Recessional: A Novel (31 page)

The marine, a likable man from the New Orleans area, came over to Betsy’s chair: “I was hit by a land mine in Vietnam. Thought I’d never walk again, let alone dance and play basketball, but you can see I made it.”

“What was your secret?” Betsy asked, for her intellectual adventure with climbing into the chair had convinced her that her recovery was primarily a matter of using her brain to direct her body to perform in new ways, and the marine confirmed this. “You got to believe you can do it, and you have to visualize yourself doing it. And in the first weeks when you fall down, you have to get right back up and do it correctly.”

“Do you go around demonstrating what you can do?” Betsy asked and he said: “Yes, I work for the Veterans Administration. I earn a fair living and I have a great time showing others. That’s how I met Mr. Mallory.”

“Do you and your team ever fail?”

“One in twenty, maybe. But the losers have convinced themselves before we ever get to them they’ll never be able to do it, and they refuse to walk, just to prove they were right. We think it may be a psychological fixation that imprisons them in the first hours after the incident. It’s so powerful it can’t be overcome, so we too are powerless.” He looked at Betsy, squeezed her shoulder and said: “They tell me you don’t have any of those mental negatives.”

“For four months I did.”

“Oh my God! You wasted all that time?”

“I had to collect myself…get the pieces together. Now I’m a free woman ready for the job.”

“Ma’am, may I kiss your hand?” and as he did he whispered:
“The fight’s nine-tenths won. I’ll be back in three months and then it’s you and me doing the dancing.” He stepped back and bowed formally: “Now, Miss Tennessee, do you want to try on your new legs, and make-believe walk with me so you get the proper mental pictures right at the start?” She looked at Yancey and the prosthetist and they nodded. So for the first time in her new life, Betsy had her new legs fitted snugly to her stumps, and when she had worked her thighs back and forth to adjust what seemed like tremendous lumps immobilizing her legs, she indicated to Yancey that she was ready to try standing. But he cried: “You’re not going to stand. We’re going to hold you six inches off the floor, and you’re to imagine you’re standing. Nurse Nora, fetch that big mirror,” and when this was done the men held Betsy aloft and moved her about, feet clear of the floor, as if she were walking. In the mirror she could see that her new feet looked like feet, shod in sensible shoes. But then the experiment fell apart, for as she tried to move her legs they did not respond, and Yancey and the marine felt her go limp in their arms, so they quickly set her down. The men were afraid she might have been near fainting, but Nora said reassuringly: “This one won’t faint. What’s the matter, little queen?”

“I could not feel them. They were not a part of me. It was frightening,” but Yancey reassured her: “It often happens that way. But they were a part of you, and I’ll prove it. Stand up again,” and he and the marine brought her to her feet as he shouted across rehab to a newcomer to the room: “Dr. Zorn! Just in time to take my place. Help hold her up, I have to kneel.” When Zorn came over to his star patient and placed his right arm firmly about her waist, everyone could see that now she felt secure.

Then Yancey, on the floor and taking control of her right foot, began tapping it on the floor while the left dangled, and soon he was hammering the right foot down against the floor and mumbling in time to the rhythm of “The Blue Danube.” Finally he started shouting: “This foot belongs to Miss Betsy Cawthorn. It is the right foot of Miss Betsy, and it’s a damned good foot.”

When he rose, he stood before Betsy as he told the two men holding her to relax their grip ever so slightly…more…more…more until at last they were holding her upright merely with their fingertips, while Yancey remained alert to catch her if she should fall. When she was for all practical purposes standing alone, he gave her a tremendous smile that filled his face and ran up to his red hair: “Now, Miss Betsy, does that foot belong to you? Is it attached to the rest of
your body in any way? Are you now standing on it, full weight? Could you, just perhaps, move it forward, just an inch or so?” When she did, he gave her a huge hug, banged her right leg smartly just above the knee and announced to the hall: “This right leg now belongs to Miss Betsy Cawthorn, but we aren’t sure about the left one. We’ll test it tomorrow.” And Dr. Zorn, keeping his arm around her, lifted her back into her chair.

