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Old Friends
Copyright © 1993, 2014 by Tracy Kidder
Cover art, special contents, and Electronic Edition © 2014 by RosettaBooks LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

The Last Place

Inside Linda Manor, upstairs on Forest View, the lights in the corridors brighten. The living room windows begin to reflect the lights on the plastic Christmas tree, and the view through those windows is fading, the woods growing thicker, the birches glowing in the dusk. At the west end of Forest View’s longer corridor, a white-haired woman in a plain housedress and sneakers leans against the heating register, a cane in her hands, and she gazes out at clouds. She is very forgetful and yet very nostalgic and, of all the people who live here, the most devoted to windows. “They come and go,” she says of the clouds. “I guess that’s to be expected. First they’re dark and then they’re light. First they’re there and then they’re gone.” She makes a small laugh. She goes on gazing through the glass. “I don’t know what all this business is about, living this way. I tried to figure it out, but I can’t.” The clouds hovering above the silhouette of the far ridge are sharply etched, clouds of the north wind, dark gray in the last light of a sky that is still too bright for stars.

The light seeps away. The windows at the ends of Forest View’s corridors throw back watery images of carpeted corridors that could belong to a clean motel. It is night. Lou Freed comes out of his room, down on the north hall just past the elevators. Lou is small and plump in the middle, with fleecy white hair and thick, dark-framed glasses. Behind the lens, the lid of his left eye droops. His close-cropped mustache is a dash of white across his face. His forehead and cheeks are deeply furrowed. Lou wears a look of concentration as he comes out into the hall. He holds a cane in his right hand. Its black shaft is striped like a barber pole with yellowish tape. Lou applied the tape several years ago when his eyes began to fail and he couldn’t cross a street very quickly anymore. He used to hold the cane aloft as he crossed, hoping it would catch the attention of drivers. He no longer has to worry about crossing streets, but he’s left the tape in place since coming here, on the theory that it will help him to spot his cane if he should misplace it. He never does misplace it.

As he walks, Lou leans on his cane, but not heavily. Now and then he extends it forward, searching for possible obstructions. Lou walks with his legs spread well apart, his left arm swinging free and a little away from his torso while his right arm works the cane. He crosses the corridor perpendicularly and then turns south, following the carpet’s border, traveling in a slow, sturdy gait, like an old sailor crossing a rolling deck, passing along a wall equipped with an oak handrail and adorned with cream-colored wallpaper and rose-colored moldings, passing several numbered bedroom doors of blond oak veneer and framed prints of flowers and puppies and English hunting scenes.

The nurses’ station, enclosed with a Formica counter, is brightly lit as always. Lou stops at the corner of the station. He shifts his cane to his left hand and slides his right hand up the wall until it touches the edge of a four-gang light switch. His fingers are nimble. They move with a confident inquisitiveness, but they fumble slightly over the plate of the light switch. This isn’t the switch that Lou wants. He finds the one he wants by finding this one first. His hand pauses here tonight, however. The plastic plate surrounding these four switches feels warm. In Lou’s experience, this sometimes signifies a circuit overload. Nothing serious, but he’ll have to remember to tell Bruce, the director of maintenance, tomorrow.

Lou’s hand moves on across the wall, fingers fumbling again until they strike a two-gang switch. Then with a flick of the forefinger, joyous in its certainty, Lou throws both switches up, and in all the bedrooms of Forest View the night lights come on.

Night lights are important. They might save other residents from falling on the way to their bathrooms in the middle of the night. They might save Lou from such a fate. April, one of the aides, has forgotten to turn them on. Or else she’s been too busy. When that happens, Lou does the job. He doesn’t mind. It is a job.

“Hi, Lou.” A nurse, a young woman in slacks—the nurses here don’t wear uniforms—stands nearby, behind the medication cart, studying her records.

Lou lifts his right arm and makes as if to flex his biceps. His arms are thin. The flesh sags from them. But some muscle rises. “Pretty soon I’ll be sweating rust.” Lou has a soft, gravelly voice.

The nurse chuckles. Lou smiles. Then he shifts his cane to his right hand, his face grows serious again, and he starts slowly back down the carpeted hallway toward his room. As Lou nears the doorway, he hears the sound of screeching tires. He enters to the sound of gunfire.

Within, the lights are out and the curtains drawn. Lou’s roommate, Joe Torchio, lies on his back on the bed nearer the door, a bald-headed, round-faced, round-bellied man. In the changeable glow of his TV, Joe looks beached and bristly. Lou feels his way past Joe to the other side of the room, and in a while he begins to get ready for bed. The charge nurse knocks. Joe flicks his remote control at the TV, leaving it lit but mute, and the nurse enters, carrying pills.

Back in his eighties, Lou knew all the names and functions of his medicines. Now he takes too many to remember, though he still makes inquiries about new ones now and then. Joe has said he doesn’t know what pills the nurses give him and he doesn’t care. “If they want to kill me, go ahead,” Joe likes to say, and Lou replies, “Joe, don’t talk that way.” But Lou says he isn’t worried either, because the pills he takes all have arrows on them, to tell them where to go once they get inside. The nurse laughs: Lou and Joe may take a lot of pills, but they are among the most physically healthy of Linda Manor’s residents.

