Old Friends

by Tracy Kidder

  ***

  Lou traveled in Linda Manor as through a moonlit terrain. An irreversible ailment called vascular occlusion had extinguished his left eye. His right eye was afflicted with glaucoma, macular degeneration, and a cataract, but it saw enough light to help him get around. Out in the corridors he followed the carpet’s blue and white border. Lou saw the border only as a lighter shade of gray than the rest of the carpet, but in his mind he made it pure white. He saw the outlines of people. He did not see faces. Lou could identify some fellow residents and members of the staff by their voices. By sight, he could recognize only the very tall or very fat or idiosyncratically mobile. He was left to imagine the rest of the appearances of the people who lived and worked around him, as he imagined color in the carpet’s border.

  The room upstairs on Forest View, to which the nursing home’s administrator escorted Lou, was just the same as the room that Lou had occupied downstairs on Sunrise, but everything was opposite, like a mirror image. Moving up here, Lou would probably bump into things at first. Lou had never liked change for its own sake. He actively disliked the prospect of most changes now, he’d noticed. But he understood the situation. If he had to move up here, he’d just be extra careful for a while, until he memorized the landscape.

  The administrator helped Lou find a chair. Joe was lying on his bed. Joe turned off his TV and the administrator made introductions: Joe, this is Lou Freed. Lou, this is Joe Torchio.

  Lou looked across the room. The man over there was just a hazy shape, made of shades of gray different from the surroundings, as if seen through several layers of gauze. Joe’s voice, when he said hello, sounded rather gruff. “Who is this guy?” Lou thought.

  The administrator chatted with them for a few minutes, doing most of the talking, then decided to leave the two men alone, to get acquainted, if they would.

  A lot of men would say that their wives were their best friends, but Lou’s wife really had been his. He hadn’t lived in close quarters with another man since the Army, more than seventy years ago. “I don’t know what it is to have a roommate,” Lou thought. But he used to meet a lot of new people in his work. He reminded himself that he’d made many new acquaintances at meetings of the Power Maintenance Group of south New Jersey. This shouldn’t be too hard.

  “Where ya from, Joe?”

  Joe came from Pittsfield.

  Where was Pittsfield? Lou wondered.

  Farther west. “Uh, wait a minute now. Ten, twenty, thirty, thirty miles away,” said Joe. He explained that he had to count up to numbers sometimes. “Stroke. You know.” He’d had a stroke in his early fifties. It had crippled his right side and still affected his speech.

  How about Lou? Where did he come from?

  Philadelphia, originally. Lou and his wife had moved to California when he was sixty.

  Lou could have said a great deal more about both places, especially about Philadelphia. Lately, Lou had noticed himself forgetting items of the recent past, such as the date when he and Jennie had arrived here. Meanwhile, Philadelphia would arise in his mind, all at once and in its entirety. The old Philadelphia that no longer existed, of Irish cops walking beats and vaudeville houses and hawkers selling roasted chestnuts and “Balteemore crabs” on street corners. A couple of the nurses here seemed interested to hear all this described, but Lou knew that once he got started it was hard to stop, and when he got started, some people would suddenly have somewhere else they had to go.

  Had Joe been in the service?

  In the Navy, during World War II. Three years in the Pacific. How about Lou?

  The Army, back in World War I. But Lou never got overseas. “The Kaiser heard I was coming, and he quit.”

  Where did Lou go to college?

  He didn’t. Lou finished eighth grade on a Thursday in 1914, and on Friday he started his first full-time job, sweeping floors in a factory for $3.50 a week. A fifty-two-hour week. And no coffee breaks. “They hadn’t been invented then.” How things changed.

  Joe agreed with that. “Things change. Jesus Christ.”

  Lou had worked a lot of jobs, from assembly-line labor to managing a fountain pen factory to making models for an aerospace company. He liked to think back over the many different jobs he’d done, reviewing all the steps and motions and the thought required. It was almost as if he were performing them again. But this guy wouldn’t be interested in the details.

  How about Joe? Where did he go to school?

  There were a lot of places. The Stockbridge School of Agriculture, for a year. “I studied, uh, breed and breeding, feed and feeding.” Then Joe went to the University of Pennsylvania. Then Boston University, where he got a master’s degree in sociology, then Boston College, where he got a law degree.

