ONE CALL I RECEIVED FROM HIM, IN THE days right before I went back to Columbus, carried a significance I did not immediately comprehend.
I must have been out when he called, because he left a voice-mail message. Just two sentences:
“Greene, I’ve got a question for you. Call me.”
I thought it might be a trivial one—the kind of question with which we had always peppered each other. Questions about what one-hit singer sang what obscure song (Bobby Jameson, “I’m Lonely,” which for a few brief months had been an obsessive, play-once-an-hour favorite of disc jockey Jerry G. on Cleveland’s strong-signal KYW) or what actor had starred in what only-on-for-one-season television series (Nick Adams, Saints and Sinners, about the newspaper business). Questions we meant to entertain each other.
This was different. I should have known. “Greene, I’ve got a question for you,” and there was a sense of urgency.
THERE ARE A HANDFUL OF PEOPLE, DURING your lifetime, who know you well enough to understand when the right thing to say is to say nothing at all. When the right thing to do is just sit there with you—either in the room, or on the other end of a telephone line. To be there.
Those people—and regardless of how lucky you are in your friendships, there will be, at most, only a few of them during your life—will be with you during your very worst times. When you think you cannot bear that with which the world has hit you, the silent presence of those friends will be all you have, and all that matters.
When, during an already painful juncture in my life, my wife died, I was so numb that I felt dead myself. In the hours after her death, as our children and I tried in vain to figure out what to do next, how to get from hour to hour, the phone must have been ringing, but I have no recollection of it.
The next morning—one of those mornings when you awaken, blink to start the day, and then, a dispiriting second later, realize anew what has just happened, and feel the boulder press you against the earth with such weight that you truly fear you will never be able to get up—the phone rang and it was Jack.
I didn’t want to hear any voice—even his voice. I just wanted to cover myself with darkness.
I knew he would be asking if there was anything he could do. But I should have known that he had already done it.
“I’m in Chicago,” he said.
I misunderstood him; I thought he was offering to come to Chicago, and I was going to thank him but tell him that wasn’t necessary.
That wasn’t it.
“I took the first flight this morning,” he said. He had heard; without calling, without being asked, he had made a plane reservation to Chicago and had flown in. He was already here.
“I know you probably don’t want to see anyone,” he said. “That’s all right. I’ve checked into a hotel, and I’ll just sit in the room in case you need me to do anything. I can do whatever you want, or I can do nothing. I’m here as long as you need me.”
He meant it. He knew the best thing he could do for me was just to be present in the same town, to be ready in case I wanted to ask for his assistance. To tell me not to feel obliged, not to give it a thought. He would be there, he said. He wasn’t going anywhere.
And he did sit there—I assume he watched television, or did some work, but he waited in that hotel room until I gathered the strength to say I needed him. In those first days, he helped me with the things no man ever wants to need help with—how much do you have to trust another person to ask him to carry your wife’s death certificate to where it must be taken?—and mostly he sat with me and knew that I did not require conversation, did not welcome chatter, did not need anything beyond the knowledge that he was there. He brought food for my children and by sharing my silence he got me through those days.
So I should have known, when I received his voice message now—“Greene, I’ve got a question for you. Call me”—that it might be important. “Call me.” That was what should have told me.
“DO YOU THINK YOUR MOM KNOWS ANYTHING about how to get long-term nursing care?”
That is what he wanted to ask me; that is why he had made the call.
It was basic, and it was something he was going to have to deal with, and he didn’t know how. He was going to get sicker—of that, he was sure; the time was going to come when he and Janice could not take care of all his medical exigencies at home themselves. And he didn’t know quite where to start.
He had no illusions that I would know—I’m obtuse about even the most elementary things like that. I don’t know how to fill out an insurance form. Long-term nursing care is not a need you consider until that need is right upon you. So he asked if my mother might be able to help him.
How difficult it must have been for him to say those words to me. After a lifetime of talking with each other, conversations that once had been about soda pop and sports teams, about movies and milkshakes, how difficult it must have been for him to ask me about securing nursing care for the time when he could no longer care for himself.
He didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to do.
But he knew that I knew someone who always knew everything.
