Since the cockpit had no doors—they were optional and could be added later—St. Près, proudly sitting up straight, was free to wave to the cheering crowd before turning to attend to his job. Obtaining takeoff clearance, he released the brakes, eased back on the wheel and started his plane down the runway. Pulling back the controls, he soared into the air as nearly two hundred residents and townspeople applauded. This time he did not fly out over the gulf but kept the plane in a confined area so that its progress could be followed both by those on the ground and by those watching excitedly from their Assisted Living windows at the Palms.
Then, as the plane circled in the sky, it alternated altitudes, sometimes flying close to the heads of the watchers, at other times climbing with a steepness that startled those who knew anything about flying, then leveling off through the cloudless winter sky.
As the plane demonstrated its capabilities—and they were awesome considering how it had been built—a collective consciousness of a mind-boggling phenomenon gripped the crowd. The average age of the five builders was 79.2 years, the probable average of the spectators from the Palms was seventy-four, but as the spectators saw the plane that they, in a sense, had built and realized that the pilot was one year short of eighty, a surge of enormous pride engulfed them. They had done it! These elderly men whom many outside the Palms would have deemed too old to accomplish much of anything, had built an airplane just as they said they would, and had flown it to celebrate the beginning of the new year.
This remarkable achievement buoyed up all the watchers. Look! He’s buzzing the field to salute us! And a roar went up—a carefully modulated roar, since the voices were so old and many of them cracked—and the crowd edged forward to see how the ambassador would end this historic flight, but he confused them by flying far to the south, turning in a big circle, taking another complete circle and then activating an ingenious device that Maxim Lewandowski had contrived. When St. Près released a catch, a long bundle trailed from the rear of the plane and unfolded in the wind to reveal a large white banner. As the plane dragged it overhead the spectators could read RAÚL Y FELICITA. This display brought no roar of approval, only the silent salute of the Jiménezes’ friends to mark their passing.
His job done, St. Près flew his aircraft to the far end of the field and checked the windsock, then landed it perfectly and taxied it back to the starting point while cheering people crowded forward to congratulate him. That evening when the tertulia, with Lewandowski as an honored guest, convened, the dominant question was: ‘What do we do with the plane now?’ and President Armitage had a ready answer: ‘Let’s give it to one of the industrial high schools. The sooner their mechanics learn about planes the better.’ The men investigated various schools till they found a junior college with a shop foreman who already had his small-plane license. In the months to come, the Palms residents would occasionally see the plane in the skies above the palm trees, and some would think of Ambassador St. Près and others of Raúl Jiménez.
On his last day at the Palms, Andy rose early, walked through all the corridors of all the buildings bidding farewell to the workers who had supported him so energetically and who had seen the rooms filled to 96 percent occupancy. Together they had converted a marginal operation into a minor gold mine, and they were proud. He could see that although they restrained themselves they were sorry to see him go and angered by the reasons that had driven him away.
‘Good luck in Tennessee!’ some of the workers cried as he passed, and one or two gave him more sturdy encouragement: ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down,’ and at these words he reflected that this was the task of honorable men wherever they worked. There were adverse forces, some natural like hurricanes, some like Clarence Hasslebrook, whose job it was to oppose men and women of goodwill. No one escaped their pressure, but strong men and women found the courage to oppose them, no matter what the cost.
‘If you run the new place the way you’ve run this,’ one woman said, ‘it’ll be a shoo-in.’
‘I want it to be,’ Andy said as he left the building and walked outside into the crisp January air, and as he did, both his lungs and his spirit expanded, for now he was back in touch with nature. True, the savanna was badly scarred, but the new plantings along the proposed roads seemed to be doing nicely, and the four small lakes did have water in them, which moved from one to another by means of little streams that a child could jump over. The individual residential buildings that would complete the Palms and ensure its financial security were nearing completion, and they did not look entirely deplorable: ‘With people in them and green grass sprouting, I suppose it’ll be almost acceptable.’ Then he laughed at himself: ‘My successor will never have seen the savanna or known what a splendid part of nature it had been. He’ll never miss it, but I’m glad that the Sheltering Hills will have trees and lakes and mountainsides that will last at least for our lifetimes. Thank you, God, for that national park and our thirteen hundred acres. If we mess that up we should be ashamed of ourselves.’
