Old Friends

by Tracy Kidder

  Night baseball games had begun. Now Lou went to sleep to the mingled sounds of play-by-play and his roommate’s half-stifled cheers and curses. Almost daily, it seemed, Joe said, “I weighed myself. Jesus Christ, it’s impossible! I don’t eat!”

  Lou could not resist offering a little advice, the solution seemed so near at hand. Lou said again, “Why don’t you come down to M&M’s with me?”

  All right, Joe said. He’d try it.

  ***

  Entering the room, Joe sometimes stopped to gaze out the picture window at the view of field and woods, now very leafy, very green. He’d been working outside on a hot day this time of year just before his stroke, almost twenty years ago. The small sliding windows on either side of the picture window were now closed against the heat. The windy sound of the ventilator, in air-conditioning mode, no longer competed constantly with the sounds from Joe’s TV. Joe lay on his back, his TV off. Lou sat by the window. Joe was telling Lou about the missing big toe on his partially paralyzed right foot. The operations Joe underwent before coming here had included that toe’s amputation. Joe said that after the surgeon cut off the toe, he asked what Joe wanted done with it. “I told him, ‘Why don’t you send it Chicago and have it bronzed? I’ll put it on my mantelpiece.’ For God’s sake.”

  Lou smiled.

  But, Joe said, he wished he’d told the surgeon to wrap up the severed toe and send it to a certain judge in Pittsfield, the judge who forced Joe into retirement about eight years ago.

  Lou remembered the company that wouldn’t give him a job because he was a Jew. Lou eventually got even. While running the pen factory, Lou said, he had the opportunity to tell one of that company’s salesmen that he wouldn’t do business with him. And that squared matters, as far as Lou was concerned. Lou could understand how a person might hold a grudge. But, Lou said, he couldn’t think of any he held himself.

  Some of the things Lou said surprised Joe. Some were hard to believe.

  Lou said he dated only one girl, and he married her.

  Joe said he dated many, and none ever dumped him.

  Lou said that back during Prohibition he built a still for a relative, but he didn’t drink any of its product, because that would have been illegal. Actually, Lou said, he got drunk only once in his life. “Did I tell you that story?” he asked Joe.

  Lou sometimes repeated stories. But Lou was an old man, Joe told himself. He had already heard this story, but he didn’t say anything, and Lou told again how on his birthday years ago he went to a nightclub called the Stable, in Philadelphia, and had about three beers. “I suddenly felt something I never felt before. I was spinning around. I excused myself and went across the street to a drugstore and got some Alka-Seltzer.”

  Joe guffawed. “Three beers. That isn’t drunk! I used to drink. Good Gawd.”

  Lou said he’d never smoked. He believed in moderation.

  Joe had smoked most of his life. He smiled at the ceiling. “Moderation I was never for.”

  Lou said that he grew up in tough, seamy parts of Philadelphia. “I sometimes wonder, growing up where I did, why I didn’t get in more trouble.”

  But Joe had worked with people who got in trouble. Lou’s stories made it obvious that Lou had never gotten into anything like trouble.

  On Saturday mornings, the phone rang for Lou constantly. All of his relatives called. Joe turned down his TV so Lou could talk, which meant that Joe could not help overhearing. “I love you,” Lou said into the phone every time before hanging up. Every time! Joe heartily disliked his own brother-in-law, and made no secret of it. Wasn’t there anyone in Lou’s family Lou didn’t love? Was there anyone in the world this old man didn’t like?

  They got talking about their wives. Lou told of how, before her death, Jennie suffered from skin irritations. She was incontinent, and Lou figured out that the nurse’s aides made up her bed all wrong for a person in her condition—with a plastic sheet beneath her bottom sheet instead of absorbent pads. Lou said he showed the aides how to do it right, and, his soft voice suddenly loud and severe, he told how he had struggled with the staff sometimes, to make sure they gave Jennie proper attention. The staff worked hard and most were good. Lou often praised them. But one time he found Jennie wet, and he set off every call bell in their room, and no one came. So he grabbed his cane and marched down to the Sunrise nurses’ station. “I could see a little better then.” On the other side of the counter, he saw the shapes of aides and nurses, all in a group, and the figure of a man standing in front of them, addressing them. The man had to be a doctor. Evidently the staff thought a doctor’s words of wisdom more important than call bells. Evidently the doctor thought so, too. Lou slapped his hand hard on the counter and yelled at them. “Jennie needs attention. And she needs it now!” Lou’s countenance was stern, recalling this. “And I got results.”

