Recessional: A Novel (70 page)

“What’s that? Maybe we can correct it.”

“None of the big-league baseball teams train there. Within striking distance of Tampa there’s a lot. And I’ve got to stay here to keep in touch with them.” He paused, and before Andy could probe deeper, Yancey said: “I love baseball. I love bein’ around the professionals. I’m stayin’ right where I am, and Ella feels the same way.”

Having failed twice to persuade some valued members of his staff to move north with him, he could comfort himself with the knowledge that his most valuable staff member would be making the trip, for on the day he and Betsy decided to go to Tennessee they had approached Nora and said: “We’ll need you in the new place. You especially, because up there I’m going to be a full-fledged doctor, not the manager of a posh hotel. We’ll get someone else to do that. You’re to be my head nurse, and together we’ll give Tennessee the best retirement facility in the States. Just what our brochures promise: ‘Full medical attention guaranteed for the rest of your life.’ ”

“Sounds exciting,” she had said, “but I hate to leave Dr. Leitonen and my AIDS patients.”

“We understand. But there’ll be work to do up there, too, and we know you’ll find it,” so she had agreed to make the move.

Now, on their last day together at the Palms, Andy promised her: “We’ll provide the very best, and you and I will have a great time working together on our patients’ care.”

As he made his way down the hall he was now stopped by a committee of residents who had come to express their thanks for his impeccable management. They were four citizens of Gateways whom he had especially liked and who were indebted to him: the Mallorys, whose lawsuit he had helped resolve in their favor; Ms. Oliphant, whom he had helped through her battle with cancer; and the Duchess, whose temperamental excesses he had tolerated with good humor. “We wish we could go with you,” Ms. Oliphant said, and the two other women began to sniffle. Mr. Mallory joked: “Aren’t you glad you allowed us back in after we behaved so poorly three times?” And the Duchess asked coyly: “We defended the honor of the place, didn’t we?”

He embraced them all, sniffled himself, and said: “This is a marvelous way to say good-bye. Live to a hundred, all of you,” and he was off.

By the time he joined Betsy and Nora in the car, his spirits had revived and he was ready for the final farewell.

As he started his car and drove around the oval, Ken Krenek came rushing from the building and ran across to intercept him as he was about to pass through the gate. “Hey! Andy! I came to say good-bye and wish you well. You were one of the best.”

“I thought we said a proper farewell at the dinner last night, but always glad to have another. Ken, you proved yourself a most excellent
assistant, and as I said: ‘You’re ready for the big job.’ Tell Taggart I said so.”

Krenek did not want to hear this: “Andy, you must have seen. I was cut out to be a damned good second in command. Help the big boss achieve his goals. I’m good at that. Anything higher, I get nervous.”

“You mean you’d turn down my job?”

“Yes. I like things to stay the way they are,” and he leaned in the car to bid good-bye to the two women, and when he turned back to the home base on which he felt secure, Betsy said: “He’s such a good guy, I’ll miss him.”

Finally they drove down that superb avenue of soaring palms on the left, a fugitive Brazilian pepper tree hiding among the oleanders on the right, and when Betsy saw the bright red berries she was loath to leave them. “Stop the car, Andy,” she said, and with her cane to aid her she walked over the rough ground to the pepper tree and broke off a large branch covered with an infinity of berries. Back in the car she said: “I’ll bet they’ll last till Tennessee, and provide us with a housewarming there. Let’s go.”

But Andy did not start the car immediately, for he too was moved by the thought that this might be the last time he would ever see those majestic palms, with their halo of green only at the top. And as they left the Palms they looked back with affection at the towering palm trees.

As the three expatriates reached the North Carolina border with the Great Smoky National Park lying just to the west, Betsy smiled mysteriously and chuckled, and when the others asked: “What’s so funny?” she said: “The floating white angel, and the way she diverted attention from who did the break-in.”

“What do you know about the angel?” Andy asked, and Betsy said: “I invented her. She was my idea, a brilliant one, if I do say so myself. A real angel! Two different witnesses saw her, didn’t they, and others, too?”

“Come clean,” Andy said as he headed up into the Smokies, and Betsy explained: “I found myself identifying tremendously with poor Berta Umlauf, I’d been so close to death myself and had contemplated it much more deeply than either of you two could know.

