The
Science of Gerontology
(also
known as “Love Among the Ruins”)
By
Robert M. Grossman
Lionel Hubert Rittenhouse was his name at birth. He came to adulthood
during the Depression when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president. Since Lionel’s
name had always seemed a burden to him, he found himself quite taken with the
press’ continuing reference to the president by his initials, FDR. Accordingly,
on his 21st birthday, he told everyone that henceforth he was to be
known as LHR, and during the next 60 years that’s how he was referred to. Now
at age 81, he had had a long and ultimately rewarding life, working hard and
vacationing even harder. He had just returned from two weeks in
LHR was a man of contrasts. He
had a fetish for infants. He would fawn attention and affection over them, and
they giggled and gurgled approvingly. He spent countless hours in the park nearby
his home awaiting unsuspecting mothers as they paraded their youngsters in
canopied strollers. When one came within close range, he would sidle up and,
like a magician, suddenly turn and hide his face behind a handkerchief. Then he
would turn again, peer into the stroller and slowly lower his mask as his bald
head and big, brown eyes emerged like an octopus from the deep. The infant, in
its wisdom, initially recoiled in fear as LHR crouched down, buried his face in
the infant’s belly and blathered guttural sounds. The slightly unnerved mother,
finally sensing that this was a harmless game perpetrated by a fun-loving
geriatric, usually smiled with a mixture of relief and pride, but the child,
now recovered, unfailingly exploded with laughter. LHR loved the attention.
Most of what propelled him, whether with infants or adults, was the unceasing
struggle to be noticed in the face of the relentless onslaught of Hortense, his
wife, who, indeed, was a lot to contend with. She was one of those splendidly
ugly women for whom nothing could be done, save surgery. She even found ways to
add to her uncomely appearance. Her dresses were usually shiny rayon splattered
with fruited displays that had people racing for their sunglasses. Her handbag
looked like a cowboy holster and her shoes were reminiscent of the boots Bronco
Naguarski hung up after he retired from pro football. But none of this daunted
her. She was a mongrelized version of Sophie Tucker and Ethel Merman, which she
felt entitled her to belt out a torch song at any gathering of two or more,
herself included. Of course, this made things difficult for LHR. When the two
of them arrived at a party, she handed him her ratty fur and was off to find
fellow dilettantes and a grand piano. He trailed behind, looking desperately
for an infant whose toes he could suck.
Most parents try valiantly to shield their children from the kind of
bickering and nastiness which invades many a marriage, particularly ones that
are held together for the sake of the children and out of fear of loneliness.
There was no such pretense with LHR and Hortense. They could hardly stand the
sight of each other. When LHR first entered her life, Hortense was in her early
twenties but had already been married once. She was then at a low point,
laboring with the stigma of divorce in an era when it meant shame, degradation
and damaged goods. LHR was over 30 at the time and probably never been kissed.
No one believed any of his hints about sexual orgies at the beach in the torrid
days of his teens. The general suspicion was that Hortense met him at a party
and didn’t let loose until she beguiled him with her throaty rendition of
“Swanee.” Once anyone showed any interest in him – and, of course, vice-versa –
the fortuitous implausibility of such an event worked its magic. They joined
together – and spent the rest of their married life tearing asunder.
Hortense had been very active in community work during their beginning
years together, in part because she divined well ahead of the women’s movement
that making a bed and cooking a meal were jobs that LHR did as well, if not
better. Since he was a good man, he accepted the assignment, usually making the
bed while she was still in it. She was always at one meeting or another, and
consequently her children never felt that they came first with her. Since LHR
had no meetings to go to, he stayed home at night and the children got to know
him. This prescient arrangement worked well until Hortense had her first heart
attack in her early fifties. Then LHR reverted to the role of protector of his
beleaguered wife, and his men friends finally felt comfortable with this
demonstration of traditional Southern Baptist values.
