by Tracy Kidder
On April 22, a day reminiscent of November, when all the world outside is gray and visitors cross the parking lot huddled in raincoats and the still-leafless maples by the drive stand dark and dripping, Dora wets a thumb, turns to today’s page in her diary, and writes, “Beautiful morning here.”
This is a prophecy. The next day the sun comes out, and for weeks blue skies prevail. The limbs of the hardwoods in the groves around the building give off the reddish glow of incipient growth. Spring has not exactly entered Linda Manor, except in rooms like Lou and Joe’s, where the windows are cracked open. But Dora’s interior weather and the objective weather have begun to coincide, and pictures of a bountiful spring have arrived at every window.
***
The Judge, a courtroom drama, has unfolded toward a climax, and Bob is thrilled. He sits in his room upstairs, on the edge of a chair, poking a finger at the screen. “Oh, boy. I’m tellin’ ya.”
Up on the witness stand, an elderly man says, “Of course the way I took care of my parents…”
“Bullshit,” says Bob.
“Now he wants to throw away five generations of craftsmanship and lock us up in a retirement home,” continues the old man. He is speaking of his son.
Bob looks thoughtful, as if considering changing sides in the dispute. He runs a finger back and forth across the cleft between his lower lip and chin. He leans forward toward the screen.
Suddenly, the old man clutches his chest and topples forward onto the courtroom floor. He must be having a heart attack. And who should rush to the old man’s side but the son’s despised fiancée.
Bob is chortling.
The old man lies on the courtroom floor, twitching all over.
“Told ya! Damn it all!” cries Bob.
The courtroom fades into another commercial. “Come on, for Christ’s sake,” says Bob. “Yak, yak, yak. It’s ree-diculous!”
When the courtroom fades back in, the stricken father has vanished from the floor. The judge tells the son that he is free to sell the family business and marry his fiancée.
“Hoo-ray!” says Bob.
The judge says to the courtroom, “A family relationship should be built on love.”
“Bullshit!” says Bob.
The son’s fiancée starts to speak about filial piety. Bob stands up, says “Goddamn fool,” and snaps off the TV. “All right, let’s go.”
Bob hurries, limping on his cane, through the halls of Linda Manor like a fire truck in traffic. The lobby is his destination. His doorkeeping chair awaits him. It appears to be exactly where he left it, but must be a few inches out of place. Bob makes the corrections, sits down, scratches his nose with his good hand—“Goddamn nose. Itch, itch, itch”—and then extracts a roll of wintergreen candies from his shirt pocket. He works a candy off the roll with his lips, slides it into his mouth, crumples up the excess wrapper into a little ball, leans over, and deposits it in the pot of the plant beside his chair.
Bob keeps watch as the afternoons lengthen. Warm weather lures a few of the more mobile and determined residents outdoors. They wheel themselves past Bob and sit outside in front of the portico. Every so often, a resident gets positioned so as to block Bob’s view of the drive and parking lot. “Goddamnitall!” says Bob, shaking a fist at the figures out there in the window. Rising, Bob hurls the front doors open, stumps out, and shakes his cane at the obstructionists. Usually, they move.
***
The soil in the potted plant is disappearing gradually beneath Bob’s little foil balls of candy wrapper. On the lawn outside, maintenance erects a yellow tent, under which on Father’s Day—mothers are also invited—a noisy crowd of residents and relatives and staff gather for a picnic lunch. The white-haired combo, the same that played here New Year’s Eve, sets up their music stands just outside the greenhouse. Between them and the tent Winifred is parked, her legs sticking out on her wheelchair’s extenders, dressed in one of her best silky gowns, about to give a speech.
