by Tracy Kidder
The doctor sat down. “The x-ray doctor, who wasn’t here, now is. He’s sending his secretary down to get the x-rays.”
“Well, you told me last time it was clear,” Joe said.
“Clear in comparison,” said the doctor. “It looked like a pneumonia. Nothing serious. But not clear absolutely. How are you?”
“I’m very well.”
They sat talking for a while, awaiting the radiologist’s secretary. Joe, by his own account, hadn’t always been polite in his former life, but everyone who’d known him remarked on his ability to charm strangers when he chose. Besides, Joe liked the looks of this doctor’s children. They chatted pleasantly. Then the young doctor said to Joe, “Well, it’s like Groucho Marx says: ‘You’re in trouble. Not only are you sick, but you’ve got me for a doctor.’”
Joe let out a truly big laugh. The doctor left the room, to confer with the radiologist. “You know, I’m missing my lunch,” Joe said, but he didn’t curse. He repeated the Groucho Marx line and chuckled. Then he waited in silence, watching the door for the doctor’s return.
“All right?” Joe asked.
The doctor sat down, leaning toward Joe. He looked serious. “Well, not exactly. The problem is not cleared. Let me go over it. In January you had an x-ray and the lung was clear. In June the x-ray showed a probable pneumonia. In July the x-ray showed significant improvement from June. But this x-ray is unchanged since the last one. The lung’s not clear, especially compared to January. So that leaves the question unresolved of what’s going on.”
“Well, I lay in bed a great deal,” Joe said. “That may have something to do with it.”
“It may,” said the doctor. “The lung tissue is a little collapsed on itself. By now it should have opened up again, and it almost always does.” The doctor wet his lips, as if getting himself ready. “The last time you said you’d agree to a CAT scan, but you didn’t want to be in the hospital and you didn’t want tubes down your throat.”
“That’s right,” said Joe, his face coloring.
“And that if it was cancer, you wouldn’t want—”
“That’s right,” Joe said, more loudly.
“The other choice is to have a CAT scan and the lung doctor examine you.”
Joe waved his left hand at the doctor. “The hell with it.”
“When you say the hell with it—”
“I’ll write it down,” Joe said, more loudly still, his eyes fixed on the doctor.
The doctor blinked. He spoke softly. “I have to assure myself that it’s not because you’re real down or blue.”
“No. Because I’m seventy-two.” Joe had no trouble saying the number.
The doctor smiled. Youth repeats sayings, too. “You can’t die young anymore.”
Then Joe laughed. He leaned toward the doctor. “That’s right. I’m seventy-two. I eat well. I sleep well.”
“You’re happy as you are. But I have to think you could end up leaving here worried.”
“No, no.” Joe waved a hand at him.
“It’s probably not a cancer,” said the doctor. “The overwhelming likelihood is that it’s a pneumonia.” He looked Joe in the eyes. “There is a possibility that it’s very bad.”
Joe nodded.
The doctor wondered about Joe’s wife. How would she feel about all this?
“Well, she has cancer,” Joe began. Joe listed his wife’s medical troubles for the doctor, as he often did in his room at Linda Manor when the subject of other people’s ailments came up—when, perhaps, Joe felt tempted to talk about his own. Finishing the list, Joe went on to say again that he’d executed a Health Proxy. His family knew he didn’t want to be kept alive on machines, Joe said.
The doctor began again to speak.
Joe interrupted him. “Wait a minute. I want pills. I don’t want to suffer when the time comes.” Joe smiled, then thunderously concluded, “But, Jesus Christ, I don’t want anything done to me!”
“Makes sense to me. My eighty-year-old grandfather was just visiting, and he feels the same.”
“No,” Joe said. “You make seventy, you did okay. You make eighty, good for him.”
“Do you notice any change?” the doctor asked.
“Short of breath, that’s all.”
The doctor took Joe’s blood pressure. Joe predicted that it would be high, but the doctor said that it was fine. “How long have you been married?” he asked Joe.
“Forty-eight years,” Joe said.
“Sounds like you cared about each other quite a lot,” said the doctor.
Joe’s face contorted. His shoulders heaved.
The doctor bit his lip. He looked away. “Really loved each other,” he murmured.
