by Tracy Kidder
Earl seemed more like his old self than ever before in here, in spite of the lost tooth. He hung up the phone and said, “I’m getting to know the people here.” He had plenty to keep him busy today. He’d get his favorite aide to help him with the tape recorder, so he could begin dictating the family history. Technology makes it easy for younger generations to earn the admiration of their elders. Earl couldn’t seem to get the recorder to work right, but that aide could. “She’s a world beater.”
12
“Dad? How’s Earl Duncan doing?” Ruth asked Lou upstairs in the room.
“Well, I went down to see him the other day, and he was doing fine. Then I went down yesterday and the nurse said he wasn’t feeling well, so I didn’t go in.”
“Oh,” said Ruth.
Joe changed the subject. The subject was the weight that Joe couldn’t lose, in spite of diet Jell-O and long rides on the bike.
Lou, from his seat by the window, said, “The best exercise, Joe, is—”
Joe sat up and said, “Pushing yourself away from the table. Jesus Christ, my grandfather said that.”
Lou made a pantomime of shrinking back in his chair and swallowing his last words. Then he smiled and said, “I’m quoting your grandfather.”
“And his grandfather told him!”
Lou’s thoughts were already elsewhere. He had heard that three oranges cost a dollar.
“Jesus Christ! Three oranges for a dollar?” said Joe.
“I can’t believe what Dave was telling me about coffee,” said Lou. “Three dollars a pound.” He shook his head.
“Well,” said Joe, “we don’t know what real life is. We’re in a nursing home.”
The price of things was one of Lou and Joe’s continuing subjects. They agreed—vehemently sometimes, as if they were arguing—that the price of things nowadays proved they were superannuated. In the real world a pound of coffee cost almost as much as Lou had once earned in a week. There was no point in trying to keep track of such a crazy world. In agreement with Joe on that point, Lou got his cane and headed downstairs for Current Events. “See ya late-ah, Joe.”
In the activity room every Friday, for about half an hour, the activities aide Rita read aloud articles from the regional newspapers. The turnout was usually thin. It would have been thinner if the Forest View staff hadn’t routinely rounded up four or five demented residents and sent them down to hear the news. This was a way for the staff to get some respite, and was perhaps a silent protest against the general lack of activities designed for Linda Manor’s demented. Zita, the gray-haired woman who paced the halls and tried to pluck flowers from the carpet, had already fallen asleep in her chair. The former inner-city schoolteacher was trying to read a newspaper upside down. The tiny Fleur, the woman who was always wanting to call her mother on the phone, asked the room in general, “We havin’ a party or somethin’?” A couple of able-minded women were there. They were regulars. Lou and Joe’s neighbor Hazel asked the aide to read all of the local obituaries. “The Irish comics,” Hazel called them. Being Irish herself, she was entitled. She smiled sadly, hearing a couple of familiar names. To outlive one’s contemporaries is, after all, a species of accomplishment. Lou was the only man there, as usual, and once the obituaries were read and the demented residents had fallen into attentive but puzzled-looking silences, he and the aide carried on, the aide reading the news and Lou offering commentary. “Here’s an article about another beaching of whales on the Cape,” said the aide, Rita.
“I think it’s pollution that’s causing it,” Lou said.
“Bringing them in,” Rita agreed.
Lou said, in a slightly higher voice, “What I don’t understand—they claim the whales have to stay wet—why the fire department doesn’t hook up its pumps.”
“I like to read a few good things,” Elgie put in.
“That’s why I say we should write our own newspaper,” said Rita.
But Lou was not afraid of bad news.
“They’re expecting a big fight in Moscow today,” said Rita.
“Maybe they’ll bring the czar back,” said Lou.
“Ooooh,” said Rita. “Richmond, California. It says there’s a rash of—”
Lou interrupted. He’d already heard this news. “Legionnaires’. It’s in an area where they failed to clean their air-conditioning filters. That’s what happened when they discovered so-called Legionnaires’ disease at the Bellevue-Stratford in Philadelphia. They didn’t clean the filters as often as they should.”
