Old Friends

by Tracy Kidder

  The combo was entirely white-haired. All four of the musicians looked about as old as many residents of Forest View. But age creates great biological disparities, far greater than differences at birth. Facing in on a room full of parked wheelchairs and walkers, of backs bent by osteoporosis, of ankles swollen by renal insufficiency and heart disease, while here and there residents sat with vacant-looking faces holding stuffed animals in their laps, the elderly musicians in their ties and jackets seemed very vigorous.

  The combo warmed up with a few polkas. “I guess you know that song was made very popular by Bobby Vinton, ‘The Melody of Love Polka,’” said the vocalist-emcee. Soon they switched to old dance-hall numbers. “Let me call you sweetheart,” crooned the vocalist.

  Except for the bedridden, the partygoers represented most of the conditions of old age lived within these walls. There were a number on hand with vigorous minds and ruined bodies, such as Winifred, arrayed in her wheelchair, singing along. And there were almost as many in the opposite condition, such as gray-haired Zita, who wandered aimlessly around the dining room. She walked with a spryness that Winifred and Bob and Lou and Joe could recapture only in their memories and dreams.

  Art, Lou, and Joe all sat apart from the other residents. They sat in chairs in the activity room behind the combo, instead of in the dining room, not talking to one another and, anyone could see, not listening intently to this music either, but riding away on it.

  Art skipped high school to go to work. He continued his education informally while working as a janitor at Smith College in Northampton, the town where he was born, raised, married, and, here on its outskirts, would likely die. Art had liked crossword puzzles. When he got stuck, he’d visit professors in their offices and ask for help, which was how he acquired his impressive vocabulary. He started singing as a boy soprano in his Catholic church’s choir. Later, while he was working as a custodian at Smith, his boss overheard him singing to himself during a lunch break, and he got Art free voice lessons. Art remembered going up to Hampton Beach with his wife one summer evening, to a concert at the band shell there. An organist played and encouraged the crowd to sing. Art and his wife sat near the back. “I was singin’ away. At intermission the organist comes up to me and says, ‘Are you a pro?’ I says, ‘No, semipro.’ I couldn’t understand it, all these people singing and he comes up to me. My wife says, ‘That’s the funniest thing.’” Locally, Art’s voice was in demand for decades. He sang on the local radio station on Easter Sunday, 1940. He was once recorded singing the prologue to Pagliacci—out of the scratchy old recording his voice emerged like a deep bell lined with velvet. He had several teachers over the years. One had felt that Art could make it as a singer in New York, but Art did not believe it, and he never tried. Sometimes he still wondered if he should have.

  Since his wife’s death, he had suffered from memories. He recalled the time when he and his wife were young and newly married and she dropped a frying pan and he yelled at her. “If she could come back to life now, she could drop a hundred of them and I wouldn’t give a darn.” Few conscious minds exert full control of memory. Art remembered his nearly sixty years of marriage as very happy overall, but the stories that he now recalled most vividly and wanted most to tell were of that dropped frying pan and of his sixty-year-long disagreement with his wife about demonstrativeness. His wife would say she wished he’d tell her that he loved her, and he would protest that he preferred to do the sorts of things that proved it. She would say she understood, but that any woman wants to hear the words, and Art would answer, “It doesn’t run in my family to be like that.” He started telling his wife he loved her several times each day, in their room on Sunrise, during the weeks before she died. “But she never said a word. Not ‘Yes, dear, I forgive you.’ I would’ve liked that. It seemed it hurt her all her life.” Probably she could not answer him then, if she even heard him, but he wasn’t sure.

  Nothing about his wife’s death had gone as Art wished in retrospect. He was watching baseball on TV in their room when she died, without a sound. “Well, the Red Sox are losing again,” he remembered saying over his shoulder to her. “I wish I’d’ve known,” he would say. “Because I’d’ve had her die in my arms.”

  Eleanor, who liked being punctual, had gotten to the New Year’s party before Art. She was sitting in the dining room among some other women, listening to the combo, feeling bored.

