The Autumn Dead

Chapter 13

You might mistake the Windmere home for one of those piss-elegant motels all gussied up to resemble a seventeenth-century manor house. It isn't, of course, it's an old folks' home, or whatever it is we're calling people over seventy these days. The grounds revealed a great deal of brick and concrete and very little foliage or trees or grass. The east windows looked out on a parking lot and the west on the brick face of a natural-wood doctor's complex and the north windows on a vacant lot with a big FOR SALE sign. Grim, when you considered that many of the people herein had come here to die. Probably even daytime television was preferable to staring out a window that only revealed either other buildings or dinosaur-like semis chugging up the broad avenue outside.

The reception area continued the motel motif, a long waist-high counter running across most of a big, carpeted room that contained enough fake wood furniture and Starving Artist paintings to send the owners of Holiday Inn into sinful ecstasy.

Seated in one of the chairs was a palsied old lady whose twisted hands rested on a black cane and whose aged eyes stared mournfully at the death the chipper people who'd brought her here were trying cheerfully to deny to her. She wore a prim dark suit with a large brooch at the throat of her prim white blouse.

"She'll love it here," said a plump woman with hair tinted a color God had never invented. She wore a white nurse's uniform and smiled with formidable dentures.

"Did you hear that, Mother?" shouted a thin man with rimless glasses and a bald head. He wore a blue jogging suit and white Reeboks. The woman with him, presumably his wife, was dressed similarly. Were they going to head right for the track, as soon as they'd dumped the old lady off?

"We believe in keeping people active, that's one thing that makes Windmere so special," said the nurse, sounding like a living brochure. "We have a Jacuzzi and we play bingo four nights a week, and the community theater sends singers over several afternoons a month."

But the old lady wasn't going to be kidded. She clung to her cane as if it were life itself and stared down the hole they were about to push her in. I wanted to go over and sit next to her and put my 'arm around her and say something comforting, but what would I say when it came right down to it? That I was sorry she was pushing off, that I didn't want her to push off, that I hoped her son and daughter-in-law tripped all over their Reeboks?

"I'll get Ken," the nurse said.

Ken proved to look like a member of the Chicago Bears blitz circa mid-sixties. He wore a white T-shirt and white ducks and white socks and white canvas shoes and his gray hair was burr-cut and he'd shaved his fleshy face so smoothly it was as pink as a baby's. He had eyes like lasers and biceps you could rest refrigerators on. He also surprised the hell out of me by making the old lady not only look up for the first time but actually smile. He extended his arm and said, "Is this my date for the evening?"

"Don't I wish," the old lady said, and her voice cracked in real laughter.

So Ken led her off. Son and daughter-in-law signed some papers and started to leave and then the daughter-in-law turned back once to the hall where the old lady had disappeared on Ken's arm and then looked around and said, "You really think this is the right thing, David?"

"Honey, we have to be realistic."

Then she nodded and glanced down at her Reeboks and then they were gone, leaving his mother to the dubious balm of amateur entertainers and bingo.

I went over to the nurse. "I'd like to see Mrs. Slater, please."

She was now behind the counter and doing some very deft things with a computer keyboard.

She looked at me. "It's Wednesday."

"Yes, isn't it?"

"Visiting afternoons are Monday, and Friday."

So I went into one of my routines. I put out my hand and she didn't really have any choice but to take it and I said, "I'm Frank Evans and I'm her nephew from Omaha. I sell plumbing supplies and I was just driving through the city, so I thought I'd stop and say hi to her."

Not that I understood any of this, of course, why a black Honda motorcycle that could do maybe 150 miles per hour flat-out would be registered to a woman in a nursing home.

"Gosh," the woman said.

"What?"

"It'd really be a hassle."

"Really?"

"Yes. I mean, well, people aren't always ready to be shown at the drop of a hat."

"Shown" being the operative word here. I had the impression that they lined them up in their wheelchairs and hosed them off to get rid of the stench, then brought in an industrial waxer to shine pallor and wheelchair alike. Then they shot them up with enough Thorazine to make Charles Manson mellow for the rest of his life. And then they brought in the guests and moved them along quickly, the way you got moved along quickly in an art gallery where an especially popular artist was being shown, and the visitors got to see how clean and shiny and docile their parents looked and so the most wonderful thing of all happened. They could jump back in their Volvos, throw in some Barry Manilow tapes, and drive back to suburbia without feeling even 1.4 percent guilty.

"Gosh," she said. "I'm afraid it's impossible. You know, we really do try to be accommodating here at Windmere, but-" She was too plump and wore too much makeup, but still you could see the erotic twenty-year-old she'd probably been, the full lips especially knowing. But she mined any real human heat with the living brochure monotone of her voice. She shrugged and her breasts raised slightly against the fabric of her bra and the bra in turn against the fabric of her white uniform and it was one of those odd moments-sunlight on linoleum, the smell of floor wax, a robin on a window ledge-when the thought of sex should not have occurred at all but it did. Oh yes, it did. But her green eyes held no promise, and so my erection slunk away.

"Has my cousin been here?"

"Cousin?" she said.

I smiled my glad-hander smile. "I imagine you'd know my cousin. Rides a motorcycle."

Now she smiled, too. "Oh, Evelyn Dain."

"That's right. Evelyn Dain."

"No, she comes Mondays and Fridays." The green eyes were haughty a moment. "The hours everyone else does."

"I should talk to her, I guess. About Patti. See how things are going." Here I had to be careful. Careful and casual. "You wouldn't know where she works, would you? I seem to recall she changed jobs a while back."

The phone rang, helping me. If the nurse had any doubts about me, about who I might really be and what I might really be doing there, they were forgotten in the rush of answering the phone. "Damiano's Aerobics over on Third Avenue."

"Thanks," I said. "And say hi to Patti for me."

She smiled with those wonderful erotic lips-you imagined them the kind of lips sixteenth-century kings demanded in their whores-and then waved me off to take her phone call. After answering, she said, "I'll be glad to tell you about Windmere.” She was back to being a brochure.