But, as usual, the spasm of soundless crying passed quickly.
Joe was smiling now, reaching for a tissue on the doctor’s desk. “My stroke, you know.” Joe laughed. “You shouldn’t have said that.”
The doctor made one last pitch for medicine. “Normally, even if you didn’t want a CAT scan, we’d—”
“No!” Joe said.
“Even if you didn’t have a CAT scan,” the doctor continued, “I’d do an x-ray in two months.”
“No,” Joe said. “No more x-rays. Please.”
The young doctor smiled wistfully. “All right. You’ll let someone know if you’re having trouble with your breathing, all right?”
“All right.” Joe smiled, too. “You know, my wife. Forty-seven, forty-eight years, we fought every day. You know that? Friday she comes to see me, and we’ll still fight. Stubborn woman.”
Joe delivered that last line with obvious irony. The doctor laughed. He offered Joe his hand, and after a moment of difficulty—the doctor reversing his right hand so that it could meet Joe’s left, meet it palm to palm—they shook.
8
Joe stood in the doorway. Sounds of old-time radio, of Amos ’n’ Andy, reverberated through the room. Lou sat in his chair by the window with his eyes closed and a smile curling his mustache.
“Hell-oh,” said Joe.
Lou turned his head toward the doorway. His fingers groped for his tape machine beside him, found the machine, found the right button, and pressed down. The show stopped. “Hi. Well, how’d it go?”
“Okay,” said Joe, limping toward his bed.
“So what did the doctor say?” Lou asked.
“I don’t know. He said, ‘You’re really sick and you got me as a doctor.’ That’s a joke. Groucho Marx said that.”
Joe lay down. Neither man spoke for a while. Finally Lou said, “Fleur was out there giving the nurse a hard time. She sounds like a broken record. Every day after lunch it’s ‘Can you get in touch with whoever.’” Lou went on through the scant local news, and then wondered aloud when working-men’s lunches had first begun to be wrapped in waxed paper instead of paper bags. Joe and Lou were once again at home.
The next day Ruth, her stockinged feet up on the footboard of Lou’s bed, asked Joe what the VA doctor had told him.
Joe was wearing his surfer’s shorts, which made his pale legs paler. He looked like a tourist fresh to the beach. He didn’t answer right away, but it would have been hard for Joe to refuse the request of such a pretty woman. And Ruth was his good friend. Joe turned his head on his pillow and, facing Ruth, said, “Don’t tell my wife. Don’t tell my daughter.”
“I’m going to call them right away,” Ruth said.
So Joe told her. “He says my right lobe, my shortness of breath, you know. There’s a thing on my right lobe. When I got over walking pneumonia it didn’t go away and it should have. He said it could be, it probably wasn’t, uh, cancer. I said, ‘Well, goodbye.’” Joe smiled at the ceiling.
“Well, that’s ridiculous.” Ruth’s face had darkened. “If it is, you probably can have it treated.”
“The hell with it. I’m seventy-two.”
“I think seventy-two is very young!” Ruth said. She went on more softly, “Since I’m only six years away from it.”<
br />
“You come from good genes,” Joe said.
“That’s beside the point,” Ruth said. “Seventy-two is very young.”
“It depends upon your genes,” Joe said.
“Oh.” Ruth clamped her mouth shut. She eyed Joe severely.
In his chair by the window, Lou smiled. “I never wore jeans,” he said, “and you wear shorts, Joe.”
Ruth laughed, eyeing Lou. She might have silver hair, but she was still a child, and he was still her father. Gently admonished, Ruth and Joe desisted. Ruth changed the subject, and Joe would not let it be reopened.
***
Bob was sitting in the lobby when a gurney passed, a couple of ambulance attendants on either end, a resident strapped to the cart. Failing residents were often taken out on gurneys to the hospital. Bob’s mustache twitched with consternation. He said with feeling, “Adios, amigo.” He added, “It’s a bitch.”
There was, of course, some winnowing on Forest View. Joe was limping toward the elevator downstairs when from around the corner came a couple of uniformed paramedics pushing a gurney. Hazel was strapped to it, the woman who lived next door to Lou and Joe, who gave Joe the sports and comics sections of her paper every day. She didn’t seem to see Joe. She looked as if she held her breath. Joe watched the gurney pass. “Good God. Good God.” He boarded the elevator along with a woman in a wheelchair. “They just took Hazel to the hospital. Gollee, huh? Christ.”