  Lou had to stifle himself when he heard Joe mention the U of Penn. What a coincidence!

  “Coming back to the U of Penn,” said Lou. It so happened that Lou’s son-in-law went there. And Joe probably knew Drexel Institute, which was pretty near the U of Penn—“Insteetute,” Lou pronounced it, with his ingrained Philadelphia accent. Drexel Institute, Lou said, was where he did most of his studying of electricity.

  Did Lou want to hear a good one? Joe arrived in Philadelphia such a country bumpkin that he spent his first several weeks at the U of Penn thinking he was at Penn State. Then he saw the announcement of a football game between the universities, and he wondered, “There are two of them?”

  Joe lay on his bed, his shoulders shaking with laughter over that memory. He was a dark-eyed, swarthy man. His looks were unmistakably Mediterranean. “I didn’t know the difference. Honest to God! Good God, huh?”

  Lou chuckled. Joe’s voice, in expostulation, reminded him of one he’d heard before. The blustery, booming voice of the Irish cop who used to walk the beat in Northern Liberties when Lou was a boy. Looking across the room, Lou imagined a face with blue eyes and ruddy cheeks on the foggy shape of Joe. It was the wrong face, of course, but a face nonetheless.

  The maintenance men moved Lou’s possessions upstairs the next day.

  ***

  With help from maintenance and his daughter Ruth, Lou furnished his side of the room, the side near the window. Lou equipped his new resting place like an Egyptian tomb. He screwed a hook into his bedside dresser for his shoehorn. In a corner of the dresser’s top drawer he had a partition constructed out of tape and cardboard. The enclosure contained Lou’s nitroglycerine pills, so that he could find them at once without fumbling if he had angina in the night—he carried another bottle of nitro pills in his pants, always in the right-hand pocket, in case angina struck when he was out of the room. He put his little kit of scissors, pliers, and screwdrivers in that drawer. In a corner by the window he placed the four-legged walker that Jennie used before she went into a wheelchair. Lou hung his striped cane on the walker, also his blue machinist’s apron, which he wore to meals because, in his near blindness, he sometimes spilled his food. He placed his pushbutton phone—it had oversize buttons—on top of his bedside dresser, and, on the wall behind, he had Ruth hang a piece of cardboard on which were printed large all of the phone numbers of Lou’s surviving adult relatives.

  Lou placed a straight-backed armchair in front of the window, facing in on the room, in a spot convenient to his tools, where the morning sun would warm his back. Lou covered the walls around him with old and recent family photos, which he could no longer see clearly even from up close, and also with a sampler that read Shalom in Hebrew. One of Lou’s sisters had embroidered the sampler. She had misspelled the Hebrew, but Lou couldn’t have cared less. She had also knitted the colorful afghan that Lou asked the aides to place on top of his bedspread when they made up his bed. All of those objects spoke of a life lived elsewhere, as if that life were incorporated in them.

  The underpinnings of the room were functional and drab. The floor was a pale gray linoleum tile, and the furniture was all institutional with photo-wood-grain finish. But Lou covered most of the surfaces around him: with
cards and books, with his combination radio—tape deck, with various knickknacks, including a small wooden box with the hand-lettered inscription “For The Man Who Has Nothing A Place To Put It.” His and Jennie’s framed wedding invitation, dated 1920, and pictures of Jennie and various great-grandchildren, which Lou had cut out and mounted on wooden backings, and a jar of peanut butter and a tin full of cookies and a few small potted plants—all stood on the windowsill behind Lou. He kept his photo albums in a stack beside his radio. Sometimes he asked Ruth or other visitors to read the captions beneath the photos in the albums. “So I can sit here and think back,” he explained. The room seemed a small place for two people to do their living in, but with Lou’s stuff installed it had a self-contained quality, sufficient unto itself of necessity, like a small boat at sea.

  Joe’s side of the room looked barren compared to Lou’s. One time a visitor from Pittsfield brought Joe an old friend’s obituary. Joe kept it for a day. Then Lou heard him crumple it up and saw him toss it in the wastebasket. Lou wondered why Joe didn’t keep it.

