Old Friends

by Tracy Kidder

  Earl retired, as a bank vice president, at the age of sixty-five. He had by then compiled a long record of public service. After retirement, he added to it. He served at one time or another as president, secretary, treasurer, director, trustee, or plain fundraiser for a great number of civic, professional, and charitable organizations. He’d been president and director of the Holyoke Rotary, a director of the local Red Cross, a member of the board of the local Chamber of Commerce, a treasurer of the Tuberculosis Society, a chairman of the United Cerebral Palsy and the American Heart Association fundraising campaigns, a treasurer, trustee, and senior warden of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Holyoke, a member of the Bishop’s Council, a president and district governor of two banking organizations. The list went on and on. He even served on a committee dedicated to saving a beautiful old merry-go-round. It was the vita of a man too gregarious and generous to say no.

  Earl’s first wife had died by the time he retired. In his sixties he married Jean, who was thirteen years younger than he, and began a second life made of public service, golf, family, and travel. Earl had mild high blood pressure and mild diabetes mellitus, and, in his early seventies, he was operated on for prostate cancer. But those ailments all appeared to be in check. He felt wonderful and young until, on a day in July in his seventy-ninth year, the day after playing in a golf tournament, he went to Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton for his routine, quarterly cancer checkup. He had a deep, dull pain in his chest. He felt nauseous. He told the receptionist he didn’t feel up to having a check-up and was on his way out the door when he decided he’d better find out what was wrong with him. Earl later said—no doubt correctly—that he probably would have died if he hadn’t turned back. In almost no time at all, he was whisked into the hospital’s cardiac care unit and hooked up to various monitoring devices, which diagnosed a rapidly progressing, left ventricular myocardial infarction, a common kind of heart attack.

  The staff administered the standard intervention, but it failed. Starved of oxygenated blood, a large portion of the muscular left wall of Earl’s heart died.

  By feeding an array of drugs into his bloodstream, the doctors brought Earl to a stable condition, and eventually they sent him home. A few weeks later, though, he was rushed back to the hospital. This pattern held through the summer, fall, and early winter. Earl would spend a week or two in the hospital on the verge of death—from heart arrhythmias, from cardiac arrest, from congestive heart failure, from intramural thrombus (an aneurism formed in the left wall of his heart), and, mainly because his heart had become an inadequate pump, from fulminant pneumonia and kidney failure. Again and again the cardiac unit staff brought him back, with oxygen therapy, with a pacemaker, with drugs that lessen, in various ways, the work that the heart has to do. Again and again Earl rallied, and his doctors sent him home with a virtual pharmacopoeia—digoxin, Capoten, Lasix, Quinaglute, Zaroxolyn, Coumadin, potassium chloride, sublingual nitroglycerin. At home in Northampton, Jean ministered to him. Visiting nurses helped out. For a while he’d seem to improve, but it was never more than a few weeks before he was being driven back to the hospital, gasping for air.

  Only a decade or so before, Earl would probably have died shortly after his heart attack. The steady advance of cardiac pharmacology deserved much of the credit, perhaps also the blame, for his having survived these last six months. But even some medical people, whose professional training should have cured them of metaphysical thoughts, expressed surprise at Earl’s durability.

  Practically the only adversity from the past that Earl freely acknowledged now, while making his notes on family history as he languished at Linda Manor, was his loss in a golf club championship back in 1933. He’d all but won, got overconfident, and lost the match. Several years later, he found himself in the opposite position. “I said to myself, ‘Don’t give up.’” He came from far behind to win that second match. “Life is that way,” he said. “If I hadn’t been defeated earlier, I probably wouldn’t have won later.” Earl derived this moral from that memory: Don’t give up.

  “Is this man a cat?” a nurse remarked over Earl during one of his five return trips to the cardiac care unit. Jean said, “There’s something tough in there.” For his part, Earl did not deny that the last six months had been a torment, but he didn’t like to dwell on them. Of that time he’d usually say, “I’ve been tied up since July,” and leave it at that.