The woman in the wheelchair didn’t answer.
Joe limped into his room. Ruth was there with Lou.
“They just took Hazel,” Joe said.
“I know it,” Ruth said.
“Holy mackerel, huh?”
“She has a heart condition. Probably she’ll be all right,” Ruth said. “She’s a nice lady.”
“Yes, she is,” Joe said.
Lou sipped at his morning brandy and didn’t comment. Joe lay down and wiped his good hand downward over his face.
Some days later, as Lou and Joe sat in the chairs outside the Forest View elevator station, Ted swayed into view and took a chair opposite them. He crossed his legs slowly, wincing.
“How do you feel, Ted?” said Joe.
“I feel okay, I guess. Everybody else okay?”
Lou leaned toward Joe and whispered, “Andrea told me he blacked out today.”
“Time for supper, is it, Joe?” asked Ted. It was about 2:30 in the afternoon, in fact.
“Nope,” said Joe. “We’re just going for a walk.”
“I blacked out,” said Ted. “Somebody told me I did.”
Ted got up. For a moment it seemed he might fall over. He walked slowly back toward the nurses’ station. There was a dark patch on the back of his pants. Joe looked away. A nurse, passing by, caught sight of the chair that Ted had sat in. The seat was glistening wet.
“When Ted gets down to the dining room, I’m afraid he’s gonna fall over,” said Lou. “It’s a shame. He’s gone downhill a lot in the short time he’s been here.”
Joe watched as the nurse, returning, bent down and wiped clean the seat of Ted’s chair, and for a few minutes no one spoke. The time was approaching for Ted to be sent downstairs.
Joe’s cough lingered. Lou overheard a nurse say that Joe lay down too much for the good of his lungs, and Lou began a new campaign. “Joe, as soon as you come up here, you take your shoes off and lie down. You should sit up more.”
But Joe said all he needed was cough syrup.
Then Lou again suffered Joe’s coughing fits in silence, and merely asked from time to time if Joe had enough tissues.
“I gotta get some Robitussin,” Joe answered. “That makes you pregnant, you know.”
“You’re thinking of estrogen, aren’t you, Joe?” Lou asked.
“No, no,” Joe said. “Robitussin makes you, uh.” He coughed a little. “It makes you, uh. You get the sperm from, ah, the hell with it.”
“The hell with it, Joe.”
Joe tried again. “Robitussin, if you take it, the sperm goes in the egg much faster. I don’t know where I heard it, but I heard it.”
“Well, you got enough tissues, Joe?”
“Yeah.”
Later on, when Joe was out of the room, Lou said, “I told him a couple times already he should sit up more. He’s not a little boy. I told him a couple times. I can’t tell him anymore. I told the nurse, too.”
But then Joe got a cold, and Lou reopened his campaign.
“I’m through with Robitussin.” Joe lay on his bed. “My daughter told me—not suggested, told—to take antibiotics, and I said I would. But I won’t. Because then I’d have to see, uh, the doctor, and he might send me to the VA.” Joe laughed. “So I’ll die.”
“Don’t say that. The best medicine is that chair in the corner, Joe.”
At Lou’s bidding, an aide had placed an armchair beside Joe’s bed. A few days later, when Lou and Joe came up from the dining room, Joe sat down in it.
“He’s been sitting up quite a bit,” Lou reported a few days after that. “Last night he had me get on the phone and tell his wife he was sitting up. I said, ‘If he doesn’t, I crack the whip.’ She said, ‘Good. Keep it up.’”
Joe had made his decision about medicine and he was sticking by it. He’d let nature deal with whatever was wrong in his chest, and refuse all drastic measures. In the meantime, he’d take care of himself—go to M&M’s, keep on trying to diet, and even sit up more often, if only because, with Lou around, it was easier to do so than not. This regimen seemed to work. As summer wore on toward a close, Joe’s cough gradually abated.
One morning while getting dressed, Joe said to Lou, “I had a dream last night. You told me a man had a stroke, and then he had another stroke, and it, uh, cured him.” Joe laughed.