  “Even though these men here have all these physical problems, it’s so nice to be in a place that has men. They add a little something,” Eleanor said. A week ago, on Christmas Day, standing with Art at the nurses’ station on Forest View, Eleanor came right out and told him, “You don’t know what a difference it’s made to have you here.”

  Art said, “I think she would approve.”

  Art had already told her about his wife, so Eleanor knew who “she” was. Eleanor leaned over and gave Art a kiss, a Christmas kiss on the cheek. And Art said, “I know she would approve of that.”

  Eleanor often found herself thinking about Art these days. “He’s a very sensitive person, I think. We’ve talked about things that older people don’t generally talk about. He knows all the words to the old songs, and I know them all. He tells me when the good shows are on TV. He’s still a good-looking man. He is the nicest man. He and Art”—she meant Art, her husband—“would have gotten on just fine. He knows every lyric, every song. He’s such a nice man. His leg’s been hurting him lately. But I can get him out of his moods.”

  Eleanor didn’t see Art come into the New Year’s Eve party, but after the first song, she spotted him out in the activity room, sitting alone, a little distance from Lou and Joe. So Eleanor threaded her way out past the tables and wheelchairs, and pulled up a chair next to Art’s. One of the dietary aides brought Eleanor a paper crown with “Happy New Year” emblazoned on the front. Eleanor put it on.

  Art was feeling blue. Eleanor could tell. She understood Art, she liked to say. No one around here understood Art as she did. She felt a little blue herself.

  How does one grow old so fast? It seemed like only a little while ago when Eleanor was entertaining suitors in the parlor of her parents’ house, and the alarm clock descended the stairwell, dangling from a string in front of her and her boyfriend. Lowering the alarm clock was her father’s way of informing Eleanor’s boyfriends that it was time for them to leave. Eleanor wasn’t one to let herself wallow in nostalgia or regrets, but she felt edgy when she looked back on the affair she’d had years ago with a colleague of her husband’s. It had begun because of a play, Brief Encounters. They had been costars. Love affairs, she thought, were occupational hazards for an actress. “I always fall in love with the person I play opposite,” Eleanor said. “But this one lasted so long. Art knew about it. Everybody did. Even the kids. I don’t know as I regret it. I’m a little ashamed of it. This man used to call me late at night. He wanted me to meet him at the university. He wanted me to go away with him. He’d say, ‘Someday I’ll do something wonderful for you.’ Eventually his wife came home and that was… it. The only thing I ever thought was, ‘Well, it isn’t quite me.’ I think it filled a void at that time, of my father coming back to live with us, and Art not making much money, and having kids.”

  Dressed in her paper crown, Eleanor leaned over toward this Art and said above the music, “Not going to sing today?”

  “No,” Art answered.

  “Well,” Eleanor said, “I guess I’ll go upstairs.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Art said.

  When they got outside the activity room door, Eleanor took Art’s arm. Behind them, the combo had just struck up “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” which would have seemed a bit ironic and dreary to Eleanor a moment ago, but now seemed too good to be true. She started to sing the song and Art joined in, his fine, trained baritone growing in authority. They walked along, singing. The combo’s music receded behind them. Art shuffled along and at the right moments doffed an imaginary top hat. Eleanor with he
r little steps easily kept pace. She held on to the crook of Art’s arm and swung her cane in the air before her like a drum major’s baton. Maintaining this arrangement, singing on, they boarded one of the elevators, ascended singing, got off and slowly promenaded, singing even louder, down the corridor. They finished up the sad old song standing arm in arm in front of the Forest View nurses’ station. The nurse on duty applauded. Then Art got his usual midafternoon pills and repaired to his room, alone.

  “Oh, I like him,” Eleanor said, both her voice and body quivering, as if vibrations in the floor were being transmitted through her cane. “I like him.” To Eleanor it seemed a fine ending to a melancholy day, and a good beginning to her eighty-first New Year.

  ***

  Downstairs the party was still going strong. During a lull in the music someone in the dining room said loudly, “These songs make me cry.” Lou got up from his chair at once and groped his way to the door. Joe followed at a little distance, then stopped and watched as Lou walked down the administrative corridor. He was heading for the lobby. Joe wouldn’t follow him.

