MY SISTER AT THE WINDOW

It is a narrow, thin memory, barely surviving, buried in my long, overloaded memory. My sister, with teenage friends, somewhere in Boston. They had gone to stay in town –we always called it “in town” — and, together, at a hotel. No moral compromises, no boys around, all girls, together.

I wish I’d asked her about it while she was alive — asked her, was there a time when you went off to downtown Boston and stayed somewhere in a hotel?

I picture one of those old hotels, maybe some lost places, like the Avery or the Essex or the Turraine that once stood ornate and tall deep in the city’s core. I’m imagining a time when the newer, shinier hostelries were yet to be built.

And what I remember hearing my sister tell my mother is that she went to the window in the dead of night and, though the city was sleeping, she could hear sounds –I was going to say, ‘the sound of silence.’ But, yes, it was the sound of a seemingly empty and asleep city’s breathing — just that mysterious, constant sound of far, far off traffic or wind or hidden life within a somnolent city.

And I might have thought about this as I woke in the hotel at Logan Airport this past Monday night, staying just a night in a hotel in the city of my birth. It is always a strange experience to stay in a hotel, like a visitor or stranger, in a city you once –or even presently — call home. The airport had, as always, been frantically busy with rushing strangers and vehicles and comings and goins, but I woke at 12:10 a.m. — I knew I must wake in just hours for a flight to Tampa where I roost now and would be constantly, or almost constantly experiencing a frightening kind of dementia, forgetting that I was due to fly (back) to Tampa, not “up” to Boston, where I was at that moment (and feeling like a stranger) and where I had been for two days that felt, at that moment, like a week. Perhaps it was because what I really wanted to do was to go down the elevator to the empty lobby and catch a taxi to my childhood home, walk to the door at 210 Neponset Avenue, pull out my key and let myself in and creep up the stairs to where I was supposed to be sleeping — where my former childhood self was sleeping — in the top floor bunks with the sloaping ceiling where my brother Bill, who I just saw in repose at a funeral home, would be sleeping in the front and my twin brothers in back — and I would go and quietly slip iinto my metal and spring bed pushed into the corner by the window. It would be dark and silent in the house, my mother and father on the second floor where, though so small, there is a bathroom and three bedrooms off the hallway. And my sister’s room would still the one at the top of the stairs and it would become my room once she married in June of 1959.

I would go to sleep in my narrow bed in those”top floor” rooms where my three brothers slept….

I still lived there, didn’t I? That was still the Wayland home, wasn’t it? Everybody was alive, weren’t they?

But I was back in Boston because my brother Bill had gone to sleep forever.

In truth, as I stood looking down at the silent, empty airport roadways and overpasses, all brightly lit – but empty — I could hear nothing except the air conditioning, because rarely can you open a window in a modern hotel. I would go back to the bed and, though having no memory of drifting off, go back to sleep to await the 5:30 alarm getting me up for the 7 :15 a.m. flight — to fly to Tampa. Why was I going to Tampa? This was home. I was home….

And my family is across water and fields and tall buildings in that house at 210 Neponset Avenue which I had just seen that day — but occupied now by strangers. I was coming from the funeral home where the service had been held for my oldest brother whom I had just seen lying in a casket right across the street from the former site of the Adams Street Theater, now an apartment building.

But, if it truly happened, if only I could remember more or could have asked my sister — who died in September of 2016 — just what she and her friends were doing in that hotel. Had they, in fact, traveled to another city, not Boston, with some group like The Catholic Daughters? Or perhaps this was a high school graduation trip?

I will never know, because I cannot remember.

But I know that she, and maybe the other girl or girls who were her roommates, excited to be in the heart of a city, any city, and be up talking and laughing to the wee hours, had perhaps finally turned out the lights for bed and gone to a window that, in the old days, you could still open. They might have been on the seventh or the eighth floor. And they would have leaned out the window overlooking perhaps a street, perhaps an alley.

Perhaps my sister was the only one awake, a young teenager having not yet met the man she would marry, perhaps kneeling at the open window alone, listening–and fascinated by the sound coming from a seemingly sleeping city. Life out there, stirring at ever hour.

Life. My sister at the window, alone. Her name was Anne. And she called my brother Bill when she was dying. And he had said, “I was supposed to be first!”

She would have laughed. She is gone. Now he is gone, too.

But I remember her now, at 10:47 p.m., November 13, 2024.

Alone. In a dark room of sleeping girls. Listening to the city in the dead of night.