  Earl’s side of the room on Sunrise was barren except for institutional furnishings. He hadn’t brought any of his own stuff here, because he didn’t intend to stay long. However, on the small, standard-issue bulletin board that hung beside every bed at Linda Manor, Earl pinned a photograph of himself as he had been six months ago. In the picture, Earl, standing between two golfing buddies, has full round cheeks with a healthy-looking glow in them. Many residents had pictures of their younger selves on their walls, such as Joe’s picture of himself on his wedding day. In those pictures, one could read by comparison the great, slow changes of time and illness and yet still see a resemblance between the resident then and now. But it was hard to see any resemblance at all between Earl in that photograph in his golfing clothes and Earl just six months later in the nursing home bed. When the photo was taken Earl weighed about 165 pounds. He now weighed about 105. He didn’t look a great deal older. He had shrunk. And his once ruddy cheeks had turned gray, nearly the color of his hair.

  Earl recalled his heart attack in the way unlucky soldiers recall their battle wounds, as an event that still defied belief. He remembered saying to himself, “What’s going on here? I’ve never really been sick.” True, he’d had cancer, but it hadn’t turned out to be nearly as serious as this, and he’d always thought that cancer was far more dreadful than a heart attack. He could not make out how this had happened to him. Not that the biology behind his transformation puzzled Earl. He’d heard enough doctors’ explanations and implicitly believed in their descriptions of what had gone awry down there in his chest. But that this could have been his destiny, to wind up gasping for breath in a place like this, without his ever having had the slightest premonition, that lay beyond understanding.

  Earl would look at the photo on his bedside bulletin board and say, “That was me just six months ago.” He hadn’t had time to get used to the face he saw in the mirror of the nursing home bathroom. He imagined it temporary. In his mind he repossessed his former, healthy body, in spite of what he knew.

  ***

  After Earl’s most recent and most serious bout with the complications of living with a half-dead heart, his family doctor recommended that he go to a nursing home, at least for a while. The doctor felt Earl needed twenty-four-hour care of a sort that would be hard to arrange at home.

  For Earl, entering Linda Manor was nightmarish. He didn’t mind the routine full-body check that the nurses performed the day he arrived or the crinkly feel of the plastic bed cover under his sheets. He was used to hospital beds and procedures. In fact, he wished Linda Manor felt more like a hospital and less like a place designed for long stays. What frightened him most was the lineup of residents across from the Sunrise nurses’ station, old men and women sitting there with their mouths open and heads lolling to one side. They clearly had arrived at the end of the line. He didn’t belong here among them, did he?

  A few days after Earl arrived, one of the evening nurses wrote in his chart:

  Disturbed that wife couldn’t come in this p.m. Has called her 4 times begging to be removed from here, says he feels “trapped.”

  Earl hadn’t ordered his own phone. He didn’t plan to stay long enough to justify the expense. His first days he made so many trips, padding along behind his wheelchair, half out of breath, down the long central corridor to the pay phone, that for a time the Sunrise staff thought he must be demented. He was not. Earl was calling almost everyone he knew, just to hear familiar voices.

  Earl felt so desperate to call yet another old friend and tell him where he was that sometimes, in his firs
t days here, he’d push his wheelchair out to the Sunrise nurses’ station and beg permission to use the phone there. He had to wait, surrounded by distressing sights and sounds. Sunrise’s long corridor lies a little closer to the woods than Meadowview’s. And just across the asphalt drive outside, there is an earthen berm, which makes some parts of Sunrise feel partway underground. It gets a lot of sun, but it seems one shade darker than Meadowview or elevated Forest View. And there was always that lineup along the wall across from the nurses’ station. One ninety-year-old man often sat there, by the water fountain, sometimes calling out while stamping his feet: “Seventy-seven turkeys. May his soul rest in peace. God save the King. Seventy-one five. Please Lord, let the country prosper. Amen.” Deep in reverie, he believed himself to be simultaneously at a turkey shoot and playing the organ in church. A woman who always wore a turban sat at the other end of the Sunrise lineup, issuing orders to passersby. She believed this was a hotel and that she owned it. Often she sat there conversing with the parakeet in the cage to her left. The bird inside could speak that woman’s name and would now and then utter a long and drawn out “Yee-ahsss” in an accent just like hers. And often a man without any legs was sitting there, calling out, “He’p me! He’p me out! Wanna go back to bed!” When Earl first heard that man’s voice, it went right through him.