“So death is very real to me and when I watched that marvelous Umlauf family frustrated in every move they made to help their wonderful old mother die in peace, the way she wanted, I think it accurate
to say that my blood boiled. I mean it. My temperature rose to the boiling point, and when I heard how Gretchen Umlauf had vomited after seeing her mother-in-law lashed to her bed with gizmos sticking into her body from all angles, I decided to help and arranged for Gretchen’s son to slip her into Extended Care by a back door that few used. In a flash of inspiration I told her: ‘Let’s make it as mysterious as possible,’ and gave her a flimsy white nightgown, all lace and frills, that a dear friend had given me when it was thought I’d be bedridden for the rest of my life. When I helped Gretchen into it, I kissed her and said: ‘You’re doing God’s work, kiddo,’ and off she went into local immortality. An angel who really did God’s work. Helped a noble woman, old and worn-out, enter heaven as God intended.”

Suddenly she clapped her hands: “To hell with Clarence Hasslebrook and his plots against us. We’ll fight him all the way! Sometimes the good guys really do win.” As the three people who would be responsible for the character of the Sheltering Hills approached the dividing line between the states, Betsy surprised the others by asking Andy to stop so that she could get out. As she stood there with her cane she said in a whisper: “Last spring I left Tennessee a hopeless cripple ready to die. Now this year I walk on my own legs back into my beloved state ready for whatever needs to be done,” and in this determined spirit the three associates crossed over into Tennessee.

Almost as soon as he wakened on the day after Zorn’s departure, Richard St. Près realized that things were beginning to unravel. He found, on attempting to read the morning paper, that the cataract in his left eye had worsened, for he could not maintain his focus on the print. He did not panic, since he had been warned that slow, manageable deterioration would probably occur, but it was an irritation, for it presaged the inevitable diminution of eyesight toward that day when he would have to undergo eye surgery.

To bolster his spirits, he gave himself a pep talk: “Not to worry. They tell me you go into the opththalmologist’s office at nine, have the operation—forty minutes—leave at eleven and drive home, if you wish. Nothing like the old days when you lay immobilized with bags of sand locking your head in a safe position.” But when his infirmity seemed to worsen as he read, he concluded: “I’d better check it out with Dr. Farquhar,” and he thought no more about it.

When it came time to dress for a morning meeting at which he was to represent the residents in a confrontation with the Palms’ managerial staff about an increase in monthly fees, he started to tie his necktie—something he had done thousands of times. Over fifty years earlier a Harvard classmate noted for his meticulous grooming had seen that St. Près was accustomed to fix his tie in an ordinary four-in-hand knot, which produced an uneven knot that kept sliding off to the left. “Richard, my dear friend,” the man had chided: “Has no one taught you the latest in neckwear?” and the dapper young man had demonstrated the Windsor, an intricate maneuver in which the right hand wove the long end of the tie under and over and about the shorter end, with a most satisfying result: “There, you see. The knot is handsomely centered directly over your Adam’s apple, but it is also wide at the top and neatly tapered toward the bottom. Voilà! You are now a gentleman.”

From that day on, St. Près had meticulously followed the intricate procedure, gratified when his silk ties, on which he had spent much money and more care, had been paraded before the world and the television cameras. But on this morning, as he entered upon the routine of making the knot, he mysteriously forgot how to manipulate his right hand. The long end of the tie did not behave and the proposed knot became a mess. In a mild confusion and with a growl of irritation, he ripped open the knot, straightened the ends of the tie and began again, but now he was trapped in a phenomenon that attacks many otherwise competent men and women: when he tried to think his way through what had become a daily routine requiring no thought whatever, he found himself totally unable to sort out what he was doing. His brain could not keep up with his fingers; indeed, his fingers required no input from the brain and when mental suggestions arrived, they confused the fingers rather than instructed them.

For a second time he failed to complete this simple operation and the knot became an impossible jumble.

Clawing at it, he dissolved the knot, straightened the ends and proceeded to instruct himself as if he were again a little child: “The right hand with the long end is the important one. Over and under, then around and under, drawing it tight to make that handsome square knot. Then over, under and around. End with thrusting the long end into the knot and tighten everything.” Surveying with childish pride the finished knot, finally perfect in all respects, he congratulated himself: “See! It wasn’t such a big problem after all.”

