Recessional: A Novel (43 page)

Felicita Jiménez, who had happy memories of the gala weddings in Colombia, took charge, with the approval of the other women, of how the marriage should be honored: “It’s got to be held here in our recreation room. After all, it’s a Palms affair, they met here and
courted under our very noses. That’s decided.” And she allowed neither the prospective bride nor the groom even to suggest an alternative: “We’ll give them a wedding they’ll cherish the rest of their lives.”

She appointed a flower committee, a music committee and a refreshments team. She wheedled eighty dollars from Miss Foxworth and appointed a committee of three, headed by Senator Raborn’s wife, to organize showers for the bride. Sentiment in favor of the marriage was so unanimous that gifts of considerable value were contributed.

And then came the problem of who would perform the actual ceremony. Felicita assumed it would be Reverend Quade, who was not only willing but eager to do so, for early on she had identified Lurline White as a superior girl: “I would feel privileged to help launch her into her new and exciting life. I see rocky times ahead in even a perfect white-black wedding, so let’s all give it our most heartfelt sanction.” Felicita was relieved that Mrs. Quade felt that way.

But Luther upset everything: “I’d like to have Judge Noble in the ceremony. He’s an honored gentleman and it would be proper.” As soon as this preference became known, hidden animosities surfaced: “You’d think he’d be proud to have a distinguished minister like Helen Quade perform the ceremony. Anyway, is Judge Noble qualified to do it?”

Felicita Jiménez was both vocal and loud: “Isn’t it the woman’s right to select the priest for her wedding? Comes once in a lifetime. It’s the girl’s prerogative, and I think it’s disgraceful that a man should try to give orders even before the wedding starts. It’s a bad omen, believe me.”

When Reverend Quade heard of the fracas, she did what her friends would have expected: “I understand Luther is a fine young man, a proud one, and if he feels that it would be proper for a fellow black to officiate, it’s no problem with me. I get far too many weddings and burials as it is.”

But when Luther heard that Reverend Quade was withdrawing he was aghast: “Hey! I didn’t mean Noble should perform it alone. I meant he should be in on the deal. I saw on television where a rabbi and a Catholic priest married a young couple. Side by side. Why couldn’t we do the same?”

When this suggestion was circulated, even the most skeptical applauded: “Just the way it should be. We don’t have two better residents than Helen Quade and Lincoln Noble, or two nicer young
people than Lurline and Luther.” Judge Noble, when approached by friends, said publicly he would be honored to stand beside Reverend Quade on such a joyous occasion.

A few newspapers along the west coast reported on the forthcoming wedding, playing up the oddity of a black Mr. Black marrying a white Miss White, and television crews sought permission to attend the ceremonies. One male columnist at the Tampa paper submitted an essay for the Op-Ed page:

I’ve lived to see the whole circle. When I was a student in Haverford College in suburban Philadelphia a beautiful young woman named Foot married a young man named Hand, and the papers reported: “They were bound. Hand and Foot.” Tomorrow our column might read: “God intended them to be joined, Black and White.”

In this swell of amity, the wedding was solemnized in the recreation room with fellow cooks, white and black, attending Luther, and fellow waitresses, also of mixed color, coming down the improvised aisle as bridesmaids. Before the far wall the two officials waited, Helen Quade as tall and dignified as ever, Judge Noble stately and solemn. They had agreed upon an eclectic ceremony with passages from the lovely Episcopalian ritual, others from the legal rites performed by justices of the peace, and a reading from Kahlil Gibran. A choir of nurses from Health sang Negro spirituals, and those couples from Gateways who were fortunate enough to have survived together into their seventies or even eighties held hands and fought back the tears.

Dr. Zorn, who had insisted upon serving as Luther’s best man, chanced to look across the crowd to where Betsy was dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief and he thought: I want to be sitting with her, and his own eyes misted over.

For some weeks in the late summer, Dr. Zorn had noticed that Nurse Varney appeared listless in the late afternoons as if overcome with fatigue. Since he knew from close observation that she was not performing any more tasks at the Palms than before, he had to conclude that she must be moonlighting at a second job. He could not believe that she was doing this only to augment her salary, for she was being paid top dollar for her important contribution, but he did not dare
ask lest she take offense. He was all too aware that she was, as Ken Krenek had once stated, the most valuable person in their operation.

