Don't Ever Get Old (15 page)

The home was, more or less, a medium-rise apartment building; someone driving by might have mistaken it for a hotel. Not a nice hotel like the Embassy Suites, but a hotel nonetheless.

There was a big button next to the outside entrance that visitors could press to unlock the front door. From the inside, that door wouldn't open for anyone unless the heavyset colored girl sitting at the front desk buzzed them out. Everyone insisted these places weren't prisons, but, whatever they called it in the brochure, the old folks were locked up. The lobby looked innocuous enough. Area rugs and shapeless residents dozing on shapeless couches or in their wheelchairs.

“Hi there,” said the girl behind the desk, a little too cheerily. She was pretty shapeless herself, an impassive mass in a green golf shirt emblazoned with a Meadowcrest monogram. “You thinking about coming to stay with us, sir?”

“Hell, no,” I said. “I'm here on a visit. Do I look like one of these people?”

“No,” she said. “You older than most of them.”

“Yeah, and you could stand to lose some weight,” I told her.

Tequila stuffed his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans. “Uh, we're in from out of town, hoping to drop in on someone my grandfather knows from the war,” he said. “We think he's a resident here. His name is Henry Winters.”

The girl knit her eyebrows. “Never heard of him.”

“He's been living here for about fifteen years,” Tequila said.

“I been here a while, and I know nearly all of them, but I don't know Henry Winters,” she said. “You sure he ain't dead?”

“Is there any way you can check?” Tequila asked.

She punched the name into a computer console on her desk and raised one eyebrow at whatever it told her.

“Oh,” she said. “He in dementia. Don't see those folks much. He don't leave, and nobody visits.”

“What do you mean, he's in dementia?” I asked.

As it turned out, the Meadowcrest Manor, being a full-service residential community for active seniors, had a special ward, behind another set of locked doors, for the active sort of seniors who couldn't feed themselves, couldn't clean themselves, and couldn't be trusted not to wander out into traffic.

The girl from the desk led us away from the lobby and the main dining room toward a set of plain-looking, locked double doors and punched a code into a numeric keypad on the door frame.

“We can give the code to family members, so they can get in and out when they want,” she explained. “It's good for the residents to see the guests coming and going.”

“What happens if the inmates learn the code?” I asked.

“Don't matter,” she said. “They can't remember it. Can't remember what to do with it.”

The lock clicked, and Tequila pushed on the door.

The dementia ward was a smaller, more acute circle of rest home hell nested within Meadowcrest Manor, and it came complete with its own sad little lobby.

Someone had gone to great effort to try to keep this place from looking like a hospital. The walls were festooned with brightly colored paintings, and end tables with potted plants on them were scattered about the public areas. Big windows let in lots of sunlight. But there was no carpeting on the floors, there were wheelchair bumpers running along the walls, and the couches were upholstered with a plastic-looking fabric; easy to wipe clean. The dementia residents managed to look even more pathetic than the people outside. Most of them were wearing baggy sweats or tracksuits, and many were also wearing stains I decided to assume were from food. The girl from the front door handed us off to a nurse in hospital scrubs who supervised the dementia residents, then returned to her station.

“Welcome to our home,” said the nurse, aiming a warm smile in my direction. Everyone was happy at Meadowcrest Manor, and it was really irritating. “Are you thinking about coming to stay with us?”

“I'd eat my gun before I'd come to live in a place like this,” I said.

“I want to eat something,” said a man in a grubby-looking blue sweatshirt, who was sitting on one of the sofas. “When's lunch?”

“You just had lunch twenty minutes ago,” the nurse told him.

“No, I didn't,” he protested. “I'd remember if I ate.”

“Why don't you burp a little bit and see if you don't taste egg salad,” she told him.

He let out an exploratory belch and then settled, satisfied, back into his seat.

“So,” said the nurse. “You're here to see Mr. Winters?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Henry Winters.”

“So you're about the same age?” she asked, sizing me up.

I nodded.

