Jo Dereske

ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME

©Jo Dereske 2014

Chapter 21

The Missing Diamond

My mother left Michigan, returning to California to help care for her parents, and that afternoon as I completed a circuit of my trail through the woods, noting the fading of green leaves as summer wound down – way too early, I felt – I spied Louise sitting on the patio holding a tissue to her face.

"Is everything all right?" I asked, sitting in an orange metal lawn chair beside her, thinking she must be missing Mom, her “Junie.”

"I just wish you were my daughter instead of my niece," she said as she dabbed her eyes. She’d never expressed such a sentiment and I was momentarily struck speechless.

"I love you like a daughter would," I told her, "and you are my godmother."

"It's not the same."

I realized then that in my heart of hearts I was grateful to be her niece rather than her daughter. She was too powerful of a woman to have as a mother and I suspect that any daughter who wasn’t born with the same strength as hers would be turned into a rebellious hateful child – or crushed to a weak dishrag of a woman.

But as a friend! Louise had given me a photograph of herself taken when she was twenty-one and living in Chicago. Her eyes confronted me: bold, questioning. The corners of her mouth lifted slightly, as enigmatic as a Mona Lisa, if more sardonic. Her hair was curled and crimped into the height of Depression-era stylishness. The photo sat on the shelf above my desk, next to the oak gall wasp ball, and I found myself glancing at it several times a day. I wish I’d known her then. To have been her contemporary, I suspected, would have been an adventure, never boring. It was there in her eyes: nothing is impossible.

It was a mystery why certain people became unattainable ideals, as Louise had always been for me. Why on earth did I struggle to emulate her? Why, over my life had I looked to her as an example? She was unhappy much of the time, obsessive, compulsive, domineering, drawn to sorrow and depression.

But her spirit was indomitable and her intellect, even in her current state, awesome, her wit breathtaking. She was an unfathomable rich soup of strength, vulnerability, creativity, and generosity; depths and contradictions I couldn’t fathom.

I was convinced if I could be like her, possess that sharp sense of life and complex character, I would be satisfied. But also true, the price of emulating Louise, meant to never be satisfied, maybe even to never be happy.


1931 I had my teeth fixed so my smile is now nice and shiny! Went to the south side with Billy, then Sylvia and Al and Tom came over to play cards. It was a beautiful day for this time of year.

It was just a plain day, with plenty of worries to top everything off. Tony brought over his new girlfriend. Money is tight, either here or not here. I worked for Mrs. B for two days and made a little money. Billy says he’ll make it up to me. But how? We went to confession and Holy Communion. Billy is keeping his promise and looking for a real job.
I went to Novena of the Little Flower and prayed for Billy to get a real job. I’m afraid I’ll go nuts if I’m not careful. What can I do but worry and pray? I’m so discouraged.


Coming around the side of the house after weeding asters, I nearly stumbled over Louise on her hands and knees in the grass. My heart skidded.

“Are you hurt?” I asked, dropping my hoe and kneeling beside her. “Did you fall?”

“I’m looking for it myself.” She sounded angry, controlled. She separated blades of grass, feeling around the roots, her face close to the ground.

“What did you lose? I’ll help you find it.”

“You lost it,” she charged, casting a look at me that set me back on my heels.

“What is it?” I asked again, more warily now.

“My diamond ring. You threw it out in the dishwater.” She raised her swollen, arthritic left hand to show me. There was no ring on her finger, true, but I couldn’t recall ever seeing Louise wear a ring. Her knuckles were too swollen to slide a ring over.

I was silent, thinking wildly what to say. Denying she had a ring would only intensify her certainty that I’d thrown it out.

“Are you sure it was in the dishwater?” We carried all her dishes back to the little house to wash and hadn’t washed so much as a cup in her own sink in months, the only way we’d found to stop her from arguing with us to let her do dishes, knowing she couldn’t and if she tried, it only brought on frustration and sorrow that she’d lost that simple ability. She never seemed to notice us packing up dirty dishes into our wicker basket in front of her and taking them away.

That look again. “It slipped off my finger while I was washing cups in the dishpan and you threw out the pan of water.” She spoke slowly, patiently as if of course, I already knew what I’d done. How could her own niece be so dense? She resumed searching the ground, her hands sliding flat back and forth across the grass.

