This Old Man (19 page)

All this—the first glimpse of Old Man's small body and wizened face and disheveled hair—happened in a flash. And yet it seemed that these seconds stood perfectly still. Now the frozen scene was plunged into a steaming frenzy. The bed raced down the hall, a nurse went ahead to press for the elevator. Someone ran beside the bed taking Old Man's pulse; there was a blood-pressure cuff on his arm. A nurse dabbed at his forehead with a damp cloth. These were all signs of life. Why hadn't I noticed them before? Old Man was alive! The lowing I'd heard came from deep within him.

Later I found out that he had only broken his hip. The nurses were rushing him to the operating room for x-rays and to have his hip set.

The part that stuck with me through that long night as I tried to fall asleep was the image of Old Man lying peacefully still on that bed. He wasn't writhing or squirming. He didn't even move a muscle. His small, ordinary, old-man face said nothing of the pain he felt in his body. He had won still another round with the foreign doctors.

Then I understood what Wing meant about saving face.

21

There was no ceremony or induction. I simply became Old Man's guest each afternoon. I couldn't keep my eyes off his toes. They stuck out of the end of his cast, because they were too tender to be touched, even by a thin sheet. I'd never noticed until then that feet don't age like the rest of the body. They could have been the toes of a young cowboy, flexing and glad to be free of the boot.

Old Man never asked what I was doing there. I was simply introduced as the Girl of the Lu Yun Poem. He never spoke to me directly. Still, I felt he was very aware of my presence. Wing said Old Man remembered my being in the hall the day he broke his hip.

After a week or so I was sure he was playing with me, in the manner of a man who remembered himself to be roguish and dashing. He smiled much more than I thought he would, and pointed to this and that of me, and said things to Wing that I didn't understand, but that seemed happy and playful.

Wing taught me a few things to say—hello, have you eaten today, thank you—and Old Man would snicker when I said them awkwardly. He'd command me to say them again and again. Other times there wasn't a thing we could say to please him, and we would just wait quietly for the storm in his heart to pass.

The broken hip seemed to have done wonders for his health. The foreign doctor said that if all went well, Old Man would be home in two weeks.

Mrs. Kwang began preparing the apartment for his homecoming. She stripped his bed and beat his mattress and rearranged the furniture in the boys' room so that Old Man's corner would be closest to the bathroom in the hall.

I worried about who would take care of him at home.

“I will, of course. A visiting nurse will come from Chinese Social Services to give him a bath and shave him every day or two, and take his blood pressure or whatever they do, but I'll do the rest,” Wing said proudly.

“I know, I know, the first born of the first born, et cetera.” Poor Wing. He'd be tied down all summer with that gnome of a tyrant, who'd be yelling at him one minute and cooing to him the next. Each day he'd demand more and more of Wing's attention and energy. What a way to spend your sixteenth summer.

“I'm surprised you asked, Greta. Who else would do it?”

Who else? I would have done it. I would have given up Quinn's job at Candlestick Park and stayed with Old Man in the daytime. I would have learned to say more words, and to understand even more, so he could tell me what he needed, and I could take care of everything.

I was disgusted with myself for feeling so jealous of Wing. It wasn't as though he were getting a fantastic trip to Honolulu, or a new TransAm. What he was getting was a sentence to three months in a musty, crowded, third-floor apartment, with a man who muttered tight, ancient poems and clapped his hands to bring Wing to him, as he'd done seventy years before to his household of humble servants. Who could be jealous of such a thing? I must have been crazy.

The next Tuesday Mr. Saxe and I had it all out.

“What does Old Man represent to you?” he asked pointedly.

There was a lot to do in forty-five minutes. “Could we maybe skip the question game and get right to it? What
does
Old Man represent?”

Mr. Saxe must have sensed my impatience that day, because he gave me one of his rare straight answers. “Old Man is—oh, the family continuity you've never had, the ethnic background you miss as a Wasp? Try that on.”

“What's a Wasp?”

“White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. In other words, you don't have roots in a specific ethnic or minority group.”

“You mean, Old Man's interesting and different, and I'm ordinary?”

