Recessional: A Novel (22 page)

“Let’s see if we can get anywhere by starting with Florida Medicare.” Miss Foxworth dialed the 800 number and after listening to about ten minutes of music, she finally got a clerk on the line. “Good morning. I’m calling on behalf of Clara Clay.”

“Who are you? Are you authorized to speak for her?”

“I’m the accountant for a Tampa retirement center, and Mrs. Clay is right beside me.”

“Well, ma’am, my computer says that’s impossible. According to our records, Clara Clay died several months ago—October 15.”

“What! She’s very much alive, sitting right beside me as we talk.”

“If you’ll hold a moment, I’ll get my supervisor.” And Nora had to listen to another five minutes of cloying music until the supervisor picked up the line.

“Yes, this is Mrs. Kennedy. Are you calling about Clarice Carpenter Clay of Coral Gables?”

“No. Mrs. Clara Cunningham Clay of Tampa.”

“Just a minute, let me check the name on the computer. Well, I’ll be…When names are so nearly identical, errors do slip in. Glad to hear this Mrs. Clay is still with us. She’s right there? Please put her on the line. Welcome to the land of the living, Mrs. Clay. Was your husband Dortmund Clay of Chicago?”

“No, Detwiler Clay of Indianapolis.”

“And your Social Security number?” When it matched the one in the computer, Mrs. Kennedy said brightly: “A deplorable mistake, but understandable. The computer here mixed up the files of the two Mrs. Clays. It will take us some time to sort out what bills and information belong in which file, but when we do there’ll be no further embarrassment to you.”

Getting Clara restored to life and her file in order required all morning, but in the space between telephone calls Miss Foxworth had an opportunity to check the various bills and found them in order and not excessively higher than normal. They were from Dr. David Farquhar, the Palms’ medical director; Dr. Joel Mirliton, the radiologist who did the mammography; Dr. James Wilson, the surgeon specializing in cancer operations; Dr. Leon Jenner, the anesthetist; Dr. Ed Zumway, the administrator of the six-week radium treatment; and the Good Shepherd Catholic Hospital, for seven days’ stay. The total bill, including extras, was $27,080.

When Mrs. Clay inspected the last bill, she shuddered, for she found items like “Two aspirin $6.85; three gauze bandages $11.90; two Zantac pills $15.50” and a flood of other charges of many dollars each for items she could have purchased herself for pennies. But when she complained, Miss Foxworth said: “Hospitals have to stay open so that when you need them, they’re there. What they charge for any one item doesn’t really count. They have to make the bill big enough to stay in business.”

“You think the bills, overall, are reasonable?”

“They’re what we see all the time. If you’d had something that required six months in the hospital, eleven different doctors, total charges of upwards of a hundred thousand dollars, then you would really sweat.”

“All right. I agree that my bills are trivial by comparison. But how do I find my way out of this jungle of who pays for what? And how can I avoid having the collection agency destroy my credit because I didn’t pay some bill I never knew about?”

“Mrs. Clay, remember this. Your case is not exceptional. Nobody has gone out of his way to do you harm. It’s the system, especially the paperwork system. To tell you the truth, Mrs. Clay, you’re one lucky woman! Dead one moment, alive and kicking the next.” Her final words were even more comforting: “The good thing about all this is that once Medicare gets this case of mistaken identity straightened out, you may owe next to nothing. We’ll just have to wait until we hear, then if you still owe a little, you’ll pay up and not have to worry about it again.”

When the widow left the accounting office, Dr. Zorn asked: “Was her case typical?” and Miss Foxworth used her left thumb to indicate the hundred and eighty-two residents in Gateways: “Each one has his or her own special problems with health costs. So much paperwork, so many different systems, so much of what you might call ‘planned chaos,’ that I’m surprised anyone can keep his or her head above water.”

“Your own records? Can you keep them straight?”

She gave a mirthless laugh, reached in her top drawer and pulled out two letters warning her that unless she paid the delinquent bills they would be turned over to a collection agency: “I’m the local expert and I can’t understand my own accounts!”

