The Condor Passes

by Shirley Ann Grau

  The Old Man rubbed his nose with his crippled left hand. “Anna was asking me some questions. She was wondering about her husband, what sort of value I put on him.”

  “Why?”

  “She was considering a divorce.”

  “For God’s sake.”

  The Old Man rocked his wheelchair back and forth. The rubber tires squeaked softly. “This needs oil. I told her a divorce was impossible.”

  The bird was still flapping around in the gravel. “And that stopped her?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t believe that, Papa. She wouldn’t stop so easily.”

  The Old Man leaned back in his chair and rubbed his paralyzed hand. “These things go on aching. … Anna is not getting a divorce.”

  “What did that cost you?”

  The Old Man sighed. “Too bad you were not a man, you are very astute.”

  “Come on, tell me how you bought off Anna. How much?”

  The Old Man stared at his hand as if he had never seen it before. “For me, nothing. Only a change in my will.”

  Margaret said: “What change did Anna insist on having?”

  “Robert’s share now goes into a trust managed by you and Anna.”

  Margaret turned around, leaving the darkening garden. “That’s almost everything, Papa. Robert has very little in his own name.”

  The Old Man nodded. “The fund is to be dispensed completely at your discretion.”

  “Anna drove a hell of a bargain—and you sure sold him out.”

  “Yes,” the Old Man said.

  “And you kept him around here. …” Margaret stared into her father’s pale face and wondered again how they could be related. “Robert know any of this?”

  “No,” the Old Man said. “But when he finds out I will be dead.”

  “So you won’t care. … You know what Anna will do once she has control of the money?”

  “You will be there. You can take care of him.”

  “Not me.”

  “Yes, you will.” The Old Man smiled his crooked smile. “We both love him.”

  “Shit,” Margaret said.

  MARGARET CALLED her pilot. “We’re going to Collinsville right now.”

  “Ma’am?” His resonant Texas voice rattled over the wires: “The lead-in lights aren’t adequate for night approaches. If we found a pocket of fog, it could be very dangerous.”

  She clucked in annoyance. “Is there anywhere you can go?”

  “Yes, ma’am, at Pensacola—”

  “Okay,” she interrupted, “let’s go.”

  At Pensacola she rented a car for the rest of the trip.

  Traffic was heavy; she swung around oil trucks and big semis, pounding her horn. She shaved across fenders, occasionally ran along the dusty shoulder, blinking into a steady line of headlights. Finally the traffic lessened; for the last two hours the roads were completely empty, with only the thin night shadows of pines flicking by on both sides of her.

  As she unlocked the entrance gates, she heard the distant pack. Half a mile along the narrow winding road she saw them: a flood of brown-and-white bodies across her way. Robert’s hounds were out again, the wind in their teeth. Before morning they would probably ruin Anna’s new gardens. They loved the loose soil.

  Wearily, she turned off the main estate road and drove along a smaller one, hardly more than a cut in the sandy ground. She would tell Osgood Watkins that the pack was loose again. Palmettos scratched the sides of her car; the high sandy middle ridge bumped against the undercarriage. A deer leaped directly in front of her headlights. She jammed on her brakes, skidded up a side slope, bounced and hopped, and landed back on the road again.

  I’ll hit the next deer, she thought, before I get stuck in the sand out here with the pine rattlers.

  There were no more deer and the night-blackened pines ended at the Watkins clearing. Her headlights pulled it from the empty night, fence and white-painted house, lightless and sleeping. She blew her horn and leaned out the window to listen. At first, silence, then the strangled hasty barking of Watkins’s house dogs as they tumbled off the porch and raced toward the fence. They crowded the front gate, yelping and throwing themselves straight into the air.

  Osgood Watkins stumbled out, barefooted, shotgun in his hand. The dogs ignored his shouted commands. He kicked at them, remembered he was bootless, put his shotgun on the ground, grabbed one dog, and threw it into the pack. He picked up a second and tossed it the same way. The dogs retreated, yelping, under the porch. Margaret could see them jumping about, snapping at each other.

