Old Friends

by Tracy Kidder

  She had a lot of plans. Some of what she was doing now was merely waiting—to see if she would win the $10 million Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes. A while back she received an entry blank and filled it out. Right on the front of the envelope it said that she might already be the winner. “If I should become a multimillionaire, I’ll buy the damn van myself.”

  Winifred paused in her morning chores to contemplate her chances. She had received many follow-up letters from the Sweepstakes people, all of them encouraging. “I have been working on it and answering every letter for months. My daughter keeps telling me, ‘Read the fine print.’ I keep saying, ‘No! I am reading every word that comes and there’s nothing that sounds negative.’ So I say to my daughter, ‘Okay, you skeptic, if you don’t go along with me and wish me the best, I’m not going to give you one red cent.’”

  Winifred knew this was a long shot, but as she thought about it, she felt pretty sure that she’d improved her odds. “The one thing that they accentuate in their correspondence is timeliness. And every time a letter comes, I fill out the questionnaire and put those silly stamps on. You’re not supposed to have to buy any magazines from them, but I believe it helps. And they praise me for my choices. I just buy one each time I get a letter, and usually as a gift for someone else.” The winner would be announced soon, on late-night TV, and she would be watching.

  ***

  Ideas of progress, like old habits, die hard. Earl still believed that this was no kind of place for a person who loved life. But he’d always felt at home in groups of people, and he was going to try to get involved in things a little more. Jean had urged him to do so. He loaded up his portable oxygen canister and walked behind his wheelchair to Ruth’s Literary Hour, out in the activity room.

  Earl didn’t say much before Ruth began to read, and he simply sat and listened to the conversation after she had finished. He was a newcomer here. Besides, Winifred was there and very voluble today. As Literary Hour began to disband, Winifred asked her fellow residents to wait for just a moment. But they were already leaving their places. Winifred said she had something to sell today. She was managing a mail-order contest, all proceeds for the Chairlift Van Campaign. The prize would be a stuffed Easter bunny. Ruth, smiling politely over her shoulder at Winifred, pushed one resident to the door. Lou was following. “You press the button and it plays ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘Here Comes Peter Cottontail,’” Winifred said.

  The procession of wheelchairs was moving out the door. Joe limped along behind them. Winifred, meanwhile, rummaged through a sheaf of papers on her lap, the papers for the contest. “Ah, here it is. Now on the back are all these names,” she said, but everyone had left, everyone except for Earl. Never mind. She still had an audience.

  Earl sat across the table from her, staring at her, nodding now and then.

  “And there are thirty-six chances,” Winifred said. “And I have to fill them all in before I can scratch them off and see who is the winner.” She shoved the contest card across the table toward Earl.

  He glanced toward the door. He looked back at Winifred. “I’ll take one.”

  Earl rubbed off one spot on the card, as directed. Winifred took the card back and accused him of rubbing off two spots. Earl denied it calmly.

  “Well, just let me see.” Winifred studied the card through her magnifying glass. “Well, you’re all right. You just owe me whenever. Just don’t rub off another, because that belongs to somebody else. And when we get this all rubbed off, we can see who the winner is.”

  “Yup. All right.” Earl stood up slowly, carefully, and made his way back to his room. He was still feeling better generally, but he couldn’t eat much. His hands, strong and supple on a golf club a mere six months ago, were skeletal. The other day his wedding band had fallen off his finger. Jean had put it on her own for safekeeping.

  Earl had not forgotten how, almost two months ago, he’d felt desperate for a telephone and Winifred had offered him the use of hers. He was less than interested in stuffed, musical Easter bunnies.

  Earl lay down on his back, thinking of Winifred. She certainly did have a knack for clearing out a room, he allowed. “But she’s alive, I’ll tell ya.”

  15

  Joe’s movies were one thing. There was no accounting for taste. As for Joe’s eating and dieting and exercising habits, it was obvious, as Lou often said, that Joe was his own worst enemy. But Lou could understand all that. Joe savored his luncheon outings, and he liked riding the bike. However, Joe’s inability to say the three simple words “I love you”—that was simply unfathomable.

