Recessional: A Novel (25 page)

When Dr. Zorn and Krenek dined with the two women, the younger Ms. Oliphant spoke at length and with considerable ardor about how her aunt had taken her in when she was orphaned, seen her through puberty and high school, and sent her on to college: “If there is a living saint, it’s this woman sitting here. What a difficult time she had with me. I hated the world. Felt that my mother’s death was a personal affront to me. Despised my teachers when they wanted to help me. Aunt Laura, no wonder you turned gray prematurely.”

After the younger woman’s long explanation of how they survived, emotionally and financially, Laura finally spoke: “In the middle of the Sturm and Drang when I was feeling sorry for myself a thought flashed through my mind: ‘The job of parents is not to browbeat a child into the kind of adult they would prefer, but to give the rebellious one all the love in the world and the encouragement to become the kind of productive human being the child aspires to become.’ Later, I phrased it more simply: ‘It isn’t Mildred’s obligation to make me happy. It’s her job to make herself productive, in whatever that might be.’ ” She smiled at Mildred, reached out and clasped her hand and said: “After that it was easy, for all I did was allow her to become a wonderful, mature, emotionally free human being.”

The following night the residents were assembled after dinner to hear Mildred give a forty-minute talk on how Duke University was now publishing its books, and almost every step in the new processes she described astonished her listeners, including Zorn and Krenek. She was an excellent speaker as she explained the miracles of desktop publishing in which the word processor made obsolete a half-dozen cumbersome machines.

As they left the session, Krenek asked Zorn: “Wasn’t she fascinating? She presented her ideas so clearly and interestingly.” He added: “Wasn’t she a nice change after those horrible Mallory kids?”

And then a cloud momentarily dulled the shining impression the young Ms. Oliphant had made. The Duchess received a letter from a friend on the faculty at Duke that contained startling news:

I understand that Mildred Oliphant, one of the stars at Duke, spent some time with her aunt at your establishment. She’s notable here for having been the first unmarried woman to bear a child out of wedlock. She not only kept the little girl and reared her with no outside help, but proceeded rather promptly to have a little boy by the same process but not necessarily the same father. It raised an enormous stink, but that was at the beginning of the drive for women’s equality, and Duke was afraid to fire her, because of lawsuits and possible campus marches.

But even hurricanes quiet down after the big blow, and the same happened here. If you take the North Carolina triangle of Duke, North Carolina, and N.C. State, I suspect you’d be able to find several cases of faculty women who are unconventional mothers and nobody worries about it anymore.

When this news circulated through Gateways, women who had met Mildred could scarcely believe it, for they remembered her as such a congenial person that rumors of her sexual rebellion were hard to credit. Some months later the elder Ms. Oliphant not only invited Mildred to return to the Palms but asked her to bring along her daughter and son. The girl, a scholarship student studying French at Princeton, and her younger brother, a football player at Wesleyan, were so well mannered and such charming conversationalists when they visited with the other residents during their three-day stay that any objections the gossips might have had regarding their mother were completely withdrawn.

The Duchess, who knew class when she saw it, and who was pleased that the young woman was studying French, broke her habit of avoiding the dining room at night and preempted two tables for a small dinner party featuring the two young scholars. She brought two bottles of a good French wine from her private stock and offered a toast in a voice so loud the nearby tables could hear it:
“Autres temps, autres moeurs!”
To the man at her right she whispered: “If the peasants don’t know what that means, they’re the losers.”

The visits of children to the Palms continued to pay dividends for
two reasons, as Jiménez pointed out: “When you’re past seventy, you need children around now and then to remind you of what the continuity of life is, and also, in these days, you never know what refreshingly unexpected types you’re going to get.”

The unbidden guest at every Palms meal was death. Sensible residents did not brood about his presence; they remembered some of the reasons why they had entered the Palms and accepted their advancing years with equanimity and a resigned sense of “So be it.” Some, on whom the burden of age was debilitating and repugnant, would occasionally even say to themselves: I’ll be grateful when he comes knocking, but they were a minority.

