Recessional: A Novel (37 page)

When they reached the man’s room they found a big placid fellow staring out the window at birds. They stayed only a short while and outside his door Mrs. Umlauf said: “The floor above isn’t like this one at all. Up there hope does not exist. It can be cruel. Do you still want to try it?”

“Yes,” Betsy said with no bravado. “The more I see, the better I’ll understand things,” and back they went to the elevator.

The floor presented a striking incongruity: the decorations were aggressively bright as if the occupants lived in a constant state of euphoria, but the patients themselves were colorless and listless and obviously awaiting death. Betsy noticed the difference in how people here greeted Mrs. Umlauf, their tested friend, from how those below, most of whom expected to be released from Assisted Living, had greeted her.

But volunteers like Mrs. Umlauf did bring warmth and hope. She
talked intelligently with the old people and let them know that she was just about their age, but luckier in that her health was still pretty good. Also, these people could read, and watch television and enjoy music: “They especially like the afternoon talk shows when Oprah and Donahue and Sally Jesse Raphaël bring those unbelievable human beings on the screen to discuss their woes or their weird lifestyles or their defiance of accepted behavior; like the man who had been sleeping with three sisters and saw nothing wrong in it, or the woman who was lending her womb to her daughter who could not have a baby. They spent some time trying to figure that one out,” Mrs. Umlauf said. “What was the official relationship of the mother to the baby or the husband, whose sperm had been used, to his mother-in-law?”

To complete her rounds Mrs. Umlauf looked into a room that terrified her but that she felt obligated to cover. Room 312 contained one of the ugly aspects of the Palms, a very old woman stretched out on a bed with a tall mechanical gantry reaching out over her. From it was suspended a network of electrical wires, plastic feeding tubes and intravenous delivery systems sticking into her arms for the providing of chemical food substances in liquid form. The woman was obviously brain-dead, and had been since before the day of Berta’s first visit to the floor, but through the brilliance of mechanical wizardry the various functions of her body could be kept going, all except those of her brain, which had ceased functioning nearly two years earlier.

Berta went through her routine: “Can you hear me, Mrs. Carlson? Mrs. Carlson, do you want to be turned over to ease your bedsores? Mrs. Carlson, do you see my hand in front of your eyes?”

There was no response, nor would there ever be, barring the miracle of Lazarus. The harsh truth, however, was that many doctors in America, most courts, and almost all legislators hoped for a recurrence of that amazing incident when a man clearly dead rose and resumed his life. And to keep that religious faith alive, about once a year in America, a woman like Mrs. Carlson, certifiably dead for two or five or ten years, did miraculously revive and give renewed hope to those who prayed for a repetition of such a phenomenon. The caretakers on the third floor kept hoping for such marvels.

Mrs. Umlauf, who had prayed diligently for such divine deliverance in the case of her three family members, had learned not to
hope, but she did voice one wish over which she did have some control: “Do not let me or anyone I love wind up in some Room 312.”

“Why do they allow this to go on?” Betsy asked.

“The law. We’re not allowed, on this floor, ever to terminate a lifesaving procedure without legal permission, and that’s almost impossible to get. So the miracles of medicine keep life continuing, but of course it isn’t really life.” As she left the room she said: “It’s abhorrent, this place, and I cannot understand how it’s allowed to continue,” and Betsy agreed.

As Berta was about to take Betsy back to Nora’s office she was intercepted by a very young nurse who said: “Mrs. Pawling in 319 is dying and wants you to help her make one last phone call, but they won’t let her. Please come.”

When Berta and Betsy entered the room they could see that Mrs. Pawling had not long to live and they were appalled by what her problem was: “I want to phone my lawyer in a little town near Indianapolis, but they won’t let me.”

“Who won’t?”

“Nurse Grimes. All I’m allowed is local calls.”

“I’ll speak to Nurse Grimes,” Mrs. Umlauf said, but when she did, the administrator for the floor said firmly and with an obvious show of disgust: “That Pawling woman again! Her children have given strict orders, ‘No more long-distance calls.’ ”

“Can’t I ask for an exception? I’m willing to pay for the call myself.”

“No exceptions,” Grimes said. “If we did allow her to call, we’d have to pay for it. Orders.”

“Could I call downstairs?”

“Of course,” and she shoved the intercom over to her.

