FALLING STARS
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Six months after Cal’s death, Rose left
Philadelphia and moved to California. After moving into a small house in the
Los Angeles area, she convinced Nancy to help her find work as an actress.
Rose had acted before, in local theater
productions in Philadelphia, and even as an extra in a couple of movies filmed
in the city, but she had never tried to make a career of it before. Nancy
regarded her mother’s new career with some trepidation--Rose was eighty-one
years old, after all. But Rose, despite her years, was still strong and
healthy, and saw no reason to sit around wasting her life when there were so
many things she could do.
Nancy finally relented, and introduced her
mother to several agents, as well as a couple of directors and a number of
actors. Nancy had never been a major celebrity, but she had acted in dozens of
movies over the years, and had even won a few awards for her work. She knew
more than a few people who could give Rose the break she needed, and it wasn’t
long before her mother was cast in her first commercial.
Rose’s acting career went on for seventeen
years. She appeared in a dozen commercials, two television shows, nine movies,
and three plays. Finally, when she was ninety-eight, she decided that she’d had
enough of working the long hours required of an actress, and moved to Ojai,
near to where Harry and his family had finally settled. Lizzy, too, lived
nearby, having moved to California after divorcing her husband in 1985.
Rose returned to Philadelphia only three
times during those years. In 1982, she was present for Lizzy’s wedding, though
she didn’t think much of the man her great-granddaughter had chosen, and she
wasn’t at all surprised when they divorced three years later. Lizzy had lived
with her in Los Angeles for a while, until she got back on her feet. Rose was
just grateful that the couple had had no children.
In 1987, and again in 1992, Rose returned to
Philadelphia for much sadder occasions--the funerals of two of her children.
Libby’s research had helped make great strides in the treatment of
radiation-induced diseases, but Libby herself died of radiation-induced cancer
on October 24, 1987. On June 8, 1992, Gregory died suddenly of a heart
attack--the same thing that had killed his father twenty-two years earlier.
Rose attended both funerals with a sense of
disbelief--had she really outlived three of her children? It didn’t seem
possible. And yet, she was ninety-seven years old when Gregory died, and had
outlived most of those she had known when she was young. Libby had been
seventy-two when she died, and Gregory had been seventy-nine. It was hard to
believe that she had lived to such a great age, that she had lived to see her
eldest children grow old, but she had.
It was the death of her firstborn that
brought Rose to the reality that she herself was very old. She had lived a long
time, but she wouldn’t live forever, and it was this realization that compelled
her to retire from acting a year later. She had left the fast-paced, frantic
world of acting behind, and had taken up a quiet retirement.
Over the next two years, Rose indulged her
love of art, decorating her home with pieces of folk art picked up wherever
they caught her eye and learning to make pottery. When Gina and her daughter,
Ruth, came to visit during the spring of 1995, she allowed her granddaughter to
teach her about photography, though she never found it quite so fascinating as
works of art made by hand.
In the summer of 1995, the entire Dawson
family came together for a reunion. It was held at Rose’s home, though the
guests stayed elsewhere, except for three of Rose’s four surviving children.
The house wasn’t big enough for more. Children, stepchildren, grandchildren,
great-grandchildren, great great grandchildren, the spouses of her
descendants--everyone converged upon her home. There were sixty-seven people
altogether, and the gathering wound up spreading into the vacant lot across the
street. Rose had never dreamed that she would have such a large family.
Even as she watched the members of her family
celebrate their reunion, she couldn’t help but think of those who weren’t
there--Jack, Cal, Adam, Libby, Gregory--even her grandson John, who had died in
Vietnam. But as she remembered those who weren’t there, she realized that she
was still glad to be alive, glad to have lived to be a hundred, even if it had
meant saying good-bye to many of those she loved.