Recessional: A Novel (5 page)

Zorn, who had ample cause to believe what the Tennessee doctor was saying, asked: “What would you have done in my case?”

“Just what you did, but then fled. Given my name to nobody. Kept my mouth shut about the entire affair and allowed no one to make me a hero. Did you give your name to our people when the paramedics brought you and the girl here?”

“No.”

“I’m going to forget you even gave it to me. How about the young man with your car?”

“I certainly didn’t give it to him.”

“But he could probably find your name among the papers in the car.”

“If he snooped.”

Dr. Zembright leaned back, studied his whiskey glass, drained it and said: “Young fellow, accept a word from an old-timer. To hell with the Good Samaritan stuff. Protect your own ass and hope the patient lives. I’m cleared. If the girl’s family tries to sue me, I can claim ‘Some horse’s ass screwed her legs up at the site.’ I’m home free.”

Zorn smiled ruefully: “I was in obstetrics. Two baseless malpractice suits were brought against me by a lawyer who was splitting jury awards with the family. I gave up my practice because I couldn’t accept the lies and perjury and the persecutions. Now I’m heading for a nonmedical job in—”

“Don’t tell me where!” Zembright interjected quickly. “The less I know about you the better. You never touched the girl. You never brought her here. You never saw me, and I sure as hell never saw you. Another shot?”

“One was too many.” As Zorn left the office he said to the doctor: “Help her. I was standing as far from her as I am from you now when she looked down and saw that she’d lost her legs. Things like that you remember.”

“So long. Good Samaritan.”

The older doctor’s cynical advice had a powerful effect on Zorn, who said to himself: If a specialist that old and that skilled can be worried about how society treats medical men, maybe I was smarter than I realized in easing myself out of the profession. But he could not accept what he felt to be a cheap rationalization for his impetuous departure from Chicago: “No, for better or for worse I chose a noble career and at the first signs of trouble I chickened out.”

When he returned to the site of the disaster, he stood beside his rig and pondered whether to continue southward to his new job. Suddenly
he slapped himself on the forehead: Cut this out, Zorn. Stop your whining and your indecision. I hereby swear that I’m going to make my facility the biggest moneymaker in the Taggart chain. And then, someday, maybe I’ll make myself a full-fledged doctor again.

Andy, like most northerners driving south into Florida, believed that when he left Valdosta, Georgia, he was practically in the heart of Florida, and that, in his case, Tampa would be only a few miles down the road. But when he checked his map he found that he had well over two hundred miles to go. Consequently, he drove only till nightfall, then edged off the road and slept behind his steering wheel, as in the old days, but the persistent whirring of passing cars made him dream he was back on that fatal highway west of Chattanooga. When, in real time, a brutal semi hauling behind it two immense storage tanks roared past, he woke with a cry of warning, expecting it to slide sideways along ice that wasn’t there and crash into another truck. Frightened by the violence of his reaction he told himself: I’d better get some hot food in me if I’m to drive all night with visions of disaster haunting me. After some pancakes and coffee at an all-night café, he felt better and was soon on the road again.

When he reached the outskirts of Tampa shortly after eight in the morning of January 2, he stopped for coffee and received directions to the Palms: “Keep on Route 41 right through Tampa till you hit open land followed right after by a wonderful cypress swamp—that is, if you like swamps. Cross over a small river and you come to a small town with a big mall. Keep watching for street numbers, and when you reach 117th Street, turn sharp right. Straight ahead’s your target, but take money. It ain’t cheap.”

With those helpful instructions he remained on the super-highway to the city limits of Tampa, where a welcoming sign reminded him of a joke he had heard in Chicago: “Florida is God’s waiting room.” This sign read:
YOU ARE NOW ENTERING GOD’S PARADISE. THE O’NEILL CREMATORIUM, COMPLETE SERVICES $475
.

Slowing down to assure himself that the sign was not a joke, he provoked loud honking by motorists he was blocking on their way into the city. Pulling aside and waving them on with an apologetic smile, he muttered: “Welcome indeed. They don’t hide their secrets, do they?” He was then four miles from his future home; the sky was a scintillating blue; palm trees were blowing in the light breeze; and
the blizzard off Lake Michigan was a thousand miles behind him. Saluting the attractive offer from the crematorium, he continued on to his new home.

