by Tracy Kidder
Ray believed that Joe had far more talent as a violinist than Joe would himself acknowledge now. In his late teens, however, while putting up storm windows, Joe fell off the roof of his parents’ house and put his hand through a windowpane. The broken glass severed tendons in his wrist. After that, he quit the violin. Visiting one afternoon at Linda Manor, Ray recalled that accident. Lou had mentioned Fiddler on the Roof—recently he and Joe had listened and watched, respectively, to the movie version again. Ray remarked to Joe, “You were the original fiddler on the roof. You fell off and wrecked your tendons, and couldn’t play anymore.”
Joe made a face. “Yeah, well, the hell with it.” And Ray changed the subject.
After Joe’s stroke, Ray struggled mightily with Joe’s rehabilitation, trying among other things to help Joe read again. After a while, Joe gave up on reading. It was just too frustrating. But Ray didn’t give up, not until just recently. Some months back he brought Joe a couple of new books. The next time he visited, Ray asked Joe how he liked them, and Joe replied, “Jesus Christ! Why do you do that to me?” Ray knew he couldn’t read. Joe seemed very angry. In that moment, Ray thought he saw a glimpse of Joe as he used to be, the man of violent passions. It was the last such glimpse he’d seen, and Ray could have wished for others.
They had been great friends, friends through almost all the stages of their lives, friends for life. “If Joe were to go, I lose one third of myself,” Ray said. And yet he found himself making up excuses now to stretch out the time between visits to Joe. When people told him they wanted to live to a great old age, Ray would say ironically, “May the view from your nursing home window be beautiful.” The first time he visited this room, Ray looked out the window and said, “Well, Joe, the view from your window is beautiful.” That time he did not speak ironically. It was a fine view, Ray thought. And Linda Manor was spectacular, as nursing homes went. But after every visit Ray would go home and mix himself a stiff martini. Visiting Linda Manor distressed him, partly because he would imagine himself there and also because he had imagined a rich old age for Joe, filled with literature, and he thought of Joe’s life and of its ending here as a tragedy—“a tragedy of all that talent gone to waste.”
During one of Ray’s visits, he and Lou and Joe were chatting amiably in the room upstairs, Ray in his street clothes, Lou and Joe in their usual outfits of indoor living, the three men discussing medicine. Joe asked Ray, “You had your prostate out?”
“No,” Ray said. “Why should I? I treated mine with respect. I didn’t try to drown mine.”
From his bed, Joe pointed a finger at Ray. “All right.”
Lou smiled. “Don’t pick on my friend Joe.”
Ray changed the subject. “Giuseppe,” he said to Joe, “when you coming home again?”
“I don’t know. I’m getting institutionalized now. I like it here.” Joe grimaced and said, “No.” But perhaps Joe disavowed the statement partly for Ray’s comfort, and in order to save face in front of him.
Ray could by now predict that when he walked into the room for a visit, Joe would ask at once about Ray’s family. “He asks about my son. He doesn’t talk about himself. He immediately connects himself to me. He goes right to the center of my interests,” Ray said. This was in part, Ray felt, Joe’s way of trying to re-establish their old relationship. Ever since their early school days, Joe had exerted a power over him that he couldn’t fully account for.
Many people said that Joe had adjusted admirably, without complaint, even calmly, to life inside a nursing home. Of course, Ray understood that for Joe there hadn’t been much choice. But it did a disservice to his vision of Joe to find him well adjusted to this life. “What irritates me,” Ray said, “he’s capable of doing this here. Can you imagine what he could have done in another setting?”
In Pittsfield, in the morgue of the Berkshire Eagle, there was an obituary, written many years ago:
Joseph A. Torchio, the chief probation officer of the Central Berkshire District Court, died at the age of 54.
In 23 years as a probation officer in Pittsfield, Mr. Torchio and the judges he assisted made the local court a leader throughout the Commonwealth in using probation instead of jail sentences in the correction of offenders.
Recent statewide plans to assure every youthful offender either a probationary period or a rehabilitative program before his misdeeds warrant a jail sentence were anticipated on an informal basis by many years in the Pittsfield District Court.
