Old Friends

  Joe smiled out the windshield as the Grecian portals of Linda Manor hove into sight.

  ***

  Joe said that he’d been bluffing the doctor about suicide. “I don’t have the guts.”

  The VA doctor had said his lung was on the mend. The doctor ought to know. Joe went back to riding the exercise bike, but he didn’t get very far. Five minutes on the bike, which once would have merely warmed him up, left him panting now. “Cripes,” he said. “Before, uh, pneumonia, I was doing an hour.” He rode the bike only one more time. He got short of breath immediately, and he thought he felt another blister coming on. Afterward he told Lou that he’d never ride the bike again. He rarely made such statements idly.

  The bike hadn’t flattened his belly, but Joe knew that it had helped to keep his weight down and his diabetes under control. And riding doggedly on his trips to nowhere had sometimes served as an act of sweet memory, in which Joe repossessed his former strength. But riding had become too painful. And perhaps in reminding the doctor that fighting against the tide of age inevitably reaches a point of futility, Joe also reminded himself of the fact. Maybe Joe felt he didn’t need the bike anymore. He mourned it just once. “It made my leg feel strong.” And he didn’t mention it again.

  Joe waved away Lou’s questions about his shortness of breath, but Lou guessed it was still with Joe, because from time to time Joe skipped M&M’s.

  At night, the room illumined by the glow of the ball game on TV, Lou lay silently on his side of the curtain, as if he were asleep. But Lou was wakeful, waiting for the sound of Joe’s coughing to begin, like a person waiting for an alarm. Lou couldn’t talk to Joe about his coughing anymore. Joe made it plain that the subject irritated him. On a morning a week or so after Joe’s first visit to the VA, Lou waited until Joe went into their bathroom, and then he whispered, “When he coughs at night, it sounds like it’s coming out of a hollow barrel. I don’t think he’s got that out of his system yet. I can’t say anything about it.”

  6

  At midmorning, seated in her rocking chair by her window down on Meadowview, Dora took up her pen and hardbound diary. She leafed to today’s page. “Beautiful morning here,” Dora wrote.

  It was gray outside and too warm for morning. In the lobby, a visitor greeted Bob by saying, “Hot enough out there for ya?”

  Those open canopies that Bruce and his assistant had erected, without cement-block anchors, one in front of the building and the other out back, certainly looked pretty through the windows, surrounded by the green grass, like miniature versions of wedding tents. But no one sat beneath them. In this weather, even the residents who liked to go outside now ventured only a step or two beyond the doors and then turned back. Today was hot and humid again. Surrounded by combustible air, under an ominous sky, Linda Manor lay sealed.

  By early afternoon every window had a view of rising thunderheads. Lou, in his chair by the window, couldn’t see them, of course, and Joe, on his bed, didn’t notice. “If you could settle all the problems on the second floor, they’d make you secretary of state,” said Joe to Lou. Joe was thinking of the bickering and the yelling they’d heard in the halls last night. Fleur and Phil, among others, still mixed it up. At the nurses’ station, Fleur had said to Phil, “You don’t like me talking loud, but I don’t pay it any mind.” And Phil had yelled at her, “I don’t like you talking, period, sweetheart.” Phil had added, more calmly, “At least I’m not a policeman anymore.”

  The first thunderclap seemed to shake the floor. The glass in their window rattled, and Lou and Joe both flinched, turning toward the window.

  In suddenly gloomy light, Joe got up, put on his shoes, and limped across the room. By the time he got to the window, the rain was coming down in sheets. It streaked the glass in front of him. The window rattled steadily in the wind. Staring down, through the streaks of driving rain, Joe looked at the canopy in the grassy yard below. It was lurching on its four steel legs, its once rectangular shape distorted to a series of parallelograms. Joe lifted his eyes to the tree line. Tall pines and maples tossed from side to side. Leaning on his cane, standing at the window, Joe saw ocean waves he hadn’t seen in fifty years.