Soon after crossing a bridge over the little river, Dr. Zorn spotted 117th Street, and with a sharp turn to the right he was able to follow the river as it wound its way westward. But he soon forgot the attractive waterway, for along the riverbank was a line of immensely tall palm trees unlike any he had seen before, not even in books. More than eighty feet tall, all were completely barren of limbs or even small branches for two thirds of their height; in that lower reach they consisted solely of slight, fragile-looking trunks standing severely erect with not a single deviation left or right. At the very top of each tree, and extending for only a few feet downward, was a green crown of typical palm fronds, but so few that they seemed like accidental dandruff atop a bald head. Below the fronds, eighty feet in the air, they sported a totally bizarre aspect, a thin whorl of jet-black dead fronds that radiated out from the trunk and parallel to the earth, giving the appearance of a ruff at the neck of some Elizabethan lady. Below this dead whorl was the weirdest feature of all, a huge crisscross tangle of weather-beaten dead fronds, gray-brown in color, like a half-oval in shape, wide at the top, narrow at the bottom, as if the tree were wearing an immense bustle built upon brown interwoven wires.

The damnedest trees I ever saw! Zorn thought as he stopped his rig to inspect them. Look at them! Naked up to the belly-button, then that huge bustle, then the necklace of black pearls, and that preposterous hairdo on top! He looked down the roadway and saw that more than a dozen other towering palms, each a duplication of the first with their crowns high in the air, marched in order, leading the way to the retirement complex in which he would be working.

“Well,” he said with a shake of his head, “with that handsome parade the place is entitled to call itself the Palms.”

A flash of red off to the left attracted his eye, and when he turned away from the palms to inspect it he saw that it was a row of strange tropical bushes that also lined the road, each about eight to ten feet tall, extremely wide and covered with copious dark green leaves decorated with generous clusters of bright red berries. What handsome bushes! Never heard of them either, he thought.

As he approached the end of the roadway he was greeted by an imposing structure built of reddish stone, a giant gateway consisting of two turreted towers from which extended a wall made of the same stone. The wall was seven feet high and appeared to encircle a substantial area of manicured lawn, in the center of which stood the single, many-cornered building of the retirement center. With that gateway and those walls it’s really a medieval fortress, Zorn thought. A man could find himself at ease in a retirement place like this. Then he found that he had overlooked a significant feature that tied the place to its home office in Chicago: into the face of the right tower had been inserted a rather small brass plate containing in cast letters almost as small as those on the wall outside Mr. Taggart’s office two austere words:
THE PALMS
.

Staring at the modest sign, Zorn said to himself: The chief doesn’t go in for conspicuous display, but then he reflected: Wait! If you consider the whole setup—trees, gate, wall—it adds up to one clear message: class—this place has class. My job will be to keep it that way, but to make it profitable.

Once through the gate he entered an oval driveway that curved first to the right, then under a porte cochere leading to the main entrance, then on to the left where another porte cochere gave entrance to the health care area, and around to the exit through the gate. The area inside the oval was meticulously landscaped, with a cluster of varicolored croton bushes near the entrance to the main building. But the effect of elegance was somewhat marred by large macadamized parking lots covering almost every other inch of available space and packed with cars, many of expensive European make.

As he tried to back his bulky tandem in what he took to be a free area for visitors, an elderly woman of erect posture and blue-white hair, neatly coiffed, exploded from the main entrance, waving her cane and shouting in a voice unexpectedly rough and bold: “Wait! Wait! That’s my parking space, young man. Get your contraption out of there!”

Startled by the fury of her attack, Zorn became confused. Instead of maneuvering his car forward and out of the restricted parking area, he continued backward, which made the infuriated woman think he was ignoring her protest. She started beating on his left front fender with her cane, shouting louder and louder: “Get out of there! Right now! Get your pile of junk out of my parking space!”

