Old Friends

by Tracy Kidder

  She entered through the lobby, dressed in her parka. The first resident she saw was usually Bob. Bob had turned an armchair so that it faced the inner front door. He sat there for hours at a time, keeping watch. Visitors would offer him weather reports, doing pantomimes of shivering as they came in, and saying, “Brrr!”

  “Cold out there!” Bob would reply. December brought north winds, which sometimes blew the outer door back open behind the visitors without their knowing it. Then, as they came into the lobby through the second set of doors, they would find themselves confronted, not by the cheerful mustachioed man, proffering a hand for shaking and saying, “Beautiful. Excellent. Thank you kindly,” but by a strange, fearful sight: Bob on the edge of his doorkeeping chair, quivering with what certainly looked like wrath, jabbing his cane in the air at them, and mumbling something emphatic. The visitors stopped in their tracks, alarmed. What had they done? Bob jabbed his cane toward them, then toward the doors. Eventually, most got the point, went back out, and pulled the outer door shut.

  But Ruth always got a cheerful welcome. When from his chair Bob saw through the bay window her thin, elegant, silver-haired figure coming toward the door, he’d say, “Oh boy. Beautiful. Here she comes now.” Entering, Ruth received Bob’s Howdee!, also his left-handed handshake and a “Cold out there!” Ruth sometimes felt in need of such a greeting.

  She had a great incentive to like Linda Manor. Not many people can bear to feel their parent’s nursing home is bad. But Ruth knew this was a decent place. She knew most of the staff by now, and liked them. A faint odor like buttered toast, with the butter a little off, lingered in parts of the building. Ruth sometimes caught the sharp whiff of urine when passing by some bedroom doors, but Linda Manor on the whole was remarkably odorless. As for its sights and sounds, Ruth had long since grown accustomed to them, and they did not frighten her as they did some first-time and infrequent visitors. It was not the place itself but the visions of the life to come that got her down. The visible decline of residents who came to her Literary Hour—that woman who seemed so sprightly last week on her cane, appearing this week in a wheelchair, bravely trying to smile—and the glimpses Ruth had of the nearly comatose laid out in their bedrooms, and of the demented wandering the halls. Once when she was on her way out, a nice-looking resident approached her and asked if she wouldn’t please give him a ride home. She left in tears that day, feeling sorry both for the man and for the fact that her own father now resided among people who seemed consigned to live no kind of life at all.

  “Guilt’s my middle name,” Ruth said. It was entirely self-inflicted. Lou often reminded her that he’d rather live here than at her house, where inevitably he’d be alone and bored a lot of the time. He was always telling her that she didn’t have to come every day, always urging her to go away on trips with her husband, Bob. But now, when she and her husband were both retired and in good health and had the money to travel, she couldn’t tear herself away. She tried it once. She took a trip to England with her husband and felt miserable the whole time. She made herself busier these days, taking courses and doing charitable work, than when she was teaching. As she understood her reasons, she had to feel that what she did instead of taking care of Lou at home was arduous and important enough to justify his being here. Maybe if he had turned into a querulous old man and insisted that she visit him every day, it would have been possible for Ruth not to do so, or at least to feel that she was being dutiful enough. Lou’s cheerfulness and consideration intensified her “guilt spasms.” But they also made her visits pleasant. She enjoyed her father’s company, more now perhaps than ever before, now that she had so much of it.

  Ruth came in order to visit Lou, but gradually she realized that she also came to visit Joe. On Saturday mornings Lou’s phone began ringing at around ten o’clock. “It’s either Aunt Esther or Aunt Ruth. Wanta take bets?” Ruth said to Joe one Saturday morning when the phone rang.

  “Esther,” said Joe from his bed. The foot with the blistered toe was bared and rested on a pillow, looking oddly separate from Joe, like a part removed for repairs.

  “Hi, Esther,” said Lou into the phone.

  “See?” Joe said to Ruth.

  While Lou talked on the phone, Ruth and Joe talked to each other. Joe said he’d seen some news on TV about an advance in the prevention of strokes. “I wondered if they had something if you already had one. No, huh?” Joe laughed a little.