The four men who constituted the tertulia were judged by the other residents to be the brains of Gateways, and the corner in which they met was viewed with awe and a touch of pride. They were presumed to be of such high intelligence that common folk could not really converse with them, and when word did leak out about what they had been discussing of an evening, people were apt to say something like “What else would you expect of those brains?”

These assumptions of superior intelligence were fortified at the bridge table, where Senator Raborn and Ambassador St. Près were so adroit in bidding and play that they were not allowed to be partners. As Ms. Opliphant complained: “You simply cannot follow their bidding. You and your partner have ten clubs, but they open the bidding with two clubs, no way they could make it. Then they bid spades and diamonds and in the end one of them says four hearts and that’s what they intended from the first, because partner jumps to six, and they make a slam.” The two experts explained several times that they used a variation of the Italian system and even wrote down what their various bids meant for all to see: that two diamonds showed heart strength and so on. During play they allowed their explanation to rest on the table, and when they made an esoteric cue bid they would point to the line on the card that explained what it signified, but still they won, so their partnership had to be outlawed.

Intellectual and bridge prowess aside, the men of the tertulia were remarkable for another reason—their age. One of them, Senator Raborn, was in his eighties; two of them, Ambassador St. Près and President Armitage, in their late seventies; and one, editor Jiménez, had just turned seventy-one. They were about to demonstrate that even at their advanced years they enjoyed abilities and dreams no one could have imagined.

The adventure started one night after dinner when St. Près said: “The four of us ought to be engaged in a lot more than abstract philosophizing. We have the talents to attempt some big effort,” and the other three showed immediate interest. There was protracted discussion about what might be a practical project, and even after waiters cleared their table they remained huddled, discussing and rejecting proposals such as starting a class in a nearby junior college to be given some modest title like “the wisdom of the world,” or the formation of a civics club that would teach high school students the true meaning of democracy. “No,” the ambassador said, “we’re still spinning our wheels, still verbalizing. I intended something we could do with our hands.” When they pressed him for an example, he gave one that was so bizarre, so totally beyond normal reasoning, that at first the other three rejected it, but the more they talked and revealed hidden aptitudes, the more practical St. Près’s suggestion became until, sometime after eleven that night, the four men agreed upon what would be a gallant effort, preposterous perhaps, but one that would challenge and demand their full energies.

The program started early next morning when Senator Raborn, a man who knew how to get things done, called on Ken Krenek with a publicity brochure distributed by the Palms some years before: “It says here in bold type that when functioning, the Palms will offer women comfortable nooks for teas and socials and bridge, and their husbands, and I quote: ‘a fully equipped hobby shop with hand tools and a lathe.’ I represent a committee asking that this promised amenity be provided. Now.”

Krenek knew from reports assembled when the senator and his wife applied for admission to the Palms that Raborn had been famous in the Senate for using his seniority and personal power to bring ever-larger infusions of federal money into his state. One cynic pointed out that if his state got any more government installations it would sink, and Raborn himself had once observed that “people in the big cities can laugh at us rubes out in the sticks, but their taxes go to support our operations.” So Krenek knew the odds were that Raborn would get his workshop.

Ken first called Miss Foxworth to see if there was any budget provision for such a room and she could recall none. He then discussed the problem with Andy, who capitulated to the inevitable: “You say we printed it in one of our early brochures? We did? Then, I guess we have to see to it that it’s done. A wood lathe can’t cost a fortune. Get one.”

When Krenek asked where they were going to find a room, Andy reminded him that there were still vacant one-room apartments on the first floor of Gateways. Krenek went back to Miss Foxworth to determine where they could tuck in a workshop, and she pointed out that they’d had trouble disposing of one of the ground-floor rooms that opened directly onto a parking lot, and the decision was made to use it.

