Recessional: A Novel (55 page)

“I can only hope that some aspect of the majesty of life from here on out will tempt you to change your minds.”

“And you want people like Armitage and me to end our lives like Mrs. Carlson up in Extended Care? Is that the golden triumph of your teaching?”

“Senator Raborn, God plants on earth certain lives to serve as measuring sticks for the rest of us. These perplexing cases are not here by accident. He wants them to stand forth like beacons. The Down’s syndrome child that tests the extent of a family’s love. The hemophiliac boy of sixteen who contracts the HIV virus through a contaminated transfusion. Mrs. Carlson in her slow, agonizing departure from this life. They are the litmus papers that enlighten the rest of us. Mrs. Carlson ennobles this entire establishment. God is not testing you and me, He isn’t ready for us yet, but He watches how we respond to the litmus papers He has strewn about.”

Senator Raborn had been respected as a bulldog on examining witnesses who came before his various Senate committees and now he asked: “But will you—I mean of course your society—allow my living will to be executed according to the new Florida law?”

“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s. The Florida law is a temporary aberration that I hope will be corrected in due course.”

“And your group will do everything possible to revoke it?”

“Yes.”

“I agree with you, Mr. Hasslebrook,” Jiménez said. “You are a voice of reason in a troubled world.”

“I fear you’re a fanatic,” Senator Raborn said, “who will probably do much more harm than good. Keep your hands off my will, please.”

President Armitage made a curious comment as the tertulia ended: “Mr. Hasslebrook, on our first meeting, if you recall it, you impressed me as being unusually reticent and almost boorish. Tonight you’re being the sophisticated Boston lawyer. Why the change?”

“Simple, on that first night you were probing me with questions I was not prepared to answer. I had to feel my way along. Now that you know who I am, and what my mission is, I must show you the courtesy of being forthright.”

One night at dinner Judge Noble asked for the microphone and said in a voice quivering with joy: “They’re back! The manatees started north late this afternoon!”

The passage of the manatees to their warm refuge for the winter provided no breathtaking beauty like a flight of Canada geese in their sky-piercing V, and none of the exquisite charm of a snowy egret or the solemn majesty of a stately blue heron. To appreciate a manatee you had to love nature per se, and to love the ungainly creatures, as many did, you had to be just a bit off center. But many residents that first night set alarm clocks so as to be awake when morning broke and they could watch the solemn procession of these strange water creatures.

Early next morning Judge Noble was sitting in a chair with binoculars and bits of food for Rowdy, the pelican, in case he came by. But his attention and that of those who clustered around his chair with their own glasses, was on the center of the channel, where the manatees would become visible. Suddenly Ms. Oliphant, always the keenest-eyed, cried: “Here they come!” and many residents had their first sight ever of a manatee.

When one moved in close to shore, watchers saw a huge, blubbery creature about fourteen feet long with a monstrous flat tail parallel to
the surface of the water. The manatee is, in principle, much like a small whale, but the torpidity of its movement makes it unique among aquatic animals. It is a lazy, loafing beast, but its lack of mobility and easy charm make it lovable, like a worn teddy bear.

What had made it famous in sea lore was its amazing head, a large misshapen blob, and a face with a blunt nose, vast drooling mouth and whiskers that often in a certain light looked exactly like that of a careless old man who no longer shaves or tends to his appearance.

Muley Duggan, joining the group and seeing for the first time a group of manatees, shouted: “They look like fat old men in a Turkish bath!” and others agreed that he had the best simile of the day, but the Duchess brought the comparison closer to the experience of the residents when she cried: “That one looks exactly like my Uncle Jason,” and then made a correction that sounded as if it was important to her: “On my father’s side.”

As the beasts moved northward, Judge Noble explained: “They’re very partial to warm water, so you’d think they’d swim southward as cold weather creeps in. But there’s a manufacturing plant north of Tampa that pumps a good deal of warm waste water into the channel, and what they’re doing as you watch them now is locating the remnants of that warm stream and following it to its source.”

“How do they do it?” a woman asked, and the judge said: “Two theories. Either extreme sensitivity to even the slightest modification of temperature or some chemical trace deposited by the manufacturing process.”

