Recessional by James A. Michener
When they finished shooting what Zorn called ‘the ghetto shots,’ they turned to the new life that Mrs. Jessup would be enjoying, and here Fritz used his cameras in a fully upbeat way. He showed her in a charming mix of scenes, walking beside the channel to talk with Judge Noble and inspecting his birds, or roaming in the African veldt, or looking down the beautiful entry lane of tall Washingtonias.
Even more gratifying to Zorn were the shots of her making friends in the library, watching the men play billiards, or sitting in as a fourth at bridge, helping in the garden with the flowers, or going on a bus trip to the Dali Museum in nearby St. Petersburg or to the Ringling Brothers circus museum in Sarasota or to the exquisite new marble art museum in Ocala to the north. She took a day trip to Disney World’s Epcot Center and attended an orchestra concert in Clearwater. Some of the most interesting pictures were those of Judge Noble and her as they took a nature walk in a wild area north of Tampa and then as they enjoyed a dinner—paid for by the magazine—at the Colombian Restaurant, where they were entertained by flamenco dancers.
But the sequence of shots that really impressed most viewers were the photos of the Mallorys inviting Mrs. Jessup into their big Cadillac for the drive to the posh Berns’ Steak House in Tampa, and then to a public dance at which Mr. Mallory, nearly ninety, did fancy steps with the new widow.
Pepper did not allow Mrs. Jessup to gush over any of her experiences; she turned off her recorder whenever effusiveness threatened to slip in, but she liked to catch the newcomer’s surprise at the richness of life awaiting her once she left her little room. Pepper also caught couples who had been in residence for some years saying: ‘We should have come here ten years earlier than we did,’ but she also snooped around until she found a bitter elderly woman who was moving out, and her comments, eagerly spewed onto the tape, were scathing: ‘They charge double what they should. The people are boring, the food is dreadful, and come summer in this climate you swelter.’
‘Where are you going?’ Pepper asked.
‘Back to Vermont, where people are civilized.’
‘Aren’t the winters pretty cold up there?’
‘Yes, but you have libraries and you expect your neighbors to have read books, too. Worst decision I ever made in my entire life was moving into this area of cultural wasteland. Television six hours a day, and the yogurt machine is never working. If you moved in here at your age, you’d commit suicide within a month.’
‘But it wasn’t intended for people like me.’
‘Nor for people like me either, whose blood is still circulating. God’s Waiting Room they call it when no one’s listening. When He wants me He can find me just as easy in Vermont. That’s where I’ll be.’ Pepper incorporated such comments in her story to give it the needed spice.
Her lively prose and Fritz’s vivid photographs depicted so enticingly the lifestyle ‘among the sixties and the seventies,’ as the magazine called it, that three days after the team left, Pepper could send Zorn another fax: ‘Story so smashing they’re allotting us eight pages.’ And when John Taggart heard about the story and saw early proofs of it, he found it so accurate in showing what he was trying to do that he ordered a thousand reprints for each of his eighty-seven centers, which distributed them widely.
Some who received copies came to inspect the Palms, and when they did they invariably asked whether they might meet Mrs. Jessup, who was always gracious in assuring them that the center was even more pleasant than the article had shown.
Zorn, happy to see the positive reactions to his brainchild, sent Pepper a three-word fax: ‘You done good.’ But he felt no desire to host any more press crews at his Palms.
If the Duchess had not been such an inveterate snoop, the members of the tertulia might not have uncovered the Reverend Quade’s secret. When the postmaster arrived with a package too large to be included in Mrs. Quade’s locked postal box, he had to leave the bulky bundle leaning against the row of boxes on the floor. This was an invitation to the Duchess to inspect from whom and from where the parcel had arrived, and she saw, with some excitement, that it had been mailed by the New York publishers Doubleday and obviously contained a manuscript.
Senator Raborn was passing by when the Duchess made this tempting discovery, and he heard her tell others at the mailboxes: ‘It looks like our Reverend Quade has written a book.’ Her listeners, inspecting the package, were easily convinced that the Duchess’s assumption was correct.
As the four tertulia members convened that night for dinner, Raborn told them: ‘I think it’s highly likely that our Mrs. Quade is about to have a book published.’ When the others heard about the package, they suggested that a fifth chair be added to their table and sent editor Jiménez to intercept Helen as she entered the dining room and escort her to their table.
When seated she asked quietly: ‘And to what do I owe this signal honor?’ Senator Raborn explained how the Duchess had happened to see the telltale package: ‘We are intensely curious as to what it might be that you’re writing.’ Quickly he added: ‘Assuming, of course, that Mrs. Elmore’s deduction was correct.’
‘It was,’ Mrs. Quade said with just a touch of asperity. She was irritated by the snooping but also pleased by the fact that these somewhat aloof men had discovered she was writing a book, an activity they had probably thought was restricted to their own sex.