Joe turns his head on his pillow and looks at Lou, who has climbed into his bed and under the covers. “We’re the best!” Joe exclaims.

“And so betwixt us both, we licked the platter clean,” Lou says. He smiles, the covers pulled up to his chin, and he sighs. “Ahh, dear. It’s a great life, if you don’t weaken.”

Joe aims his remote control at the TV. The sounds of a car chase resume, and Lou drifts off to sleep.

At eleven, the night shift takes over on Forest View. They turn out the hallway lights, leaving the corridors in the glow of the cherry-colored exit signs, a red that grows increasingly lurid as the night wears on. The charge nurse and her two aides sit in the pool of light at the nurses’ station over endless paperwork. The lights on the Christmas tree blink on and off in the living room across the way. Christmas carols play softly on the staff’s communal tape recorder. It is the season of long New England nights, the year’s midnight.

On Forest View, morning begins long before dawn. Around five o’clock, a voice comes out of the darkened west corridor. “Howdee! Howdee! Howdee! Hello to you, hello!” the voice sings.

A thin man on a cane limps out of the shadows. The man has wings of gray-white hair on either side of his bald dome and a gray mustache.

“Hi, Bob,” says the night nurse. She looks up from her paperwork and smiles at him.

“Excellent!” Bob says to the nurse. Then he says, “Adios, amigo,” and, cane in his left hand, his right arm held tight to his side, he limps on, with a purposefulness that makes his progress seem rapid, up to the living room doorway. Deftly, Bob lets his cane handle slip deep into his palm and snaps on the living room lights with his fingers. He surveys the room, twisting his mouth critically. Then he lays down his cane on the seat of an armchair and starts moving furniture around, pulling chairs here and there—one-handed and hobbling. Bob is a victim of left-brain stroke. He is seventy. “There,” Bob says when he’s assembled a semicircle of armchairs near the living room door. He sits down to wait, keeping an eye on the door.

Gradually the chairs around Bob begin to fill. First comes Clara, in slacks, orange sweater, and high heels, carrying a gigantic pocketbook. Without asking or being asked, she bends down and ties Bob’s shoes, Bob saying, “Excellent! Beautiful! Thank you kindly.” Then Eleanor comes in out of the shadowy corridor. She wears a red flannel floor-length robe and pink slippers. Her short, curled gray hair looks as neat as if she’d just come from the beauty shop downstairs. Her makeup is already in place. Eleanor enters in quick, dainty steps, with slight unsteadiness and yet with erectness of shoulders and chin. Eleanor is eighty. One can imagine her in younger days sweeping into a grander room and turning some heads, not so much with her looks as with sheer force of will. She sits down in a tall-backed upholstered wing chair, looks at Bob, and says, “So.”

“For the birds,” Bob says. He looks at Eleanor. “I wish I could talk now.”

“You’ve said enough,” Eleanor says. “What would you say if you could talk?”

Then Art appears in the doorway, a short, broad-chested man of eighty-four with a fine head of white hair and sad-looking watery eyes. Art has the Parkinson’s shuffle. He walks as if wading through water up to his waist. But his voice is cheerful. It is also deep and sonorous. “Good morning, Mrs. Zip Zip Zip,” Art says to Eleanor. She beams up at Art. Only Eleanor knows the song to which Art is alluding. He sang it for her not long ago. It dates back to World War I:

Good morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip

With your hair cut just as short as mine

With your hair cut just as short as mine.

You’re surely looking fine.

From ashes to ashes, dust to dust

If the camels don’t get us, the fatimas must.

Good morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip

With your hair cut just as short as

With your hair cut just as short as mine.

Bob’s eyes dart from Art to Eleanor. “Incredible!” Bob declares. He grins.

Bob jabs his index finger in Art’s direction, then at the fourth armchair in the circle. Art sits down, and the circle by the door of the living room is complete. With shaky hands, Art pulls his electric razor from its case and begins to shave. First he asks Eleanor, “This won’t disturb you too much now, will it?” To which Eleanor waves a deprecating hand. “No!”

Art’s wife died here a couple of months ago. He has only recently begun to fraternize with other residents. To her select group of confidantes, made up mostly of nurses and aides—she refers to most other residents as “them”—Eleanor has begun to speak of Art as if he were her personal discovery. “A bon vivant,” she’ll say, pointing out the many coincidences of their lives. That they both got married around the same time and had their first children the same year, that her husband, too, was named Art, and that both she and this Art knew a passion for performance, Art through his singing and she through the theater. Eleanor’s father was a flamboyant, itinerant producer of minstrel shows late in the last century and early in this one. Eleanor acted all her life in amateur and semiprofessional theatricals. Some months ago she assembled a theater group, the Linda Manor Players. Eleanor is the director. She has a production coming up.

