Recessional: A Novel (29 page)

“They’ll be properly weighted,” he promised. “Of that I can assure you. And articulated, best in the business.”

“Are we jumping the gun a bit?” Betsy asked, and he laughed: “Mr. Yancey said he wants to hurry this one along. Says you’re a prime target for a sure, swift rehabilitation.” He smiled at her as she sat in the sunlight coming in from the pool area and asked: “Would you like to feel, right now, early in the game, how the fittings are going to enclose the space below your knees?”

“Yes, I would, very much,” and she pulled her shorts above the knees and invited him to apply the fixtures. When tightened, they felt snug, and he pointed out: “And these don’t even conform to your plaster casts. Miss Cawthorn, this is going to be a great adventure for you, and I’ll be proud to be a part of it.”

She did not share his enthusiasm, for the curious structure he placed on her right leg bore no relationship to anything human. It consisted of a big plastic cup into which her stump found a secure haven, but below it stretched what she could only think of as part of a metal skeleton, the bones of a leg without any kind of covering to make it look like a leg. The whole ended in a normal shoe, but bigger than any she had ever worn: “That’s to give stability,” the prosthetist explained. The session ended with her thinking: I’ll never adjust to anything as ugly as that. It will never be a part of me.

But the technician was a clever man, and as she left him he handed her a big glossy magazine,
Amputee Sportsmen
. When she went to
bed she started to leaf through it casually, but soon she was riveted by the photographs. Here was a handsome young man with one skeleton leg like the one she’d seen, and he was driving a golf ball off the tee and twisting his metal leg as easily as if it had been real. On the next page was a girl with her right leg missing above the knee playing basketball and delivering a sharp pass to a teammate. Amputees were hunting, driving fast cars, casting for fish and working trained field dogs. It seemed there was nothing they had to give up except perhaps swimming. She noticed that half had flesh-colored coverings over their steel structures, half did not, and also that half had lost a leg above the knee, the other half below. Upon closer checking of the magazine she made a sad discovery: there was no photograph of a sportsman with both legs gone, and her euphoria evaporated.

That night she turned to her immediate problems, and she lay awake a long time pondering the test she had failed that morning when she could not edge her left hip into the chair, and the more she thought of the problem, and analyzed the specific twists of her body she had failed to make, the more she was overtaken by a strange sensation: as she began to visualize every move she would have to make to climb into that chair, and which signals she would have to send to muscles, bones and ligaments, she could feel herself rising in the air and finding the seat she sought. And then, as she remembered the feel of the mechanical devices that would be attached to her leg stumps, she could almost will them to return to her stumps, and remain there with her new legs attached. She could feel what motions would be necessary for her to climb out of bed and walk across the floor to the bathroom, and she felt herself doing this without crutches or a four-footed walker or cane. Her rehabilitation started in those midnight moments as she visualized her cure and made it a part of her psyche to be applied later in governing her new legs and the newly strengthened muscles and ligaments that would operate them. Having enlisted her entire body and brain in this exercise, she convinced herself that it could be achieved, and she slept well.

In the morning she ate a light breakfast, telling her nurse: “Big job today. Don’t want to be waterlogged.” At the training area she told Yancey: “Help me get down on the floor and hold that chair, please.” Lying huddled on the floor, theoretically unable to do much about anything, she looked up at Yancey, and he saw that with all her energies under control, she was certain to work her way into the chair. But he told her: “Wait just a moment. There’s someone else
who ought to see your first triumph,” and he called for Dr. Zorn, who was eager to join the watchers.

Pleased by his presence, she called: “Dr. Zorn, you hold the chair rigid.” When he and Yancey had the wheelchair immobile, she crawled along the floor, directed her entire body to behave as she had visualized the night before and, almost as if lifted by some arcane power, she rose in the air. With no strain she edged her left hip a good two inches higher than required for it to clear the arm, and with a grand relaxation of her whole body she slipped easily into the chair.

“Bravo!” Andy cried. “Magnificent!” and she said with some truth: “Your being here gave me that extra strength.”