“The oldest-old, those around ninety, are one of our fastest-growing demographic segments here at Meadowcrest, and we're experts in meeting your special needs,” the nurse told me. Always a sales pitch at these places. “You know, about a third of men your age suffer from significant dementia, but for those who survive an additional five years, that percentage will double. If you're in good health and you anticipate continued longevity, you should make your long-term care plans while you are still able.”

“I'm just here for Henry Winters,” I told her, through my clenched teeth.

“Well, you know, with Mr. Winters, a judge had to decide where to put him when he couldn't take care of himself anymore. You don't want to end up like that. Nobody ever comes to visit the poor man. It's so hard to get him out of his room most days. I'm glad you're here. This will be good for him.”

“A visit from my grandpa brightens anyone's day,” Tequila assured her.

“Okay. Before you see him, though, I have to give you the warnings, since you are first-time visitors to our facility,” she said. She looked at me. “I'm sure you've heard most of this before. You probably know quite a few folks who enjoy the kind of lifestyle places like Meadowcrest offer.”

I did. Had some friends in assisted living and a few in the locked wards. I knew a fair number of other people who had moved on from such places to smaller, danker quarters. But I usually couldn't stand to visit these hellholes, so when people went away, I didn't see them much after that, unless they had family who would bring them out to the Jewish Community Center. I'd never actually been on a dementia floor before.

“He's not going to recognize you,” the nurse explained. “I see him every day, and he can't recognize me. It doesn't mean he's being rude, or that you aren't important to him, but he has a disease in his brain that affects his ability to recall things. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“Okay, that's good. He's likely to lose track of the conversation, because he can't hang on to new memories, not even stuff that is still happening. It doesn't mean that he's bored with you. He can't follow a television program or read a newspaper article either. This is a terrible disease he is living with, so try not to get frustrated with him. When you upset one of the residents, they forget what happened, but they still know they're upset. When they feel that way, and they don't know why, they get scared.”

“We certainly wouldn't want to ruin his afternoon,” I said.

She walked us down a hallway, off the main lobby, and stopped in front of a door with a nameplate that said the resident was Henry Winters. Taped on the door, below the knocker, there was a picture of a Thanksgiving turkey made of construction paper. It was the kind of art project a child might make by tracing the outline of his hand and cutting it out with blunt scissors.

“His grandkids?” I asked, gesturing toward it.

The nurse shook her head. “Regular stimulation slows the progress of the disease, so we do arts and crafts on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

Tequila stifled a laugh.

The nurse glared at him over her eyeglasses. She didn't seem to think anything was funny about former SS officers making construction paper hand-turkeys. “Before you go in, let me make sure he's up to receiving visitors,” she said.

She knocked, waited a minute, and knocked again.

“Mr. Winters?”

No answer.

“Mr. Winters?”

“Fuck off,” said a voice from the room. No trace of a German accent, but I thought I could detect the faintest hint of the sort of strained precision I'd heard before in the voices of Europeans who had almost mastered the American accent. Or maybe it was just my imagination. I glanced at Tequila, and his worried expression told me I wasn't the only one thinking that Heinrich Ziegler couldn't possibly have ended up in Missouri, doing arts and crafts while wearing a stained sweatshirt.

“Our patients can be a little belligerent sometimes,” the nurse said.

“Oh, so can this one,” said Tequila, playfully pointing a finger at me.

I scowled at him.

“That's why I have a key,” said the nurse, and she unlocked the door and threw it open. The ammonia stink of stale piss was so overpowering that I recoiled. Tequila actually took a step back. The nurse didn't react at all; no surprise registered on her face. Dealing with such stenches was evidently part of her job.

The room was dark and the miniblinds on the window were shut, but I could make out the shape of a man curled up on a plastic-covered mattress.

“Uh, incontinence is a major problem in the dementia ward,” said the nurse. “These poor folks forget they've got to go until it's too late to get to the toilet. We put disposable absorbent adult undergarments on them, but when the residents are alone in their rooms, a lot of them will strip those off, so we find little surprises in the beds sometimes.”