Art packs his razor away in its leather case. Clara watches. Bob helps. “This takes two people,” Art says to Eleanor. Art’s hands shake, and Bob can use only his left. “There,” says Bob at last. Art pulls a cracker out of his shirt pocket and hands it to Bob. Art laughs, Eleanor laughs, Bob laughs as he bites into the cracker, and Clara looks confused and starts laughing just as the others are finishing. It is a two-way conversation after that, in the small circle of armchairs, Clara listening quietly and Bob listening with agitation, his eyes jumping back and forth between Art and Eleanor.

“I was a boy soprano,” Art says. “I could hit a high C like nobody’s business. Then the change hit. Around twelve or thirteen. I became a baritone.” Art smiles. The expression looks brave beneath his sad-looking eyes.

“I had a lot of fun, though,” Art goes on. “In light operas. I sang at a numerous amount of weddings. And funerals.” Abruptly his voice gets very soft. “I won’t say any more. People would say I was bragging.”

“Well,” Eleanor says, “I’m going to listen to the weather report. It’s almost six, isn’t it?”

Bob looks at his wristwatch. “Oh boy.” He gets up and limps fast out the door. It is time to turn on the corridor lights. Bob does that every morning. Then he returns to his seat in the living room. Eleanor, meanwhile, goes back to her room. She takes the diuretic Lasix for her heart when she first gets up, and it takes effect around six. But the weather report is not entirely a ladylike ruse. When she returns to the living room a few minutes later, with little steps—in her hybrid gait of daintiness, frailty, and vigor—Eleanor announces to the others, “All right. It is twenty-six degrees. It is going to snow in the Berkshires. It is going to sleet tonight. Tomorrow’s going to be cloudy and cold.”

Art and Eleanor resume their chat, turning to the subject of breakfast. “We never have donuts here,” Eleanor says.

“Louie! Damn right!” Bob cries. He thrusts his left arm out, like a boxer jabbing, in obvious approval of Lou Freed and his breakfast.

They begin to discuss the behavior of other residents at meals. “Phil causes trouble,” Eleanor says.

“Nonstop,” Art says. “But Winnie the Pooh, she can go from one topic to another. Boy, she can do that smoother than anybody I ever heard. I remember the first time I met her. I kept thinking, ‘I’ll get out of here sometime. There’s got to be a break somewhere.’ First chance, I got out of there. ’Twas rude. But I had to. If I hadn’t, I’d still be there, I guess.”

Eleanor smiles. Bob smiles, darting looks toward the doorway behind him. Out there, around the nurses’ station, the night nurse and the aides hurry to and fro. Many call bells are beeping. The bustling in the corridors makes the living room seem cozier, like a cabin in a storm.

The first gray light has just appeared in the living room windows, black mirrors a moment ago, now opening on the view of the woods to the south. Art has announced the dawn, saying, in an ironic tone, “Darkness shall not prevail.” And the four coffee klatchers have begun laughing again—including Clara, who has developed an ensuing case of the giggles, which has reignited the others’ laughs—when the imposing figure of Phil rolls up in a wheelchair into the doorway. Phil has a huge head and huge ears, the head of an old lion. He wears the same institutional-green cardigan sweater as always. His silver hair is slicked back. His lower front teeth are missing; the effect is more disturbing than if he had no teeth at all. He looks dangerously irascible, but his hands are soft looking, white, and small, and his trousers bunch up at the waist, a common sight here, signifying diapers beneath.

The four have stopped laughing. Phil rolls himself in his wheelchair through the coffee klatch. The others move their feet out of the way. Phil rolls up to the center of the room and the table piled with magazines. Eleanor studies Phil and makes a face. “Now he’ll complain about how old the magazines are,” she murmurs.

Phil is, as it happens, lifting a copy of Time, wearing a dour expression. “October 1990. That’s good. That’s only two months old.” He starts paging through it. “Old George, he’s got troubles over there in Kuwait.”

The four coffee klatchers resume their chat, ignoring Phil. But then Eleanor mentions the Forest View resident who broke her hip a few days ago and has not returned from the hospital. And Phil, still sitting in front of the table, joins their conversation. He says, “That’s the thing. First they have the walker. Then they have one of these.” Phil looks down at the arms of his wheelchair and pats them with his small white hands. “Then they go to the hospital. And that’s the end of that.”

Art turns around in his chair. “Look at you,” he says to Phil. “You fell down the other day and nothing happened to you.”

Phil seems not to hear this. He picks up another magazine, cocking his great, leonine head. “Yeah,” he says. “Leonard Bernstein, he died. Only seventy-one. I used to love to watch him jump around the podium. He was Koussevitzky’s pet.”

“Koussevitzky,” repeats Art, without turning to look at Phil. Art seems deep in thought.

“I was surprised Forbes died so fast,” Phil goes on, musingly, pleasantly. “Another actress died. She was really famous. I can’t remember her name.”