  Earl was waiting there for the phone one day, in that place he thought of as Bedlam, feeling more lonely than ever before in his life, when a woman in a wheelchair approached, an aide pushing her. She was large, brown-haired, toothless, dressed in a silky gown, with hugely swollen legs. Earl was almost afraid to look at her, but then she spoke. “I have a phone. You can make a call on it anytime you want. You just come in my room anytime,” she said.

  Thus Earl met Winifred. Earl soon got his own phone—“Boy, am I glad to see you,” he exclaimed when the service man appeared in his doorway. He never did use Winifred’s phone, but her gesture comforted him a little. Rational, even generous people survived, after all, in some of these ruined bodies around him. Earl’s roommate, a stroke victim, seemed weird at first, wheelchair-bound and given to fits of weeping and periods of incoherent talk. But after a few days of sharing a room with him, Earl discovered a person he liked underneath that unfortunate man’s symptoms.

  Lou visited. Earl liked Lou. And Earl met some congenial people in the dining room. He began taking mild exercise with the physical therapists. He told everyone he met that he’d be leaving in a week or two. He still had hopes of a recovery, not a full one perhaps, but he imagined that he might play golf and travel again. He decided that he had to know if his hopes were realistic. About a week after his arrival at Linda Manor, Earl’s family doctor visited him in his room. Jean was there, but waited outside in the corridor while the doctor examined him. When Jean left the room, Earl asked his question. He thought he was prepared for the worst, and he hoped, of course, for good news.

  “Listen, Doc, I’m not a kid anymore. I want to know where I stand.”

  Earl’s doctor had heard this question many times in his career. He was in his sixties and had made a specialty of geriatric medicine. He liked dealing with elderly patients partly because they usually permitted candor from him. Over the last six months of crises, Earl had told him several times that he worried about whether Jean would be able to manage her own financial affairs without him. This worry had special force, since Jean’s first husband had died in a car accident, and for a long time afterward she had found herself utterly lost among bills and checkbooks. So the family doctor thought he owed Earl an honest answer. He wasn’t God, he said, but he doubted that Earl would be alive in six months. And, he added, a fatal event could occur suddenly, at any time.

  How soon at the earliest? Earl wanted to know.

  The doctor didn’t want to say.

  Earl pressed him for an answer. “I’m not a kid anymore.”

  Finally the doctor gave in. Maybe a week, he said.

  “That’s what I wanted to know,” said Earl bravely.

  Some months later, recalling the day when he delivered that bad news, Earl’s doctor remarked, “People usually want to know. They don’t usually want to hear it.”

  3

  In the activity room, the aide was calling today’s last game of bingo. No other event drew such a large crowd. Two dozen residents sat at dining tables, each equipped with a single card and a stack of bingo chips decorated with images of cartoon teddy bears and cats and ladybugs and bees and bunny rabbits. Rita, the activities department aide, called out the letter-number combinations through the tinny sound system. “B-two. B-two.”

  One of the women at the table next to Joe’s said, “Beef stew again.”

  Joe smiled.

  He sat at the same table as always, with Art, as always, seated to his left. Art’s eyes were failing. Sometimes he had trouble placing his bingo chips correctly. He wouldn’t let just anyone help him. He’d turn to Joe. Today a third man sat at Joe’s table, the resident of Sunrise who had no legs. He sat across from Joe, on his stumps, in a wheelchair. On the way to and from the elevators, Joe had often heard his eerie cries. But Joe had heard and seen worse here, and at the VA. And the legless man had surprised Joe today. Joe saw that he wasn’t very old, and he could carry on a conversation. He hadn’t done any yelling. It might be possible to like this guy, Joe thought.

