PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC PLACES : Alone With Memories at the End of the Line

On a busy stretch of Manchester Boulevard, opposite Weezy’s Celebrity Hair and the Quality Bail Bonds office, an imitation carriage lamp in pastel plastic announces the presence of Westchester Villa retirement residence.

In summer, there is always a row of chairs dragged out onto the edge of the parking lot, and the sight of old men, hands on canes, hands in laps, in stiff silence watching the traffic pass.

In winter, the lot is empty. The old have crept away, vanished in the cold wind. Enormous planes rumble overhead, a cruel reminder of other worlds to those who have shrunk to a concrete patch behind a pastel plastic sign.

Perhaps we should all be made to pass the bossy notices that mark the entrance to a retirement residence. “Use this door,” “use the other door,” “mail will be given out at 2 p. m. no exceptions,” “do not touch the thermostat,” and so on.

The sitting-room furniture is covered in plastic and has the unreal look of chairs that are sat on not lived in. Small cracklings mark a conversation, discreet old voices anxious not to offend. The television is on: soap-opera lives full of drama, lust, events. The perfidy of time--that loves die and are forgotten, that quarrels and betrayals all go to the grave.

There are 87 rooms, 160 beds, $700 to $1,100 a month negotiable, private or shared, three nutritious meals a day, snacks, prayer and exercise included.

This is board-and-care, “for before they get into convalescence and death,” as the cheery administrator puts it. It is clean and refurbished in the Ramada Inn way--a plastic home to withstand changing custom that it may leave no mark, no lingering trail of life.

Breakfast at 8, lunch at 12. In the early afternoon, doors are mostly open. Inside, figures lie dozing in beds, fully-dressed--the terror of growing too old to come down for meals, to be neat and clean, to be too frail even for board-and-care.

Heartbreaking visions through the open doors: The elderly woman whose son and daughter-in-law have come to visit. Polite, eager to please, she falls like a sparrow on holiday snapshots of a sailing trip on sparkling open seas. Like a child afraid of being sent away, she looks through bleary eyes and lets not a word drop of longing, of hurt, in her too-bright voice.

A handsome figure stands by a window. Edwin Burkhart taught chemistry, briskly and without nonsense. He retired 25 years ago, his wife died five years later. His “close friend” comes to see him every week, and he tries not to mind that she is still too young to share the slow, cutting losses: the car he sold when he was 86, the home he left at 88, the Christmas dinner he could not join this year at 90. And if he remembers his grand tour of Europe, his adventure in the South Pacific, the years in charge of others and himself, he laughs in a clipped, mocking way at the black joke of life’s ending.

Edwin Burkhart came to Westchester Villa with two small photographs and a few books. Others cling more desperately. Each room has a dresser, one shelf, at most two, on which to re-create a life. Each trinket becomes invested with meaning beyond itself, a distillation of love and loss. In room after room stand the photographs of grandchildren, in slightly too-large frames. The embroidered samplers reading “Grandma is best” just a little too big for the space. The unwitting cruelty of a family so pleased with themselves for remembering. Children, grandchildren, near, far, weddings, graduations: busy lives in which the old have no share. Fifty years of caring, of dinners, lunch boxes, tears, illness--and now this silence and the photographs smiling just off camera.

And all around, in malls and shopping centers, the defiantly young are hurling themselves through their days in the quest of more, of larger and of newer. How much poorer we are for shutting away from us those who see their end and beginning both.