But then he stared at himself in the mirror and broke into a nervous laugh, for he remembered how, as a Boy Scout at summer camp in Vermont, he had been reprimanded by the scoutmaster: “Richard, you’ll never be a proper Scout until you learn to tie something besides a granny knot. See how it pulls apart the way you tie it? It’s easy to tie a square knot, and look! No power can break that knot apart.”

“How do I do it?” Richard had asked him, and his instructor had made the task an easy one: “The right hand controls. The left hand never moves. Right hand under, then bring it back over, draw it tight and you have a perfect knot.” The half-smile in the mirror vanished, and in its place came a look of trembling fear: Am I beginning to fall apart? A simple thing like fixing a necktie, and I almost crumbled. Studying his features in the glass he conducted an inventory: Hair thinning and turning white. Teeth showing signs of cracking. Nose not taking in and delivering the amount of oxygen it used to, so lungs less efficient than before. Ticker seems OK but the legs are weakening, and that damned cataract does creep on apace. Still, in reaching a summary he said: “Not hopeless, all things considered. I can still stand erect and I look as good as any of the others ten years younger than me.”

Then came the doubts: “Did the tie fiasco have any real significance? I mean, was it a premonition, a signal that disintegration really is speeding up?” The question was so unsettling that he remained for some moments staring into the mirror, and the more intently he studied himself, the more frightened he became, so much so that he telephoned President Armitage and asked to be excused from the morning meeting: “I’m a bit queasy, not in top form. I need fresh air.”

As he prepared to leave his quarters he chanced to see himself once more in the mirror, and with a brusque wave of his hand he obliterated the image: I’m as good as I have a right to expect, and with that he ripped off the offending tie, cast aside his dress shirt, kicked off his black trousers and dress shoes and dressed instead in what he called his “African gear,” stout bush shoes, heavy twill khaki pants, rough shirt, English-style scarf and wide-brimmed felt hat. In this garb he stepped briskly from his room, strode to the elevator and descended to the ground level, pleased that he did not encounter anyone to whom he must explain what he was doing.

As he left Gateways and started for what used to be his beloved savanna the noisy gulls began to gather in the air. Soon, realizing that
St. Près was bringing them no food, the angry gulls began to chastise him, screaming through the air and diving almost on his safari hat.

Two of the swift gulls came very low from two different directions, streamlined forms so like those of the Japanese suicide planes that had tried to sink his cruiser at Okinawa. The kamikazes, cheaply built airplanes carrying unbelievably large cargoes of explosive, were piloted by fearless young men whose job it was to seek out the American warships and dive directly into them, destroying their plane, themselves and the enemy ship. So many had attacked his ship that hectic morning that now the sky became filled not with seagulls but with screaming Japanese warplanes, and he was again in uniform, fighting the enemy.

One bird, infuriated by St. Près’s empty hands, wheeled in the sky and flew directly back at him, head-on, and his motions were so like those of a kamikaze that Richard cried: “It’s him! The one who nearly sank us!” and he clenched his fists as if once again activating the antiaircraft guns on his cruiser. The suicide pilot seemed immortal, for he continued his dive through an aerial carpet of flak, on and on, coming ever closer to Richard’s ship. But at the crucial moment, bullets from the cruiser struck the plane and aborted the dive, so that in a flash the kamikaze whirled by overhead, missing the ship and exploding in the sea beyond.

In the fatal second as the airplane missed its mark, St. Près caught a glimpse of the Japanese pilot, a boy of about seventeen, as he fell into the sea, having accomplished nothing. Waving his right hand at the fiery gull, St. Près ended in a reverent salute to the young pilot who had come so close to destroying the cruiser.

He was now at the edge of that portion of the former savanna that resembled those portions of Africa that had most deeply affected him, the great veldts south of the Congo. Staring at the scarred land from which all growing things had been erased, he visualized once more that reach of spiny shrub, berried bushes and scrub trees in which he had so often trekked, and as he saw these forms rising like gray-green ghosts from the barren land he recalled those hectic, harried days in which he had won his civilian medals, from President Truman this time, as a rather young chief of mission at an American consular post in one of the minor African states that had been carved out of the former Belgian possessions neighboring the Congo River.