Yesterday and the day before, Winifred sat out here happily for hours, behind a table laden with a hundred different things assembled from the corners of her room—gifts she’d gotten and hadn’t used, or had used only a little, and things she’d purchased through the mail, and things she had recycled, such as her bookmarks and pictures of cute puppies torn from old calendars, and things that she had made, such as her collection of embroidered handkerchiefs, attached to a large piece of cardboard, which bore this beguiling hand-lettered advertisement:
Assorted Handkerchiefs
Some hand Tatted edge
Some crocheted
Some for Doilies
Some for Framing
Some for Blowing or Weeping
She assembled all her hoarded treasures and offered them for sale, all proceeds to the Chairlift Van Campaign. At the center of her table she propped up a sign that read:
Raffle
Tickets $1.00
5 Fine Prizes
$1000 Goal
We Need Your Help
Today there is no selling, but Winifred has seen an opportunity. She has conferred with the leader of the combo, and he has obliged her by ordering a dramatic roll on the snare drum. A hush falls over the crowd at the sound, and Winifred leaps into it, calling toward the tent, “Can I have your attention briefly, please. I am speaking as chairperson of the commi-tee for the Linda Manor chairlift van. Isn’t that a mouthful?” Winifred laughs resoundingly. Her t’s, like Dora’s, are very crisp. “On Friday of the two-day Craft Fair, I sold for-tee-seven raffle tickets. I have sold a total of seven-tee-two! Leaving a total of twen-tee-eight of my allotment unsold.” Beneath the tent the picnickers turn back to their food and conversation. The staff now move to and fro around the tent again, carrying trays of food. “From the sale of miscellaneous merchandise, I realized a total of eigh-tee-two dollars and thir-tee-two cents!” cries Winifred. “The total for Saturday, a lesser day but appreciated, was for-tee-two dollars and eigh-tee cents. Bringing us to a grand total of one hundred and twen-tee-seven dollars and eigh-tee cents! We are pleased and grateful and thanks goes to…”
Behind her, the white-haired combo stand with their instruments poised. Winifred looks small, all alone out there in her wheelchair. Her voice, loud and cheery, rises into the warm June air, sweetened with the smell of new-mown grass, but her voice meets a barrier of babbling voices from the tent. Perhaps she doesn’t notice. “I don’t come from the George H. Beane Yankee auction family for naught! Today’s object is to realize an additional fund of one hundred dollars! I urge you to consider the urgent necessity of owning our own van, even without state assistance. It’s a scary and an ambitious undertaking! But with belief in our cause, we shall prevail!”
The members of the combo shift from their left feet to their right and back again. “Thanks for listening,” cries Winifred toward the noisy tent. “But listening isn’t enough. We appreciate nickels and quarters, but we really appreciate green!”
Winifred has absorbed her earlier defeat. How many bedridden people lay awake with her that night back in the winter, figuring they had a chance to win the Sweepstakes because of all the magazines they’d bought? Winifred, however, went right back to hatching schemes for chairlift van fundraising, plans for raffles and teacup auctions, plans to put the squeeze on a dozen local restaurants, then sell the donated food to residents and staff at a “social box lunch,” plans for getting residents to remember the van in their wills.
But the intervening times of enforced idleness torment Winifred. On many mornings, from her room on Sunrise, though her open door, comes the sound of weeping, mingled with TV. Winifred still sobs about the Hoyer Lift. “I still have that strength of will. Oh, I cannot, I will not, let anyone destroy it. I believe miracles will happen, but sometimes you have to give them a shove. And if I can’t touch my feet to the floor, how can I walk again? It just breaks my heart to think that I can’t use my own will, my own strength, to put my own feet on the floor. When they use the Hoyer, it
just denies you the chance to see what you can do. I really, really feel deprived. You have no idea how I long to slip out of bed, and sometimes I feel that I could do it. I could hold on to something.”
She sobs at this image of herself trying to stand beside her bed. And yet a little company and a chance to say all that almost always cheers her up.
The staff has not yet wheeled the Hoyer in. Winifred lies on her side in bed, looking out her window. Spring has passed too quickly for her. “Before you feel that you’re gathering years, you have the misconception that as you get older time is going to lag. But even bad days—it doesn’t matter—they are just fleeting. I look at the calendar and I think, ‘Where did the months go?’ I get almost in a panic and I think, ‘I must harness myself, hold myself back and not let it race so. I accomplish a lot, but I want to do more before this day goes.’ On wings. Time goes on wings. I wish I could reach out and put a leash on it.”
