of her. She didn’t have much to say of my father’s second wife, which endeared me to Maia all the more.
II
“I don’t think that I will attend your father’s funeral. Alice’s family will be there and I am not sure they will want to see me. Perhaps I will not want to see them.”
I understood immediately. Alice, as surviving wife, had a cloying and to me an offensive presence even post mortem. Yes, I was hard on Alice which was surprisingly easy to feel. I offered my sympathy to Maia which Maia abruptly steered me away from. “I find most funerals boring. I shall meet you, your sister and your families after the funeral, say for lunch? I would like that. I can share stories and your father in my own way. You make the reservation and let me know, eh?”
One of the stories I heard from my father, not from Maia, explained a lot about her distance and her presence. One day in 1940 — Maia was 15 at the time — she received a knock on her parent’s ground floor apartment door in Amsterdam. Maia was summoned to greet her visitors, whom she vaguely remembered meeting at a Resistance rally. Her past was about to be exposed and she feared for her parents’ disapproval, so she motioned to her mother to retreat and Maia ushered the visitors — a man and a woman — into the vestibule.
“You are about to die, so you can live,” the woman said, and she handed Maia a paper with a picture of Maia and the caption, ‘Dutch Spy Against the Nazi Cause. 1 Hundred Thousand Guilder for Her Death.” The man handed Maia a package tied up with twine to resemble a food vendor purchase and a bottle of what resembled hair dye. The package contained a boy’s clothes; the hair dye was to alter Maia’s appearance.
Maia became Max.
Her parents did not object. Now they understood that their daughter was a messenger for the Dutch Resistance. They didn’t encourage her; she had placed them in harm’s way. But how could they stop her? As I heard recently about the war: the real peril was not only surviving death but enduring separation.
Shortly after the war’s end, Maia emigrated to the US, her family reduced by the war.
A survivor, Maia was alone.
III
As I said I first was introduced to Maia at a family get together in Connecticut, which my father referred to as a “reunion,” which to me sounded hollow, pretentious even. Reunions followed families, and ours had long before splintered over sourness and neglect.
Maia was visiting her son who had settled in the Boston area. She wanted to get away for the weekend. My father offered her the guest room, where my mother in later years had moved into, to escape my father’s snoring and prostate.
Maia and I hit it off. Over one glass of Chardonnay, served on an outdoor patio, Maia embarked on what for her was a current cause. “What is this, therapy, you call it,” she began. “My son says he is ‘in therapy.’ He is separated from his wife. He is suffering, I am sorry to report. I am very sorry for him. So, explain to me, what is this … therapy? In my day, in Amsterdam, mental health doctors treated the insane, the ones with visible mental ailments. You did not go to a mental health doctor unless you were brought or committed by a magistrate, because you had — due to your illness — caused a disturbance.”
Maia paused. Not hearing a reply which she took for general affirmation, she continued.
“The rest, I suppose, is for… the curious? Today, you go to a therapist because you are curious… you want to find an answer, eh? Isn’t this what family is for? What is this, a doctor performing what a family does?”
Well, you can’t argue with that, I mused, smiling at Maia. “Maia, you are right: the problem is not all families are caring in that way.”
“And strangers are? Look, I know families can be tough, but where are you without one? Families know that if they are not for the curious, then the curious will go elsewhere, to seek answers.”
I shot a glance at my father who was busy messing with hamburgers on a grill.
“But, what if the families, as you put it, don’t know that they are not…”
Maia, interrupting, “ I don’t know. I do not have an answer. I remember once saying to your father who was complaining to me about something I said or did; I said to your father, “Henry, the Dutch have a saying: ‘See the door, it swings both in and it swings out.”
IV
On our second encounter, after my father’s funeral, there was no Chardonnay, but sweetened iced tea. A noisy bunch, our families reunited over the passing of a family “head,” and settled into a long luncheon around a table overlooking a canal and postcard pelicans.
I sat across from Maia. She seemed tired. I did not offer the gratuitous, “Are you all right?” I did not describe the funeral. I did not bring up families or grieving or loss.
I listened to Maia talk. She seemed older now. Perhaps she was older all along. Perhaps I just failed to notice. Her hair was neatly coiffed, a single strand of pearls, silver jewelry. The jewelry was hers, and she wore them matter of factly. Maia’s husband had died ten years before my mother, so she had lived alone, a phone call away from her son, a good twenty years before she and my father became close.
“I knew Alice, but we rarely spoke. I would watch your father and Alice swim together in the pool from my window. They were happy together, so I was happy for them. When Alice died, your father still visited the pool every late afternoon, and he would swim alone. So, I let myself out of my apartment and I would come down to the pool and would watch him swim. I don’t swim, but I liked watching him. That’s how we became friends.”
“What will you do now, Maia, stay at the Villas?” I hated myself for crossing this boundary. It was a thoughtless inquiry, like a dumb question from a news reporter.
Maia shifted in her seat. “I understand what you are saying. Don’t worry yourself about me. Now that your father is gone, I can’t stay here. I will move to the east coast, near my son.”
She paused as if to breathe in what she was about to say. “Do I have friends? I don’t have any here now that your father is gone. He was loyal, a regular guy, and I put up with his cooking. He cooked for me. That’s a friend — doing what you prefer not to do — to be with you. The rest? Well, you can play cards with them, to while away the hours and the loneliness, but in the end they leave you. And then you understand they were visitors, not friends.”
Another pause. And straightening up, Maia shared a conviction which is hard to forget.
“No, I will leave the Villas and move near to my son. We will still talk on the phone, but he will know I am nearby. He needs me. That’s where I belong.”
September 9
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