  More softly, Lou said, “I still wish I’d’a went with her. But I thank the good Lord I didn’t have to leave her alone.”

  Joe listened, gazing intently at the ceiling. Joe listed his own wife’s many ailments. “I wore her out. She couldn’t take care of me anymore, that’s all.”

  Lou said that he and Jennie never went to sleep without kissing first.

  “Well, I did.” said Joe. “Because we’d argue, and she wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “I don’t think I ever had an argument with Jennie,” said Lou. He and his wife had disagreements, but never went to bed without settling them first, and kissing.

  Joe sat up in bed and stared at Lou. “Jesus Christ! That’s impossible!”

  Lou was too much. It sometimes seemed as if he must have lived in an entirely different world from the one that Joe had known. And yet they had a certain amount of history in common. Lou’s parents were immigrants, from Austria, and Joe’s father was a shoemaker from Calabria. Joe, too, grew up in a largely immigrant neighborhood, on Pittsfield’s Dewey Avenue. Lou grew up within walking distance of burlesque shows and whorehouses, while it was said of Joe’s grammar school that the graduates became either judges or bank robbers. But all of Lou’s father’s business ventures failed, while Joe’s father’s business, Artistic Shoe Renovator, prospered modestly during the Depression, when many people got their shoes repaired instead of buying new ones. Joe’s parents had been able to send him to college. As a consequence, Joe was much more widely read. There were deeper differences.

  Lou said he loved the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches books as a boy, and later on, the poems of Robert Service. Joe had wider, less sunny tastes in literature. The kind of poem he didn’t like was one he used to hear recited, and could still recite in part himself. “‘Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be,’” Joe chanted. “When I was thirty, forty, I thought it was all right. But now, bullshit, it’s false.” One of his favorite poems—it lay in the anthology that Joe had carried with him across the Pacific in the Navy—was Stephen Crane’s “The Wayfarer.”

  The wayfarer,

  Perceiving the pathway to truth,

  Was struck with astonishment.

  It was thickly grown with weeds.

  “Ha,” he said,

  “I see that no one has passed here

  In a long time.”

  Later he saw that each weed

  Was a singular knife.

  “Well,” he mumbled at last,

  “Doubtless there are other roads.”

  Joe smiled wryly over that poem. “Doubtless there are other roads.”

  “I quit lying in my thirties,” Joe said once. Then he amended that statement. “I quit lying about everything except drinking.”

  Lou told again about that time when he’d gotten drunk. “I can remember the place. Place called the Stable. I never felt I missed something.”

  “Well,” said Joe, “you missed something.”

  “I saw enough people that way that I never wanted to be that way myself,” said Lou from his chair over by the window.

  “I saw a lot of people get drunk and got drunk my
self,” Joe said, lying on his bed.

  “I enjoyed life without getting drunk,” Lou said.

  Joe’s voice softened. “It made it easier on the people you were close to.”

  To Joe, Lou’s general outlook was strange, not alien, but something he himself had left behind long ago. Most cynical and pessimistic utterances seemed to leave Lou truly puzzled—puzzled as to why some people chose to think that way. One time when Ruth was visiting, she said that she had a Ph.D. in guilt, and Lou said, “I don’t think I feel guilty about anything.” And Joe thought to himself again, “Jesus Christ, that’s impossible.” If in the privacy of their room Joe made a little sport of a fellow resident, Lou might join in, but he would often end up saying, “Poor soul. We shouldn’t laugh.” And then, if one of those people got sick and was confined to bed, Lou would go and pay a visit. Perhaps Lou did dislike some people after all. He sometimes talked as if he did. “But,” Joe thought, “it has to be a very mean man.”

  There was one exception. Lou seemed to have it in for the director of food service here, and as far as Joe could see, that man was nothing but pleasant, patient, and obliging. Among his mementos, Lou had a book of recipes for dishes he used to make. He said he did all the cooking at home after Jennie got sick. He would say that if he could see now, he’d go into the kitchen and show the food service director how to cook “something decent.” Joe didn’t think the food was all that bad. Maybe Lou saw the director of food service as a rival, who’d won the right to do what Lou felt he could do better only because the director was young and had his sight. Anyway, it gave Joe some comfort to see Lou step into a more easily comprehensible character now and then.