  At such moments Ruth felt keenly aware of the difference between her father’s age and Joe’s. It was one thing to be in your nineties and in a nursing home, but Joe was only six years older than Ruth and her husband. Imagining herself in Joe’s place, Ruth imagined herself very bitter. The first time she mentioned her husband’s love of downhill skiing, Ruth felt like slapping her hand over her mouth. Joe, she thought, might well feel jealous. She thought she would, in his place. But Joe said, “It’s good that a man of sixty-five can do that.” And he seemed to mean it.

  On her morning visits, Ruth often told stories. One of her favorites was about a Jewish mother of her acquaintance who told her son, as he was leaving for his honeymoon, “Don’t forget to wear your rubbers.” At the wedding, when someone asked this woman’s son if he wanted a drink, the mother said, “No, he’s not thirsty.”

  “My mother said the same thing!” cried Joe from his bed. “‘No, he’s not thirsty.’ We go into, uh, store. ‘Say thank you to the man, Joey.’ And I was forty years old, for Christ’s sake!” Joe levitated off his bed in laughter. “Oh, God. Jewish sons and Italian mothers, it’s all the same.”

  Another time Ruth arrived to find Lou and Joe fulminating about an item on that morning’s TV news. America was sending food to Russia while, Lou and Joe angrily protested, people here went hungry. “We’re starving,” Joe said, meaning that some Americans were.

  “Forgive me for saying so,” Ruth said to Joe, “but you don’t look it.”

  Joe laughed and laughed.

  On Sundays Ruth used to bring the New York Times crossword puzzle. She thought that Lou and Joe would enjoy struggling through it with her. “Joe, give me a Red Sox catcher whose name begins with P.”

  Joe stammered. “Uh, uh. Ah, the hell with it. I got half a brain, you know.”

  “It functions, that’s all that matters,” said Lou.

  Finally, Joe told Ruth, speaking of the crossword, “Don’t get me started on that goddarn thing.” After that, Ruth stopped bringing it.

  When she first met Joe, she thought he must be a little crude, the way he lay on his bedspread, scratching his stomach, watching TV. Then one day Ruth sat down in her usual place, in a chair across from the foot of Lou’s bed, and she mentioned that she’d just read a review of a new novel that sounded interesting—a novel by Joyce Carol Oates called Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart. And the blustery man, who had to count up to numbers, said, “Stephen Crane. That comes from, uh, poem by Stephen Crane.”

  Joe directed Ruth to his poetry anthology. He had Ruth read the poem in question.

  In the desert

  I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

  Who, squatting upon the ground,

  Held his heart in his hands,

  And ate of it.

  I said, “Is it good, friend?”

  “It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

  “But I like it

  Because it is bitter,

  And because it is my heart.”

  “Oh-ho,” Joe said. “That’s good.” He had Ruth read his favorite poem of Crane’s, “The Wayfarer.” As Ruth read the last line—“Doubtless there are other roads”—Joe’s face grew flushed. He grinned at her from his bed. “Ah-hah! That’s good.”

  “That’s what we call irony,” Ruth said.

  “Yeah, but it’s good,” Joe said.

  The whole transaction astonished and delighted Ruth, the former English teacher. That, she thought, was the moment when she really began to know Joe.

  Joe wasn’t just well
read; he clearly had a taste for bitter irony, in life as well as literature. In some ways, Ruth realized, she resembled her gentle-minded father less than she resembled Joe.

  ***

  Ruth usually stayed for a couple of hours, and left before lunch.

  On her way out, she stopped to button up her coat and say goodbye to Bob in his sentry chair.

  Bob looked up at her. “It’s a bitch.”

  “No, it’s not,” Ruth exclaimed. “It’s a beautiful world.”

  Bob looked at her, his brow knitted. “It’s too bad.”

  “Yes, it is,” Ruth said.

  “Beautiful,” said Bob.

  5

  At seven o’clock in the morning, Joe awakened to the sound of a cane rapping on the door, followed by Bob’s voice. “All right?”

  Joe was still half mired in sleep. “All right!” he called back testily.

  “Okay,” said Bob’s voice from the doorway. “Bye-bye.”

