Recessional: A Novel (20 page)

Pepper would have none of that. A handsome young woman who could look quite intriguing when she smiled, she could also be rock-hard when required: “I am not here to glorify your nursing home,” she told Zorn, aware that her linking the Palms with an ordinary nursing home would annoy him, and she certainly meant what she said. Trouble came when she and Fritz spent most of one day photographing Mrs. Jessup tucked away in her one room. They showed her converting her sofa into a bed, showed her edging into and out of the bathroom, and photographed her huddled at one extreme edge of her cramped quarters. The pictures made the constricted area look almost repulsive.

When they continued exposing the room’s deficiencies well into the afternoon, Zorn had had enough: “Damn it! She doesn’t live in this room twenty-four hours a day! She has the full run of this spacious and well-appointed installation. That must be shown, too.”

Pepper listened and tried to hide her impatience with his complaint, then said almost as if speaking to a child: “My dear Dr. Zorn. Don’t you suppose I understand the necessity for an upbeat conclusion
to my text? Do you think I’m so stupid as to ignore the inevitable?”

Humbled by Pepper’s repeated rebukes, Zorn was tempted to feel sorry for himself, the manager who was not allowed to manage, but one busy afternoon he discovered that he was not the only one who was being put down. Fritz was snapping at Pepper rather nastily because she had ruined one of his shots by trying to interview Mrs. Jessup when he required the widow’s full attention. Pepper waited till Mrs. Jessup had wandered off to her next setting, then she unloaded her wrath on her white-haired photographer genius: “Listen, old man, I’ve been covering for you on our last three jobs. I do everything to make you look good. Well, Grandpop, I’m serving notice I will not take any more of your petulant bullshit. Keep it up and when I get back to New York I’m going to tell them you’re over the hill. You can’t pull your weight in these assignments, and I will not go out with you ever again. But if you stop the crap, do your job and keep your big mouth shut, I’ll continue to make you look good and you can probably hang on for another two or three years. But don’t you ever yammer at me like that again.” The old cameraman had no response.

When they finished shooting what Zorn called “the ghetto shots,” they turned to the new life that Mrs. Jessup would be enjoying, and here Fritz used his cameras in a fully upbeat way. He showed her in a charming mix of scenes, walking beside the channel to talk with Judge Noble and inspecting his birds, or roaming in the African veldt, or looking down the beautiful entry lane of tall Washingtonias.

Even more gratifying to Zorn were the shots of her making friends in the library, watching the men play billiards, or sitting in as a fourth at bridge, helping in the garden with the flowers, or going on a bus trip to the Dali Museum in nearby St. Petersburg or to the Ringling Brothers circus museum in Sarasota or to the exquisite new marble art museum in Ocala to the north. She took a day trip to Disney World’s Epcot Center and attended an orchestra concert in Clearwater. Some of the most interesting pictures were those of Judge Noble and her as they took a nature walk in a wild area north of Tampa and then as they enjoyed a dinner—paid for by the magazine—at the Colombian Restaurant, where they were entertained by flamenco dancers.

But the sequence of shots that really impressed most viewers were the photos of the Mallorys inviting Mrs. Jessup into their big Cadillac
for the drive to the posh Berns’ Steak House in Tampa, and then to a public dance at which Mr. Mallory, nearly ninety, did fancy steps with the new widow.

Pepper did not allow Mrs. Jessup to gush over any of her experiences; she turned off her recorder whenever effusiveness threatened to slip in, but she liked to catch the newcomer’s surprise at the richness of life awaiting her once she left her little room. Pepper also caught couples who had been in residence for some years saying: “We should have come here ten years earlier than we did,” but she also snooped around until she found a bitter elderly woman who was moving out, and her comments, eagerly spewed onto the tape, were scathing: “They charge double what they should. The people are boring, the food is dreadful, and come summer in this climate you swelter.”

“Where are you going?” Pepper asked.

“Back to Vermont, where people are civilized.”

“Aren’t the winters pretty cold up there?”

