Old Friends

by Tracy Kidder

  “Yeah-ell,” Earl said. “Remember that poem we read in Florida? ‘When I’m gone…’”

  “It’s on the theme of don’t spend too much time mourning me,” said Jean. “That’s how I’d want my children to feel.”

  They talked about Earl’s children, and which would take his death hardest. They paused when, over on the other side of the room, a press conference about the war in Iraq interrupted the soap opera. Earl had stayed up late a few nights ago to watch TV, because there was talk that the war might begin then. “If it did, I wanted to be part of it,” he’d said. What they were calling the air war began just yesterday.

  “Well, I hope it doesn’t go on too long,” Earl said now, as the press conference on the TV went on. Then Earl asked Jean to excuse him for a moment, which was code between them for the fact that Earl needed to use the urinal bottle. Diuretics, to lessen his heart’s labor and prevent congestive heart failure, had long since become a fact of his life.

  Jean went out. She stood at the glassed-in, west-facing end of the corridor, looking out at the parking lot. The landscape was sunny and icy. Jean looked tired around the eyes. Her phone had rung, back at her house in Northampton, at seven o’clock this morning, an odd hour. She heard her own heart pounding as she went to pick it up. But it was just someone from the security service saying there’d been a burglary in the neighborhood last night.

  For six months she’d lived with her nerves on edge, dreading every phone call when Earl was in the hospital and, when he was at home, lying awake half the night, fearing the worst. Five times Jean had driven Earl to the hospital, had left him there, and come back to her empty house, wondering whether this time she should prepare for a funeral or another less than joyous homecoming. Several times the doctors predicted that Earl wouldn’t rally, and the whole family gathered. Jean couldn’t remember how many nights she’d spent on couches in the hospital’s waiting rooms, sometimes sneaking past the nurses into Earl’s room for a late-night chat. For months she’d had her house invaded by medical strangers and medical equipment. A compulsion for privacy and order was a weakness of hers, she knew. “I’m a picture-straightener.” It seemed cruel and ironic, though, that when one was weakest, one had to rely on strangers for help.

  Jean wished all this news about war would cease. There was too much death around her already. She didn’t know whether she had the strength to take Earl home again.

  The sun was so bright on the icy grounds it made her squint. Her first husband had died in the early spring, many years ago. Memories of the aftermath were fresh again. As if standing outside herself, she had watched her hold on sanity slip away. The times when she felt lost, literally lost, in the middle of a supermarket, and her daughters, teenagers then, had to lead her down the aisles and finally out of there. Then one day a friend told her that she had to keep herself together for the sake of her children. Those simple words helped a great deal then. So she had to hold on now, for her own sake as well as Earl’s.

  Jean would not express regrets about either of her marriages or declare one better than the other. But she had found, for herself, advantages in a second marriage in the years after children. One came to such a marriage fully formed. Knowing herself, she felt free to be herself. Of course, Earl had a lot to do with that. He let her feel that way. Another man might have bridled at the thought of living in her house, and that would have been hard. She loved her large old house, on a tree-lined street in Northampton. Earl had adopted it, not possessively but comfortably, naturally, just as he had adopted her children. He’d been a marvelous father to them in their young adult lives, she thought.

  They had an almost perfect partnership. She tended to get fuddled over little things, like balancing a checkbook. A routine notice from the IRS could upset her greatly. She’d worry aloud, and Earl would say, “Don’t worry. It’ll be all right.” And it always was all right. She tended to be shy. Earl seemed to know everyone, and everyone he knew seemed ready to do him a favor. Confronted with a problem he couldn’t solve himself, Earl had only to pick up the phone to make everything all right again. He had strength and boundless energy. Those qualities, Jean thought, were attractive to a woman, to this woman especially. She felt very safe with him.