  Lou sat across the room in his skivvies, slowly pulling on his pants. “You know, Joe, I’ve been thinking. With Bob, we don’t need an alarm clock.”

  Joe wasn’t sure he wanted one at these moments when he struggled up from sleep. Once again, Joe considered telling Bob to stay away from his door at this hour. But as Lou often said, these self-appointed duties made Bob happy, or at least they kept him busy. And Bob had a special claim on Joe’s sympathy. For a time after his own stroke, Joe could say only three things: “Jesus Christ,” “balls,” and “goddamn.” He meant to say other words as well, but only those came out. Gradually, Joe had regained most of his powers of speech. But Bob had not, in spite of therapy.

  When at a loss for words, Bob would often say, in a plaintive voice, “I wish I could talk now.” He would add, in an angry voice, “It’s a bitch, I’m tellin’ ya. It’s a bitch.” Bob could repeat new words, but most didn’t seem to stick. He retained a vocabulary of only about three dozen words and phrases. With them, he mustered a range of expression that was quite amazing. His greetings, for example. For curt hellos, at all times of the day or night, Bob would say, “Howareyouthismorning,” the phrase all one word, like a priest’s mumbled devotions. For quick but more enthusiastic hellos, he sometimes used “Beautiful” or “Excellent.” His truly cheery greetings, like the ones he delivered to Ruth, resembled songs: “Hi oh dee oh dee oh to you. Howdee! Howdee! Howdee! Hello to you hello!”

  Bob worked as a factory machinist most of his life. Right up until his stroke, he spent his spare time restoring antique horse-drawn sleighs and buggies. Bob had two fat albums filled with photographs of his work. He showed them eagerly to any staff and fellow residents who were interested. “Buggy. Buggy,” Bob said, pointing at the photos. Those who viewed them didn’t have to pretend to be impressed. The sleighs and buggies looked brand-new, with lacquered finishes and delicate scrollwork painted on them.

  “These are beautiful, Bob.”

  “You’re damn right. I’m tellin’ ya. I wish I could talk now.” Bob would turn the page and point at another example of his handiwork. “Excellent. Excellent. Buggy. Buggy.” He would turn to a picture of a neatly lettered sign, standing outside what had been his workshop. “Bob’s Restoration Company,” read the sign.

  Bob’s wife had told Lou and Joe that if someone dared to move a tool so much as an inch out of place in his workshop, Bob would know at once, and often there’d be trouble. So Bob’s exacting ideas about order preceded his entry into Linda Manor. But creating and maintaining that order around him was virtually Bob’s sole occupation now. Here at Linda Manor, an activities aide sometimes held pottery sessions. Bob, who had been right-handed, painted bowls left-handed. He no longer had many chances for doing something well.

  Right now Bob would be limping quickly through the long central corridor downstairs and into the activity room, still empty at this morning hour, to begin rearranging furniture. Once in a while the cleaning staff left the upright piano a little out of place—on the wrong side of the parakeet cage, for instance. On such occasions, Bob would jab his cane at the piano, saying, “Ree-diculous!” Bob couldn’t move the piano by himself. Muttering, “Sonofabitch. Ree-diculous,” he’d get to work on things he could move. No rearrangements mattered as much as the assemblage of chairs Bob made in the wide doorway that connected the activity room and the dining room. Bob would place five chairs in two rows, like theater seats, facing in on the dining room. The two chairs in the back row were reserved for Art and Art’s roommate, Ted. The front-row left-hand seat was for Joe, the right-hand one for Lou, and the middle seat was Bob’s, and woe to the resident who tried to sit in any of those five chairs while waiting for the meal.

  Eleanor tried to do so once, some months ago, when she was still new here. Bob jabbed his cane at her. “Get out! Get out! Black bastard! Get out!” Eleanor, whose skin without makeup was alabaster white, hadn’t sat in one of those chairs since. Eleanor now called Bob the Inspector General, after a play by that name. One morning back around that same time, Bob threw a fit in front of the lab technician who periodically came in to take blood samples from residents—Eleanor had nicknamed her affectionately the Vampire Lady. The technician was adept at taking blood painlessly and was a popular figure among residents. Bob liked the Vampire Lady, too. “She’s a damn good girl, I’m tellin ya.” But that morning she arrived some fifteen minutes late, and delayed Bob’s pre-breakfast preparations. “Bob went into just a spastic rage in front of her,” Eleanor remembered.