“Yes, but you have libraries and you expect your neighbors to have read books, too. Worst decision I ever made in my entire life was moving into this area of cultural wasteland. Television six hours a day, and the yogurt machine is never working. If you moved in here at your age, you’d commit suicide within a month.”

“But it wasn’t intended for people like me.”

“Nor for people like me either, whose blood is still circulating. God’s Waiting Room they call it when no one’s listening. When He wants me He can find me just as easy in Vermont. That’s where I’ll be.” Pepper incorporated such comments in her story to give it the needed spice.

Her lively prose and Fritz’s vivid photographs depicted so enticingly the lifestyle “among the sixties and the seventies,” as the magazine called it, that three days after the team left, Pepper could send Zorn another fax: “Story so smashing they’re allotting us eight pages.” And when John Taggart heard about the story and saw early proofs of it, he found it so accurate in showing what he was trying to do that he ordered a thousand reprints for each of his eighty-seven centers, which distributed them widely.

Some who received copies came to inspect the Palms, and when they did they invariably asked whether they might meet Mrs. Jessup, who was always gracious in assuring them that the center was even more pleasant than the article had shown.

Zorn, happy to see the positive reactions to his brainchild, sent Pepper a three-word fax: “You done good.” But he felt no desire to host any more press crews at his Palms.

If the Duchess had not been such an inveterate snoop, the members of the tertulia might not have uncovered the Reverend Quade’s secret. When the postmaster arrived with a package too large to be included in Mrs. Quade’s locked postal box, he had to leave the bulky bundle leaning against the row of boxes on the floor. This was an invitation to the Duchess to inspect from whom and from where the parcel had arrived, and she saw, with some excitement, that it had been mailed by the New York publishers Doubleday and obviously contained a manuscript.

Senator Raborn was passing by when the Duchess made this tempting discovery, and he heard her tell others at the mailboxes: “It looks like our Reverend Quade has written a book.” Her listeners, inspecting the package, were easily convinced that the Duchess’s assumption was correct.

As the four tertulia members convened that night for dinner, Raborn told them: “I think it’s highly likely that our Mrs. Quade is about to have a book published.” When the others heard about the package, they suggested that a fifth chair be added to their table and sent editor Jiménez to intercept Helen as she entered the dining room and escort her to their table.

When seated she asked quietly: “And to what do I owe this signal honor?” Senator Raborn explained how the Duchess had happened to see the telltale package: “We are intensely curious as to what it might be that you’re writing.” Quickly he added: “Assuming, of course, that Mrs. Elmore’s deduction was correct.”

“It was,” Mrs. Quade said with just a touch of asperity. She was irritated by the snooping but also pleased by the fact that these somewhat aloof men had discovered she was writing a book, an activity they had probably thought was restricted to their own sex.

“May we ask,” President Armitage said as he leaned toward her, “what the subject matter is? Commentary on the New Testament as it applies to contemporary living, perhaps?”

Ignoring his somewhat condescending manner, she first attended to giving her dinner order, then looked up and smiled at the men:
“It’s nearly ready for publication—I’m correcting galleys. It’s entitled
Likewise the Mistress, Too
.”

“Now, what could that refer to?” Ambassador St. Près asked. “It’s a phrase that reverberates, but I can’t place it.” Turning to face her, he asked: “It is a quotation, I believe?” and she nodded, launching into a description of the song from which the quotation was derived: “One of the cherished songs of Christmas, dating way back to the time before the sentimental carols, was ‘The Wassail Song.’ Its words are simple, its music haunting, evoking memories of snowy yuletide scenes in seventeenth-century England. One can almost see a dozen men and boys stomping their feet to keep warm as their voices ring out in the chill night air.

“In the recording I have, which I bought in London one Christmas, a couple of lines captivated me. I’d been invited over to England to explain to church groups how I had become one of the first women in America to be ordained. It had shaken the British establishment and I’d been greeted with a mixture of cold courtesy and obvious distaste. After one testy interrogation I was walking back at dusk to my hotel when I heard from a music shop the opening chords of ‘The Wassail Song,’ and it seemed so Christmasy, so very right in its celebration of good fellowship, which under the circumstances I sorely needed, that I stood transfixed as two lines struck me as exactly defining my position.”