  Jean’s family was one of Holyoke’s most prominent. She grew up on the other side, the wealthy side, of the canals of Holyoke from Earl. When she was a young woman, she enlisted in the World War II Army. Her mother was horrified. Jean enlisted partly because she wanted to fight evil in the world and partly because she wanted to test herself—she believed her life too sheltered. Jean was intellectually adventurous. But what others could do easily in the physical world required strong acts of will from her. She marveled at how comfortable Earl was in the world, a way that she could never be. She was the philosopher of their union, always trying to look beneath the surface of things. Earl was not very philosophical or introspective. But Jean never wished him otherwise. What charmed her most about him was that he remained the same—cheerful, competent, friendly, unpretentious—whether alone at home with her, or in the company of his golfing buddies, or in a park in Yugoslavia feeding pigeons.

  They traveled all over the world. On one trip they conceived the wish that they’d die together, in a big bang in the sky, coming back from another trip somewhere. But things weren’t turning out that way. Sometimes Jean wished that Earl had died from the heart attack, without foreknowledge. Philosophically, she didn’t believe in keeping people alive just for the sake of doing so. But in the particular case, how did one know when to stop applying for help from medicine? Earl wanted to live. She wanted him to live, for his sake and her own. She hated the thought of facing life alone again, without her buddy, as she often called him in her mind.

  Jean understood why Earl wanted to come home to die. But she meant more than she’d said back in the room, when she’d told him that she didn’t want him dying at home. She didn’t want to be complicitous in his death, and she felt all worn out with anguish and the effort, more mental than physical, of keeping him alive. She was afraid of failing him. While Earl was here at Linda Manor, others were responsible. Standing at the windows at the corridor’s end, Jean rubbed her hands as if to warm them against the chill on the other side of the glass. Behind her and in front of her she saw months of wakeful nights. She couldn’t bring Earl home yet.

  5

  The morning sun lay on Lou’s neck. This winter morning’s conversation began with child rearing.

  “I don’t think we ever hit any of our kids,” Lou said. “My wife washed Harold’s mouth out with soap for calling Ruthie a bum once. We didn’t have TV. We couldn’t take that away from them.” Lou squinted his eyes shut behind his thick glasses. “We got Ruth a player piano. Harold played the violin for a very short period and then he said, ‘You should have hit me over the head before you went to the expense.’”

  Not all of the reminiscing that went on in this room was Lou’s. For both men, memories seemed to expand spheres of action backward, the way a wall of mirrors seems to expand a room.

  “I played the violin for years and years,” said Joe, reclining. “My father started me when I was five. Two or three people in Berkshire County could beat me. Them were the days when you didn’t have TV or anything, so everybody… My sister played piano, my father played the sax.”

  “They used to sell song sheets at the five-and-dime,” said Lou. “In Philadelphia. And they used to have a piano player and a vocalist to advertise the songs.”

  Joe remembered a classmate who could really play. “He got killed by a tree. He was good, but none of ’em was good enough to play, uh, Boston Symphony Orchestra.”

  “I wish I could remember the name of that piano player we used to hear at Fairmount Park. He ruined his life with alcohol and drugs,” Lou said.

  Joe hummed a snatch of a song, one he’d heard as a boy.

  “Very good, Joe.” Lou lifted a hand, extending the index finger. “In Fairmount Park they used to have
bands come and play for the public. That’s where I heard him.”

  Joe was still thinking about the boy who had been felled by a tree. “I think he was good enough to play in a symphony orchestra.”

  “The one I’m thinking of?” Lou asked.

  “The Boston Symphony,” Joe said. “Plays at Tanglewood. They wouldn’t let me carry the fiddle on the Boston Symphony.”

  “That place on Lemon Hill in Philadelphia and the gazebo was the first time I took Jennie to a park to hear music.”

  “When I was a kid, every Jewish boy and Italian boy played a musical instrument, that’s all.”

  “Each one was gonna be Jascha Heifetz, huh?”

  “He went to Juilliard School of Music and played piano and cello,” said Joe, speaking again of the boy he’d known, the best musician in Pittsfield in his time.

  “How come I didn’t play an instrument, Joe?” Lou closed his eyes, and he smiled. “I wish I could remember that piano player’s name.”

  “I know who you mean,” Joe said. “I think his first name was Oscar.”

  “I think you’re right, Joe.”

  “Last name begins with an M?” Joe asked.

