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CHAPTER NINE
THE VOICES OF OUR DEAD FRIENDS
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At a hundred and two, Eleanor Ouellette was the oldest resident of Rivington House in that fall of
2013, old enough so her last name had never been Americanized. She answered not to Wil-LET but to
a much more elegant French pronunciation: Oooh-LAY. Dan sometimes called her Miss Oooh-La-La,
which always made her smile. Ron Stimson, one of four docs who made regular day-rounds at the
hospice, once told Dan that Eleanor was proof that living was sometimes stronger than dying. “Her
liver function is nil, her lungs are shot from eighty years of smoking, she has colorectal cancer—
moving at a snail’s pace, but extremely malignant—and the walls of her heart are as thin as a cat’s
whisker. Yet she continues.”
If Azreel was right (and in Dan’s experience, he was never wrong), Eleanor’s long-term lease on life
was about to expire, but she certainly didn’t look like a woman on the threshold. She was sitting up in
bed, stroking the cat, when Dan walked in. Her hair was beautifully permed—the hairdresser had
been in just the day before—and her pink nightie was as immaculate as always, the top half giving a
bit of color to her bloodless cheeks, the bottom half spread away from the sticks of her legs like a
ballgown.
Dan raised his hands to the sides of his face, the fingers spread and wiggling. “Ooh-la-la! Une belle
femme! Je suis amoureux!”
She rolled her eyes, then cocked her head and smiled at him. “Maurice Chevalier you ain’t, but I
like you, cher. You’re cheery, which is important, you’re cheeky, which is more important, and you’ve
got a lovely bottom, which is all-important. The ass of a man is the piston that drives the world, and
you have a good one. In my prime, I would have corked it with my thumb and then eaten you alive.
Preferably by the pool of Le Meridien in Monte Carlo, with an admiring audience to applaud my
frontside and backside efforts.”
Her voice, hoarse but cadenced, managed to render this image charming rather than vulgar. To
Dan, Eleanor’s cigarette rasp was the voice of a cabaret singer who had seen and done it all even before
the German army goose-stepped down the Champs-Élysées in the spring of 1940. Washed up, maybe,
but far from washed out. And while it was true she looked like the death of God in spite of the faint
color reflected onto her face by her craftily chosen nightgown, she had looked like the death of God
since 2009, the year she had moved into Room 15 of Rivington One. Only Azzie’s attendance said that
tonight was different.
“I’m sure you would have been marvelous,” he said.
“Are you seeing any ladies, cher?”
“Not currently, no.” With one exception, and she was years too young for amour.
“A shame. Because in later years, this”—she raised a bony forefinger, then let it dip—“becomes
this. You’ll see.”
He smiled and sat on her bed. As he had sat on so many. “How are you feeling, Eleanor?”