“I wouldn't put it quite like that. You're an extraordinary girl.”

I shook my head. “I don't think you've hit it yet. Try something else.”

“All right, how about this? Old Man appeals to you because you'd like something or someone to take care of.”

“Too obvious. A cocker spaniel would work just as well.”

He agreed. “The young have always had a reluctant fascination with old age, as if knowing about aging could prevent it from happening to them. Does that ring true?”

“Not yet,” I sighed.

“Then consider this. From time to time we've talked about Mrs. Barnes.”

“Hackey's mother?” I suspected he was getting closer. Seeing me bristle with anticipation, he zeroed in on his new theory.

“Mrs. Barnes was sort of a grandmother to you, a stable, older influence. I think you've missed her quite a lot in the two years she's been gone. Old Man is a substitute for Mrs. Barnes, am I right?”

Only partly. Something was still missing. Many mornings Jo would interpret my weird dreams, in her unique, colorful way. Usually I thought the interpretation told more about Jo herself than it did about me. Sometimes, though, she hit on something absolutely right, and it would be like a door opening at the back of a movie theater—a sudden flash of light that dimmed everything on the screen. There wasn't that flash of light yet in Mr. Saxe's interpretation, but he was getting closer and closer.

He dealt me a crushing blow: “I can't think of anything else, can you?”

I shook my head, hurt and disappointed. Neither of us spoke; minutes flew by. It was there somewhere in the room, just out of reach, taunting us to grab it. What was it? What
was
it?

Mr. Saxe said, “I'm sorry, Greta, I feel powerless to explain this any further.”

I raised one eye. He had chosen that word,
powerless
, as though he'd seen it in my head and plucked it out. He sat back in his swivel chair with his hands pressed together against his lips, like an altar boy. He was waiting patiently.

I tried to get my words together. They were crashing in my head, and I had to find a way to pull them out of the wreckage. “It has something—a lot—to do with power.”

He nodded, as though he expected this.

“Old Man has tons of power, you know?” Where was I going with this? It still made no sense, but at least there was a crack of light in the door. “I mean, he lies there helplessly in that bed and commands three generations with a word, a frown, a wave of his shaking hand.”

“You envy that power?”

“Hmmm.”

“Do you wish you were one of the people controlled by that power?”

“Hmmm.”

“I'm still wide of the mark, aren't I?”

“It's that, I guess. Old Man has a real clear view of things. He doesn't mess around with shades of truth or any kind of compromising. He knows that he's absolutely right, and God help anyone who disagrees, because that person's absolutely wrong. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be so sure?”

“Wonderful, perhaps,” agreed Mr. Saxe, “but how could you get along with anyone, when you were always right and they were always wrong?”

“Old Man gets along fantastically with his family.”

Mr. Saxe raised his eyebrows. “Sure?”

“Well, yeah. They adore him and can't do enough for him. And you should see the way his face lights up when Wing comes into his room. And look at Wing. He's spending his whole, entire summer babysitting for Old Man.”

“Greta, this is only my observation, and you tell me if I'm wrong, but it seems like what's going on is not so much pure adoration as it is a love-hate relationship between Old Man and his family.”

I'd never heard of such a thing. Either you loved somebody, or you hated him. You couldn't hold on to two opposite feelings at the same time.

Mr. Saxe leaned toward me and looked me straight in the eye. “How do you feel about Hackey?”

“I hate him.”

“How do you feel about your mother?”

“I love her.”

“Do you ever love Hackey and hate your mother?”

“No!”

He leaned back again and closed his eyes. I had a sense of time racing away from me. We were still off the target, as he said, but so close, with so few minutes left. I couldn't waste time mulling things over, so I blurted out what came to mind before I could stop myself. “I love Old Man and I hate Old Man.”

“And Hackey?”

“Him, too.”

“Is Old Man like Hackey?”

“Maybe a little. They both control people.”

Very quietly, Mr. Saxe said, “Is Old Man like your mother? Think a minute. Does his utter helplessness remind you of your mother? After all, Greta, he may run his family like a tyrannical general, but he can't even go to the bathroom without help. He's at the mercy of his family, isn't he?”

