Recessional: A Novel (59 page)

Now, safely aloft and with the gulf below him to smother his failure if it did occur, he was satisfied that his friends had done a thoroughly competent job. The engine throbbed, the wings held fast, the compass turned with the nose of the plane, the gas tank was nearly full, and the grandeur that he had sought when he launched this enterprise was at hand, so he headed far out into the gulf where the tips of waves glistened in the moonlight and silence threw a cloak about the soft rhythms of the engine, muffling its sound. He was free, aloft in the sky again as he had been decades ago when he flew for his life over the vast areas of Africa. He had been a novice then, brave and determined to aid others, and tonight he was again a beginner, recovering the skills he was afraid he had lost. How magisterial the night sky was, ahead an unbroken sweep to the hills of Mexico, behind the invisible coast of Florida, and he was a free power floating between them.

Then a careful turn on the dropped tip of the left wing and a heading back to land, with the dark sea behind and slowly the appearance of lights ahead. How deep in the experience of mankind it was to come back at night across the sea, or the desert, or the snowbound tundra and to see light in the distance and the promise of home! “How strange,” he said to himself as he headed toward the airfield and the shed that housed the plane, “that I should have come a stranger to the Palms and allowed it so quietly to creep into my heart that now I call it home. I spent so little to acquire so much! And there it is, waiting in the moonlight.”

In his euphoria he allowed himself a few bars of the gallant song the air force men had taught him in Africa, the part about living in fame or going down in flame, and his spirit soared. Winging in at the proper altitude and adjusting his flaps to serve as a brake, he descended in what seemed like a roar, touched down exactly as planned, turned slowly so as not to place strain on the outer wheel and taxied back to the crude hangar.

He was met by Senator Raborn, who greeted him with the same kind of reserve that St. Près showed as he climbed out of their plane: “I could guess what you were going to do. I had more or less planned
to do the same thing next week, if you didn’t. You wouldn’t want a lot of gawkers on a holiday staring at you if the thing went down. That wouldn’t be fair to the Palms.”

St. Près nodded as he helped push the plane back into its parking place, and when it was tied down, Raborn asked: “How did it handle? Light on the controls or heavy?”

“You know, Stanley, I haven’t much to compare it with, so I don’t know. But it flew well, and the instrument panel lighted up nicely. I think we’ve done a good job, the others and Lewandowski. I think his extreme care gave us a margin of safety.”

“So we’ll take it up publicly right after Christmas?”

“As planned,” St. Près said as he and the senator tied the plane to its wooden-stake moorings. It would have been unthinkable for the two grizzled veterans to walk back to their cars arm in arm as a gesture of their fellowship in this bizarre project, but St. Près did allow himself to say: “Stanley, I did appreciate it when…” He found the words difficult—“I mean, when there was doubt about the project…when the engine arrived and I could see that some wanted to draw back. I appreciated your vote of confidence, forthright and loudly delivered.” When Raborn said nothing, the ambassador said as they reached their cars: “An equally loud voice against…it could have come from anyone, even you….It would have destroyed the fabric…and I might have joined the nays. I’m sure you must have seen it in the Senate when the fates of some enterprises of great moment depended on the first speaker and the volume of his voice.”

“In that case the trick is to be sure who speaks first. You should have tipped me off that evening, Richard. In my committees I always organized it.” He smiled, recalling important incidents, then said as they reached their cars: “So it flies? And three days after Christmas you fly in it with the public cheering?”

“That was our plan from the start, wasn’t it?” And the two veterans of many battles said good-night.

Nora Varney, as self-appointed surrogate mother to both Dr. Zorn and Betsy Cawthorn, knew that the time had come for her to act again, so she invited the two young people to her house in Tampa for a Saturday-night dinner. They had grown so attached to Nora and so dependent on her, each in his or her own way, that they were delighted to accept.

When they reached the parking lot Andy headed for his car, but Betsy said: “No. I want to see if I can handle my own car at night,” and he said rather tentatively: “I suppose you have to start sometime.” She chided him for being a defeatist: “Yancey would have said: ‘Let’s have a go!’ and he’d have cheered me on.”