  He was grinning. “Head into the wind!” he cried at the glass. He was quoting the captain of one of the ships on which he’d served, a man of Swedish blood, the model of seamanship to Joe, who had never been to sea when he came aboard that ship as a brand-new ensign. The captain had promoted him almost at once, explaining simply that Italians made good sailors. Joe wasn’t so sure about that. Off the Philippines, in the midst of a typhoon that sank several American ships, Joe stood on the bridge and watched with rising panic as the gauge that measured the ship’s roll plunged past what he thought was the point of no return. They were going to capsize, he said aloud, and the captain, as Joe sometimes told the story, growled at him, “No we’re not, you goddamn fool,” and banished him from the bridge.

  “Head into the wind!” said Joe toward the window again, lifting his cane and shaking it, and grinning.

  “Tie yourself to the mizzenmast,” said Lou, still sitting in his chair. Lou chuckled. Then he asked in a serious voice, “What does that mean?”

  Joe laughed. “By God, that’s a real storm, you know it?”

  “They said it wouldn’t last long.”

  “How’d you like to be out now?” Joe said. “If I were well, I’d be out now.” Rain drummed on the roof right overhead. Lightning flickered. “I gotta go to the bathroom, darn it.”

  “Well, don’t do it on the floor!” Lou said, and again he chuckled.

  “I know that,” Joe said. “I hope it stops before the game tonight.” He gazed out for a moment longer, looking down at the canopy. Two of its supporting legs had lost their footings. It stood all twisted out of shape, the canvas top shuddering in the wind like an animal in its death throes. Joe described what had happened to the little tent. “I think it’s torn.”

  Lou shook his head over this news, but didn’t comment. Then he murmured, “I hope Ruth and Bob are home.”

  Joe turned from the storm-tossed landscape and limped to the bathroom. When he returned to the window, the storm had become just a soaking rain in gloomy light.

  Lou asked Joe what he saw now.

  “Person getting out of their car.”

  “He’ll get a wet tushie.”

  “Ah, dear,” Joe said.

  “Yup,” Lou said. “That’s nature.”

  Watching the rain, Joe spoke to Lou about a woman whose obituary notice had been posted just this morning. “I knew her when I was downstairs. Very nice woman,” Joe said.

  “She used to greet us all by name,” Lou said.

  “Nice woman,” Joe said.

  “She was all those weeks in the hospital, and what did they do for her?” Lou asked. Distant thunder made Lou turn his head toward the window for a moment.

  “The Sox are tied for first,” said Joe, pensive at the window.

  The canopy lay on the grass below, a heap of green cloth and twisted metal legs, abject in the rain.

  ***

  A resident could go on living a long time at Linda Manor. Bodies were well cared for here. In some cases, doctors spared Medicare no expense in order to keep people alive. The woman in her nineties whose surgeon had amputated her gangrenous arm, for instance. She had died anyway within a month or so. Some residents were kept alive with feeding tubes inserted in their stomachs, just as at the VA. Not a pretty sight, but then again the alternative was not attractive either. One nurse still remembered vividly the frightened eyes of an all but comatose resident whose next of kin had forbidden the feeding tube.

  That friend of Joe’s whose obituary he read the other day had been a painful case, a case to give Joe pause as he looked out the window at the summer thunderstorm. One day she had awakened with pain in her hip. The pain increased. She was sent to the hospital to treat her aseptic hip displacement. At the hospital, however, other problems suddenly developed. She lan
guished there three weeks, at a cost to taxpayers of about $50,000, her general condition rapidly deteriorating. Then she was shipped back to Linda Manor, to die in her husband’s company. Her last weeks would have been much happier if she’d never gone to the hospital. But no one could have known that beforehand.

  When you put yourself in the hands of doctors, you assumed that they knew what was best for you. But you couldn’t know before they went to work on you whether they did or not. It was easy to imagine a dreadful chain of events. Joe could go back to the VA for his next lung examination and end up being hospitalized to death, like that friend of his. Anything was preferable to dying that way, Joe thought. He’d seen enough of hospitals, especially the VA. “Jesus Christ, you can’t think you’re going to live forever.” Joe didn’t know what he would do this next trip back to the VA. Probably everything would turn out all right. If it didn’t, he’d have to decide when the moment came. Or maybe he’d already decided. It was hard to be sure until the time.