  Lou would call his daughter Ruth. Maybe she’d know. But there was no answer. He sat back down by the window. “It’s a shame,” Lou murmured. “He ruined his life on alcohol and drugs.” More loudly, he said, “Who’s that other meshuggener who hammed it up too much?”

  “Victor Borge?”

  “I liked what he played. I didn’t like it when he clowned.” Lou again lifted a hand from the arm of his chair and turned his palm upward. “Speaking of music, in Philadelphia we had the Settlement Music School. It was a Red Feather agency. Like the United Way. It was in a big old home in South Philadelphia. Had a stage on the first floor, for plays and dancing. They had a Russian ballet teacher.”

  “Mmmm.” Joe’s brow was knitted. “Oscar something. He had a face only a mother could love.”

  “Yup,” said Lou. “Towards the end his face was all puffed up.” Then he said, in his smoothed old voice, “The man who ran the Settlement School would go to the waterfront docks when the boats came in and find an immigrant with an instrument and invite them to stay at their boarding house.”

  “All right, goddamn it!” Joe said. He began getting himself upright, grunting a little. He started putting on his shoes, calling over his shoulder to Lou, “I betcha I know who’ll know the name. Phil or Eleanor. Or Art.”

  From the hallway outside came the sound of Fleur’s voice saying, “Can somebody call my mother and tell her to pick me up?”

  “Oh, shut up,” said Joe under his breath. He limped toward the door, heading out to find someone who might know the name of that piano player, first name Oscar, who ruined his life with alcohol and drugs.

  In his chair by the window, Lou returned to the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia. Every Saturday Jennie would take Ruth down there for piano lessons. On the trolley. The number 50. And Jennie would give the neighborhood children dancing lessons at their own house on Ruscombe Street. They said it was an entirely black neighborhood now. Back then it was mixed. Jennie would tie up the chandelier and roll up the rug. She tried to teach Lou to dance, too, but he had two left feet. And there was always cookies and milk for the kids who came. It was never “Don’t bring your friends.” Everyone was welcome. That’s how Jennie was. “She always gave of herself.” Lou lifted his chin, squinting his eyes hard.

  A knock at the door intervened. By the time Lou had said “Come in,” an aide had already entered, pushing the blood-pressure machine. It was mounted on wheels. It looked like a tool for fixing cars. The aide was doing weekly vitals.

  Lou said, “How is it?” as the aide removed the cuff from his arm.

  “Excellent.”

  “Careful. Bob’s got a patent on that word. Gonna take my temperature?”

  “No. One of the other girls.”

  “Everyone’s a specialist.” Lou lifted a hand. “You know the definition of a specialist? A doctor who knows more and more about less and less until he gets to the point where he knows everything about nothing.”

  The aide laughed. “Ain’t that the truth.”

  Lou settled back, wearing a rather satisfied-looking smile.

  In a moment, Joe limped into the doorway. “I couldn’t find Phil,” he announced. “And I had to come back to go to the bathroom.” He laughed. Joe Torchio not only liked bingo, he had to go to the bathroom a dozen times a day.

  “Tell me,” the aide said, “for my diary.” She meant the BM Book. “Did you or didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Lou said.

  “I’m about to,” Joe said.

  Joe went to the bathroom, the aide went off on her rounds, then Joe came out and, limping toward the door again, said, “I’m gonna go find Art or Ellen-er, Lou.” Joe paused in the doorway, leaning on his cane, and called back, “And after I find out, Lou, don’t bring up any more names to me today. Goddamn it!”

  Lou chuckled. He stretched his neck, resettled himself in his chair, and went back again to Philadelphia, back to the place where he’d left off, at the Settlement Music School. Jennie would take the kids to the Sugar Bowl on the way back from the music school to Lou’s mother’s house, where Lou would meet them on Saturday afternoons.

