The Condor Passes

by Shirley Ann Grau

  Two white-jacketed attendants were waiting outside. They had the door open almost before the wheels stopped. The Old Man’s doctor ran down the concrete ramp, hair fuzzy and greenish in the brilliant fluorescent lights.

  As Stanley watched, they wheeled and rushed off in the other direction. Look at that. First you see round faces rushing at you, then you see square backs running away.

  Lord, Lord, Stanley stared after them as they spun off like a flock of birds, curved, and disappeared inside the shadowed door. Lord, Lord, nothing like money to make the feet move. …

  Stanley selected a parking spot marked “Reserved for Superintendent” and pulled in there.

  Walking across the concrete lot, he glanced up, beyond the two-storied windows of the hospital, to the night sky. No stars yet, he thought automatically. I’ll call Vera and tell her I’ll be late.

  There was a phone just inside the entrance, you could see it through the window, a bright red lucite marker, but Stanley decided to use the one on the corner. After he’d finished talking to Vera, he stood in the shadowy chilly dark, thinking: The hospital is the only new building in town, that and the road the state paid for, the smooth concrete strip right along Main Street.

  There was nothing at all to notice in Collinsville. Small white houses with gingerbread porches and people rocking on them in the evenings, seven or eight stores with glass fronts that nobody ever seemed to wash, one bar, one ABC store, one cafe, and two gas stations, one of them also the Greyhound bus station. There weren’t any more regular trains. The only thing that happened at the railroad station was in summer when the sheds and platforms were piled high with watermelons waiting shipment.

  It was a small ugly town, but it was lucky. Lucky that the Old Man lived nearby—lucky that his daughter had devoted her life to good works.

  Stanley walked back slowly. Even this early in the evening the town was completely quiet, with only occasional house lights to show that anyone still lived along the empty streets. He passed a high hedge, snapped off a blooming twig. He was still holding it as he crossed the fluorescent-lit entrance, still sniffing it absent-mindedly as he approached the door. He stopped abruptly, looked at the flower-crusted twig. It was sweet olive, sometimes called dead-man’s bush, and carried to wakes and funerals. He tossed it away, as far as he could; it fell in the grass, and disappeared in the dull green spread. He couldn’t be the one to bring bad luck inside. He couldn’t be the one to hurry the Old Man along.

  He recognized the yellow Mercedes convertible parked directly across the entrance. The Old Man’s daughters had arrived. Stanley took a deep breath and marched in military fashion, precisely, accurately bisecting the rectangle of the door, and down the exact center of the hall.

  Dig me, man, me and my invisible uniform.

  Pity he didn’t have farther to walk, he was marching so smartly. But the Old Man’s door was no more than ten feet from the entrance.

  His suite was really a special wing of the hospital building. There was a large living room, and next to it, the bedroom. Right now the door was wide open and people were running in and out, with a loud rustle of starched cotton and a squeak of soft-soled shoes, pushing and pulling bulky equipment on rubber-tired wheels.

  They had to look busy.

  Deliberately Stanley stood in the center of the living room. People hurried back and forth around him, but nobody asked him to move. I bet me a nickel nobody asks me to move. Me that’s standing right in the way. …

  At his elbow Mr. Robert said: “Good old Stanley, I knew you’d be here.”

  Stanley thought: he’s drunk, where did he get the liquor? Then: No, that’s fear.

  “Good old faithful Stanley, how long have you been with us?”

  “Since ’46.”

  “Long time. … Well, I suppose the cardiogram will show that he blew out something else. …” He stopped, rubbing his face briskly with both hands. His skin was mottled, the color of decaying walls. “I feel the god damn hell like I was going to pass out.” He walked to the far corner of the room, stared through the polished window at the parking lot. “Is there anything to drink in the car?”

  “We came in the ambulance, sir.”

  “Look, go to the liquor store and get me a bottle of Scotch.”

  “It’s almost ten o’clock; they’re closed.”

  “Sure, sure, sure.” Mr. Robert made a pattern of fingerprints on the clear glass.