MY MOTHER IS THE MOST CAPABLE PERSON I have ever met.
Had she decided to do something other than dedicate her life to being a wife to my dad and a mom to my brother, my sister and me, I have no doubt that she would have risen as high in the business world as she might have desired. She was a woman of the era during which the standard choice for wives, if they and their husbands could afford it, was to stay at home and raise the children; that she did, with love and great wisdom. She also became the head of numerous civic organizations on a volunteer basis, leading them with the skill of a seasoned CEO. She is a beautiful writer; although for much of her life she wrote only for her family, once she passed her eightieth birthday and was, for the first time in almost sixty years, alone, a widow, she wrote a book that made it onto the New York Times extended bestseller list, and followed it with another. There is nothing, I have long believed, that she cannot do.
For Jack, on all the occasions after the age of fifteen when he would have loved to share his happiness, his grief or his hardships with his mother, there was no one there. Graduation from high school, graduation from college, honors, achievements, wedding day, birth of a child—whatever instincts the rest of us who were his friends had at moments like those, instincts to turn to our mothers, Jack had learned to bury those instincts inside. All the times during our twenties and thirties when the rest of us picked up the phone to call our mothers when we had good news about business, or sorrowful news about setbacks, when we just wanted to hear our mothers’ voices to reassure ourselves that on the solid and steady level that counted most, they were still there…Jack was unable to give himself that. When he wanted to hear his mother’s voice, to ask for her advice, he knew he could not. He was, in that most consequential precinct of the human experience, a man alone.
His sweetness of spirit—his core of kindness—at times obscured something else in him: an inner-driven confidence in himself that had been born not of unalloyed high self-regard, but of necessity. Once his mother was gone, and, later, his father, Jack knew that he was all he had—if he couldn’t figure life out, there was no one to turn to. He believed he would always in the end prevail because he had no choice but to believe that. The only voice cheering him on was the voice he heard within himself. The first voices—the voices of a mother and a father, the voices that most matter—were both gone.
So when he asked if I thought my mom knew anything about how a person might secure long-term nursing care, it signified, to me, something pervadingly affecting. He was turning to my mother because he had seen her for fifty years, he knew just how smart and how determined and how relentless she could be when the need to accomplish something was vital to her, when that need mattered to her. And he knew that he mattered to her—that he had mattered to her since he was five. He knew that if she didn’t know anything about the logistics and regulations of nursing care, the prudent steps to take and the minefields to avoid, she would not rest until she found out. He knew there was no one he would rather depend on.
IT DIDN’T EVEN TAKE ME ONE SENTENCE.
I wasn’t twelve words into explaining that he had called me to ask if she could help before she interrupted me.
“I know exactly who to call,” she said. “First I want you to ask Jack and Janice some questions about what kind of insurance they have.”
She was eighty-five years old. She sounded like a woman on her first day at an important job out of college—in her voice, she had that kind of resolve, that kind of poised volition to succeed.
I told her I would pass the questions on. She said she had some phone calls to make. She had some ideas. She wanted to get started. She said to tell Jack not to worry.
ALL OF THIS WAS GOING ON IN THE TWENTY-FIRST century, and Jack and I had always assumed we would have everything figured out by then.
We were born in 1947, and for years when we were boys we would occasionally have long discussions about what we would be like at the turn of the century—what kinds of jobs we would have, who we would be married to, where we would live, who our friends would be. We knew one thing: We knew we’d be fifty-three (fifty-two when 1999 turned into 2000; fifty-three by the end of March that first year of the new century).
It was always a toss-up as to which was more unfathomable: the concept of living in the twenty-first century, or the concept of being fifty-three. Probably fifty-three; we knew approximately what the basics of our lives would be in the year 2000: robots to clean our houses, personal hovercrafts to take us to work, freeze-dried steak-and-potato pills to pop into our mouths and wash down instead of eating meals, vacations on Mars. We read Popular Science; we understood what American life was going to look like.
Fifty-three, though, was a more difficult notion to imagine. Only one thing about that seemed certain: We would know pretty much everything. By fifty-three, we would have the answers. Once you’d lived that long, there wouldn’t be anything left to figure out.