Mr. Torchio envisioned in his role as probation officer a responsibility to speak out on public issues in the community which affected rehabilitation. He was a vocal supporter of low income housing, more facilities to handle family problems, recreational facilities for youngsters, an enlightened parole policy, and an alcoholism clinic. He served as chairman of the city’s Advisory Council on Public Welfare and also helped advise the Boys Club.
Mr. Torchio began his career as probation officer in July, 1950…. His appointment represented a return to his native city, which he left in 1942 to join the Navy. He was discharged from the Navy in 1945 as a lieutenant after service that included 3 years in the South Pacific.
From 1946 to 1949, Mr. Torchio was employed as a vocational rehabilitation training specialist for the VA in the Worcester area. In June of 1949 he joined the Youth Services Board for work with juvenile delinquents. For a brief period before the war Mr. Torchio worked in prisoner rehabilitation with the U.S. Prison Association of Massachusetts.
A graduate of Pittsfield High School, Mr. Torchio earned a BA in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned an MA in sociology at Boston University and received his law degree from Boston College Law School.
Joe lay on his bed laughing, bouncing up and down on his back and clutching his belly, when he heard about this document.
Lou was smiling.
Joe’s laughter subsided. “I’ll be…” he said.
Joe figured an old friend, Bill Tague, had probably written the obituary. It was strange to think of Bill’s writing it, imagining Joe dead nineteen years ago. And now Bill himself was dead. “I’ll be…” said Joe. “Goddamn fool.” He smiled and chuckled.
“Mark Twain,” Joe said. “Obituary. What’d he say?”
“The report of his death has been grossly exaggerated,” Lou said. He raised his index finger. “And another one. ‘How come you haven’t spoken to your wife in fifteen years?’ ‘I didn’t want to interrupt her.’”
“Winiferd,” said Joe.
“You said it, Joe, not me.”
The obituary, typed on copy paper with handwritten corrections in the margins, was two and a half pages long. Joe laughed again. “Christ. I wasn’t that important.”
“I never knew I had such a nice roommate,” Lou said. Then Lou’s face assumed its solemn, its rabbinical look. “You’re all right, Joe. Seriously.”
“Yeah. Wait a minute. They didn’t put in there that I was a teacher four years, at Berkshire Community College, uh, at night. I could call Bill Tague. But I need a séance to do it.” Joe smiled. “They didn’t put in I was chairman of a committee for the Salvation Army.”
“Now’s your chance to get ’em to rewrite it, Joe.”
“Yes!”
Even with those omissions, the obituary was the record of a creditable public life, which had ended long ago. The paper would surely shorten it when Joe actually died. His public accomplishments would count for less than they had nineteen years ago. The things he’d done that were bold and innovative then had become commonplace. Fewer people knew him now in his hometown. Certainly, there’d be nothing to add to the obituary. These days Joe lived a life that was reduced in most respects—reduced, it might be said, to awaiting death. One time, speaking of Ray, Joe said, “He was with me in the beginning. He was with me in the end.” What remained, Joe himself sometimes seemed to say, was only epilogue. But another time, thinking back to the part he played in Eleanor’s cabaret, Joe remarked, “Some people think I am Sim
on Legree. They don’t know how I am in here.”
Joe had been a big man in his town, but not as big as others wanted him to be, and it wasn’t that big a town. Of course, even the great and powerful, if they live long enough, live to retire, and they make sad figures if they retire only with their medals. Private life goes on for everyone. A moral life doesn’t have to end with youth or public life, or even with confinement in a nursing home.
Joe’s obituary would be shorter than the prematurely written one, but his life had expanded. That was the remarkable fact. Strangely, he had changed himself in here, inside a nursing home, of all places. He’d done the opposite of what might have been predicted. One might have thought such a fiery temperament would expend itself in fury at the irritations and confinements of this place. But when his powers to act had greatly diminished, Joe had taken control of his life. He’d done so by gaining a greater control of himself. Passions still lurked in him, but they didn’t rule him anymore. He still possessed his great sympathetic capacity, and through it he’d connected with many fellow residents and with almost all of the staff. He’d made himself as useful as he could. He had entered a little society founded merely on illness, and, accepting it for what it was, realizing it was all there was for him, he had joined it and improved it. He had made a lot of friends in here, and one friend for life.
