Old Friends

by Tracy Kidder

  “I used to box intramurally,” Joe remembered. He smiled. “Sometimes in bars.” He didn’t drink during working hours, but he spent many evenings in the Legion bar. After his stroke, his Legion pals sent him a giant card with the queen of spades on the front in memory of their Saturday games of hearts. It was an odd feeling to realize that most of the men who signed that card were dead now. A lot of friends had died.

  Father John. Joe grew up with him, and John became a Catholic priest. Father John was one of Joe’s most faithful visitors after Joe had his stroke. He would come over to the house, and they’d sit down at the kitchen table, and Joe’s wife would put a bottle down between them. The bottle wouldn’t last long. They’d argue theology. Joe remembered asking Father John if he believed what the pope had said about Mary ascending to heaven in her clothes.

  “Yes, I have the faith,” said Father John.

  “Well, by Jesus, I don’t,” said Joe.

  Then Father John contracted Lou Gehrig’s disease, an excruciating fatal illness. Joe remembered visiting him on his deathbed, at a rectory in eastern Massachusetts. Father John smiled up at him. He said, “Christ suffered on the cross for three days.”

  Joe answered, “He didn’t suffer as much as you!”

  Joe was a devout Catholic as a boy. He lost his faith around the age of seventeen. “I just didn’t believe the story anymore. Immaculate Conception, I used to believe that. God is in three persons. That’s a mystery that we can’t understand, right? I’m an agnostic leaning toward atheism. But…” Here Joe would raise his good arm and declare, “There’s something that started the goddamn world!” The fault must lie in him for lacking religious faith, Joe thought, because so many other people had it. But his professional and personal experiences of life made the idea of a just God, mindful of the fall of sparrows, laughable.

  It was around this time of year, long ago, when the doctor had said there was no hope for his first son. The boy died at the age of seven from leukemia. He used to apologize to his mother and Joe for the messes of blood his illness caused. And then their first daughter was born retarded. It took about a year before the fact was known. Joe and his wife eventually raised two healthy children. It was a relief to know that, but he never really got over what happened to his first son and daughter. He merely grew accustomed to the facts. “I was no good for ten years. I just went through the motions.” But it would be dishonest to say he drank because of that.

  Then the stroke hit. He was only fifty-four. He remembered falling out of bed and hearing his wife on the telephone, summoning help. Joe wasn’t worried right away. He figured that whatever it was, he’d come out of it. Therapists and his wife and his best friend worked on him, and gradually his speech returned and he learned to walk again, after a fashion. And with a great deal of help from his wife and his assistants, he went back to work. He had a lot to thank those people for, especially his wife. About ten years later he was forced to retire. For a few more years he lived at home, in semi-isolation, keeping mainly to a small den that smelled of chimney smoke. He kept on drinking in retirement.

  One day Joe announced, to a family friend who was visiting, that he would never drink again. Joe remembered his friend saying that he’d bet his house against it. Joe knew himself to be the sort of person who liked to do a difficult thing just to prove that he could do it. He’d always been that way—learning in grade school to recite the alphabet backwards just because a classmate said he couldn’t do it. There wasn’t anything mysterious about his wanting to quit drinking. “I got sick of it, that’s all.” Joe quit a few years before he underwent those several operations and had to leave home for good. It was almost five years now since he’d tasted liquor.

  ***

  Joe limped into the empty room upstairs. Daylight still filled the window. He took off his shoes and lay down on his bed. He gazed at the ceiling. He was glad he had quit drinking. He wished he had quit sooner. But maybe not much sooner, to be honest. He had usually enjoyed himself. Drinking had enhanced his life, he thought. But it had not enhanced his family’s, and now he really did wish that he had quit sooner.

  To his family and friends, Joe still issued orders, but he kept from them a great deal of what he felt. He had resolved never to complain to them, if he could help it. A person in a nursing home has a lot of time to contemplate the shortness of what’s left and to summon up regrets. “See, my wife was nurse, nurse’s aide, physical therapist, and everything for me for fifteen years. And I got mad at her. She served steak. I said for Christ’s sake, I’m sick of goddamn steak and every other goddamn thing. I didn’t realize, and now I’m trying to make it up to her. Honest to God. And I drank too much. Honest to God.”

