Everyone told her not to do it. New widows should not make any major decisions in the first year after such a loss, her bridge group insisted. Moving to be closer to your children is always a disappointment, said the ladies in her Bible study group. You’ll be sorry you gave up the house, warned her neighbor Sally. Why, on earth, would anyone move north? asked Veronica, her friendly mail deliverer.
But Alice was afraid and lonely. She had friends, but not the type you could wake in the middle of the night and ask whether the new pain in her belly was likely appendicitis, or a heart attack, or was she simply having a panic attack? That was what husbands were for. And also for investigating strange noises, dealing with obnoxious salespeople, and sitting opposite you at the breakfast table. Once Wally was gone, Alice seldom had a decent breakfast anymore.
So she had called the real estate agent they had used when they bought their retirement home a dozen years ago, and quickly sold the house, arranged to move about half of the contents, and deposited the leavings with various thrift shops, neighbors, and recycling centers. And now she was in New Hampshire, living close to her daughter, her sister, and a few old friends who had been hardy enough to remain in the Granite State upon retirement. Despite the warnings of her friends, Alice was not doing anything unusual in relocating to be closer to family in her old age. If the widows and widowers she had known had no family (either in the flesh or in kindly spirit), they eventually went to assisted living. And then the nursing home. There their migrations ended.
Finding a condo in an over 55 community was not hard, although living in it had some disadvantages. Alice had not shared walls with strangers since she was twenty-two; the nearness of the neighbors, the consistency of their sounds, made her feel somewhat voyeuristic. The condo was well-built, but she had chosen to be on the first floor (“I’m not getting any younger and you never know what might happen”) and so she knew every time the old man upstairs flushed his toilet in the middle of the night. She looked out when car doors slammed and saw some of her neighbors arguing with their spouses. They regularly got each other’s mail and packages by mistake. She felt like she were living in some kind of dormitory.
She bought this particular condo because it was close to her daughter’s suburban house, and the complex had a pool, which she thought might entice her two teenage granddaughters to stop over once in a while. That rationale turned out to be false; in the New England climate, the pool was only usable about two months out of the year and it was not nearly as attractive as the pools of their friends and boyfriends. Alice’s daughter, Ellie, was a dedicated social worker who, it turned out, was not particularly dedicated to her mother. Yes, Alice did feel that she could call her in the middle of the night if she needed to, but… she felt that she would have to have pretty good proof that she “needed to.”
So she made scones and cookies as an excuse to drop over to Ellie’s house on occasional evenings. Alice would have liked to have been invited to dinner, but there was no such thing as “dinner” at her daughter’s house. If she arrived at 6:30, she might find the ruins of take-out (pizza and sushi being the most popular) on the kitchen table, and everyone distributed around somewhere in their portion of the lovely (if messy) house.
In her condo, other than the sharing of plumbing noises (why did the man upstairs flush so often?), her unit was relatively quiet. So quiet that Alice started hearing sounds in the night. Oddly enough, the sounds took the form of the “hallelujah” songs her husband Wally used to sing constantly, in an under-the-breath, background kind of way.
For some reason, Wally loved any tune that included the word hallelujah. There were the hymns of course, with “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” leading the pack, and there was the rousing “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” At Christmas, he always offered snatches from Handel’s Hallelujah chorus. In middle age, he joyfully added Leonard Cohen’s ubiquitous anthem. But his favorite of all was the old American folk tune, “Hallelujah, I’m a bum.” This is the one Wally did chores to the tune of: “Rejoice and be glad, for the springtime has come/ We can throw down our shovels and go on the bum.” Wally was surely not a bum, nor was he religious, and yet there was this fascination with this divine exclamation. Whether he was reading the paper, washing the dishes, or playing gin rummy, if you got close to Wally you could hear the tune and lyrics of any of these works softly accompanying him. Alice had put the single word Hallelujah on the little plaque covering his ashes at the veterans cemetery.
Alice had sometimes complained about Wally’s constant descant, but now she missed it. It had been the background music of their life. But the rustling sound she kept hearing in the condo sounded a lot like Wally’s purring. It was a comfort. Soon she was looking forward to listening in the dead quiet as she tried to fall asleep at night.
One night, when sleep didn’t come, she went out to the kitchen to get a bowl of cereal. When she turned on the light, the rustling took form and a gray mouse scuttled across the floor and disappeared under the fridge.
