That’s what the president did not see. Or the cameras.
39
THEY ALSO DID NOT SEE THE Louis Martinetti beneath the chest of medals.
Every health care worker has patients she likes and patients she dislikes. Some are simply unpleasant to deal with—people ill-tempered, mean, or belligerent. At the other end are individuals in whose comfort and well-being one feels an extra emotional investment. For René, Louis Martinetti fell into that special category of favorites.
Yes, Louis reminded her of her own father. Each was a Korean War vet, each had lived an active mental life, and each had been a devoted family man and a great guy. It was those ordinary “great guy” characteristics that over the months were beginning to reemerge and endear Louis to René.
An hour after the president had left, René sat with Louis in the small parlor with a view of the woods. “So, what did you think of the president’s visit?”
“Pretty good.”
“I think he liked your saluting him like that.”
Louis smiled proudly. He was still wearing his army shirt with the decoration and his old dog tags around his neck. Even in his facial expression he resembled René’s father. And in these quiet moments she was brought back to tender intimacies as a girl. Perhaps that was why Louis’s progress was of special concern for her—as if, in Jordan Carr’s metaphor, she were witnessing the defeat of the demon that had left her father a ragged husk of himself.
Louis’s progress was remarkable on all fronts. Nick’s imaging sequence over the last several months showed a reduction of protein deposits and neurofibrillary tangles in the frontal temporal lobe—the seat of language and logic functions—as well as the hippocampus, a region of the brain essential to maintaining memory. Likewise, the gray-matter tissue had increased in density. As his functional abilities for his basic activities of daily living (dressing, personal hygiene, feeding himself) approached baseline normal, Louis had become more self-directed and more socially deft than he had been, now mingling with other residents. He had also become more concerned with his appearance, no longer emerging from his room in mismatched tops and pants. And, of course, René always complimented him on how nice he looked, and Louis loved that.
With some effort he could read news headlines. He knew the days of the week and the schedule for his favorite TV shows. He recognized the people and faces in the photos in his room without labels. He’d sometimes talk to the guys in the Korea snapshots by name, often snapping them a salute.
Louis’s Korean memories were important to him. As his daughter once said, in spite of the time spent in a POW camp—something he never talked about—the army had been the best time of Louis’s life. He was young, feeling immortal, bonding with other guys, and engaged in an effort he deeply believed in. Ironically, Korea was part of why he had been committed to Broadview two years earlier. Louis had thrown a violent fit when he thought that his wife had hidden his Purple Heart. When he calmed down, she showed him that the medal was stored in the special war memorabilia chest in the bedroom where it had always been. An hour later he accused her of taking it once more. When she again showed him the medal, he claimed she was trying to trick him. She denied it, and he pushed over the chest and smashed a mirror. A few days later he pushed Mrs. Martinetti to the floor. It was then he had been admitted to Broadview. Luckily, he remembered nothing of the incident.
The definitive evidence of Louis’s progress were the Mini-Mental State Exams, which consisted of different memory tests—lists of grocery or household items that the subject was asked to repeat in any order, word associations, et cetera. For healthy individuals from eighteen to twenty-four years of age with at least nine years of schooling, the median score is twenty-nine out of thirty. For healthy individuals seventy to seventy-nine years of age and older—Louis’s range—the median is twenty-eight. When first tested last year, Louis scored sixteen, indicating moderate cognitive impairment. That morning of the president’s visit he scored twenty-four. Also impressive was that Louis had developed learning strategies, clustering items according to semantic categories—food, tools, clothes, et cetera—a practice more sophisticated than simply remembering serial order. He also enjoyed taking the tests because he could measure how daily dosages of Memorine were bringing him back.
“You’re doing a great job, Louis, and we’re all proud of you.”
He smiled with pleasure. “Coming along.”
“I never told you this, but my father was in Korea.”
Louis’s eyes widened with interest. “What branch? I was in the 187th Airborne.”
“Yes. I saw the photograph from Korea in your room. My father was in the navy, and spent most of his time on a ship called the USS Maddox.”
“USS Maddox. That was the Seventh Fleet.”
René was astounded. It was one of the few things she knew about the Maddox. “Yes, it was. How did you remember?”
“I remember lots of stuff about the war.” He looked away for a moment as he began to gather some recollections. “The guy in that picture. He was my best friend, Fuzzy Swenson. You look like his sister.”
René began to feel uncomfortable and thought it best to change the subject. “Maybe you can tell me about where you grew up.”
But he disregarded her. “He was our platoon sergeant. His real name was Sam but all the guys called him Fuzzy. Blond hair, cut real short,” and he held up his forefinger and thumb, making a small gap. “Like peach fuzz. Why we called him Fuzzy. He was our gunner, real good kid from … Racine, Wisconsin. We used to josh him about being from the land of milk and beer.”
“It’s great that you can still remember him.”
“Yeah, I remember him.” Louis nodded then looked out the window.
He looked back at her for a puzzled moment and René felt herself brace against whatever was coming next. His eyes rounded as his glare intensified—and she could swear something passed through them. “Louis?”
His head snapped at the window again. “They said it would be a surgical drop.”
“What’s that?”
He looked back at her, and his eyes seemed slightly askew.
“Louis, are you okay?”
“Captain Vigna. He said we were going to fly a special mission one night when conditions were just right.”
“Louis, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He smiled furtively and cocked his head. “I don’t know when it’s gonna be, but it’s going to be a drop behind enemy lines. Gonna take out those bastards for what they did.”
“Louis, maybe we should change the subject.”
But he did not respond—just stared off someplace and began to get jiggly.
She took his hand. “Come on, let’s go to the dayroom.” She started to pull, but he snapped his hand away.
Suddenly Louis’s face began to spasm with emotions. He grimaced out the open window at the trees, looking as if he had spotted something terrible. He ducked down then shot up, and for a second he looked as if he were going to attack René. Instinctively she pushed back her chair and looked around for help. But in the next instant Louis gasped and pressed the heels of his hands against his brow, as if trying to force back some awful visions.
“They killed him, the bastards. They killed him in pieces.”
“Louis, let’s talk about something else. You’re getting upset.” She thought about calling an aide.