by Tracy Kidder
“Hot stuff, Bob,” Lou said softly. “Hot stuff.” Lou had started this campaign a while back, as another effort to protect Joe’s granddaughter and his own great-grandchildren from vulgarity.
Bob looked at Lou. “Hot stuff,” said Bob, the still unaccustomed phrase mumbly in his mouth. “Thank you kindly.”
Then the main event began. Across the dining room, through the swinging kitchen door came a pretty young dietary aide wearing an apron. Joe turned. “Lin-dah!” Joe called in a loud falsetto. Other aides emerged. “Sue-zeee!” Joe called in his falsetto. “Mare-eee!”
The aides called back greetings. Joe glanced at Lou. Lou was smiling. Good.
The aide named Mary walked over to the group of men and slapped high, low, and medium fives with each of them.
“Thank you kindly,” Bob said to Mary. “She’s a damn good girl, I’m tellin’ ya,” Bob said to Joe as Mary went back to work.
“Yes, she is,” Joe replied.
A crowd of gray and white and bald heads, seated in wheelchairs and leaning on walkers and canes, had now collected in a disordered line at the dining room doorway, alongside the five Stupidvising chairs. This was always a slightly painful sight for Joe. He agreed with Lou: people their age shouldn’t have to stand and wait. At last a nurse’s aide arrived and called out “Okay!” from the dining room, and the breakfast-bound crowd started moving. “Let’s go, let’s go,” said Bob. Joe watched as Bob got up and limped headlong into the dining room, weaving around wheelchairs, barging past old women on walkers. Joe shook his head at the sight.
Joe looked forward to breakfast, the best meal served here in his and Lou’s opinion. He was hungry now, as always. But before he could eat, Joe had to interpret for Bob. The dietary aide waiting on them this morning was fairly new. She wondered if Bob wanted his eggs scrambled this morning.
“Yes,” Bob declared.
Joe looked up at the aide. “No. Wait a minute. He wants them, uh, poached.”
“You’re damn right,” Bob said to the aide. To Joe, Bob said, “Thank you kindly.”
This was no time to have Bob get riled up over his eggs, but Joe would have interpreted for Bob anyway. “Because I was in the same position, that’s all,” Joe had explained to Lou. “Guys with a stroke say yes when they mean no, see.”
The aides took their orders and had just begun to emerge through the swinging doors with trays of food, and Joe was looking hungrily at the tray coming toward him, when from a table off to Joe’s left came the sound of a woman’s voice bellowing, “This is crap right here!” It was Rosa. This was going to be one of those mornings. Smiling, Joe turned in his chair to watch.
Rosa, a fellow Forest View resident, was a dwarfish woman, usually dressed in sweat pants that looked about to fall down. She was a poet. The other day, encountering Rosa upstairs, Joe asked her to recite, and she declaimed rapid-fire:
Here’s to Hitler, the sonofabitch.
May he die of the seven year’s itch.
May his pecker be hit with a seven-pound hammer
And his asshole will whistle “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
As a rule, Joe confined his own swearing to invocations of the deity, with a “bullshit” or a “sonofabitch” thrown in now and then. He didn’t much care for dirty jokes, but he made an exception for Rosa’s. Turned in his chair, forgetting breakfast for the moment, Joe watched as an aide tried to reason with her.
“Rosa, it’s a pear.”
“I don’t want it,” Rosa declared.
Joe looked around the table. His comrades were all smiling. “And in this corner, we have…” intoned Lou. Joe’s shoulders shook with laughter.
In a moment the tiny figure of Rosa waddled furiously by, leaving the dining room in a huff, a nurse’s aide hurrying after her.
“Goodbye, Rosa,” Joe called.
Joe turned to Lou. “Yesterday she walked out of lunch, she walked out of dinner. And they, uh, grounded her.” Joe’s shoulders shook again.