  He knew that Lou was thinking about his wife. Lou would probably go to the lobby and cry quietly, or if one of the staff stopped to talk to him, Lou might tell her about his wife’s death and, his voice thin and wailing, say, “I held her hand right up until the end. That’s the way we started, and that’s the way we ended up.” And afterward, Lou would probably say to his listener, “I think that little talk did me some good.” Together in their room, Lou and Joe had discussed the issue of men crying. They agreed there was no shame in it. But Lou did not often cry in front of Joe. Perhaps that was because his crying was apt to make Joe cry, too. Lou clearly felt no shame in crying in front of anyone—in crying, that is, about his wife and not about his own condition. But Joe, no matter what he said, clearly did not like to cry in front of another man or to display affection toward another publicly.

  The so-called labile tendency that sometimes accompanies strokes had lingered eighteen years in Joe. It made him feel like weeping over inconsequential things, such as the sight of a young tree growing. Even the news of an ugly gas station’s being torn down could make him cry, Joe said. His fits were brief but powerful looking. He’d sob silently, often without tears, his mouth open and his shoulders shaking—a momentary, dry-heaving kind of sob. Then he’d run his good hand downward over his face and reappear unruffled, sometimes smiling, as if from the powder room. The combo’s old dance-hall songs were strong stimuli, and Joe had wanted to get out of the activity room before he was overwhelmed. Joe couldn’t prevent weepiness, but he’d get out of public places if he could when the fit was on him—just as he would make sure to wipe the numbed right side of his mouth periodically, in case spittle that he couldn’t feel had collected there.

  Joe belonged to the generation whose young men felt compelled, even desperate, to join the military and serve in World War II. He himself had searched for a military doctor who would overlook his congenital high blood pressure. He found such a doctor, and then discovered war to be less glorious than advertised. But Joe absorbed his generation’s ideal of manly virtue, and more than ever now he tried to live up to it. He would say that he admired Hemingway for committing suicide, because suicide took courage. And if one chose to live on, one must weather one’s own fate bravely, or at least without complaint. Joe saw examples of such virtue all around him here. At least once a week he and Lou would hear a loud thump through the wall, the sound of a woman who lived next door taking a fall, and Joe would say, “Oh, dear God. Mary.” He or Lou used to go out and tell one of the staff that she had fallen, but then Mary asked them not to. Mary said she was afraid that if the staff knew how often she fell, she’d be “sent downstairs.” So now Joe listened to the thump unhappily and said, “Mary, she never complains.”

  Joe said, “Art. He has, uh, Parkinson’s. He’s losing, uh, eye. He walks a little, he gets tired. And he never complains.” Joe often made these expressions of admiration for the stoics around him when he himself was feeling pain—phantom pain in his missing toe, chronic pain in his knees or shoulder—or after some common sight, such as a resident drooling, reminded him that he’d ended up in a nursing home. At such times, Joe might recite the litany of his own wife’s ailments.

  Joe was also surrounded by counter-examples of stoical virtue, the “goddamn fools,” as he would say, who complained about their lot and did everything they could to make their families feel guilty.

  And then there was Lou. “Lou’s hemorrhoids are bothering him. He has angina. His back’s bothering him. He’s legally blind. And he never complains. Good God, huh?”

  The music wafted out of the activity room. This was Lou’s first New Year without his wife. Joe watched him move slowly toward the lobby. “It’s sad. Sad,” said Joe. He limped toward the elevators. Joe got winded more quickly now than before his blister. Now when he walked from the dining room to the elevators, he had to stop on the way and rest. When he made this short walk in the company of an able-bodied visitor or one of the nurses whom he advised on matters of alimony, Joe timed these halts with the conversation. He made it seem as if he stopped and leaned awhile on his cane simply in order to emphasize a point. Joe rode up to Forest View alone.

