by Tracy Kidder
When Lou talked about death, he still expressed some trepidation about the event itself but none about its consequences. There was, after all, a chance that death might mean a reunion with Jennie. One could always hope. In the meantime, he didn’t usually mind the waiting. This life still had some things for him to do and to discover.
Lou sighed, and smiled again. “What’s that song? Don’t step on that ant, it might be your grandmother.” He chuckled, squinting his eyes tight, and said, his voice serious again, “It’s a mystery.”
11
The first snow fell the second week of November. Joe went to the window. “It’s snowing, Lou. Can you see it?”
“Honestly, no.”
Later that week, half a dozen residents trooped into the activity room to meet some new friends, a group of children from a local junior high. Ruth had made the arrangements, and the teachers had prepared the children.
In her room, Winifred was being made ready for lifting. She said she did not mourn the passing of autumn. “So many people have a misconception about winter. They think everything is dead and so forlorn. But it’s not. It’s just resting.” She was out and around in her wheelchair less often recently. “To get jostled and pinched and turned and bent in places that don’t bend anymore just isn’t worth it.” But she would have undergone worse torments than the Hoyer Lift for the sake of a get-together. And so today again, Winifred submitted as the aides trussed her up in the sling. One aide attached the buckles to the gallows-like device and turned the crank, a ratchety sound. And Winifred ascended, like an engine block being hoisted for repair. The aides rolled the contraption toward her wheelchair. Furled in the Hoyer sling, swaying gently in the air, the dangling Winifred rolled on toward another day.
***
Most of the residents arrived early to the activity room for Ruth’s party. Excessive punctuality, it is sometimes imagined, comes naturally with age, like white hair and bifocals. But usually residents had nothing better to do. Ruth directed traffic. “Hi, Arthur!”
“Bonjour, mes amis,” said Art, wading into the room and taking a seat at a table.
“Dad,” Ruth said to Lou, “why don’t you sit down here.”
Joe limped in. He said to Art, “I was looking for the right chair.”
“I thought you were looking me over,” Art said.
Joe began to sing, “Hey, look me over…”
Art tapped out the rhythm with his cane on the floor.
Winifred, now positioned in her wheelchair at a table nearby, was saying to another resident, “I’m not sure what these kids will want to know about.”
“Did she say she didn’t know if she’d have enough to say to the kids?” Art said to Joe. “That’d be the first time she was ever in that predicament.”
In came Dora on her walker, small and wide and beaming.
“Dora, how are ya?” Joe said from his chair.
“I couldn’t be better,” Dora said.
“Doctor been in to see you?” Joe asked.
“Hasn’t been in this month,” Dora said.
“Get your sleep?” Joe asked.
“Every night. I sleep good.” Dora was ready to go on, but just then the children arrived, a shy-looking group, all wearing name tags. Ruth took over. “Okay, Kathy, come here. This is your friend Hazel. Okay, Kim, this is your friend Elgie. Eileen, this is your friend Winifred.”
Joe offered his left hand to the boy assigned to him, saying, “I can’t shake hands with the other hand.”
Lou’s boy wasn’t shy. He sat down on the edge of his chair next to Lou and said, “You mind if I ask you a few questions? If they’re too personal, just tell me.”
Lou smiled.
“It was rough!” Joe was saying, the next table over. “Sure. A Navy ship in the South Pacific.”
“How young are you?” asked Lou’s new friend. The boy had black hair. He’d have to start shaving soon.
“Ninety-two,” Lou said.
“To me, old is dead,” said the boy.
Lou smiled.
“Do you play cards?”
“When I could see.”
“Do you like animals?”
“Dogs,” said Lou. “I don’t like cats.”
“Do you collect anything?”
“Woodworking tools,” Lou replied.
He scarcely had time to answer one question before the boy asked another. He had a list of questions. “Did you have any childhood heroes? Did you use any slang when you were a kid? Strange words to your parents and not for you? Like ‘cool’ or ‘awesome’?”
Lou smiled on. Winifred had spread old photographs across her table. Joe was asking his boy more questions than the boy was asking him. All around the room, in every little huddle, the residents were smiling. They were bathing in the kinds of looks that children give. Not that children don’t judge adults, but they do it differently. They don’t judge the pretty and the ugly, only the mean and the gentle. These children hadn’t really needed coaching. Sitting a foot away from a ninety-two-year-old clearly didn’t make Lou’s new friend uncomfortable.
He had put away his list of prepared questions. “Any questions for me?” he asked.
Lou started to speak. His voice broke, then reassembled. For a moment he’d seemed on the verge of tears. “Stay away from—”
“Drugs?” said the boy.