  The other day a family friend who’d been visiting and was getting ready to leave asked Joe if he had any messages he wanted carried back to his wife. Joe said, “Tell her I love her.”

  Lou recalled again his father-in-law’s precept: No one knows what goes on between the sheets. But this was too much. “Why don’t you tell her yourself on the phone!” Lou cried out.

  “I do sometimes.”

  Lou couldn’t help himself. “I’ll get out of the room, if you’re bashful.”

  “Wait a minute,” Joe said. “I’ve only been married forty-seven years.”

  He was trying to wriggle out of this. “That has nothing to do with it, Joe.”

  “I know it. But, see, compared to you—”

  “I never went to bed without telling Jennie I loved her.”

  Then Joe said, “Open the window or not?” It was the last week of February. Word was, the air had some spring in it again.

  Lou let the subject be changed. He’d had his say. “We’ll give it a try.” He got up and groped his way to the sliding window to the right of the picture window. “Quite a breeze blowing in,” Lou said doubtfully.

  “It hasn’t reached me yet,” said Joe from over on his bed.

  So Lou left the window partway open and went back to his chair. They talked about the trouble Art was having with his legs, about Bob’s vigilant ways, about George Washington’s false teeth. Joe wondered if they’d been made of mahogany. Lou pointed out that the Father of Our Country wouldn’t have wanted red teeth. Lou thought they were probably made of white oak. He would remember to ask Ruth tomorrow to ask her dentist. Supper interrupted their conversation. Later, Joe called his wife.

  Lou sat across the room listening. His face looked stern. He felt stern again. It sounded as if Joe was arguing with his wife. Soon Joe hung up, simply saying, “All right, we’ll see ya.”

  Lou didn’t comment. He’d said what he had to say earlier. It was none of his business. Joe just had a different way. Lou wasn’t going to say anything about what he’d overheard. They’d talk about other things.

  But then Joe said, “Ahhh, dear.” He said that he wished he hadn’t argued with his wife. Joe sounded sad and remorseful.

  Lou thought of Joe’s lying over there feeling miserable. And for what? The solution was so simple. Lou was old enough to be Joe’s father. Well, he’d play the part again.

  “Joe. Next time before you hang up, why don’t you tell her you love her?”

  From the direction of Joe’s bed, through the gauze of his cataract, Lou saw the outline of Joe shift jerkily. He heard a brief series of sobs.

  “I’m sorry, Joe,” Lou said. He was truly sorry. He shouldn’t have said that. He should mind his own business.

  But Joe had recovered his voice. “No. No. I agree with you.”

  16

  Sometimes Earl’s roommate got confused, and the man was prey to those abrupt fits of weeping that strokes often induce. Once, over a month ago, he had been parked out by the nurses’ station and had started weeping, saying that he couldn’t watch what he wanted on TV. But that had all been straightened out, Earl thought. It was long past dark. Earl had asked his roommate, “Mind if I watch this show?” His roommate had said he didn’t mind. Now Earl was watching a mystery. As always, he had reminded Jean to be sure and watch this show at home tonight. He lay propped up on his pillows. Now and then he’d remind
himself that Jean was watching too, at home. Suddenly, two young women entered. One of them picked up the remote control from Earl’s bedside table. She put it down on his roommate’s table and said, “Mr. Duncan, you can’t have this.”

  But Earl’s roommate himself had given Earl the control to handle. Earl tried to explain.

  “Mister Duncan,” said the other young woman, “you cannot have that.”

  Earl was not a wrathful man. But this was the second time this had happened. When the social worker visited him the next morning, he simply asked her how many days’ notice one had to give before leaving Linda Manor. She sat down and asked him for the story. Earl told her that he felt as though he’d been treated like a five-year-old. She questioned Earl’s roommate, who said there was no problem, that he got to watch what he wanted, and that Earl helped him find the channels. The social worker went back to her office and wrote a long note addressed to all of the Sunrise staff, a politic version of her thoughts, which were: “This really pisses me off. Earl shouldn’t be sitting in his room worrying about what two twenty-five-year-olds said to him last night. That’s the last thing he needs.”