Eleanor now speaks up. “Well I saw Helen Hayes on TV the other day. She looked wonderful.” Eleanor’s voice quivers over the last word.

“She’s somethin’ else,” Phil agrees. Then he adds, “She lost her daughter, lost her husband.”

For a moment no one speaks. Then Phil says, “Sergio Franchi, he’s dead. He was only in his fifties, for cryin’ out loud.”

Eleanor makes a face. Art says over his shoulder to Phil, “He died three or four years ago, didn’t he?” Art’s voice insinuates the question, Why bring that up now?

“Yeah, I was surprised at that,” says Phil, ignoring Art’s tone. “Sergio Franchi. He had some voice. His sister was a singer. Country and western.”

“Yeah,” Phil says. “Then they got those two girls, a mother and daughter who sing country music. The mother’s s’posed to be dyin’ of cancer.”

“This goes on like Tennyson’s brook,” murmurs Eleanor, but silence descends on the room. Bob, who is Phil’s roommate, has not uttered a word since Phil’s entrance, but has glared at Phil from time to time, making a chewing motion. Now Bob stands up, says, “Bye-bye,” and limps out. Each of the remaining coffee klatchers gazes a separate way. They seem lost in a collective case of the long thoughts, distant memories at hand, and none of them happy. Phil stares at his lap, but he alone does not look sad. “I never saw Al Jolson in person,” he says.

“Yeah, he went overseas in the Second World War and got sick,” says Phil. “And that was the end of that.”

This is not exactly an argument, but more like a contest. Given the subject, Phil is bound to win.

It seemed so new a place for people so old. Linda Manor had opened for business only a little more than a year ago. It stood in what had been a hay field, in a suburban-bucolic setting, on Route 9 a few miles west of downtown Northampton, Massachusetts. The developer named Linda Manor after one of his daughters. The building had balconies and balcony railings along its flat roofs and wide frieze boards under its eaves. Out front there was a portico, supported on four Doric columns, and two tall flagpoles, also a little fountain, like a child’s wading pool. And everything, except for the brick walls, was painted white. The building looked not quite finished, like the parts of a giant wedding cake laid side to side.

The obligation of finding a nursing home for a sick, aged person usually falls to a daughter. On any given day in the region, a middle-aged woman would be looking around for an acceptable establishment. There were a few. But there were also places where the stench of urine got in one’s clothes like tobacco smoke, where four, sometimes five, elderly people lay jammed in tiny rooms, where residents sat tied to wheelchairs and strapped to beds, where residents weren’t allowed to bring with them any furniture of their own or to have private phones or to use the public pay phone without nurses listening in. One woman, on a recent tour of a nearby place, had been shown a room with a dead resident in it. Some nursing homes looked fancy and well kept but were all veneer. When Linda Manor’s portico hove into view, it looked like one of those.

Large windows surrounded Linda Manor’s lobby. Thick carpeting covered the floor. A huge brass chandelier had been hung from a coffered ceiling above a baby grand piano with a gleaming, black lacquered finish. Linda Manor’s owner wished that residents were banned from his lobby. That wasn’t an extraordinary practice at nursing homes. But the administrator refused. (She worked for the huge nonprofit medical corporation that leased Linda Manor, and she had full authority over the running of the place.)

What most people take for granted is unusual in nursing homes. Linda Manor had some unusually pleasant qualities. The staff wasn’t the largest per resident in the area, but large by the prevailing standards and far larger than the state required. Every room in the building got natural light. There was a small greenhouse. Residents were allowed to bring their own furnishings and to have their own telephones. Most rooms contained two beds. A few were singles. And none of the residents was tied up. This policy of “no restraints” was rare in the world of nursing homes. The local newspaper carried a long story about it when Linda Manor first opened. The publicity helped to make the policy work. A good reputation meant lots of applications for beds. The management could afford to turn away the very violent and most floridly demented.

Some residents were brought from great distances, from places like Florida and California, to be near their families. Most came from western Massachusetts, and collectively they made up a fairly accurate cross section of the area’s old people. A few were wealthy. About 30 percent paid the high private rate. Medicaid and Medicare paid the room and board for most. Some owned nothing when they arrived. One man did not even own a change of clothes; several of the staff rummaged through their husbands’ closets and outfitted him.

Periodically, wheelchair vans or ambulances or private cars parked in front of the portico and new residents were escorted in, a few on their own feet, others in wheelchairs, some on gurneys. New residents arrived from hospitals mainly, and occasionally from other nursing homes. Some arrived directly from their own or their children’s homes, and for them the transition tended to be hardest. Some newcomers left their relatives’ cars only after coaxing. And, on the other hand, a few residents would say that they felt sad but relieved when they arrived. The eighty-five-year-old woman, for instance, who had lived alone in a two-story house, crawling up and down the stairs, bathing herself with talcum powder for fear of the tub, subsisting mostly on tea and toast.