When Mrs. Umlauf got the central desk she said: “Delia, I want you to allow Mrs. Pawling, 319, to call Indiana. Yes, I know it’s forbidden, but charge the call to me. What? You’ve never done it before. Ask Mr. Krenek, he’ll authorize it.” When she received permission she pushed the intercom back to Nurse Grimes, who scowled so fiercely that Berta thought, as she returned to Room 319: I wonder why she bothers to work here? She could certainly get a job in a munitions factory.

When she asked Mrs. Pawling what she wanted to talk to her lawyer about, the woman whispered: “The outcome of my son-in-law’s
appeal. He’s been in jail two years.” She sighed: “I begged Elinor not to marry him, but he sweet-talked her.” When the call went through, the old woman asked feebly: “Erik, what news?” She listened, sighed again and said: “You promised that this time…” There was obviously a long explanation, at the end of which she said: “I’m sure you did your best, Erik, and if it wasn’t my own daughter I’d say, ‘Let him rot in jail,’ but she does want him out. Just like the last time.” She told him to keep trying, bade him good-night and asked Berta: “Did you pay for that call?” When Berta put up her two palms to show it was nothing, the old woman said with grief in her voice: “Thank you. To me it was important, but my son and his wife who are paying for this room despise their brother-in-law, understandably.” She started to weep, and when Berta tried to comfort her she whispered like a little child: “It’s all ending so wrong. It wasn’t meant to end this way.”

When Mrs. Umlauf delivered Betsy to Nora’s office, the nurse could see that she had been deeply moved by what she had seen on floors two and three, for she said in a subdued voice: “It was so eye-opening! When you spend your time in the luxury quarters in Gateways and dine in that handsome room, and you see the women with their Cadillacs, you get the feeling that the Palms is reserved for millionaires and the well-to-do. But all the time upstairs, and perhaps nearer to God, are these ordinary people who are struggling to stay alive. It’s really sobering.”

Nora was gratified to see Betsy’s new maturity and her empathy for the less fortunate residents. She judged that now was the time to get down to basics: “You’re in the proper frame of mind, child. And now you have to plan ahead. Three, four more months, you’re going to have to start looking around. We’ll have done all we can for you, and then it will be up to you to build a new life for yourself. I suppose your daddy has enough to support you for a while?”

“My mother left me a trust fund, and on his own account he’s not poor. But he has two other daughters, you know.”

“Why haven’t they come down to see you? It’s not so far.”

“They live in the North, Chicago and Omaha, and they were on hand right away when I was in the hospital. But yes, I can afford to look around a bit when I get home.” She paused in a manner that suggested that her plans did not involve returning to Chattanooga in a hurry: “Nora, I’ve been deeply moved by watching you, the way you affect the lives of so many people. What’s your secret?” and the black woman said: “I think you gots to love people. I mean the good
and the bad, the living and the dying. Just accept them, find out what’s eating them, and help them find an easier way. I truly likes to help peoples.”

Betsy said: “You seem to speak in two tongues. High school English when you first meet the public, then old-style black lingo like we hear in Tennessee when—What’s your rule for using polite as against down-home?”

“That would be hard to say, Miss Betsy. Maybe, the way you ask it, I get back to down-home Alabama black earth when I’m talkin’ about things that matter, like you and the rest of your life. Let’s get back to that. You think you’ll ever marry?”

“I’ve wondered about that a good deal since January and especially when spring came. April can be lovely in eastern Tennessee, and it occurred to me one rainy day when it wasn’t so nice that
before
the accident I had five or six fine young men seriously interested in me, but
after
the crash they seemed to evaporate.” She shook her head: “And those that did come around wanted to be big brothers.” She studied Nora to judge whether she should make her next statement, for it did sum up her problem but not in a very ladylike way: “Boys in high school liked to boast that they were divided into two groups, “Them as go for tits and them as cotton strictly to legs.” What could I have to offer a young man in the second category?”

