第1章 The Last Place

For my father

There is an ancient proverb:

Don't judge a life good or bad before it ends.

—SOPHOCLES, Women of Trachis

1

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.

"Hi," Lou says. "Who's that?"

"Eileen," she says, adding, "Lou, did you get your iron today?"

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.

"God help the others if we're the best," Lou says.

"Anyway, I can't read."

"I could read if I could see."

"I have half a brain, and you can't see," Joe says.

"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?"

"Forget it," Bob says. "For-get it."

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

With your hair cut just as short as mine.

"Excellent," Bob says, looking up at Art.

"We've got to change that word, don't we," Art says to Eleanor.

"What shall we have?" Eleanor asks. "'Incredible'?"

Bob's eyes dart from Art to Eleanor. "Incredible!" Bob declares. He grins.

"That's pretty good," Art says.

"For a change," Eleanor says.

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.

"So," Eleanor says to Art. "How's your new medication working?"

"Not working," Art says. "I get tired very easily in my legs."

Eleanor tries a different subject. "How early did you start singing?"

"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.

"I've been here since April and not once," Art agrees.

"Coffee cake twice," Eleanor says.

Bob speaks up vehemently. "Lousy! Lousy!"

"Louie gets the English muffin," Art says.

"Louie gets bagels," says Eleanor.

"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.

"That sonofabitch!" says Bob.

"And there's Dan," Art says.

"Oh, he can talk," 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."

"Jessica Tandy is ninety," says Eleanor. "She's still going strong!"

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."

"She was?" Eleanor says, brightening up. "I didn't know that."

"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.

"The nearest I got to him was in the movies," says Art in a distant voice.

"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.

2

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.

In one of her many poems, Winifred had written:

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.

3

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.

"Where ya from, Joe?"

Joe came from Pittsfield.

Where was Pittsfield? Lou wondered.

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.

How about Lou? Where did he come from?

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.

Had Joe been in the service?

In the Navy, during World War II. Three years in the Pacific. How about Lou?

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

Where did Lou go to college?

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.

Joe agreed with that. "Things change. Jesus Christ."

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.

How about Joe? Where did he go to school?

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.

The maintenance men moved Lou's possessions upstairs the next day.

***

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."

Joe would go out to lunch—members of his family took him out once a week—and he would come back and say, "Oh, dear God, I ate too much." He would heave himself onto his bed and add, "It was worth it." The next day he would weigh himself and fume at the results. "Jesus Christ! I gained a pound." He'd go on a diet for the rest of the week, eating little more than prunes for breakfast, which Lou thought must be insufficient for a diabetic. After breakfast they'd come back upstairs to the room. Lou would sit down in his chair by the window, and from across the room he'd hear a ripping sound. This meant that Joe was undoing the Velcro straps of his orthopedic shoes. A clattering would follow, the sound of the steel brace attached to Joe's right shoe hitting the floor. And then Joe's bed would creak, which signified that he was lying down again. He always lay down when he came back to the room, and he hardly ever budged from there between meals. And then he wondered why he had trouble with his weight.

Lou himself didn't get as much exercise as he thought he should. He used to take Jennie out for walks, pushing her wheelchair around the corridors. He didn't walk as often now. "I don't have the incentive," he said. But then, feeling slothful, Lou would get up from his chair, take his cane, and walk across the room and out the door. He'd cross the hall, touch the wall on the other side, and then return. Sometimes he'd do several laps before he resettled himself in his chair. And three mornings a week he went downstairs to the physical therapy room for the formal sessions of gentle exercise and stretching called Music and Motion—M&M's for short. All the exercises were performed while sitting down. It was a pretty good workout, Lou said, touting M&M's to Joe. It gave Lou all the exercise he could handle. Joe would benefit from M&M's. Maybe he just needed encouragement. So, on one M&M's morning, Lou said toward the shape of Joe, "Why don't you come down with me?"

But Joe said he didn't feel like it, and Lou resolved to hold his tongue. Lou's father-in-law used to say: "No one knows what goes on between the sheets." In other words, mind your own business. Lou believed in that advice, up to a point.

Two small sliding windows flanked the picture window behind Lou. He cracked one open to let in the first airs of May. The room was often filled now with the folksy voices of Boston Red Sox play-by-play announcers from Joe's TV, and with the louder sounds Joe made while watching—shouts of joy sometimes and, at least as often, strings of oaths as Joe thundered at the Red Sox manager, "Jesus Christ! Goddamn it, I told you not to put him in! Jesus Christ!"

Lou was amused. But he thought it only right to warn Joe that if his granddaughter should come in to visit just when Joe was cussing out the Sox, well, Joe knew how easily little children picked things up. And Joe agreed. He'd have to watch himself. It was just a game, Joe said. Just a game, but Jesus Christ, the Red Sox made him mad.

Lou could not imagine getting that emotionally involved in baseball, but this was not as strange as other tendencies of Joe's. A young nurse's aide came into the room to check their vitals. Lou listened to Joe question her about the intimate facts of her life. Was she married? Did she have any kids? She had two and another on the way? Three children were enough, Joe told her. "Tell your husband. Vasa-sectomy! Snip, snip, snip."

Joe was laughing when he said that, but he always grilled the staff. "You married? You living with someone? Why the hell don't you marry him?" One of the staff said she'd gotten a dog. "Did you worm it yet?" Joe wanted to know. And there were any number of nurses and aides—Lou couldn't say just how many, because he couldn't tell all of their voices apart—who, under Joe's questioning, revealed that they had trouble collecting alimony. Joe told them how to go after their ex-husbands. Sometimes he gave them names of people to call. But maybe that was Joe's lawyer training coming back, Lou thought. Joe had been a probation officer. Maybe he was trying to keep his hand in.

And then there was the matter of Joe on the telephone. He called home every evening. At the end, he said, "Okay, we'll see ya," and hung up.

Lou couldn't help overhearing. Joe's voice often sounded peremptory and gruff when he talked to his family over the phone. He rarely opened the conversation by asking them how they were, and he always hung up that way.

One evening Joe called his son and got his son's answering machine. He growled into the phone at the answering machine, "This is your father. Jesus Christ!"

It sounded to Lou as if Joe had said, "This is your father, Jesus Christ." Lou had to make an effort to keep from laughing out loud. He wasn't sure how Joe would react if he told him how funny that sounded. It wasn't worth the risk. It might just make him angrier. If Joe got any angrier, Lou thought sometimes, he might keel over with another stroke.

For all of that, Joe was turning out to be good company. He had a sense of humor. He seemed to like hearing stories. Lou never felt that Joe's anger was aimed at him. "He gets angry, but he doesn't really mean it," Lou thought. He wasn't frightened of Joe, just puzzled.

Joe's son brought in tapes of movies. Late in the evening Joe would play them on his VCR. At first, Joe asked Lou if the movies disturbed him. Lou said he didn't mind them, and it surprised him to discover that this was true. He went to sleep a lot more easily to the sound of one of Joe's movies than to silence in the room, drifting off easily amid the mayhem.

Joe's taste in movies wasn't all bad. He had a tape of Fiddler on the Roof, which Lou loved to listen to. But he wouldn't have wasted his time on most of the movies Joe watched. "I don't know what he sees in them," Lou said out of Joe's hearing. "And they have all the f words in them. I'm not a prude, but I don't understand what Joe sees in most of those movies." But Joe seemed to enjoy them. Lou kept his comments mild.

"What's the movie for tonight, Joe?"

Joe looked at the latest tape his son had brought, and said, "Marked for Death."

Lou chuckled.

The next morning Lou remarked, "The girl came in to make our beds. First she had to sweep the bodies off the floor."

From over on the other side of the room, Lou heard Joe laughing. Joe said he didn't know why his son brought him movies like that. But Joe went on watching them.

Night baseball games had begun. Now Lou went to sleep to the mingled sounds of play-by-play and his roommate's half-stifled cheers and curses. Almost daily, it seemed, Joe said, "I weighed myself. Jesus Christ, it's impossible! I don't eat!"

Lou could not resist offering a little advice, the solution seemed so near at hand. Lou said again, "Why don't you come down to M&M's with me?"

All right, Joe said. He'd try it.

***

Entering the room, Joe sometimes stopped to gaze out the picture window at the view of field and woods, now very leafy, very green. He'd been working outside on a hot day this time of year just before his stroke, almost twenty years ago. The small sliding windows on either side of the picture window were now closed against the heat. The windy sound of the ventilator, in air-conditioning mode, no longer competed constantly with the sounds from Joe's TV. Joe lay on his back, his TV off. Lou sat by the window. Joe was telling Lou about the missing big toe on his partially paralyzed right foot. The operations Joe underwent before coming here had included that toe's amputation. Joe said that after the surgeon cut off the toe, he asked what Joe wanted done with it. "I told him, 'Why don't you send it Chicago and have it bronzed? I'll put it on my mantelpiece.' For God's sake."

Lou smiled.

But, Joe said, he wished he'd told the surgeon to wrap up the severed toe and send it to a certain judge in Pittsfield, the judge who forced Joe into retirement about eight years ago.

Lou remembered the company that wouldn't give him a job because he was a Jew. Lou eventually got even. While running the pen factory, Lou said, he had the opportunity to tell one of that company's salesmen that he wouldn't do business with him. And that squared matters, as far as Lou was concerned. Lou could understand how a person might hold a grudge. But, Lou said, he couldn't think of any he held himself.

Some of the things Lou said surprised Joe. Some were hard to believe.

Lou said he dated only one girl, and he married her.

Joe said he dated many, and none ever dumped him.

Lou said that back during Prohibition he built a still for a relative, but he didn't drink any of its product, because that would have been illegal. Actually, Lou said, he got drunk only once in his life. "Did I tell you that story?" he asked Joe.

Lou sometimes repeated stories. But Lou was an old man, Joe told himself. He had already heard this story, but he didn't say anything, and Lou told again how on his birthday years ago he went to a nightclub called the Stable, in Philadelphia, and had about three beers. "I suddenly felt something I never felt before. I was spinning around. I excused myself and went across the street to a drugstore and got some Alka-Seltzer."

Joe guffawed. "Three beers. That isn't drunk! I used to drink. Good Gawd."

Lou said he'd never smoked. He believed in moderation.

Joe had smoked most of his life. He smiled at the ceiling. "Moderation I was never for."

Lou said that he grew up in tough, seamy parts of Philadelphia. "I sometimes wonder, growing up where I did, why I didn't get in more trouble."

But Joe had worked with people who got in trouble. Lou's stories made it obvious that Lou had never gotten into anything like trouble.

On Saturday mornings, the phone rang for Lou constantly. All of his relatives called. Joe turned down his TV so Lou could talk, which meant that Joe could not help overhearing. "I love you," Lou said into the phone every time before hanging up. Every time! Joe heartily disliked his own brother-in-law, and made no secret of it. Wasn't there anyone in Lou's family Lou didn't love? Was there anyone in the world this old man didn't like?

They got talking about their wives. Lou told of how, before her death, Jennie suffered from skin irritations. She was incontinent, and Lou figured out that the nurse's aides made up her bed all wrong for a person in her condition—with a plastic sheet beneath her bottom sheet instead of absorbent pads. Lou said he showed the aides how to do it right, and, his soft voice suddenly loud and severe, he told how he had struggled with the staff sometimes, to make sure they gave Jennie proper attention. The staff worked hard and most were good. Lou often praised them. But one time he found Jennie wet, and he set off every call bell in their room, and no one came. So he grabbed his cane and marched down to the Sunrise nurses' station. "I could see a little better then." On the other side of the counter, he saw the shapes of aides and nurses, all in a group, and the figure of a man standing in front of them, addressing them. The man had to be a doctor. Evidently the staff thought a doctor's words of wisdom more important than call bells. Evidently the doctor thought so, too. Lou slapped his hand hard on the counter and yelled at them. "Jennie needs attention. And she needs it now!" Lou's countenance was stern, recalling this. "And I got results."

