Leo, outstanding in his field

My neighbor, whom I will call Leo, is 98 years old. I know that summer is coming when he retires his down vest, which has a little window in the pocket that frames a picture of his wife and granddaughter, and begins to work in his garden. For the last 65 years or so he has been growing tomatoes in his backyard, and he has gotten so expert at it that the native Rutgers and Ramapo varieties he favors, sturdy, old-school sauce tomatoes, achieve a level of freakish super-perfection, like top-heavy turkeys bred for their breast meat, and the vines become so ponderous and crowded with fruit that he has to lash them to stakes with torn t-shirts until by the end of the summer the plant is immobilized, like the victim of a terrible accident, in a web of splints and bandages.

I can see Leo’s house from our window, but we often talk on the telephone. If the connection is clear I know he is talking to me from the pink wall phone in his kitchen, which was given to his wife by her long-time employer AT&T in return for her years of service. In his front room he has a very old photograph of his wife, who died nine years ago. She has a kind smile and is blond and dazzlingly beautiful. For a while in addition to her regular duties at AT&T she held the position of “Miss Telephone”, which Leo says was due to her superior diction, and for which she appeared in ads that ran before the main feature in movie houses.

Leo met his wife in one of the ballrooms that used to line Kennedy Boulevard — then called the Lincoln Highway — which was the only paved road around. “Everyone used to go dancing back then. I would get dressed up, patent leather shoes, jacket, starched white shirt and tie. When you got home you’d be soaking wet. I was a hoofer, honey. Oh, I was known as quite the hoofer back then.”

The Jersey City of Leo’s memories is a vital, thriving, close-knit place, where “the avenue” was packed on Saturday nights with people who had saved up all week to do their shopping, and Hudson County was an industrial powerhouse — “everything you could want, we made here,”and driving was a luxury people indulged in only on Sundays “between Decoration Day and Labor Day,” and the trees on our street (which is now mostly bare) were so tall and thick that in the summertime the sidewalks were dim and cool below.

Until I met Leo I had not thought much about what it would be like to have essentially your entire life behind you, to be living at the far end of the long trajectory of planning and ambition and plain old muscling-through that makes us who we are. This part of his life — without his wife, in a changed world, on a treeless street — must seem like a brief coda to his real life, which remains so vivid and present for him that I always feel disoriented after we talk, as though I am emerging from a dark theater onto an afternoon sidewalk. He tends to dismiss his astonishing longevity and ongoing good health as a handicap or worse, a curse, something to be endured until he goes, God willing, painlessly in his sleep and can be reunited with his wife. Often, toward the end of winter, when I begin pressing him for his gardening plans, he tells me how little he is planning to do this year, “not like I used to, honey,” and depending on his mood this sometimes leads to a gloomy digression about the current state of things, all things, in comparison to the way things were. “I want to tell you,” he tells me. “It was a beautiful world.”  

Every year, though, around this time, I drop by and he shows me the brick oven, as big as a Viking six-burner, that he built decades ago in the backyard when he and his wife threw garden parties. Now retired, it has topsoil in all its orifices, and each one holds a marigold sprout, which Leo grows from seeds each year from last summer’s flowers, a habit he started around the time his wife died. His beds are weeded and tidy, his hydrangea is trimmed back and ready to bloom, his squash and eggplant seedlings are in. The tomatoes are spindly, propped in their cages, but it is early still; we have the whole summer.