“But I feel responsible for you. Your father put you in my hands.”

“Are you ordering me not to drive?”

“I’m cautioning you to be very careful with the car.” And then he added words he immediately regretted: “We’ve seen what dangerous things cars can be.”

She pivoted on her cane and faced him: “Andy, with Yancey’s constant cheerleading, I’ve recovered a confidence I feared I’d never have again. And now I’m on a roll. So please don’t stop me,” and she kissed him.

Assisting her into her specially equipped sedan, he helped her seat herself behind the wheel and saw that she had positioned her feet in a neutral spot away from the brake pedals, which would be of no use. He then reviewed with her the clever adjustments the car manufacturers had made to the steering wheel with its brake activator, its turn signals, its improved gearshift indicator and its simplified light controls.

“This is really quite marvelous,” Betsy said to strengthen the confidence that Andy had diminished. “On the run this afternoon things went so easily. The mechanics of this world are geniuses.”

Since neither Andy nor Betsy had ever been to Nora’s, the nurse had given them a detailed map, and with this in Andy’s lap so that a dashboard light could play on it, they eased out of the parking lot and headed east toward the intersection with Route 78 and the highway into Tampa. Andy gave turning instructions well in advance, and Betsy cried: “This is a piece of cake!” as they left the main highway and eased slowly into the smaller streets that led to Nora’s. They could not imagine what they were going to see when they got there. All that Andy knew about her living arrangements was that the Palms paid her a good salary, that she was reasonably frugal, and that she had had a husband and two children, but whether they still lived with her he did not know.

As they drove through a depressed area of Tampa Betsy said: “How strange. We know Nora so well and rely on her so much, but except for this we’d never know where she lived or how. Two worlds so near, yet so far apart.” At Andy’s reply: “We don’t know how the
billionaires live either,” Betsy retorted rather sharply: “Since there aren’t so many of them, there isn’t the same obligation,” and Andy chuckled: “I like it when you fight back. Very promising signal, that.”

The house was a small, neat one in the black section of Tampa proper and appeared from the outside to be carefully tended. He helped Betsy out of the car and gave her his arm so she could negotiate the two steps leading to the small porch just as Nora opened the door to welcome them. The first thing he saw inside was a big black-and-white basketball poster showing Jaqmeel Reed, Nora’s talented nephew, full-length in uniform in those days when he had been a nationally known star. It must have been taken well before he was stricken with AIDS but Andy thought: Can you imagine it? Already carrying HIV, yet there he stands, invincible. And then the swift decline. Betsy, on Nora’s arm, saw tears in his eyes.

The ensuing conversation recalled Jaqmeel’s glory days on the basketball court and then the tragic story of his irreversible disintegration. “He didn’t decline,” Nora said. “He climbed on the white horse of death and galloped straight down the hill and over the cliff.” When they spoke in glowing terms about Dr. Leitonen, and the crucially needed work he performed so tirelessly, Betsy cried: “I’d like to meet a man with that kind of heart!” and Andy assured her: “It could be arranged. We still see him now and then.”

She was also fascinated by the shadowy figure of Pablo, the agent of death, but as they spoke of him she shivered and said: “I don’t think he should be allowed to roam.” Both Andy and Nora rebuked her, pointing out the salvation he brought to young men who were in the last stages of an inevitable, agonizing death. “Don’t they deserve a decent going away?” Nora asked and Betsy replied: “I wasn’t thinking of them. I was thinking of me. In the days following my accident the bandages about my knees were so huge and lumpy I couldn’t even close my legs, or go to the bathroom, or see any hope in the years ahead. I was in such despair that I considered suicide, a quick, painless exit. It was good that your Señor Pablo wasn’t available. I’d have been tempted and it would have been terribly wrong. Who could visualize in those dreadful days that before Thanksgiving I’d be dancing.” She shook her head: “How awful it would have been to surrender to that momentary impulse!” and Nora said flatly: “You had an option. With lost legs people have a chance to recover. But Jaqmeel—” Her unfinished sentence bespoke his unfinished life, so that tears came to Betsy’s eyes.