So although Zorn was reluctant to query his nurse about a possible second job, he felt he should know what was happening because it could impair her work at the Palms. One morning, with trepidation, he asked in a carefully casual tone: “Are you getting enough sleep, Nora? I’m worried about you,” and she knew he had spotted the change in her appearance. At first she denied there were any problems, but when on the second day he said: “I want Dr. Farquhar to take a look at you,” she could no longer keep her secret.

“I have obligations.”

“Your major obligation is here. You must report here fully rested, it’s only fair to us.”

Firmly but not contentiously she said: “Maybe my obligations there are as important as those here,” but when she saw him stiffen at this rebuff, she regretted her curt response and said tentatively: “I think maybe you’ll understand. I think you have heart as well as brains.”

“Understand what?”

“Could you spare half an hour? Right now?”

“For you, yes. Of course.”

Taking her car they left the Palms, drove east along 117th Street, turned left on Superhighway 78, crossed the bridge, drove through the cypress swamp and into the southern reaches of Tampa. Dodging down side streets, she took him into a jumble of broken-down warehouses intermixed with mean culs-de-sac lined with obviously empty three-story houses whose windows had been broken and front doors ripped off for firewood.

“What is this?” Zorn asked, and Nora replied: “End of the world, gateway to hell.” And as she pulled up to a curb she offered a solemn confession: “This is where I’ve been spending my nights.” Knocking on a half-broken door, she said: “The other side of medical practice.”

The door opened and a surly woman dressed in a heavy man’s sweater led them up rickety stairs with frayed carpeting. She took them to a tiny room on the third floor, and from the moment she kicked open the door without knocking, Zorn saw all he needed to know about that room: from the facing wall two large areas of plaster had worked loose from the laths and fallen to the floor, making the wretched room look even more desolate and forbidding.

On a cheap metal bed in the far corner of the room, jammed in
beside the lone window, lay a very tall, emaciated young black man who once must have been handsome, for he had a face with strong chiseled features and deep-set glowing dark eyes. Even in his present condition he looked as if he could have been an athlete.

Against his better judgment, Andy Zorn again became a doctor, for automatically he leaned down to take the stricken man’s pulse: “Is it what I think it is?”

“Yes, AIDS,” the young man whispered. At this terrible word Zorn drew back because, coming from those withered lips, it sounded doubly horrible. Nora explained: “Jaqmeel is my nephew, my brother’s boy. Basketball scholarship to the university at Gainesville. And this happens.” She elbowed Zorn aside and took the young man’s hand.

Zorn asked: “Are you pretty good at the game? I should think you might be, with your height and all.” He used the present tense purposely, as if there were a chance that Jaqmeel might one day miraculously recover and play again.

“Fair.”

His aunt could not accept this depreciation of his ability. Taking from her purse a carefully folded clipping from a sports page, she showed Zorn a full-length photograph of a six-foot-four university basketball player in a uniform that displayed his two hundred and twenty pounds of aggressive muscle: “He was the star. What they call the point guard, rather big for that job, but very quick in his movements.”

Zorn had the grace not to gasp at the horrendous difference between the photo and the figure huddled on the bed. The first was a giant oak tree, the second a shriveled reed. Nora, eager to have Dr. Zorn understand how extraordinary her nephew was, used basketball jargon she had picked up from him: “With him so tall and strong in those days, he made himself a master of the in-your-face slam dunk,” and this made Jaqmeel smile wanly. Then he said: “I’m nothing now,” with such grim finality that the doctor shivered. In an awkward effort to maintain a conversational tone Zorn asked: “How far did you get toward your degree?”

“It was mostly basketball.”

Again his aunt would not allow such an evaluation to stand: “Two years of excellent work, mostly A’s and B’s. His professor told me Jaqmeel could go on for a master’s.”

“In what?”

The emaciated young man, not eager to relive his days of glory, mumbled: “He thought I could go into college teaching. Black history.”