‘May we ask,’ President Armitage said as he leaned toward her, ‘what the subject matter is? Commentary on the New Testament as it applies to contemporary living, perhaps?’
Ignoring his somewhat condescending manner, she first attended to giving her dinner order, then looked up and smiled at the men: ‘It’s nearly ready for publication—I’m correcting galleys. It’s entitled Likewise the Mistress, Too.’
‘Now, what could that refer to?’ Ambassador St. Près asked. ‘It’s a phrase that reverberates, but I can’t place it.’ Turning to face her, he asked: ‘It is a quotation, I believe?’ and she nodded, launching into a description of the song from which the quotation was derived: ‘One of the cherished songs of Christmas, dating way back to the time before the sentimental carols, was “The Wassail Song.” Its words are simple, its music haunting, evoking memories of snowy yuletide scenes in seventeenth-century England. One can almost see a dozen men and boys stomping their feet to keep warm as their voices ring out in the chill night air.
‘In the recording I have, which I bought in London one Christmas, a couple of lines captivated me. I’d been invited over to England to explain to church groups how I had become one of the first women in America to be ordained. It had shaken the British establishment and I’d been greeted with a mixture of cold courtesy and obvious distaste. After one testy interrogation I was walking back at dusk to my hotel when I heard from a music shop the opening chords of “The Wassail Song,” and it seemed so Christmasy, so very right in its celebration of good fellowship, which under the circumstances I sorely needed, that I stood transfixed as two lines struck me as exactly defining my position.’
‘I don’t think any of us know the words. It’s not a popular Christmas song here,’ President Armitage said. She nodded, and brought up the phrase that had provided the title for her book.
‘The song was sung by a professional chorus, with the men’s voices vigorously singing
“God bless the master of this house …”
following which, almost as an afterthought, the boy sopranos—they’d allow no women in a chorus like that—sang in high sweet voices imitating women:
“Likewise the mistress, too.” ’
She had half sung these words, and in the silence that followed, the men of the tertulia looked at one another and shrugged their shoulders, but Senator Raborn asked: ‘The significance? What could the heavy significance of such casual words possibly be?’
When the others also admitted being baffled, she said quietly: ‘The second line seemed a paradigm of my life—especially my life that difficult, wintry week in London.’
&nb
‘The words, and the offhand way in which they were delivered, as if this were a sop thrown to a lowly peasant—a generous afterthought—were directed specifically at me. The male voices sang of important things, the “female” voices were acknowledged but never taken seriously.’
‘What did such an experience do to you?’ the ambassador asked, and she replied carefully, for she was aware of the negative impact her words were going to have: ‘The words confirmed what I’ve known for a long time. Made it brutally clear.’
‘Now, what could that be?’ Senator Raborn demanded, almost truculently. ‘A simple Christmas carol. A simple phrase.’
‘To you it would have sounded quite simple, I’m sure,’ she said, ‘but to me it reiterated what formal religion has always taught, that women have inferior stature—that they are, indeed, to be despised.’
Her words were bombshells, for not one of the four men was prepared to accept such a brazen condemnation of the churches that had sustained them and, leaving theology aside, to which they were in large part indebted for their success in life. Armitage and Jiménez had attended church-run universities. Senator Raborn had won his first election to his state’s House of Representatives because a plurality of churchgoers had voted for him instead of his Democratic opponent, who had been accused of atheism, and the ambassador had served with ease and distinction in two Catholic countries. Each man wanted to challenge Mrs. Quade, but before anyone could do so, she strengthened her accusation by citing episodes from her extensive experience.
‘I went to a Quaker school, one of the most liberal in the nation, but when we attended Sunday meeting in the little towns nearby, men were on the left as you entered the house of worship, women strictly on the right.’
‘That sounds as if they were given seats of honor,’ St. Prés suggested, but she corrected him: ‘That was how you saw it when you entered, from the back, but when you sat on the facing bench from which the meeting was conducted, you saw the powerful men on the right, where they belonged, the weak women on the left, where they were ordained to sit.’
‘That’s a preposterous conclusion to reach from accidental seating,’ Senator Raborn protested.
‘Not so preposterous, for who sat on the facing bench, as if they were cardinals of the Catholic Church or deacons in the Baptist? Mostly men, as it has always been throughout the history of Quakerism. Who were the lay people who became known as Quaker ministers through the force of their speaking in meeting? George Fox, John Woolman, Rufus Jones.’
‘Have you suffered because you were one of the first women—’ began President Armitage, but Mrs. Quade ignored his question and cut him short. ‘Primitive religions placed intolerable burdens on their women. In some societies a woman could be executed if she allowed her shadow to fall across the tribe’s major fishing canoe. I could cite a hundred curious laws that disciplined women when they were menstruating. Men feared and hated women because of the arcane powers they had. They could bear babies. They sometimes saw things that men couldn’t see, so such women were branded as witches and either burned or hanged.’