His throat choked as he came to the ruins of Judge Noble’s empty chair, rooted in concrete, and he sat on it awhile, visualizing the judge and his birds. Of course the gulls came, screaming abuse at him for not bringing food, and the white egrets and blue herons strutted by to check whether he intended fishing, then moved on in disgust. Pelicans dived in the channel, and to his delight, a late-arriving manatee moved lazily up the warm current to his regular haven.
‘I had a good year here, thanks to the birds and manatees. My regards,’ and he thought with regret: Farewell, old friends. None like you in Tennessee, and he wondered what he would find there. With those woods and mountains he was sure there would be wildlife he would find just as wonderful as the pelicans and manatees.
A short turn to the left brought him to the neglected Emerald Pool, which had so captivated him in his first days at the Palms, and here he stopped to rest on a grassy hummock overlooking the limpid water and prepared himself for the two difficult interviews he must conduct before making his departure. Feeling little hope that he could bring these matters to a successful conclusion, he rose, squared his shoulders and marched back to his office.
The first interview was with Helen Quade, and when this stately woman with a touch of grace in all she did joined him, he said pleadingly: ‘Helen, I hope you’ve reconsidered your refusal to join our team in Tennessee.’
She smiled as if she were a teacher and he a pupil, then said with quiet firmness: ‘No, Andy. I can’t go with you.’
‘Why not?’ he begged, and she said: ‘In these last few days since you proposed such a move, and with a salary attached, I’ve had to study what I believe in as a human being, not as a clergy woman, and I realize that I’m like all the others living here. I came here to organize a spiritually satisfying end to a life that has been mainly beautiful and which I shall fight like Berta Umlauf to keep that way. I trust I will have better luck than she did. But I’m like precious Raúl Jiménez, gunned down by his perpetual enemies. Or like dear Muley Duggan, caring for his wife to the end. And I’m like all the wise widows who come here quietly to assuage their grief over the loss of their husbands. Andy, I’m one of this decent, self-respecting congregation, a vital part of it, and I doubt that I could find anything as meaningful in Tennessee.’ She stopped, looked at him with tears in her eyes and said: ‘I’m in my mid-seventies, Andy, and I don’t have the energy to build a new congregation.’ She waved her hands as if erasing the unworthy thought of giving up. ‘Of course I have the energy. I’ll have the energy till the day I die, but I’ve invested years of my life in building a haven here, and here I will remain among my friends as each day we grow older and each month some of us falter, and each year some of us die. That was the great adventure I entered into years ago and with which I am now content.’
She rose, said something about wishing him and Betsy well in their new home, then asked: ‘Andy, would you allow me to say a prayer for both of us?’
‘
Please.’
‘Dear God, Andy and I have been partners in striving to bring decency and order into this special place. We’ve had triumphs and disasters, moments of great joy and tragedy, but we have prospered. Please give us additional strength to continue to do Thy work in helping the lives of our friends wind down to a conclusion that Thou would approve of, he in his new obligation in Tennessee, I still in Florida.’ As her final words passed like a whisper in the room, she took Andy’s hands, drew him to her and gave him the kiss of Christian charity. Then she slapped him soundly on the shoulder and cried: ‘Off with you. Your job here’s been completed, handsomely,’ and she started to leave, but at the door she turned and broke into a roguish chuckle: ‘They tell me Clarence Hasslebrook has rented rooms in the village next to your new retirement center.’ When Andy winced she added: ‘He is a fool, but remember, he’s also basically right. Life is sacred, and sometimes we need men like him to protect us old people.’
‘But do they need to come in the likes of Hasslebrook?’
‘God sometimes uses strange messengers to do His work. Tread softly,’ and she raised her right hand to bestow blessings on Andy and his new ventures.
His next appointment was with Bedford Yancey, his genius rehabilitator, and when the lanky Georgian entered, Zorn went right to the point: ‘Yancey, we need you in Tennessee. And you’ll have so many advantages there. New buildings, a fine gymnasium, state-of-the-art exercise machines, and more money than you can make here. What do you say?’
‘Like I said before, I can’t do it, Dr. Zorn.’
‘I still don’t understand why,’ Andy said, and he was shocked by the simplicity of the answer: ‘Tennessee may be all you say, but it has one real fault.’
‘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 belove
d 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.’
Recessional: A Novel Page 57
