Old Friends

by Tracy Kidder

  Meanwhile, one of the elevators had broken down again. Lou saw the familiar shape of one of the housekeepers getting into the one still-functioning elevator and said, “Take a lunch-box with ya.” Lou knew what was wrong and he knew the cause. “It needs a new motor now. I said at the beginning—and I wasn’t just talking through my hat, because I had experience—that they needed maintenance. And I don’t think Bruce understands these elevators. I don’t think he called for maintenance until it broke down.”

  After the elevator broke, Lou made a special trip downstairs to the administrator’s office. He reported back to Joe: “I says, ‘Something should be done about that.’ I says, ‘First of all, God forbid someone gets stuck inside and has a heart attack.’ She said, ‘Don’t even mention it! If someone gets stuck, we’ll call on Bruce or Mike.’” Lou replied, “But they might not be here when it happens!” Lou told her that there should be a key that would unlock the elevator in case of emergency, and the administrator promised Lou she’d find out where that key was kept and make sure all the nursing supervisors also knew where it was. A few days later, Lou went out again, looking for nursing supervisors. “I want to follow up on this key business. I’ve been told they know where it is. I’m not gonna let it ride until I know for sure.” He visited every unit and questioned the charge nurses. They all knew where the key was, and Lou was satisfied.

  Lou allowed that the kitchen was making progress. They put the beef stew in a bowl now, for instance. “Progress,” he said. “But it’s awful slow. I’ll be an old man before it’s all straightened out.”

  On the “Today’s Events” bulletin board downstairs, a new message read, “Let’s Take One Day at a Time. Have a Great Day Everyone.” But it wasn’t easy to distinguish one day from another here, or even this year from the last. Lou and Joe’s days ran along mainly as they had last year, with small variations.

  On the elevator back from breakfast, Lou took the controls. Pleasant, confused Clara came along. “Call out your floors, please,” said Lou. It was one of his old elevator jokes, but Clara had slipped some.

  “Second,” she said. “I’m not sure.”

  Lou was quick to save her. “You’re not sure? If you’re not sure, we can’t let you out.”

  Clara laughed.

  M&M’s was more crowded than previously, but the routines were the same. On non-M&M’s mornings before Ruth arrived, Joe had taken to watching on TV the real-life courtroom arguments presided over by Judge Wapner. Joe liked to argue with the disputants and sometimes with the judge himself.

  He was watching, and Lou was listening, to an especially good show one fall morning when a new aide—there seemed to be quite a few new aides lately—came to the door and called in, “Did either of you have a bowel movement today?”

  Joe turned from the TV. “No. Hey, wait a minute!” Joe glanced at the puzzled-looking aide. He looked at the TV. “Oh, all right. Yes. And so did he.” Joe gestured toward Lou. He waved at the aide as if throwing something at her, and turned back to the show. He and Lou would break her in later.

  Lou’s wristwatch stopped keeping proper time. He tried wearing it upside down, and for a while it worked better. Then it functioned only after dark. “It’s gotten to the point where it only wants to work nights,” Lou said. Then the watch seemed to work only when Lou placed it on his bedside table. Lou told Joe he had a plan. He’d get a leash and tie it to his table and drag his watch around that way. Finally Lou gave up on his watch. He wouldn’t go to the expense of buying a new one. “There’s no place that I’m goin’ that’s that important that I have to have the time,” he said. When he wanted to know the time, he asked Joe. Joe had to count up both to the hour and the minute, and sometimes got balled up.

  “That’s all right,” Lou would say. “I’m in no hurry.”

  Lou still went faithfully to all meetings, and Joe never did, but he might have now begun working his way toward attendance. At the September Food Committee meeting Joe got as far as the doorway to the activity room. He stood there, leaning on his cane, listening in. Elgie spotted him and said in her high, cheery voice, “Come on in!”

  “Come on in!” Winifred called.

  “No,” Joe said. “I’m just looking.”

  One evening, Joe hung up his phone just as Lou was coming from the bathroom. “Well, if it makes you feel any better, I told her I loved her,” Joe said grumpily.

  When Joe was out, Lou shook his head and recited the catalogue of things in Joe that still did not add up: Joe’s continuing weight-loss program, now minus the bike; Joe’s pessimistic, superstitious utterances; Joe’s movies; Joe’s interrogations of the staff. On the other hand, Lou thought Joe was swearing less, in spite of the Red Sox.