More softly, Lou said, "I still wish I'd'a went with her. But I thank the good Lord I didn't have to leave her alone."

Joe listened, gazing intently at the ceiling. Joe listed his own wife's many ailments. "I wore her out. She couldn't take care of me anymore, that's all."

Lou said that he and Jennie never went to sleep without kissing first.

"Well, I did." said Joe. "Because we'd argue, and she wouldn't talk to me."

"I don't think I ever had an argument with Jennie," said Lou. He and his wife had disagreements, but never went to bed without settling them first, and kissing.

Joe sat up in bed and stared at Lou. "Jesus Christ! That's impossible!"

Lou was too much. It sometimes seemed as if he must have lived in an entirely different world from the one that Joe had known. And yet they had a certain amount of history in common. Lou's parents were immigrants, from Austria, and Joe's father was a shoemaker from Calabria. Joe, too, grew up in a largely immigrant neighborhood, on Pittsfield's Dewey Avenue. Lou grew up within walking distance of burlesque shows and whorehouses, while it was said of Joe's grammar school that the graduates became either judges or bank robbers. But all of Lou's father's business ventures failed, while Joe's father's business, Artistic Shoe Renovator, prospered modestly during the Depression, when many people got their shoes repaired instead of buying new ones. Joe's parents had been able to send him to college. As a consequence, Joe was much more widely read. There were deeper differences.

Lou said he loved the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches books as a boy, and later on, the poems of Robert Service. Joe had wider, less sunny tastes in literature. The kind of poem he didn't like was one he used to hear recited, and could still recite in part himself. "'Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be,'" Joe chanted. "When I was thirty, forty, I thought it was all right. But now, bullshit, it's false." One of his favorite poems—it lay in the anthology that Joe had carried with him across the Pacific in the Navy—was Stephen Crane's "The Wayfarer."

The wayfarer,

Perceiving the pathway to truth,

Was struck with astonishment.

It was thickly grown with weeds.

"Ha," he said,

"I see that no one has passed here

In a long time."

Later he saw that each weed

Was a singular knife.

"Well," he mumbled at last,

"Doubtless there are other roads."

Joe smiled wryly over that poem. "Doubtless there are other roads."

"I quit lying in my thirties," Joe said once. Then he amended that statement. "I quit lying about everything except drinking."

Lou told again about that time when he'd gotten drunk. "I can remember the place. Place called the Stable. I never felt I missed something."

"Well," said Joe, "you missed something."

"I saw enough people that way that I never wanted to be that way myself," said Lou from his chair over by the window.

"I saw a lot of people get drunk and got drunk myself," Joe said, lying on his bed.

"I enjoyed life without getting drunk," Lou said.

Joe's voice softened. "It made it easier on the people you were close to."

To Joe, Lou's general outlook was strange, not alien, but something he himself had left behind long ago. Most cynical and pessimistic utterances seemed to leave Lou truly puzzled—puzzled as to why some people chose to think that way. One time when Ruth was visiting, she said that she had a Ph.D. in guilt, and Lou said, "I don't think I feel guilty about anything." And Joe thought to himself again, "Jesus Christ, that's impossible." If in the privacy of their room Joe made a little sport of a fellow resident, Lou might join in, but he would often end up saying, "Poor soul. We shouldn't laugh." And then, if one of those people got sick and was confined to bed, Lou would go and pay a visit. Perhaps Lou did dislike some people after all. He sometimes talked as if he did. "But," Joe thought, "it has to be a very mean man."

There was one exception. Lou seemed to have it in for the director of food service here, and as far as Joe could see, that man was nothing but pleasant, patient, and obliging. Among his mementos, Lou had a book of recipes for dishes he used to make. He said he did all the cooking at home after Jennie got sick. He would say that if he could see now, he'd go into the kitchen and show the food service director how to cook "something decent." Joe didn't think the food was all that bad. Maybe Lou saw the director of food service as a rival, who'd won the right to do what Lou felt he could do better only because the director was young and had his sight. Anyway, it gave Joe some comfort to see Lou step into a more easily comprehensible character now and then.

After his experiences with other roommates, during his time at the VA hospital and when he first came to Linda Manor, Joe had thought that he'd just as soon not have another roommate. He hadn't relished the idea of a ninety-year-old's moving in with him. Being only seventy-two himself and burdened with a textbook's worth of ailments, Joe had figured that by ninety there couldn't be much left of a person. But Joe now had to remind himself how old, really old, Lou was. The man sometimes seemed too virtuous to be true, but he clearly wasn't senile. "He's got all his buttons, by Jesus," Joe thought. He felt grateful for that. Lou said his sense of smell had vanished suddenly a couple of years ago. He applied deodorant liberally, he explained, lest he give offense unknowingly. A little thing, but not inconsequential for close-quartered living. And Lou, unlike Joe's other roommates, didn't do a lot of complaining. Lou's voice got teary when he talked about his wife sometimes, but teary over her and not himself—and that was an important difference to Joe. Occasionally Lou said, "If I had my sight, I'd still be doing something productive."

Several times already Lou said he'd asked the authorities to install a handrail in the weighing room downstairs, but to no avail. "If I could see, I could put the damn thing up in a couple of hours."

But, Lou added, there was a saying he guessed was true—that if you could choose among everyone else's troubles, you'd end up choosing your own.

"You'd still be working if you could see," said Joe, looking pensively toward the ceiling.

***

The maples in the woods outside the window turned fiery. Baseball season ended. The Red Sox didn't win the pennant again. "Wait'll next year, that's all," Joe sighed.

Lou's son, Harold, flew in from California and visited for several days. Reminiscing with Harold about things they'd built together in their home workshops, Lou remembered making toy soldiers years ago for the children in the family. Thinking back over his old jobs and workbench projects, though pleasurable, made Lou's hands yearn for something in the here and now to do. So he asked Harold to look for those old toy-soldier molds when he got back to California. A few days later Harold called to say he'd found them. Lou asked him to send them to a family friend who worked in metal, and not long after that, a box full of toy soldiers arrived at Linda Manor in Lou's mail.

Joe, meanwhile, put the finishing touch on his weight-loss program. Lou had inspired the program, but the details were all Joe's. The weekly luncheon outing and occasional Linda Manor baked chicken dinner, at which Joe also overate. The mounting of the scale. The subsequent dieting. And the exercising, which now included not only M&M's but also daily rides on the exercise bike in the occupational therapy room.

When Joe was out of earshot, Lou said, sotto voce, to their favorite nurse's aide, "The dietary people should look at what Joe eats. It isn't healthy for a diabetic. And," he added, "don't tell Joe I said so."

Joe's rides on the exercise bike were also worrisome. Lou gathered that every time Joe rode, he pedaled farther and faster. Lou felt he ought to warn him. The man didn't seem to know where his own best interests lay. Lou couldn't help himself. "Joe, you're going at that bike too hard." But Joe simply denied it, and kept on riding farther.

When Joe left the room for his bike ride, Lou opened the cardboard box and took out a small shiny infantryman. He got a piece of sandpaper out of his top dresser drawer and set to work. Seated in his chair with his back to the window, in late autumn afternoon light, Lou sanded rough edges off one toy soldier after another. He paused now and then to stroke the toy soldiers with his fingers. He'd give some to his great-grandchildren. Maybe he'd try to sell some in the gift shop downstairs.

Lou lifted a hand from his work, extending the index finger. "Another thing I don't understand about Joe. He wears those sweat pants and he keeps heisting them up, and he has no pockets in them. When we go downstairs, he asks me to carry things for him. I don't mind, but I don't think I could get used to pants without pockets."

Lou's hands went back to his work. He'd sand awhile, then pause, stroking the toy soldiers, hoping to find more rough edges to sand.

***

Both Lou and Joe packed overnight bags and went away for Thanksgiving, Lou to his daughter Ruth's house and Joe back to his former home in Pittsfield. Lou returned to Linda Manor feeling all worn out. For him, trips away had become exhausting. "I don't know what the problem is. Too many birthdays, I guess."

Joe limped back into the room on Forest View saying that there had been too much company back home. He'd had to retreat from it to his old den at times. Joe also weighed a few pounds more than when he'd left. This didn't surprise Lou, nor did the consequences. Joe went right back to the exercise bike, to work off Thanksgiving, and then, on an afternoon a few days later, after an especially vigorous ride, a blister erupted on the big toe of Joe's left foot, his good foot.

It was a little blue capsule with some red at the edges, the kind of blister that weekend carpenters raise on their thumbs. As soon as the nurse's aide saw it, she summoned the charge nurse, and the nurse put in a call to Joe's doctor, who made a special visit. He put Joe on an antibiotic.

Diabetes reduces circulation. Even Joe's relatively mild case made his toes, because of their distance from his heart, especially vulnerable to infection and the risk of gangrene. This blister, like a broken hip, could lead to graver complications. Out of Lou and Joe's hearing, a nurse remarked, "Joe could lose the toe." Whether Joe's body or his spirits could withstand another blow like that was an open question. Lou didn't entertain dire thoughts like those, but he knew the blister must be serious if it had caused a doctor to make a special visit here. And a parade of aides and nurses kept coming in to have a look at Joe's toe. After listening to the commotion for a time, Lou got up, fetched his cane from the walker in the corner, and, saying to Joe that he guessed he'd take a walk, he made his way to the elevator and rode downstairs. He walked down the long central corridor, turned left into the administrative hallway, and stopped at the second door on the left, the door of his favorite nursing supervisor. She had been very helpful and adept in Jennie's last days. Lou knocked on the door with the handle of his cane. "Kathleen?"

"Yes, Lou?"

"Kathleen, I'd like you to take a look at Joe's toe."

Kathleen discussed the blister with Lou and said she'd come and look at it. Lou thanked her, then made his way, by cane and handrail and carpet border, back upstairs to his chair.

Kathleen had told Lou that Joe's blister would almost certainly heal, and Lou believed her. The nursing care was good in here. If a person came down with something curable, a lot of the staff acted as if they'd been given a present. But why take chances? Joe shouldn't go downstairs for meals for a while, Lou decided. Lou told Joe he should take it easy, stay upstairs, and keep his foot elevated.

But Joe wouldn't hear of it. "The hell with it," he said.

It was a morning a few days after the blister had appeared. Lou sat by the window, warming his back in the morning sun, and said to Joe, "Eingeshpart. Stubborn." Joe lay as usual on his bed, but with his wounded foot bared and propped up on a pillow. "That's what you were on that bicycle, Joe."

A privacy curtain hung from tracks in the ceiling. Joe had pulled the curtain a foot or so out from the wall, to shield his eyes from the morning sun. Now he sat up in bed and pulled back the curtain so he could confront Lou directly. "No, I wasn't!"

"Yes. I told you you were overdoing it."

Joe lay back and grunted at the ceiling.

Lou smiled. His eyes were squinted shut behind his thick glasses. The low December sun suffused his white hair. "You guys don't listen to me. After all, Joe, stop and think about it. I'm old enough to be your father."

"I know it!" Joe laughed, not making much sound but jiggling his bed. Then his right arm went into a jackhammer-like shaking. With his left hand, Joe grasped the wrist of the shivering arm and pulled it over onto his stomach, and it stopped moving.

Lou murmured, "My son'll be here in January."