The two guests had noticed, when entering, that five places had been set at the table, but they had not asked who else might be coming. Now came a rapping at the door, and when Nora opened it Andy saw with pleasure that it was the Tom Scotts whom he had met at their Pelican Refuge. They looked bright and almost Christmasy, for they were bringing Nora two gift-wrapped boxes which she placed in a corner of her living room.

There was animated conversation about doings at the refuge, and the Scotts wanted to know how affairs were progressing at the Palms: “We heard the terrible news about our good friend Judge Noble, who was drowned,” Scott said and his pretty wife added: “How unfair! To have died trying to save an innocent creature—he could even have been one of our own pelicans.”

This observation caused some surprise, but Scott confirmed what his wife had said: “Yes, those birds that congregate at feeding time on our beach do roam as far north as this….I’m sorry he died this way. He was a fine judge who was done in by his friends.”

Nora absented herself from much of the conversation to attend to pots simmering on the nearby stove, for the social part of her snug home consisted of one all-purpose room, and now she announced: “Tonight I’m serving a dish my grandmother taught me to make: ‘Poor folk better learn to cook the reeblie stew,’ she used to say.”

“What could that be?” Scott asked. “Possum, maybe?”

“Chicken. Reeblies, and I’ve never heard the word since I left home, are little salted flour dumplings that you make when you rub a spicy dough real fast on a board and stringy little bits fly off. They’re so small they soak up the flavor much better than ordinary noodles, and here’s your reeblie stew.” It was delicious, a tasty chicken dish thickened with the stringlike reeblies and seasoned with just a little pepper.

When the supper was well under way, Nora, from her seat at the head of the table, rapped for attention and said: “This is like an Agatha Christie mystery. The owner of the decaying mansion says: ‘I’m sure you must have been wondering why I invited you here tonight, you four in particular.’ Well, I did it for a very special reason, one long overdue. I wanted Betsy Cawthorn to meet Gloria. Shake hands,” and although they had done so when the Scotts entered, they now shook hands again, then looked at Nora for an explanation. What she had to say, delivered in a low, almost musical voice, was so bold and unanticipated that the four listeners were stunned: “If there
has ever been a couple who ought to get married, who could be said to have been ordained by God to marry, it’s our beloved Betsy and our Doctor Andy. But each is afraid to speak, and for reasons anybody would understand. He’s afraid to risk marriage again after his first one was such a disaster, and she can’t believe any fine young man like Andy could love a girl with no legs. So they look and wonder and spar like two boxers. Well, I wanted them to see you,” she said, turning to the Scotts, “because if there ever was a couple who must have gone through mental hell before they were brave enough to get hitched, it must have been you. That took the kind of courage few peoples have.”

The two couples sat flushed with embarrassment, but she boldly plowed ahead, letting the emotional sparks fly: “The important fact about tonight is that I’ve been told by spies that Mrs. Scott is pregnant.”

This stopped the monologue, for Gloria confirmed the rumor as her husband smiled shyly, and both Betsy and Andy welcomed the break to congratulate them effusively, glad to have the spotlight shifted from themselves. Nora came to the salient point of the evening: “I don’t want to know by what gymnastic or medical miracle our boy Tom, dead from the waist down, got his wife pregnant. But there the wee thing is in her womb, and each day it grows bigger.”

The room was silent, each of the four visitors driven to an emotional frontier where darkness and indecision reigned, and sometimes a distant, flickering light. But Nora, who had connived to create just such a moment, utilized it in a brazen way: “So Betsy and Andy, your case is child’s play when compared to their case. You really don’t have no problem, two healthy, normal people, bar a couple of legs.”

This was such a brash way of putting it that all four listeners had to laugh, a reaction that Nora had hoped for, and this gave her the courage to move on to her next point, the burden of the affair. “So, Betsy, the ball is in your court. You wonder if you can ever have a normal life, babies and all. You can, the Scotts prove it. And you wonder if Andy will ever muster enough nerve to ask you to marry him. He won’t, he been badly scarred by his first disaster, takes the whole blame on hisself.” The nostalgic effect of cooking a reeblie stew again after some years and her mixing in the lives of two couples were causing Nora to revert to more black dialect than she usually employed, but it made her observations sound more basic.