Though still disoriented by her attack, Zorn now shifted to go
forward but stepped on the gas so firmly that the tandem leaped forward as if he were trying to run the woman down. She screamed: “He’s trying to kill me!” and stepped back but continued to pound on the fender.

She was so violent that staff from the main building began running out to see what trouble she was in this time, for they had learned that the Duchess, as she was called, lived from one crisis to the next. Her room was on the ground floor overlooking the oval, and from it she could guard the choice parking slot in which she usually kept her highly polished gray Bentley. Let a delivery boy try to park there when her car was in the garage, which it was more than half the time, and she could be relied upon to rush out, beat on the boy’s car with her cane and force him to move. She also kept a sharp eye out for stray dogs that wandered into what she called My Oval, for she was its chief protector.

The first official to reach her this time was a chubby, rather nervous man in his mid-fifties who wore a three-piece business suit and an air of perpetual harassment. Running to where the Duchess was still hammering the fender, he cried in a quavering voice: “Sir!”

“I’m trying to get out,” Zorn said plaintively, “but she won’t let me.”

“And who are you?” the man asked as he tried to pull the woman away.

“Dr. Zorn. I’m sure you’ve been told—”

As soon as he heard the name, the man became obsequious: “Madam! Madam! This is our new director, Dr. Zorn!”

When the woman heard the word
doctor
it was as if an enormous lightbulb had been turned on in her mind. Her face changed from a scowl to a smile: “So—you’re the new man we heard about. Time you got here to bring some order to this dump!” She glowered again, but this time at the official who had been trying to placate her.

“I’m Kenneth Krenek, as you may have guessed,” the man said, “and this fine lady is Mrs. Francine Dart Elmore of Boston, whom we honor as the Duchess. She occupies that bay-window room there and her job is to see that things move properly in the oval. She’s a wonderful asset to this place, Doctor, and you’ll come to rely on her.”

“And don’t try any foolishness,” the woman said as she turned to head back to her room, “because under my pillow I keep a loaded revolver.”

“She does,” Mr. Krenek said. “We’ve tried to take it away, but she says—”

“If a woman lives alone on the ground floor, available to anyone who comes through that gate, she deserves a pistol and I have one. I can use it, too.”

When they were alone Krenek told the doctor where he could park his rig: “You’ll learn that your most important job in this place—that is, the one that gives you the most trouble—is how to find enough parking spaces for the residents.” With a sweep of his arm he indicated the cars wedged in everywhere. “And just as difficult, how to give everyone a spot that’s convenient to one of the doors. I’ve tried for eleven years—” Abruptly he stopped, laughed and indicated the open bay window through which the Duchess was watching them. In a voice loud enough for her to hear he warned: “Remember, if you try to take her parking space, she’ll shoot you with her little gun,” and she shouted back: “I would, too.”

When they entered the main portion of the building and were seated in Krenek’s modest office, the temporary manager said frankly: “Dr. Zorn, I want you to know that I understand you’ve been sent down here to run this place, to bring a clearer sense of mission. I’ve been the interim manager, but it was never intended that I remain so. Mr. Taggart telephoned this morning and spelled it out. You’re to be advertised as Dr. Zorn, but you’ll have no real medical duties. Your job is to be the director. I’m a great detail man, Dr. Zorn, and you can rely on me to carry out your orders. But I’m not the man to keep all the people here happy, and bring in new ones to keep the beds filled. That’ll be your job.”

“Tell me what I need to know, Krenek. The Chicago office spoke well of you, said you were invaluable, knew which buttons to push.”

Krenek blushed: “I hope they know what they’re talking about. We’ve really needed you, Dr. Zorn.” Then he said, deferentially, “Would you like a tour as we talk?”

“Great. Let’s go.”

Because Krenek had worked at the Palms since the blueprint stage, he proved to be a knowing guide: “In this main section called Gateways we have seven floors, offices occupying most of the first one, with double elevators at each end. Twenty-one spacious apartments to each of the upper floors, that’s a hundred and twenty-six apartments plus eleven single rooms tucked away on the ground
floor. If we had two occupants in each apartment, we’d have a total of two hundred and fifty-two plus the eleven singles, but actually we have only about half that number.”