LHR was a caring man, so when the opportunity to care for Hortense
finally presented itself, he seized it like a mother superior. “Horty, you
shouldn’t go out tonight. Horty, have you taken your pills? Horty, you haven’t
finished your dinner. Horty, you’ve got to get your rest. Horty, stop eating
candy.” It drove her nuts. And the more he cared, the crazier and crankier she
got. They were like boxers confined by the ropes, forced by the rules of the
day to stay in the ring for the full 15 rounds – punching, jabbing, slashing,
thrusting and downing each other, yet always bouncing back, exhausted but
determined, and never throwing in the towel until one of them was about to keel
over.
After her heart attack, Hortense did take it easy for awhile, but as
soon as she felt the urge to mingle and mix, she was back on the do-gooder
circuit. She had developed a liking for the attention her heart attack brought
her, so once she was declared medically recovered, she arranged to have an
aching back. As an aid, she took to wearing a corset reinforced with slices of
walrus tusk. Her brother, who looked like a crossbreed between Teddy Roosevelt
and Tombstone Sam, had brought a few of the giant teeth back from a foray in
Alaska and the ever-frugal Hortense had one of them sliced up, cut down and
fitted into her corset. She needed help in attaching it to her and would direct
LHR on how to place it around her girth and lace it up. Given its incredible
weight, he feared a hernia from the moment he lifted it from its resting-place
in the corner. The last time she permitted him to help her was when, in
desperation, he slapped it around her upper carcass, crushing her left breast
under a slice of walrus fang in the process. That sent her to bed for two days.
Henceforth, the maid assisted her, though since she was even clumsier than LHR,
Hortense gave it up and rarely ventured forth anymore.
It was unfortunate that LHR was unable to continue helping her with the
corset because it was one of the few times he got to see her with hardly any
clothes on. Even though her humpback was a bit off-putting, he found himself aroused
by the sight of her. Of course, after lifting the corset he was too exhausted
to do anything about it – and Hortense would have knocked him against the ropes
had he tried – but the fact that he reacted to her near-nakedness soothed his
fear of impotence.
The last time the two of them had any sexual contact was not long after
Hortense had recovered from her heart attack. They slept in separate beds. It
always took what for LHR was an emotionally Herculean effort to leave his bed and
move to hers. She was hardly an inviting figure. She would apply mounds of
cream over her leathery visage so that she fairly glistened with grease.
Naturally her head was latticed with one of those nets that neatly contained
every last hair follicle, and with the covers tucked up under her chin, her
ears looked elephantine and her nose protruded like the beak of a parrot. Faced
with this ghastly scene, one could understand LHR’s threshold reluctance. Once
the battlefield darkened, however, this formidable obstacle no longer totally
eviscerated his desire.
Hortense always sensed her exposure at this point and would thereupon
throw up her second line of defense – the specious snore. This was usually
quite sufficient to unplug every remaining vestige of his sexual yearning, and
generally he would then relax into a twitching sleep, succumbing to the absence
of any hint from Hortense’s bed that she might be receptive to an excursion
with him under the covers.
Even the most redoubtable defenses, however, can be breached in moments
of weakness. One such moment arrived not too many years before Hortense was
floored for the count. It was a spring evening and the two of them had retired
relatively late. It might have been expected that LHR would drift right off,
but for some inexplicable reason his desire was high. Hortense, for her part,
was completely wiped out. The room went dark and she immediately fell asleep,
forgetting to invoke her snoring routine. LHR took her silence as an
invitation, gathered his strength and clambered through the dark to her bed. He
eased under the covers and snuggled next to her backside. Her nightgown had
ridden up to her waist and her plump, exposed rear cheeks felt warm and soft in
the hollow of his fetal position.
Hortense slowly began to awaken. As soon as she realized that she had
been completely outmaneuvered, she went rigid with horror, her sleepy mind
grasping for a solution. What possible excuse could she use to ward him off?
Her only hope was that he would ponder his own vulnerability. After all, he
hadn’t ejaculated for years. The internal combustion generated by such an
uncontrollable chain reaction might shake his teeth loose.