  Watkins bent to pick up his shotgun. Margaret walked to the fence, the sandy ground sifting into her shoes.

  “Watkins,” Margaret said, “the pack’s out again.”

  He nodded. Against the white of his T-shirt, his skin was perfectly black. “Hard to keep ’em in sometimes.”

  “Watch the gardens, will you?”

  “It’s the moon,” Watkins said. “I’ll get ’em locked up again.”

  “Just so long as we save my sister’s precious gardens.”

  THE MAIN house was gray and sprawling and silent. Inside its massed shape, only a few lamps burned—but the gardens were fully lighted. The Old Man liked to see in all directions at night, and even when he was in New Orleans, the lights here followed his wishes.

  Margaret circled the house, following the flagstone path—her key was for the front door. As she climbed the steps, something caught her eye. Not a movement. Not a sound. A sense that someone was there. A sense of another presence.

  “Who’s there?”

  A pause. She was just getting ready to repeat the question when Joshua said, “Well, Mother, you really spoiled that one.”

  She squinted into the profusion of lights that only seemed to create bottomless spots of darkness. “My night vision is terrible, Joshua. You’ll have to come out.”

  Even as she said that she saw him, sitting under the big azalea bush. “Whatever are you doing under the bushes in the middle of the night?”

  “Meditating.”

  She heard just a little hesitation in his voice, a little shame. He does know better, she thought.

  “In the lotus position,” he said as he came to the steps. “I was perfecting it.”

  “I’ve seen the pictures,” Margaret said, “and I seem to remember Buddha sitting under some kind of tree, but I’m sure it wasn’t an azalea.”

  “Of course it wasn’t, Mother, but the spirit is there.”

  “Oh, sure,” Margaret said, “spirit is the big thing.”

  “Mother, I want to ask you something.”

  “Why I came walking in at midnight?”

  “Huh? … No.” His thin face looked puzzled; he’d found nothing strange in that at all. “Mother, very seriously, I want to talk to you.”

  “About your plans.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

  “You have a long range plan.”

  “Mother, I think it is possible to apply the mysticism of Dr. Schweitzer—removing the racism of course—to the practical problems of a lost society.”

  “Joshua”—she stared at the tall young man, thinking: I gave him too many vitamins—“I haven’t the god damnedest idea what you are talking about.”

  “Oh, Mother, you make everything sound so cheap and horrible.” Joshua disappeared into the night.

  When Margaret was quite sure he was not coming back, she unlocked the big oak door.

  She went directly upstairs, thinking: The whole house smells of potpourri; Anna keeps it all around, all those funny dry petals. … For something dry and dead, it smells so fresh. …

  She knocked on Anna’s door, watched the light come on under the crack, pushed it open.

  “Morning,” she said.

  “For heaven’s sake.” Anna was sitting upright in bed, her oval face misty with sleep, her long black hair hanging straight down her back, unruffled even in her sleep. Perfectly straight black hair with a single streak of
gray over the left temple.

  “Is that gray real or did you put it there?”

  “What?”

  “Is it real?”

  “Of course it’s real.”

  “I didn’t know. … You look like something out of a movie right now.” The ruffled white linens, the pale blue blanket, the white nightgown with its square neck and long sleeves. … Margaret thought: I bet if I looked closely I’d see that everything is covered with some sort of expensive lace or embroidery. Conservative elegance, that’s Anna. Theatrical conservative. What’s mine? Sort of scrubby. Like my hair. And my round dago face. I look like the balls on a sour-gum tree, round and prickly. …

  “Did you come all the way out to tell me that?”

  “No,” Margaret said.

  “I’m sorry if I’m dense.” Anna smoothed down the unrumpled sheet automatically. “But when did you get here? I didn’t know you were coming.”

  “I just walked in this minute. I stopped to tell Watkins that the damn hounds are loose again. And I found Joshua sitting cross-legged being Buddha.”