“Isn’t that something,” said Rita.
“The problem is,” said Lou severely, “they don’t do the maintenance.”
“Oh, here’s something! A bicycle for eight.”
“That’s what this country needs,” said Lou.
“Here’s a bit of slightly good news. ‘The Persian Gulf War should not cost the United States any money.’”
“So far the other countries haven’t come across with their share,” said Lou, wearing a dark look.
“I think they will,” said Rita.
“I don’t know,” said Lou. “I think they’re gonna hem and haw on it, that’s for sure.”
Rita read some figures. One country was going to give $12 million, another $11.5 billion.
“Promises, promises,” intoned Lou.
***
Joe liked these hours and half hours when Lou went to activities. Over this last year he had discovered—it seemed like for the first time in his life—a capacity for calmness. Lou might have been astonished to hear that, but Lou hadn’t known him before. The other night, for instance, Joe had called his wife and gotten no answer. At such times he used to fill up with worry. He would call his son to ask where the hell his mother was. But the other night he waited and called his wife back later, and sure enough, everything was all right. She’d just been out to dinner at the neighbors’. In his newfound calmness, Joe could see himself more clearly. He remembered how as a young man he’d imagined himself like the movie actor Leslie Howard, suave, urbane, insouciant. Joe guffawed at that old fantasy, remembering himself back then, jealous, combative, always anxious. He was different now, both inside and outside. Somewhat more on the outside, he thought. “I still have things inside me.”
Lou would return soon. Today being Friday, there’d be scrod for lunch, and before lunch Lou would probably tell his scrod joke, one of Lou’s two or three off-color jokes. Lou would probably say again, “You know the story about the proper Bostonian lady. She said, ‘I’m going to Boston to get scrod.’”
Joe wouldn’t mind hearing the joke again. “He’s seventy, eighty, ninety, ninety-one, for Chrissake. He can tell his joke. Good God.”
But when Lou came back to the room, he had something else on his mind, obviously. He gave Joe his usual summary of Current Events, and then, shifting in his chair, lifting a hand, index finger extended, Lou said, “Changing the subject a little. Talking about tools…”
Joe grinned. He sat up in his bed and, still grinning, said toward Lou, “I wasn’t aware we were talking about tools.”
“I was up last night trying to figure this out,” Lou went on. “Millers Falls. They made tools somewhere around here. Are they still in business?” Lou didn’t wait for an answer. He lifted an index finger again. “The first tool I ever bought myself was a hand drill. I was working in a shop that made electrical fixtures. I had to drill small holes. And I paid three dollars and fifty cents for that drill, and three dollars and fifty cents was my wages for the week, and that tool is still in good working order. I gave it to my grandson. It has the Millers Falls label on the handle.”
Still grinning, Joe sat up again and said toward Lou, “Changing the subject a little.”
“A hundred and ninety degrees.” Lou smiled. “Go ahead, Joe.”
“I don’t have anything to say.” Joe lay back and let his laughter out. Then, the trace of a smile on his face, Joe lay listening to Lou reminisce.
Lou said he knew where all of his ol
d tools had gone, and it was true. Joe had overheard Lou on the phone on Saturday mornings asking his grandson about the well-being of that old hand drill. Afterward, Lou had told Joe that the drill was still “in perfect working order.” Over on the table beside him was Lou’s album of photos of knickknacks and furniture he had made. Lou had shown the pictures to Joe, and often Joe had lain here watching and listening while Lou, who could no longer see those photos himself, showed them to various visitors and staff. Joe had listened many times this past year as memory summoned Lou back to his workshops. Knowing where his old tools were and having pictures of things he’d made with them kept that part of his life real. Sitting there by the window, Lou would reconstruct the furniture, telling how he’d used this and that tool, now in his son’s workshop, to make that grandfather clock, now in the album and in a granddaughter’s living room. And lying on his bed, Joe listened.