  Earl worked hard on his family’s history off and on the rest of the day. He made his call about reinstating the reservations in Florida. The resort was booked. Earl had them put his name on the waiting list.

  ***

  Within a few days, by Thursday, the last day of February, Earl had shed the humiliation of his scolding. Earl’s sense of who he was could withstand much stronger blows. But everyone who has been mistaken for someone he is not feels lonely. Earl couldn’t shake the loneliness he felt in here when he was without Jean or other people from his former life beside him.

  If he lay in bed somewhere down in Holyoke, he’d have a steady stream of visitors, he thought. “See, they don’t know me here.” That was the problem. There were no biographies hanging on residents’ doors. It was all too apparent that this was a place where biographies ended. He had more visitors than many people who languished here—Jean and his children and a few old friends from Holyoke. But the majority of his old pals still hadn’t come. Earl could imagine why. Linda Manor was a twenty-minute drive each way for them, and most people didn’t need stronger excuses not to visit nursing homes. Earl didn’t feel angry at his absent friends, only disappointed. He’d just like to see them.

  His family doctor, the same who had given him the bad news about two months ago, was due in this morning. Earl had asked for the visit. The prospect worried him, but he had to know if anything had changed to improve his prognosis. He’d like to hear his doctor say that Florida was possible. Just now he missed Jean. She came in early this morning and stayed briefly. She promised to return this evening for a lengthy visit. She said she had a busy day ahead of her. Earl didn’t begrudge her that, a day of her own. Far from it. He looked forward to hearing all about it, every detail she could think of—for Earl, the next-best thing to being there.

  Right now his friends would be sitting in the booths at Friendly’s on Northampton Street in Holyoke. If only he could join them. He’d love to go down there some morning with his health restored. He’d just show up at the door. He’d gladly put up with a few bad jokes about where he had been the last eight months. Maybe he could go there some morning even as he was. His friends would know that he was still himself in every way that counted. He needed something like that to look forward to. He had held his tongue with Jean this morning. But most of last night, lying awake in spite of his sleeping pill, he thought of pleading with her, pleading, to take him home. All he said to her this morning, though, was that he’d like to visit home and go through his desk. Right now he’d settle for that, a trip back to their house in Northampton. He really would like to see his desk and go through its drawers. But he wasn’t sure if he could travel even that far right away. This morning, in the bathroom, he’d dropped a towel and, bending down for it, he’d fallen to his knees. To his astonishment, he couldn’t get up. He had to pull the emergency cord to summon help.

  Now he lay on his bed with the catheter at his nostrils, breathing carefully. The canned oxygen left a funny taste in his mouth. His roommate lay in bed beside him, but the privacy curtain was partway drawn. His roommate was probably asleep. A soap opera played on the TV screen, and nobody was watching it. It had snowed again yesterday, just a couple of inches. The snow would be gone by lunchtime. It looked like a pretty day, what Earl could see of it, around the privacy curtain, through the picture window on the other side of the room. A rose in a vase and a vase full of jonquils stood on the sill.

  ***

  Earl’s doctor didn’t keep him waiting long.

  He was a stocky figure in the doorway, dressed in a dark, slightly rumpled suit, with a stethoscope around his neck. He sat down on the edge of the chair beside Earl’s bed. Leaning forward, his hands clasped, he asked Earl how he felt. Earl said he felt depressed, frankly.

  “That’s the tragedy,” the doctor said. “Your mind is perfect, and your body can’t keep up.” He had a quiet voice and a laconic manner. He seemed the sort of man who preferred listening to talking.

  Earl spoke in a hasty-sounding way, taking quick shallow breaths—it is hard to speak normally while breathing through a catheter. “I’ve gotta get out of here,” Earl said. “I told Jean I wanted to go home and just go through my desk.”

  “That’s a good idea,” the doctor said. “Do it in small steps. Take some short trips. It’ll be easier on Jean.”