  Anna’s fingers went right on smoothing the edge of the sheet. “I suppose Watkins will have sense enough to watch the gardens. … Joshua has some elaborate future plans. He’s put in quite a lot of thought and he wants to talk to you. Do you mind?”

  “Mind?” Margaret stared into the shadowy corners of the room. This house, she thought, was always dark. There were hundreds of lamps but nobody ever seemed to turn them all on, so that nights always hung around the edges and the corners. Anna liked it that way. “No, I don’t mind. How can I?”

  “He’s quite serious.” Anna’s fingers finished with the sheet and moved to the ruffled edge. Her fingers pleated it steadily, crawling inch after inch, across the top of the bed.

  “I didn’t come all this way to talk about Joshua.”

  I’d feel better, Margaret thought, if the whole thing didn’t look so unreal. I can almost hear the background music. Anna goes around building stage sets and then lives in them. …

  “Papa said Robert decided to tell all.”

  Anna’s fingers stopped moving. They lay on the ruffles, slim and smooth and delicate olive. “Papa ought not to have done that.”

  “And he told me about your bargain.”

  The hands folded, fingers lying on top of fingers. For comfort? For strength?

  Anna said: “It wasn’t really a surprise to me after I thought about it.”

  Margaret waited. Thinking: I’ll drive back tonight. I can hardly wait to get to the car.

  “You see, Robert has had so many women, I’m not really surprised if he has one more.”

  “Well, he’s got one less.” Ought to tell her about Bertucci standing at the door, ought to tell her. But I won’t. “I drove all this way to apologize.”

  “That isn’t necessary.” Anna’s voice was light and dry. Completely without emotion. “I know Robert. No matter how much he has, it isn’t enough. Not ever enough.”

  “Well, for me it is. It’s finished.”

  “Would it have been finished if Papa hadn’t told you?”

  Margaret hesitated, startled. Was there a hint of malice under that smooth skin?

  “You answer that yourself,” Margaret said.

  “Papa is so very fond of him.”

  “I know, like a son. … Well, look, I apologize and I’m sorry, and I’m going home now.”

  Margaret had reached the door when Anna said: “Don’t worry about it. It’s all in the family.”

  All the way back Margaret drove as fast as she could, fleeing the following tide of that anger.

  Stanley, 1965

  IT’S ME, STANLEY, YOUR friendly guide, your humble servant, your loyal descendant of slaves. Only there seems to be some argument about that. My brother-in-law’s nephew—seventeen with an Afro haircut—he says to me: “You are a white nigger.” I expect he’d have put it stronger, but his mother was sitting right there. “A white nigger.” I just looked at him—me with my blue-black skin—and just about the only Negro thing on him is that hairdo; his skin’s no darker than any Italian. … I got to laugh at that: among whites I’m a nigger, among niggers I’m white. That’s really something now. … Maybe he didn’t approve of me, but he sure accepted the bond I posted for him on that car-stripping charge. And glad to see it. His family all came running to me because the boy was a repeater and the judge had set bail pretty high. Got me out of bed with bronchitis and 102 degrees to save their baby boy. … I’m the only one has any money, me and Vera. (She doesn’t like this kid either, but she thinks she ought to.) And you know, when I was driving down to the station, I kept thinking that this was how the Old Man must feel—people looking to him to get them out of trouble, people demanding things because they’re related. Not that I’m like the Old Man. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean that. I was just surprised to find any resemblance at all. If you know what I mean.

  NO MATTER how you look at it, this past year with the Old Man has been hard. Six, seven times—which was it?—we rushed him to the Collinsville hospital. Sirens screaming, lights flashing. And six, seven times he came back. Slow, sedate, no sirens, just silence.

  All those times dying.

  Each time, after a week or so in the hospital, he’d go back to the big house on the coast at Port Bella. It wasn’t a hard trip for him—only a little more than an hour’s slow drive. He had his own ambulance—Miss Margaret bought it a couple of years ago—it followed him from place to place, out of sight, but waiting.

  That was the way they did things. And in a way you had to admit it was practical. Because the Old Man did a lot of moving about.