That first tool, the seventy-eight-year-old Millers Falls hand drill, was like the fertilized egg of Lou’s memory. It seemed to carry all the information Lou needed to reconstitute his long life. The drill took him back: Lou finishing up eighth grade on a Thursday in 1914 and skipping the graduation ceremony in order to start his first full-time job. Turning over his $3.50 paycheck to his mother, who somehow managed always to put food on the table for a large family. His father’s delivery service that ended in failure, like all his other ventures, in this case when his horse went lame. The restaurant and boarding house in South Philadelphia, Lou’s father’s voice calling to his mother in the kitchen, speaking about a man who had ordered beef stew, which cost a nickel, “Take the beef out, the bum’s only got three cents.” Shutting his eyes tight, Lou described Philadelphia, in whole and in parts, and repopulated it, with that Irish cop with a voice like Joe’s and that hawker down in the Tenderloin.
That old hand drill took Lou forward from boyhood, through his long succession of jobs, helping to wire up factories and shipyards. With that drill and a can of shoe polish, for covering up scratches in baseboards, Lou once again brought the first electricity to a number of houses in Philadelphia.
Joe could imagine the hollow feeling of unemployment that lay upon Lou these days. It lay upon Joe, too, sometimes. Probably it was that feeling that took Lou back once again to the time, in his late fifties, when after thirty-five years of running the pen factory in Burlington, the company went bankrupt and Lou was left with neither pension nor job, and at every interview he could see that his gray hair was being studied, and he waited to hear the interviewer say, “We’ll get back to you.” But that was all right, Lou would say. He and Jennie always lived frugally, and Jennie never complained. “She was never demanding.” Lou got a job finally, working with industrial machinery again. “I invented a few things for them, too.” Then he was sixty, moving to California, where their son Harold, who was an engineer, found Lou a job in the model shop at Lockheed. There Lou, who’d started out in the early days of electricity, made pieces of models of rockets and space stations. Then Lou was being forced to retire at the age of sixty-eight, and was enlisting as the maintenance man for the apartment complex where he and his wife lived, fixing locks and windows and appliances until he was seventy-five. Then he was in his workshop, building furniture.
Joe listened to Lou inventing things as a boy, working on designs for a perpetual motion machine, for a bobbinless sewing machine. When remembering the hand drill led to remembering the job for which he had bought it and that job led to his next jobs, which he sometimes skipped over, and he came finally to the fountain pen factory, then Lou was rising again at 4:30 in the morning, reriding the trolley through the quiet streets down to the ferry terminal, to cross the Delaware. He crossed it every day except Sundays for thirty-five years, wondering, when there was ice in the river, about the strength of the ferryboat’s hull. He boarded the train on the other side. He remembered all the stops. Joe could hear the conductor calling them out. Lou also remembered the names of the factories that lined the tracks of his daily commute through that part of New Jersey. Once in a while he’d pick up some information from other commuters bound for other factories. He made it a point to visit the factories of his factory’s suppliers. Lou was amazing, Joe thought. He still knew everything there was to know about how fountain pens were made, about the invention of ballpoints, about the fabrication of carbon paper. He had watched tinkers make their little dams of clay to catch excess solder, and then throw out the ruined clay, which was why, of course, tinkers’ dams had become synonyms for worthlessness.
The first times he heard Lou repeating himself, nearly a year ago now, Joe had decided to say nothing about it because Lou seemed like a nice guy, and he was old, really old. Joe felt differently now. He liked to hear Lou repeat his stories. He actually liked to hear them again.
There was something beautiful about Lou in the act of storytelling, opening up his storehouse of memories and bringing them back to life. He summoned up his memories with what seemed like the force of necessity. Telling his stories, he sat quite still in his chair but his hands became animated, and if he was interrupted midcourse, by a visit from an aide or a nurse, he would stop. He might even chat with the intruder, but his fingers would stroke the arms of his chair or drum lightly upon them, and when the intruder departed, he would pick up his story just where he’d left off.