Yancey, the prosthetist. Betsy, Nora, Dr. Zorn, the Mallorys, their visiting marine and the woman with one leg missing had lunch together in Zorn’s office, and the talk was exclusively on the problems of rehabilitation in which prosthetic devices were used. The prosthetist said that he had studied with the great Dr. Rusk in New York, from whom he had learned that there was no movable external part of the human body that could not be replaced by a mechanical device if it was properly engineered, fitted and intelligently introduced to the user: “Providing always that the patient is intelligent enough to appreciate what he is getting and how to adjust to it.”

“Even knees?” Betsy asked, and the man said: “Yes. Not right now, but very soon we’ll have a knee that can twist and turn in every way a natural one can. Hips we have, fingers, wrists, and wonderful arms with articulated hands and fingers. And my experience has been that ten years from now, Miss Betsy, you’ll have a pair of new-generation legs that will let you perform even more miracles.”

“Why can’t I have them now?” and he said: “Because it takes geniuses, teams of them, working day and night for a decade to develop the next level of equipment. Right now we’re down here six inches off the floor. In twenty years we’ll be up there near the ceiling. Miss Betsy, before you die you’ll have legs that operate electronically on thought messages relayed from your brain to your thighs and knees, instructing them what to do next. Of that I’m sure.”

When the lunch ended after its lively exchange of ideas, the others departed, but Betsy stayed behind to talk further with Zorn: “I was surprised to see what you looked like when I arrived. I remembered you as a miracle man who had saved my life, but had no recollection at all of what you looked like. I wasn’t even sure you were real.”

Andy said, rather clumsily: “Same with me. You were a girl with mangled legs. I paid more attention to them than I did your face.” Hesitantly he added: “You’re quite beautiful, you know.”

She blushed and changed the subject. “You have a splendid place
here. Rooms are pleasant, food’s pretty good and the atmosphere is great. You should be proud.”

“Are you finding rehabilitation tedious? Yancey can be pretty relentless.”

“I’m finding it frustrating, to be honest, but not because of him. I enjoy his toughness. Brings me down to reality. But I used to be a really good tennis player, nowhere near top-drawer but I could smash that ball and run after shots. Now that will never again be possible.” Andy could see she was feeling sorry for herself, so he said something that would later amaze him: “I think most of us face tremendous defeat at some point in our lives. You’ve lost the ability to chase tennis balls. I lost my entire profession,” and he confided in her how dismal he had felt when he lost his clinic, his job and his place in the medical life of Chicago.

When he finished, they sat in silence for some time, he on one side of the table, she on the other. After their talk, a new and quite different bond seemed to bind them together, two wounded people, each in need of rehabilitation.

For Betsy, Dr. Zorn’s active part in her rehabilitation made a tremendous difference. In her drab surroundings and unimaginative therapy in Chattanooga, there had been none of the uplifting promises she heard in the Palms, no agile fellow amputees to inspire her, and no one with the enthusiastic supportiveness of Bedford Yancey, Nora and now Dr. Zorn. When it had been decided in Chattanooga that in obedience to her wishes she would be brought down to Florida and Dr. Zorn’s care, she had not dared to hope that he would take a personal interest in her recovery. That he would be in charge would be enough. Now that he had shown a deep interest in her care, she felt sure that her recovery would be quick and complete.

That afternoon she asked to be taken again to Rehab, where she asked to have her legs attached to her stumps. When they were in place, with Yancey looking on, she used two hands to grab her right leg and jerk it up and down, roughly, so that her new shoe could tap on the floor, and when she had done this for some minutes, smiling at the results, she shifted to her left leg, repeating the process, and after a thorough test she looked approvingly at Yancey and said: “It seems to belong, too, and now if you please, Maestro, a few bars of that waltz again,” and while he hummed “The Blue Danube” she shifted from thigh to thigh, tapping her new shoes and even roughly keeping time to the music.

One day Dr. Zorn was helping a newly arrived widow from Vermont move her furniture into one of the single-bedroom units on floor three of Gateways. While he was shifting pieces around in one room he overheard a young fellow from the trucking company ask an older man: “Who lives in these rooms? They must cost a bundle!” and the answer was “A bunch of used-up old geezers who sit around waiting to die.”

Andy did not rebuke the man but he was irritated by several of the words he had used that were grossly inappropriate:
Used-up?
The people I see are brimming with energy and enthusiasm. Look at Judge Noble.
Old?
The four men who sit around that table arguing certainly don’t think of themselves as old, nor are they.
Waiting to die?
The ones I know are too busy living and participating in life to waste their time brooding about death—those like Reverend Quade and her counseling work, and our women who volunteer to work with the people in Extended Care.”