  Joe listened to the voices from the tables around him, chuckling now and then at the comments he heard. This last game stretched on and on without a winner. A woman at the next table said, “Somebody’s gonna yell pretty soon.” Her voice was tense with excitement.

  “I-sixteen,” called the aide through the metallic sound system.

  “Bing-go,” Joe said. He smiled, an inward-looking smile.

  “Oh, Joe again,” said the aide through the microphone, in mock consternation.

  “He’s always got it,” piped up Eleanor’s roommate Elgie from the next table.

  “See, it pays to be cute,” said the aide.

  “Oh, Jeez,” Joe said as the aide placed a dollar bill beside his card.

  “That won’t buy a beer,” said Art, looking at the dollar bill.

  Joe chuckled, pocketing the dollar. He winked at the legless man, but the legless man’s eyes didn’t seem to see Joe now. His eyes looked far away.

  Across the room the aide was packing up the bingo equipment. Residents were moving, by cane, walker, and wheelchair, slowly toward the door. Joe was chatting with Art. Suddenly the legless man began to shout. “He’p me, he’p me out!” He was yelling right in Joe’s face. Actually, he was yelling for help toward the doorway, and Joe happened to be in the way.

  “Oh, boy. Jesus Christ,” Joe groaned, turning his face away. What pain the man must be in now! An aide hurried up and wheeled the legless man out. The cries died away. Joe looked at Art and said, “Without your legs… you know.”

  “He’s got a voice like a bull,” Art said.

  Joe looked at Art. Then Joe started to smile, his shoulders bouncing a little, and in a moment his face returned to normal.

  Around here, a person could count on incidents like that to remind him where he was. “Nice place to be, huh?” Joe would sometimes say. There was too much sadness concentrated here, Joe thought at these moments.

  A couple of tables away Winifred was chatting with another resident. Winifred was doing all of the talking.

  “We could use her tongue for an antenna,” Art muttered.

  Joe smiled. Then he limped off on his cane toward the lobby.

  ***

  A chilly sunlight filled the lobby’s many windows. The piano, at the center of the room, gleamed darkly. This was Joe’s eighteenth winter since the stroke. To the left of the front doors, Bob’s armchair was pulled out from the wall and turned to face the traffic. Joe sat down in it. Bending forward, he unstrapped his orthopedic shoes and took them off, and began surveying his world.

  There was only one other person in the lobby just now, a very old woman,
thin and gnarled with shoulders humped high as if she wore football shoulder pads. She sat on a sofa across the room. She’d been a schoolteacher. She was ninety-five. Joe didn’t know her well, but she had all her buttons, he’d decided. They chatted a little from either side of the lobby.

  “Who’s your roommate now, Joe?”

  “Lou Freeze.” Joe looked out the bay window toward the south visitors’ parking lot. “He gets mad at Phil. Oh, God.”

  “You roomed with Merle for a while.”

  “Yeah. Miserable Merle. I got along with him all right,” Joe said. “What time is it?”

  The former schoolteacher studied her wristwatch. “Two minutes of. You wouldn’t hang a man for two minutes.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” Joe said. He smiled, looking toward the window. “You know, nine or ten, I played bingo. And I didn’t play again until I got here.” Joe’s smile grew. Suddenly, clutching his belly with his good hand, he hooted, “It’s a stupid goddamn game!”

  What a marvelous joke that was. Joe Torchio playing bingo in a nursing home. And enjoying it!

  A few minutes later the former schoolteacher dozed off, her head falling onto her shoulder. And then the front door opened and a couple of visitors, an elderly man and woman, came in. They paused in front of Joe.

  “It’s cold out there today,” said the woman.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Joe said. He laughed.

  Joe Torchio didn’t even know what it was like outside. This was a fine joke, too.