At times, Joe seemed more calmly philosophical than ever before, and more inclined toward wistful reminiscence. Lying on his bed—he wouldn’t sit up all the time—he recalled for Lou his boyhood days on Dewey Avenue, when he raised racing pigeons behind his grandfather’s house, in a stable down the hillside, in a gully beside the Housatonic. “I used to get egg boxes and cut ’em in half. Raise my pigeons in the egg boxes. I was never handy with hammer and nails. I bent the nails for my friends. I would run down the hill and feed my pigeons.”
Joe laughed backward at those memories. He went on: “I went with Italian boys and Jewish boys. Sal Bernardo. Boomie Green. He went to Albany and he disappeared. He loved to gamble. The other craps shooters became lawyers and doctors. But I never was interested in craps because I used to go look at my pigeons. Most of the guys I remember are dead now. Dwyer, George O’Brien, Eddie Radkey, me. Holy mackerel, everybody’s dead.” Joe paused. “Except me.”
Lou stirred. On a TV news show last night, Lou reminded Joe, they’d heard an expert predict that the United States might be a second-rate economic power in ten years. “But I don’t think I’ll be around.”
“What do you mean?” Joe pulled back the curtain. “I might die and you might live. Who’s being pessimistic now?”
“I just don’t think I’ll be around in ten years.”
“Why not?” Joe said. “A hundred, a hundred and two.”
“They’ll show my picture. Look at this handsome man. Has all his teeth.”
Joe lay back and laughed.
As always, they had many visitors. One curious visitor asked them if time did not go very slowly for them here.
“Time doesn’t hang too heavy on me,” Lou replied. “I can’t seem to remember the date when Jennie passed away. I can’t remember the date exactly when we came out here. Because from the time we came out here to the time she passed away I was occupied with her.” He paused, then said once more again, “I thank the Lord I didn’t have to leave her alone.”
One of Joe’s favorite jokes, told by Ruth, was of the ninety-year-old who, when asked how he was, replied, “Fine, but I don’t buy green bananas anymore.” To the visitor, Joe explained that for him time didn’t go slowly at
all. “Time is very short. For me. And Lou, too.”
9
When Joe returned to Pittsfield after the war, after three years at sea, he thought he’d like to stay attached to water. He and his friend Ray bought a boat, and Ray tried to teach Joe how to sail, out on one of the lakes near town. Joe kept trying to sail the boat directly into the wind. Ray explained that this was impossible. But Joe never really accepted the fact. Rather than bow to physics, he quit sailing.
Ray remembered an earlier time, when he and Joe were just twenty years old and had both read most of Shakespeare and Joe was in the midst of reading Dante in Italian. They shared their passion for literature and philosophy freely, as only the young can. They’d talk about Eugene O’Neill and other favorite writers as if the writers were close friends. They’d swap quotations. One would quote, the other would name the poet or philosopher. They’d pose theoretical conundrums to each other: If you had a choice between saving your mother or your wife, which would you choose? Both had grown up devout Catholics, and it was through their relentless, questing conversations, Ray believed, that both had shed their faith. Ray remembered, from this time, climbing with Joe on a starlit night to a hilltop near Pittsfield. Joe looked up at the sky and said to the God he no longer believed in, “If you want to prove you’re there, strike me dead.” The memory of that evening had given Ray pause from time to time over the years, as he’d watched Joe’s life unfold.
It wasn’t possible to capture Joe’s life through anecdotes, Ray believed. But the life, as he now saw it, could be divided, roughly, into three parts. There was the young Joe, a youth of great intellect and promise and fierce determination, the Joe whose high school classmates declared him “Future Dictator” in their yearbook. And there was the tragic figure, stuck in the wrong job—in Ray’s opinion—dealing daily with the dregs of Pittsfield society, who saw his first-born son taken by leukemia and his first daughter born retarded, who drank too much, and was himself struck down, by stroke, in what should have been his prime. The third was the invalid Joe. One day in Linda Manor’s lobby, thinking back to that starry night on the hilltop when Joe challenged God to prove His existence, Ray said, “If I were God, I’d prove it this way. Bit by bit, not in one big blast.”