  In Joe’s plan, he’d make what amends he could by making his close friends and family feel that he was happy at Linda Manor. “Perfect place,” he’d say to them. In the privacy of his own thoughts, Joe gave a slightly different accounting.

  He remembered his four months at the VA as vividly as a nightmare from which he had just awakened. The ward, on an upper floor deep inside the hospital building, was clean but old and drab. The staff were competent and pleasant, but they were practically the only people around who could carry on a rational conversation. They put Joe to bed in a five-man room. On one side of him lay an all but comatose man. Joe saw a feeding tube protruding from that man’s stomach, and tried not to look that way again. The patients lying in the other beds around him moaned and babbled and cried out, and the one man in the room who could talk complained incessantly, cursing the staff and Joe. Often alone with no one but the busy staff to talk to, Joe couldn’t shake the feeling that he did not belong there, among the comatose and demented. Even at its best, life on that ward seemed to Joe like a case of false imprisonment. He considered suicide, but rejected the idea, and then wondered if he was a coward for doing so.

  For about a week after he got to the VA, Joe writhed inwardly. “Then I turned over.” Joe rotated his good hand as if opening a doorknob. “I decided to adjust.” He remembered his first sight of Linda Manor. After the VA, it looked fresh and airy. But it was still a nursing home. He arrived in a wheelchair. When they pushed him into his room on Sunrise, his new roommate glared at him from bed and greeted Joe by saying, “They call me Miserable Merle.”

  The man’s tone sounded threatening, and Joe wasn’t going to let it pass. “I’m just as miserable as you, you sonofabitch,” Joe told him. Joe got along all right with him after that, but the man was truly miserable and he complained a lot.

  Joe remembered one young nurse’s aide on Sunrise, the only aide around here he really didn’t like. She was gone now. “You’re quite bossy, aren’t you,” Joe remembered telling her. “Well, you don’t boss me.” Most of the time in here it seemed as if he were obliged to say please and thank you constantly. It still seemed that way. But maybe that was just because he’d said those words too seldom in his life before.

  When he came to Linda Manor, he hadn’t taken more than a few steps toward walking again, not since the surgeon had cut off his toe. Walking had been difficult ever since his stroke. Without the toe, he couldn’t seem to get his balance. He wasn’t going to bother to try. But the staff insisted that he transfer from his wheelchair to a regular chair in the dining room. He had to wait his turn for an aide to help him. He endured the procedure for a couple of weeks or so. Then one day, while he was in the midst of being lifted, turned, and deposited in a dining room chair, it occurred to him that learning to walk again couldn’t be more aggravating than doing this three times a day. “The hell with it,” he thought. Inspired by irritation, he relearned the art of walking. It didn’t take very long. “It wasn’t hard. It wasn’t easy.” Good thing he’d done it, though, or he might not have been moved upstairs and gotten Lou as a roommate.

  Things were much better now than they had been. Lou was a vast improvement over his other roommates. And Linda Manor was a great improvement over the VA. But it was still the last place he ever though
t he’d end up living in. “Perfect place,” he’d tell his friends and family. To himself, he said, “It’s as good a place as you can get without home. But who would choose this if you had any other choice, that’s all.”

  Lying in the room on Forest View, Joe thought back to other New Year’s Eves. “Before I got crippled, I used to, uh… tie one on. On New Year’s Eve. Oh, Jesus!” It used to be midmorning tomorrow when he got in from celebrating. He laughed. He gazed at the ceiling. “But… that’s gone forever. Just as well, or I’d be dead now.”

  Winter

  1

  Dora sat in a rocking chair beside her window on Meadowview. She was short and stocky. She had round, ruddy cheeks and brilliant white hair, hairdresser-curled, the coiffure slightly flattened in back, a common fate of coiffures here because of frequent reclining. Dora held a hardbound diary in her lap, opened to today’s page—a day in early January. She smiled as she lifted her pen. Dora almost always smiled.