Tequila couldn't quite manage not to laugh at that, but I didn't think it was funny. I was, myself, a slip in the shower away from sporting disposable absorbent adult undergarments while making arts and crafts in a full-service residential community for active seniors.

“Why don't you two wait in the lobby, and I will bring him out when I get him cleaned up and dressed?”

“I'd prefer to speak to him in private,” I said. “There are some personal matters I'd like to try to discuss.”

She frowned. “Let me clean him up and then I'll come get you,” she said.

The door closed behind her and we went back to the lobby.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” said the man on the sofa in the grubby blue sweatshirt. “Do either of you know when they serve lunch here?”

 

24

As we waited for the nurse to hose the piss off Heinrich Ziegler, I tried to prepare myself to stare into the face of the man who almost killed me. There are things that blur together, rough edges that smooth out, and hard feelings that mellow as I age. The night in September 1944 when Heinrich Ziegler beat me into a coma is not one of them.

We already knew by then that the Germans were in retreat from France. But we'd been hearing it for a while, and we were still waiting to get sprung. Rumor was that we'd retaken Paris in August. But days and then weeks passed, and nobody came to rescue us. Our hopes flagged. If the Germans were really getting beat out there in the world, it just made the ones guarding the prison camp meaner. And Heinrich Ziegler was mean enough to begin with.

Ziegler was not Wehrmacht, regular German army; he was SS, one of Hitler's elite paramilitary storm troopers and a sincere devotee of the ideology of racial superiority. The very idea of a Jewish army lieutenant offended him.

A man called Baruch Schatz couldn't hide his enthnoreligious persuasion behind a Tennessee accent. My father had wanted to name me Grant, but my mother thought that would cause problems for me in the schoolyard, what with so many folks in Memphis still sore about the North's aggression. So instead, I got saddled with a moniker that was perfectly good for my maternal grandfather, who spent his whole life in a nineteenth-century Polish shtetl, but it wasn't what a fellow wanted stamped on his dog tag when he was captured by the Nazis.

There were five Jewish guys in the camp when I arrived, but they weren't too durable, and pretty soon they were out on the compost heap, incubating maggots. My situation was slightly better, but still fairly unpleasant. Whenever Ziegler and his guards needed to vent some anger, they would haul me into their offices for what they called an interrogation. They never asked any questions, but after they finished, Wallace and some of the other guys would have to carry me back to my rack.

When Ziegler called everyone to the parade ground that night, the Nazi brass had just denied his last request for ground support to defend the camp and ordered him to take his men and retreat. I didn't know anything about it. But Ziegler's jaw was clenched, his eyes were red, and a fat, throbbing vein stood out on his forehead.

Rain was falling in sheets from the slate gray sky, plastering his yellow hair to his scalp. He peeled off his wool uniform jacket, with the SS lightning bolts pinned to the collar, and stood bare-chested in front of the prisoners.

“Do you men want to leave?” he shouted at us in English.

None of us answered. He shouted something in German to his guards, and one of them opened the front gate. The prison was an evacuated village of low-slung houses, which the Germans had surrounded with several rings of barbed-wire fence. The fences weren't what kept us in; they were just an obstacle to slow down any would-be escapees while one of the snipers stationed on the camp's three wooden guard towers lined up a clean rifle shot.

The gate blocked the only clear route out of the prison. It was still covered by one of the towers, but a man running zigzags on foot had about even odds at getting out of rifle range alive, while a guy caught up in a barbed-wire fence was a very easy target. Ziegler usually kept two armed guards on the gate.

Nobody had seriously tried to break out of the camp since we'd arrived. We were unarmed, and the camp was in territory occupied by the enemy. Even if we got out, we had no very good idea where to go. A lot of us had fully embraced the belief that we'd soon be freed, and all of us suspected the guards had some informants among the prisoners, so plotting an escape seemed unnecessary, and unnecessarily dangerous.