10
Dan had not gotten his breakfast eggs runny, in spite of his calls to the senator’s office. Now, in the fall, he was in trouble with the state, and his emphysema had worsened.
When Dan moved into Linda Manor over a year ago, Medicaid assumed his cost—about $45,000 a year. In principle, people moving into nursing homes must pay their own way, until they’ve used up all but their last $2,000. But the law exempts some kinds of property, and it also allows people to reduce their assets, to “spend down,” in various ways before they enter nursing homes and go on Medicaid. Spending down had become a way, notoriously, for people both of modest and substantial means to avoid paying their own nursing home bills. Dan had spent down, quite legally, the little he had before he went on Medicaid. But he continued to receive Social Security and a tidy veteran’s pension. The checks kept swelling his bank account above the spend-down limit. By law, Dan should have paid the excess to Medicaid, but Medicaid sent Dan incorrect bills—bills that were much too small. Dan also got some wrong information about the rules of spending down. Either that, or he misinterpreted what he heard. Dan, in relative innocence, worked hard to keep his bank account below $2,000 by buying things.
Almost no one from the world outside came in to visit Dan. He had no siblings. His parents were dead. He’d been married for only about a year back when he was twenty-one. He had no children. He had no pictures of family or friends on his walls, only a porcelain kitten on top of his TV to remind him of Pepe, the cat he lived with before he entered the nursing home. “I’d give a lot to have little Pepe back,” Dan would say, glancing at the figurine on top of his gigantic TV. “Why, we had more fun than a barrel of monkeys.” When he used to go downstairs for meals, Dan sometimes brought along one of the items he had purchased during his long spend-down. Other residents avoided Dan, by and large. He brought the gadgets for conversation starters.
He had bought the television set, with its twenty-seven-inch screen and internal VCR, as well as a fine pair of binoculars for watching birds and airplanes out his window, two radio scanners—he still hadn’t figured out how to program the more powerful one—and an electronic amplifying antenna, his programmable phone, an electronic device called an entertainment center, and an electronic dictionary. “You can spell and get it corrected,” he’d said, showing it off. “And that was fifty-nine dollars, on sale from a hundred and eighty-nine, because them are expensive. There are some wonderful bargains out there today, if you’re fortunate enough to have a little extra cash.” He had bought his own bedside table and a $1,000 wheelchair, both of much higher quality than the institution’s, and a gadget that kept track of appointments and told the time in twenty-two of the world’s cities, the best stereo Walkman money could buy, a very good watch, a fine German clock, a nifty machine that would have stamped his return address on letters if he’d had anyone to write to, a pair of down sleeping bags, a huge $100 Swiss Army knife fit for a wilderness expedition, and a top-of-the-line camcorder, which he hadn’t found a use for yet. He had not prepaid his funeral expenses. “That’s too far down the road,” Dan had said. “I don’t want to be rushed into it.”
Recently, he had bought another, more powerful pair of binoculars, with electric-powered zoom lenses, for viewing the moon out his window. But that was going to be his last purchase. Medicaid had finally found the error in their books, and said he owed them thousands. On top of that, Dan had now been sent downstairs. “Sent downstairs”—a grim, bell-tolling term among the able-minded residents of Forest View.
***
When Lou heard the news, he began to visit Dan in his new room on Meadowview. After one of those trips, Lou reported to Joe, “Dan had trouble with his legal whatever. And the weather’s been bad for his breathing. Poor Dan. Problems, problems, problems.”
“Why do you go in there?” Joe asked.
“I don’t go in there. I stand in the doorway, and I get the same story every time. And I always say, ‘Joe says hello.’” Lou looked upward and said, “For telling a lie, forgive me.”
“Why do you go in there?” Joe asked again. “You feel obligated?”
“No,” Lou said. “Disinfected.”