“Yeah,” Lou said. Then he smiled again. “And stay away from wild women.” To tout the virtues of not smoking, Lou bared his teeth. “They’re my own.”
The boy leaned forward and peered into Lou’s mouth. “Oh, cool.”
“Do you have any brothers?” he asked Lou.
“I have two brothers.” Lou didn’t say that only one was living.
“Who’s the boss, them or you?” asked the boy.
Lou was smiling, the kind of smile that seems to want to become more. “I was the oldest of seven,” Lou said.
“Do you like art? What kind?”
“No special kind.”
Behind Lou, Joe was giving his young friend some boxing instructions, demonstrating left-handed the proper way to jab. “So, uh, you box with sixteen-ounce gloves?” Joe was saying.
“So you don’t like horror books?” Lou’s friend said.
Lou bent close to him. “No.”
“That’s good. Because I don’t either.”
Joe was talking about Joe Louis now.
“I was just wondering what kind of toys did you used to have,” said the boy assigned to Lou.
“I didn’t have toys.”
“No time, huh. Always working.”
“One thing I always wanted was a kite,” Lou said. “I made one, but I couldn’t make it work.”
“Oh, yeah, I have that trouble,” said the boy.
“I sold newspapers when I was ten,” Lou said.
“I do yard work,” said the boy.
“Well, in my city, we didn’t have any yards.”
“Where’d you grow up?”
“Philadelphia. The city of brotherly love, they call it.” Lou told him about his schooling.
“I’m gonna be goin’ to Smith School to be a cook,” said the boy. “Is there anything else you want to know about me?”
“I’m trying to think.” Lou told him about the time when his mother brought him home by the ear from “the hotties,” the warm spot in the Delaware River where boys used to swim. “I remember, vaguely, they used to have horse-drawn trolleys,” Lou went on.
“Oh, that must’ve been cool. I like old pictures. If I go to college, I’ll major in cooking, electronics, or…”
“Better make up your mind,” Lou said. “Learn to cook.”
Then the boy looked furtively around the room and leaned a little closer to Lou. “Are you guys allowed to drink what you want?”
Lou cupped his ear. His hearing had faded some in the past year, and the boy had asked the question in a low voice.
“Do you like soda?” the boy asked.
“No.
” Lou shook his head.
The boy looked around again, leaned toward Lou, and said, “If you wanted, I could probably sneak something in for you.”
Lou beamed. He patted the boy’s arm. “No, that’s all right. We get everything we need here.”
Everyone agreed. The visit was a great success. They’d do it again soon. Lou left smiling. He was in such a good mood he decided to visit Dan.
12
The trouble with visitors is that they have to be thanked for coming, and forgiven for going away. They are always welcome, but their usefulness is circumscribed.
The central problem of life at Linda Manor is, after all, only the universal problem of separateness: the original punishment, the ultimate vulnerability, the enemy of meaning. Lou keeps an old appointment calendar in which are recorded the birthdays and anniversaries of all his relatives. He keeps it so he won’t forget to offer congratulations, over the phone, at the proper times. All of Lou’s solutions come in such simple clothes. At another time, in another place, Joe might not have understood. But he has lived in a little room with Lou for going on two years, and he understands now. Joe points toward the chair by the window and says, “There are no smart guys. The only smart guy I know sits over there.”
Late on a frigid November afternoon, Joe’s friend Ray, tall and thin and fit looking, arrives for a visit. After some small talk, Lou excuses himself, to give Joe and Ray privacy. Lou is expecting company, too. He’s gotten word that a friend is in town and plans to stop by this afternoon, a man who had recently spent a couple of months convalescing at Linda Manor. He and Lou used to speak Yiddish together. Since then, Lou’s friend has moved to California. Lou heads down to the lobby to wait for him.
Lou hears voices around him. There are a lot of visitors today. Feeling his way with his cane, he skirts the piano and sits down on the sofa by the front door. He crosses his legs, leans his cane against them, and waits.
In a few minutes he sees the movement and brightening that mean the front door is opening. Shapes appear, and from them come voices. He recognizes the voice of his friend. Lou smiles, the smile drawing intricate connections among the furrows of his face.
Age, it seems, tends to cull evenly among groups of friends, so that very few groups survive intact. This fellow lived in the area for years, but most of his old crowd have died. Coming back with his daughter to take care of some business, he felt impelled to make contact with the people he’d met in his time at Linda Manor. His walker rattles. Lou moves aside. His friend parks his walker and sits next to him. In the window behind them, a pale sun hangs just below the state flag.
“I’ve been looking forward to your visit,” says Lou, his voice gravelly yet smooth, like pebbles in a river. “I got advance notice.”
“How’s your friend? Joe.”
