So close, yet so far: Aching to see Irene
He’s 96, she’s 97, they married two months after they met 70 years ago; his eyes still haven’t had their fill
Bill Harvey, 96, sat with his daughter at St. Joseph’s Villa last week, a small distance from the sun and the moon and the stars — her name is Irene. But Irene’s room? In the Lilac Garden building. And his? Not in the Lilac Garden building, but in another nearby, and no passage allowed between.
“That’s my sweetheart in there,” he told his daughter Beth HarveyMair, tears in his eyes, referring to Lilac Garden. Beth knows. His sweetheart. Oh, does she know.
The song says there’s a place for love, and Bill and Irene have been it, at St. Josephs Villa, for over two weeks. But two buildings apart. The heart knows no “small” distances; might as well be two different time zones.
Irene, who has Alzheimer’s, is 97. She was admitted in March. Bill, who was hospitalized briefly with a stroke in January, was scheduled to follow right on her heels.
Then, as Beth puts it, “Enter coronavirus pandemic.”
Quarantines. Isolation. Shutdown. He got pushed back on the priority list to make room for seniors coming into the residence from COVID-related hospital stays. Bill finally got green-lighted for the villa three weeks ago, but because he’d been in hospital, he was quarantined in a different building, the convalescent one, from Irene’s. Understandably, permissible contact is under strict control.
So Bill hadn’t seen Irene in more than two months and he didn’t know when he’d see her again. And, says Beth, it plunged him into a depth of sorrow and pining all the more poignant for him knowing how necessary; for the best. So he clung. But it hurt. So much.
“Theirs is the greatest love story,” Beth says.
Irene and Bill were wed in 1947 in his home town of Bronxville, N.Y. (24 kilometres from Manhattan) two months after they met. And, Beth tells me, fond laughter in her voice, there was a plane that day doing skywriting over the church, advertising C-O-K-E. The giant O fell and landed on the steeple. The wedding party watched in amazed amusement. It was like a sign from the heavens but meaning what? Her parents always told that story.
Bill played pro baseball, in the Brooklyn Dodgers farm system. He knew Branch Rickey.
“My father’s friend and teammate was George (Shotgun) Shuba who played for a time with Jackie Robinson. He (Shuba) stood by home plate and shook Robinson’s hand after he hit his first home run.”
The photograph became famous, dubbed by some “The Handshake of the Century.” A white man, shaking a Black man’s hand.
Beth has another picture, of her dad, keeping score for an aging Babe Ruth in the mid-1940s, at Bronxville Lanes.
Bill pitched for the Olean Oilers. Later, in 1947, as part of what was called Outlaw Ball (outside the official league system), he played in Granby, Que., east of Montreal. That’s where he met Irene Hobbs one night.
The sun and the moon and the stars. Knowing she was the one, he took her along when he went to visit his parents, so she could meet them. They came back husband and wife. Soon after, he quit baseball to start a family with her. In four years they had three boys. Eight years later, Beth arrived.
In 1968, he had an opportunity to work in the Hamilton area for a textile company.
“During this time,” says Beth, “every Friday evening he drove the seven hours home to Quebec — he adored her — and every Sunday evening he’d drive back to Dundas and settle in at the Collins Hotel to prepare for another workweek.” He did this every weekend, for months, until he could move the family, listening to hockey on the car radio.
That, she adds, was the last time they were ever apart.
“They made a beautiful home here, and everyone was welcome,” says Beth, who owns 7th Heaven Fashion Exchange in Dundas. “My mom was the most lovely woman. And so fit and healthy. She skinned her knee when she was 76, jumping a fence to retrieve a ball.” Bill coached the Dundas Chiefs baseball team.
Around 2008, Irene was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s; it wasn’t truly debilitating until three years ago. Still, they lived quite independently, in a retirement home, and Bill could be seen pushing Irene in her wheelchair through town.
“‘Are you afraid of dying, Dad?’ I asked my father earlier this week. Silence. ‘No,’ he eventually answered through tears. ‘I’m afraid of never seeing Mom again.’ ”
This is how Beth opened her letter to me, outlining her parents’ story.
So he waited and waited, to see his beloved, maybe to hold her again — his eyes, after 73 years, still hadn’t had their fill. Nor his arms.
“Everywhere people are in (COVID) crisis,” Beth wrote in her letter. “Our personal crisis comes in the form of one gentle man who pines for his sweetheart. The woman he loves whom he cannot see.”
Beth described it in the letter, as unbearably heartbreaking. “Even if she could be wheelchaired over so they can at least lay eyes on each other. I don’t want them dying of a broken heart.”
Maybe, it occurs to me, the letter from the Coke skywriting, falling on the church on their wedding day, was their destiny prophetically announcing, “It’s the real thing.” Oh, the real thing all right.
Beth wrote: “Without even his beloved baseball to watch, he waits, his own health failing, hoping his dear Irene can hold on long enough for him to get there. Then, and only then will they be whole again.”
As this story was being readied for publication, news came. The villa was moving Irene, from Lilac Garden, to convalescent. Next to Bill’s room, as he has finished his quarantine. On the weekend they met, Bill and Irene, for the first time in months — months that moved more slowly than geology changing.
Beth hasn’t been allowed a visit yet. Soon. But the nurses described it to her.
“They said it was a tearful, joyful reunion,” Beth tells me. “They sat there,” Beth was told, the two of them, “holding hands.”
And Beth’s reaction to the news? She tries to answer me but there is no voice for what she feels. She struggles to make the words come out but they don’t and they don’t have to; they could never express as much as her inability to say them.
Finally, she tells me, “It’s been such a long journey. I just want to see them.” Together.