My father’s side of the family had bad luck with stairs, very bad luck. My mother’s side had exactly the opposite.
I have a great deal of respect for stairs, now that I am about to turn 72. Both my father, at 78, and his brother, at 80, died after falling down stairs in their own homes. These days, for the first time in my life, I use the railing or at least have my hand on top of it as I walk down stairs. Oh, occasionally I skip jauntily down the middle of a flight of public stairs with the railing just out of hand’s reach. But my nonchalance is just pretend. I’m acutely aware I’m doing it.
My mother’s mother — Alice Nugent Ward — lived the first 18 years of my life in a third-floor walk-up with no hot water at the corner of Elm and State streets in New Haven, Conn., two blocks from the New Haven green and the Yale campus. It was on the edge of what was then called “the ghetto,” a word which today is often politically incorrect. As I recall, rents decreased by the floor. Three flights of stairs meant a lower rent.
She was poor and she lived alone, but she was a woman of great dignity and beauty, at every stage of her life, although I knew her only as a white-haired grandmother who belonged to a group called the Eastern Star, which required wearing a gown.
Poverty was her friend in a strange way. If she forgot the paper or milk or toothpaste, she had to walk down three flights of stairs to the corner grocery, and then back up three flights of stairs. Sometimes there would be a panhandler or a drunk on the sidewalk or even in her building’s doorway.
Multiply that times 365 days and 18 years and you can guess that my grandmother had strong legs, powerful lungs and a strong heart. She probably had the cardiovascular system of an Olympic athlete from walking those stairs. She lived into her 90th year.
My family lived in a six-room, tiny World War I-era cottage in Mount Carmel, Conn.; on weekends we drove 9 miles to New Haven, picked up my grandmother, brought her out for Sunday dinner and then drove her back again. As I got older, I ran up and down those stairs for fun, my grandmother trailing behind.
She did not own a car. She had never learned to drive. She went everywhere by bus, or on foot. She walked all over New Haven, a totally flat city with sidewalks everywhere, paying her bills (water company, gas company, electric company, telephone company) in cash.
On these missions, she always wore white gloves and carried a patent leather pocketbook and handed the money to the clerks in an envelope. It was impolite to thrust cash bills at another person, and count them out.
She worked as an afternoon receptionist answering the phone in the front lobby of what was called “The Professional Building,” greeting clients of doctors and lawyers. She retired at 70, the year the building was sold, two years younger than I am now.
She moved to Bethesda, Md., with her other daughter in a three-room apartment on Chevy Chase Drive. There she was, great-gramma, as her two grandsons, my cousins, raised their own children.
When she was 88, her oldest grandson bought a condominium in Germantown, Md., and she and her daughter — my mother’s sister — went for a visit. She had never seen the new place before.
At one point she asked for directions to the “powder room.” The next thing my family heard was my 88-year-old grandmother hitting the cement cellar floor. She had mistaken the door to the cellar stairs for the door to the bathroom. She backed into what she thought was a tiny water closet and used both her hands to gather up her dress as she proceeded to seat herself on the expected throne.
Only there was just a flight of cellar stairs.
Because her hands were occupied, she did not grab for a railing. She just skidded down those stairs on her back upside down, head first, totally relaxed, which probably saved her life and kept her from breaking an arm or a leg, or worse, her neck.
Everyone rushed to her aid in a panic, thinking fractured skull, paralysis, death. They knew immediately from the plunk of her head on the cement what had happened.
Astonishingly, and I mean that word with its full force in this case, she managed to get to her feet, adjust her dress and regain her composure. She insisted on walking up the stairs unaided.
When she was seated in the living room again, she said, “I’ll take a cup of tea and a glass of whiskey and don’t you tell anyone this happened!” She might have been poor but she was proud and a Yankee, a “tough old Yankee,” as my cousin said.
I was so amazed back in Connecticut that I drew a cartoon of her on a skateboard with a cane in the air. I titled it “Amazing Alice at 88” and sent it to her. She was ambulatory for another year and a half.
Paul Keane lives in Hartford.