Recessional: A Novel (26 page)

Andy had been in residence almost four full months before he was again forced to witness death, but this time it entailed the complete cycle of residence at the Palms. The happily married Clements lived on the fourth floor, as typical a pair as the halls contained. He was in his early eighties, she in her late seventies, and they had obviously been of ample means, for they occupied one of the larger suites, frequently took their lunch at some restaurant in Tampa, and contributed generously to the collections made at Christmas for the staff. They were an amiable pair whom everyone liked; he was a good bridge player and she a volunteer helper on the floors of the nursing building.

Their lives were progressing in the orderly way they had planned, for when they were in their forties they had started to invest their income so that they could one day find refuge in some place like the Palms. Their two children, safely married and with good jobs, and four grandchildren came to visit them periodically. One would have predicted that it would be some years before they would be interested in Assisted Living, for Mrs. Clement still drove their Cadillac and he took a walk almost every day when it was not raining.

And then their placid routine was shattered when Mr. Clement, while climbing out of the bathtub, fell and broke his left hip. Since he would require nursing care after the operation, he was immediately moved to a comfortable room on the Assisted Living floor. Normally he would have remained there for five or six weeks receiving the best medical attention but, as in so many similar cases, his weakened condition produced severe pneumonia, known in previous centuries as “the old man’s friend” because it was often the agency for a quick, peaceful death. It served that function with Mr. Clement, whose condition
declined so rapidly that it was clear to all that he was dying. He was therefore moved to a sunlit room on the top floor, Extended Care, where he would be expected to live for the brief remainder of his life. He realized what the move upward meant but was not distressed by it. He told his wife: “We’ve had a decent life, fine children, wonderful grandchildren, everything in good order to protect you for as long as you live—the end of the trail, and I have few regrets.”

His stay in Extended Care was short, for the genetic inheritance with which he had started life eighty-two years earlier dictated that he had run his course. Everything was happening according to schedule, the only remarkable aspect to his dying being the ease with which he accepted it. The end came one Thursday night at about eleven o’clock. His wife, who had been sharing his room with him, was at his side when he died, holding his hand until it began to grow cold, then folding it gently over his heart. His death could be seen as almost a beautiful rite of passage. A responsible life had been lived and had ended with as much dignity as death ever allowed. If no angels sang at his passing, neither did friends and neighbors wail in unseemly grief.

Andy monitored with care the established routine for handling the event. At midnight Dr. Farquhar appeared to certify that Clement had died of natural causes. This done, an hour was spent dressing the body in street clothes and lifting it from the bed onto a rubber-tired stretcher, which was wheeled into the elevator before it could be seen by anyone except the nurses who had helped in the arrangements.

With Mrs. Clement remaining beside her husband’s body, the elevator went to the ground floor and the stretcher was whisked out an unobtrusive door that some sardonic wit had labeled Avernus, regarded by ancients as the gateway to hell. Once outside, the body was placed in an ambulance, which sped down a rarely used unnamed path. This soon connected with the lane leading into the mall, from which the ambulance would go across town to the Tampa morgue. By three in the morning, with none but the medical staff aware that a death had occurred, the corpse was safe in its temporary resting place, from which morticians would retrieve it before nine the next morning.

At breakfast in the Palms a notice edged in black appeared on the bulletin board stating that at midnight Charles Clement had died peacefully and that memorial services would be held two afternoons
hence. At these services, attended by more than half the residents, Reverend Quade conducted a shortened version of the noble Episcopal service for the dead, after which fruit punch and gingersnap cookies were served, with one person after another telling his or her neighbor that it was the kind of death Charley would have wanted.

Death was not yet finished. When Mrs. Clement returned to her fourth-floor suite and realized she must now live alone in those spacious rooms, she suffered what could only be termed “a collapse of the spirit,” with the result that, for no medical reason that Dr. Farquhar could detect, she too died. “She died,” the women in the Palms averred, “because of a broken heart,” and they noted with unvoiced approval that she, like her husband, had died peacefully in bed.