6
Once the theater gets in the blood, it never leaves. Eleanor was living proof at eighty. She sat in her armchair in her room on Forest View’s west wing. She gazed out her window at the wintry landscape, making mental notes about the coming dress rehearsal. “I should have had a property person. Well, here’s Eva’s wig and Simon Legree’s whip. Supposedly the piano tuner will help lower the pitch. They’re all going to be terribly nervous with their families here. The lights and the PA system make me terribly nervous. But that’s typical of the day before a performance.”
Some things had gone perfectly today. Eleanor finally got, after weeks of requests, a baked Idaho potato for lunch. Her blood sugar was good at 7 A.M., and was probably better now because of the potato. On top of that, some young woman she’d never seen before, someone visiting a relative here, had given Eleanor a hat. “Oh, what a lovely beret,” Eleanor said to the stranger as they were passing each other in the hall, and just like that, the young woman took off her hat and presented it to Eleanor. Not that Eleanor really cared about clothes, but she knew a fine thing when she saw it. She liked the way it looked on her in the mirror. “A beret for the bon vivant,” she said. And as for the rehearsal, well, c’est la vie. Eleanor sighed toward the pine trees outside her window. “Well, if we haven’t done anything else, we’ve created a little adrenaline in these people.” She meant her fellow residents.
“Hi-lo!” said an extremely cheerful voice from the doorway. Eleanor’s roommate, Elgie, a large smiling woman in a dress, came in, pushing the wheels of her wheelchair while padding along with her feet—the caterpillar walk.
Eleanor glanced at her. “You can come in now. I’m going.”
The remark didn’t seem to faze Elgie. “Well, I hope the dress rehearsal goes lovely.”
“It won’t,” Eleanor said.
Elgie laughed heartily, a high-pitched laugh with a master-of-ceremonies quality about it.
Eleanor stiffened at the sound. “They never do,” she said.
“That’s what I’ve heard,” Elgie said.
Eleanor got up, picked up her cane, her script, a bonnet, a small riding crop, and a brown wig, and headed for the door with her small quick dainty steps. Elgie’s voice trailed after her, saying, “Goodbye and good luck to you. God bless you all.”
***
Eleanor had decided to call the coming production a cabaret. In fact, it was mainly an old-fashioned minstrel show—without blackface, lest she offend racial sensitivities. Eleanor had assembled most of the materials herself, culling skits and music from the faded pages of her father’s old repertoire.
One of Eleanor’s most vivid childhood memories was of traveling around upstate New York early in the century, with her young mother and middle-aged impresario father, as he put on his gypsy theatrical shows. Her father would go from one small town to another, bearing large black trunks full of props. He’d recruit local talent and direct them in a minstrel show. He wrote the skits, music, and lyrics. Part of the production would take place outdoors, when he’d lead a parade of the actors down the main street, half the town strutting along behind him and most of the rest watching from the sidewalks, in those days long before television. The company would promenade to the strains of a march Eleanor’s father had written, called “The Minstrel Street Parade.” The chorus went like this:
Ta ta ta tum
On they come
Look at ’em mash
Hear the drums crash
Comedians in line
Some of old time
’Tis the minstrel street parade.
Her father got paid out of the receipts from the indoor performances, usually staged under the auspices of the town’s dominant church. He always claimed it as the church of his faith, becoming a Methodist in a Methodist town, for example, though he was actually Episcopalian. Eleanor wrote a short book about her father—she had it published privately. “In 1915 we were still in the north country and I performed in my first minstrel show,” she wro
te. Among other acts, she sang a song called “Only a Waif.”
A sad-eyed, raggedly dressed little girl of five singing “Only a waif out in the street asking a penny from all.” I would sing my song and then walk down the aisles, supreme tragedy, as I pretended to beg for a penny from people in the audience. Of course, I never took any money although the patrons would willingly have put the coins in my outstretched hands while tears streamed down their cheeks. Although only five, I can remember it even now, the odd satisfying sensation of making people feel sad because of my tragic appeal.
Reminiscing about that time, back when she was allowed to be one of the party, Eleanor said, “We trouped around the countryside, and then I went back to being a little schoolgirl in Glens Falls.” She never got over that early experience. Deep down, she’d been restless ever since.
