Life lessons from my grandfather- in- law, my roommate
My wife and I unexpectedly lost our Brooklyn lease in the summer of 2022. With preposterous rents all around us, we decided to save money and postpone our real estate predicament by moving, for one year, into her grandfather’s apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
We made odd roommates, at least for his address, the same building Joan Didion had lived in: the two of us, a couple of kids under 5, and the 97- year- old Robert M. Pennoyer.
Bobby, as he was known, was born into a life of patrician privilege. His education at Harvard was accelerated so he could serve in the Navy during World War II aboard the USS Pensacola. He earned a law degree, battled Joseph Mccarthy as a Pentagon staffer in congressional hearings, married a fellow blue- blooded but free- spirited woman who wrote poetry, helped found a halfway house in East Harlem, and became a staunch abortion rights advocate in his later years.
One time he took a London Towncar to attend a Black Lives Matter meeting — just about the literal definition of a limousine liberal, but nevertheless inspiring for a nonagenarian born four decades before the Civil Rights Act. (“They told me I’m ‘ woke,’” he happily announced.)
He was far from religious — the separation of church and state was his other legal passion — but before holiday meals he’d say: “For those who are hungry, give them food. For those who have food, let them hunger for justice.”
He was a throwback to a distant era and mien, speaking in a Locust Valley lockjaw reminiscent of Thurston Howell III, an unerring practitioner of a noblesse oblige that seems to be dying out among today’s 1%.
I was terrified that our son, starting pre- K, would bring home COVID and cause his great- grandfather’s demise. Perhaps my anxiety rubbed off on him, because he began asking us when Bobby would die, and, inevitably, if our immediate family would, too. We assured him that we wouldn’t for a long time, but that Bobby might, and it was OK, because he’d lived a full life and was ready — sentiments he himself had begun communicating that year.
Though you wouldn’t have known it from his chipper attitude in the mornings, when he’d come out of his bedroom with his walker, in slacks and a crisp button- down. Nora, his devoted aide, would ask him how he’d slept. “Terrific!” he’d say as I shuffled past them bleary- eyed in my sweatpants with holes in the knees.
I tried to make myself helpful around the house, scanning documents for him, troubleshooting his finicky cable box, yelling at phone fraudsters when he was in danger of being scammed. I discovered he was overpaying for his internet and phone and saved him more than $ 100 a month — a drop in the bucket for him, but it made me feel better about freeloading.
His family’s wealth, by his account, had come with a paucity of warmth. As a result of his detached upbringing, and maybe as a greatest- generation member for whom stoicism was nearly mandated for survival, he went most of his life without expressing himself much to others.
His wife’s depression when their children were young was another likely factor; during her hospitalizations, he had to be the family’s rock. In his 90s, in the ER after a heart attack scare, a doctor asked how anxious he was feeling, on a scale of 1 to 10, as part of a study. “One,” he declared, half an hour removed from a near- death experience. No, the doctor clarified, one was the lowest number. “Yes, one,” Bobby repeated with his usual jaunty sangfroid.
He’d been fortunate — very fortunate — to lead a full life, as we’d told our son, but he hadn’t necessarily been allowed to have a full emotional life.
His natural reserve softened in his final decade, when he began telling people he loved them as he said goodbye at the end of a phone call or a visit — something he’d apparently never been able to do before. He said it to me, too, especially that year we lived with him.
He was a voracious reader who, despite not being the target audience, read several of my novels, and he frequently told me he admired me. It felt absurd to be on the receiving end of reverence concerning things I had written in those tattered sweatpants from a war veteran more than twice my age whose philanthropic efforts had been devoid of ego.
Telling anyone besides my wife and children that I love them isn’t always the easiest thing for me, either. But with Bobby — maybe because he’d had similar struggles — it wasn’t nearly
A writer receives life lessons from a 97- year- old lawyer of the old school.
as fraught, and I’d say it back to him before putting the kids to bed.
On a warm day last August, he asked me to retrieve a sweater from his bedroom. Just a little chilly, he said. The next day he was
too sick to get out of bed. His four children, 11 grandchildren, and eight greatgrandchildren quickly gathered to pay their respects.
When it was my wife’s and my turn, Nora told him who was coming in to see
him. Bobby lay on a portable hospital bed, eyes closed but awake. I’d never seen someone on his deathbed and was nervous — a nine out of 10. I feared I’d clam up or, worse, spew bromides that would make for a regrettable valediction.
I put my hand on his arm. Soon after I started saying that neither of my own grandfathers had shown me the kind of love he had, and that it had been such a gift to live with him and become part of his family, I broke down but was able to power through.
With his eyes still shut, he said, “Get my checkbook — I want to give you some money for your honeymoon.”
My wife and I chuckled at his characteristic reflex of largess through the fog of morphine, particularly since we’d been married for seven years, and I told him that wasn’t necessary. But he wasn’t finished with me.
“From the moment I saw you I loved you,” he told me. “I knew right away that Peter was the one for Molly.”
Molly is my wife’s sister; Peter is the boyfriend she’d moved in with a couple of weeks earlier whom he’d met a handful of times.
As another round of laughter cut the tension in the room, Nora reminded him that it was Teddy he was talking with, but he didn’t appear to get it.
I went back the next day to repeat my speech, again while tearing up. This time he was barely conscious and certainly didn’t hear me.
But that was all right. The important thing was that I’d managed to get the words out when I said goodbye.