“It’s the way God intended them to go,” several of the women said, and they watched, again with approval, the orderly manner in which the Clement children and grandchildren appeared at the Palms with their own movers to clear the apartment of their parents’ belongings. By the end of the next week Mr. Krenek had sold the empty Clement apartment to a couple from Skokie, Illinois. Andy, reviewing the transition, concluded that it had been handled with admirable efficiency, and he praised his staff for their unstinting help.

Very shortly after the calm departure of Mrs. Clement, Gus Ranger, an overweight florid man in his early seventies, dropped dead of a massive myocardial infarction. Quite a few men at the Palms said they were not surprised that a man like Gus, who took little care of himself, should have died in that dramatic fashion. “He asked for it” was their opinion, but they were appalled by
where
his death occurred.

Word sped rapidly throughout the Palms: “Have you heard where Gus died? In the bedroom of one of Tampa’s prostitutes!”

Yes, a friend of the woman in question had called 911 rather frantically from a Tampa rooming house with the news that “a gentleman has dropped dead in the living room of the apartment house,” and when the rescue squad arrived, the attending medic jotted in his notebook: “Corpse showed every indication of having been hastily dressed by someone not himself and dragged down to the reception area.” Tampa newsmen who saw the official report had to explain in their stories how Gus Ranger happened to be in that unusual location
and whom he was visiting. They used the convenient phrase “a longtime friend,” and left it to the reader to deduce who that friend might have been and the circumstances of Ranger’s sudden demise. But only a retarded reader would have failed to understand that Gus Ranger, aged seventy-two and a respected resident of the Palms, one of Tampa’s finest retirement complexes, had dropped dead in the apartment of a well-known local prostitute.

Managing editors could see no reason for exploring self-evident truths or developing the fact that Mr. Ranger had been in the habit, for some time, of visiting this young lady and showering rather generous gifts upon her. Of course, the rumor mill at the Palms quickly developed the parts of the story the news media had censored, and various witnesses testified in private to the fact that Gus Ranger had developed a habit of absenting himself from his quarters in the morning for what he had described as “business affairs in town.”

Privately some raffish men whispered to one another: “What a glorious way to go!” but most of them thought to themselves: Jesus! I’d hate to be caught in a mess like that. My farewell performance. No thanks. And many thought: I couldn’t do that to my wife. And the kids.

This feeling was strengthened by reports of how traumatic Gus Ranger’s ugly death had been for his wife. Reverend Quade was not invited to deliver a eulogy at the memorial services at the Palms, and for the good reason that no such services were offered. Dr. Zorn had given orders: “If Mrs. Ranger insists, of course we’ll go ahead, but she hasn’t left her rooms, so let’s not suggest it.” Muley Duggan persuaded a few men to attend a service he organized at a downtown Tampa mortuary but no wives participated.

Andy did not wait long before visiting with Mrs. Ranger in her lonely apartment. When he sat with her he gave her the warmest assurance that he personally would see to it that she was offered a smaller apartment if she decided to remain at the Palms, which he advised her to do. “You have your friends here. You already know everyone, and there’s no need whatever to try to find a new life.” When she said she’d have to think about costs now that Gustavus was no longer there to manage their investments, he reminded her: “You know that your monthly costs drop with only one of you occupying these quarters, and they’ll drop even more if you accept my invitation to take smaller rooms.”

But since this was his first experience with a widow who might be staying on, Mrs. Clement having died almost simultaneously with her husband, he wanted to make sure that the women in the center knew that he and his staff would do everything in their power to make adjustment to a single life easy, friendly and inexpensive. He stayed with Mrs. Ranger more than two hours, reviewing all aspects of her financial situation and especially the alternatives she might consider: “I want you to share with us your plans and your hopes, and if you’d do better shifting to some other retirement area, we’ll give you the warmest possible cooperation. Mrs. Ranger, we were established to provide comfort and safety to people like you. You’ve made yourself a member of our family, and as family members we’ll give you sound advice. I hope you’ll stay with us.”