“Fine,” Lou says. “He just had someone visit from his hometown. So what have you been doing with yourself?”
“Living in California off the fat of the land. Does your daughter still come every day?”
“Yeah.” Lou mentions the kids from the junior high. “One wanted to know if he could sneak in any soda for me.” Lou’s smile makes webs of his face’s wrinkles again, as intricate as memory. He musters his news. “My sister was up here a few weeks ago, and my son was here. And Thursday we’re all going up to my daughter’s. The mishpocheh.” Lou lists all the members of his family who are coming. And then he runs out of news. There’s a long pause.
“So.”
“So what’s happening with your house down here?” Lou asks. “Selling it?”
No. He hasn’t tried to sell it yet.
“I guess I’m gonna stay put here,” Lou says.
Has Lou considered moving to one of the local retirement homes?
“I don’t want a change, I know most of the people here, and Ruthie comes down most every day.” Then Lou laughs. “And I know my way around! I follow the white line in the carpet.”
“So what else is new? What’s the color of the scrambled eggs today?”
Lou looks away. “I never ate eggs for breakfast.”
Again, they fall silent. It’s that time of winter afternoon when the world pauses, and they pause with it, two old men in reunion on a sofa, in slanted light. From across the lobby come other voices. And then Martha appears, carrying her pocketbook, dressed in her winter coat. She laughs merrily. “Well, folksies, goodbye.” She goes out, heading home again, and in about a minute returns. “It is cold,” she says.
The lobby is quite full. Voices from the separate conversations blend into an intermission-like buzz around Lou, in the midst of which Joe’s voice can now be heard. Joe limps into the lobby, the much taller Ray, dressed in his overcoat, walking slowly beside him. The little group of men coalesces near the front door, but Ray’s overcoat marks him as not really one of them, and in a moment the group begins disbanding. Ray has to be going.
“Okay, I’ll see ya,” Joe says.
The door closes and Joe sits down in the festive lobby. Visitors do leaven life’s routines. They bring news of other worlds—the family news, the meteorological news, the hometown news. It is always nice to have visitors, especially when winter is closing in around the building and it feels more than ever like an outpost.
But it is getting late. Those stirrings begin, and sighs, and the long, drawn-out “Well,” which everywhere signify the beginning of a day’s partings. Well, Joe says finally, it’s time to go upstairs and get some pills.
Joe shakes hands with Lou’s friend. “I’ll see ya.” Joe turns and limps past the potted plant and around the piano, which catches his reflection and overstates his roundness. He heads slowly toward the wide doorway, back toward the inside of Linda Manor.
Lou’s friend will be leaving soon. He isn’t a part of this place anymore. Lou probably won’t see him again. But his ninety-two years afford a lot of experience with partings. Lou gets up. “Well, zei gezunt, fohr gezunt.” This is Yiddish for “Be well, travel well.” Lou extends his hand. He’s glad that he still has the strength to deliver a firm handshake. He clasps his friend’s hand and holds it for an extra moment.
Then Lou starts after Joe, in his well-braced walking stance, a sturdy old sailor at sea in a storm.
Joe looks back over his shoulder. “Come on, Lu-Lu,” Joe calls.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Seth Goldsmith of the University of Massachusetts found Linda Manor for me and helped immeasurably throughout, lending me counsel as well as many books and articles. Ann Hallock performed a variety of difficult tasks ingeniously and thoroughly. Elizabeth Coughlan helped to organize my notes. My thanks to Larry Cooper, the estimable manuscript editor. I got help and comfort from all of the following: Jerry Avorn, Robert Bagg, Madeleine Blais, Georges Borchardt, William Cooley, Blanche Cooney, Stuart Dybek, Ed Etheredge, Elise Feeley, Warren Fisher, Sandy Goroff-Mailly, Jonathan Harr, Joe Kanon, John Katzenbach, Jamie Kilbreth, Cindy Klein, Mark Kramer, John O’Brien, Barnaby Porter, Susan Porter, Tim Rivinus, Mike Rosenthal, Allison Ryan, Norman Spencer, John Sterling—and also from Alice, Fran, and Nat. I wish to thank the Berkshire Eagle for allowing me the freedom of their files, and the Cooley Dickinson Hospital for allowing me to observe a cataract operation. I also wish to thank the many people who submitted to interviews. I am grateful to all of the staff and management of Linda Manor, to relatives and friends of residents, and, above all, to those dozens of residents with whom I spent a year indoors. I am greatly indebted, once again, to Richard Todd.
I cite only two published works in the text: Thomas R. Cole, The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992; and Eleanor L. Niedeck, W. B. and the Big Black Trunk, printing by Boonville Graphics, Inc., Boonville, New York, 1980.