  Miss Margaret came out the bedroom; instantly Mr. Robert spun on his heel; he must have recognized her step among all others.

  “How is he?”

  Her cool even brown glance ran over Stanley, who remembered immediately that he should have straightened his tie. Her eyes touched gently on Robert, then moved off down the hall, as if she found the sight distasteful.

  “He is still with us, Robert.”

  “Thank God.”

  Wearily her brown eyes returned to him. “Don’t come apart, Robert.”

  “Look, I’m worried.”

  “We all are.”

  Miss Anna came to stand beside her. Stanley thought: They do look alike. Standing together like that, you can see the resemblance that you ordinarily miss.

  “How is he?” Robert asked.

  “You just asked me that,” Margaret said.

  “It might be different.”

  “No, Robert,” Anna said, “it’s no different.”

  Her face was a little more set, a little smoother. In the glazed reflection of the shiny walls, that perfect oval looked harsher, its mouth firmer. The wide streak of gray hair rose sharply like a crest.

  “Look,” Robert said, “how about flying him to New Orleans?”

  “There’s no reason to move him, Robert.”

  “I want to see that idiot of a doctor.”

  “You’re in no shape for that, Robert,” Anna said.

  “Come on now.” Margaret took Robert’s arm, coaxing him toward the door. She kept her arm in his, guiding him out the door. “There you are,” she said, “hop an ambulance home.”

  The thin thread of her joke snapped against the dark.

  “You don’t seem upset.” The fear in his voice was gone. He now sounded sulky.

  She patted his arm, very gently. “Robert, go home.”

  “It’s like there was you and Anna and not me at all.”

  “I’ve got enough to worry about,” Margaret said shortly, turning away. To Stanley, she said, “Just drag him home, if you have to.”

  IN THE morning when he came to work, Stanley found the broken Scotch bottle in the hall near the stairs. It had rolled under the big bombé chest, leaving behind a wide trail of gummy varnish.

  Miss Anna, Stanley thought automatically, would be furious. These floors were special; they had come from some famous house—was it Jefferson Davis or Alexander Hamilton or General Beauregard? He swept up the glass, ignored the rest of the sticky mess, and was drinking a cup of coffee in the kitchen when Vera walked in.

  “Guess what I saw?”

  “A four-headed cow or something like that?”

  “You know where Mr. Robert is?”

  “Passed out upstairs, I guess.”

  Vera looked at him, her pecan-colored eyes dancing with amusement. “Nope.”

  Beyond the wide kitchen windows the sky was filled with racing scud. Stanley squinted into it. “Vera, you remember what we called those clouds when we were kids?”

  “Yes,” she said, “bishops.”

  “Why?”

  “Just a name.”

  “They don’t look like bishops. … Where is he?”

  “The tennis courts.”

  “Lord, how’d he get down there?”

  “He’s got a tennis racket in one hand and a bottle in the other.”

  “You remember, years ago, how I carried him up here after he passed out on the court?”

  “Don’t do it again,” Vera said. “You’re not that young any more.”

  “You know the Old Man’s still
alive.”

  “The Lord takes his time,” Vera said.

  And that struck Stanley as very peculiar, because Vera wasn’t religious. He never remembered her saying anything so pious before.

  They saw Mr. Robert coming up the slope. He walked quite steadily until he stumbled into the line of tree gardenias that edged the herb garden, fell through them, and regained his balance halfway into the neat intricate low maze of green. He paused, sighted carefully on the house, and then walked directly across the garden, flattening whatever plant stood in his way.

  “There goes Mount Vernon,” Stanley said. The garden was a perfect copy of the one in Virginia. “You suppose George Washington ever staggered home like that?”

  Mr. Robert crossed the garden, skirted the last big azalea bed, and, straight and perfectly proper, climbed the steps, not even using the railing. When he opened the door, the wind pulled it away, smashing it into the wall, rattling every hanging pot on its hook.

  He did not even seem to hear the crash. “Ah, yes, good morning. Stanley and Vera, good morning.”