  Joe’s coming appointment hung over him as August wore on. But the Red Sox did not stay tied for first place long, and their uneven performance gave Joe a surrogate for his worry. He donned a pair of multicolored surfer’s shorts and turned on the TV, singing along to the national anthem. “He’s out of tune with me,” Joe said of the organist. An enemy batter singled in a run. Joe shouted instructions at the Red Sox manager. “I said he should walk him! For Christ’s sake, walk him.” The Red Sox shortstop let a ball go through his legs. “See?” he said to the manager. “See?” he said to Lou. Joe’s appointment at the VA receded before the ecstasies and yearnings and bitter disappointments that the Sox engendered through a lot of August.

  “They’ll still make it,” Joe said to a fellow resident, talking baseball down in the lobby on a hot afternoon.

  “Oh ho ho.”

  “I got faith,” said Joe, shaking his fist in the air. “I don’t have faith in anything else, but I have faith in the Red Sox.”

  7

  “I used to love to travel, you know that? ‘I want to go down to the sea again, bum-baba, bum-baba, bum. And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer me by.’” Joe lay on his bed. He began describing a sunrise he once saw in the South Pacific—remembering himself vow never to forget the sun coming up over that island—when the door to the room slowly opened. The bald head of Norman, the Alzheimer’s victim who searched the halls for exits and his wife, peered in around the edge of the door.

  Lou rose and made his way to the door. “This isn’t your room,” Lou said softly. Placing a hand on Norman’s shoulder, Lou steered him out. “Good fella.” Lou returned to his chair, leaving the door ajar.

  “All-timer’s, that’s all,” said Joe.

  Joe turned to baseball. “Six and a half games out. They won’t win.”

  They’d had their breakfast. Joe lay on his bed, killing the time before he had to leave for the VA. Over the intercom in the ceiling just outside came Sue’s voice, delivering the usual morning announcement. “Have a good day, everyone.”

  Joe bared his gums and growled. “Rrrrrr.”

  “That’s universal anymore,” Lou said. “Have a good day. You go to a store”—Lou made his voice nasal—“‘Have a good day.’”

  Joe was gazing at the ceiling. “If they find something wrong with me, I say, ‘Bullshit. Send me back to Linda Manor.’”

  “I don’t know why you want to come back to Linda Manor after what you heard this morning,” Lou said. Down at breakfast the fifth Nudnik, Ted, had said that the people around here didn’t know what they were doing.

  “Orange juice, eggs,” Joe said.

  “Blueberry muffins.”

  “Prune juice, milk, bananas.”

  “Grapefruit, both whole and in segments,” Lou said.

  “Waffles,” Joe said. “Where do you get that? You don’t get that at home. And Art insists on three-minute eggs.”

  “Bob gets poached eggs,” Lou said, “and spills half on his napkin and picks it up again.”

  “And Ted said, ‘They don’t know what the hell they’re doin’.’ Jesus Christ!”

  “I told you, Joe, he’s been pushing Phil around too long. Phil said the other day, ‘Nobody knows what the hell they’re doin’ around here.’” Lou sighed. “Ahh, dear.” He lay awake last night wondering about the old firehouses that, when he’d left Philadelphia, had become social clubs. “I’ll have to try to remember to ask my brother about them,” Lou said aloud, but to himself. Then he was back in Philadelphia again, taking Joe around old neighborhoods. He wound up at the parlors where the sailors got tattooed. “We used to call them moving pictures. I was never tempted.”

  “I wasn’t either,” said Joe. He said he wished he could just stay here today. Right now he could have wished for nothing more than to be allowed to lie listening to Lou all day. But it was time to leave. An empty wheelchair sat waiting for Joe when he limped to the nurses’ station and signed out.

  “I hate to do this, makes me nervous,” Joe murmured as he was wheeled down the central corridor, heading for the lobby.

  The dietary aide High-Five Mary, the one who always slapped fives with the Nudniks before meals, was coming down the corridor in her apron. “Where you going, Joe?”

  “VA hospital,” said Joe, looking up at her.

  “That’s nice,” Mary said.

  “Nice?” Joe said.

  “Different faces,” Mary said.

  “I don’t want to see any different faces.”

  “You like ours?”