4

Since Lou's arrival, Joe was getting out a little more. He now went to bingo three times a week. Lou went to most scheduled activities except bingo. He had his Saturday morning phone calls. On Sundays they both looked forward to a TV show that carried them off to other parts of the country—Joe watching and Lou listening. Tuesday morning they both went to Literary Hour, when Ruth, who was a retired high school English teacher, read aloud to residents in the activity room. Many visitors called on them. Members of Joe's family came weekly, and from time to time his friends from Pittsfield. And almost every morning, seven days a week, Ruth arrived.

She entered through the lobby, dressed in her parka. The first resident she saw was usually Bob. Bob had turned an armchair so that it faced the inner front door. He sat there for hours at a time, keeping watch. Visitors would offer him weather reports, doing pantomimes of shivering as they came in, and saying, "Brrr!"

"Cold out there!" Bob would reply. December brought north winds, which sometimes blew the outer door back open behind the visitors without their knowing it. Then, as they came into the lobby through the second set of doors, they would find themselves confronted, not by the cheerful mustachioed man, proffering a hand for shaking and saying, "Beautiful. Excellent. Thank you kindly," but by a strange, fearful sight: Bob on the edge of his doorkeeping chair, quivering with what certainly looked like wrath, jabbing his cane in the air at them, and mumbling something emphatic. The visitors stopped in their tracks, alarmed. What had they done? Bob jabbed his cane toward them, then toward the doors. Eventually, most got the point, went back out, and pulled the outer door shut.

But Ruth always got a cheerful welcome. When from his chair Bob saw through the bay window her thin, elegant, silver-haired figure coming toward the door, he'd say, "Oh boy. Beautiful. Here she comes now." Entering, Ruth received Bob's Howdee!, also his left-handed handshake and a "Cold out there!" Ruth sometimes felt in need of such a greeting.

She had a great incentive to like Linda Manor. Not many people can bear to feel their parent's nursing home is bad. But Ruth knew this was a decent place. She knew most of the staff by now, and liked them. A faint odor like buttered toast, with the butter a little off, lingered in parts of the building. Ruth sometimes caught the sharp whiff of urine when passing by some bedroom doors, but Linda Manor on the whole was remarkably odorless. As for its sights and sounds, Ruth had long since grown accustomed to them, and they did not frighten her as they did some first-time and infrequent visitors. It was not the place itself but the visions of the life to come that got her down. The visible decline of residents who came to her Literary Hour—that woman who seemed so sprightly last week on her cane, appearing this week in a wheelchair, bravely trying to smile—and the glimpses Ruth had of the nearly comatose laid out in their bedrooms, and of the demented wandering the halls. Once when she was on her way out, a nice-looking resident approached her and asked if she wouldn't please give him a ride home. She left in tears that day, feeling sorry both for the man and for the fact that her own father now resided among people who seemed consigned to live no kind of life at all.

"Guilt's my middle name," Ruth said. It was entirely self-inflicted. Lou often reminded her that he'd rather live here than at her house, where inevitably he'd be alone and bored a lot of the time. He was always telling her that she didn't have to come every day, always urging her to go away on trips with her husband, Bob. But now, when she and her husband were both retired and in good health and had the money to travel, she couldn't tear herself away. She tried it once. She took a trip to England with her husband and felt miserable the whole time. She made herself busier these days, taking courses and doing charitable work, than when she was teaching. As she understood her reasons, she had to feel that what she did instead of taking care of Lou at home was arduous and important enough to justify his being here. Maybe if he had turned into a querulous old man and insisted that she visit him every day, it would have been possible for Ruth not to do so, or at least to feel that she was being dutiful enough. Lou's cheerfulness and consideration intensified her "guilt spasms." But they also made her visits pleasant. She enjoyed her father's company, more now perhaps than ever before, now that she had so much of it.

Ruth came in order to visit Lou, but gradually she realized that she also came to visit Joe. On Saturday mornings Lou's phone began ringing at around ten o'clock. "It's either Aunt Esther or Aunt Ruth. Wanta take bets?" Ruth said to Joe one Saturday morning when the phone rang.

"Esther," said Joe from his bed. The foot with the blistered toe was bared and rested on a pillow, looking oddly separate from Joe, like a part removed for repairs.

"Hi, Esther," said Lou into the phone.

"See?" Joe said to Ruth.

While Lou talked on the phone, Ruth and Joe talked to each other. Joe said he'd seen some news on TV about an advance in the prevention of strokes. "I wondered if they had something if you already had one. No, huh?" Joe laughed a little.

At such moments Ruth felt keenly aware of the difference between her father's age and Joe's. It was one thing to be in your nineties and in a nursing home, but Joe was only six years older than Ruth and her husband. Imagining herself in Joe's place, Ruth imagined herself very bitter. The first time she mentioned her husband's love of downhill skiing, Ruth felt like slapping her hand over her mouth. Joe, she thought, might well feel jealous. She thought she would, in his place. But Joe said, "It's good that a man of sixty-five can do that." And he seemed to mean it.

On her morning visits, Ruth often told stories. One of her favorites was about a Jewish mother of her acquaintance who told her son, as he was leaving for his honeymoon, "Don't forget to wear your rubbers." At the wedding, when someone asked this woman's son if he wanted a drink, the mother said, "No, he's not thirsty."

"My mother said the same thing!" cried Joe from his bed. "'No, he's not thirsty.' We go into, uh, store. 'Say thank you to the man, Joey.' And I was forty years old, for Christ's sake!" Joe levitated off his bed in laughter. "Oh, God. Jewish sons and Italian mothers, it's all the same."

Another time Ruth arrived to find Lou and Joe fulminating about an item on that morning's TV news. America was sending food to Russia while, Lou and Joe angrily protested, people here went hungry. "We're starving," Joe said, meaning that some Americans were.

"Forgive me for saying so," Ruth said to Joe, "but you don't look it."

Joe laughed and laughed.

On Sundays Ruth used to bring the New York Times crossword puzzle. She thought that Lou and Joe would enjoy struggling through it with her. "Joe, give me a Red Sox catcher whose name begins with P."

Joe stammered. "Uh, uh. Ah, the hell with it. I got half a brain, you know."

"It functions, that's all that matters," said Lou.

Finally, Joe told Ruth, speaking of the crossword, "Don't get me started on that goddarn thing." After that, Ruth stopped bringing it.

When she first met Joe, she thought he must be a little crude, the way he lay on his bedspread, scratching his stomach, watching TV. Then one day Ruth sat down in her usual place, in a chair across from the foot of Lou's bed, and she mentioned that she'd just read a review of a new novel that sounded interesting—a novel by Joyce Carol Oates called Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart. And the blustery man, who had to count up to numbers, said, "Stephen Crane. That comes from, uh, poem by Stephen Crane."

Joe directed Ruth to his poetry anthology. He had Ruth read the poem in question.

In the desert

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

Who, squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

I said, "Is it good, friend?"

"It is bitter—bitter," he answered;

"But I like it

Because it is bitter,

And because it is my heart."

"Oh-ho," Joe said. "That's good." He had Ruth read his favorite poem of Crane's, "The Wayfarer." As Ruth read the last line—"Doubtless there are other roads"—Joe's face grew flushed. He grinned at her from his bed. "Ah-hah! That's good."

"That's what we call irony," Ruth said.

"Yeah, but it's good," Joe said.

The whole transaction astonished and delighted Ruth, the former English teacher. That, she thought, was the moment when she really began to know Joe.

Joe wasn't just well read; he clearly had a taste for bitter irony, in life as well as literature. In some ways, Ruth realized, she resembled her gentle-minded father less than she resembled Joe.

***

Ruth usually stayed for a couple of hours, and left before lunch.

On her way out, she stopped to button up her coat and say goodbye to Bob in his sentry chair.

Bob looked up at her. "It's a bitch."

"No, it's not," Ruth exclaimed. "It's a beautiful world."

Bob looked at her, his brow knitted. "It's too bad."

"Yes, it is," Ruth said.

"Beautiful," said Bob.

5

At seven o'clock in the morning, Joe awakened to the sound of a cane rapping on the door, followed by Bob's voice. "All right?"

Joe was still half mired in sleep. "All right!" he called back testily.

"Okay," said Bob's voice from the doorway. "Bye-bye."

Lou sat across the room in his skivvies, slowly pulling on his pants. "You know, Joe, I've been thinking. With Bob, we don't need an alarm clock."

Joe wasn't sure he wanted one at these moments when he struggled up from sleep. Once again, Joe considered telling Bob to stay away from his door at this hour. But as Lou often said, these self-appointed duties made Bob happy, or at least they kept him busy. And Bob had a special claim on Joe's sympathy. For a time after his own stroke, Joe could say only three things: "Jesus Christ," "balls," and "goddamn." He meant to say other words as well, but only those came out. Gradually, Joe had regained most of his powers of speech. But Bob had not, in spite of therapy.

When at a loss for words, Bob would often say, in a plaintive voice, "I wish I could talk now." He would add, in an angry voice, "It's a bitch, I'm tellin' ya. It's a bitch." Bob could repeat new words, but most didn't seem to stick. He retained a vocabulary of only about three dozen words and phrases. With them, he mustered a range of expression that was quite amazing. His greetings, for example. For curt hellos, at all times of the day or night, Bob would say, "Howareyouthismorning," the phrase all one word, like a priest's mumbled devotions. For quick but more enthusiastic hellos, he sometimes used "Beautiful" or "Excellent." His truly cheery greetings, like the ones he delivered to Ruth, resembled songs: "Hi oh dee oh dee oh to you. Howdee! Howdee! Howdee! Hello to you hello!"

Bob worked as a factory machinist most of his life. Right up until his stroke, he spent his spare time restoring antique horse-drawn sleighs and buggies. Bob had two fat albums filled with photographs of his work. He showed them eagerly to any staff and fellow residents who were interested. "Buggy. Buggy," Bob said, pointing at the photos. Those who viewed them didn't have to pretend to be impressed. The sleighs and buggies looked brand-new, with lacquered finishes and delicate scrollwork painted on them.

"These are beautiful, Bob."

"You're damn right. I'm tellin' ya. I wish I could talk now." Bob would turn the page and point at another example of his handiwork. "Excellent. Excellent. Buggy. Buggy." He would turn to a picture of a neatly lettered sign, standing outside what had been his workshop. "Bob's Restoration Company," read the sign.

Bob's wife had told Lou and Joe that if someone dared to move a tool so much as an inch out of place in his workshop, Bob would know at once, and often there'd be trouble. So Bob's exacting ideas about order preceded his entry into Linda Manor. But creating and maintaining that order around him was virtually Bob's sole occupation now. Here at Linda Manor, an activities aide sometimes held pottery sessions. Bob, who had been right-handed, painted bowls left-handed. He no longer had many chances for doing something well.

Right now Bob would be limping quickly through the long central corridor downstairs and into the activity room, still empty at this morning hour, to begin rearranging furniture. Once in a while the cleaning staff left the upright piano a little out of place—on the wrong side of the parakeet cage, for instance. On such occasions, Bob would jab his cane at the piano, saying, "Ree-diculous!" Bob couldn't move the piano by himself. Muttering, "Sonofabitch. Ree-diculous," he'd get to work on things he could move. No rearrangements mattered as much as the assemblage of chairs Bob made in the wide doorway that connected the activity room and the dining room. Bob would place five chairs in two rows, like theater seats, facing in on the dining room. The two chairs in the back row were reserved for Art and Art's roommate, Ted. The front-row left-hand seat was for Joe, the right-hand one for Lou, and the middle seat was Bob's, and woe to the resident who tried to sit in any of those five chairs while waiting for the meal.