A few people died within days of arriving—one on her very first day—and it was hard to resist a Victorian explanation, that they died of broken hearts. More often, though, the physical health of new residents stabilized or even improved, in some cases because they had received marginal care and feeding before. Some residents merely stopped here, to rest and receive a few months of therapy, on the way home from the hospital. One well-traveled, well-read woman declared, soon after arriving, that she never played bingo in her life and did not intend to start now. She stayed at Linda Manor for a year, read most of Proust, and then returned home. But hers was an exceptional case.

By this time, December 1990, Linda Manor was running at capacity—121 beds, all full. Most of the residents were over 70 years old. The oldest had reached her 103rd year in remarkably good health. About two thirds were women, a figure in line with national actuarial figures. It went without saying that everyone had an illness. Most had several.

The building was organized, generally, by illness. The upstairs wing, Forest View, was home to the physically healthier residents, so-called Level III’s. Among them were Lou and Joe and the nostalgic woman who often stood at the western windows and Eleanor and Phil and the other coffee klatchers and a man named Dan. He was only sixty-five, one of the youngest residents, but gaunt and pale. Most hours of the day found Dan lying on his bed upstairs, dressed in street clothes and wearing a thin, blue nose catheter, which was attached to an oxygen concentrator burbling next to his bed. Dan had a huge television set at the foot of his bed and a powerful, programmable speaker phone beside him, a phone fit for a fair-sized office. He had only to lean a little out from his pillow and punch a button, and all by itself his phone would dial up the office of the junior senator from Massachusetts. Lately, Dan had been calling that office regularly, to find out if any action had been taken on his complaint about his breakfast eggs, which the Linda Manor kitchen wouldn’t prepare the way he liked them—runny. The kitchen said they couldn’t oblige him because of the risk of salmonella, but Dan suspected they were just being contrary. The last time he called the senator’s office, a voice over his speaker phone informed him that a letter on the matter of his eggs would soon be in the mail.

About half of Forest View’s residents were able-minded. The management had mingled among them most of the residents who were demented but mobile and restless. Living upstairs made it harder for those people to find their way outside, where they might vanish in the woods or get hit by cars. There was a former inner-city schoolteacher who would sometimes rush down the corridors of Forest View, muttering threats to call the police if the children wouldn’t behave, and a woman whom Phil had nicknamed Lady Godiva, because one night she ran nude and screeching through the halls, fleeing the aide who was trying to bathe her. That woman usually didn’t run, but walked very gingerly upon the colorful, elaborately patterned carpet. In a place of damaged minds, a carpet full of complex shapes was a mistake. She balanced on the rectangular borders as if on the narrow ledges of a skyscraper under construction. Evidently, she saw an abyss in the carpet’s deep blue background.

When the demented roamed the halls, Forest View could seem like an underworld of myth. There was Fleur, a tiny, spry ninety-two-year-old, her face quilted with wrinkles, who a dozen times a day would stand at the nurses’ station counter and ask if someone wouldn’t please call her mother. Clutching her pocketbook, Fleur would say that even though she liked this resort and her family had been coming here for years, it was time for her to go home now. There was Norman, who walked the hallways slowly, sometimes looking for an exit, sometimes looking for his wife. (When he mistook certain fellow residents for her, they got upset and yelled at him.) Zita was always out in the halls. Unperturbed by any of the sights and voices around her, moving at a steady pace, sometimes holding her hands cupped before her as if to receive a communion wafer, leaning slightly forward, her short gray hair swept back, her eyes half hooded, Zita paced the halls of Forest View from the time she arose until she went to bed. Sometimes she paused and, bending down, scratched at the flowers depicted in the carpet, trying to pick one.

Two thirds of Linda Manor’s residents lived downstairs, on the nursing units called Meadowview and Sunrise. These units were, by and large, reserved for the very ill and the immobile, the so-called Level II’s. Some never left their beds, and many didn’t mix much, but some were gregarious, and none more than Winifred. She lived in a room just past the open fire doors of Sunrise. She endured great discomfort daily for the sake of sociability. In the morning she would lie in bed and stare unhappily toward her door as the Hoyer Lift, a contraption that looked like a miniature gallows on wheels, rolled toward her across the room, a nurse’s aide pushing, another following.

Winifred wasn’t tall, only five foot four the last time she was vertical. But she was big. She weighed over 200 pounds. Winifred was in her eighties. In her youth she had been one of the prettiest girls in Florence, Massachusetts.

The aides would truss her up in a black mesh sling and crank her out of bed. As she rose on the Hoyer Lift, Winifred groaned. She sobbed. “Oh, it bends and it breaks and it pinches.” She wore a shocked and fearful look as she was rolled, dangling in midair, toward the bathroom. Eventually, the aides lowered her into her recliner. She’d sit there until it was time for her to be Hoyered into her wheelchair, so that she could sally forth to church services or resident meetings or any other local event—she went to all. After the aides wheeled the Hoyer out, Winifred sat weeping into her hands.