Joe recalled the old story about two prisoners locked up together so long that they no longer tell each other their jokes. One simply says, “Thirty-six,” and the other at once begins laughing hysterically. Maybe he and Lou resembled those prisoners, two old pensioners who had run out of new things to say to each other. It was true that local news was scant. Around here, what qualified as a new story usually had to do with someone’s new ailment. Lou’s stories were more entertaining than most contemporary local ones. Heard only twice, Lou’s memories could seem monotonous. Heard many times, they were like old friends. They were comforting. They lent stability to Joe’s life in this room, and there was little enough of that around here, in many rooms in this building. Lou’s memories seemed like an immortal part of him. They existed right now forever. Lou’s memories contained such a density of life that in their presence death seemed impossible.
Here in the room, he was often at the business of keeping his wife alive. The fact that some of his memories about her were painful was part of the point. Joe understood this. His voice turning high and reedy, Lou would say, “I have a mental picture of my wife on the day she had her first stroke, which I can’t eradicate from my mind. And which I don’t want to eradicate from my mind!” As he said those last words, Lou’s gentle countenance would turn stony, as if he meant to warn Joe against telling him to put such thoughts away. In a softer voice, Lou would describe that mental picture again. Though he couldn’t smell anything in the present, in his mind he smelled the meal Jennie had been cooking—Canadian smelts. “Ahhh, beauty-ful.” He heard the thud from the kitchen again, and he saw Jennie lying on the floor by the stove, and also, lying on the floor beside her—this detail had weight and was never omitted from Lou’s telling—her wire-rim eyeglasses with the temple pieces bent.
Jennie didn’t seem to be breathing. Lou had never been trained in artificial respiration, but he had read about it. He knelt down and breathed into Jennie’s mouth, and she revived. Lou didn’t always tell that part of the story, and when he did, he seemed to think it incidental. Joe did not agree. “How old were you?”
“It was a couple years ago,” Lou answered.
He’d have been in his eighties when he did that. Good God.
Lou also worked on his memory now, Joe realized. That is, Lou maintained and improved his bank of memories. One of the nurses had brought in a collection of clocks. Nearly every time he and Joe passed them in the display case in the central corridor downstairs, Lou would stop and peer in and wonder aloud what had happened to that clock of his mother’s that used to rest on the mantels of their many homes. “I’ve got to remember to ask my sister next time she call
s.” Next Saturday on the phone, Joe would overhear Lou asking his sister. Lou’s mother used to tell him that when he was a baby, before the family moved to Philadelphia, Lou witnessed the return of Admiral Dewey’s fleet from the Philippines. His mother said she carried him down to the New York City waterfront and stood among the crowd, holding him in her arms. Lou had carted this memory of a memory around for the better part of a century, but it was only recently, here at Linda Manor, that he had set out to verify the story. He asked his son-in-law to look up the date. Lou was born on May 2, 1899, and Admiral Dewey returned from Manila on October 3 of that year. These facts had become a necessary addendum to Lou’s telling of the story. “The dates checked out,” Joe would hear Lou say.
Lying on his back, listening to Lou today, Joe had watched himself scissor the fingers of his good hand, and had kept silent. Now Lou had left off. He’d left off too soon to suit Joe. Watching himself scissor his fingers, Joe said, “Hey, Lou, who was the relative you were visiting in New York and you got the cot and she was still talking?”
Lou smiled. “Oh, that was my sister-in-law, who called up a friend to borrow a cot.”
Joe laughed.
“What are you laughing about? I haven’t told the story yet,” said Lou.
Joe backed off at once. “I just think it’s funny, that’s all.”
Lou went on: “Harry and I walked a few blocks to the friend’s house, said hello, got the cot, brought it back, and she was still on the phone talking to the person we borrowed the cot from.”
“That’s funny,” said Joe.
“The story I like,” said Lou, “my sister-in-law’s sister was being courted, and her father came down in his robe and said to the young man, ‘You expect to see my daughter again?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, how you gonna see her again if you don’t go home first?’”