As the morning progressed, the watchers from the Palms were witnesses to one of the tragedies of wildlife in America, for the powerboats that ranged these waters daily began to appear and pose enormous danger to the slow-moving animals. “It’s so cruel!” Noble complained. “The boats move so fast and manatees are so slow, collisions become inevitable. And the poor beasts are chopped to death.” With his binoculars he studied a manatee drifting along close to shore, and then he passed his glasses around to show how horribly sliced up the hide of the creature was. “One more hit by a speeding boat, and that one’s dead,” he told his listeners. “The carnage each year is appalling.”

“Aren’t there laws to protect them?” a man asked and Noble said: “Yes. And loyal officials to enforce them. Powerboats are to slow down and stay clear, but look!”

As he spoke, two boats in an early morning race to test their motors, zoomed in from the south, roared past and headed right for the lumbering creatures ahead. It was obvious that if they maintained their speed they must crash into the animals and chop them up savagely with the razor-sharp blades of their whirling propellers.

“Slow down!” the judge shouted impotently at the roaring boats as they sped by, and, sure enough, the lead boat rammed into the big animals, sliced one of them badly and veered off.

To prevent such disasters, Judge Noble used his handkerchief and two borrowed from the other watchers to make a banner to alert the passing boats to the presence of manatees. When the drivers saw him waving frantically at them, most tended to slow down and even come closer to shore to see if an accident of some kind had happened. When he shouted: “Manatees ahead!” they tended to go even slower and obey the law, but a minority accepted the news as a kind of challenge and actually revved up their motors to roar upstream and try to be first to run down a manatee.

This so infuriated the judge that he told listeners: “Wish I had an Uzi. I’d blast those criminals out of the water,” and when a man asked: “How do you know about the Israeli killer-guns?” he said: “When you’re a federal judge these days you learn a lot about Uzis.”

Dr. Zorn, who had watched the judge’s futile attempts to stop the lawbreakers, brought to the chair a used pool cue to which he had attached a big red tablecloth and a small portable long-distance radio that he had tuned to the frequency used by the Tampa Harbor Patrol. Now the judge had both a very large visual signal to warn the boats, and a radio signal to inform the police ahead: “Judge Noble at the Palms. Two Boston Whalers, one white, one green, passed here at thirty knots and going faster to overtake manatees.”

During the spells when there were neither manatees nor pursuing boats, he shared his knowledge of these creatures with the residents gathered around him: “Sailors as far back as Roman times saw an occasional manatee and mistook it for a human being with the body of a whale, and the men concluded that if there were these men, there also had to be women, and of course, they had to be beautiful. Hence the invention of the mermaid.”

As the lovely day drew to a close, Dr. Zorn returned to express his appreciation: “You made a lot of people happy today, Judge—they learned a lot from you. Thank you.”

“Sit for a while,” he said, offering the doctor his chair. “I’ve been
sitting all day and would enjoy moving about a bit, casting my bait out farther might catch me some fish.”

“Have you ever figured out why people get so excited about the manatees? They’re not the world’s most attractive water animals.”

“I’ve often thought about it, especially today. I think it comes down to the problem of beauty.”

“That’s a word you can’t use for those creatures.”

“Yes. And that’s the precise problem. Why did our people crowd down here to watch the manatees? They’re probably the ugliest creatures on earth, but more compelling than a fish of elegant design. Is it something primordial that attracts, as with an elephant, for example? No way can the elephant be called beautiful, but he’s so commanding. Magnitude also counts. And so, too, God forgive me for admitting it, does color.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“If you’d been here today you’d have heard them. Whenever one of those stately white egrets came to stand by me, hoping for a fish, the folks cried: ‘Isn’t that bird the most beautiful thing?’ But let a blue heron stop by, an infinitely better-engineered bird, and no one comments on his beauty, because he’s the wrong color. What did Muley Duggan call that masterful fellow from our Heronry over there? ‘A village policeman on stilts.’ A dark blue heron has got to be as valuable to God in His animal kingdom as any white egret, yet we refuse to admit it.”

“Do you mean to say that being black affects even a man of superior qualities like you?”

“Every day. And I think it comes back to that word
beauty
and people’s reluctance to term a bird with black coloring beautiful.”

“By the way, how did you become a federal judge?”