Two successive rainy days in midsummer, a rarity, left the Palms in a somber mood, so that when the tertulia assembled there was little inclination to discuss anything of significance. Raúl Jiménez, reminded of a day like this at a resort in the Colombian mountains, said: “I was fifteen, just awakening to the world outside Medellín, when the Spanish ambassador to Colombia came to the resort. He was such an imperious but impressive man, slim, erect, wearing an expensive uniform laden with medals, that I saw in him the grandeur of his homeland.”

“What effect did this have on your thinking?” Ambassador St. Près asked.

“It made me realize for the first time that I was an heir to all the greatness of Spain. I was not only a loyal
Colombiano
but also a Spaniard whose roots went far back in the history of Iberia. I was a Spaniard, something to be proud of, and the discovery changed my life—certainly my attitude toward life.”

“Did you speak to the ambassador?” St. Près asked, and Jiménez gasped: “At fifteen? Me go up and speak to an official like him? Never! I admired him from afar and made believe that someone like him had been my great-great-grandfather back in Spain. For me it was a noble day, one when I suddenly saw everything in a different light. I’d like to live it over again, that intensity of feeling. As we grow older we lose the capacity for such emotion, and it’s a shame.”

Senator Raborn, who had listened intently to Raúl’s story, said: “I had a day like that, and it too was in the mountains. When I was a young officer I was stationed in Peshawar, now in Pakistan, at the gateway to the Khyber Pass. I was bitterly disappointed at not being
able to see the Khyber, even more famous then than now, but I was never sent on the scouting expeditions that went into it because I was detailed to a joint British-American exploring team that was visiting three former provinces of the British Empire: Swat, Dir and Chitral. What a fantastic adventure that was! We traveled in little airplanes, rickety helicopters and Land-Rovers that broke down on the ancient mountain roads. And the natives! Their standard of living was like that of people even before the time of Christ. But what a glorious experience it was to be there among the high mountains of the Hindu Kush and the turbulent valley streams.

“We were in Chitral, talking to old-timers who had fought against the British in the siege of 1895, and one of them told me: ‘We’d have defeated the Englishmen if the Russians had given us the help they promised,’ and in that moment I caught the full meaning of the struggle that had been under way in these mountainous passes for the last two thousand years. It had been constant warfare.”

“And especially during what came to be called the Great Game in the 1740s,” St. Près said, “when England held back repeated attempts by Russia to burst through the mountains and capture India—”

“Exactly!” Raborn said. “I suddenly saw it all, and that insight has determined my attitudes on foreign policy ever since.” He smiled at Jiménez and concluded: “I’d like to have a moment of insight like that right now. To foresee what’s going to happen to the former Soviet empire. Almost the same kind of country. Swat, Dir and Chitral.”

In the lull that followed, the men looked first at St. Près and then at President Armitage, but it was the ambassador who accepted the challenge: “My story is nothing world-shaking but it’s about an emotional time for a seventeen-year-old at a summer resort on Long Island. There was going to be an end-of-season gala dance, and I was hoping that a girl of heavenly beauty—her name was Rosamund—would agree to be my date. What dreams of glory I had! But everybody else wanted to invite her, too, so my chances were not good. Then we heard that she had accepted an invitation from a smoothie from Yale, twenty-two years old with his own car, and we were heartbroken, me especially.

“But then what seemed a miracle happened. She actually came over to me—my heart was thumping, let me tell you—and said: ‘Richard, you’re one of my best friends. I wonder if you’d do me a favor about the dance on Saturday.’ I thought she was going to ask
me to take her, and I must have turned purple, but she placed her hand on my arm and said: ‘A cousin of mine is coming to town, and I wondered if you’d be real sweet and take her to the dance?’

“I mumbled, ‘Yes,’ and the cousin turned out to be drab and homely and while I was pushing her around the floor I could see Rosamund dancing with the Yalie. I was in agony.” He shook his head and said: “I’d like to have another summer like that, when everything was lived at such an intense level. Incidentally, years later I saw Rosamund and her cousin at the same summer resort, and Rosamund had gained weight and looked dumpy, but the cousin had matured into a lovely woman.” He banged on the table with his fist and repeated: “The intensity! The years pass and we lose the intensity! It’s the same in politics. I’m ashamed to say that in the last election I didn’t really care who won, Bush or Clinton.”