If I scrambled around on the ground searching, too, wouldn’t it reinforce her belief that I’d indeed thrown out her diamond? Would I be eroding her trust in me and make myself what she believed during her worst bouts of uncertainty and paranoia: a thief taking advantage of her?

That glance of suspicion frequently entered Louise and Mike’s eyes: why were we bossing them around? Why didn’t we go home? Were we after their farm, their money, their car? We couldn’t reasonably argue against their doubts, only wait for them to pass.

“Let’s go in the house and search the kitchen,” I suggested.

“I did,” she replied curtly. “It’s not there.”

“Would you like a cup of tea?”

“After I find my ring.”

She was doomed not to find a ring. The lost diamond was a story I hadn’t heard before and didn’t know what reality it was built on – or even if the basis had been a dream, or perhaps another woman’s experience that had been shared with her.

“What does the ring look like?” In my mind a plan was forming: a similar ring – or even the ring she was hunting for through the grass – might be in her jewelry box. If it were slipped out and placed in the grass for her to find . . .

“Simple. A gold band. A solitaire.”

My spirits rose. That sounded doable. If the ring wasn’t in her jewelry box, maybe we could purchase a similar one. The lost-ring story was entrenching itself in her mind and it would haunt her until we somehow settled the question.

Then she added, “My name is engraved inside it,” and realized what a cowardly subterfuge I was considering in my desperation.

I didn’t know how to solve this one. Louise and I rummaged through her jewelry box without finding a diamond solitaire. I searched the tangle of costume jewelry in her antique shop.

There was no ring. Off and on to varying degrees during the coming days, we’d discover her combing through the grass or feeling around the roots of flowers, once illuminated by the yard light in the middle of the night, brooding over my perceived crime of throwing out her precious diamond with the dishwater.

“You remember my diamond ring, don’t you Mike?” she asked, flexing her naked fingers.

“Diamond ring,” Mike dutifully repeated, and Louise flashed me a See, he knows, too look.

She related the story of my crime to the nurse who sympathetically assured me she’d witnessed similar – and worse – accusations “too many times to count,” and not to be bothered by it. “It comes with the territory,” she said.

The missing ring story would take weeks to fade from Louise’s mind. I knew I was innocent but still I suffered a wave of unfounded guilt when a woman Louise knew called and inquired with an edge of suspicion in her voice if I’d “ever found that ring you threw out in the dish water.”


1931 Billy found a job! But then he had a horrible cold and had to spend the day in bed. But he went to work doing hard nights. Emma and I went to an American Legion concert.

Only five days and Billy was laid off. More worries. He didn’t want me to go back to Mrs. B. I’d rather work like a horse every day than do nothing and have worries. I try to keep my nerves under control but they are slipping all the time. Billy told me he was going to the north side to see Tom Jones.

Mother sent a lovely fat duck for Thanksgiving. Sylvia and Al came over to share. I could forget the worries for a while. It’s heck to be poor but complaining won’t help. I read in the news that we are in a “depression.” It IS depressing. Hah!


Whenever Lithuanians gathered, there was bound to be music: singing, often an accordion, or piano, usually accompanied by food and alcohol. Mike had played a rollicking accordion, but music now held no place in their lives. Louise and Mike didn’t want the radio turned on; they didn’t watch television. We couldn’t coax them into attending any musical events.

“Did you used to listen to music?” I asked Louise.

The question seemed to startle her. “Of course. There was always music, especially in Chicago. We even used to go to Idlewild.”

“You did?” I asked in surprise.

Idlewild existed only twenty miles to the east of us, a former resort town created in the early 1900s for wealthy black vacationers from Chicago, Detroit, and the east. It may as well have been a million miles away when I was growing up.

Rumors, stories, and fact recounted a history of legendary jazz and blues music and musicians, nightclubs and roadhouses and a testing ground for Motown music. Idlewild was a booming center, especially between World Wars I and II, then slowly decaying until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made Idlewild’s original purpose for existing redundant. It dwindled to abandoned buildings and memories, here and there a small clutch of resort homes.

What remained in the area was a shadow of a spontaneous music culture: blues, jazz, gospel. Ginger’s Roadhouse brought in live music, local bars hosted jam sessions.