  After his experiences with other roommates, during his time at the VA hospital and when he first came to Linda Manor, Joe had thought that he’d just as soon not have another roommate. He hadn’t relished the idea of a ninety-year-old’s moving in with him. Being only seventy-two himself and burdened with a textbook’s worth of ailments, Joe had figured that by ninety there couldn’t be much left of a person. But Joe now had to remind himself how old, really old, Lou was. The man sometimes seemed too virtuous to be true, but he clearly wasn’t senile. “He’s got all his buttons, by Jesus,” Joe thought. He felt grateful for that. Lou said his sense of smell had vanished suddenly a couple of years ago. He applied deodorant liberally, he explained, lest he give offense unknowingly. A little thing, but not inconsequential for close-quartered living. And Lou, unlike Joe’s other roommates, didn’t do a lot of complaining. Lou’s voice got teary when he talked about his wife sometimes, but teary over her and not himself—and that was an important difference to Joe. Occasionally Lou said, “If I had my sight, I’d still be doing something productive.”

  Several times already Lou said he’d asked the authorities to install a handrail in the weighing room downstairs, but to no avail. “If I could see, I could put the damn thing up in a couple of hours.”

  But, Lou added, there was a saying he guessed was true—that if you could choose among everyone else’s troubles, you’d end up choosing your own.

  “You’d still be working if you could see,” said Joe, looking pensively toward the ceiling.

  ***

  The maples in the woods outside the window turned fiery. Baseball season ended. The Red Sox didn’t win the pennant again. “Wait’ll next year, that’s all,” Joe sighed.

  Lou’s son, Harold, flew in from California and visited for several days. Reminiscing with Harold about things they’d built together in their home workshops, Lou remembered making toy soldiers years ago for the children in the family. Thinking back over his old jobs and workbench projects, though pleasurable, made Lou’s hands yearn for something in the here and now to do. So he asked Harold to look for those old toy-soldier molds when he got back to California. A few days later Harold called to say he’d found them. Lou asked him to send them to a family friend who worked in metal, and not long after that, a box full of toy soldiers arrived at Linda Manor in Lou’s mail.

  Joe, meanwhile, put the finishing touch on his weight-loss program. Lou had inspired the program, but the details were all Joe’s. The weekly luncheon outing and occasional Linda Manor baked chicken dinner, at which Joe also overate. The mounting of the scale. The subsequent dieting. And the exercising, which now included not only M&M’s but also daily rides on the exercise bike in the occupational therapy room.

  When Joe was out of earshot, Lou said, sotto voce, to their favorite nurse’s aide, “The dietary people should look at what Joe eats. It isn’t healthy for a diabetic. And,” he added, “don’t tell Joe I said so.”

  Joe’s rides on the exercise bike were also worrisome. Lou gathered that every time Joe rode, he pedaled farther and faster. Lou felt he ought to warn him. The man didn’t seem to know where his own best interests lay. Lou couldn’t help himself. “Joe, you’re going at that bike too hard.” But Joe simply denied it, and kept on riding farther.

  When Joe left the room for his bike ride, Lou opened the cardboard box and took out a small shiny infantryman. He got a piece of sandpaper out of his top dresser drawer and set to work. Seated in his chair with his back to the window, in late autumn afternoon light, Lou sanded rough edges off one toy soldier after another. He paused now and then to stroke the toy soldiers with his fingers. He’d give some to his great-grandchildren. Maybe he’d try to sell some in the gift shop downstairs.

  Lou lifted a hand from his work, extending the index finger. “Another thing I don’t understand about Joe. He wears those sweat pants and he keeps heisting them up, and he has no pockets in them. When we go downstairs, he asks me to carry things for him. I don’t mind, but I don’t think I could get used to pants without pockets.”

  Lou’s hands went back to his work. He’d sand awhile, then pause, stroking the toy soldiers, hoping to find more rough edges to sand.