  In honor of that episode, the Vampire Lady gave Bob an additional title: Mayor of Linda Manor.

  When Bob had the five chairs arranged, he’d say, “Okay, that’s enough.” He’d be sitting in his chair now, waiting all alone while the activity and dining rooms filled with sunlight.

  ***

  Bob started setting up those five chairs in the dining room doorway a month or two ago. Since then, before every meal, Joe and Bob and Lou would sit there in the front row, Art and Ted behind them, and the five would watch and kibitz as the dietary aides moved around the dining room, setting the tables. Lou called their little group the Nudniks. And Lou also named their pre-meal kibitzing sessions. “Stupidvising,” he called them. But Lou couldn’t really participate. He couldn’t watch the dietary aides. Most of the time he probably had no idea which aides the other Nudniks were talking to. When Joe realized this, he decided to learn the name of every dietary aide. It wasn’t, on reflection, something he’d have done in his former life. Joe rarely bothered back then with the names of casual acquaintances. “I wasn’t interested. Now I’m interested, that’s all.” The loss of tangible gift-giving power lay heavily on Joe. He couldn’t often find a remedy, so when he did, it seemed significant to him, however small the gift. Now that he had all the aides’ names down, he’d call them out for Lou during Stupidvising.

  Lou was ready for the journey down for breakfast, dressed in his blue machinist’s apron. Joe told him to go on ahead. Gingerly, Joe eased his damaged left foot into his shoe. The blister didn’t hurt much, just enough to remind Joe of its presence. What a ridiculous aggravation, a blister the size of a nickel. Back when he had his health, he’d have hardly noticed it.

  Joe’s shoes were black, his right one blunt-toed with a steel brace attached to its heel. One-handed and deftly, Joe strapped the brace to his calf. Shod at last, Joe picked up his cane and, rising a little more unsteadily than usual, headed downstairs. He did his stepping forward with his good left leg, leaning heavily on his cane while that leg was in the air. Then he paused to bring the right leg up to where the left leg stood. His walk was an inchworm-like series of movements, slow and deliberate, a forced adaptation that revealed what a complex activity normal walking is. Joe’s left hand worked the cane. His left arm still carried a fair portion of its once formidable muscle. His right arm hung limply, like meat on a hook.

  As Joe turned into the activity room door, Bob’s voice rang out, “Here he comes now!” There they sat, Bob and the other Nudniks in the Stup
idvising chairs. All was in readiness for the morning’s ritual.

  Sometimes Joe found it hard to believe that he was about to join in this silliness. A lot of life was silly, though. This wasn’t a great deal different from spending Saturdays playing hearts at the Legion bar in Pittsfield. Of course, you could take that two ways. The present could look better, or the past could look worse. But these pre-breakfast high jinks made him laugh. That was the important thing. It didn’t really matter that he was often laughing at himself for taking part. “Jesus Christ, if I couldn’t laugh, I’d go nuts in here,” Joe often said.

  Joe stopped a few feet from the Stupidvising chairs, took a deep breath, which lifted him fully erect, and sang out toward Bob, “Howdee! Howdee! Howdee!”

  “Howdee! Howdee! Howdee!” Bob answered.

  “That’s gonna be on his tombstone,” Joe said, smiling at Art.

  Joe sat down—heavily, in one motion of surrender to gravity—then looked at Bob. “Everything under control?” Joe asked.

  “Beautiful! Excellent!” said Bob, offering Joe his hand for shaking. They shook left-handed, their afflictions meeting. Looking at Bob with an appraising eye, Joe lifted the tip of his own cane in the air. “He’s the Mayor of Linda Manor. And the In-spector General.”

  Bob grinned. “You’re damn right!”

  “He’s one of the few mayors that, uh, that doesn’t take bribes,” Joe said. “Right?”

  “That’s right!” Bob reached over and slapped Joe’s leg. “You hot shit.”