Admiringly his aunt said: “Jaqmeel could do it. He speaks well, none of that ‘all peoples gots’ that you teased me for,” and Zorn could see from the way she looked at the young man that she loved him and had marked him as the member of the family who would really make it in the white man’s world. To her, his loss would be tragic.

Dismissing somber thoughts, he again became a doctor, “First thing we must do,” he said brightly, “is get you out of this dump.” Turning to Nora, he asked: “Where can we take him? Don’t worry about the money. Something can be arranged.”

“No one will take him,” Nora said. “Even if you have the money.”

Zorn could not accept this: “There must be something available. This is the United States. We don’t throw people into the streets—or into places like this.” He took it upon himself to call downstairs: “Ma’am, can you give me some help?” and when the frowsy woman climbed protestingly to the third floor, he asked: “Could you tell me if there’s a place with medical care that we can take this young man?”

“There ain’t any.”

“There must be, in a civilized place like Tampa.”

The woman looked at Nora, then shrugged her shoulders: “There is one place, but it costs money.”

“Money we have,” Zorn snapped, and the women started whispering.

“Why the whispering?” the body on the bed cried weakly. “Whatever it is, I can take it.”

“It’s a hospice,” the woman said harshly. “Where they take people to die.”

“I’m ready to go,” the wasted young man said with no touch of bravado. He was nearing the end and knew it. “Let’s get on with it.”

When Nora nodded, Zorn lifted the man in his arms, and the woman running the place grabbed the bedsheets, which she was obviously afraid Nora might steal. Zorn’s labor down the stairs was too easy: This man weighs practically nothing! How could he have been a rough-house basketball player of well over two hundred pounds? Studying the young athlete’s face he clearly saw a look of unimpaired exceptional intelligence, and from that moment he accepted responsibility for Jaqmeel’s existence as long as the frail body could stay alive.

As they loaded him into Nora’s car, Zorn noticed that a curious-looking couple—a dumpy woman about five feet tall, and a scarecrow of a man a foot taller—stood across the dirt-filled road photographing everything happening at the hovel. Returning to the landlady, he asked: “Who are they?” and she said with obvious bitterness: “The morals police. They photograph everyone who enters or leaves my house.”

“Why?”

“They want to be sure that anyone inside dies in the proper way. None of that Kevorkian stuff like out in Michigan. Helping dead-enders to commit suicide.” Placing her right thumb to her nose, she threw them an indecent gesture before slamming the door.

The hospice to which they drove, Angel of Mercy, occupied a respectable three-story house in a reasonably decent part of Tampa, and its manager was no frowsy beldame in a man’s sweater. Mrs. Angelotti was a middle-aged Italian woman who with her husband, Tommaso, operated one of the few havens for people with AIDS in this city, where the disease was not yet rampant. They all stood on the porch while Nora explained that they were rescuing her nephew from a situation so abominable that no stricken man should end his days there, and they were sympathetic when Nora said: “I didn’t want him to come to you, where he’s supposed to die. It doesn’t seem right.”

“It isn’t right!” Mrs. Angelotti said. “But this is how it is.”

“Can you direct us to any other place where he’d have a chance of getting round-the-clock care?” Dr. Zorn asked.

“We have no such places. Be glad you found us. I give these men loving care. In their dying breath they thank us, all of them, rich or poor, because we seem to be the only ones who give a damn.”

“Can he get a doctor’s care with you?”

“Most doctors don’t like to come here. What’s the profit to them? And I don’t mean money. Some of them are generous about that. But if they come here they run the risk of contracting AIDS, and besides, they have no real chance of curing the young men anyway. So it’s a no-win proposition. It’s the goodness of my husband that makes this place possible. One day a couple of years ago, he got real mad and said: ‘We can’t let them die like dogs.’ You should see some of the places these men have to go for their last days.”

“We saw one of them.” Zorn said. “That’s why we’re here.” He had not yet entered the hospice, but now, forced to accept the fact
that there was no alternative, he wanted to satisfy himself that the Angel of Mercy was a proper refuge: “Could we please see your place? Then we can decide.” Mrs. Angelotti looked at him and shook her head as if she could not believe his innocence: “Doctor, not many couples are brave enough to run a hospice, so it’s leave him here or lug him back to some foul hole in the wall. You haven’t a lot of options, you know.”