  ***

  Both Lou and Joe packed overnight bags and went away for Thanksgiving, Lou to his daughter Ruth’s house and Joe back to his former home in Pittsfield. Lou returned to Linda Manor feeling all worn out. For him, trips away had become exhausting. “I don’t know what the problem is. Too many birthdays, I guess.”

  Joe limped back into the room on Forest View saying that there had been too much company back home. He’d had to retreat from it to his old den at times. Joe also weighed a few pounds more than when he’d left. This didn’t surprise Lou, nor did the consequences. Joe went right back to the exercise bike, to work off Thanksgiving, and then, on an afternoon a few days later, after an especially vigorous ride, a blister erupted on the big toe of Joe’s left foot, his good foot.

  It was a little blue capsule with some red at the edges, the kind of blister that weekend carpenters raise on their thumbs. As soon as the nurse’s aide saw it, she summoned the charge nurse, and the nurse put in a call to Joe’s doctor, who made a special visit. He put Joe on an antibiotic.

  Diabetes reduces circulation. Even Joe’s relatively mild case made his toes, because of their distance from his heart, especially vulnerable to infection and the risk of gangrene. This blister, like a broken hip, could lead to graver complications. Out of Lou and Joe’s hearing, a nurse remarked, “Joe could lose the toe.” Whether Joe’s body or his spirits could withstand another blow like that was an open question. Lou didn’t entertain dire thoughts like those, but he knew the blister must be serious if it had caused a doctor to make a special visit here. And a parade of aides and nurses kept coming in to have a look at Joe’s toe. After listening to the commotion for a time, Lou got up, fetched his cane from the walker in the corner, and, saying to Joe that he guessed he’d take a walk, he made his way to the elevator and rode downstairs. He walked down the long central corridor, turned left into the administrative hallway, and stopped at the second door on the left, the door of his favorite nursing supervisor. She had been very helpful and adept in Jennie’s last days. Lou knocked on the door with the handle of his cane. “Kathleen?”

  “Yes, Lou?”


  “Kathleen, I’d like you to take a look at Joe’s toe.”

  Kathleen discussed the blister with Lou and said she’d come and look at it. Lou thanked her, then made his way, by cane and handrail and carpet border, back upstairs to his chair.

  Kathleen had told Lou that Joe’s blister would almost certainly heal, and Lou believed her. The nursing care was good in here. If a person came down with something curable, a lot of the staff acted as if they’d been given a present. But why take chances? Joe shouldn’t go downstairs for meals for a while, Lou decided. Lou told Joe he should take it easy, stay upstairs, and keep his foot elevated.

  But Joe wouldn’t hear of it. “The hell with it,” he said.

  It was a morning a few days after the blister had appeared. Lou sat by the window, warming his back in the morning sun, and said to Joe, “Eingeshpart. Stubborn.” Joe lay as usual on his bed, but with his wounded foot bared and propped up on a pillow. “That’s what you were on that bicycle, Joe.”

  A privacy curtain hung from tracks in the ceiling. Joe had pulled the curtain a foot or so out from the wall, to shield his eyes from the morning sun. Now he sat up in bed and pulled back the curtain so he could confront Lou directly. “No, I wasn’t!”

  “Yes. I told you you were overdoing it.”

  Joe lay back and grunted at the ceiling.

  Lou smiled. His eyes were squinted shut behind his thick glasses. The low December sun suffused his white hair. “You guys don’t listen to me. After all, Joe, stop and think about it. I’m old enough to be your father.”

  “I know it!” Joe laughed, not making much sound but jiggling his bed. Then his right arm went into a jackhammer-like shaking. With his left hand, Joe grasped the wrist of the shivering arm and pulled it over onto his stomach, and it stopped moving.

  Lou murmured, “My son’ll be here in January.”

  4

  Since Lou’s arrival, Joe was getting out a little more. He now went to bingo three times a week. Lou went to most scheduled activities except bingo. He had his Saturday morning phone calls. On Sundays they both looked forward to a TV show that carried them off to other parts of the country—Joe watching and Lou listening. Tuesday morning they both went to Literary Hour, when Ruth, who was a retired high school English teacher, read aloud to residents in the activity room. Many visitors called on them. Members of Joe’s family came weekly, and from time to time his friends from Pittsfield. And almost every morning, seven days a week, Ruth arrived.