***
There’s clover in the grass outside. From Meadowview windows the surrounding bits of field are likely-looking pasture for a horse. Perhaps it is the grass that stirs Cliff’s memory and brings him out of his room down on Meadowview. Cliff is lean and gnarled. He wears a baseball cap with a legend above its brim that reads, “We Are All In This Alone.” He wears a cardigan sweater and has draped a down vest over the front rung of his walker. Cliff is ninety-three, partially deaf, and very unsteady on his feet, and he usually keeps to his room. The two nurses on duty and Meadowview’s lone male aide look up, surprised, as Cliff comes slowly down the hall and stops near the nurses’ station. They ask him where he’s going. Cliff says that he is looking for his horses.
The male aide stands beside Cliff and shouts his questions while the two nurses bustle here and there, listening in.
“Cliff,” shouts the male aide, “you used to deliver the mail up in the hill towns, didn’t ya?”
“Yup,” says Cliff.
“How’d you do it? With horses?”
“The first four years,” Cliff says. “Then they started clearin’ the roads, and I could go by car. I had a Reo Speedwagon.” Cliff leans on his walker and peers down the long corridor as he talks. He says that in the wintertime he used to take the front wheels off his Reo and replace them with skis, “I made some money the first few years I had the Reo, but I spent it. And, shit, I haven’t made any since.”
“What’d you spend it on, Cliff?” shouts the aide.
“Liquor,” Cliff says. “There were thirteen places between Pittsfield and Adams where you could get something to drink.”
“You didn’t drink on the job, did ya?”
“Sure!” exclaims Cliff, still peering down the corridor.
One of the nurses, passing by, lets out a hoot.
“Cliff,” shouts the male aide, “were there any women on your route?”
“Oh, sure. A lot of ’em,” Cliff says. “All accommodatin’, too. Up through there.”
The two nurses, heading in different directions, both hear this. Both make simultaneous, mock cries of distress—“Oh!”—and move on, laughing.
“How old are you, Cliff?” asks the aide.
“Ninety-three, I guess. I was born in ’98.”
“Where were you born? Plainfield?”
“No, Plainfield,” Cliff says. “Well…”
“Well, what do you say we head back to your room,” says the aide.
“You think I better head back?”
But only minutes later Cliff reappears, with his down vest still draped over his walker. “Hi,” says a nurse. “Where you goin’?”
“I don’t know,” Cliff says. “Goin’ down there where I live.”
“Got a hot date?” asks the nurse.
Cliff, halted on his walker, once again peers down the long corridor toward Sunrise. People all the way down there look small, like figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Cliff is breathing heavily from his walk of thirty feet. “No,” he replies. “I got some hosses down there. That’s one thing that irritates me. Been there about two days.”
Cliff moves on, grunting, and stops after a few steps. A female aide comes up to him and asks, “Where you goin’, Cliff?”
“I got some hosses way down at the other end,” he says. “Ain’t seen ’em for three days, want to see how they are.” Poking his chin forward, he peers hard down the long corridor. “Well, Jesus Christ, I’m on the right way to go down to the other place, ain’t I?”
“You live down there,” says the aide, pointing in the other direction.
“I just came from down there,” says Cliff. “Christ, I came down through there. My room ain’t down that way.”
“Yes, it is.”
“How the hell can it be?”
The aide hurries on. To himself Cliff mutters, “My God, I don’t know if they’re right. Prob’ly are.” He looks around him. “Oh, I see where the hell I come out.”
A nurse emerging from another resident’s room stops beside Cliff. She tells him he looks tired. Doesn’t he think he should go back to his room? Cliff guesses that he should. The horses will have to take care of themselves for another day. They’ll be all right, he figures.
***
“How old are you?” the consulting psychiatrist asks the woman, who lies propped against her pillows in her bed on Meadowview. The curtains are drawn. It might be any time of year.
“Eighty-two,” the woman says.
“What year were you born?”