Eleanor relocated to Linda Manor nearly a year ago under most unusual circumstances. She checked herself in. What’s more, she did so without prodding from family or friends and without the compulsion of grave illness. Eleanor lived previously in a retirement home for women, a venerable Northampton institution housed in a mansion not far from Smith College. Time had worn the old building to an elegant shabbiness. Each inhabitant still had her own silver napkin ring, and a sign on the old-fashioned elevator warned against using it during electrical storms.
The retirement home was clean. Although she had to share a bathroom with several other women, Eleanor had her own cozy private bedroom. Since she’d left, many people had asked her why she’d wanted to trade that life of relative independence and privacy for confinement in a nursing home. Eleanor’s answers had by now a well-rehearsed quality. Her rest-home room had become insufferably hot in the summers, she’d say. She’d recall that one day her diabetes had flared up dangerously, adding that her own mother had died that way, in a diabetic coma. Although the rest home kept a nurse on duty around the clock, Eleanor would say that she felt she needed more nursing care, or soon would. And besides, there were no men at the rest home—well, there had been one, but he didn’t count—and she’d found most of her fellow female residents too prim and proper. “They’re all ladies,” she’d say. “They never wear pants. They never say anything risqué.” But then again, people who had known Eleanor over the years said that she always came up with good reasons for making a change in her life or for leaving a place.
Eleanor’s son wasn’t surprised when she called him to say that she was leaving the rest home for Linda Manor. He figured she’d exhausted the rest home’s theatrical possibilities, both the figurative and literal ones. In fact, Eleanor had already put on seven plays at the rest home, and had begun to find the resources for casting there much too limited. “There were only ten people I could work with.” She visited Linda Manor, on a social call, the summer after it opened and liked the looks of the place. “There’s so much I could do here,” she said.
Relatives almost always assume the considerable burden of managing a move such as Eleanor’s. But her two daughters lived far away, and, Eleanor insisted, she preferred not to trouble her son, who lived in Pittsfield. She also allowed that she had never been a very “family-oriented” person, adding that theater people rarely are. She made her decision to move, and then asked for her children’s approval.
Eleanor didn’t have much money. She had to enroll in Medicaid. The regulations said that if she did not prepay her funeral expenses, the state would take the money. So Eleanor was obliged to prepare her own funeral shortly after she arrived at Linda Manor. The mortician called on her there. It took three hours to get everything picked out, the newspapers in which she wanted her obituary to appear, the accoutrements of the ceremony, the urn for her ashes. Every day for three weeks afterward, she felt like weeping. “And I’m not a weeper,” she said, adding, of her funeral, “I think I’m more afraid of going through with it now that I’ve paid for it.” She would like five more years. And in five more years, she figured, she would wish for another five.
Linda Manor wasn’t all that Eleanor had hoped. She disliked the food generally, and detested her roommate Elgie. She often spoke yearningly of Forest View’s three private rooms, each occupied by a person paying the private rate. She’d never be able to pay for one of those rooms herself, but, Eleanor reasoned, she was doing a great deal for the nursing home in the way of arranging and managing activities for residents. She felt herself really to be more like one of the staff than a resident. So perhaps some arrangement could be made when one of the private rooms’ occupants expired. Any of them might go at any time, Eleanor thought. Meanwhile, she was keeping busy. Speaking about one of the women in the room next door to hers on Forest View, Eleanor said, “She has no memory, and she doesn’t have Alzheimer’s. Maybe it’s from having nothing to think about. I have found you’ve got to make a goal for yourself, even if you’re living in a little corner of a little room.” She swept a hand outward, gesturing at her half of the small room, furnished with an antique writing desk, a few family photographs, an armchair, a TV, a stack of books from a local library.
For months her chief occupation had been the Linda Manor Players and the cabaret. It had been a mountain of work. She’d assembled about thirty amateur singers, dancers, and actors. She couldn’t find enough residents to fill all the standup parts, so she recruited members of the staff, also the nursing home hairdresser and the hairdresser’s husband. And like her father before her, she turned to the churches and shanghaied an Episcopal minister and several members of a local Baptist church into the company.