Eleanor tried to do so once, some months ago, when she was still new here. Bob jabbed his cane at her. "Get out! Get out! Black bastard! Get out!" Eleanor, whose skin without makeup was alabaster white, hadn't sat in one of those chairs since. Eleanor now called Bob the Inspector General, after a play by that name. One morning back around that same time, Bob threw a fit in front of the lab technician who periodically came in to take blood samples from residents—Eleanor had nicknamed her affectionately the Vampire Lady. The technician was adept at taking blood painlessly and was a popular figure among residents. Bob liked the Vampire Lady, too. "She's a damn good girl, I'm tellin ya." But that morning she arrived some fifteen minutes late, and delayed Bob's pre-breakfast preparations. "Bob went into just a spastic rage in front of her," Eleanor remembered.

In honor of that episode, the Vampire Lady gave Bob an additional title: Mayor of Linda Manor.

When Bob had the five chairs arranged, he'd say, "Okay, that's enough." He'd be sitting in his chair now, waiting all alone while the activity and dining rooms filled with sunlight.

***

Bob started setting up those five chairs in the dining room doorway a month or two ago. Since then, before every meal, Joe and Bob and Lou would sit there in the front row, Art and Ted behind them, and the five would watch and kibitz as the dietary aides moved around the dining room, setting the tables. Lou called their little group the Nudniks. And Lou also named their pre-meal kibitzing sessions. "Stupidvising," he called them. But Lou couldn't really participate. He couldn't watch the dietary aides. Most of the time he probably had no idea which aides the other Nudniks were talking to. When Joe realized this, he decided to learn the name of every dietary aide. It wasn't, on reflection, something he'd have done in his former life. Joe rarely bothered back then with the names of casual acquaintances. "I wasn't interested. Now I'm interested, that's all." The loss of tangible gift-giving power lay heavily on Joe. He couldn't often find a remedy, so when he did, it seemed significant to him, however small the gift. Now that he had all the aides' names down, he'd call them out for Lou during Stupidvising.

Lou was ready for the journey down for breakfast, dressed in his blue machinist's apron. Joe told him to go on ahead. Gingerly, Joe eased his damaged left foot into his shoe. The blister didn't hurt much, just enough to remind Joe of its presence. What a ridiculous aggravation, a blister the size of a nickel. Back when he had his health, he'd have hardly noticed it.

Joe's shoes were black, his right one blunt-toed with a steel brace attached to its heel. One-handed and deftly, Joe strapped the brace to his calf. Shod at last, Joe picked up his cane and, rising a little more unsteadily than usual, headed downstairs. He did his stepping forward with his good left leg, leaning heavily on his cane while that leg was in the air. Then he paused to bring the right leg up to where the left leg stood. His walk was an inchworm-like series of movements, slow and deliberate, a forced adaptation that revealed what a complex activity normal walking is. Joe's left hand worked the cane. His left arm still carried a fair portion of its once formidable muscle. His right arm hung limply, like meat on a hook.

As Joe turned into the activity room door, Bob's voice rang out, "Here he comes now!" There they sat, Bob and the other Nudniks in the Stupidvising chairs. All was in readiness for the morning's ritual.

Sometimes Joe found it hard to believe that he was about to join in this silliness. A lot of life was silly, though. This wasn't a great deal different from spending Saturdays playing hearts at the Legion bar in Pittsfield. Of course, you could take that two ways. The present could look better, or the past could look worse. But these pre-breakfast high jinks made him laugh. That was the important thing. It didn't really matter that he was often laughing at himself for taking part. "Jesus Christ, if I couldn't laugh, I'd go nuts in here," Joe often said.

Joe stopped a few feet from the Stupidvising chairs, took a deep breath, which lifted him fully erect, and sang out toward Bob, "Howdee! Howdee! Howdee!"

"Howdee! Howdee! Howdee!" Bob answered.

"That's gonna be on his tombstone," Joe said, smiling at Art.

Joe sat down—heavily, in one motion of surrender to gravity—then looked at Bob. "Everything under control?" Joe asked.

"Beautiful! Excellent!" said Bob, offering Joe his hand for shaking. They shook left-handed, their afflictions meeting. Looking at Bob with an appraising eye, Joe lifted the tip of his own cane in the air. "He's the Mayor of Linda Manor. And the In-spector General."

Bob grinned. "You're damn right!"

"He's one of the few mayors that, uh, that doesn't take bribes," Joe said. "Right?"

"That's right!" Bob reached over and slapped Joe's leg. "You hot shit."

"Hot stuff, Bob," Lou said softly. "Hot stuff." Lou had started this campaign a while back, as another effort to protect Joe's granddaughter and his own great-grandchildren from vulgarity.

Bob looked at Lou. "Hot stuff," said Bob, the still unaccustomed phrase mumbly in his mouth. "Thank you kindly."

Then the main event began. Across the dining room, through the swinging kitchen door came a pretty young dietary aide wearing an apron. Joe turned. "Lin-dah!" Joe called in a loud falsetto. Other aides emerged. "Sue-zeee!" Joe called in his falsetto. "Mare-eee!"

The aides called back greetings. Joe glanced at Lou. Lou was smiling. Good.

The aide named Mary walked over to the group of men and slapped high, low, and medium fives with each of them.

"Thank you kindly," Bob said to Mary. "She's a damn good girl, I'm tellin' ya," Bob said to Joe as Mary went back to work.

"Yes, she is," Joe replied.

A crowd of gray and white and bald heads, seated in wheelchairs and leaning on walkers and canes, had now collected in a disordered line at the dining room doorway, alongside the five Stupidvising chairs. This was always a slightly painful sight for Joe. He agreed with Lou: people their age shouldn't have to stand and wait. At last a nurse's aide arrived and called out "Okay!" from the dining room, and the breakfast-bound crowd started moving. "Let's go, let's go," said Bob. Joe watched as Bob got up and limped headlong into the dining room, weaving around wheelchairs, barging past old women on walkers. Joe shook his head at the sight.

Joe looked forward to breakfast, the best meal served here in his and Lou's opinion. He was hungry now, as always. But before he could eat, Joe had to interpret for Bob. The dietary aide waiting on them this morning was fairly new. She wondered if Bob wanted his eggs scrambled this morning.

"Yes," Bob declared.

Joe looked up at the aide. "No. Wait a minute. He wants them, uh, poached."

"You're damn right," Bob said to the aide. To Joe, Bob said, "Thank you kindly."

This was no time to have Bob get riled up over his eggs, but Joe would have interpreted for Bob anyway. "Because I was in the same position, that's all," Joe had explained to Lou. "Guys with a stroke say yes when they mean no, see."

The aides took their orders and had just begun to emerge through the swinging doors with trays of food, and Joe was looking hungrily at the tray coming toward him, when from a table off to Joe's left came the sound of a woman's voice bellowing, "This is crap right here!" It was Rosa. This was going to be one of those mornings. Smiling, Joe turned in his chair to watch.

Rosa, a fellow Forest View resident, was a dwarfish woman, usually dressed in sweat pants that looked about to fall down. She was a poet. The other day, encountering Rosa upstairs, Joe asked her to recite, and she declaimed rapid-fire:

Here's to Hitler, the sonofabitch.

May he die of the seven year's itch.

May his pecker be hit with a seven-pound hammer

And his asshole will whistle "The Star-Spangled Banner."

As a rule, Joe confined his own swearing to invocations of the deity, with a "bullshit" or a "sonofabitch" thrown in now and then. He didn't much care for dirty jokes, but he made an exception for Rosa's. Turned in his chair, forgetting breakfast for the moment, Joe watched as an aide tried to reason with her.

"Rosa, it's a pear."

"I don't want it," Rosa declared.

Joe looked around the table. His comrades were all smiling. "And in this corner, we have…" intoned Lou. Joe's shoulders shook with laughter.

In a moment the tiny figure of Rosa waddled furiously by, leaving the dining room in a huff, a nurse's aide hurrying after her.

"Goodbye, Rosa," Joe called.

Joe turned to Lou. "Yesterday she walked out of lunch, she walked out of dinner. And they, uh, grounded her." Joe's shoulders shook again.

6

Once the theater gets in the blood, it never leaves. Eleanor was living proof at eighty. She sat in her armchair in her room on Forest View's west wing. She gazed out her window at the wintry landscape, making mental notes about the coming dress rehearsal. "I should have had a property person. Well, here's Eva's wig and Simon Legree's whip. Supposedly the piano tuner will help lower the pitch. They're all going to be terribly nervous with their families here. The lights and the PA system make me terribly nervous. But that's typical of the day before a performance."

Some things had gone perfectly today. Eleanor finally got, after weeks of requests, a baked Idaho potato for lunch. Her blood sugar was good at 7 A.M., and was probably better now because of the potato. On top of that, some young woman she'd never seen before, someone visiting a relative here, had given Eleanor a hat. "Oh, what a lovely beret," Eleanor said to the stranger as they were passing each other in the hall, and just like that, the young woman took off her hat and presented it to Eleanor. Not that Eleanor really cared about clothes, but she knew a fine thing when she saw it. She liked the way it looked on her in the mirror. "A beret for the bon vivant," she said. And as for the rehearsal, well, c'est la vie. Eleanor sighed toward the pine trees outside her window. "Well, if we haven't done anything else, we've created a little adrenaline in these people." She meant her fellow residents.

"Hi-lo!" said an extremely cheerful voice from the doorway. Eleanor's roommate, Elgie, a large smiling woman in a dress, came in, pushing the wheels of her wheelchair while padding along with her feet—the caterpillar walk.

Eleanor glanced at her. "You can come in now. I'm going."

The remark didn't seem to faze Elgie. "Well, I hope the dress rehearsal goes lovely."

"It won't," Eleanor said.

Elgie laughed heartily, a high-pitched laugh with a master-of-ceremonies quality about it.

Eleanor stiffened at the sound. "They never do," she said.

"That's what I've heard," Elgie said.

Eleanor got up, picked up her cane, her script, a bonnet, a small riding crop, and a brown wig, and headed for the door with her small quick dainty steps. Elgie's voice trailed after her, saying, "Goodbye and good luck to you. God bless you all."

***

Eleanor had decided to call the coming production a cabaret. In fact, it was mainly an old-fashioned minstrel show—without blackface, lest she offend racial sensitivities. Eleanor had assembled most of the materials herself, culling skits and music from the faded pages of her father's old repertoire.

One of Eleanor's most vivid childhood memories was of traveling around upstate New York early in the century, with her young mother and middle-aged impresario father, as he put on his gypsy theatrical shows. Her father would go from one small town to another, bearing large black trunks full of props. He'd recruit local talent and direct them in a minstrel show. He wrote the skits, music, and lyrics. Part of the production would take place outdoors, when he'd lead a parade of the actors down the main street, half the town strutting along behind him and most of the rest watching from the sidewalks, in those days long before television. The company would promenade to the strains of a march Eleanor's father had written, called "The Minstrel Street Parade." The chorus went like this:

Ta ta ta tum

On they come

Look at 'em mash

Hear the drums crash

Comedians in line

Some of old time

'Tis the minstrel street parade.

Her father got paid out of the receipts from the indoor performances, usually staged under the auspices of the town's dominant church. He always claimed it as the church of his faith, becoming a Methodist in a Methodist town, for example, though he was actually Episcopalian. Eleanor wrote a short book about her father—she had it published privately. "In 1915 we were still in the north country and I performed in my first minstrel show," she wrote. Among other acts, she sang a song called "Only a Waif."

A sad-eyed, raggedly dressed little girl of five singing "Only a waif out in the street asking a penny from all." I would sing my song and then walk down the aisles, supreme tragedy, as I pretended to beg for a penny from people in the audience. Of course, I never took any money although the patrons would willingly have put the coins in my outstretched hands while tears streamed down their cheeks. Although only five, I can remember it even now, the odd satisfying sensation of making people feel sad because of my tragic appeal.