  He looked much worse than a night of drinking and a morning of sleeping on his own lawn. Bits of grasses, of yellow and pink flowers clung to his gray suit, like camouflage. His dark eyes were sunk way back under his cheeks. They seemed to peer over the blue-black smear of his beard, hanging on for dear life, harried by the unrelenting growth of hair.

  Hair, Stanley thought suddenly, that grows after we are dead. …

  Mr. Robert swayed very slightly in the wind. “You ever see crawfish hanging on to bait, when you pull them out the water—you ever see that? … That’s what I feel like. Nothing more nor less than that.”

  He wandered through the kitchen, hesitated a moment at the edge of the dining room, then went into the hall. He stopped, hooking one arm over the balustrade. Stanley slid silently into the room behind him.

  “I lost a bottle in here last night, Stanley, you find it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Ruin the varnish?”

  “Yes, sir.” Impatiently Stanley thought: Was he going to pass out or wasn’t he? If he’d only do one or the other.

  “Well, there goes General Beauregard’s floor and to hell with it. Get the Old Man on the phone, will you?”

  Stanley dialed the number. “It’s Miss Margaret.”

  For a moment Stanley thought he would refuse the phone, but he finally took it. His hands, Stanley noticed suddenly, were filthy, the nails black-rimmed, the whirls and pores of the skin outlined with dirt. But he sounded usual. “How you, sweetie? How’s Papa?”

  Stanley went back to his coffee.

  “You check the birds yet?” Vera asked.

  “Without the Old Man there didn’t seem any reason to.”

  “Why don’t you look?”

  “You curious? About the birds?” Stanley marched his measured butler’s step across the entrance hall, past the elevator doors—closed so firmly, like lips—and up to the double glass doors of the greenhouse.

  When he opened those doors, heavy thick air fell on him like a thing with mass and weight. He held his breath and dodged quickly through the trailing bits of green, avoiding the fleshy drooping orchid leaves.

  The birds were singing, loudly. They were fluttering in the trees, knocking off the white gardenia blooms; they were swinging on their foolish toys, they were careening wildly around the open upper reaches of their cage.

  Mr. Robert came in. “Stanley, you’re a mind reader. Bring me breakfast in there.”

  “Here?”

  “Over there, over where the Old Man sits.” He pointed to the high white wicker chair, under a curling loop of flowering bougainvillaea.

  “Yes, sir,” Stanley said. “Will you be having coffee or tea?”

  Mr. Robert didn’t hear. “Old age, it gets you. And the whole world’s changed when you weren’t looking at it.”

  He absent-mindedly began rubbing the tips of the giant fern that brushed his shoulder. “You know what’s the worst damn thing? The first gray pubic hair. That’s hell. … She should have let me talk to the Old Man, you know.”

  “Coffee or tea, sir?”

  “I wanted to talk to the Old Man. No, no, he’s resting. … They’re always there, one or the other. …”

  He spun around and walked off, head hunched against the dripping vines.

  Stanley brought both coffee and tea. It was easier than getting an answer.

  He spent the whole day stretched out between two chairs, a blue-flowered pillow propped behind his head, sleeping. He did not change, or shave. Once Stanley found him urinating on a huge ficus. “That’s what I think of the whole thing, Stanley,” he said. “Look at that funny fiddle-leaf tree, and that one over there—it’s got red veins running under the leaves. I’ve been sitting in the chair looking at it; damnedest thing. I never noticed it before. Take a leak, that’s about what they’re worth.”

  STANLEY DID NOT MIND hospitals at all. They had always seemed to him places of rest and comfort, vaguely friendly in an impersonal way, places to relax, to be taken care of. He’d learned that twenty years ago, in the army, when a hospital was the loveliest place to go, safe and secure. Best place to be. … He could tell when there’d been a big strike called—the line at sick call would be out the door and clean around the building. All the scared bastards trying not to fly. … And me, Stanley thought, I stand and watch and smile, on the inside of my face. Because it doesn’t matter to me. I’m a black man, I don’t get to play in your wars. I just get to pour drinks and swing trays for the ones that come back. …

  Stanley still liked the smell of oxygen coming out a tank. Little oily, little crisp. The way the Old Man’s room smelled right now.