The Palms was generous in providing not only the lathe but also the hand tools that would normally go with it, and the four tertulia members were equally helpful in donating their own equipment to the common effort, so that soon the new workroom was humming night after night behind a door that was never opened to the other residents. Rumors circulated about what might be going on inside, but not even the two wives, Marcia Raborn and Felicita Jiménez, knew what their husbands were doing there. What was obvious was that it involved wood, lots of high-powered epoxy glue, and bits of canvas, but this information did not explain the mystery.

Then one day Felicita Jiménez, in opening her husband’s mail as she was accustomed to do, found a well-illustrated catalog for “men who were building their own airplanes.” It offered a wide variety of items for the enthusiastic amateur to purchase, with diagrams of how the components would be fitted together. “My God!” she cried in disbelief. “Are those idiots trying to build an airplane?” Aghast, she ran downstairs to consult with Mrs. Raborn, and when the senator’s wife saw the catalog, she and Felicita marched to Raborn and demanded that they be allowed to see what was happening in the new workroom. Reluctantly he agreed and opened the sawdust-covered room. The sight that confronted them struck the women with terror.

The four men were indeed building an airplane. Starting with a kit that provided much of the intricate innards, they were adding the canvas, the struts, the fuselage. Even more appalling to the two women, who knew something about the difficulty of putting together even the parts of a dress, was that the men were actually trying to build the wooden propeller. Since it was to be a single-engine plane, the efficiency and durability of the propeller was crucial, yet there they were, cutting the pieces of some exotic wood, which, when laminated and shaped, would be the element that would keep the plane aloft, assuming it ever left the ground in the first place.

When word flashed through the Palms that the resident geniuses were building a plane that they intended to fly, discussion centered first on the expertise of the four participants: “Ambassador St. Près told me that while serving in one of the new African republics he learned to fly the embassy’s one-engine plane, in case he might have to evacuate in a hurry,” and someone else noted that President Armitage had been good at science and had once taught a seminar on the properties of various metals and woods. Raúl Jiménez was skilled at amateur woodworking, having built various small items to enhance their apartment, and Senator Raborn was knowledgeable about gasoline-powered engines, having taken apart and reassembled automobile power trains since he was a boy of eleven.

It was agreed that the four men had the ability to bring together the various parts of a small airplane, but it was obvious that they could not build an engine that would fly it, nor were they having much success in constructing the propeller. “The engine’s no problem,” St. Près assured those who asked. “The Lycoming people in Pennsylvania have been building great engines for half a century.
They’ve said they’d sell us one and send instructions on how to install it. Raborn says he’ll know how to attach the controls and see that it’s properly fitted to the propeller.” The men spoke with such confidence that even those who had at first doubted their engineering skills finally had to concede that it might be done.

Their optimism was strengthened when the original four took in a fifth partner, Maxim Lewandowski, eighty-six years old but a first-class scientist with proficiency in varied fields; he would assume responsibility for fashioning the propeller, determining the various angles and taking charge of the laminating that would bind different woods into an indestructible bond. To watch him hard at work with the lathe, the pot of epoxy and his shaping tools was to see an old man reborn and revitalized. He became the intellectual core of the operation, just as St. Près with his firm insistence that the job could be done and that their energies would produce a plane that could fly, had provided the moral force.

When residents asked: “Who will fly it if you do get it finished?” St. Près said with icy confidence: “Any one of the four of us could do it. After all, it’s like driving an automobile in the air.”

“Yes, but who will take it up the first time?” and he said: “I will. I flew in Africa. It’s nothing, really, if you have a stout plane and a reliable engine.”

As the venture slowly progressed with various components nearing completion, it enthralled the residents, who were allowed to look into the workshop at announced intervals. Their repeated question, “How are you going to get this huge thing out of this little room?” was easily answered: “We take out that window and drag it out with a small lawnmower motor—and our muscle power.”

“Yes, but what do you do about those big wings standing in the corner?”

“We attach them when we get outside.”

“But we don’t see any motor.”

“In an airplane it’s an engine. That’s due to arrive in several months. We fit it in, turn it over, check to see we have enough gasoline and oil, and fly away.”