When we were ten or eleven we would ride the Broad Street bus from Bexley to downtown Columbus, and usually at some point during our day we’d walk one block east past the Ohio Statehouse until we got to the corner of Broad and Third Streets. We’d look up at the big electrical sign on top of the headquarters of the Columbus Dispatch; in orangish red Old English neon lettering the sign announced: “Ohio’s Greatest Home Newspaper.” To us, that building seemed to be the font of all worldly knowledge and fact-infused mightiness; we knew just about nothing about anything, we were two kids standing on a street corner and peering up at a bright sign, and directly beneath that sign, inside the building, the people at work surely knew everything.
Just as one day we believed we would; by the time the century turned, by the time we were fifty-three, we’d have it all down pat. Of course when I did make it into that newspaper building seven years later, for the summer copyboy job I loved so much, it was to work not for Ohio’s Greatest Home Newspaper, but for the Citizen-Journal, a smaller and less prosperous daily that shared the Dispatch’s office space and printing presses because of a joint-operating agreement worked out with the federal government to prevent newspapers like the Citizen-Journal from keeling over and dying (which, in fact, it did do in 1985, once the joint-operating agreement expired); when I did make it into that newspaper building, the repository of all the sagacity and deadline-driven information that our vast planet could provide, what did I do? Put Jack’s name in the emergency runs for a cut head that was never cut.
And when the year 2000 finally did arrive—accompanied not by steak pills or hovercraft, but by jitters that everyone’s personal computers (personal computers! Why didn’t Popular Science tell us about that?) would break down at midnight because of improper coding, jitters that turned out to be without merit….
When the year 2000 did arrive, Jack and I, and probably everyone else in the world, discovered what we should have guessed all along—that in the new century we didn’t know everything after all. We still felt as if we knew, if not nothing, then not nearly enough. Just when we got to the point at which we had thought we would have all the answers, mostly we had questions. More questions than before.
NEW INVENTIONS, THOUGH, WERE SOMETHING he instinctively understood and embraced. I was always slow to accept changes in the machines and products that infuse our daily lives; it didn’t seem to me that they would work, never mind be an improvement. Jack, in our thirties and forties, was invariably among the first to try the new way—and would invariably do his best to bring me around.
“Where does the sound come from?” I asked him when he purchased one of the earliest CD players and showed me a compact disc. He explained that the mystery of how music emanated from a CD was no more or less mystical than whatever marvelment made sounds come out of a vinyl record. This was the future, he said.
“It can do everything a record album can, and it sounds better,” he said.
“How do you go from one song to another?” I asked.
“Trust me, it’s easy,” he said.
“But what if you want to start a song in the middle?” I said. “On an album, you can put the needle into the grooves halfway into a song.”
“First of all, how many times do you actually do that?” he said. “And second, if you want to with a CD, you can. Trust me. You’ll get used to this.”
Same with cash machines. He’d needed some money one day after the bank had closed, and we drove over to a branch on Main Street. He inserted a card into one of the first-generation ATMs, and I said, “What are you doing?”
He showed me how it worked. To me, a bank was supposed to be what it had been when we first walked into one: marble floors, hushed tones, a discreet teller writing figures into your passbook. “How do you know they took the right amount of money out of your account?” I said after his cash had spit out of the ATM’s metal mouth. “What if you took out fifty bucks and they say you took out five hundred?”
“They don’t,” he said. “This is just as accurate and much more convenient, and you can do it twenty-four hours a day.”
“But what if they say you took all your money out, and you know you didn’t?” I said.
“These are the same things you worried about when they first had drive-through teller windows,” he said. “You’ll get used to this. Trust me.”
We did this mostly for effect; I wasn’t quite as nervous about the new ways as I pretended to be, but I was a lot more skeptical than he was, and he seemed to get a kick out of showing me the ropes. Whether it was VCRs or e-mail or cell phones, he was always months or years ahead of me in signing up, and he would always laugh at my reluctance to jump into the pool.
