La Reine des Coeurs
By Ricky Bernstein
Nothing’s fair and nothing’s free. One of the bedrock foundations that ordered her life and later mine. She said it often as though each time was the first rendering of some important truth that needed reminding. How could someone have so many stories, I often thought. She was generous in their telling and no friend to the silence of her Quaker upbringing. Raised with brothers on a New England apple farm, she could skip stones and drive a tractor. Far from the debutant her mother imagined. Gender held no boundaries, no limitations. There was nothing she couldn’t do.
The tattered list on the ‘fridge guided her daily activity and the measure by which she judged whether “Plan A” would casually morph into “Plan B.” The done deeds were unceremoniously crossed off as the pencil marks she liberally added grew like unchecked weeds. The list had a life of it’s own. Like the ring of a phone its only mantra was the song of purpose.
Applying for her first real job she jotted down the perfunctory stuff and brightened when she came to the section marked “other.” “I can milk a cow, change a flat tire and sing, I’m forever blowing bubbles in Latin.” She got the job. After 25 years of life in suburbia, she declared without fanfare that the next 25 were hers. Simple as that. She packed up and headed for Amherst, a small New England college town, bought an old Victorian house and began her new life. At 55 she’d seen a lot, done a lot and knew just about everything that needed knowing – or so it seemed to us. She was supremely capable, accomplished and always did what she said she would. Always. We thought of Penrose as the “mother of us all.” Her presence often larger than life as she taught us to not open paint cans with scissors and the best way to make applesauce. Tolerant more than kind, she encouraged and coaxed from us the best we had to give as much from good example as anything.
Kneeling on the Craft Shop floor with glue, tacks and new rubber soles I looked up to see a large white-haired woman in scratched to bits glasses with sparkling eyes and ruddy cheeks. Hands planted firmly on her hips in a defiant stance, a bit like the statue of David. We met in the Craft shop where the kids on campus came to make leather belts, silver bracelets and sheepskin mittens. Penny was the head honcho, benevolent ruler and craft city queen. Almost imperious though decidedly august, like Saraswati, the Hindu Goddess of wisdom, a look of total understanding emanated from her core.
She could tell I really didn’t have a clue what I was doing with my beat up old hiking boots, though I acted as though I did, I’m sure. What attracted her was probably the audacity of this attempt to re-sole my boots in preparation for a winter camping trip with Danny. It was the sort of thing she’d have done I suppose, so she seemed amused by the effort. “What,” she said, “are you doing down there ?” She calmly raised an eyebrow and suggested I pop back in to tell her how the trip went. A week passed and I’d not shown up. She fretted, she told me years later, convinced that my new soles had taken their earthly leave from my boots with me still perched perilously on some rock face in the clouds. Or worse. When eventually I did return, she was clearly delighted, a twinkle of relief in her eye. She invited me out to the house for teatime, a ritual we’d share for many years to come.
Soon after in town, she picked me up hitchhiking starting off to visit my family in Providence. She pulled over in her red Mustang convertible and told me to hop in. She may have only gone out for a quart of milk, but three hours later she dropped me off on Rt. 95, a short walk up to my house on 6th street. As I said good-bye to the person who would ultimately have the most deeply profound moral influence on my life, I shouldered my pack and said, “I’ll do anything for you – you need only ask.” She laughed and said “OK --- I’ll think about that.” Then without a fuss, she turned around and headed home. I would be reminded of that freely given promise now and again in the 35 years until her recent passing.
Like Superman, the man of steel and hero of my youth, Penrose became forever the hero of my life. Forever and always the keeper of reason – the voice I still listen for and to when the big questions loom large and the answers are far from clear. La reine des coeurs…the queen of hearts. An everlasting source of the brightest of lights.
