The Immortal Woman of Asteronga

mjcooney
mjcooney
Sep 9, 2018 · 11 min read

She was one of those odd people who didn’t fit into a town like Asteronga. For one thing, she dressed like a man, old suit and tie with a fedora, and smoked a cigar when she could get one. I couldn’t say what she did for a living, maybe nothing. She called herself Juno and spent a lot of time sitting in an old Model T on Mary Street with a little guy, almost a midget, named Rile. The car hadn’t been moved in thirty years. They lived together upstairs over the Wonder Store, but anybody could see there was nothing romantic between them. Willie Zimmerman used to hang with them, a few other misfits. That was before Willie got crippled up when the two brats from Monroe Street knocked him off his bicycle.

I never really got to know her, but a girl that I knew did and this whole story is based on what she said. Jennifer Walrath was a nice girl, kind to everyone. She was a candy striper at the hospital, which was a volunteer job for girls who wanted to be nurses. She was the one who became friends with Juno and it was all on account of an accident the lady had. If you know the town, you’ll remember that Mary Street is very steep. The Model T, which as I say hadn’t moved since maybe the 1920s, was parked on the sidewalk on the steepest part of Mary Street. Somehow or other it started to roll down the hill. Maybe Rile accidentally put it into neutral. Maybe some kids had removed the blocks from the narrow little tires, which were completely flat anyway. Whatever it was, the two of them took a wild ride straight down Mary Street, somehow whipped right across Main without a collision, and kept going until the Model T crashed into the corner of Lovenheim’s Floor Covering, a solid old stone building that used to be a bank. Rile was killed, poor guy.

After Juno was in the Asteronga Hospital for three or four days, she still hadn’t come to her senses, and the docs were ready to send her to Marcy State. She had no family and her one friend was dead so what were they supposed to do with her? Every day after school, Jennifer would wheel her little cart of magazines and books from room to room. Whenever she came to see Juno, who looked maybe sixty or seventy, she was going on and on in some foreign language, seemingly not at all aware of her surroundings. The room was a double and Juno’s mumbling kept her roommate awake. The woman, whose name was Olga, told Jennifer that Juno was raving in Russian but it was very old-fashioned kind of Russian that she could barely understand. “It’s like the kind the priests say in our church,” she told Jennifer. Her next roommate was Mrs. Renzulli who told Jennifer that Juno was mumbling all night in Sicilian. Jennifer was taking French and she recognized plenty of French words coming out of Juno the day after that.

On the morning that the men from Marcy were due to pick her up, Juno suddenly came out of whatever mental state she was in. “Good morning, doctor,” she said to Doc Burke, the one they later named the park for. “When are you going to let me go home?”

“Let’s keep you one more day,” replied the Doc, who was used to sudden improvements in his patients. “Just to make sure the old noggin is okay. You took quite a hit on the head.”

She cried a little when she was told that Rile had been killed, but had cheered up by the time Jennifer wheeled her little cart into the room. She picked out two National Geographics and then she asked Jennifer about school and if she wanted to be a doctor. “A nurse,” said Jennifer.

“Don’t settle for less, sweetie. Nurses spend their whole lives waiting hand and foot on doctors who are far less intelligent than they are. Believe me, I was a nurse in Crimea and even with all those men dying, the doctors would get their noses out of joint at every little slight to their self-importance.”

“Crimea? That’s in Russia, right?”

“Yes, beautiful place but not when I was there.”

“Was that during the war?”

“Yes, the war.” Juno paused. “Not the most recent one.”

“World War One, you mean.” Jennifer was a great student and knew more history and geography than I ever did. “That’s when the communists took over, right?”

“The Bolsheviks, yes. They were horrible, that Trotsky especially. It’s hard to believe so many people think he was some kind of saint but he was the worst butcher of them all.’

“I guess you grew up in Russia, but your English is so good. You don’t even have an accent.”

“Thank you, dear. Help me to sit up in the chair now, all right?”

After Jennifer had her settled in a chair, they continued their conversation until Father Noonan came in and asked Juno if she was a Catholic and did she want to take communion. He visited the sick in the hospital and in their homes nearly every day.

“I have been, padre.” She winked at Jennifer.

“You’ve drifted away from the faith?” The priest was genuinely concerned. “Would you like to come back?”

“Drifted? You could say that, I suppose. Say, father, what do you think of Joan of Arc?”

“Joan of Arc? Well, the pope canonized her in 1921 so she is a saint, one of many whom we may ask to intercede for us.”