Eddie Calhoun, the famous bassist who’d played with Erroll Garner, retired to Idlewild that winter and frequently jammed in local bars with musicians who came from afar for the chance to play with the legendary bluesman.

Louise nodded at my question about Idlewild and her eyes went distant. “Idlewild reminded me of Chicago. We went to the south side and sometimes Maxwell Street. It was a wild time: the speak easies and that blues music. I remember – ” She stopped and gave me a sharp look.

“We go to bars to listen to blues sometimes. Will you come with us?”

When a jam session was scheduled word would go out by grapevine and invariably Ray would hear and let us know when and where.

She adamantly shook her head. “No, no. I can’t fit into my dancing shoes anymore.”


1931 Received $5 from Mother and Dad for Christmas. I feel terrible blue that I couldn’t go home because we’re almost broke. Went to midnight mass and then we stayed home all day.


Evelyn didn’t attend the next Alzheimer’s meeting.

“Her husband was admitted to an Alzheimer care unit in Muskegon,” Susan told us as we waited to settle in, chatting, expectant for Evelyn’s arrival.

“But she’ll still come once in a while, won’t she?” Milly asked.

By this time, we’d claimed our chairs around the table, the same seat each meeting and Evelyn’s folding chair, across from mine, sat empty. Despite her rocky beginning, we’d all grown fond of Evelyn, appreciating her sharp wit and impetuous generosity. We were bound together by Alzheimer’s, its trials and challenges difficult to share with people who’d hadn’t been touched by its effects.

Susan hesitated, then told us, “She moved to Florida.”

“But he’s in Muskegon?” Milly’s daughter asked as if she hadn’t heard Susan correctly. Susan nodded.

We were stupefied. Evelyn had left her husband in a care unit in Michigan and moved to Florida?

As she often did, Susan used the situation as a teaching moment. “Don’t feel she’s betrayed him,” she said, exactly where I was heading. “We each cope with the disease differently. He’s in a safe place and she’ll be back to visit him.” I thought Susan made this last statement with less certainty, but she continued, “Evelyn worked very hard to keep her husband at home as long as possible, and she did a valiant job. And she did it alone, by herself, “she emphasized, glancing at Milly and her daughter, and Kipling and me, reminding us that we at least, were not doing this alone, that we had each other for support.

“But he’s her husband,” Julie said. “She made a vow.”

“Maybe this is how she’s honoring her vow.” Kipling, always kinder than me, offered, “by giving him professional care.”

Because some Alzheimer’s patients wandered or became violent, separate wings or specialized nursing homes were required for their care, homes where doors could be locked, the environment kept simple and low key, and the staff-to-patient ratio was higher. Muskegon had the closest such facility, sixty miles away.

Contrary to popular belief, Susan told us, most families struggled to care for their family members with dementia at home, often juggling aging parents with growing children. Care facilities were usually a last resort, after family caregivers were stretched too thin, when the situation demanded professional 24-hour care. Rarely was a nursing home confinement a decision made lightly and rarely was it made without excruciating guilt.

I struggled not to judge. Evelyn’s husband had disappeared from his body forever, certainly as the person she’d married and loved. He didn’t need her presence any more, not her personally. We’d watched the toll his care had taken on Evelyn, how it had nearly broken her own health.

What remained for Evelyn’s husband was humane care – that was the bottom line. That was all that lingered of his future: a hopefully comfortable and safe ending. In my darker days, didn’t I feel overwhelmed and yearn to escape? Wasn’t I hoping for death to avoid a similar fate for Louise and Mike?

It was a reasonable decision – I knew that intellectually – but it still made me uneasy.

But there was a new member of our small sad club. Another middle-aged woman who twisted a tissue in her hands. “My mother forgets my name,” she told us. “And yesterday she thought my son was the paper boy.”

Milly and I exchanged glances. We were the old-timers now, the people with the experience, witnessing the sorrowful saga beginning all over again for another family.


New Year’s Eve. 1931 was a bad year for employment. I never worried so much as this year. Almost broke but I have more hope for the coming year. 1932! Also, //////// -- I’m sorry.


Next Tuesday, Chapter 22: An End to Reading