No such thought crossed his mind. But just as he moved his arm around
Hortense’s frozen breasts, the apartment intercom rang. For Hortense, the
ringing had the sound of a church bell heralding the coming of an angel. It
rang again. Could it be a mistake? In all the years they had lived in the
building, no one ever rang at this late hour. Had someone died? Was someone
hurt? LHR released his prey and turned on the lights. The clock read 11:45 p.m.
He glanced at Hortense and immediately lost all traces of desire. When he
reached the intercom and asked who was calling, the doorman at the other end
echoed up to him: “Mr. Rittenhouse, there are two policemen here. They have a
search warrant for your apartment.”
“What!” he shouted back.
“We’ll come up and you can speak to them yourself.”
When LHR opened the door, there, indeed, stood two policemen and the doorman.
“These officers claim to have information about a party this evening in your
apartment. They say there were drugs and they have a search warrant. Show it to
him,” he said to one of them. “I told you there were only two old people living
here.”
LHR blinked at this unkind cut. He fumbled for his glasses and looked at
the formal, printed language that was thrust before him, wholly unable to
comprehend what he was reading. Finally, he blurted out, “Go ahead, look
everywhere. We have nothing to hide. You’re welcome to all the drugs you kind
find.” He retreated to the bedroom where Hortense remained mummified in
essentially the same position he had left her. When he explained what was
happening, she whipped out of bed, put on her robe and marched off corset-free
to the center of attention.
As one policeman drifted back towards the kitchen, Hortense took him by
the arm and directed him into an adjoining room which she had turned into her
office. Like many people her age, Hortense saved everything. She put her
savings of whatever kind in shoeboxes. She liked to save tissue paper, too, which
she used to wrap many of the items in the boxes. When the policeman was ushered
in, he gazed upon rows and rows of shoeboxes, each neatly labeled and lining
the walls on shelves which reached to the ceiling, like a full growth of ivy in
the midst of summer. Hortense had a stepladder on lockable wheels which she
used to retrieve some precious piece of memorabilia from time to time.
“Maybe the party was going on back here while we were asleep,” she
sneered. “Why don’t you check each box for drugs, but don’t you dare tear the
tissue paper.” She placed her foot on the stepladder and in a gesture of
disdain propelled it at him across the floor, like a hockey player driving a
puck at the crotch of a helpless goalie. She then marched out in search of the
other policeman, whom she found on his knees in her dressing room rummaging
through her array of still-life print dresses, pistol-packed beaded bags and
Nagurski gunboats.
The sleuths soon concluded that they had erred. There really were only two
old people in the apartment. “What made you think we had drugs here?” LHR
asserted to their backs as they sheepishly retreated to the front door. “You
better have a good answer. Our son-in-law is a lawyer. We can sue, you know.”
The policemen then explained that they had picked up a youth who had a
supply of marijuana. They demanded to know where he got it. He said it was at a
party in a neighborhood high-rise building, but he was too stoned to remember
which one. They drove him around to see if it would jog his mushy memory. It
did. He pointed to LHR’s building. Why not? It was the tallest in the area.
They then took him inside where they were provided with the names of the
apartment dwellers. “Rittenhouse” was the longest one so he chose it. The
policemen then put the youth behind bars at the police station and obtained a
search warrant based on this weighty evidence. With it in hand, they assaulted
LHR’s castle, unwittingly coming to the rescue of the fair Hortense as she was
about to be set upon by the randy Mr. Rittenhouse.
As time passed, Hortense deteriorated progressively. She found it harder
to move about and stayed in bed much of the time watching television. Their
bickering continued unabated, however. He had given up the last traces of
desire, but even with that now settled they found other important issues to
differ over. Should walruses be placed on the endangered species list? Should
“Swanee” become the national anthem? The ultimate dispute was finally settled
with Hortense’s demise. She had suffered a stroke, from which she seemed to be
recovering when suddenly the call came to LHR from the hospital doctor.
Hortense had gone down for the count. They carted her body from the canvas to
the crematorium soon after the knockout blow.