Reminiscing about that time, back when she was allowed to be one of the party, Eleanor said, "We trouped around the countryside, and then I went back to being a little schoolgirl in Glens Falls." She never got over that early experience. Deep down, she'd been restless ever since.

Eleanor relocated to Linda Manor nearly a year ago under most unusual circumstances. She checked herself in. What's more, she did so without prodding from family or friends and without the compulsion of grave illness. Eleanor lived previously in a retirement home for women, a venerable Northampton institution housed in a mansion not far from Smith College. Time had worn the old building to an elegant shabbiness. Each inhabitant still had her own silver napkin ring, and a sign on the old-fashioned elevator warned against using it during electrical storms.

The retirement home was clean. Although she had to share a bathroom with several other women, Eleanor had her own cozy private bedroom. Since she'd left, many people had asked her why she'd wanted to trade that life of relative independence and privacy for confinement in a nursing home. Eleanor's answers had by now a well-rehearsed quality. Her rest-home room had become insufferably hot in the summers, she'd say. She'd recall that one day her diabetes had flared up dangerously, adding that her own mother had died that way, in a diabetic coma. Although the rest home kept a nurse on duty around the clock, Eleanor would say that she felt she needed more nursing care, or soon would. And besides, there were no men at the rest home—well, there had been one, but he didn't count—and she'd found most of her fellow female residents too prim and proper. "They're all ladies," she'd say. "They never wear pants. They never say anything risqué." But then again, people who had known Eleanor over the years said that she always came up with good reasons for making a change in her life or for leaving a place.

Eleanor's son wasn't surprised when she called him to say that she was leaving the rest home for Linda Manor. He figured she'd exhausted the rest home's theatrical possibilities, both the figurative and literal ones. In fact, Eleanor had already put on seven plays at the rest home, and had begun to find the resources for casting there much too limited. "There were only ten people I could work with." She visited Linda Manor, on a social call, the summer after it opened and liked the looks of the place. "There's so much I could do here," she said.

Relatives almost always assume the considerable burden of managing a move such as Eleanor's. But her two daughters lived far away, and, Eleanor insisted, she preferred not to trouble her son, who lived in Pittsfield. She also allowed that she had never been a very "family-oriented" person, adding that theater people rarely are. She made her decision to move, and then asked for her children's approval.

Eleanor didn't have much money. She had to enroll in Medicaid. The regulations said that if she did not prepay her funeral expenses, the state would take the money. So Eleanor was obliged to prepare her own funeral shortly after she arrived at Linda Manor. The mortician called on her there. It took three hours to get everything picked out, the newspapers in which she wanted her obituary to appear, the accoutrements of the ceremony, the urn for her ashes. Every day for three weeks afterward, she felt like weeping. "And I'm not a weeper," she said, adding, of her funeral, "I think I'm more afraid of going through with it now that I've paid for it." She would like five more years. And in five more years, she figured, she would wish for another five.

Linda Manor wasn't all that Eleanor had hoped. She disliked the food generally, and detested her roommate Elgie. She often spoke yearningly of Forest View's three private rooms, each occupied by a person paying the private rate. She'd never be able to pay for one of those rooms herself, but, Eleanor reasoned, she was doing a great deal for the nursing home in the way of arranging and managing activities for residents. She felt herself really to be more like one of the staff than a resident. So perhaps some arrangement could be made when one of the private rooms' occupants expired. Any of them might go at any time, Eleanor thought. Meanwhile, she was keeping busy. Speaking about one of the women in the room next door to hers on Forest View, Eleanor said, "She has no memory, and she doesn't have Alzheimer's. Maybe it's from having nothing to think about. I have found you've got to make a goal for yourself, even if you're living in a little corner of a little room." She swept a hand outward, gesturing at her half of the small room, furnished with an antique writing desk, a few family photographs, an armchair, a TV, a stack of books from a local library.

For months her chief occupation had been the Linda Manor Players and the cabaret. It had been a mountain of work. She'd assembled about thirty amateur singers, dancers, and actors. She couldn't find enough residents to fill all the standup parts, so she recruited members of the staff, also the nursing home hairdresser and the hairdresser's husband. And like her father before her, she turned to the churches and shanghaied an Episcopal minister and several members of a local Baptist church into the company.

Eleanor had to make painful concessions. The actors would read their parts. "If I'd insisted on memorizing, I couldn't have gotten a corporal's guard." It wasn't easy staging a play when you didn't have a stage and half of your cast was in wheelchairs and the other half was always too busy to make rehearsals. Although she scolded and cajoled, she hadn't managed to get everyone together at any one of the rehearsals—not until the dress rehearsal, which, she didn't mind saying, was pretty ragged. She also had to fire the first piano player she engaged. Several times lately she'd threatened to cancel the whole thing. "I should never have tried to do something this ambitious," Eleanor said, back upstairs in her room. But there was a lot of color in her face, not all of it from the rouge on her cheeks. She was smiling.

***

"You say I inveigled you into Eleanor's play," Lou said from his chair by the window.

"You got me into…" Joe began to say, his voice on the verge of a bellow.

"Joe, the word you like to use, I don't like to use it. Bullshit. I got inveigled just by suggesting a few jokes to her."

They'd been having this same discussion for a few weeks now. "I did many stupid things," Joe said. "But this play of Ellen-er's…"

"Oh, you'll do all right," Lou said. "You signed the contract and you gotta live up to it."

"Listen." Joe rose up in bed, pulling back the privacy curtain to face Lou. "I did high school plays and I did all right. But this script, for Christ's sake, it stinks, huh?"

"Oh, it doesn't stink," Lou said, adding, "I don't have a script. I'm playing it by ear."

In the evening they made their way downstairs, dressed in their costumes—Lou in a large, floppy, snap-brim hat, Joe with a cloth band tied around his head. From the elevator landing all the way down on Sunrise, one could hear the babble of the gathering theater crowd.

As the cast assembled in the activity room, Bob looked around at their costumes, the floppy hats, the black gloves, the several fancy dresses, and said, "Oh boy, oh boy. Excellent."

"I don't want to hear that word," said Eleanor. "Not tonight."

Bob sat in the chorus, grinning at everything, along with Phil and several women in wheelchairs. The major singers and players sat in front of the chorus, in a row of folding chairs across the dining room doorway, in about the same position that Bob and Lou and Joe occupied for pre-meal Stupidvising. This spot now became the stage. The actors faced the dining room, where their audience sat.

At one end of the front row of actors sat Lou and Joe. Joe looked amused and a little embarrassed. Eleanor sat at the other end of the front row, beside the piano and the drummer, who was a nurse's son. The rest of that row were Eleanor's able-bodied, younger ringers: Linda Manor's director of activities, her assistant, an administrative assistant in charge of scheduling, two youngish Baptist friends of Eleanor's, the Baptist minister, who wore a dark suit and would serve as "Mr. Interlocutor," and a nursing supervisor whose pretty soprano equaled in volume the combined voices of the rest of the company and, it must be said, saved most of the musical parts of the show. The company rose, and with sweet and sour notes the cabaret began.

On a bright and pleasant morning in the springtime

When the birds are sweetly singing in the shade,

There is nothing half so thrilling to the senses

As to see a minstrel troupe do their parade.

Ta ta ta tum,

On they come…

The company sat down. Rising, Mr. Interlocutor gestured at the row of actors, saying to the audience, "Ladies and gentlemen, the funmakers of the evening." The audience clapped loudly.

The audience overflowed the dining room. In the back were a number of the actors' relatives—children, grandchildren, a great-grandchild or two, many of them standing, some sitting on the windowsills. The residents in the audience, mainly in wheelchairs, sat at the round dining tables. Most seemed more interested in the hors d'oeuvres than in the show.

Up on the stage—the open patch of gray linoleum floor where the stage should have been—Mr. Interlocutor said to Mr. Charcoal, "Your brother is an author, I believe."

"Oh, yes. Pinky am an author. Is you read his last book?"

"No. What is it?"

"It's pigs. De social life of pigs. It sho' am a swill book."

One of the residents in the audience said to another, "Well, at least they have a sense of humor." Behind them, though, the younger contingent laughed and laughed. As the show went on, the female residents at one table in the audience discussed the finger foods. Why did the kitchen serve them food you needed teeth to eat? And where were the napkins? But the rest of the audience drowned out most of that conversation. The audience laughed at all the right moments and applauded at the end of every song, dialogue, and skit.

Joe, playing Simon Legree in Eleanor's father's egregious "Uncle Tom's Nabin," fumbled his lines, trying to read his script. Eleanor prompted him, hissing from stage left, and Joe found his voice. "I'll have his blood!" Joe roared, flicking a riding crop over Uncle Tom, Linda Manor's chief of maintenance, who lay snoring on the floor. The third actor in this bit, a retired school principal in a wheelchair with a painful-looking hump, declared, her mordant voice improving the line: "You can't. He's anemic."

Eleanor donned a bonnet, tied its strings under her chin, and remained seated beside the drummer for her solo. "My mother sang this song in my father's revue when I was two and a half years old, but I'm no singer, so I will speak it," she told the audience, and then slipped into character, hunching her shoulders, clasping her hands together, pulling them to her chest, and saying, "I'm an old maid, an old maid. That's what the people say. Although…" She paused, her hands coming forward, palms facing up. "Although I'm very fond of men, they never come my way…"

Eleanor was the smoothest of the performers, clearly a trained actress acting. But Winifred, in the role of a nagging, weeping wife to a bankrupt ne'er-do-well, was utterly convincing, a natural talent now exposed. Everyone knew Winifred, and she got a big hand when her able-bodied partner in the skit wheeled her out before the audience. Winifred wore a bouffant, curly brown wig, like a headdress, and a satin print dress with perhaps two pounds of costume jewelry around her neck. Her wheelchair had leg extenders on which her swollen feet and legs rested, pointing straight out at the audience. Winifred was huge all over and in outline nearly shapeless, but for all of that she looked regal, like a queen in a peculiar dream. Her voice was very strong. It seemed a pity that she didn't have more lines.

Lou came on near the end of the show, rising and walking slowly on his cane to center stage. Lou didn't use any of Eleanor's father's material. He did three old vaudeville turns remembered from his youth. They were two-man acts. Lou did both voices. "On the way out I met an old friend of mine who just came back from a course in school where he learned all about nature. I said, 'You did? What is nature?' 'Well, I'll tell ya. You plant a sweet potato and it grows, that's nature.' 'Oh, nature is a sweet potato? Ah, you didn't learn nothin'. Tell the people everything you learned.' 'I'll tell them everything we both learned. It won't take any longer.'"

"Ladies and gentlemen," Lou said at last, "we'll be here tonight, tomorrow night, and probably Saturday night. Provided police and weather conditions permit." The audience laughed uncertainly. "That's all, folks," Lou added, and everybody cheered.

Soon Mr. Interlocutor was saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, the finale by the entire company," and, led by the nursing supervisor's fine, strong soprano, they began, "Ta ta ta tum, on they come…" The front row of actors was supposed to stand to sing.

Lou stood up. Beside him, Joe inched himself to the edge of his low metal chair, planted his cane, and started to rise. Many days had passed since he had gone to M&M's or ridden the bike, because of his blister. Joe's arm trembled. He rose a little, and then settled back. He tried again. His arm shook as it tried to push him up.

Lou turned and reached down to help, but by then the song was almost over, and Joe waved him away.

7

Christmas carolers were abroad, and they were drawn to nursing homes like missionaries to the South Seas. Some groups gave semiformal concerts in the activity room. Many residents attended. They enjoyed the singing, especially when they were asked to sing along and when children came. The sight of children brought sudden infusions of color into the faces of almost every resident. The hearts of even the listlessly demented seemed to pump harder. But residents sometimes had no choice except to listen, since some groups serenaded in the corridors of the nursing units. All things grow oppressive if repeated enough. It seemed as if every religious and civic group had to come in and sing carols. Some residents, Eleanor particularly, began groaning at the news of yet another group's coming. But the carolers meant well, and it was Christmas season.