He would travel on business, and he would tell me about the great deals he would get using the online reservation services—he favored one of the early ones that didn’t apprise you of exactly where you’d be staying until you and the computer had settled on a price and a neighborhood. “It’s amazing,” he told me. “The rooms are so cheap.”
“But what if you get there and they’ve never heard of you?” I said.
“They’ve heard of you,” he said.
“What if they haven’t?” I said. “What if you fly in from another city and they’ve never heard of you and they don’t have a room?”
“You’ll be doing this soon,” he said. “Trust me. You’ll get used to it.”
I trusted him. And most things, I could get used to.
But not this. Not what we were going through now.
HE HAD ALWAYS BEEN THE ONE TO GIVE me advice. There was one time, though, just before or just after we were turning fifty, when he sought mine.
He was having money troubles. He was in a hole not of his own making, and he needed to get out of it.
“Do you think I should ask Chuck?” he had said to me.
It was an involute and wrenching decision for him to wrestle with. Acknowledging that a friend is in a different financial universe than you are is awkward enough—add to that the fact that the friend is not of recent vintage, but someone with whom you have been close all your life.
And then add this: The old friend is your brother-in-law. You’re married to twins.
“I just hate to ask him,” Jack had said. “But I don’t know what else to do.”
The embarrassment of asking aside, he was afraid that the request would somehow, in small but important ways, change his relationship with Chuck. And that would be awful.
“We’re pretty far along in life to think that any of our feelings about each other are going to change now,” I had said.
“I know,” he’d said. “But I hate being in this position.”
“I think you should do it,” I had said.
I never asked him if he had gone to Chuck; I figured he’d tell me if he wanted to. I was thinking about it now because he had come to me looking for help with finding out about the nursing care. And I realized that he was a man who so seldom asked for anyone’s help—who took such pride in solving all his problems himself, overcoming all his obstacles on his own—that it stood out when he asked. It was like an alarm going off.
NOT THAT HE’D EVER HAD A REASON TO hesitate asking anyone for anything. I couldn’t imagine someone saying no.
In school, when students all over the building were constantly trying to get away with every shortcut imaginable, wheedling to give themselves every leg up—from finding out what questions were on a test by asking friends who’d taken it the period before, to copying each other’s lab book homework for chemistry class—no teachers ever suspected Jack Roth of trying to pull something over on them, simply because he wouldn’t and they knew he wouldn’t.
Parents always respected him—a rare enough thing. In our house, my dad was ever ready to show disdain for most of my friends, just on principle. A guy named Tim Greiner with whom I spent a lot of time returned one college vacation with a conservative and neatly trimmed new beard, and from that day on my father contemptuously referred to him solely as “Beardo.” Once, after coming home with my mom from a too-long cocktail party, my dad actually took a swing at Chuck. I believe it was because my father had long viewed with disfavor that Chuck (1) consistently failed to stand up when an adult walked into the room, and (2) had “big teeth.” On this particular night he evidently felt like knocking them out. (He missed. He may have intended to miss. It was an unusual evening.)
Jack, though, was always in a separate category. And he did his best never to ask anyone for anything. When he did, you knew it was not an entreaty arrived at lightly.
MY MOTHER TALKED TO JACK, AND SHE talked to Janice, and she got in touch with agencies and she checked with friends who had needed nurses in their homes for significant stretches of time. She found the information that Jack had hoped she would find; she made suggestions and offered to be a go-between and said that she would be following up. In short, she did a perfect job, and she did it quickly.
In telling me about it, she said something that brought me up short. I should have known, but I suppose I hadn’t been allowing myself to think about it.
She explained to me about the various home-health-care options she had looked into—that was the phrase, bland enough, “home health care”—and then she said:
“And of course, after that he’ll need hospice.”
“Hospice?” I said. “He’s not talking about needing hospice.” Jack was walking around, having friends come over, speaking about driving again once the radiation-and-chemo doctors gave him the OK—what he was looking for was some in-home help later on. Hospice was for people at the very end of their lives—hospice, I knew from my own father’s last months, was to help people die with dignity.
“That’s not what he was asking you about, Mom,” I said. “He doesn’t need hospice.”
“He will soon enough,” she said gently.
And this was a woman who was not often wrong.