  The doctor sat down on the bed behind Earl, to examine him. Earl sat bolt upright, his mouth open, as the doctor applied the stethoscope. Earl looked distressed, perhaps from trying to oblige and take deep breaths, and his eyes were wide. Then the doctor took off the scope and went back to the chair beside the bed. Earl lay back against his pillows.

  “You’re not better. You’re not any worse.” The doctor said there was some fluid in Earl’s lungs; he’d increase the Lasix.

  Earl looked at the doctor’s face. “About two months ago you told me I had between a week and six months.”

  The doctor nodded. “It’s probably. That’s all I can say. It’s because your heart is functioning so marginally. Because of that, I didn’t think you’d be here in six months.”

  Earl raised his head from the pillows, an eagerness, a near smile, on his face. “Oh, you meant I wouldn’t be in here?”

  The doctor looked squarely at him. His voice was very soft, almost a whisper. “No. Among the… living.”

  “Oh.”

  Earl told the doctor he hoped to go to Florida next week, but that it looked as though there wasn’t space for him and Jean. “It’s March, you know.”

  The doctor nodded. He said, again in a very soft voice, “You’re not going to Florida.”

  Earl said, “I’d like to go in my sleep.”

  “You probably will.”

  Suddenly Earl’s voice had an edge to it. “I could just walk out that door and do myself in.”

  “Probably not,” said the doctor, his own voice resigned. “You’re not strong enough. They’d probably catch you.”

  For a long moment the two men didn’t speak. Earl stared at the wall across from him. To his left, a commercial flickered across the TV screen, the images mostly washed out in the sunlight. Then the doctor said, “We have to make the best of where we are.”

  “I know it,” Earl said. “I’d like to make some short trips. Not for long, because I get tired.”

  “Just an hour or two. You don’t have much reserves,” the doctor said. He added quietly, “You don’t have any.”

  ***

  Mary Ann, on her morning med pass, came in as usual, carrying a cup of pills and another of water. She hadn’t seen Earl’s doctor, let alone talked to him, but it wasn’t hard to tell that something was wrong. Earl was breathing rapidly. He struggled to sit up. Finally, he swung his legs over the edge of the bed.

  “Trouble getting up today,” said Mary Ann, sitting down beside him. He took
the pills and water. “A Duncan donut,” she said. “I made a funny.” She hugged him.

  It was an odd tableau, the very thin, pale Earl hanging limp in big Mary Ann’s embrace. “That’s what we need, a sense of humor,” Earl said. His voice sounded rueful, but he was smiling a little.

  “We only do this when your wife’s not around. You were single, I could kiss you.”

  “You can kiss me anytime.”

  “She’s a good nurse,” Earl said when Mary Ann had left. “But the others, they aren’t nurses. They have no personality, some of them. So I guess my gripe this morning is… Not a gripe. At least I know where I stand, maybe. But to get away from the business world and the social world…”

  From behind the privacy curtain came Earl’s roommate’s voice. “I spent thirty-four years and nine months workin’ at the VA.” A raucous game show was playing on the TV now. His roommate, it seemed, was talking to himself.

  Earl went on: “I guess my Florida trip is definitely out. I could’ve maybe died on the way down… That’d be fun if I could go down to Friendly’s on Northampton Street. Not all the gang’ll be there. A few are in Florida. If I’m gonna die, I’d like to see some friends… When I think of all the things I was involved in, and all the civic things I tried to do…”

  The phone rang. It was his daughter. “Well, pretty good,” he said into the phone. “I’m having a hard time breathing. The doctor was in this morning. I said, ‘Would you repeat to me what you said about two months ago, about a week to six months?’ He said, ‘That’s right.’ I’d like to just go in my sleep. I was going to tell Jean I wanted to go home, but I guess I can’t. I fell in the bathroom this morning, and I couldn’t get up. Yeah, if you could come Sunday, I’d appreciate it. By the way, did you ever buy anything for your birthday? Whatever you did buy, I’m going to give you a check Sunday for fifty dollars.”