  Every morning Dora wrote in her diary. Every entry began with Dora’s own weather report. A few days ago, sitting here in her rocker, her diary in her lap, she glanced out her window and wrote, quite accurately, “Snowing here this A.M.” It wasn’t that Dora didn’t see what others saw, but she saw beyond what distracted them. Nine days out of ten, in fair weather or foul, she looked out her window and wrote, “Beautiful morning here.” Today the sky hung low and gray outside Dora’s window. Visitors crossing the parking lot, passing through Dora’s view, hunched their shoulders under heavy coats and with gloved hands pressed their collars to their ears. “Beautiful morning here,” wrote Dora.

  ***

  On her way through the lobby, Ruth ran into an old acquaintance named Jean Duncan. Ruth had taught Jean’s daughters in high school, and asked after them. They were doing fine, but Jean’s husband, Earl, was not. He had just arrived at Linda Manor, he was very sick with heart trouble, and he was feeling pretty low. Maybe Ruth’s father would visit Earl, Jean suggested. Earl needed a friend on the premises. His room was on Sunrise. Ruth passed the message along.

  Lou set out for Sunrise. Earl seemed a lot less depressed than advertised, Lou thought. In fact, Earl said he’d be going home soon. He asked Lou to call on him again. A few mornings later, after fortifying himself for the journey with his usual shot of brandy, Lou headed off to perform what he called his mitzvah, his good deed for the day.

  Lou could have made it from his door to the elevators on memory alone. He had only to keep a lookout for wheelchairs, or the tall stainless steel lunch cart sometimes in the way, or fellow residents. A shape, a lighter shade of gray than the surrounding grayness, was moving in his direction on a near collision course. The shape swayed from side to side like a metronome, a familiar movement. “Hi, Ted.”

  The elevator doors made two tall, bright rectangles before Lou. He reached with an open hand for the elevator button, missed by an inch or so, then found its raised surface and pressed with his thumb. He stepped back one step, looked up, and waited for the bells to ring and for the arrow to light above the left or right door. A sudden, nearly blinding glare made Lou squint. The elevator had opened—the interior walls were of a bright color. Moving quickly, standing outside, Lou reached around inside the elevator, found the stop switch by feel, and flicked it up. Now he could take his time, to test the footing with his cane, in case the elevator had landed with its floor not quite even with the floor outside.

  “Going down?” said Lou to the shape of Ted. Lou smiled at his own joke, there being, of course, no other way to go. Bending over, and with a little more pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey fumbling, he flicked off the stop switch and pressed the left-hand button below it, bowing low to get his good eye close, so he could make sure that the correct button was lit. Then he straightened up and listened to the machinery with a practiced ear—he used to take care of elevator maintenance at the pen factory. Everything sounded okay. He smiled again at the shape of Ted. Lou’s mood was sunny. “Well, like they say,” he said as the elevator started to move, “life has ups and downs.”

  Lou had a picture of Sunrise in his mind, from the months he’d spent there with his wife. Sunrise’s layout was identical to Forest View’s. The only differences to Lou were the incessant, eerie, slurred cries of a certain Sunrise resident—“He’p me, he’p me out, wanna go back to bed”—and a number of gray shapes, brighter than the wall behind them, that Lou knew to be the heads of the people in wheelchairs parked along the wall opposite the Sunrise nurses’ station.

  Lou made his way around the counter and bore to the west, following the left-hand border of the carpet and counting doorways. The doors were light rectangles against a gray wall if closed, and brighter rectangles if open. He stopped at a brighter rectangle, the last on the left. He knocked with the handle of his cane on the open door and took a step inside. “Earl? It’s Lou.”

  ***

  There were two beds in the room. Earl sat on the edge of the bed nearer the door. He wore a nightshirt. His gray hair was mussed and sticking up in back, like a cowlick. A blue oxygen catheter was looped over his ears and descended over his cheeks and across his upper lip like a long, slender handlebar mustache. His jawbones were prominent. His wrists were knobby. He was painfully thin. “I’m sorry, Lou,” said Earl. He spoke rapidly, with a hint of nervous haste, the haste of a man short of breath. “I’m sorry, Lou. I haven’t been able to sleep at all. My bowels. I’ve got one of these on.”