  After his last coronary, when the worst was over, they flew him into the big University Hospital in New Orleans. There was a lot of talk about calcified heart valves. (Vera and I looked it up one night—funny diagrams like a child’s printing, big lopsided Y’s. Vera studied them for an hour or so, but me, I quit. I just didn’t like thinking what the Old Man’s heart looked like, all holes and rocks and scars. Vera always did have a strong stomach. Like, she could kill a chicken, and I never could do that, not even when I was a kid.) There was some talk about operating, but nothing happened except the Old Man’s ambulance brought him slowly, carefully, to his New Orleans house.

  This time was different. This time he wanted to make a couple of stops on the way home. I was driving—he liked me to drive him everywhere—and I can tell you that he knew just exactly where he wanted to go. He wasn’t senile or wandering. He had the addresses—numbers and streets—and he had them right. From the way he told them to me, you could see that he had thought them out and arranged them in order. We went all over town, first way down to Music Street, then he had to circle Gayarre Square, then out Canal Street—I guess we made a dozen stops. Not that he wanted to go in any of these places, or knew anyone there—he wanted to drive by, turning sidewise in his litter, to look at them.

  The effort of all that riding knocked him out. By the time I turned in to the drive, he was fast asleep. Exhausted. He didn’t even stir when they carried him upstairs to his own bed.

  A month later, he decided he had to go back to Port Bella.

  Now, I don’t know why that mattered to him. After all, what does he do, either place, but sit in the warm wet air of a greenhouse, talk on the telephone, and watch his birds flap around and sing in the big cage? It’s not like you could see out—you can’t, not from either greenhouse. It’s all green leaves and flower shapes, growing and hanging and sprouting in all directions. Wet leaves arching and dripping, moving slightly in their own current of air. Nothing to watch, nothing to see. Nothing to move for.

  Except the Old Man thought so. I’ll tell you one thing about these people—they don’t see things the way we do. Me, Stanley, when I stand on the front porch at Port Bella, I see a grass slope, then a little bluff that drops to the beach; I see a white edge of sand and then the water. Nothing else—oh, I see how the Gulf changes color with the cloud
s and the winds, and how the grass is a different green in different seasons. But that’s all. … Them? I don’t know what they see. … Like Miss Anna … she never even looks this way. She never comes to this porch; she never walks on the lawn here. She stays in the gardens on the other side, away from the salt spray. There’s something here she doesn’t want to see. … Mr. Robert now, he goes down to the beach occasionally. Just a couple of weeks ago, I saw him there, shouting at the empty water. He was drunk—he’s pretty much always drunk these days—but he’s not one for seeing things. I thought he sounded angry, but Vera, who was with me, said he sounded scared. Anyway we left him there; neither of us wanted any part of their ghosts or their hauntings.

  So I don’t know. Maybe, when the Old Man sits in his greenhouse and looks at the shiny leaves hanging in the thick wet air, maybe he really can see something that makes one place mean more to him than another. I don’t know.

  And something else. I think this is his last time, and I think he knows it. I think maybe that long slow drive we had around New Orleans was his funeral procession. Ambulance looks something like a hearse.

  The Condor Passes

  IT WAS A GOOD period for the Old Man, Stanley thought, all that bright summer and way into the fall. Until one Friday evening in late October. Then came the emergency signal on the intercom, the electronic shriek sounding in all rooms at once, sending everyone running to the Old Man’s room. After that it was morphine and oxygen and down the elevator and into the ambulance.

  Though there were two seats in the back, next to the litter (the Old Man had passed out and was snoring loudly), only the nurse sat there. Mr. Robert got in front with Stanley. Sweat poured down his face, in the cool night; his eyes were round and flat.

  Stanley drove fast as he dared on dark roads streaked with autumn fogs. Not once during the entire half hour, Stanley noticed, did Mr. Robert turn to look at the Old Man. He only said, over and over: “Hurry, hurry.”

  His steady rasping voice went on until they turned down Collinsville’s Main Street and in to Pine Tree Hospital.