All were aware of death’s constant presence; they could not avoid his shadow if they wished. A friend would die. A bridge partner would suffer a stroke and be moved into Assisted Living, no longer able to take her meals in the dining room or to linger afterward for the evening card foursome. And occasionally one of the older residents, as he left the dining room, would bid effusive farewells, much more protracted than the dictates of friendship would have demanded; he wanted to say a fond good-bye to his friends because there had been signals warning him that death was near, and in the morning he would be found dead. In such a case most of his acquaintances would tell one another, as they did when Fred died: He came to the kind of end he would have wished. And three days later Reverend Quade, in her obligatory memorial service, would speak of the tranquillity with which the deceased had passed away. In Fred’s case the afternoon service coincided with a rather noisy storm marked by flashes of lightning and loud claps of thunder, and on the spur of the moment she improvised: “We seek refuge from the storms of life and if we are fortunate we find a safe haven. Our beloved friend has found eternal peace in the bosom of our Lord.”

Death is, of course, universal; man is not the only animal fated to die—sometimes arbitrarily, without warning, or hideously, or capriciously in a manner that has no meaning. When Muley Duggan led some two dozen of the residents to a nearby racetrack for the races and for a convivial lunch, neither he nor they could have foreseen they would encounter death that pleasant afternoon.

“The real reason I’ve arranged this,” Muley explained as his
friends settled down for the ride to the track, “is so we can see this spectacular filly, In For A Penny, who is beginning to look as if she might have a chance to win the Kentucky Derby. There hasn’t been a filly winning that race in years. So we can look her over at the beginning of what could be a gallant career.”

At the track, where he was well known because of his affiliation with racing in New York, he was allowed to take the Palms people into the paddock, where they could see In For A Penny close up, and they found her to be a most handsome young lady, with her chestnut coat, fine head, bright eyes and an auburn mane and bushy tail. Muley’s male friends praised the horse’s conformation, assuring one another: “She looks as if she could run,” while the women were impressed by her delicacy of manner: “She conducts herself as if she were a great lady,” and Muley assured them: “That’s just what she is.”

The group was so taken with the famous filly, already the winner of several important races in which she had handily beaten the best of the young male colts, that most of the people wanted to place bets on her in the big fifth race of the afternoon, but Muley warned them: “Don’t get carried away by her looks. Remember, she’ll be racing against young male horses, and sad as it is, the males usually win. Stronger, better wind, more determination.”

“Male chauvinist pig!” one of the women cried, and she led her friends to the betting window to place their five- and ten-dollar bets on the filly, but Muley now contradicted himself by warning them: “You can see by the board that In For A Penny is going to start as the heavy favorite, so your odds are not going to be very attractive. You bet two dollars and if you win you’re paid back only one extra dollar because everyone else is betting on her, too. But if you are lucky enough to bet on some other horse who beats your filly, you might win ten or twelve dollars.”

Despite this warning, which two other practiced bettors confirmed, the Palms contingent insisted on backing the favorite, especially the women, who were moved by considerations other than winning a few dollars: “Wouldn’t it be great if she beats all those colts? Let’s give her our support.”

The Palms people did not wager much on the first four races because they knew nothing about the horses running, but almost everyone placed at least a two-dollar wager on the charismatic filly, while Muley Duggan, as the sponsor, bet one hundred dollars on her to
win and fifty on her to place, or finish second. He instructed the cautious women bettors how to bet win-place-show, which covered the horse if it won or placed second or third: “But you understand that since she’s the favorite, she’s likely to finish among the top three, so you’d hardly win anything with such a bet.” However, just to be in the game, some of the women did make such bets, and before the start of the race they were just as excited about their prospects as were the daring women who had bet up to fifty dollars on the filly to win.