A nursing home proceeds to many different clocks. Illnesses and injuries hold people to different schedules from the world outside them. Time in Lou and Joe's room became the time of the blister on Joe's toe. It was marked by the judicious looks and noncommittal words of the nurses, and by Joe's growing weariness with the question, "How's the blister, Joe?" "It's, uh… Oh, the hell with it," he said, waving the question away.

Joe still could not return to M&M's or ride the exercise bike. But he couldn't resist weighing himself each morning. "Good God, I gained a pound," Joe said, lying on his back on his bed. "I think it was the Jell-O last night."

"I don't think so," Lou said from his chair by the window. He added, "When you were bicycling like mad, you weren't losing weight."

"I wasn't bicycling like mad," Joe said. But his voice wasn't vehement. He didn't even sit up in bed to argue this point anymore. What was the sense of arguing? Lou was right, and Joe might as well admit it.

"Yes, you were," said Lou. "I told you you were going at it too hard. Like do or die."

Joe gazed up at the ceiling. "That's right. Eingeshpart. Well, I paid for it. Two weeks and it won't heal."

Joe missed the bike. "It made my leg feel strong, you know." But everyone here had problems of one sort or another, most much worse than this. The blister would pass, Joe told himself. Days ran into each other. Life in the room wasn't all that different, really. To be at Linda Manor at all was to be laid up. Joe was just a little more laid up for now.

He and Lou could not control most of the substance of their life in here, but they had imposed a style on it. The way, for instance, that he and Lou had come, in the past months, to deal with matters of the bathroom. Joe had to go there what seemed to him like a ridiculous number of times each day and night. He and Lou referred to the bathroom as "the library." The mock gentility of the term amused Joe. The point was to make a joke out of anything you could around here, whether it was weakened bowels or Bob's antics. Up in the room after breakfast, Joe would say to Lou, "I gotta go to the library. I have to do my, uh, uh, prune evacuation."

This room was now their home. As in any household, people entering were expected to follow local rules. The nursing staff was overwhelmingly female. Lou and Joe referred to all of them as girls, and indeed, next to them, even the middle-aged did look like girls. The staff had all, of course, been quite willing to talk frankly about matters of Lou's and Joe's biology. Too frankly for Lou. Too frankly for Joe, once Lou had made the point. The aides, "the girls," used to come to the doorway cradling open in their arms the large, ledger-like Forest View "BM Book," and they'd call loudly in, "Did either of you gentlemen have a bowel movement today?" It was Lou, some months ago now, who responded to this question by inviting in the girls who asked it, and then telling them gently, "All you have to say is, 'Did you or didn't you?'" The way Lou did that job impressed Joe. Lou did it so diplomatically, so much more diplomatically than Joe would have. Lou, as he liked to say, had trained all the girls by now. Joe took care of reinforcement.

It was a morning in December, in the third week of Joe's blister. Joe had the television news on. He and Lou were listening to the dispatches from the Middle East. It looked increasingly as though there would be war in Iraq. Joe watched intently, fuming now and then about the stupidity of war. He wasn't waiting for the aide with the BM Book, but he had a question ready for her. When the aide came to the door, she asked, "For my book. Did you?"

"Yes." Joe tilted his head toward Lou. "And so did he." Then, a little smile blossoming, Joe looked at the aide and asked, "And what about you?"

"None of your business!" The aide looked embarrassed. She laughed.

"Well, you ask me," Joe said.

"But I get paid for it."

"Good bye," Joe said pleasantly, and went back to watching the news.

Across the room, Lou was bending over in his chair, getting out his shot glass and bottle from his bedside dresser. Joe sat up in bed to watch. "Good God. That isn't drinking. One shot glass. Tee-hee."

Lou raised the glass. "L'chaim. Cheers, Joe." The room filled with the sweet smell of cheap brandy. The war news had concluded. Joe shut off the television and lay back on his bed. Now they'd talk. Lou was always ready to talk, and never at a loss for subjects.

Did they offer service-connected life insurance in World War II, as they had in World War I? Lou wondered. He wished he'd bought that insurance back in 1917.

"Mine'll bury me," Joe said. "It costs you pennies a month, for God's sake."

"When I was first married, my wife didn't believe in insurance. She was afraid if you got it, you'd die." Lou shifted in his chair. He said, "One thing my wife and I discussed when she was still in her right senses, we didn't want to be a burden on our children. In fact, before we came here we purchased a burial plot." Joe heard Lou's voice turn thin. He glanced at Lou. Lou's chin was raised, his head back, his eyes closed. "She didn't want to be a burden on the family, and it's turned out that way." Lou sniffled, just once. He rolled his shoulders slightly, readjusting himself in his chair, his face recomposing itself.

Joe stared at the ceiling. He didn't speak. What could he say? He ran his good hand downward over his face and, his face thus cleared, made a chewing motion.

"Well," Joe said, "I'm gonna be cremated. Take up less space. Christ almighty. When the spirit leaves you…" Joe threw his left arm high in the air and said, "Whoop!" His spirit dispatched, Joe went on, "And I'm going to heaven, and it's going to be run by a woman."

Lou still had his eyes closed, but Joe had him smiling now. "Your vision."

"Yes, my vision," Joe said. "Through that window. God came down and said, 'I'm a woman,' and I said, 'Good!'"

"Dan," Lou said. "Dan sees little green men out his window." Their fellow Forest View resident Dan was very garrulous. He once told Lou and Joe that he thought he'd seen a UFO outside his window.

Outside, a story below their east-facing window, a grassy hillside led upward to an evergreen and hardwood forest. Some residents insisted that they once saw a bear crossing the field. Joe hadn't seen it. He didn't spend a lot of time gazing out. It looked cold outside, the grass brown, the oaks and maples and birches bare. It was very warm in the room. Joe raised his left arm, like a maestro conducting from bed, and he declared that he hoped his house back in Pittsfield was still in the family when he died. He hoped there would be an ice storm that day. "I want my ashes spread on the sidewalk. So nobody will slip."

"What if it's summer?" Lou said.

"Then I'll have them put on the garden. Sure. For God's sake."

Lou mentioned the story they heard on TV, of the funeral director who cut his expenses by cremating several people at once.

"What the hell difference does it make?" Joe said.

"It doesn't make any difference," Lou said. "But if you want the remains of your loved one, you don't want six or seven other people mixed in."

Joe laughed. He glanced at Lou, who lifted a hand from the arm of his chair and made a gun with the forefinger, saying, "Talking about ashes and stuff."

Joe knew what was coming, in a general way. "Yup," Joe murmured toward the ceiling. He gazed up, his bared toe aloft on its pillow. He let himself relax into his bed. He wondered which story Lou would tell now, and if it was one already told. Sometimes Lou told new ones, or added new elements to old ones.

"Speaking of ashes and stuff," Lou said. "As a youngster in Philadelphia, we had quite a few oyster saloons, they used to call them. They were only open in the r months. The shells were ground up and sold to chicken farms. Then they started using them on the roads." And there were the arcades, theaters, and vaudeville and burlesque houses on 8th Street: the Gayety, Forepaugh's, Lubin's Nickelodeon, the Bijou where Lou saw the first talking pictures, and the nearby sporting houses where Lou never went, though he sometimes earned a nickel by giving sailors the directions. A hawker used to set an open suitcase on a tripod on Summer Street, between Vine and Race, and pull out a postcard of a half-naked woman, moving it from side to side in front of Lou and his two schoolboy friends. All three boys wore knickers and snap-brim caps. The hawker practiced his pitch on them, and when adults appeared he would say, not unkindly, "Beat it, kids." As Lou and his pals walked away, they'd hear the hawker saying to his customers in a singsong voice, "I'll be here tonight, tomorrow night, and probably Saturday night. Provided police and weather conditions permit."

Lou's tongue did not quite form th, so "these" came out as "dese," but with a much softer d than in Brooklyn. His gravelly voice, not a basso profundo but from a deep place, rolled smoothly on, like the sound of a lone propeller plane in a quiet country sky. Joe could drift away on it. Lou's voice carried on for what seemed like both a long time and no time at all. "Yup," Joe said occasionally.

"Ahh, dear," Lou sighed. "The things you remember. What time is it?" He peered at his wristwatch, holding it up to within about an inch of his right eye, like a jeweler examining a precious stone. "Time to go down for lunch, Joe."

Months ago now, Lou had affixed, to the upper-right-hand casing of their doorway, a tiny mezuzah—the talisman found in many observant Jewish homes, to remind the inhabitants to walk in the ways of God. On his way out of the room for lunch, Lou paused in the doorway, reached up, and touched the little mezuzah. Then, after he crossed the threshold, Lou called back, "Joe, close the door."

Lou feared that if they left their door ajar when they went out, one of Forest View's demented residents might ransack their room. That made sense to Joe, but Lou seemed to think he had to remind Joe to close the door every time they went out. Every time.

"Jesus Christ," Joe muttered to himself, "if I don't close it, he'll kill me."

Joe followed Lou toward the door. Lou always touched his mezuzah. "Lou figures that the Tribe will go to heaven," Joe thought. "Well, for Christ's sakes, they got no more chance than anybody. The Chinese die, they're going to heaven?" Lou and the door. Lou and his mezuzah. But you never can tell. At the threshold, Joe reached up and touched the mezuzah, too. Then he closed the door.

***

Joe's doctor changed Joe's antibiotic. Probably that did the trick, or maybe time deserved the credit. In any case, Joe awoke one morning near the end of December and for a moment he couldn't even see the blister. So Joe was cleared for a return to M&M's and stationary biking. But when Lou asked, "You coming down to M&M's?" Joe said he didn't feel like it today.

With Joe it was all or nothing, Lou thought. "He's his own worst enemy." In the afternoon, contemplating the shape of Joe, lying over there, Lou had an idea. He got up and fetched his cane. "Joe, I'm going out for a walk." But that didn't work. Either Joe didn't get the hint or he chose not to.

Lou understood the problem. You get old and you get rusty. You go without exercise for a while, and you don't feel like exercising anymore. But persistence had worked on Joe before. He'd just keep asking the question until Joe got sick of it. "Joe, why don't you come down to M&M's with me tomorrow?"

"All right," Joe said finally. He didn't sound too happy about it, but he would be, Lou thought.

A little later, Lou went off alone downstairs. Just to take a walk, he told Joe. Actually, Lou went to the physical therapy room, searching for the voice of Carol, the physical therapy aide who ran M&M's and supervised Joe's biking.

The next morning all was just as it had been before Joe's blister. Joe limped into the physical therapy room and took his usual seat, an armchair next to Lou's. Carol welcomed Joe back. She told him she had attached some foam rubber pads to the pedals of the bike. That way Joe could ride it in his stocking feet, lessening the chance of another blister.

"It was an extra thing for you to do," Joe said to Carol. "Thank you."

"Well, I just wanted you to be able to use the bike again," Carol said. She paused, then added, "But maybe not quite so violently."

As she said these words, Carol glanced at Lou.

Joe's eyes followed Carol's to Lou. Lou was making an effort to look completely nonchalant. It showed. Joe smiled.

Lou could sense Joe's eyes on him. Lou rolled his shoulders, as if getting ready for the workout. Beside him, he heard Joe's voice, directed his way. "I'm not eingeshpart!"