LHR took it fairly well. After a respectful period of mourning, he
retreated to
When Hortense was alive, LHR occupied himself by bothering her. Now his
gaze turned longingly to his children and grandchildren. Which one could he
bother the most? Having an unerring instinct for self-preservation, they
caucused to devise a plan to head him off. It was not that they didn’t love
him. It was just that they wanted to do it from a distance. Once they put their
heads together, the solution became obvious – find him a woman. In earlier
years that would have been a task of gargantuan proportions. No longer. The
older he got the better he looked. At 78 his stats were impressive; they
bespoke virility. No one had to know that the recurring dampness on his pants
was not water splashed from the washbasin but the uncontrolled seepage of a
withered and atrophied penis.
At the appropriate time LHR was given the name of a 76-year-old widow,
Gilda, who had already divorced one husband and buried two. While there was a
certain inauspicious note in this choice, she was a woman whom LHR had known in
his earlier years and even if she ended up burying him as well, at least he
would have had a period of companionship. She lived on one side of town; he
lived on the other. After some hesitation, he called her and they made a date –
hamburgers at the Cupboard. They found a secluded booth with a linoleum-covered
tabletop. The two quickly became reacquainted after 40 years of only the most
casual contact. They had fun exchanging reminiscences about the people they had
known in common in their youth. He told her stories that for her were new, even
if the family had heard them umpteen times. They both smoked like chimneys,
except he was too busy talking to inhale. She suffered from racking emphysema and
her voice was throaty and gruff. He found it sexy. That first night he walked
her home and then drove to his apartment giddy with excitement. He called her
the next morning and from then on the family rarely saw him. He not only fell
in love with Gilda, he fell in love with her whole family. They had this and
they had that. They did this and they did that. No one was jealous, just
relieved that he had found another entire family to salivate over.
It was not clear what role sex played in their relationship. Given
Hortense’s recent demise, LHR was cautious about flaunting any sexual prowess
and uncertain about its existence. He did sleep at Gilda’s apartment but who
knew what that meant. There was a distinct glow about him these days, but that
could have come from his nitroglycerin pills. Neither seemed to be interested
in tying the knot even though in most respects they acted like a married
couple. Their various married friends began to include them at social
gatherings and no one whispered any admonitions or recriminations, not even
when she sat on his lap. It soon followed that an invitation to one was an
invitation to both. Almost everyone fully came to accept the arrangement.
Indeed, stories of similar arrangements began cropping up everywhere. One old
acquaintance at 83, shortly after his wife died, began making the rounds with
the widow of his former best friend. Another took to vacationing with his unmarried
sister-in-law four months after his wife expired. Other stories from around the
country filtered through to them and fortified their comfort level.
The sexual
revolution, which the young had wrought and the mid-lifers had sustained, now
redounded to the ultimate benefit of the senior set. Their unmarried status
achieved social acceptance, not to mention quiet envy. What would have been
scandalous behavior in their own parents, or, indeed, in their children, was
perfectly acceptable in them. They no longer had to marry to enjoy intimacy and
avoid loneliness – to be seen together in the same restaurant, to share the
same hotel room, to vacation together as a couple, to walk arm-in-arm in the
park, to go dancing, to bowl together, to hold hands at the symphony, the
ballet, the opera or an X-rated movie. They only had to be in their seventies
or more. Their deceased spouse whose last will and testament cut off a life
income upon remarriage was now thwarted. Uncle Sam continued to send the social
security check uninterrupted. The children of one or more of their prior
marriages felt no betrayal of their dead parent and no threat to their
inheritance. There were no pre-nuptial agreements for lawyers to draft and
charge for. The sexual revolution had spawned a lapsed generation of
unanticipated but grateful beneficiaries.
This is not to say that everything was hunky-dory for LHR and Gilda. He
liked to vacation on the east coast of
Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever. Notwithstanding Gilda’s having
outlived her former husbands, she just couldn’t outlast LHR. Her emphysema soon
got the best of her and she followed the same path as Hortense. LHR slowly overcame
his grief at Gilda’s departure and disengaged from her family, as they did from
him. He was once again available. This time it required no family caucus to
deal with his eligibility. The word had spread among the widowed set. No one
knew the extent of his physical powers, but since he was still very much in one
piece, all signs were favorable.