Eleanor had to make painful concessions. The actors would read their parts. “If I’d insisted on memorizing, I couldn’t have gotten a corporal’s guard.” It wasn’t easy staging a play when you didn’t have a stage and half of your cast was in wheelchairs and the other half was always too busy to make rehearsals. Although she scolded and cajoled, she hadn’t managed to get everyone together at any one of the rehearsals—not until the dress rehearsal, which, she didn’t mind saying, was pretty ragged. She also had to fire the first piano player she engaged. Several times lately she’d threatened to cancel the whole thing. “I should never have tried to do something this ambitious,” Eleanor said, back upstairs in her room. But there was a lot of color in her face, not all of it from the rouge on her cheeks. She was smiling.
***
“You say I inveigled you into Eleanor’s play,” Lou said from his chair by the window.
“You got me into…” Joe began to say, his voice on the verge of a bellow.
“Joe, the word you like to use, I don’t like to use it. Bullshit. I got inveigled just by suggesting a few jokes to her.”
They’d been having this same discussion for a few weeks now. “I did many stupid things,” Joe said. “But this play of Ellen-er’s…”
“Oh, you’ll do all right,” Lou said. “You signed the contract and you gotta live up to it.”
“Listen.” Joe rose up in bed, pulling back the privacy curtain to face Lou. “I did high school plays and I did all right. But this script, for Christ’s sake, it stinks, huh?”
“Oh, it doesn’t stink,” Lou said, adding, “I don’t have a script. I’m playing it by ear.”
In the evening they made their way downstairs, dressed in their costumes—Lou in a large, floppy, snap-brim hat, Joe with a cloth band tied around his head. From the elevator landing all the way down on Sunrise, one could hear the babble of the gathering theater crowd.
As the cast assembled in the activity room, Bob looked around at their costumes, the floppy hats, the black gloves, the several fancy dresses, and said, “Oh boy, oh boy. Excellent.”
“I don’t want to hear that word,” said Eleanor. “Not tonight.”
Bob sat in the chorus, grinning at everything, along with Phil and several women in wheelchairs. The major singers and players sat in front of the chorus, in a row of folding chairs across the dining room doorway, in about the same position that Bob and Lou and Joe occupied for pre-meal Stupidvising. This sp
ot now became the stage. The actors faced the dining room, where their audience sat.
At one end of the front row of actors sat Lou and Joe. Joe looked amused and a little embarrassed. Eleanor sat at the other end of the front row, beside the piano and the drummer, who was a nurse’s son. The rest of that row were Eleanor’s able-bodied, younger ringers: Linda Manor’s director of activities, her assistant, an administrative assistant in charge of scheduling, two youngish Baptist friends of Eleanor’s, the Baptist minister, who wore a dark suit and would serve as “Mr. Interlocutor,” and a nursing supervisor whose pretty soprano equaled in volume the combined voices of the rest of the company and, it must be said, saved most of the musical parts of the show. The company rose, and with sweet and sour notes the cabaret began.
On a bright and pleasant morning in the springtime
When the birds are sweetly singing in the shade,
There is nothing half so thrilling to the senses
As to see a minstrel troupe do their parade.
Ta ta ta tum,
On they come…
The company sat down. Rising, Mr. Interlocutor gestured at the row of actors, saying to the audience, “Ladies and gentlemen, the funmakers of the evening.” The audience clapped loudly.
The audience overflowed the dining room. In the back were a number of the actors’ relatives—children, grandchildren, a great-grandchild or two, many of them standing, some sitting on the windowsills. The residents in the audience, mainly in wheelchairs, sat at the round dining tables. Most seemed more interested in the hors d’oeuvres than in the show.
Up on the stage—the open patch of gray linoleum floor where the stage should have been—Mr. Interlocutor said to Mr. Charcoal, “Your brother is an author, I believe.”
“Oh, yes. Pinky am an author. Is you read his last book?”
“No. What is it?”
