by Tracy Kidder
***
Joe’s daughter had recently brought him a photograph of his granddaughter, and Joe had given it central billing, on the wall directly above his TV—the image of a mischievously smiling three-year-old with very curly blond hair hanging beside the photo of Joe with very curly black hair, mischievously smiling on his wedding day. “God, she’s beautiful,” Joe said, staring at the photo. “God, I love her.”
To know that new generations of one’s family will follow may be the greatest comfort that old age retains in modern times. It had been Joe’s fate to learn the perils of succession, too. He went to war, survived himself, and then he lost his first son. In this room, Joe uttered the names of the Christian deity as often as a monk in prayer. He was, it seemed, still arguing with the God he no longer believed in.
Joe was mightily, superstitiously solicitous of his granddaughter’s health. If someone should happen to praise her beauty or intelligence, Joe would invoke the belief of his forebears that to praise a child was to tempt the evil eye of fate. “Malocchio! Don’t give her the malocchio!” he’d say. His tone was joking. But news that his granddaughter had a cold or an earache would send him into real paroxysms of imagined grief. “Oh, dear God, the baby’s sick. Sonofabitch. God almighty. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ!” In the habit of imagining the worst, as if by imagining it he could prevent it—as if it wouldn’t have to happen because it already had in his mind—Joe would depict her dead from the sniffles. “Joe, don’t talk that way!” Lou would say. “Joe, if you’re gonna talk that way, I’m gonna leave the room.” He could not understand why Joe tormented himself. But Lou had never lost a child.
A friend of Joe’s named Neal was in the room on a visit. He said something in praise of Joe’s granddaughter, and Joe suddenly sobbed. “I’m starting to cry,” Joe said.
“We couldn’t tell,” Neal said.
Joe laughed. Then his face darkened. “Lou leaves the room if I say it. But if something happens to her…” Joe, catheterized, threw his good arm out sideways as if cutting the air with a sword.
Lou accepted this as bluster. “Calm down, Joe. Or your blood pressure will be way up, way it was the other day.”
Neal smiled. He had always conducted his friendship with Joe via insults, which was one reason Joe liked him. Neal tried out an insult now. “Joe has creeping pneumonia. It can’t be walking pneumonia.”
But Joe wasn’t in the mood for insults. “Ha, ha,” he said.
“I’m surprised,” said Neal, seriously then. “You never get sick.”
“I know,” Joe said.
Then the evening nurse came in with her stethoscope and applied it to Joe’s chest. “But it’s all right,” Joe said to her when she unplugged the stethoscope. “Because I’m coughing up clear, you know.”
“It just sounds wheezy,” said the nurse, offhandedly, reassuringly.
For parts of every day and evening Joe lay breathing the canned oxygen. “Run oxygen this morning, run it this afternoon. Now I’m sick of it,” he said.
“You’ve got pneumonia, I got a sore tushie,” Lou said.
Joe laughed, then said seriously, “But it’s a mild, mild case.”
Daily, Joe sucked on a tube attached to a little machine called a bronchodilator. He’d hold the tube with his pinkie extended, as if sipping a cocktail. He’d start laughing, the laugh would turn into a cough, and he’d go back to sucking the tube.
Joe’s trips downstairs to meals and bingo left him gasping. But after those first days with the illness, Joe became quite calm. It was as if, lying on his back, he observed from a distance the skirmish going on down in his chest. Up in the room after dinner, he and Lou replayed Art and Ted’s spat during Stupidvising. “Ted came down, and he’s an old man,” said Joe. “I am an old man. And Ted said, ‘Nobody calls me a liar.’”
“And Art sat at the other end and said something about how he wouldn’t sit next to Ted,” Lou said.
“Two old men,” said Joe. “What’s the sense of fighting? They could be dead tomorrow, for God’s sake.”
Joe puffed on the bronchodilator. Lou sat in his chair, in an engineering frame of mind. “I said, ‘Why don’t you give him some moisturizer with that.’ Because they gave it to my wife before she passed away. They said the doctor didn’t order it, but the next day they gave it to him, and I think it helps.” Lou added, “When my doctor first saw me, he said, ‘You’re too scientific.’ I don’t just take things for granted.”
