The Princess on Welfare

Thursday, January 15, 1987

It was Thursday, the best day of the week, Kathy's day to play therapist. Her pace was light and brisk as she maneuvered through the winding corridors, past elderly in wheelchairs and others with walkers, and those strong enough to walk gripping the railing to keep their balance. One old lady in particular, the oldest of the old, caught Kathy's eye and raised her spirits. Lettie, short for Leticia, meaning "happiness" or "joy," was ninety-nine years young. She was one of Kathy's patients, the one who above all the rest made her feel her work had meaning.

Lettie refused to use either wheelchair or walker, despite severe arthritic pain in all her joints. She held onto the rail with both hands and shuffled along, steady and determined. Not that she had anywhere to go. Twice a day, she ventured forth into the corridors, for the exercise, in hopes of living another day and then another and another, to discover what continued life might bring of experience and memory, to squeeze the last drop from the still-moist cloth of life. She wasn't done yet. She would keep going. It was her duty, her god-given chore, and she wouldn't let up regardless of the pain of movement. "Fuck the pain," she would say in Russian, which even after forty years in America was still the language she thought in, her English being an awkward translation of her native thoughts.

Her name was Mrs. McNamee, but she didn't have a drop of Irish blood. McNamee was her married name.

To Kathy, who never knew her mother, much less a grandmother, Lettie was like a great-grandmother. Kathy was fascinated by Lettie as an example of how long and varied a life could be.

Leticia Orlov had been her birth name. Her grandfather, a nephew of one of Catherine the Great's lovers, rose to the rank of general and was made a prince by Alexander II. Hence Lettie, only child of only child, inherited the title of princess.

She was a princess by marriage as well. At eighteen, her parents married her to a general who was both wealthy and well-connected. He was a widower twenty years older than she, with half a dozen children from his first marriage, the oldest of whom was older than she was. He was a hereditary prince of Georgia, a cousin of a lady-in-waiting to Czarina Alexandra. Lettie should have been proud to have been chosen by such an important man.

When he died eight years later in the Battle of Tannenberg at the beginning of World War I, she moved from Petersburg to his family estate in Sochi on the Caucasian Riviera, near the beach on the Black Sea. She was twenty-six, independently wealthy, and as long as she remained unmarried, she was free to do as she pleased. It pleased her to swim, to read, and to paint watercolors of the countryside.

After the October Revolution, when a Red army was approaching, she fled by boat to Istanbul and then to Dubrovnik on the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia. Having left her fortune behind, she taught French at a secondary school, and in her free time painted one landscape watercolor after another, until twenty-three years later, at the age of fifty-three, she met and married Sean McNamee, an American of Irish descent.

Sean was ten years younger than Lettie. He spoke no Russian. She spoke no English. When they needed words, they used French. But they didn't need words very often. They understood one another at a glance. A sailor, he had jumped ship in Dubrovnik, charmed by the beauty of the place and by the beauty of the older woman he saw painting watercolors on the beach. He found work repairing cars. They were married three months later. Then three months after that, he was shot as a spy by invading Italian troops. He was no spy. The fact that he was American made him suspect. When the war ended, that false charge and her marriage certificate enabled her to get a visa to go to America.

Even though she was only married to Sean for three months and had only known him for six, she went by his name for the rest of her long life. Instead of Princess Orlov or Princess Bubnov, she was known as Mrs. McNamee, and forty-six years later, her eyes still sparkled when she heard that name—a reminder of the man who had been the love of her life.

Kathy knew that much from Lettie's roommate, a distant cousin of hers, ten years younger than her—a mere eighty-nine—the path of whose life was equally haphazard and intriguing, but who had no title and no talents.

Even at ninety-nine, Lettie continued to paint, largely scenes of the Adriatic coast from memory. And she could play much of Chopin on the piano from memory, with accuracy and feeling, despite arthritis that was so severe she could hardly unwrap a piece of candy. Her fingers remembered the music and became young again once they touched the keyboard.

And regardless of her talents and her exotic past, Lettie was special. She could look at you in a way that said she cared about you and every word you said, even the words and phrases that she didn't understand, having never fully mastered English.

Seeing Lettie in the hall—her frailty, her feisty determination—Kathy wanted to do something special for her, to honor her as she deserved to be honored. For months, she had considered calling the Transcript, the local newspaper, to ask them to send a reporter to interview "the Princess on Welfare." Now she dared not procrastinate any longer, for Lettie, despite her grit and guts, couldn't have much longer to live.

Bill Greene was the reporter she wanted. She had read several articles with his byline. She had asked a friend who worked at the paper and found out that he was a grad student in English, who was taking a break to decide on a topic for his dissertation. That reminded her of herself, with a Master's in psychology and mulling what she might focus on for a doctorate. And, she had to admit to herself, the photo they published next to Bill's byline was also a factor in her choice. He reminded her of a young Robert Redford.

She reached for the phone to call the paper, but it rang before she could pick up the receiver. It was Maggie, who filled in for Kathy's caregiver duties on Thursdays.

"Come quick!" Maggie said. "Lettie's room. Something's wrong. Very wrong. I can't explain on the phone. You'll have to see it to believe it."

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