  “With all his faults, I like Joe,” Lou said. “I think I pretty much know how to handle him. When to say yes and when to say no. When to kibitz and when not.” But Lou didn’t always know. One autumn morning, as they were heading out of the room together, Lou said, “Joe, close the door.”

  And Joe exploded. “Jesus Christ! You say that every goddamn time!”

  Lou’s head rocked back a little in surprise. “I just say that as a joke.”

  “Well, you say it every goddamn time, that’s all.”

  Lou smiled and headed on toward the elevators.

  Then they agreed, tacitly, to make the business of closing the door into a joke. Joe began to move more quickly when it was time to leave the room for meals or M&M’s or the lobby. He often managed to precede Lou out of the room. “Don’t forget to close the door,” Joe called back to Lou.

  “What’d you say, Joe?” Lou cupped a hand to his ear.

  “Don’t forget to close the door.”

  “I can’t hear ya, Joe.” Lou pulled the door shut.

  When Joe seemed to be getting riled up in an argument, Lou still silenced him by saying, “Behave yourself. I’m old enough to be your father.” And Joe laughed and said, “I know it.” Speaking of Lou, Joe said, “I got three degrees, but I don’t know as much as he does.”

  Lou reminisced again about the time, back when he was in his mid-fifties, when the company he’d worked for in Burlington, New Jersey, had gone out of business and he’d had to look for a new job. “I spent a few months searching for work. They kept saying no, even though I knew darn well I was qualified,” Lou said.

  “Because your hair was white,” Joe said, finishing Lou’s story for him.

  “Burlington,” said Joe later on that day while out for a walk around Forest View. “Every day Lou mentions Burlington. I don’t mind. Good God.” It was a sentiment that Joe repeated nearly as often as Lou repeated stories. “You know,” Joe went on, “I get along better with Lou than I ever did with anyone in my life. He never fought with his wife. I said, ‘For Christ’s sake, that’s impossible!’ He’s amazing. He likes all his grandchildren. He likes all his great-grandchildren…”

  On a day early in fall, both men bound for lunch, Joe again preceded Lou out of the room. Joe reached up and touched the mezuzah. He’d been doing this fairly regularly for nearly two years now, imitating Lou, saying out of Lou’s earshot, “Why take chances? You never know who’s right, you know.”

  Following Joe out, Lou said to him, “You’re still touching the mezuzah. In fact, you knocked it off the wall the other day.”

  Joe stopped and turned to face Lou. “I didn’t know you knew I touched it.”

  “Can’t hoit,” said Lou, putting on a Brooklyn accent. “I touch it, too.”

  “I didn’t know you knew I touched it,” said Joe. He blushed.

  ***

  As September wore on, the Red Sox again climbed back into contention. Joe cheered them on from his bed while Lou lay in his, rooting silently, saying to himself, “I wish they’d get a hit.” The Sox might have played better in the last days of the season if they’d known how ardently Joe, in his nursing home bed, yearned for their success. He mourned the season decorously. Down in the lobby, he said to Art, “You and I shoul
d be sad. The Red Sox lost.”

  “Boo-hoo,” Art said. “Did you have a bundle on them?”

  “No.”

  “That’d be a reason to be sad,” Art said.

  “They haven’t won the, uh, World Series, since you were twelve,” said Joe. “They won the year I was born.” He laughed a short laugh. “Well, wait until next year, that’s all.”

  From their window upstairs the maples in the woods looked unreal, bright green and red. They were colors of insanity and exaltation. Paper maple leaves, more sedately colored than the real things, adorned the activity room’s windows, as in elementary schools elsewhere.

  Lou asked Joe if he saw any change in the colors in the woods. Joe said yes, he certainly did. So it was time, Lou thought, to go to the graveyard, before the weather turned cold. He figured this would be his last trip there until next spring.

  “This morning I pulled the drape around six o’clock, and the sky was the most beauty-ful rose color,” Lou said as he prepared to leave the room. Lou put on a cardigan sweater, got his striped cane with its handle of “gen-u-ine plastic” from his wife’s walker, and groped around inside his closet for his blue windbreaker. He made sure, of course, to pull the door fully closed. Joe was elsewhere.