“You’re trying to check up on me,” she says. She smiles, not warmly but brightly.
The psychiatrist laughs in a friendly way.
“I was born in 1907,” she says.
“I hate to tell you. You’re eighty-three.”
“Well,” she retorts without so much as a pause, “I give myself the benefit of the extra year.”
Do her breathing problems frighten her?
“I don’t think I’d go so far as to say fear, young man.”
He asks her the date. She offers one. He tells her, gently, that she is a month off. She says, “Don’t fool me. Don’t ask me what year it is or I’ll throw you out.”
“I was just about to ask you that,” the psychiatrist says, smiling.
But before he can, she asks him, “And where are you from, sir?” She traps him in a long digression.
Finally, the psychiatrist finds a way back. “I’ve always been very interested in someone who’s had an intellectual life, and what happens as we get older. Do you think your memory’s—”
“I don’t think my memory’s as sharp,” she snaps. “I think I started losing some of that back when I was sixteen. The things I’ve forgotten are things I don’t mind forgetting.”
He’d like to give her a simple memory test. Would she be willing to take it?
She looks thoughtful. “I’m being an awfully good sport to say yes, I will.”
He gives her three words—feather, car, bell. He asks her to repeat them. She does so. He says he’ll ask her for those three words again in about a minute. She says she’d prefer to repeat them now.
“I want to distract you first.”
“I know. But I don’t want to be distracted.”
“But it’s part of the test.” Quickly, he asks her to do some subtraction in her head—7 from 100, then 7 from the remainder, and so on. She falters after 86, and in a moment the psychiatrist asks, “Now do you remember those three things?”
“No,” she says.
“A feather,” he says.
“Oh, the things,” she says. She falls silent for a moment, and when she speaks again, her voice sounds small and plaintive. “A feather and a broom?”
He names the three items.
She looks pensive, then suddenly declares, “I wouldn’t have remembered those in a hundred years. I think a smart person such as I am would forget them right away, because you said you were not going to ask me to repeat them.” She looks quite regal, her head framed against white pillows, a lofty-looking smile on
her face.
“Well, I thought I said I would,” says the psychiatrist.
“I think you tricked me,” she says.
“I don’t like to trick people,” he answers. He might be her pupil, in spite of his gray hair. He looks down at his feet. “I apologize.”
“I accept your apology.”
***
The warm weather, the long green afternoons, beckon Martha out more often now. She walks steadily along, a determined look on her face, her pocketbook dangling from her arm, through the lobby, out the front doors, and down the drive toward Route 9. A nurse runs after her.
Martha imagines that she is walking home to get supper for her husband. Martha was a nurse, a big nurse in charge of surgery and pediatrics in a hospital. From time to time, she issues orders to the Meadowview nursing staff, sweetly but firmly, often cogently. She’ll come upon a fellow resident in need of “toileting,” as it is called, and she’ll tell the charge nurse to get on that job immediately. Once, a resident’s grandson skinned his knee while visiting, and Martha bandaged it herself. She told a fellow resident’s granddaughter that she would give her some doll clothes, and, a full week later, Martha, who could not have named the date or this place, made good on her promise to the child. Once every week or so, when one of the staff has coaxed her back from the brink of the highway, she will surface completely in this world of impoverished present time. Eyes wide, her voice choked with sobs, she’ll say to one of the staff, speaking of her husband, “He’s dead, isn’t he.” She’ll weep over her husband for an hour or two. By dinner she will return to a time when her husband is alive. Whenever she remembers her husband’s death, it is as if for the first time. Alzheimer’s—that’s what the doctors think she has—has fastened Martha to a wheel. About once a week it brings her back to mourning. She has intermittent but never-ending grief.
Martha is escorted inward, and Ted, the fifth Nudnik, sits alone in the lobby, his cane between his legs, looking through bay windows at the afternoon, like so many afternoons that he recalls and yet so strangely empty. “Just waiting for some company that isn’t gonna come,” says Ted. “She’s comin’ down. I can’t remember when. I can’t remember anything anymore.”