An epidemic of injured backs threatened to decimate Linda Manor’s staff. A while ago, to prevent more injuries, the administration had ordered that Winifred and several others be lifted mechanically. It took its toll on her. Winifred had grown increasingly volatile, cheerful at one moment, weepy the next. Sometimes lately she shrieked at the nursing staff for small and imagined offenses. Behind all that lay her conviction that they had wronged her with the Hoyer Lift. To her, the hoisting signified defeat. She surmounted polio as a child and later a terrible car wreck, and she would not let herself think that she wouldn’t walk again. But how could she, she’d cry, if they used the Hoyer? If they went on using it, she sobbed, her feet might never touch the ground again.

Soon, however, Winifred would cheer up, laid out in her recliner, her swollen feet elevated. “All my parts have been broken or bent.” She’d laugh a high, cackling giggle. “Don’t you think there ought to be some dump somewhere, like there are for used cars?” In a moment, she would turn to business. She was the preeminent fundraiser here. She intended to raise the money to buy Linda Manor a chairlift van, and she felt sure she would succeed. She had only to put her full mind to it.

Youth fled, agility failed,

With hoisted sails, high hopes afloat,

I brace channels of stormy, ever-changing tide…

Beauty not duty I left behind

Back in the time when.

Linda Manor’s grounds were often empty. Their stillness lent a secretive quality to the sprawling, low-roofed building—set back from busy Route 9, surrounded by wintry woods and dormant grass, adorned with Greco-Roman columns, balconies and parapets, all as white as a nurse’s starched uniform. As one stared at it, the place grew odder in the mind. The building looked so provisional. So new and yet containing so much of the past. Many residents remembered World War I as if it had ended yesterday. Some remembered firsthand accounts of the Civil War. They were like immigrants arriving in a new land with long lives behind them, obliged to inhabit a place that was bound to seem less real than the places they recalled. For most of those long-lived, ailing people, Linda Manor represented all the permanence that life still had to offer. It was their home for the duration, their last place on earth.

Lou and Joe had been placed together in the room upstairs beside the elevators ten months ago. People entering nursing homes have, for the most part, already lost control over their lives. Once inside, they usually don’t even get to choose their roommates.

Lou had come to Linda Manor with his ailing wife, Jennie. They had been married for almost seventy years when Jennie died, in early March of 1990. In the weeks afterward, Lou walked the familiar corridors of Linda Manor on his cane. For hours at a time, he sat alone in the room he’d shared with Jennie on the Sunrise nursing unit. In the room, the two beds, which Lou had kept shoved together, stood apart.

Lou’s daughter, Ruth, asked him to leave and live with her. But he said, “I couldn’t do that to you, Ruth.” If he lived at her house, he’d feel he was a burden, and he didn’t want to feel that way. Besides, at her house, he’d inevitably spend a lot of time staring into space. So Lou thanked his daughter, but said he’d just as soon stay on at Linda Manor.

Jewish ritual prescribes a period of mourning that lasts for thirty days of outward abstinence from joy. This was easy for Lou to accomplish. He faced a new life, which consisted mainly of absences. He had thought of himself as his wife’s main nurse and protector. Now he lacked his life’s companion, and he lacked employment for the first time in eighty years. His daughter was very worried. She thought that Lou might find that there was nothing more for him to do in life except to await an end. And an end wasn’t clearly in sight. Lou was ninety, but bodies keep their own time. Except for his eyes and occasional angina, Lou remained quite healthy.

Joe had left home for good in his early seventies, after a siege of operations. He had been disabled for many years, during which his wife had managed his care and feeding. His operations left him more disabled, his wife’s own health was failing, and finally she could no longer take care of him at home. Joe lived as a convalescent patient for about four months at the veterans’ hospital in Northampton, and then was moved to Linda Manor. When he arrived he was deemed a Level II and was placed on the Sunrise unit. When Joe began to walk again, he became a Level III, and was moved upstairs to Forest View. Joe had been the chief probation officer for the district court in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He was a big man in his town. For thirty years he sat on the right hand of powerful judges, dispensing justice for a county. Now he lived in the care of strangers, exiled by illness from his family and his home. For hours at a time, shunning all scheduled activities, Joe lay alone in the room beside the Forest View elevators and watched TV, which he used to hate.

Both Lou and Joe became administrative problems. Joe had no savings, and nursing home bills had long since exhausted Lou’s. The VA paid Joe’s room and board, and Medicaid paid for Lou. Each man was occupying a two-person room, and the nursing home wasn’t being paid to keep them in rooms of their own. Moreover, Lou did not belong on Sunrise—he was too healthy. Both men were wrongly situated. It was a truth, as Jane Austen might have said, that a single nursing home resident without the money for a private room must be in want of a roommate.