Joe seemed to be improving. That’s what Lou heard the staff say. Lou considered this a likely moment for advice, and said from across the room, “Joe, you’re gonna get mad at me, but I told you you shouldn’t just lie in bed. You should at least raise the head of your bed up high.”
Joe sat up, the blue tube trailing, and glared across the room at Lou. “Do you see my bed? It’s raised up, all right?”
“All right, all right,” Lou said. “I can’t see it. I didn’t say anything.”
“All right!” said Joe, lying back down.
That sounded like the old Joe. Lou thought he must indeed be getting better.
From the intercom just outside their door came the voice of Sue, the activities director, saying, “Good morning. Today is…” Sue’s cheery voice named the day and date and intoned the menus and scheduled activities, also the birthdays. As always, Sue closed by saying, “Have a good day, everyone.”
“Jesus Christ,” Joe said to the ceiling. “Have a good day. Wheee! The people here, uh, Parkinson’s, All-timer’s, cancer, bad heart, can’t walk. Jesus Christ, huh?”
Joe liked Sue. What he objected to was the nearly universal voice of the helping professions in gerontology, indeed of society in general, saying “Cheer up, cheer up” to people who were struggling with the infirmities of age, to him and the other people here.
Joe waylaid Sue in the lobby later. He went there to escape his sickbed for a while. “Why don’t you say, ‘Have a good day, if you can’?”
Sue thanked him for the suggestion, but said she couldn’t do that. The words would sound too negative.
Joe shrugged. “Well, that’s a good answer.”
***
Lou made sure that the staff monitored Joe’s oxygen machine. He’d go out and remind them if they didn’t check it. From time to time, Lou focused his eye on the gray image of the machine and said, “I’d like to know how that thing works.”
It was lovely weather outside and pneumonia in the room, another season of its own, an eerie contrast to the other, flowers blooming in the garden below their window, while Joe lay on his back breathing manufactured oxygen. Pneumonia’s time passed slowly. The nurses monitored its progress through their stethoscopes. And then one day a nurse came in and wheeled the oxygen machine away.
Lou, returning from M&M’s, brought Joe some news. The class had a new member, a ninety-five-year-old woman, and very vigorous. “She was kickin’ her legs up,” Lou said. “She eats garlic every day, so when the Angel of Death comes to her, she’ll say, ‘Whoooo are you?’ Friend of mine used to tell me that story about a hundred-and-ten-year-old man.”
When one has had pneumonia in a nursing home, being in a nursing home without pneumonia looks like a pretty good deal. Joe was eager to get back to Linda Manor time. “I’ll go to M&M’s Friday,” he said.
“Make sure you got your wind before you go,” said Lou. “If you do go and get winded, stop!”
“That’s right,” Joe said.
“Don’t be a hero,” Lou said.
“Damn right,” Joe said.
“That’s what my doctor said to me. If you have chest pains, take a pill. Don’t be a hero.”
Lou thought that Joe was clearly better. Joe seemed to manage M&M’s without much difficulty. But Lou knew he wasn’t altogether well. When Joe went to the bathroom, Lou confided to one of the staff in a low voice, “He’s still short of breath, and he gets himself excited once in a while.” And Joe had an intermittent cough. It would grip him for minutes at a
time. The sound of it across the room made Lou grasp the arms of his chair. It sounded, sometimes, as if Joe was suffocating.
A chest x-ray, taken about a month ago, had shown improvement. Now that he was off the oxygen, Joe got x-rayed again, just to make sure the pneumonia had really passed. A few days later, while waiting at the nurses’ station counter for his morning pills, Lou overheard a couple of the staff talking to each other about the latest x-ray. From what Lou overheard, he gathered that it showed something wrong. Lou kept the information to himself.
Joe had already heard the news, but he kept his own silence in front of Lou, for now at least. Joe didn’t think he could be very sick. His appetite was all too good, as always. This occasional cough and shortness of breath would pass, he figured. He felt like telling everyone to leave him alone. He was sick of being an invalid. He was sick of the attention. It also worried him. He didn’t know exactly what he had to fear from the nurses and the x-rays and his Linda Manor doctor until events unfolded, and then he felt as if he’d known all along. The doctor came in, examined him, and discussed that last x-ray. It showed a lingering irregularity in a corner of Joe’s right lung which should have passed by now. The doctor couldn’t say just what this signified. Joe would have to see another doctor, a specialist. Since the ultimate responsibility for Joe’s health lay with the VA, Joe would have to see a specialist there.
