Cradle to Grave

”I would have to go to the D.A. and say these people should be investigated.”

Maybe the Noe case isn’t a ditzel after all.

There is something wrong with Marie Noe. When I visit her small rowhome in the working-class West Kensington neighborhood that used to be called Coopersville, it is one of the first subjects she brings up. She describes her problems in the past tense, yet when she cocks her head and purses her lips in a certain way, they seem acutely present. Marie is big-boned, but time has eroded her sturdiness. Now 69, she walks with an unsteady gait from a bad knee, and her doctor is concerned about lumps in her breast. She has mannish gray hair, fair skin, and wide eyes that are largely vacant, except when she is momentarily occupied with sadness or anger or some other emotion that defies easy description.

Art Noe, her husband of nearly 50 years, sits next to her in his black easy chair. Smaller than his wife, he is red-faced and bantam-feisty, the 99-pound weakling grown old, with a drinker’s eyes and a veiny nose. Almost fully recovered from a recent stroke, he has an urge to finish other people’s sentences, filling the achy silences with patter.

There is something wrong with Marie Noe. Whether it was caused by the trauma of her children’s deaths or actually caused her children’s deaths is hard to surmise. She may not know herself.

”I was very, I guess you would call it hard to teach,” she explains. “I came down with scarlet fever, and I was one of the ones they experimented on, with different drugs. I guess it took a toll on my ... um, my noodle,” she says, with a chuckle, “and as I got older I got worse, trying to learn and stuff like that there — “

Art interrupts. “After we were married, I would make her sit down and read the dictionary, and take the mathematics tables off the old copy books. Now, she can do a checkbook, she reads books.”

”When we got married, I was practically illiterate,” she says. “My problem was never mentioned when I was growing up, but when I got married and seen how other people could talk, could read, could understand things better than I could, I understood I had a disadvantage.”

”She got me, and I taught her,” Art says. “That was it.”

”I would talk to a lot of doctors,” she continues, “and they told me it was just one of those things. It took me quite a while to understand...words, especially if it was a long word — “

”Like philoprogenitiveness?” Art interjects.

Like what?

Marie bursts out in weird laughter. Her husband knows a word that I don’t.

”I thought you were a writer,” he says. “Phil-o-pro-gen-i-tive-ness. It means ‘motherly love.’ The act of motherly love. Look it up in your dictionary.”

There’s a pregnant pause as he drags on the cigarette he’s not supposed to smoke, and then he prods: “Now I got a question for you. There’s only one word in the English language that has all the vowels. What is it?”

Marie laughs again. Something else he knows that I don’t.

“Sequoia!” he tells us triumphantly.

---