Lou traveled in Linda Manor as through a moonlit terrain. An irreversible ailment called vascular occlusion had extinguished his left eye. His right eye was afflicted with glaucoma, macular degeneration, and a cataract, but it saw enough light to help him get around. Out in the corridors he followed the carpet’s blue and white border. Lou saw the border only as a lighter shade of gray than the rest of the carpet, but in his mind he made it pure white. He saw the outlines of people. He did not see faces. Lou could identify some fellow residents and members of the staff by their voices. By sight, he could recognize only the very tall or very fat or idiosyncratically mobile. He was left to imagine the rest of the appearances of the people who lived and worked around him, as he imagined color in the carpet’s border.

The room upstairs on Forest View, to which the nursing home’s administrator escorted Lou, was just the same as the room that Lou had occupied downstairs on Sunrise, but everything was opposite, like a mirror image. Moving up here, Lou would probably bump into things at first. Lou had never liked change for its own sake. He actively disliked the prospect of most changes now, he’d noticed. But he understood the situation. If he had to move up here, he’d just be extra careful for a while, until he memorized the landscape.

The administrator helped Lou find a chair. Joe was lying on his bed. Joe turned off his TV and the administrator made introductions: Joe, this is Lou Freed. Lou, this is Joe Torchio.

Lou looked across the room. The man over there was just a hazy shape, made of shades of gray different from the surroundings, as if seen through several layers of gauze. Joe’s voice, when he said hello, sounded rather gruff. “Who is this guy?” Lou thought.

The administrator chatted with them for a few minutes, doing most of the talking, then decided to leave the two men alone, to get acquainted, if they would.

A lot of men would say that their wives were their best friends, but Lou’s wife really had been his. He hadn’t lived in close quarters with another man since the Army, more than seventy years ago. “I don’t know what it is to have a roommate,” Lou thought. But he used to meet a lot of new people in his work. He reminded himself that he’d made many new acquaintances at meetings of the Power Maintenance Group of south New Jersey. This shouldn’t be too hard.

Farther west. “Uh, wait a minute now. Ten, twenty, thirty, thirty miles away,” said Joe. He explained that he had to count up to numbers sometimes. “Stroke. You know.” He’d had a stroke in his early fifties. It had crippled his right side and still affected his speech.

Philadelphia, originally. Lou and his wife had moved to California when he was sixty.

Lou could have said a great deal more about both places, especially about Philadelphia. Lately, Lou had noticed himself forgetting items of the recent past, such as the date when he and Jennie had arrived here. Meanwhile, Philadelphia would arise in his mind, all at once and in its entirety. The old Philadelphia that no longer existed, of Irish cops walking beats and vaudeville houses and hawkers selling roasted chestnuts and “Balteemore crabs” on street corners. A couple of the nurses here seemed interested to hear all this described, but Lou knew that once he got started it was hard to stop, and when he got started, some people would suddenly have somewhere else they had to go.

The Army, back in World War I. But Lou never got overseas. “The Kaiser heard I was coming, and he quit.”

He didn’t. Lou finished eighth grade on a Thursday in 1914, and on Friday he started his first full-time job, sweeping floors in a factory for $3.50 a week. A fifty-two-hour week. And no coffee breaks. “They hadn’t been invented then.” How things changed.

Lou had worked a lot of jobs, from assembly-line labor to managing a fountain pen factory to making models for an aerospace company. He liked to think back over the many different jobs he’d done, reviewing all the steps and motions and the thought required. It was almost as if he were performing them again. But this guy wouldn’t be interested in the details.

There were a lot of places. The Stockbridge School of Agriculture, for a year. “I studied, uh, breed and breeding, feed and feeding.” Then Joe went to the University of Pennsylvania. Then Boston University, where he got a master’s degree in sociology, then Boston College, where he got a law degree.

Lou had to stifle himself when he heard Joe mention the U of Penn. What a coincidence!

“Coming back to the U of Penn,” said Lou. It so happened that Lou’s son-in-law went there. And Joe probably knew Drexel Institute, which was pretty near the U of Penn—“Insteetute,” Lou pronounced it, with his ingrained Philadelphia accent. Drexel Institute, Lou said, was where he did most of his studying of electricity.

Did Lou want to hear a good one? Joe arrived in Philadelphia such a country bumpkin that he spent his first several weeks at the U of Penn thinking he was at Penn State. Then he saw the announcement of a football game between the universities, and he wondered, “There are two of them?”

Joe lay on his bed, his shoulders shaking with laughter over that memory. He was a dark-eyed, swarthy man. His looks were unmistakably Mediterranean. “I didn’t know the difference. Honest to God! Good God, huh?”

Lou chuckled. Joe’s voice, in expostulation, reminded him of one he’d heard before. The blustery, booming voice of the Irish cop who used to walk the beat in Northern Liberties when Lou was a boy. Looking across the room, Lou imagined a face with blue eyes and ruddy cheeks on the foggy shape of Joe. It was the wrong face, of course, but a face nonetheless.