It was the worst news Joe had heard in a long time—not the news about his lung, but that he must go back to the VA. He still went there periodically, but he never had to stay more than an hour or so. This problem with his lung could get the VA doctors going, Joe imagined. “When they get you there, they like to keep you.” He couldn’t bear the thought of spending another night in that place. Never again, he told himself. No one had said he’d have to stay. But there was always that chance. A worrier like Joe automatically converts the possible into the probable and, given a little time, the probable into a certainty.
Soon Joe was notified that he had an appointment at the VA. It was for a few weeks from now. He would keep the appointment. He didn’t see how he could refuse.
2
Eleanor had decided to leave. The arrangements themselves hadn’t been easy, and they’d been complicated when, a couple of weeks ago, she’d taken a fall in the elevator and suffered a hairline fracture in her pelvis. But she had persisted in her plan. She had consulted with her family in Wisconsin. They had found her a place in a nursing home there. And she was going, no matter what.
In the visitors’ parking lot, Eleanor’s son and an old family friend paused beside their cars. They had just come from Forest View. The old family friend now shook his head and, smiling, said to Eleanor’s son, “She’s well organized. When she really wants to leave a place, she doesn’t waste any time.” The man paused. Then he said, “I just hope that in six months…” He left the sentence hanging.
“Well,” said Eleanor’s son, “she’s not getting any younger…” But he, too, let his voice trail off. The eighty-one-year-old woman they’d just left upstairs, sitting regally in her wheelchair with her cheeks rouged, talking about how exhausting this process was and wondering where she’d find the strength to direct her new play, The Silver Whistle, before she left—and surrounded by several packed suitcases, even though her departure date was still a couple of weeks away—certainly looked as if she had gotten younger.
Eleanor smiled out her window up on Forest View. Hasn’t everyone, traveling away from the routines of life at home in summertime, seen through the windows of a car or train other people staying behind, stuck at their daily stations, and felt enviable?
Eleanor had heard that the place where she was going had both a stage and decent food, but she’d never seen the place. It was, after all, another nursing home and therefore bound to be, to some extent, a house of grief and pain. But moving there would put her nearer to more of her family, including a granddaughter who had a child on the way. These past few months Eleanor had discovered a great desire to be surrounded by family. Or so she’d said to everyone at Linda Manor. But she was still her nomadic father’s daughter, and she knew that the main reason she was going was to go. She knew this in feelings that were hard to put in words and that none of her young confidantes would really understand. She felt like a child again, watching as her father, the receipts from his latest minstrel show extravaganza in his pocket, packed up his big black trunks. The show was over. She and her father had pulled another sleepy town out of its dull routines. They’d left the people laughing and given them something to talk about. Soon they would board the night train and leave that little burg behind. Eleanor might be eighty-one, with diabetes and a slightly damaged pelvis, but she had pulled off another escape. Where she was going didn’t matter. She was getting out of here. In the meantime, there were preparations to be made. She had to make a proper exit.
Everywhere Eleanor looked, from her easy chair in her room, from her post across from the nurses’ station, from her pretend porch, she saw new reasons to leave. The other night at 2 A.M. she awakened to find Norman standing at the foot of her bed. She rang her call bell, but no one came, so she led him to the door, and he urinated there on the floor. When she complained, the aide said to her, “How’d you like to run one floor all alone?” The staff had been cut again. The food, Eleanor insisted, was getting worse. There was a water stain on her ceiling. The place was going downhill fast, she thought, and she might be, too, if she were staying.
All the few remaining ties that she had to this place were breaking. The Forest View staff had imposed a new rule: residents should no longer sit across from the nursing station. Too much confidential information about residents was being passed in rumors, the staff decided. The other night, several hours after supper, Art was eating his pre-bedtime popcorn in a chair across from the nurses’ station, and a nurse told him he shouldn’t sit there, he must move into the living room. Art was irritated but didn’t argue. Most residents never argued about policy. The next morning, though, Art came back from breakfast and found Eleanor sitting in a wheelchair in the very spot where he’d been sitting last night. Art called to the nurse behind the counter. Did the rule about not sitting there apply only to him?