  Miss Margaret said: “My father wants to give you something, Stanley. And I want you to understand exactly what it is.”

  Stanley nodded.

  “Today my father gave you two hundred acres of marsh, a part of the Bonaventura tract.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “It’s nothing now, just marks on a surveyor’s map, but if you wait five years. …”

  “I can wait,” Stanley said.

  “My father has held that land for twenty years. He was right, as usual. The interstate is going to run directly through most of the tract, and you understand what that means?”

  “Yes,” Stanley said. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Miss Margaret smiled a half smile. “I’m sure you do. My father is putting together a shopping center. Your land is the northwest corner. You should also have a sizable piece outside the area suitable for general residential development.”

  Stanley thought slowly, carefully. “That will be worth quite a bit of money.”

  Margaret smiled, briefly. “At the very least three-quarters of a million. I would imagine something around a million and a half.”

  If you’re giving me that, Stanley thought suddenly, how much are you making yourself? … Greedy, he thought, I am getting greedy. …

  Stanley said: “I don’t understand why.”

  Her smile flickered again briefly. “Because my father liked you.” (He glanced at her quickly and decided she had really used the past tense.) “Because he wants you to be free to do anything you want.”

  Stanley thought: He is paying me off. Because he expects to die.

  The Old Man said: “You know about a condor, Stanley?”

  “Yes, sir,” Stanley said. “You told me about the condor.”

  “Place for keeping gold dust.” The Old Man chuckled, a flat smile-less sound. “You keep gold dust in his feathers.”

  “Yes, sir.” Why, Stanley thought, is there a tickling at the nape of my neck, like a breeze blowing the little hairs there, when there’s no breeze?

  “And the Indians—they said he carried messages to the next world. They’d fill the quills with gold dust and bury them with the dead; that way the spirit would always have money.”

  He’s looking at me, Stanley thought. Me, the big black bird.
Where you going to put the gold, Mr. Oliver? Mr. Oliver, I ain’t got no feathers to put gold dust in. I ain’t your condor, so stop looking at me.

  “I used to see condors all the time,” the Old Man said; “forget where it was. They were always way up, way way up, riding air spirals over the mountains. Everybody would stop to watch, until they passed.”

  Then the Old Man’s hooded eyes slipped down. The rate of his breathing changed. He was asleep.

  They heard Mr. Robert come down the hall. “Hell of a fine day, isn’t it? When do you suppose it’ll stop blowing?” Loud, faintly alcoholic good cheer. Other voices answered him, a bubble of conversation and laughter.

  “He does have charm,” Margaret said. She picked up a bottle of cologne and sniffed it.

  “He’s doing better,” Robert was talking to somebody outside the door. “After all that attack was only three days ago.”

  Margaret looked straight into Stanley’s eyes and made a wry face.

  “Hey,” Robert said, “look who’s here.”

  “Ten minutes earlier and you would have found Papa awake, Robert.”

  “Hell.” Robert pushed back his hair from his forehead. “I knew I should have gotten an earlier start, but I was talking to the office.”

  Margaret opened the cologne again and sniffed it, as if she had never noticed it before. “You did? I wondered when you’d sober up enough to call in.”

  His dark skin flushed. “They said you’d taken care of everything.”

  She shrugged, closed the bottle, and put it down with a click on the glass top. Robert spun around, his heels squeaking on the vinyl floor, saying over his shoulder: “Stanley, I’ll need you to drive me to the club.”

  Stanley looked quickly at Miss Margaret. “I suppose he means the yacht club,” she said. “And maybe that’s the best place for him.” She glanced at the shadowy gray form, so thin it hardly lifted the sheets. “He’ll sleep three or four hours. Stanley, do you get the feeling today he’s keeping a secret, that he’s hiding something?”

  Outside, Mr. Robert shouted: “Stanley, come on.”

  “Go ahead,” Miss Margaret said. “Be sure to bring him back at eight.”

  STANLEY DROVE him to the yacht club. “Let’s see if I can line up a piece around here,” Mr. Robert said as he got out.