8

The New Year's Eve celebration started at 2 P.M., in order to accommodate the nursing home's routines and the residents' bedtimes. A four-man combo, with drums, saxophone, accordion, and bass guitar, set up their music stands in the wide doorway to the dining room. Crepe paper streamers stretched in webs among the chandeliers, and party favors lay with every table setting. At Linda Manor's parties, there was always the appearance of a broad dichotomy between bustle and passivity—aides and managers dressed in party hats waiting on the tables, blowing party horns and clacking party noisemakers, singing brassily along to the music, while many residents sat quietly with open mouths, or smiling, or looking grumpy. Now and then a nurse slipped in among the crowd, with pill cup in one hand and water cup in the other, and knelt down before a resident.

The combo was entirely white-haired. All four of the musicians looked about as old as many residents of Forest View. But age creates great biological disparities, far greater than differences at birth. Facing in on a room full of parked wheelchairs and walkers, of backs bent by osteoporosis, of ankles swollen by renal insufficiency and heart disease, while here and there residents sat with vacant-looking faces holding stuffed animals in their laps, the elderly musicians in their ties and jackets seemed very vigorous.

The combo warmed up with a few polkas. "I guess you know that song was made very popular by Bobby Vinton, 'The Melody of Love Polka,'" said the vocalist-emcee. Soon they switched to old dance-hall numbers. "Let me call you sweetheart," crooned the vocalist.

Except for the bedridden, the partygoers represented most of the conditions of old age lived within these walls. There were a number on hand with vigorous minds and ruined bodies, such as Winifred, arrayed in her wheelchair, singing along. And there were almost as many in the opposite condition, such as gray-haired Zita, who wandered aimlessly around the dining room. She walked with a spryness that Winifred and Bob and Lou and Joe could recapture only in their memories and dreams.

Art, Lou, and Joe all sat apart from the other residents. They sat in chairs in the activity room behind the combo, instead of in the dining room, not talking to one another and, anyone could see, not listening intently to this music either, but riding away on it.

Art skipped high school to go to work. He continued his education informally while working as a janitor at Smith College in Northampton, the town where he was born, raised, married, and, here on its outskirts, would likely die. Art had liked crossword puzzles. When he got stuck, he'd visit professors in their offices and ask for help, which was how he acquired his impressive vocabulary. He started singing as a boy soprano in his Catholic church's choir. Later, while he was working as a custodian at Smith, his boss overheard him singing to himself during a lunch break, and he got Art free voice lessons. Art remembered going up to Hampton Beach with his wife one summer evening, to a concert at the band shell there. An organist played and encouraged the crowd to sing. Art and his wife sat near the back. "I was singin' away. At intermission the organist comes up to me and says, 'Are you a pro?' I says, 'No, semipro.' I couldn't understand it, all these people singing and he comes up to me. My wife says, 'That's the funniest thing.'" Locally, Art's voice was in demand for decades. He sang on the local radio station on Easter Sunday, 1940. He was once recorded singing the prologue to Pagliacci—out of the scratchy old recording his voice emerged like a deep bell lined with velvet. He had several teachers over the years. One had felt that Art could make it as a singer in New York, but Art did not believe it, and he never tried. Sometimes he still wondered if he should have.

Since his wife's death, he had suffered from memories. He recalled the time when he and his wife were young and newly married and she dropped a frying pan and he yelled at her. "If she could come back to life now, she could drop a hundred of them and I wouldn't give a darn." Few conscious minds exert full control of memory. Art remembered his nearly sixty years of marriage as very happy overall, but the stories that he now recalled most vividly and wanted most to tell were of that dropped frying pan and of his sixty-year-long disagreement with his wife about demonstrativeness. His wife would say she wished he'd tell her that he loved her, and he would protest that he preferred to do the sorts of things that proved it. She would say she understood, but that any woman wants to hear the words, and Art would answer, "It doesn't run in my family to be like that." He started telling his wife he loved her several times each day, in their room on Sunrise, during the weeks before she died. "But she never said a word. Not 'Yes, dear, I forgive you.' I would've liked that. It seemed it hurt her all her life." Probably she could not answer him then, if she even heard him, but he wasn't sure.

Nothing about his wife's death had gone as Art wished in retrospect. He was watching baseball on TV in their room when she died, without a sound. "Well, the Red Sox are losing again," he remembered saying over his shoulder to her. "I wish I'd've known," he would say. "Because I'd've had her die in my arms."

Eleanor, who liked being punctual, had gotten to the New Year's party before Art. She was sitting in the dining room among some other women, listening to the combo, feeling bored.

"Even though these men here have all these physical problems, it's so nice to be in a place that has men. They add a little something," Eleanor said. A week ago, on Christmas Day, standing with Art at the nurses' station on Forest View, Eleanor came right out and told him, "You don't know what a difference it's made to have you here."

Art said, "I think she would approve."

Art had already told her about his wife, so Eleanor knew who "she" was. Eleanor leaned over and gave Art a kiss, a Christmas kiss on the cheek. And Art said, "I know she would approve of that."

Eleanor often found herself thinking about Art these days. "He's a very sensitive person, I think. We've talked about things that older people don't generally talk about. He knows all the words to the old songs, and I know them all. He tells me when the good shows are on TV. He's still a good-looking man. He is the nicest man. He and Art"—she meant Art, her husband—"would have gotten on just fine. He knows every lyric, every song. He's such a nice man. His leg's been hurting him lately. But I can get him out of his moods."

Eleanor didn't see Art come into the New Year's Eve party, but after the first song, she spotted him out in the activity room, sitting alone, a little distance from Lou and Joe. So Eleanor threaded her way out past the tables and wheelchairs, and pulled up a chair next to Art's. One of the dietary aides brought Eleanor a paper crown with "Happy New Year" emblazoned on the front. Eleanor put it on.

Art was feeling blue. Eleanor could tell. She understood Art, she liked to say. No one around here understood Art as she did. She felt a little blue herself.

How does one grow old so fast? It seemed like only a little while ago when Eleanor was entertaining suitors in the parlor of her parents' house, and the alarm clock descended the stairwell, dangling from a string in front of her and her boyfriend. Lowering the alarm clock was her father's way of informing Eleanor's boyfriends that it was time for them to leave. Eleanor wasn't one to let herself wallow in nostalgia or regrets, but she felt edgy when she looked back on the affair she'd had years ago with a colleague of her husband's. It had begun because of a play, Brief Encounters. They had been costars. Love affairs, she thought, were occupational hazards for an actress. "I always fall in love with the person I play opposite," Eleanor said. "But this one lasted so long. Art knew about it. Everybody did. Even the kids. I don't know as I regret it. I'm a little ashamed of it. This man used to call me late at night. He wanted me to meet him at the university. He wanted me to go away with him. He'd say, 'Someday I'll do something wonderful for you.' Eventually his wife came home and that was… it. The only thing I ever thought was, 'Well, it isn't quite me.' I think it filled a void at that time, of my father coming back to live with us, and Art not making much money, and having kids."

Dressed in her paper crown, Eleanor leaned over toward this Art and said above the music, "Not going to sing today?"

"No," Art answered.

"Well," Eleanor said, "I guess I'll go upstairs."

"I'll go with you," Art said.

When they got outside the activity room door, Eleanor took Art's arm. Behind them, the combo had just struck up "Show Me the Way to Go Home," which would have seemed a bit ironic and dreary to Eleanor a moment ago, but now seemed too good to be true. She started to sing the song and Art joined in, his fine, trained baritone growing in authority. They walked along, singing. The combo's music receded behind them. Art shuffled along and at the right moments doffed an imaginary top hat. Eleanor with her little steps easily kept pace. She held on to the crook of Art's arm and swung her cane in the air before her like a drum major's baton. Maintaining this arrangement, singing on, they boarded one of the elevators, ascended singing, got off and slowly promenaded, singing even louder, down the corridor. They finished up the sad old song standing arm in arm in front of the Forest View nurses' station. The nurse on duty applauded. Then Art got his usual midafternoon pills and repaired to his room, alone.

"Oh, I like him," Eleanor said, both her voice and body quivering, as if vibrations in the floor were being transmitted through her cane. "I like him." To Eleanor it seemed a fine ending to a melancholy day, and a good beginning to her eighty-first New Year.

***

Downstairs the party was still going strong. During a lull in the music someone in the dining room said loudly, "These songs make me cry." Lou got up from his chair at once and groped his way to the door. Joe followed at a little distance, then stopped and watched as Lou walked down the administrative corridor. He was heading for the lobby. Joe wouldn't follow him.

He knew that Lou was thinking about his wife. Lou would probably go to the lobby and cry quietly, or if one of the staff stopped to talk to him, Lou might tell her about his wife's death and, his voice thin and wailing, say, "I held her hand right up until the end. That's the way we started, and that's the way we ended up." And afterward, Lou would probably say to his listener, "I think that little talk did me some good." Together in their room, Lou and Joe had discussed the issue of men crying. They agreed there was no shame in it. But Lou did not often cry in front of Joe. Perhaps that was because his crying was apt to make Joe cry, too. Lou clearly felt no shame in crying in front of anyone—in crying, that is, about his wife and not about his own condition. But Joe, no matter what he said, clearly did not like to cry in front of another man or to display affection toward another publicly.

The so-called labile tendency that sometimes accompanies strokes had lingered eighteen years in Joe. It made him feel like weeping over inconsequential things, such as the sight of a young tree growing. Even the news of an ugly gas station's being torn down could make him cry, Joe said. His fits were brief but powerful looking. He'd sob silently, often without tears, his mouth open and his shoulders shaking—a momentary, dry-heaving kind of sob. Then he'd run his good hand downward over his face and reappear unruffled, sometimes smiling, as if from the powder room. The combo's old dance-hall songs were strong stimuli, and Joe had wanted to get out of the activity room before he was overwhelmed. Joe couldn't prevent weepiness, but he'd get out of public places if he could when the fit was on him—just as he would make sure to wipe the numbed right side of his mouth periodically, in case spittle that he couldn't feel had collected there.

Joe belonged to the generation whose young men felt compelled, even desperate, to join the military and serve in World War II. He himself had searched for a military doctor who would overlook his congenital high blood pressure. He found such a doctor, and then discovered war to be less glorious than advertised. But Joe absorbed his generation's ideal of manly virtue, and more than ever now he tried to live up to it. He would say that he admired Hemingway for committing suicide, because suicide took courage. And if one chose to live on, one must weather one's own fate bravely, or at least without complaint. Joe saw examples of such virtue all around him here. At least once a week he and Lou would hear a loud thump through the wall, the sound of a woman who lived next door taking a fall, and Joe would say, "Oh, dear God. Mary." He or Lou used to go out and tell one of the staff that she had fallen, but then Mary asked them not to. Mary said she was afraid that if the staff knew how often she fell, she'd be "sent downstairs." So now Joe listened to the thump unhappily and said, "Mary, she never complains."

Joe said, "Art. He has, uh, Parkinson's. He's losing, uh, eye. He walks a little, he gets tired. And he never complains." Joe often made these expressions of admiration for the stoics around him when he himself was feeling pain—phantom pain in his missing toe, chronic pain in his knees or shoulder—or after some common sight, such as a resident drooling, reminded him that he'd ended up in a nursing home. At such times, Joe might recite the litany of his own wife's ailments.

Joe was also surrounded by counter-examples of stoical virtue, the "goddamn fools," as he would say, who complained about their lot and did everything they could to make their families feel guilty.

And then there was Lou. "Lou's hemorrhoids are bothering him. He has angina. His back's bothering him. He's legally blind. And he never complains. Good God, huh?"

The music wafted out of the activity room. This was Lou's first New Year without his wife. Joe watched him move slowly toward the lobby. "It's sad. Sad," said Joe. He limped toward the elevators. Joe got winded more quickly now than before his blister. Now when he walked from the dining room to the elevators, he had to stop on the way and rest. When he made this short walk in the company of an able-bodied visitor or one of the nurses whom he advised on matters of alimony, Joe timed these halts with the conversation. He made it seem as if he stopped and leaned awhile on his cane simply in order to emphasize a point. Joe rode up to Forest View alone.