“Right, now there’s a girl I could respect but Agnes and all those virgins? They just sat there and took it. Didn’t even try to hit back at the men who were torturing or deflowering them.”

Father Noonan left in some embarrassment. Since Jennifer had such a good vocabulary, she knew the meaning of “deflowering” and couldn’t help but join the old woman in laughing over the priest’s discomfiture.

“Jeanne, to give her proper name, really was a great girl,” Juno mused. “I never thought she heard voices. That was just a tactic to get control of the French armies. She admitted as much.”

“She did? I never read that.”

Juno smiled and invited the girl to come and visit her after she went home. “I live in a dump but it suits me.” The first time Jennifer visited, she saw that Juno had stolen one of the National Geographic from the hospital. “I’m keeping this one,” she told the young girl, “because of this article on Rome. There’s a great picture of the Piazza Navona. See?”

Jennifer looked at the illustration as Juno described the wonderful gelato she had at the Piazza Navona. “It sounds like you’ve been everywhere,” she told the older woman. “I’d love to travel some day.”

“Then do it, dear. Don’t let anybody hold you back. Just do what you want to do. That’s the only reason to stay alive.”

On her second visit Jennifer saw a book opened on the bed that served as Juno’s couch. “What language is this?” she asked.

“Oh, that one? That’s Greek.”

“How many languages do you know?”

“I don’t know, exactly. A smattering of this and that that I picked up here and there.”

Their conversation hit a lull but Jennifer didn’t want to leave yet. She was too curious about the woman. “What’s the book about?” she asked.

Juno smiled and Jennifer was surprised that her teeth looked so good for someone her age. In fact, she already looked younger than she had in the hospital. “That’s poetry, very old poetry.”

“Is it by Homer?”

Juno laughed. “I’m impressed that a young American girl even knows who Homer is, but no, this isn’t Homer. The poet’s name is Sappho and she lived on the island of Lesbos hundreds of years before Homer.”

“What does she write about?’

“Love”

“Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning? I love her sonnets.”

“Sappho was a little different. She wrote about loving women.’

“But I thought she was a woman.”

“She wrote about women loving women. Have you ever heard of such love?”

Jennifer blushed and remembered what she overheard her mother saying about Aunt Janet who moved to California and never even came back to visit her mother. When Jennifer left Juno’s apartment that day, she thought maybe she shouldn’t come back. She was afraid that Juno was the same kind of woman as Janet. But she went back the next week anyway, only this time she asked me to come with her. Jen knew that I liked to read and she said that I would get a kick out of Juno.

She insisted on making tea for the both of us, and embarrassed us by asking if we were going steady. “That is what you young people call it now, isn’t it? Going steady?” We both told her that we were just friends and she wagged her finger at us.

“Jennifer says you know Russian,” I said to make conversation. I said a few words that I had learned from my grandmother and Juno answered with a stream of words I couldn’t follow at all. “Too buistra for you?” she laughed. “Too fast?”

“Too bad you don’t speak Latin,” Jennifer joked. “Can you believe that’s what he’s taking in school? It’ll be real useful if he gets in a time machine and goes back to ancient Rome.”

Juno began to recite a line of poetry: “Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus.”

“Another line maybe?” she smiled, reciting “rumoresque senum seviroum omnes unius aestimaeus assis.” She laughed out loud. “You don’t know Catullus?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “We’re still on Cicero in class.”

“Let us live, my Lesbia, he is saying, and let us love. And let’s ignore the mean looks and gossip of the old people That’s a loose translation.”

“Did you study Latin in school too?” I asked.

“In a manner of speaking, young man.” Turning to Jennifer, she said, “Catullus was a Roman who admired Sappho whom we were talking about last time. I think he was the second greatest love poet of all time.”

“Sappho was first?” said Jen.

“Of course! Now, I hear the teapot boiling. And I have little cakes for you.”

As she set the cakes in front of us, she said, “Catullus loved these. I don’t have all the ingredients I need but these are as close as I can make them.”

“You sound like you actually knew him,” I joked.

“But I did, my dear, I did,” she said and we all laughed.

I went with Jennifer to see Juno a couple more times but by then I was going out with a girl from St. Johnsville and that kind of interfered with the friendship Jen and I had. We never talked much in the last year of high school, and never stayed in touch after graduation. It wasn’t until years had passed that I came to regret becoming distant from Jennifer.

Fifty years later we both went to the Asteronga High reunion at the Elks Club and were so glad to see each other that we hardly talked to anybody else. “So do I have to call you Dr. Jennifer?” I joked.

