Unforgettable stories of Nurse Vivian live on

By the time a woman’s been dead for 19 years, you’d figure you knew everything about her. Especially when that woman was your mother. But Nurse Vivian was no ordinary mother. In most ways she was extraordinary, but in some ways she was mundane. And she can still embarrass me to this day.

Ruth Vivian Wise was born in Johnstown, Penn., more than a few years ago. She would tell you it was 39 years ago. My mother, like Jack Benny, spent most of her senior years frozen at the age of 39.

She grew up in the Depression in a city known only for the fact that it flooded every few years. The first woman in her family to continue her education after high school, she moved to New York to attend the Kings County nursing school. Her roommate, Helen Barton, was engaged to a guy named Harold “Hap” Paulson, but broke up with him when she joined the Women’s Army Corps. After Hap returned from the war, he would marry his ex-fiancee’s roommate. Together they raised three boys: Brother XX, Brother X and me — Brother Y Knot.

Regular readers of this column know all this.

When my column about Halloween came out last month, Margie Carbone messaged me. Margie was our next-door neighbor in 1962, so we go back a very long way. Now in her 90s, she still lives in the same row house in South Ozone Park, N.Y. Her son Michael was the only boy in the neighborhood who never beat me up. Neighbors remember history differently than family. Margie remembered, as I did not, that one year Nurse Vivian dressed me up as a gypsy queen, and the next as a 4-year-old Aunt Jemima.

Fortunately, there are no pictures of this. I’m not sure what was going on in my mother’s head, but never once had I asked her to let me walk around the old Irish neighborhood dressed as a pancake box. It never struck my mother that might be culturally offensive. In those days, Aunt Jemima was just a brand. Wasn’t until just last year that Quaker itself retired the character “to make progress toward racial equality.”

We are just a little more woke than we were 50 years ago, but still, there’s a part of me that cringes and wonders how I can tell my African American son about this.

Someday, Zane and Aidan will be embarrassed by a story told about me in the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior, but hopefully not as embarrassed as I am about this.

There’s a double whammy, since South Ozone Park was the straightest neighborhood in Queens, and Nurse Vivian never once blinked that she had dressed up her pre-gay son as a woman two years in a row. The irony is I did drag with my mother more than I’ve ever done as an adult.

The second story I hadn’t heard (or remembered) came from Brother X, when he, Brother XX and I were arguing about which president was the worst. Readers of the past six years can guess mine, while Brother XX was unusually critical of Abraham Lincoln.

Brother X said, “But no other president ever let Nurse Vivian sit in his lap.”

“The year was 1942. The United States was raising money by selling war bonds. They asked the nursing students to come to Washington, D.C., and sing on the radio to help sell bonds in front of the Lincoln Memorial.”

X’s story goes on: Nurse Vivian couldn’t sing a note. The Kings County choral director asked her not to sing the tune, and instead just move her lips rhythmically. Now as it turns out, the memorial was being cleaned at the time and it was covered with scaffolding. But the program was on radio, so no one would know that. Still afraid that Nurse Vivian would somehow mouth the words off-key, the director told her to stay as far from the microphone as possible. So, she stepped back. And stepped back again. And then she climbed up the scaffolding. She sat herself down on Lincoln’s lap and didn’t sing a single note the entire show!

Most Irish sons, when a mother dies, think of her as a saint. But Nurse Vivian was no angel. Our neighbor, Margie, reminded me that my mother was never woke. My brother reminded me that she was tone-deaf — and prone to sitting on national memorials.

She made mistakes. She was extraordinarily human. And she taught me to be the same.

Brother XX was unusually critical of Abraham Lincoln. Brother X said, “But no other president ever let Nurse Vivian sit in his lap.”