  Lou signed out at the nurses’ station. Every resident who was, in the local idiom, “going out on pass,” had to sign out. Then it was down to the lobby, a memorized passage strewn with the same memorized dangers—the Hoyer Lift outside Winifred’s door, the copying machine in the front hall. Lou was a little preoccupied this morning, with two issues. First, the ointment he used for his hemorrhoids. Medicaid wouldn’t pay for the brand he used to use. “So they got a different one. Okay. It did the job. It ran out this week. I got a new one. It was supposed to be in my drawer. I searched high and low. Then I found a package, a fancy package. I haven’t opened it yet. You need an engineering degree to open it. It’s an engineered package. Now, what I want to know, why did they substitute a more expensive package for a less expensive tube?”

  Lou sat down near the lobby door to await Ruth. The second issue on his mind was a story he’d heard on the news. “About a nursing home in Indiana where cleaning agents were mixed together wrong and produced hydrochloric acid, which got into their ventilation system. I wonder if they clean the filters as often as necessary on their air conditioning here. I asked Bruce, but he didn’t really give me an answer.”

  The question took Lou back to the day the pen factory in Burlington burned, to one of his fights with his cruel boss Whitehouse, to the many old records of his days in fountain pen manufacturing. He’d thrown those records away. “I keep thinking about a lot of things I should have done. I should’ve kept all those recipes and formulas and the pen sizes. After a while I got tired of looking at them. I don’t know what I’d do with them now. But I could look back at them,” he said.

  Then Ruth arrived. “Put your jacket on, Dad, because it’ll be chilly.”

  She held his left hand, and Lou used his cane as an antenna, walking very slowly down the sloping concrete apron to the car. Out in California, back when Lou was in his late eighties, he’d been helping Jennie, as Ruth was now helping him, out of a doctor’s office and down a sloping concrete apron just like this one. Jennie had lost her balance, and Lou couldn’t hold her up. He managed to get his hand around her head so that, falling with her, he kept it from hitting the pavement. The memory was fresh. It might have happened just the other day.

  Ruth guided Lou to the passenger seat. He placed his cane snugly in the angle between the open door and the car frame while he climbed in. Not that he thought Ruth would close the door on his hand or leg, but accidents happen. When Lou was all settled, he removed the cane.

  “So anyway, Fleur was on a rampage yesterday,” Lou said as Ruth turned the car onto Route 9.

  “Again?” Ruth said.

  “Yeah, she got hold of Norman and tried to choke him,” Lou said. “And Linda Manor now has a cat for a mascot. Joe said, ‘Why do we need a cat?’ And I said, ‘It’ll save money. We can use it for CAT scans.’”

  Ruth smiled. She told Lou she had a new friend who wanted to come to the nursing home and meet him.

  “Did you check my schedule?” Lou asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “I’ll cancel my tennis date,” Lou said. He squinted his eyes. Lou looked very small in the passenger seat. He also looked fully composed. “Penney’s is having a sale on shoes,” he said after a while. “What’s Sugar Babies?”

  “Ya got me, kid.”

  “Well, the sale’s over.”

  “Thanks a lot for telling me,” Ruth said.

  “Well, anyway,” Lou said. “Dave is in today. He came over to say hello, and I said, ‘What day is this?’ ‘Sunday,’ he said. ‘Can’t be,’ I said. ‘Why?’ ‘Because you’re here,’ I told him.”

  “Oh, that’s mean. He was in yesterday.”

  “He had to be,” Lou said. “There was no one else to do the work.” Lou still periodically gave Dave what Lou called “ear jobs.” The other day he heard Dave’s voice in the lobby, and he called to him, “Hey, Dave. Goin’ out to get something good to eat?” And another time: “Seriously, Dave, you know what I’d like to know? What do you do with the flavor you take out of the chicken?” Lou hadn’t even considered apologizing to Dave before the Day of Atonement. Dave was still Lou’s weakness.

  The small city of Northampton has two Jewish cemeteries, situated side by side on the outskirts of town. The area’s earliest Jewish settlers established the first one. They came from Germany, became fairly prominent, and were embarrassed by the Eastern European Jews who arrived later. Hence the two graveyards. The gate to the first was locked. It contained only a smattering of headstones. Ruth parked the car beside the gate to the second, newer one, which was much fuller. For a time on his visits here, Lou used to walk in from the gate, but the ground is uneven and Jennie’s grave is at the far end of the lot. So Ruth opened the gate and drove in, down a corridor between headstones. Ruth helped Lou out of the car.