  “Well, I like yours.”

  “Aren’t you sweet,” said Mary.

  “I’m an anxious person,” Joe explained as he was pushed into the lobby. Besides, he said, the VA carried unpleasant associations for him.

  The man pushing Joe’s wheelchair said, “It must have been lonely for you there.”

  “It’s lonely anywhere,” Joe said. “But I have Lou. He keeps me sane.”

  ***

  “Beautiful morning here,” Dora had written quite accurately today. Joe got only tastes of the weather, transferring in and out of the car. He handed over his identity card to the receptionist, saying again, “Make sure you give it back,” and then was wheeled upstairs for yet another chest x-ray, from which he soon returned, to sit again in the borrowed wheelchair in the waiting room.

  The other people in the room might have been the same who’d sat here last time. They weren’t, of course, but that was how it seemed, as if they’d been sitting here a month. An old man near Joe stared at a photograph of the President on the wall, reading the President’s name aloud—“George Bush”—as if aware of it for the first time. The room was full of men today. They seemed resigned to waiting, more resigned than Joe at least. An unshaven man with a couple of inky tattoos on his bare arms—he might have been forty or he might have been sixty—his pants sagging for lack of a belt, wandered past Joe, muttering. Joe glanced at him and nodded significantly. On the TV high up on the wall, a game show was again in progress. Joe glanced up at it from time to time.

  He wore a white polo shirt. It had a few small reddish stains on the front. It was a tricky business, eating left-handed with a brain organized for right-handedness. “Diet Jell-O. I spilled it.” Joe looked down at himself. “I’ll change it tomorrow.” He laughed a little and looked around the room. Nurses and orderlies and white-coated doctors passed by now and then. Joe was looking for the young, black-haired doctor who had received him here last time. “He’s making me wait.” He wondered if he’d ever been to a doctor who hadn’t made him wait. “Jesus Christ, why don’t they space the time?”

  Joe kept glancing around, rather like Bob at this moment. “Come on. All right. Here.” The young doctor was walking down the hall, but he didn’t seem to see Joe. Half turned in his wheelchair, Joe expelled a breath through narrowed lips. It didn’t make much sound. “Oh, Christ, I used to be able to whistle.” Joe couldn’t remember the young doctor’s name. Hurriedly, he turned his wheelcha
ir around. He beckoned to the doctor.

  The doctor spotted him and lifted a finger. “Momentarily,” he called to Joe, and walked swiftly into one of the offices off the waiting room.

  Another patient, another old veteran with tattoos, limping on a cane toward a chair, stopped in front of Joe and pointed down at Joe’s shoes. “I need a pair of those.”

  Joe didn’t answer. He was muttering to himself. “‘Momentarily.’ Eeeeee.” He bared his gums and lifted his cane from his lap as if to strike downward with it. Then he smiled. In a moment a nurse came out to fetch him. He had not, in fact, been kept waiting long. After all, the technicians had to develop today’s chest x-ray before he and the doctor could have anything to discuss.

  Joe was wheeled into an office of two rooms. He sat in one room beside the doctor’s desk while the doctor studied x-rays in the adjoining room. Joe looked at a photograph on the doctor’s desk. There were children in the picture. “Nice-looking kids.” He thought about his first son. He’d be about forty-five now. Then he turned his head toward a sound that came from the other room, a metallic snapping like the sound of a handsaw blade being bent, the sound of the doctor looking through Joe’s x-rays.

  Joe frowned. “I don’t care what the—”

  From the adjoining room came the doctor’s voice. He was talking on the phone. “Is there a radiologist there today?”

  “What?” said Joe under his breath, his face reddening. “Jesus Christ, get out of here. I don’t want—”

  “There’s a gentleman, Joseph Torchio,” said the doctor’s voice. “I’m trying to find old films.”

  Joe muttered imprecations. “Oh, goddamn, come on. Cut the shit. And I don’t use that word.” Joe glowered. “I feel all right.”

  “Those have to be kept,” said the doctor’s voice from the other room.

  “Rrrrrr.”

  And then at last the doctor appeared in the doorway, dressed in his white coat. He smiled down at Joe.

  “What,” Joe demanded.