Nora, who suspected correctly that what Betsy really wanted to know was “What are my chances that Dr. Zorn would ever be interested in someone like me?” knew that she ought to give an answer that would respond to the deeper question, too. Thoughtfully she said: “When you’re a nurse, like I’ve been, you stay around long enough, you see everything. And I’ve seen some of the craziest marriages God ever permitted. There was this dwarf girl in our town back in Alabama. Sweet kid about three feet six. We all wondered: “What’s gonna happen to Gracey?” And what happened to her was that she married a man nearly six feet tall, and him a white, she a black. But he’d been a missionary and was hipped on Africa.” She continued with other remarkable mismatches in which women who everyone had been sure would never land a husband had done rather well for themselves: “On the other hand, I could name just as many real beauties, you’d think they had everything in their favor, they never married, or if they did it would have been better if they didn’t. So Miss Betsy, I ain’t worryin’ my head about you. You got too much ridin’ in your favor.”

She was pleased that Betsy liked to be with her and was eager to talk about important topics; she knew it was therapeutic for her, an important part of the Palms cure, but she was not naïve about the situation. She was aware that Betsy came to see her so often in hopes that she might also catch a glimpse of Dr. Zorn and be seen by him. That, Nora said to herself, is just the way it should be, but she was vaguely perplexed as to why Betsy never spoke openly of her infatuation with the doctor. But now, at the conclusion of her illuminating tour of the other floors, Betsy was eager to speak of those things that really mattered, and she asked with amazing bluntness: “Nora, what happened in the doctor’s divorce?”

“It was a filthy business, I gather.”

“Blame on both sides?”

“Mostly hers. She resented the amount of time he spent on getting his clinic organized. She felt left behind socially, intellectually and I suppose even sexually. So she hooked up—temporarily—one-nighters—with younger men she met in bars and it all went bust.”

“How do you know so much?”

“I have a nurse friend in Chicago. I asked her.”

Betsy contemplated these answers for some moments, then asked: “You think he’ll ever marry again?”

“First four months he was here, all work and bustle, I said: ‘That one’s gun-shy,’ but since you came I’m beginning to think I was wrong.”

With disarming boldness Betsy asked: “Then you think I might have a chance?” and Nora replied: “I’ve been counting the days till you both woke up. Today, I’m glad to see, you’re finally facing up to your task.”

“That’s an odd thing to say—a task.”

“Miss Betsy, you were damaged bodily, but it was physical and in the hands of someone like Yancey you can be cured. Andy has a much worse damage, psychological, and only a person with extreme patience and love can cure him.”

“Is he as good a man as I think he is?”

“Better. He does not make wrong or shabby moves. He’s quality, but remember, he’s gun-shy.”

When Dr. Zorn had first asked Miss Foxworth to show him the confidential list of residents in Gateways whose rents had been lowered
so that they could continue living in the Palms even though their investment income had dropped, he noted one name that was vaguely familiar to him. He learned from Miss Foxworth that Harry Ingram was a seventy-two-year-old man who lived off by himself in one of the smallest and least expensive units, and she characterized him as “that dear little mouse of a man.”

Zorn, eager to understand all aspects of retiree management, felt it his duty to seek out one of what someone had called “our zeros” to see if he could guess why management had extended financial aid to him. So he asked Krenek to arrange a dining table at which he could be alone with Ingram, and when Harry arrived he found him to be quite unprepossessing: a smallish man, less than five five and weighing about a hundred and thirty-five pounds. He had gone bald at the top of his head but had trained the hair on the right side to spread sparsely over the bald spot and to remain there when held down by copious amounts of a heavy pomade. He did not like to look people in the eye, but did not stare down at the floor, as some did. He let his somewhat watery eyes wander from side to side, bringing them to rest at surprising times when he looked someone straight in the eye to make some trivial observation, which he delivered with a gravity more suited to the Gettysburg Address. When he did speak, it was with a slight British accent: “My grandfather emigrated from Scotland in 1870. He was thrown out really, bad blood in the family, and he became a remittance man in Nova Scotia, but he remained on the rolls of his home in Scotland, and always thought of himself as a Scot. When he had a son in Canada—my father, that is—he registered him at the empire office as a British citizen. But later, when my father grew tired of the cold winters he saved the money that still trickled in from home and moved to Illinois, where the weather was better and where he met a farmer’s daughter who owned a bit of land in her own name. Our name was really Ingraham, but when he entered the United States an immigration official said: ‘Now, that’s silly. If it’s pronounced Ingram, that’s the way we’ll spell it in God’s country.’ And Ingrams we became. He never went back to Scotland nor have any of us, but we celebrate Robbie Burns Day in January and we have a few Victrola records of bagpipe music, dreadful stuff.” It had been a long speech for him, so he felt no obligation to converse the rest of the evening.