***

New Year's Eve: at moments like these, when fragments of time coalesced and Joe realized where he'd been and how he'd gotten here, he'd sometimes say, "Route Nine. I never thought I'd end up on Route Nine." The saying went way back. In Joe's house outside Pittsfield, or across from the courthouse in the Legion bar, there was a standing joke. If somebody did something peculiar or said something nutty, the others would point fingers at their heads and cry, "Route Nine!" That two-lane state highway winds east from Pittsfield to Northampton. It is a bucolic drive of thirty miles through the Berkshires. It also used to be the route along which mental patients rode, from Pittsfield to the tall gothic buildings and locked wards of the once gigantic Northampton State Hospital. To send people there was to "Route Nine 'em."

Joe remembered the journey east away from Pittsfield to the VA Medical Center in Northampton, the ride with which this new life of his began. He rode in the back of a VA van. His son rode with him. The rest of his family followed in a car. Joe sat in a wheelchair, looking out the windows. On the outskirts of Pittsfield, the van turned onto the famous two-lane highway, and Joe turned to his son and smiled wryly. "Route Nine!" he said. He didn't talk much the rest of the way. As the van passed through a town a few miles from Northampton where Joe's daughter lived, he caught a glimpse of his infant granddaughter. The babysitter just happened to be taking the child out for a walk in a stroller. Everyone involved in Joe's relocation agreed that the timing of that walk was a minor miracle. Joe beamed as he looked through the window at the receding figure of his granddaughter. Small and blond with the Torchio curls in her hair.

Joe didn't complain to his family when he was wheeled into his room at the VA. He tried to make himself seem cheerful. He was glad to be able to remember that. It was the right way to behave, and it was the least he could do for his family. Maybe it amounted to a little recompense.

***

Joe remembered disappointments from his years as chief probation officer. Disappointments came with the job. Trying to straighten out other people's lives, dealing every day with the county's routine, seamy social chaos—it could put a strain on sympathy. On the other hand, the job cultivated the habit of being needed, and it wasn't as though he hadn't helped a lot of people. The women with small children whose husbands weren't paying their alimony, for example. His office had the second-best record in the state for making those men pay up. And he often made it possible for the delinquent husbands to do so, by not putting them in jail. There were a lot of kids who came to him in custody, in their first big trouble. He was the first probation officer in the state to institute a program of work release instead of jail for them. And a lot of those kids straightened themselves out. In the early days, he and the first judge he worked for made some mistakes. People being hauled into court for the crime of cohabitation—that seemed pretty silly now. He and the judge should have released them on the spot. But Joe rid the courtroom of the "cage" in which the various accused used to await their hearings before the judge. He gave a lot of drunks a break. The police chief didn't approve. "Joe, Joe, Let 'Em Go Torchio," the police chief called him. The chief said he was going to stop giving Joe's office the arrest reports on drunks if Joe was simply going to free a lot of them. "Then I'll release them all," Joe retorted. Joe's son had worked awhile as a corrections officer in the county jail. He'd told Joe that, while working there, he ran into quite a few old reprobates who said, "I know your father. Yeah, he put me in jail back in '58. He's a good guy." His son said he wasn't sure if those testimonials qualified as compliments. Joe was greatly amused.

It is strange to remember an active life while lying on a bed in a nursing home. Joe's recollections of his former life seemed at moments now as stupefyingly improbable as a TV action-adventure. Once a large young man disagreed so strongly with the probationary terms Joe set for him that he pulled a knife on him. Joe, half the young thug's size, climbed over the top of his desk and took the knife away. Twenty years ago, only a couple of years before the stroke that divided up his life, a local lawyer, arguing with Joe about a real estate deal, called him a liar over the phone. Joe dropped the receiver, ran out his door and across several blocks—in his shirtsleeves, in the dead of winter—and up the stairs to that lawyer's office. The lawyer knew that he had made a mistake. He knew Joe. He had erected a barricade of chairs around his desk, and stood inside it when Joe arrived. Joe was too winded to get at the lawyer right away, and by the time he'd caught his breath, a policeman had appeared. Joe had a lot of clout with the local police force. There was no question of his being arrested. Afterward, in fact, the policeman said, "I tried to give you some time to hit him."

"I used to box intramurally," Joe remembered. He smiled. "Sometimes in bars." He didn't drink during working hours, but he spent many evenings in the Legion bar. After his stroke, his Legion pals sent him a giant card with the queen of spades on the front in memory of their Saturday games of hearts. It was an odd feeling to realize that most of the men who signed that card were dead now. A lot of friends had died.

Father John. Joe grew up with him, and John became a Catholic priest. Father John was one of Joe's most faithful visitors after Joe had his stroke. He would come over to the house, and they'd sit down at the kitchen table, and Joe's wife would put a bottle down between them. The bottle wouldn't last long. They'd argue theology. Joe remembered asking Father John if he believed what the pope had said about Mary ascending to heaven in her clothes.

"Yes, I have the faith," said Father John.

"Well, by Jesus, I don't," said Joe.

Then Father John contracted Lou Gehrig's disease, an excruciating fatal illness. Joe remembered visiting him on his deathbed, at a rectory in eastern Massachusetts. Father John smiled up at him. He said, "Christ suffered on the cross for three days."

Joe answered, "He didn't suffer as much as you!"

Joe was a devout Catholic as a boy. He lost his faith around the age of seventeen. "I just didn't believe the story anymore. Immaculate Conception, I used to believe that. God is in three persons. That's a mystery that we can't understand, right? I'm an agnostic leaning toward atheism. But…" Here Joe would raise his good arm and declare, "There's something that started the goddamn world!" The fault must lie in him for lacking religious faith, Joe thought, because so many other people had it. But his professional and personal experiences of life made the idea of a just God, mindful of the fall of sparrows, laughable.

It was around this time of year, long ago, when the doctor had said there was no hope for his first son. The boy died at the age of seven from leukemia. He used to apologize to his mother and Joe for the messes of blood his illness caused. And then their first daughter was born retarded. It took about a year before the fact was known. Joe and his wife eventually raised two healthy children. It was a relief to know that, but he never really got over what happened to his first son and daughter. He merely grew accustomed to the facts. "I was no good for ten years. I just went through the motions." But it would be dishonest to say he drank because of that.

Then the stroke hit. He was only fifty-four. He remembered falling out of bed and hearing his wife on the telephone, summoning help. Joe wasn't worried right away. He figured that whatever it was, he'd come out of it. Therapists and his wife and his best friend worked on him, and gradually his speech returned and he learned to walk again, after a fashion. And with a great deal of help from his wife and his assistants, he went back to work. He had a lot to thank those people for, especially his wife. About ten years later he was forced to retire. For a few more years he lived at home, in semi-isolation, keeping mainly to a small den that smelled of chimney smoke. He kept on drinking in retirement.

One day Joe announced, to a family friend who was visiting, that he would never drink again. Joe remembered his friend saying that he'd bet his house against it. Joe knew himself to be the sort of person who liked to do a difficult thing just to prove that he could do it. He'd always been that way—learning in grade school to recite the alphabet backwards just because a classmate said he couldn't do it. There wasn't anything mysterious about his wanting to quit drinking. "I got sick of it, that's all." Joe quit a few years before he underwent those several operations and had to leave home for good. It was almost five years now since he'd tasted liquor.

***

Joe limped into the empty room upstairs. Daylight still filled the window. He took off his shoes and lay down on his bed. He gazed at the ceiling. He was glad he had quit drinking. He wished he had quit sooner. But maybe not much sooner, to be honest. He had usually enjoyed himself. Drinking had enhanced his life, he thought. But it had not enhanced his family's, and now he really did wish that he had quit sooner.

To his family and friends, Joe still issued orders, but he kept from them a great deal of what he felt. He had resolved never to complain to them, if he could help it. A person in a nursing home has a lot of time to contemplate the shortness of what's left and to summon up regrets. "See, my wife was nurse, nurse's aide, physical therapist, and everything for me for fifteen years. And I got mad at her. She served steak. I said for Christ's sake, I'm sick of goddamn steak and every other goddamn thing. I didn't realize, and now I'm trying to make it up to her. Honest to God. And I drank too much. Honest to God."

In Joe's plan, he'd make what amends he could by making his close friends and family feel that he was happy at Linda Manor. "Perfect place," he'd say to them. In the privacy of his own thoughts, Joe gave a slightly different accounting.

He remembered his four months at the VA as vividly as a nightmare from which he had just awakened. The ward, on an upper floor deep inside the hospital building, was clean but old and drab. The staff were competent and pleasant, but they were practically the only people around who could carry on a rational conversation. They put Joe to bed in a five-man room. On one side of him lay an all but comatose man. Joe saw a feeding tube protruding from that man's stomach, and tried not to look that way again. The patients lying in the other beds around him moaned and babbled and cried out, and the one man in the room who could talk complained incessantly, cursing the staff and Joe. Often alone with no one but the busy staff to talk to, Joe couldn't shake the feeling that he did not belong there, among the comatose and demented. Even at its best, life on that ward seemed to Joe like a case of false imprisonment. He considered suicide, but rejected the idea, and then wondered if he was a coward for doing so.

For about a week after he got to the VA, Joe writhed inwardly. "Then I turned over." Joe rotated his good hand as if opening a doorknob. "I decided to adjust." He remembered his first sight of Linda Manor. After the VA, it looked fresh and airy. But it was still a nursing home. He arrived in a wheelchair. When they pushed him into his room on Sunrise, his new roommate glared at him from bed and greeted Joe by saying, "They call me Miserable Merle."

The man's tone sounded threatening, and Joe wasn't going to let it pass. "I'm just as miserable as you, you sonofabitch," Joe told him. Joe got along all right with him after that, but the man was truly miserable and he complained a lot.

Joe remembered one young nurse's aide on Sunrise, the only aide around here he really didn't like. She was gone now. "You're quite bossy, aren't you," Joe remembered telling her. "Well, you don't boss me." Most of the time in here it seemed as if he were obliged to say please and thank you constantly. It still seemed that way. But maybe that was just because he'd said those words too seldom in his life before.

When he came to Linda Manor, he hadn't taken more than a few steps toward walking again, not since the surgeon had cut off his toe. Walking had been difficult ever since his stroke. Without the toe, he couldn't seem to get his balance. He wasn't going to bother to try. But the staff insisted that he transfer from his wheelchair to a regular chair in the dining room. He had to wait his turn for an aide to help him. He endured the procedure for a couple of weeks or so. Then one day, while he was in the midst of being lifted, turned, and deposited in a dining room chair, it occurred to him that learning to walk again couldn't be more aggravating than doing this three times a day. "The hell with it," he thought. Inspired by irritation, he relearned the art of walking. It didn't take very long. "It wasn't hard. It wasn't easy." Good thing he'd done it, though, or he might not have been moved upstairs and gotten Lou as a roommate.

Things were much better now than they had been. Lou was a vast improvement over his other roommates. And Linda Manor was a great improvement over the VA. But it was still the last place he ever thought he'd end up living in. "Perfect place," he'd tell his friends and family. To himself, he said, "It's as good a place as you can get without home. But who would choose this if you had any other choice, that's all."

Lying in the room on Forest View, Joe thought back to other New Year's Eves. "Before I got crippled, I used to, uh… tie one on. On New Year's Eve. Oh, Jesus!" It used to be midmorning tomorrow when he got in from celebrating. He laughed. He gazed at the ceiling. "But… that's gone forever. Just as well, or I'd be dead now."