  Looking at the small, white-haired Lou, who stood leaning on a cane several feet away, and with a grimace, Earl pulled up his nightshirt, revealing a disposable diaper wrapped around thin thighs.

  “I can’t see. What is it?” asked Lou.

  “It’s one of these…” Earl started to say. “Like a child’s bib. Not a bib…” Earl’s voice trailed off. “I’m going to try to go back to sleep, Lou. I’m sorry.”

  “No need to apologize. I’ll see ya later,” said Lou. “Take it easy.”

  “I will,” Earl said emphatically, swinging his legs back into bed.

  Earl was obviously a newcomer. Among most of the men at Linda Manor, “Take it easy” called for an answer like, “At my age, you don’t have any choice.” Lou said the words for Earl, “You don’t have any choice,” and he chuckled. Lou meant to express solidarity. His chuckle was strained, though.

  He headed back down the corridors. A member of the staff, falling in step with Lou, told him, “Earl might be dying now.”

  Lou pursed his lips. He looked grim. “That’s what happens,” he said.

  Riding up on the elevator, Lou smiled. He was thinking about Joe’s promise to take all of the Nudniks out to dinner with his bingo winnings. Lou had told Joe, “Okay, you buy the crackers, I’ll buy the peanut butter.” Joe had won a whole dollar at Linda Manor bingo yesterday. Lou’s smile faded when he got back to the room.

  Joe was still out. Lou hung his striped cane on the rung of his wife’s old walker in the corner, and stood for a while facing the picture window. Sometimes in the late afternoons he thought he saw a rose-colored band of light out there on the grassy hillside below, a vision apparent only to him. He thought it might be a reflection of the sunset over the roof of the building. His eye doctor thought it a probable example of visual imagination.

  Mitzvahs didn’t always turn out well. This one had left him thinking about Jennie. He was picturing her as she’d lain in their room on Sunrise, during that time that Lou called “towards the end,” when she’d weighed all of eighty pounds and the staff could pick her up as if she were a child. Facing the window, his deeply lined face slightly frowning, Lou said again, “That’s what happens.”

  2

  Earl rallied, not for the first time. A few days after Lou visited, Earl was sitting up on the edge of his bed, making notes about his family’s history. This was an item on the list of affairs he had to put in order. While working on it, Earl escaped from here, back to 1910.

  A young woman stands on a corner of Cabot Street, in the shado
ws of the tall, dark factories of Holyoke, Massachusetts. A little boy stands beside her. She cradles a baby in one arm. She is waving her free hand and looking toward a window high up in the brick façade of the Crocker-McElwain paper mill, which looks like a castle. The figure of a man stands in that window, waving back at her. In those days, the streets of Holyoke’s lower wards held crowds of men around dawn and sunset, but they are probably quite empty at this midafternoon hour. Earl wasn’t sure about the season or what the woman, his mother, wore. She must have looked at least a bit disheveled. She had just arrived by boat and train from Scotland. Her husband, waving from the window high above the street, had fled hard times in Glasgow, where he’d been a professional soccer player and stonecutter. He went on ahead of his family the better part of a year before, to work in the paper mill. A friend of his brought his wife up from the train station to this street corner, for this distant reunion. The factory gates shut early in the morning and did not open again until quitting time—not for a mill worker, not even to welcome his wife to America or to lay eyes on his new son for the first time.

  That was the story as Earl heard it from his parents—at least, as much of the story as Earl remembered hearing. Earl planned to get his notes in order, then make a tape recording of the history of the Duncan clan. He intended the recording for his descendants.

  A vainer man than Earl would have replayed the story of his mother’s arrival and emphasized the hardships of his childhood, in order to add luster to his own accomplishments. But Earl, who had always shunned unpleasantness, placed most of his memories in sunshine. He grew up in Holyoke, during that now impoverished city’s industrial heyday. As a teenager he worked full day shifts at the Farr Alpaca mill and attended the Holyoke Evening High School. He was elected president of his night school class. He started caddying at the age of eight and early on discovered an ancestral talent for golf. Earl never went to college, but golf proved as useful as a diploma once he got into banking. “A lot of wealthy men wanted to play golf with me,” he explained.