It turned out to be a perfect day for racing in Florida: warm with a cool breeze now and then, sun shining but tempered by casual clouds drifting by, the grass on the oval a bright green, the red flamingos in the man-made lake active in beguiling ways, the track raked clean and without blemish. “You couldn’t ask for much improvement,” Muley told his companions. “And that lunch was pretty acceptable, too.”

When the seven competing horses for the fifth race—five colts and two fillies—were brought out to the area behind the big mechanical starting gate, they milled about for some minutes, and a few proved difficult to lure into the gate. In For A Penny entered her starting stall like a well-trained lady and waited almost scornfully for the ones who were causing trouble.

When all seven horses were in position, their noses protruding from the gate, Penny looked to be the prize of the lot, and the Palms contingent cheered loudly as she broke handsomely from the gate, rushed to the lead position and came into the first turn clearly in command. The cheering was loud and reassuring. This filly was more than a match for the five male horses, and she seemed well on her way to a victory. One of the Palms women hammered on Muley’s shoulder: “You know how to pick them! Look at her gallop,” and Muley said: “If she does gallop she’ll lose the race,” and the woman, not understanding his distinction, shouted: “Look at her go!”

Two seconds later this same woman uttered the first of the agonized screams that would fill the stands: “My God! What’s happened? She fell!” Wild cries swept the crowd as they looked in horror at the fallen horse, her left front leg jutting up into the air at a crazy angle. Obviously, it was shattered.

The filly’s owner now faced a cruel decision. The race itself ran to a finish, with one of the colts winning at 8 to 1. Trained crews rushed out to tend the stricken filly, and one glance proved that she
was so severely damaged that she would have to be “put down,” the equestrian euphemism for killing by means of a pistol shot behind the ear.

This was not an automatic decision to make, for it had been amply proven that a racehorse with a broken leg could be saved, at a punishing financial cost, if the leg was splinted and the horse treated like a delicate infant for a protracted spell. The life could be saved but the horse would never race again, a perpetual expense to the owner. The sensible solution, proven time and again, was to shoot the horse immediately.

“What is that man doing?” the woman at Muley’s elbow screamed. He said: “Better not look, Mrs. German,” and with his right hand he turned her face as the track attendant aimed the revolver and shot three times into the filly’s head.

Before the start of the sixth race, clean-up crews had hauled away the carcass, spread sand over the bloodstains and declared the track fit for resumption of the afternoon’s card of three more races.

The effect of these events on the group was harrowing. Muley explained that racehorses are so carefully bred that they become fragile creatures: “A leg can snap at any time. Even the slightest twist outside of normal can do it. Down he goes.”

“But this wasn’t a he,” Mrs. German moaned. “This was a beautiful young female horse. It’s so unfair.” He thought it best not to explain that the destruction of the filly had been a commercial decision.

“Do they always shoot them just because they hurt a leg?” she asked.

“Ma’am, a horse is a big, heavy item. The leg is fragile, might never really mend. It’s the humane thing to do.”

At these harsh but true words, she burst into tears, and her pain was so evident that Muley put his arm about her and whispered: “Mrs. German—Nancy, it was inevitable,” but she would not be consoled. The sudden, arbitrary death of this splendid animal was too much for her to absorb, and she could not stop weeping.

When they got back to the Palms, Muley Duggan and Nancy German did not, like the others, go to the comforting cheerfulness of Gateways but to the second floor of Health, where, in Assisted Living, their spouses waited: Marjorie Duggan as frail and beautiful as ever, Richard German almost as tall and energetic as he had been forty years ago. Neither Muley nor Nancy could explain to their
mates what had happened that day, for even the simplest communication was impossible, but nevertheless they spoke.

Muley said: “You’d have loved the filly, Marjorie. She was one of the finest horses I’ve seen in years. And she was winning all the way until it happened.” He paused as if to allow her time to ask: “What happened, Muley?” but the question never came.

Nancy German told her husband: “Richard, the racetrack was so neat and well cared for you’d have approved. And the races were interesting, but there was this awful tragedy.” He, too, did not ask for details, so she did not tell him about the shooting.