  Tall oaks surround the cemetery. It is a pretty spot, but it was noisy at this hour. A superhighway passes nearby, running north toward Vermont and Canada. The sound of cars mingled with birdsong. Acorn shells crunched under their shoes as Ruth, holding fast to her father’s arm, led him toward a block of polished brown granite. “It’s a little bumpy,” Ruth said to Lou. He didn’t speak. He had not spoken since climbing out of the car. There was a Star of David at the top of the stone’s bright face, and under it the inscription FREED. In a column running down the left-hand side of the stone were these words:

  JENNIE

  BELOVED WIFE

  MOTHER

  GRANDMOTHER

  GREAT-GRANDMOTHER

  JAN. 9, 1898

  MAR. 8, 1990

  The right-hand side was blank.

  Ruth looked uncharacteristically solemn now, and one could see her father’s face in hers. She stared at him. She looked a little tense. Lou shifted his cane to his left hand. He placed his right hand on the rough top edge of the headstone, leaning on it, and looked toward the ground, at nothing it seemed, a slight frown turning down the corners of his mustache, deepening the lines that framed his chin. They didn’t speak or move at all from their positions for several long minutes. Then Lou shifted his cane to his right hand and turned toward the car. Ruth took his hand, squeezing it, and they walked slowly back, acorn shells crunching under their feet.

  They drove out of the graveyard in silence. Ruth had to close the gate, so she parked on the other side of the street, beside a mailbox, the shape of which Lou could evidently make out, because when Ruth got back in the car, he said to her, “Want me to check the mail?”

  These were the first words he’d spoken since they’d arrived. Ruth laughed. Lou smiled. The car ride back to Linda Manor reminded Lou, as car rides often did, of that one time in his life when he’d sat behind the wheel of an automobile and nearly crashed it into the prison
gate back in Philadelphia—of that time when, as Lou would say, he didn’t learn to drive. “It almost ruined my life,” said Ruth, glancing over at Lou in the passenger seat. “To have a father who didn’t drive and who almost banged into the gates of—”

  “Eastern Penitentiary,” Lou said.

  “That’s another reason I don’t run for public office,” Ruth said.

  That evening, after Ruth had left, Lou went outside to take the air. He went no farther than the aluminum-clad Doric column to the left of the front door. He held his cane in his right hand, its tip planted on the concrete. He leaned his back against the column. “Holding up the building,” he said.

  Lou’s mind was back at the cemetery. “The reason I go there, I just feel that she woulda wanted me to do that. I just can’t help feeling that there is a hereafter,” Lou was saying, when the front door flew open.

  Bob stood in the doorway. His wings of gray hair seemed swept back by fury. His mouth was working, as if he meant to chew his mustache. Holding the door open with his body, Bob jabbed his cane in Lou’s direction. “Can’t see! Can’t see!” Bob shook all over.

  Lou began to chuckle. He recognized the voice, and understood the problem. He’d been standing in Bob’s view of the parking lot.

  “Can’t see!”

  Lou chuckled again. Slowly, feeling his way with his cane, Lou walked to the column on the opposite side of the front door.

  “Beautiful! Excellent! Thank you kindly.”

  The front door closed.

  Lou leaned his back against the column. From the south came a whacking sound. “That’s a helicopter,” he said. He smiled. The day had warmed up. The evening autumn breeze ruffled Lou’s white hair.

  “In the Rosh Hashanah prayers, the way I remember, it’s predicted who shall live and who shall die, who shall pass away peacefully and who shall—well, I forget the words. But it goes on that penitence, hope, and charity can avert a severe decree.” All that, to Lou, implied an afterlife. “I can’t conceive of anything like this.” He raised his cane and swept it in an arc before him, as if from a promontory and toward a vast landscape. The gesture took in the parking lots, just a gray expanse to Lou, like all the world that lay beyond about five feet. “The universe or whatever. I can’t conceive of it being in existence without at some point something being there to create it. There had to be some supreme being. That’s just my theory. As a kid I could never fathom that the universe was so big.”