“It goes way back to when I was a draftee in the navy in World War Two, eighteen years old and stuck away in the South Pacific serving on an ammunition boat. The white Southern officers of the navy refused to believe we colored could fight, or that decent Southern white boys who made up so much of the navy would ever serve with us. So we manned the ammunition boats, and one after another of those dreadful ships exploded, killing us in the hundreds and thousands. If we were lucky, we might land a job as waiter in an officers’ mess.

“Somebody told me years later that I ought to go see that new musical
South Pacific
, and I did, but I walked out. That wasn’t the
South Pacific I saw. I was belowdecks hoisting ammo and wondering when ours was going to blow sky-high.”

“You mean that’s all you did, work on ammo ships or in an officers’ mess?”

“Yes, the big brass had decided that’s all we could be used for—the limit of our capacities.”

“How did that lead to a federal judgeship?”

Noble was diverted for a moment by his pelican Rowdy as he dived for a fish. When the bird came up with a big one, the judge called out: “Go to it, Rowdy!” Then he returned to Dr. Zorn: “My redemption started when I began going to the chaplain’s office, the black chaplain that is, to see the weekly
New York Times
Sunday edition, flown in a month late. Officers who saw me checking out the
Times
thought: That guy Noble is trying to make something of himself, but what they didn’t know was that I was there to grab the magazine section before the other guys tore it apart. We all wanted to see those gorgeous long-legged blond girls nearly naked in their lingerie ads. One sailor joked: ‘The white kids all rush for the
National Geographic
to see what naked black girls look like, but we rush for the
Times
to see the white girls.’ ”

Then, as a trailing manatee wallowed by, he said almost bitterly: “The cruel fact of life, Dr. Zorn, is that most of the girls in the world are not beautiful. They’re not tall, and leggy, and blond, just as the manatee out there is not beautiful. But society conspires to force on us the concept that white is beautiful and black is something else. Damn it, if even today I want to visualize a really beautiful girl I go back to the lingerie ads in the
Times
.”

At this point, when the manatees had completed their ponderous parade, he caught a fish on his line, so a group of ever-watchful egrets and herons flew in to demand their share of the bounty. As the judge took out his penknife to cut portions for the benefit of all, he gasped: “My God, Zorn! Isn’t that egret magnificent with the sun on her white feathers, turning them to silver! And isn’t that black heron at a terrible disadvantage?” Reflecting on this, he savagely cut his fish in two, throwing the larger half to the heron, the smaller to the egret, and when Rowdy came blustering in and landing in the water with a big splash like a damaged floatplane, the judge snarled at him: “And you, you clumsy oaf, you don’t even qualify.”

“Can I help you carry some of that gear back to your room?” Zorn asked, and he picked up the binoculars and the shortwave
radio, leaving the judge to handle his fishing pole, one he had acquired forty years ago and had used in many streams. As they walked toward Gateways, Zorn said: “You still haven’t told me how your duty in the ammo ships in the South Pacific led to the federal bench.”

“In a very roundabout way. When some of us blacks got fed up with running the risk, day after day in those steaming ports, of being blown up, we protested what we saw as unfair treatment. White officers from the South who hadn’t wanted to be assigned to the ships, either, charged us with mutiny, and they might have made it stick, except that a young white lawyer who had also been drafted and who came by the office to read
The New York Times
and knew me to be a decent man, asked to defend me at the court-martial. He argued so beautifully, so persuasively that when the case ended, with me set free, I told him: ‘Come peace, I want to be a lawyer like you,’ and he said: ‘With the recent GI Bill providing a free education when this is over, you can do it.’ We kept in touch, and years later he brought me to the attention of Lyndon Johnson, who appointed me to be one of his federal judges.”

As the judge finished his explanation, Zorn felt the urge to ask him why he had left the federal bench. Zorn had heard whispers that there had been some sort of scandal, and when he looked into Noble’s eyes, he thought he saw signs of profound regret, as if the judge were still under a heavy burden, but Zorn refrained from questioning him. It’s strange, Zorn thought, other federal judges, when they retire from duty fifty-two weeks a year, elect to remain on the available list, and from time to time they are summoned to places where the backload of cases is immense and they provide valued assistance, but Judge Noble never seems to be called—I wonder why.