All this led him to ponder a phenomenon that had been brought to his attention by Nurse Varney: “Boss, have you ever noticed how many of our people who finally die are written up in
The New York Times
because they made such important contributions?” And when she helped him compile a list he was astounded at its richness. Inspired by the three most recent clippings, he sat at his typewriter and dashed off a message for inclusion in the next edition of
Palm Fronds
, a newsletter he had initiated:

Have you noticed how many famous Americans have shared quarters with you at the Palms? The other day I listed the names of our former residents who, when they died, were written up in
The New York Times
because of their notable contributions to our national life.

Tampa is a long way from New York, but our men and women were not parochial. They had been citizens of the entire nation and were so remembered. When you read this impressive list of important people who lived among us, bear in mind that among those who live with us now are others who are just as important. We are not a bunch of has-beens or never-weres. You’ll read about us in the
Times
.

Then followed a list of eleven onetime residents whose obituaries recounted the worthy contributions they had made, including a
woman who had been a noteworthy missionary in Africa; a painter whose works had been widely shown; a general with many medals; a businessman whose operations had covered a dozen states; a newspaper editor who had fought the good fights and won two Pulitzers for doing so.

On the day
Palm Fronds
appeared in each mailbox, the four members of the tertulia could hardly wait for the evening meal for a discussion of the matter. Raúl Jiménez remonstrated as soon as he was seated: “The death of former residents is hardly a topic to be discussed at dinner,” but the others disagreed, all talking at once. Ambassador St. Près voiced the consensus: “Although it does have a touch of morbidity, that’s discounted by the lift to the spirits of those who live here. Maybe some of us
are
worth remembering.”

That led to a discussion of what criteria the
Times
probably used in deciding which deaths to memorialize and how much space to accord each. The men also wanted to know why certain obituaries started on the front page and carried over, while others did not—as, for example, Margaret Mead on front page, full page later; Edward Land full page later but no front page. Here Jiménez volunteered a suggestion: “Dr. Mead dealt with ideas, Land only with things. His invention of the Polaroid camera was a contribution, but a limited one. Her probing into primitive societies enlightened us all.” The men concluded that an editorial board probably adjudicated placement along the lines suggested by Jiménez.

Then they moved on to a somewhat macabre game: “Suppose that the four of us were in an airplane that crashed. Whose name would be featured in the headlines next day?” It was a silly game but it had the virtue of driving each player back to fundamentals: “What is a noteworthy life? How are men and women judged? Does a person have to stand for some one thing if he or she is to be noticed? Does where a person lives or operates make the difference?” The factors that led to an overall evaluation of worth seemed endless, but they were not trivial; moral, social and political priorities had to be established and defended.

President Armitage, who had been accustomed to adjudicating the competing claims of his faculty members, suggested: “Let’s take locus first. Senator Raborn was a nationwide figure of some importance. Ambassador St. Près worked in the international field, so that many Americans might not even have heard his name, whereas foreigners were familiar with him. Jiménez was certainly known worldwide
because of the ugly plight in which he was trapped. The two institutions I led were not equivalent to Harvard or Stanford, but they did play a significant role on the national stage. I’d not want to make the judgment, but if I had to, I’d incline slightly to the senator.”

Raborn demurred instantly: “Like you, Henry, I was no Borah or Vandenberg, but I was a reliable workman.” St. Près made a strong point: “When the question was posed you didn’t specify what newspaper’s headlines we were talking about. I would suppose that each of us would have exercised considerable influence in our own communities. In Miami, for example, I’d guess that they’d feature Jiménez because of his importance in the Latin countries.” Jiménez would have none of this: “Come on, we were talking about
The New York Times
, the best national paper. Let’s keep the discussion focused,” and St. Près made a profound observation: “It would depend, I think, on two things. The mood that day of the editors making the decision—‘We’ve had too many women recently’; ‘I’m fed up with the arrogance of scientists’; ‘Who the hell ever heard of Bismarck, North Dakota?’; and, equally important, ‘What kind of picture of the
Times
do we want to project?’ If they presume to be the national paper, as Raúl just said, they must show a national stance—or in my case, an international one. On those criteria I honestly believe any one of us might be eligible, depending on the mood of the board on the day after our plane crashed.”