  ***

  New Year’s Eve: at moments like these, when fragments of time coalesced and Joe realized where he’d been and how he’d gotten here, he’d sometimes say, “Route Nine. I never thought I’d end up on Route Nine.” The saying went way back. In Joe’s house outside Pittsfield, or across from the courthouse in the Legion bar, there was a standing joke. If somebody did something peculiar or said something nutty, the others would point fingers at their heads and cry, “Route Nine!” That two-lane state highway winds east from Pittsfield to Northampton. It is a bucolic drive of thirty miles through the Berkshires. It also used to be the route along which mental patients rode, from Pittsfield to the tall gothic buildings and locked wards of the once gigantic Northampton State Hospital. To send people there was to “Route Nine ’em.”

  Joe remembered the journey east away from Pittsfield to the VA Medical Center in Northampton, the ride with which this new life of his began. He rode in the back of a VA van. His son rode with him. The rest of his family followed in a car. Joe sat in a wheelchair, looking out the windows. On the outskirts of Pittsfield, the van turned onto the famous two-lane highway, and Joe turned to his son and smiled wryly. “Route Nine!” he said. He didn’t talk much the rest of the way. As the van passed through a town a few miles from Northampton where Joe’s daughter lived, he caught a glimpse of his infant granddaughter. The babysitter just happened to be taking the child out for a walk in a stroller. Everyone involved in Joe’s relocation agreed that the timing of that walk was a minor miracle. Joe beamed as he looked through the window at the receding figure of his granddaughter. Small and blond with the Torchio curls in her hair.

  Joe didn’t complain to his family when he was wheeled into his room at the VA. He tried to make himself seem cheerful. He was glad to be able to remember that. It was the right way to behave, and it was the least he could do for his family. Maybe it amounted to a little recompense.

  ***

  Joe remembered disappointments from his years as chief probation officer. Disappointments came with the job. Trying to straighten out other people’s lives, dealing every day with the county’s routine, seamy social chaos—it could put a strain on sympathy. On the other hand, the job cultivated the habit of being needed, and it wasn’t as though he hadn’t helped a lot of people. The women with small children whose husbands weren’t paying their alimony, for example. His office had the second-best record in the state for making those men pay up. And he often made it possible for the delinquent husbands to do so, by not putting them in jail. There were a lot of kids who came to him in custody, in their first big trouble. He was the first probation officer in the state to institute a program of work release instead of jail for them. And a lot of those kids straightened t
hemselves out. In the early days, he and the first judge he worked for made some mistakes. People being hauled into court for the crime of cohabitation—that seemed pretty silly now. He and the judge should have released them on the spot. But Joe rid the courtroom of the “cage” in which the various accused used to await their hearings before the judge. He gave a lot of drunks a break. The police chief didn’t approve. “Joe, Joe, Let ’Em Go Torchio,” the police chief called him. The chief said he was going to stop giving Joe’s office the arrest reports on drunks if Joe was simply going to free a lot of them. “Then I’ll release them all,” Joe retorted. Joe’s son had worked awhile as a corrections officer in the county jail. He’d told Joe that, while working there, he ran into quite a few old reprobates who said, “I know your father. Yeah, he put me in jail back in ’58. He’s a good guy.” His son said he wasn’t sure if those testimonials qualified as compliments. Joe was greatly amused.

  It is strange to remember an active life while lying on a bed in a nursing home. Joe’s recollections of his former life seemed at moments now as stupefyingly improbable as a TV action-adventure. Once a large young man disagreed so strongly with the probationary terms Joe set for him that he pulled a knife on him. Joe, half the young thug’s size, climbed over the top of his desk and took the knife away. Twenty years ago, only a couple of years before the stroke that divided up his life, a local lawyer, arguing with Joe about a real estate deal, called him a liar over the phone. Joe dropped the receiver, ran out his door and across several blocks—in his shirtsleeves, in the dead of winter—and up the stairs to that lawyer’s office. The lawyer knew that he had made a mistake. He knew Joe. He had erected a barricade of chairs around his desk, and stood inside it when Joe arrived. Joe was too winded to get at the lawyer right away, and by the time he’d caught his breath, a policeman had appeared. Joe had a lot of clout with the local police force. There was no question of his being arrested. Afterward, in fact, the policeman said, “I tried to give you some time to hit him.”