  Among the photographs that covered the wall to his left, there were only several of Lou, and none bridging the gap between Lou at seventeen in his World War I uniform and Lou in a suit with gray hair and the mustache that he grew when the company where he’d worked for thirty-five years finally went bankrupt. He was back now in the time between those two pictures. All he had to do was close his eyes and he was again at work on Saturday mornings at the fountain pen factory, across the Delaware in New Jersey. Them were the days. Lou didn’t have to work Saturdays, but he wouldn’t have denied himself the pleasure. He pretty much ran the factory on weekdays. On Saturday mornings he could experiment with the machinery without interference from his immediate boss, Whitehouse. Mr. Whitehouse. With his Brooks Brothers shirts and big Chrysler sedan. It had special extensions on the driver’s foot pedals, so that Whitehouse could reach them. One of the men at the factory once called Whitehouse “a little sonofabitch,” and Whitehouse replied, “I’m little, but I’m not a sonofabitch.” Whitehouse was nobody’s fool. Lou learned a lot from him. But truly he was a sonofabitch.

  One time Whitehouse called Lou from one of the other factory buildings. He and Lou argued about something. What was it? Anyway, Whitehouse said over the phone, “You couldn’t run a peanut factory.” Lou told him to come on over and run this one, he was going home. But Whitehouse knew Lou wouldn’t be so irresponsible as to leave a factory in full operation, and Lou knew he knew it.

  They were using leftover pen materials to make lipstick cases, and Lou found a better way to get rid of the seam in the cases. Whitehouse took a look at the modification in the machine and said, “It won’t work, I didn’t think of it.” But Whitehouse didn’t tell Lou to stop doing it. Whitehouse didn’t always get the better of him in technical matters. Already back there in his mind, Lou was about to get the better of Whitehouse when Joe’s voice said from the doorway, “Art. Art thought of the name. Oscar Levant.” Joe limped in and sat down on the edge of his bed.

  “You’re right,” Lou said.

  “No, Arthur was right.” Joe’s shoes clattered on the floor. Joe grunted, heaving himself onto his bed.

  “Oscar Levant, that’s the name,” Lou said.

  “It took Art a little while to remember it,” Joe said. “Phil didn’t remember it.”

  “I ever tell you about the time I got a hundred-dollar bonus?” said Lou.

  Joe grunted, on his back now.

  The big boss, Whitehouse’s boss, had a lot of different factories. One of them made carbon paper, and there was a problem, and Lou was trying to solve it one Saturday morning. “This carbon paper used to be wound on a fiber tube, which was comparatively expensive, and it
had to have a square hole in it.” Lou’s wrists had shrunk to frail thinness, but his hands, though veiny under papery skin, were still supple and robust enough to deliver firm handshakes—he hated limp handshakes, and if his right hand ever got too weak to deliver a firm one, he’d quit offering it. Lou’s hands now described the tube on which the carbon paper was wound, his hands pulling apart as if pulling taffy. Then his fingers drew the square hole that had to be made in the tube. To make this tube, they’d extrude nitrocellulose, through a machine like a very large meat grinder, onto a square rod. That process worked all right, except that, as it cured, the nitrocellulose would shrink and it was hard to get the finished tube off the square rod. “I came in one Saturday to run a sample core,” said Lou from his chair. He closed his eyes. He was smiling. He stood alone in the factory, over the extruding machine. Something had gone wrong. The square rod had gotten bent and was stuck at the mouth of the extruder. But the nitrocellulose tube kept coming out, perfectly formed, with a square hole in it and—this was the important thing—no rod to remove. “I thought, ‘This is pretty good.’”

  Joe looked thoughtful. “You know, I don’t think Oscar Levant took dope.”

  “Yes, he did, Joe,” Lou said.

  Joe mouthed silently, “He didn’t take dope.”

  “Getting back to my invention,” Lou said. “The tube kept coming and it didn’t collapse. I didn’t know what to do. If I told Whitehouse, he’d say, ‘It’s no good unless I thought of it first.’ So I went to a vice president of the company. He said take it to S.A. That was Mr. Niedich, the boss. So Mr. Niedich said, ‘Try it a couple more times, and don’t say anything to the old man.’ That’s what he called Whitehouse. The old man. It was successful. They told Whitehouse about it, and he never forgave me for that. But that year I got a hundred-dollar bonus.”

  Lou shifted in his chair. “You know how we tested fountain pens, don’t you?”

  Over on his bed, Joe turned his head and looked at Lou. Joe smiled gradually.