  Joe hadn’t brought much with him to his new life—some clothes, a TV and VCR, an old oak cane with a shepherd’s crook handle, and a worn anthology of American poetry, which he could no longer read. Joe used to love to read. But ever since his stroke, he couldn’t get through more than a sentence before the words seemed to scatter in front of him like pigeons in a park. He could manage a part of the local paper, which a woman in the room next door tossed in to him when she was done with it. “Paper, Joe!” she’d call. Joe read the sports scores and a few comic strips. It usually took him three readings to get the jokes, he said.

  Joe also had some photographs. The most striking hung above the TV across from his bed. It was a studio portrait of Joe and his wife on their wedding day. A pretty young woman looks serenely out at the camera, and beside her Joe is a trim, handsome young ensign, the same height as his wife, with round cheeks and black, curly hair. He wears the suggestion of a smile. Joe lay across from that picture, on the bed nearer the door, with his shoes off but otherwise fully dressed, with the head of the bed cranked up slightly, a pillow under his head and a pillow under his knees. One morning when the sun streamed in the window, Lou saw a glint from the hazy shape of Joe’s head. Then Lou heard one of the aides tease Joe about his baldness. Yes, he’d lost his hair, Joe said. “And I don’t care. I had it when I needed it, that’s all.”

  Joe would get the fringing hair cropped close, to save money on haircuts. A portion of the southern slope of his belly lay exposed between his sweat pants and polo shirt. Between Joe in his wedding picture and Joe on his nursing home bed there was only a family resemblance. Joe might have been the young ensign’s irascible grandfather.

  As the weeks went by, Lou filled in other parts of his picture of Joe. He decided that Joe was “average size”—that is, about as tall as Lou, around five eight. Lou heard Joe say that he had to get his mustache trimmed, so Joe acquired facial hair. The more Lou learned about Joe’s personality, though, the more Joe puzzled him.

  Joe mentioned having trouble with his bowels, in a voice full of mock daintiness, saying, “I have a lot of trouble with my e-limination. I have a lot of trouble with my stools.” Lou suggested prunes. For a while Joe was eating about a dozen prunes for breakfast, but almost nothing else. Joe said that, among other things, he had diabetes, and was afraid that if he gained more weight he’d end up having to take insulin by injection, and by God he’d rather die than do that. Joe’s intent made sense to Lou, but once he understood the details of Joe’s weight-control program, Lou began saying privately to Ruth, “Joe does some things that don’t add up.”

  Joe would go out to lunch—members of his family took him out once a week—and he would come back and say, “Oh, dear God, I ate too much.” He would heave himself onto his bed and add, “It was worth it.” The next day he would weigh himself and fume at the results. “Jesus Christ! I gained a pound.” He’d go on a diet for the rest of the week, eating little more than prunes for breakfast, which Lou thought must be insufficient for a diabetic. After breakfast they’d come back upstairs to the room. Lou would sit down in his chair by the window, and from across the room he’d hear a ripping sound. This meant that Joe was undoing the Velcro straps of his orthopedic shoes. A clattering would follow, the sound of the steel brace attached to Joe’s right shoe hitting the floor. And then Joe’s bed would creak, which signified that he was lying down again. He always lay down when he came back to the room, and he hardly ever budged from there between meals. And then he wondered why he had trouble with his weight.

  Lou himself didn’t get as much exercise as he thought he should. He used to take Jennie out for walks, pushing her wheelchair around the corridors. He didn’t walk as often now. “I don’t have the incentive,” he said. But then, feeling slothful, Lou would get up from his chair, take his cane, and walk across the room and out the door. He’d cross the hall, touch the wall on the other side, and then return. Sometimes he’d do several laps before he resettled himself in his chair. And three mornings a week he went downstairs to the physical therapy room for the formal sessions of gentle exercise and stretching called Music and Motion—M&M’s for short. All the exercises were performed while sitting down. It was a pretty good workout, Lou said, touting M&M’s to Joe. It gave Lou all the exercise he could handle. Joe would benefit from M&M’s. Maybe he just needed encouragement. So, on one M&M’s morning, Lou said toward the shape of Joe, “Why don’t you come down with me?”