With help from maintenance and his daughter Ruth, Lou furnished his side of the room, the side near the window. Lou equipped his new resting place like an Egyptian tomb. He screwed a hook into his bedside dresser for his shoehorn. In a corner of the dresser’s top drawer he had a partition constructed out of tape and cardboard. The enclosure contained Lou’s nitroglycerine pills, so that he could find them at once without fumbling if he had angina in the night—he carried another bottle of nitro pills in his pants, always in the right-hand pocket, in case angina struck when he was out of the room. He put his little kit of scissors, pliers, and screwdrivers in that drawer. In a corner by the window he placed the four-legged walker that Jennie used before she went into a wheelchair. Lou hung his striped cane on the walker, also his blue machinist’s apron, which he wore to meals because, in his near blindness, he sometimes spilled his food. He placed his pushbutton phone—it had oversize buttons—on top of his bedside dresser, and, on the wall behind, he had Ruth hang a piece of cardboard on which were printed large all of the phone numbers of Lou’s surviving adult relatives.

Lou placed a straight-backed armchair in front of the window, facing in on the room, in a spot convenient to his tools, where the morning sun would warm his back. Lou covered the walls around him with old and recent family photos, which he could no longer see clearly even from up close, and also with a sampler that read Shalom in Hebrew. One of Lou’s sisters had embroidered the sampler. She had misspelled the Hebrew, but Lou couldn’t have cared less. She had also knitted the colorful afghan that Lou asked the aides to place on top of his bedspread when they made up his bed. All of those objects spoke of a life lived elsewhere, as if that life were incorporated in them.

The underpinnings of the room were functional and drab. The floor was a pale gray linoleum tile, and the furniture was all institutional with photo-wood-grain finish. But Lou covered most of the surfaces around him: with cards and books, with his combination radio—tape deck, with various knickknacks, including a small wooden box with the hand-lettered inscription “For The Man Who Has Nothing A Place To Put It.” His and Jennie’s framed wedding invitation, dated 1920, and pictures of Jennie and various great-grandchildren, which Lou had cut out and mounted on wooden backings, and a jar of peanut butter and a tin full of cookies and a few small potted plants—all stood on the windowsill behind Lou. He kept his photo albums in a stack beside his radio. Sometimes he asked Ruth or other visitors to read the captions beneath the photos in the albums. “So I can sit here and think back,” he explained. The room seemed a small place for two people to do their living in, but with Lou’s stuff installed it had a self-contained quality, sufficient unto itself of necessity, like a small boat at sea.

Joe’s side of the room looked barren compared to Lou’s. One time a visitor from Pittsfield brought Joe an old friend’s obituary. Joe kept it for a day. Then Lou heard him crumple it up and saw him toss it in the wastebasket. Lou wondered why Joe didn’t keep it.

Joe hadn’t brought much with him to his new life—some clothes, a TV and VCR, an old oak cane with a shepherd’s crook handle, and a worn anthology of American poetry, which he could no longer read. Joe used to love to read. But ever since his stroke, he couldn’t get through more than a sentence before the words seemed to scatter in front of him like pigeons in a park. He could manage a part of the local paper, which a woman in the room next door tossed in to him when she was done with it. “Paper, Joe!” she’d call. Joe read the sports scores and a few comic strips. It usually took him three readings to get the jokes, he said.

Joe also had some photographs. The most striking hung above the TV across from his bed. It was a studio portrait of Joe and his wife on their wedding day. A pretty young woman looks serenely out at the camera, and beside her Joe is a trim, handsome young ensign, the same height as his wife, with round cheeks and black, curly hair. He wears the suggestion of a smile. Joe lay across from that picture, on the bed nearer the door, with his shoes off but otherwise fully dressed, with the head of the bed cranked up slightly, a pillow under his head and a pillow under his knees. One morning when the sun streamed in the window, Lou saw a glint from the hazy shape of Joe’s head. Then Lou heard one of the aides tease Joe about his baldness. Yes, he’d lost his hair, Joe said. “And I don’t care. I had it when I needed it, that’s all.”

Joe would get the fringing hair cropped close, to save money on haircuts. A portion of the southern slope of his belly lay exposed between his sweat pants and polo shirt. Between Joe in his wedding picture and Joe on his nursing home bed there was only a family resemblance. Joe might have been the young ensign’s irascible grandfather.

As the weeks went by, Lou filled in other parts of his picture of Joe. He decided that Joe was “average size”—that is, about as tall as Lou, around five eight. Lou heard Joe say that he had to get his mustache trimmed, so Joe acquired facial hair. The more Lou learned about Joe’s personality, though, the more Joe puzzled him.

Joe mentioned having trouble with his bowels, in a voice full of mock daintiness, saying, “I have a lot of trouble with my e-limination. I have a lot of trouble with my stools.” Lou suggested prunes. For a while Joe was eating about a dozen prunes for breakfast, but almost nothing else. Joe said that, among other things, he had diabetes, and was afraid that if he gained more weight he’d end up having to take insulin by injection, and by God he’d rather die than do that. Joe’s intent made sense to Lou, but once he understood the details of Joe’s weight-control program, Lou began saying privately to Ruth, “Joe does some things that don’t add up.”

The Last Place

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Contents

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