“Aw, you don't know this man at all. You should have seen his self-control when they were wheeling him out to the operating room. It was like he was hypnotized, like he'd crawled into himself to find a huge mountain of courage. I was standing as close to him as I am to you now, and I mean, there was not a clue that he was in pain. It's the most amazing thing I ever saw.”

“When they brought him back to the room, what was he like?”

I said slowly, “Like a baby.”

“That's what appeals to you, isn't it, that contrast of power and powerlessness. You see the same things in yourself. You love the power and hate the powerlessness. You, and your mother, and Hackey are all rolled into one. You're all Old Man.”

22

I looked at Old Man differently after that. He didn't scare me anymore, as though the earth were quaking under me. I could sit across the room from him and hear him talk to Wing, or not talk at all, and sometimes a blush of tenderness would come over me. If he did something that made me mad—such as push Wing away after he'd tucked in Old Man's napkin bib—I felt cleanly mad. And if he did something that tickled me, I felt wholly good. The big difference was that he could no longer hurt me; in fact, I could hurt him far worse than he could hurt me. I was there every day, even on the weekends, and sometimes I'd go without Wing, just to watch Old Man sleep.

On some of those visits I noticed a young woman whose exquisite Oriental features captivated me. I thought she must have been a model at least, maybe even a famous actress. She'd had some kind of surgery, though to see her walking up and down the hall, in her red quilted brocade gown and sandal slippers, you'd never guess there was a thing in the world wrong with her. She wore her hair pulled straight up to a swirl at the top of her head, showing off tiny, flat ears and high cheekbones with a smudge of brownish rouge on each. She wore pale jade studs in her ears and a choker of jade beads just above the mandarin collar of her gown. I found out from a nurse that her name was Paula Ching, and she'd been born in Singapore, but that was all I knew about her.

Even with Old Man's door closed, I heard the laughter that poured from her each afternoon. She had so many visitors, Chinese and Caucasian both. Every time I passed her room, I peeked in to see how many people were there. Her room was a jungle of people sitting on her bed and window ledge, and all over the room there were vases and pots bursting with every kind of bright flower.

One day I was in the hall getting a drink when I saw a man sitting there beside her bed, with an ankle crossed over his knee, and they were having quite a laugh together. I stared at him in dread and fascination. It was Hackey. He spotted me in the hall and got up. A smile spread across his face.

“Paula, look who's here,” he said. “It's my little girl, Greta.”

I froze. The water I'd just swallowed felt heavy as stones in my stomach.

“Come on in here,” he said, with just the right amount of that charm he was known for.

I should have run. I should have run as far as San Jose, and caught a bus to Albuquerque, or anywhere. Instead I stepped into Paula Ching's room.

“Oh, her? I see the kid here all the time,” Ms. Ching said, laughing. “I didn't know she was your girl. She's a friend of that old man who's croaking next door.”

Hackey put his arm around me and pulled me beside him. “Isn't she a doll?”

Ms. Ching made some sort of noncommittal remark. I gathered she didn't think I was a doll.

“How's your mother doing, eh, babe?”

“Okay, I guess,” I heard myself say, amazed that I'd found any voice at all.

“Old Marla, she took off without a trace,” Hackey said. “Didn't leave even a shoelace behind. A few bills, yeah, that,” he muttered.

Ms. Ching said, “I don't miss her, do you, Hack?”

“Well, now, old Marla's been with me a long time. I notice she's gone.” He stared off into a corner of the room, as if he might spot her there.

“She—” I cleared my throat. “She has a right to her own life.”

Hackey's charm dried up instantly. “I've been good to that woman. You know where you'd be, little girl, if I hadn't come along just in time? Dead. Dead is where you'd be. She couldn't of fed you on her own. You'd of been a scrawny, starving rat, if I hadn't come by and pulled your mother out of the gutter. I gave her everything, you know that? Everything. I took her on trips. I bought her every winter coat she ever had on her back. I gave her a home, a family, a career.”