‘You’re speaking of primitives,’ Jiménez argued, for he took her charges seriously and did not want them to stand as unchallenged truth, but his words led Mrs. Quade to the core of her argument: ‘From the primitives, organized religions adopted the same strictures. When I taught in Pakistan I studied how Islam denigrates its women. They’re not even allowed to pray alongside the men in the mosque. And how they’re treated in nations like Arabia and the Emirates is a scandal.’
‘But your Pakistan elected a woman as prime minister,’ St. Près pointed out, and she snapped: ‘Yes, and didn’t they get rid of her as soon as possible? And in the ugliest way, primarily because she was a woman.’
While the dishes were being cleared and dessert orders taken, Mrs. Quade progressed to her most contentious points: ‘When I was stationed briefly in Israel, working with the rabbis, I attended a synagogue each Friday at sunset. No prayers could be said, nor the Torah read, unless ten men were present, a minyan. Women did not count. And those women who did attend the services—there weren’t many—had to sit in an upper balcony behind a gauze drape to keep them from contaminating the worship below, and perhaps—who knows?—to keep from casting an evil spell on the Torah itself as it perched there in its sacred scroll’
‘Ridiculous!’ Jiménez cried. ‘I’ve known scores of Jews. They revere their women,’ to which Mrs. Quade said in a low voice: ‘And what prayer, centuries old, does the Jewish man say as he admires himself in the bathroom mirror each morning? It ends: “And thank God I am not a woman.” ’
She was also harsh on the Mormons, saying that they kept their women in a secondary status, disciplining them severely if they stepped out of line, and when the men at the table protested because they knew Mormon men who treasured their womenfolk, she said: ‘The public record is too clear. You don’t have to accept it if you don’t want to, but women of other faiths know it’s accurate.’
She ran into vigorous opposition when she started to speak about the Bible itself and its constant placing of women in an inferior position, but she could point to Saint Paul and his almost savage disciplining of women as if they were troublesome children, and she quoted some of Paul’s more famous remarks, such as ‘It is good for a man not to marry,’ and ‘For man did not come from woman, but woman from man,’ and ‘Women should remain silent in church. They are not allowed to speak. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home.’
St Près said: ‘We all know that Saint Paul was a misogynist—he spoke only for himself,’ but it was Jiménez who struck the decisive blow: ‘I don’t think you’re quoting Saint Paul correctly. I remember the English words as being somewhat different,’ and she had to confess: ‘Like many modern clergy, I use the New International Version,’ and each of the men said: ‘Oh!’ as if that removed her from serious consideration.
The arrival of dessert provided a recess from an argument that might have taken a tense or even ugly course, but when the plates were removed, St. Près made a suggestion that all approved: ‘Your attitudes are so concisely phrased, Reverend Quade, that we’d profit from hearing more. This is all rather new to us,’ and Senator Raborn agreed: ‘Yes, the voice of the New Woman.’
Unfortunately, editor Jiménez got the postprandial discussion off to the worst possible start by giving it as his judgment that ‘at least the Catholic Church has always held women in the highest regard, certainly the equal of men and often their superiors.’
‘I do not find that in the record of your Church,’ Mrs. Quade said, trying not to sound contentious, but Jiménez bristled: ‘I think if you look at the way my Church has glorified the Virgin Mary, giving her every honor mentioned in the Bible, you’ll have to admit that we revere Mary, and have always honored her as the symbol of womanhood.’
Mrs. Quade at first seemed to accept this defense in silence, looking down at her fingers, clasped together as if to form a steeple. Then, looking up at the four men and not speaking exclusively to the editor, she ticked off a series of facts that she knew to be accurate through long study of original documents: ‘The Bible says little about Mary’s deification, nothing about her perpetual virginity except that Jesus had brothers, born Presumably after his birth, and nothing about her assumption into heaven.’
Editor Jiménez threw down his napkin: ‘Those very attributes form the soul of what our Church teaches about Mary! Truth irrefutable.’
Very quietly Mrs. Quade said: ‘None of those concepts appears in the Bible, nor in any other source until the Church Fa
‘I cannot believe that,’ Jiménez protested, and the other men’s agreement was voiced by St. Près: ‘From what I’ve witnessed in the Catholic countries, the Virgin Mary stands at the very heart of the Church. You could almost say that she defines it.’
Never raising her voice, because she knew she was on solid ground, Reverend Quade said: ‘Today, yes, the Church has adopted Mary most effectively. But in the beginning three centuries she was not conspicuous, either in the Bible or in Church doctrine.’
‘Then where did her glorification come from?’ Jiménez demanded, and the clergywoman replied: ‘From a handful of popular treatises, and would-be additions to the Bible, and from legend. Remember that when the Church Fathers finally decided to present her to the world with the attributes we revere today, the general public went wild with celebrations. It was one of the most widely accepted judgments ever handed down by the Church, that henceforth Mary was certified to have been a perpetual virgin, born and living with no knowledge of sin, and the special mediator between human beings and the Godhead. It started with that.’