“I don’t think any of us know the words. It’s not a popular Christmas song here,” President Armitage said. She nodded, and brought up the phrase that had provided the title for her book.

“The song was sung by a professional chorus, with the men’s voices vigorously singing

‘God bless the master of this house…’

following which, almost as an afterthought, the boy sopranos—they’d allow no women in a chorus like that—sang in high sweet voices imitating women:

‘Likewise the mistress, too.’ ”

She had half sung these words, and in the silence that followed, the men of the tertulia looked at one another and shrugged their shoulders, but Senator Raborn asked: “The significance? What could the heavy significance of such casual words possibly be?”

When the others also admitted being baffled, she said quietly: “The second line seemed a paradigm of my life—especially my life that difficult, wintry week in London.”

“Please explain,” President Armitage said softly, for he recognized in Mrs. Quade’s delivery the voices of several women professors who had come to his office at the university with deep grievances against the academic tradition of male professors’ blocking the promotion of their female counterparts, and he was not mistaken in guessing that Mrs. Quade was of that distinguished sisterhood.

“The words, and the offhand way in which they were delivered, as if this were a sop thrown to a lowly peasant—a generous afterthought—were directed specifically at me. The male voices sang of important things, the ‘female’ voices were acknowledged but never taken seriously.”

“What did such an experience do to you?” the ambassador asked, and she replied carefully, for she was aware of the negative impact her words were going to have: “The words confirmed what I’ve known for a long time. Made it brutally clear.”

“Now, what could that be?” Senator Raborn demanded, almost truculently. “A simple Christmas carol. A simple phrase.”

“To you it would have sounded quite simple, I’m sure,” she said, “but to me it reiterated what formal religion has always taught, that women have inferior stature—that they are, indeed, to be despised.”

Her words were bombshells, for not one of the four men was prepared to accept such a brazen condemnation of the churches that had sustained them and, leaving theology aside, to which they were in large part indebted for their success in life. Armitage and Jiménez had attended church-run universities. Senator Raborn had won his first election to his state’s House of Representatives because a plurality of churchgoers had voted for him instead of his Democratic opponent, who had been accused of atheism, and the ambassador had served with ease and distinction in two Catholic countries. Each man wanted to challenge Mrs. Quade, but before anyone could do so, she strengthened her accusation by citing episodes from her extensive experience.

“I went to a Quaker school, one of the most liberal in the nation, but when we attended Sunday meeting in the little towns nearby, men were on the left as you entered the house of worship, women strictly on the right.”

“That sounds as if they were given seats of honor,” St. Prés suggested,
but she corrected him: “That was how you saw it when you entered, from the back, but when you sat on the facing bench from which the meeting was conducted, you saw the powerful men on the right, where they belonged, the weak women on the left, where they were ordained to sit.”

“That’s a preposterous conclusion to reach from accidental seating,” Senator Raborn protested.

“Not so preposterous, for who sat on the facing bench, as if they were cardinals of the Catholic Church or deacons in the Baptist? Mostly men, as it has always been throughout the history of Quakerism. Who were the lay people who became known as Quaker ministers through the force of their speaking in meeting? George Fox, John Woolman, Rufus Jones.”

“Have you suffered because you were one of the first women—” began President Armitage, but Mrs. Quade ignored his question and cut him short. “Primitive religions placed intolerable burdens on their women. In some societies a woman could be executed if she allowed her shadow to fall across the tribe’s major fishing canoe. I could cite a hundred curious laws that disciplined women when they were menstruating. Men feared and hated women because of the arcane powers they had. They could bear babies. They sometimes saw things that men couldn’t see, so such women were branded as witches and either burned or hanged.”

“You’re speaking of primitives,” Jiménez argued, for he took her charges seriously and did not want them to stand as unchallenged truth, but his words led Mrs. Quade to the core of her argument: “From the primitives, organized religions adopted the same strictures. When I taught in Pakistan I studied how Islam denigrates its women. They’re not even allowed to pray alongside the men in the mosque. And how they’re treated in nations like Arabia and the Emirates is a scandal.”