Lou made visiting Dan a regular practice. Every few days he went. The visits all resembled one another. Lou would stand, leaning on his cane, near the foot of the bed and listen as Dan rattled on about his legal problems, his loss of appetite, the incompetence of the staff. He didn’t seem exactly morose. He seemed to take some pleasure in moroseness. Lou would try to kid him out of it once in a while. Dan said that the other night the nurses let him go to sleep without his sleeping pill, and he didn’t even realize it until he woke up. And Lou chuckled and said, “You mean they didn’t wake you up to give you your sleeping pill?” And without so much as a chuckle in return—come to think of it, Lou had never heard him chuckle, let alone laugh—Dan said no, they hadn’t. “I wouldn’t go as far as to say there’s a vendetta against me,” he said.
One day Joe decided to visit Dan himself. He went down alone, to do his own mitzvah. But it didn’t work out.
“What a pain in the ass,” Joe said to Lou.
“Joe, don’t say that. Just say P I A.”
“Camcorder!” Joe said. “What does he need a camcorder for?”
“So he can record little green people running around.”
“What you go camping with,” Joe said. “Down, uh, sleeping bag! He’s got two sleeping bags. I don’t know if they’re electronic or not. And when I visited him, I said, ‘How the hell are you gonna sleep in a sleeping bag if you need oxygen?’”
“What’d he say?” Lou asked.
“Well, I was walking away when he answered,” Joe said.
Actually, Joe didn’t object to Dan’s equipment. He objected to the fact that he’d never heard Dan talk about anyone except himself, or about much of anything except his own problems. Joe didn’t think Dan deserved to be visited. Joe suspected that Dan would not do the same for another person. Lou suspected so, too, which was why, at bottom, Lou did visit him.
Once, in deep rumination in his chair by the window, Lou said of one of his great-granddaughters, “She’s kind and considerate. I guess she takes after me that way.” Then, as if awakening, Lou shifted in his chair and smiled. “I am kind and considerate, aren’t I?” Dan was just a lonely guy who needed company, Lou thought. He was also a test for Lou. In the privacy of the room, Lou and Joe had made Dan the butt of many jokes. Lou still could not resist from time to time. And so, a few days before the Day of Atonement, when one is supposed to seek forgiveness from people one has wronged, Lou went down to Meadowview, and, pausing in the door
way to Dan’s room, Lou said beneath his breath, “I’m sorry.” Then Lou went in and listened to Dan for about twenty minutes, which was itself also an act of atonement.
A roommate so given to mitzvahs could put a strain on anyone’s conscience. But at Linda Manor there was never a lack of opportunity for mitzvahs. Lou returned to the room on a day in early fall and told Joe that he’d heard Winifred weeping in her room. Joe thought about this news. Then he put on his shoes and limped downstairs. “She said, ‘I lost my courage,’” Joe reported back to Lou. “I said cliché things, you know. ‘Keep up your courage. Smile.’ She was depressed. Awful depressed and I sat and said clichés. I brought her out of it a quarter, uh, a quarter better.”
Joe’s friend Hazel came back from the hospital and was restored to Forest View. She told Joe her heart problems came from stress. She said she got upset when her bed wasn’t made promptly. “Go make Hazel’s bed now,” Joe said after breakfast to one of the aides that day.
Bruce and his assistant had started building screens for the south Forest View porch. Lou checked on their progress regularly. He didn’t think it fast enough. “I wish I could see a little bit. I’d make those screens for them.” The porch opened off the Forest View living room. Lou went in there to check once again on the project. Looking through the glass door, he could make out the shapes of Bruce and his assistant. They were working on their hands and knees, it seemed. No wonder they were taking so long, Lou thought. He knew from long experience that you save a lot of time and do a better job if you spend a little time to set up a job properly. Lou tapped on the glass.
Bruce opened the door. “Hi, Lou.”
“Why don’t you get a couple tables and work off them?” said Lou.
Bruce laughed. “Too easy.”
Lou walked away shaking his head. “Meshugge.” Later Lou told Joe he figured that they’d finish up the screens just in time for winter.