Gilda had been gone about four months when LHR’s pace began to quicken,
it being the height of the mating season. He had recently returned from
When they left the luncheon, they left
together. That night LHR reported to the family on his encounter with Winifred.
They smiled a collective smile of relief. He described her in glowing terms.
She was so intelligent, so knowledgeable, so earnest, so healthy. She swam a
mile every day and liked to shoot free throws in her private gymnasium. She
loved to travel. She loved parties. She loved most of the same things he loved.
And she was rich, which meant, as it had with Gilda, that there was no incentive
to marry and she wouldn’t covet one cent of the money he counted each day.
Notwithstanding her many fine qualities and worthy pursuits, Winifred’s
paramount interest, unbeknownst to LHR, was sex. While she was a forceful woman
– indeed, somewhat insensitive when it came to getting her way – she didn’t
want to unleash her passion on LHR without first warning him. That took about ten
seconds. For months thereafter LHR was on a high. His smile was radiant. His
jokes were funny. He was an absolute delight, particularly to the family who
hardly ever saw him. He was always with Winifred. They held hands. She mussed
his eyebrows. She tweaked his cheeks. She occasionally gave him a hickey in
front of their friends. In the privacy of her apartment, they undressed and
frolicked in her Jacuzzi.
Winfred, like other women her age, had grown up in an era when sex was
rarely discussed in public, or even in private, and practiced largely for the
benefit and at the behest of one’s husband in the best evangelical tradition.
For Winifred to enjoy sex, to initiate sex, to experiment with sex – these were
forbidden to most women of her religion and class. But no longer, or at least
so said Winifred. She read the books that came out of the sexual revolution of
the sixties. She watched the displays on late-night television, which, however
tame by current standards, would have been shocking in an earlier day. She
listened to her grandchildren talk about their living arrangements with their
sexual partners. All this made her drool. She resolved not only to have an
active sex life with LHR, but to experiment with the old boy.
Winifred had cryptically taken to leafing through sex magazines at the
local drugstore while there ostensibly to purchase Geritol. In one magazine
that featured female muscle building, the women appeared drenched in
lubricating oil. This gave her the idea that intercourse with LHR might be even
more enjoyable if they greased each other down. She purchased several bottles
of odor-free lubricant and just before LHR was due at her apartment she found
an old sheet in the maid’s room. She spread it on top of her newly-purchased,
giant water bed which had recently been delivered, assembled and filled to the
brim. They had outgrown the Jacuzzi. As soon as he arrived, they undressed and
she liberally applied the lubricant to their dilapidated bodies. They then
threw themselves into the bed cavity and began their usual routine. They
labored with astonishing endurance and in all the grunting and groaning, in all
the delirium and delight, they slithered and bounced completely across the
water bed, unceasingly propelled by their passion and Winifred’s petroleum.
LHR was so consumed by the ups and downs of the enterprise that he lost
all sense of his direction. He bounced so high that he came loose from
Winifred. As he came down he lost control and skydived over the water bed’s
edge and right down to the hardwood floor. He lay on his back with one leg
pinned under the thigh of the other, like a pilot who forgot to open his
parachute. He couldn’t move. He was in great pain. Winifred concluded that she
had to call an ambulance. She wiped him down and covered him up before the
paramedics arrived. Then she jumped into the shower and erased the polluted
evidence while LHR groaned on.
It turned out that his hip was dislocated in the landing. He had to
spend six weeks in the hospital recuperating. As long as he was there, they
shaved down his enlarged prostate. After a period of recovery, LHR and Winifred
flew off to
“Oh, thanks, my boy. I’ll take it but I really won’t need it. I’m going
to Winifred’s. I’ll be playing water polo and working on my skydiving most of
the time.” He paused, turned toward his puzzled son-in-law and with a sudden
air of self-assurance pointedly asserted, “When he’s the right age, tell him
what that means – if you know, that is.”
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