“Oh, stop making trouble,” snapped Eleanor.
“I’m not making any trouble!” Art yelled at Eleanor. “I want to be where I’m supposed to be.” Art shuffled off in a high temper.
Eleanor tried to patch up the quarrel, but Art told her he didn’t care to talk to her, since she’d called him a troublemaker.
“I didn’t say that,” Eleanor protested.
“Then what was I hollering for?” Art said. “You’ve had your ear up near the nurses’ station, and you’ve been peddling all that stuff you hear. Who’s sick, who’s this, who’s that. You’re the troublemaker.” She was the reason they’d made the rule in the first place, Art said.
Eleanor hadn’t spoken to Art since. “You know Art,” she said, “he considers himself now sort of a bon vivant. He’s a flirt. He really is. I watch him give the nurses the eye at night, making little jokes and stuff. Anyway, I don’t see that much of him now, not since I moved to the other end of the hall.” All was perhaps for the best, she told herself. “I have nothing to hold me here at all.” Only the sight of gray-haired Zita pacing past her, up and down the corridors, gave Eleanor pause. “She’s the only one of them I’ll miss.”
Anyway, Eleanor didn’t have much time for melancholy thoughts. She had all but recovered from her fall in the elevator. She could walk again, but still used a wheelchair, to save her strength. She had to put her affairs in order. She had to dispose of some furniture and probably some clothes. “I’ve got five years of stuff to sort out. But, you know, going to these various nursing places, you have to dress like they do.” She had to alter her wardrobe when she moved to her previous stopping place, the retirement community of faded elegance. “There it was gloves and dresses. It was a very Victorian place. Heaven only knows what they’ll wea
r in Wisconsin. Probably aprons and milking stools.” Meanwhile, she was trying to whip the cast for The Silver Whistle into shape. “They want me to put it on before I leave. How can I? I’ll probably leave on a stretcher,” she said. Eleanor laughed gaily.
***
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m happy to welcome you to the Linda Manor Players’ production of The Silver Whistle,” said Eleanor from her chair at stage left—the left side of the wider dining room doorway. “This is just a reading rehearsal. We had planned to do it later, but a few things came up.”
One was asked to imagine a small unkempt garden outside an underfunded, church-sponsored home for the aged. Two elderly women, played by two elderly Linda Manor residents in their wheelchairs, and an old man, played by a middle-aged male aide, sat in the fictional garden discussing their ailments as the play began. “We’re all sitting here waiting to die,” said one of the actresses.
Out in the audience, a male resident of Sunrise who was slightly deaf said to another resident, “I can’t hear them. Why don’t they have a microphone, for heaven’s sake.” From the kitchen of the real nursing home came the clatter and clang of dishwashing.
Joe and Lou had taken end-row seats, so they could get out quickly just in case the play flopped. But soon Lou’s face composed itself in a smile, behind closed eyes, and Joe was laughing. The audience was mostly residents, with a smattering of relatives and staff mixed in. They laughed when the actors blew their lines and Eleanor snappishly corrected them, and when Dave missed a cue, because he had gone into the kitchen to mix the punch for the post-play refreshments. Dora, playing a coquettish septuagenarian, insisted that she had only just turned seventy. The waspish old-age-home resident, played by Lou and Joe’s neighbor Hazel, retorted, “You’re seventy-eight and you look every damn day of it.” That got a big laugh, as did such lines as, “He died right here in this chair” and “He gave her an enema” and “They don’t last long once they’re here.”
Eleanor had done a fine job of casting. There was, for instance, the resident of Sunrise who maintained that the men and women of Forest View all fornicated with each other and who had spread false rumors that Art didn’t really go out on Tuesdays in order to play bingo but in order to get drunk. This woman played a puritanical old scold who, in the play, made her entry on a walker, declaring, “Sin! Sin! The whole world’s gone crazy with sin!” Winifred played a drunken old woman. Never a drinker in real life, she possessed her part. It was said by the staff that only Eleanor could handle Winifred, Eleanor who had brooked no interruptions or speeches during rehearsals. Winifred nearly stole the show again, as she had months ago at Eleanor’s cabaret. At one point the audience interrupted a scene to applaud Winifred’s boozy rendition of “I want a beer just like the beer that pickled dear old Dad.”