“If you like!” Jennifer took a sip of the white wine. “Do you know that I never would have become a doctor if it hadn’t been for Juno?”

“Juno? That old lady you used to visit?”

“Do you remember much about her?” she asked.

“Only that she knew lots of languages. And you were afraid she was a lesbian.”

“Not that we even knew the word ‘lesbian’ back then.”

We were interrupted by an announcement that we would now pause for a small ceremony honoring the memory of the class of ’56 members who were no longer with us. During the moment of silence I held a candle for Jimmy Munger with whom I had a fight in tenth grade and Jen held a candle for Barbara McCluskey who died way too young.

After we sat down again, Jen said to me, “Can I tell you a story about Juno, Tommy? I met her in New York again only a couple years ago.”

“She must have been ancient. I mean, how old was she when we knew her?”

“Well, that’s what’s so strange about it. I’ve been a psychiatrist at Bellevue for years, and as I was saying, I never would have been a doctor at all if Juno hadn’t encouraged me. She said I was too smart to be just a nurse so I pushed myself and I can tell you that the male doctors never made it easy for me. I often thought about what I owed to Juno but I knew she had moved away from Asteronga and assumed she had died years ago. Then one night I was called in to evaluate a middle aged woman who had been found wandering around in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. None of the scans had showed a neurological problem but she was judged to be out of touch with reality. The clinical psychologist who had examined her was from Taiwan. She said that the patient came in speaking Chinese, mostly Cantonese but some Mandarin as well. I asked her if I would need a translator but she said that the woman was not Asian and had been speaking English off and on since yesterday. All right, I said, I’ll take a look at her.”

“As soon as I saw her, I knew it was Juno. She looked exactly the same except for the vague look in her eyes. Not a day older than the last time I saw her. I immediately said her name but she didn’t look up. She was mumbling in a language I did not understand. I sat down beside her and took her hand. She grasped my fingers, which I took as a good sign. Do you remember me, I asked her, I’m Jennifer. She seemed to smile a little bit. I’m a doctor now, I told her, just like you told me I should be.”

“Did she know you?”

“Maybe but I couldn’t be sure that first time I saw her. That night, however, she recovered quite a bit of her old self and was able to tell the psychologist, Dr. Ho, who she was. Or maybe I should say who she claimed to be. I looked over Dr. Ho’s notes the next morning before I went in to see Juno but I couldn’t be completely honest with the psychologist.”

“Why not?”

“Well, for one thing Juno had told her she was born in 1946. When I saw Juno, she was quite alert and I challenged her on that. 1946? I said. That would make you nine years old when I met you in Asteronga?’

“A lady’s entitled to lie about her age, isn’t she?” was her answer. So then I asked her about the name she gave, June Simmons. “Oh, that’s my stage name!” was her answer. She was enjoying herself being so mischievous about her life.”

“But you say she didn’t look any older? She could pass for being sixty or so?”

“Yes, that’s the most bizarre part. She looked younger than I do, to tell you the truth.”

“You don’t look a day over forty, Jen,” I said.

“Aren’t you sweet, Tommy? But to be serious, it is medically impossible that someone her actual age which must be at least a hundred could not only look sixty but have the vital signs of someone even younger. Her blood pressure, kidney function, everything about her was that of a healthy middle-aged woman.”

“Maybe the woman really wasn’t Juno at all. Did you consider that?”

“Oh it was her, all right. We talked all about Asteronga. She even asked for you and was sorry to hear that we hadn’t gotten together. She’s quite the romantic, you know.”

“I remember the poems.”

“Oh, we talked about Sappho and Catullus and some new favorites of hers, like Denise Levertov and Audre Lorde. She hasn’t been living entirely in the past when it comes to literature. And she was serious about the stage name. It turns out that she’s had several bit parts in Law & Order.”

“How do you account for her?”

“Without sounding like an old Twilight Zone?”

“Right.”

“I can’t.” Jennifer stirred her coffee. The evening was about to end and we didn’t want to neglect other old friends. “When I saw her last, I knew she was saying goodbye. She knew I was on to her secret, whatever it was that kept her young. Or at least middle aged. The next morning I learned that she had left AMA. Against medical advice.”

“She just walked out?”

“She was able to go because I insisted on having her moved off the locked ward. I knew what would happen. A woman friend came to visit her and they left together.”

“You never saw her again?”

“It’s a big city.”

“It’s a big world.”

“And she’ ll be in it long after you and me are gone, Tommy.”