  But Joe said he didn’t feel like it, and Lou resolved to hold his tongue. Lou’s father-in-law used to say: “No one knows what goes on between the sheets.” In other words, mind your own business. Lou believed in that advice, up to a point.

  Two small sliding windows flanked the picture window behind Lou. He cracked one open to let in the first airs of May. The room was often filled now with the folksy voices of Boston Red Sox play-by-play announcers from Joe’s TV, and with the louder sounds Joe made while watching—shouts of joy sometimes and, at least as often, strings of oaths as Joe thundered at the Red Sox manager, “Jesus Christ! Goddamn it, I told you not to put him in! Jesus Christ!”

  Lou was amused. But he thought it only right to warn Joe that if his granddaughter should come in to visit just when Joe was cussing out the Sox, well, Joe knew how easily little children picked things up. And Joe agreed. He’d have to watch himself. It was just a game, Joe said. Just a game, but Jesus Christ, the Red Sox made him mad.

  Lou could not imagine getting that emotionally involved in baseball, but this was not as strange as other tendencies of Joe’s. A young nurse’s aide came into the room to check their vitals. Lou listened to Joe question her about the intimate facts of her life. Was she married? Did she have any kids? She had two and another on the way? Three children were enough, Joe told her. “Tell your husband. Vasa-sectomy! Snip, snip, snip.”

  Joe was laughing when he said that, but he always grilled the staff. “You married? You living with someone? Why the hell don’t you marry him?” One of the staff said she’d gotten a dog. “Did you worm it yet?” Joe wanted to know. And there were any number of nurses and aides—Lou couldn’t say just how many, because he couldn’t tell all of their voices apart—who, under Joe’s questioning, revealed that they had trouble collecting alimony. Joe told them how to go after their ex-husbands. Sometimes he gave them names of people to call. But maybe that was Joe’s lawyer training coming back, Lou thought. Joe had been a probation officer. Maybe he was trying to keep his hand in.

  And then there was the matter of Joe on the telephone. He called home every evening. At the end, he said, “Okay, we’ll see ya,” and hung up.

  Lou couldn’t help overhearing. Joe’s voice often sounded peremptory and gruff when he talked to his family over the phone. He rarely opened the conversation by asking them how they were, and he always hung up that way.

  One evening Joe called his son and got his son’s answering machine. He growled into th
e phone at the answering machine, “This is your father. Jesus Christ!”

  It sounded to Lou as if Joe had said, “This is your father, Jesus Christ.” Lou had to make an effort to keep from laughing out loud. He wasn’t sure how Joe would react if he told him how funny that sounded. It wasn’t worth the risk. It might just make him angrier. If Joe got any angrier, Lou thought sometimes, he might keel over with another stroke.

  For all of that, Joe was turning out to be good company. He had a sense of humor. He seemed to like hearing stories. Lou never felt that Joe’s anger was aimed at him. “He gets angry, but he doesn’t really mean it,” Lou thought. He wasn’t frightened of Joe, just puzzled.

  Joe’s son brought in tapes of movies. Late in the evening Joe would play them on his VCR. At first, Joe asked Lou if the movies disturbed him. Lou said he didn’t mind them, and it surprised him to discover that this was true. He went to sleep a lot more easily to the sound of one of Joe’s movies than to silence in the room, drifting off easily amid the mayhem.

  Joe’s taste in movies wasn’t all bad. He had a tape of Fiddler on the Roof, which Lou loved to listen to. But he wouldn’t have wasted his time on most of the movies Joe watched. “I don’t know what he sees in them,” Lou said out of Joe’s hearing. “And they have all the f words in them. I’m not a prude, but I don’t understand what Joe sees in most of those movies.” But Joe seemed to enjoy them. Lou kept his comments mild.

  “What’s the movie for tonight, Joe?”

  Joe looked at the latest tape his son had brought, and said, “Marked for Death.”

  Lou chuckled.

  The next morning Lou remarked, “The girl came in to make our beds. First she had to sweep the bodies off the floor.”

  From over on the other side of the room, Lou heard Joe laughing. Joe said he didn’t know why his son brought him movies like that. But Joe went on watching them.