“Whom did you vote for?” Raborn asked, and St. Près said: “Bush. I liked Barbara better than I did Hillary.”

Henry Armitage, while listening to his friends reminisce and wondering what he could talk about that would be at all interesting, looked out the window at the rain and was swept back to another rainy day in Hartford, Connecticut: “I’d had my Ph.D. for three years and had taught at a big public university, so I was doing well. On a day much like this I applied for a major job at Trinity College, one of the best in America. In those days to get a job in Hartford was about as high as I could hope for. I reported to the building where the faculty committee was interviewing young scholars from the top universities. There were four faculty members on one side of the table and me alone on the other. When they started to question me, I seemed to become paralyzed. All the fine things I could have said about myself, like the fact that I was a serious scholar, ended as mumbled yes-no responses. When I left the interview I knew I had blown it. The letter saying I was out of the running for the job arrived three days later. They didn’t waste time on niceties.”

“Why was it so important?” Jiménez asked. “I’ve taught at six different American colleges, and if you’re a bright student with a fine professor, one school’s as good as any other. Of course, the chances of getting a great professor at Chicago or North Carolina are better than average, but I’m not sure it makes much difference.”

“Oh, it did to me! If I’d won that professorship at Trinity, I’d probably have remained in that circle of powerful private colleges and universities all my life. And ultimately I suppose I’d have been
president of one of them. Failing to gain entrance into that charmed circle at that point, I was branded as being good enough only for big public institutions and I’ve always resented the classification. It was wrong, and I brought it on myself.”

Senator Raborn sniffed at this confession: “You mean you hold schools like Wisconsin and Texas in contempt?”

“No, no! You can get a fine education in any of them. It’s just that I had hoped to spend my teaching years in one of the more rigorous schools.”

“Are you essentially a rigorous educator?” Raborn asked, and Armitage replied, in a low confessional voice: “I realize now that I wasn’t really as rigorous as I thought. Had I been I’d have nailed down that Trinity job. And when I didn’t get it, I could have gone home and written the scholarly studies I had in mind. Had I been powerfully self-motivated I could have written my books in South Podunk State Teachers College.” He stopped, fearing that he was revealing too much, then added: “But I was a good administrator. I found my level and even became a president, as I had hoped, but not at one of the great schools, the prestigious ones.”

The rain continued. The men fell silent, each recalling significant moments in the past, until Jiménez surprised the others by saying: “I wonder if women have such regrets.” He suggested that the senator invite his wife and Señora Jiménez to join them while he signaled to Reverend Quade that she too should draw up a chair.

They were now a group of seven, filling the corner of the room, and Raúl explained: “We were reminiscing about old times—about special moments when we were young men and saw things so clearly and felt so intensely.”

Raborn broke in: “And we were regretting that we no longer had such moments. Do you girls—”

“Stop right there, Stanley,” Reverend Quade said. “We do not use the word
girls
any longer to indicate mature women—”

Mrs. Raborn interrupted: “And we certainly are mature.”

“You’re acting like girls right now,” Raborn said. “Men call each other
boys
from time to time.”

“But you men determine who is given respect,” Mrs. Quade said. “You can call each other
boy
and not lose status. We have to fight for status.”

Raúl banged on the table and spoke harshly: “Ladies—”

“You can’t use that anymore, either,” the Reverend said. “It’s condescending.
The only phrase in which it’s allowable to use
lady
is ‘lady mud-wrestlers.’ For the rest, use
women
.”

Jiménez was not deterred: “You
muchachas
often ask why we
muchachos
meet together in our corner. No ladies allowed usually. It’s because we can conduct a serious conversation with an implied set of rules. Argue the idea, not the personality. Pause frequently so the other men can jump in. And control your temper. You
muchachas
disrupt orderly discourse, make it impossible.”