He asked also about her family members and what she might expect of them. He wanted to know what relations she had with any Tampa church, who her doctor was, what condition her will would be in with Gus gone, and whether she would feel more at ease if she had a room on the lower floor, or even one on the top floor with a broad view of the colorful swampland to the north. Everything he did in those mournful days proved that he was personally interested in her welfare and was prepared to serve as a business counselor to succeed her husband. He did not have to pose as a Good Samaritan, he was one.

But in the days that followed, when Mrs. Ranger was weighing carefully her choices, Andy became aware that one staff member was treating this widow less as a distraught elderly client than as an elderly beloved sister who faced great emotional problems. He heard Nurse Varney say one day when she was counseling Mrs. Ranger about some minor medical matter: “You don’t gots to bother with expensive tests for a thing like that. Go to the Eckerds down the way and ask the pharmacist what’s best for a sinus attack. He’ll tell you, total cost maybe four-fifty for one of the new medicines.” He had noticed before that when Nora spoke to residents about the serious problems of life, she reverted to the Negro dialect of her youth, the one her mother had used when sharing her folk wisdom. Now he heard her say: “What you really gots to do, Mrs. Ranger, is start right now to get out into the community. Go to a restaurant now and then. Help out in some church. See if the school down the way needs a morning helper to read to the children.”

When Mrs. Ranger said: “I’m ashamed to show my face. I’m here
in your office only because I have this sinus pain,” Nora led her to a corner chair, pulled one up for herself and lectured the bereft widow: “Mrs. Ranger, we don’t want no more such talk in this place. Listen, my dear friend,” and Andy saw his nurse take Mrs. Ranger’s hands in hers, “every peoples gots trouble, lots worse than yours sometimes, but they live on, find trusted friends, dress up each Saturday night as if it was a party, and get on with their lives.” When Mrs. Ranger held fast to the nurse’s hands and began to cry, Varney snapped: “None of that! Did you know that Mrs. Rexford has a daughter, bad brain damage, her mind stopped growing about age five. Girl’s in a home for the past forty years. And poor Mr. Duggan, his wife doesn’t even remember who he is, that’s trouble too, Mrs. Ranger. And the ambassador, his wife died young, I cared for her, a lovely woman, he like to died, but you see him now, active in his corner with his talky-talky men. He keeps living.” For some minutes she continued sharing with Mrs. Ranger the secrets of the Palms until it sounded as if half the residents lived with some dark misery in their closets: “But they keep on living. Peoples gots to stay in the fight. You know what they say in the football television? ‘No pain, no gain.’ You got pain, yes, but so do all peoples.”

“Yes, but mine is so public.” She burst into tears and covered her face with her hands, as if trying to hide from cruel strangers. “I’m so ashamed.”

For some moments the nurse allowed her to cry, then said softly: “Mrs. Ranger, they’ll whisper about it for maybe a week, then it’ll die down. What you do is learn to hold your head high. You’re a proud woman. You’re a good woman, as good as any of them, and if they stare at you, stare right back, head high as if you were saying: Go to hell! and in one week it will pass.”

When the widow continued to weep, Varney grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, saying in a harsh voice: “Snap out of it, sister. How do you think I felt when my man left me with no money, no job, and two small daughters? How much shame did I have to swallow? Mrs. Ranger, all peoples gots misery. We all gots shame. And yours is standard issue. Come on! Smile!”

When Mrs. Ranger composed herself she said: “I’ll see what the man at Eckerds has to say about my sinuses.” There was a pause, then: “Nurse, may I kiss you good-bye?”

“I ain’t leaving,” Varney said, “and neither are you,” and she embraced the widow.

On the last day of April, marking the completion of Andy’s first four months at the Palms, he conducted a tour of inspection to check on the buildings and grounds. He started by having Ken Krenek drive him out to the first of the great palm trees reaching toward the clouds, and he inspected each one as he walked westward toward the massive gateway to the buildings. He understood that in due course one or another of those majestic trees would die and have to be replaced, but he could detect none that seemed threatened: “Anyway, those out in the savanna grow so fast that replacements would be possible.” Then he had a better thought: If they can do with dead palms what they did to replace those Brazilian pepper trees that were so splendid, we could move in nearly mature palms and no one would be able to spot the difference.