Alice was surprised by the mouse, but even more surprised by her own reaction. She had always hated rodents; she had never seen a mouse in the house out in the country she lived in with Wally, but – just in case – the cellar was laced with D-con and traps. Once they had rented a vacation cottage on the Cape which was infested; Alice had refused to stay after seeing an unidentified furry object run over the bedspread. But she felt nothing but affection for the quivering thing under her refrigerator. She christened him “Hal” (as in Hallelujah), left a few crumbs in a saucer on the floor, and went back to bed to listen for the rustling that sounded like her deceased husband’s vocal habit.
She and Hal lived together companionably for several weeks. She saw the little mouse a few times a week, and noticed that the crumbs she left always disappeared. That was her side of the bargain. For his side of the unspoken compact, Hal kept up the noise that Alice pretended was Wally in the kitchen, and she could imagine her late husband singing to himself as he had a snack before bed.
One day, however, the doorbell rang. There was a large, bearded man on the mat dressed in a Terminix uniform.
“Hi, Ma’am. We’re treating all the units for mice. I guess some of the tenants are having a problem. Have you seen any sign of the critters?”
Alice didn’t know how to answer this question. She feared for Hal, but she was not an easy liar.
“Maybe once in a great while. But only one.” She stopped for a minute and looked over her shoulder. “And I’m OK with it.” She paused and decided the man was kind. “I’m actually fond of him.”
The Terminex man smiled and shifted from foot to foot as he tried to avoid laughing.
“Well, I never heard that one before. By the way, my name is Todd.” He didn’t need to tell her this; it was written in red script on his blue shirt. “But if you have one mouse, you have more. No doubt about it. And the management here is determined to clean them out of here.”
A long silence ensued. Alice was visibly upset. Todd tapped on the box of glue traps under his arm. “We’re supposed to use these. and we’re putting poison pellets in the attic and furnace rooms, but if you want to catch the one mouse, I probably have one of those humane traps in my truck somewhere – had to get them for some Buddhists at that meditation center. You’ll have to get rid of the mouse, but you don’t have to kill him, I guess.”
“Do you think I could keep him in a cage?” Alice couldn’t believe she was even having this conversation. Who was this lady talking about keeping vermin for pets? Old age was a mysterious force, she thought.
This time Todd chuckled loud and long. “You are quite a lady – you could put him in a cage, but I don’t think either of you would like it very much. Take him out to the country and let him go near a farm or something.”
Todd was so kind that, when he came back with the Havahart trap, Alice started crying, and was soon explaining all about Wally and Hallelujah and the noise and the negligence of her family. Then she invited Todd in for coffee and they both watched as Hal scuttled across the kitchen floor to get the crumbs she had left out for him.
“Cute fellah,” said Todd. “Wait’ll I tell my wife about this. She says I never meet nice people. Ava doesn’t much like mice though.” Todd told Alice he had never had quite such an encounter. He had dealt with men screaming about snakes, women refusing to come home until the cockroaches were gone, and racoons falling out of chimneys, but he had never enjoyed himself sipping coffee and eating shortbread with a client, while watching his prey have a little piece of the same pastry right across the room.
Alice baited the humane trap with peanut butter and caught Hal. A day after she released him, the noise started again and she caught another Hal. That seemed to be the end of it though.
Todd stopped by a couple of times while he was working in the condo complex; he clearly liked talking to Alice. She soon learned that Todd and his wife Ava had three boys, aged from five to twelve, and that Ava taught second grade at the local elementary school and had even taught one of Alice’s grandchildren. Alice sent cookies home for the kids, and one day when Todd and Ava were in a pinch for a babysitter, he called to see if she would be willing to do them a favor. Alice was. The boys, aged five to fifteen, were a little noisy and unruly, but not too bad, and Alice became a regular pinch hitter.
Alice’s sister Marge thought Alice was being taken advantage of by her new friends. Alice assured her that was not the case – for it surely was not. Remarkably, Alice’s daughter and her family became jealous of her relationship with the Turner family, and paid a little more attention to her. Finally, Alice had both families over for dinner at the same time and it was amusing to watch her daughter compete with Ava as if she were a sibling. The grandkids were completely fine, however, and it started a tradition of the two families getting together once in a while.
Todd and Ava Turner were evangelicals and Alice tried their big church a couple of times; it didn’t suit her, but got her interested in such things and she soon joined the local Presbyterian Church. The Presbyterians sponsored an open Messiah sing every Advent; Alice wasn’t much of a musician, but the pastor encouraged her to sign up. She was an enthusiastic participant and both her family and the Turners came to the performance. In the process, Alice mentally adopted a bit of music that became her own descant; And He shall reign forever and ever… Hallelujah was always in her mind. It wasn’t religiously significant to Alice, but it was comforting. She didn’t miss the rustle in the kitchen anymore and the mice never returned. And she even stopped noticing her neighbors’ plumbing.
When I Come To Be Old 