Recessional by James A. Michener
When Betsy saw the size of the room and the large number of people present, she lost her courage and signaled for Andy: ‘I’ve eaten in my room or with a few family friends for months. This is terrifying.’ But he insisted that she come into the room: ‘I’ve reserved a seat for you at the other side of the dining room.’
‘Why?’ she whispered nervously, and he said: ‘I want everyone to see you. To become easy with the fact that we have a new phenomenon in our midst. A girl who has been really wounded but who is going to make a great comeback.’ He pushed her chair among the tables, smiling to the diners and occasionally stopping to say: ‘This is Betsy Cawthorn, of Chattanooga. She’ll be walking among you in a short time.’
When they reached table eight, Betsy’s father, with the assistance of a young waiter, lifted her into an ordinary chair between Mr. Mallory and Judge Noble. Then the waiter quietly pushed the wheelchair back to a spot at the entrance and left it there while Andy led Mr. Cawthorn to a different table: ‘It’s best, we find, if the newcomer fits right in, on his or her own. But why don’t you join their table for dessert?’
Betsy, left alone with strangers for the first time in four months and overcome with embarrassment, could find nothing to say in response to friendly questions except the monosyllabic yes and no. The outgoing octogenarian Mrs. Mallory would not allow this to continue. ‘Chris and I are going to have to eat and run because we have an important engagement tonight,’ she said. Then she smiled roguishly and added: ‘And can you guess what it is?’
Slowly Betsy allowed herself to be drawn into the guessing game but she failed to find the proper answer. Finally, she said: ‘All right, I give up. What are you going to do?’ When Mrs. Mallory said: ‘Take part in a public dance in Tampa,’ Betsy’s jaw dropped in disbelief.
‘Yes, my dear, Chris and I love to dance. Your man Yancey is so good at his job that one of these nights we’ll drag you along, and you’ll be dancing too.’
The conversation became so interesting that Betsy was sorry to see the couple depart, but that left her with the genial Judge Noble, who invited her to join him one day at his fishing: ‘You’ll see magnificent birds standing beside you, no farther away than that next table.’ When she asked what kind of judge he was he said: ‘State judge, federal judge, appeals court judge, retired judge,’ and he explained the differences.
When Andy came to reclaim her at the end of the meal, she told him: ‘I’m glad you made me come. Everyone was wonderful.’ So in a day of many surprises Betsy Cawthorn was inserted into the normal operations of the Palms. After dinner she and her father visited the lounge to introduce themselves, and two members of the Bridge Fanatics wanted to know just one thing: ‘Do you play bridge, Miss Cawthorn?’ When she answered ‘Not yet,’ they laughed: ‘That’s the correct answer, because we’ll teach you. Are you what they call a quick study?’ and her father answered for her: ‘At home we considered her a genius, and it’s good to think that she may get back onto the main track down here.’
Betsy spent the next day getting settled into her rooms, learning about the Palms and making friends in the dining hall. That night she sat with Ms. Oliphant and enjoyed the company of the former school headmistress: ‘I wish I’d had a teacher like you. I might have learned more than I did.’ With no touch of humor on her face except for a twinkle in her eyes, Ms. Oliphant said with a primness that belied her words: ‘Yes, with me you damn well would have learned.’
But she was even more taken with Reverend Quade, who seemed exactly what a woman minister should be even though Betsy had never met one before. ‘I hope we can talk together one of these days. You seem to have seen so much of life. Have you … ever known anyone crippled like me?’
‘Worse. In Pakistan I saw many young women who had suffered severe physical damage whose fate was far worse than yours.’
‘How could that be?’
‘They had no hope, none whatever. Poverty and despair and perhaps eventual suicide were all that was in store for them. But you, my dear, have a wonderfully supportive father, who can afford whatever is necessary to help you lead a normal life, and our crazy man Yancey will have you jumping about sooner than you can imagine’—she reached out to press Betsy’s hand—‘you have so much to hope for.’
Next morning after breakfast, Betsy was taken over to rehab, where Bedford Yancey was waiting. After she had dressed in an interesting costume that consisted of a sleeveless top and denim shorts hemmed well below the knee, he dropped to the floor next to her wheelchair and asked his assistant to place her beside him. She was instructed to mimic him in every respect as he crawled around, taking sharp turns from time to time. Delighted by her agility, he cried out as she passed him on her belly, elbows and knees: ‘You’re completing the first month’s work. We’ll be dancin’ by Thanksgivin’.’
He also had her spend nearly half an hour seated at a machine that encouraged her to strengthen her stomach muscles and particularly her upper thighs. At no moment did he force her beyond the point at which she began to tire or show boredom, and after she had briefly tried two other machines that would improve the power she might be able to exercise through her knees, he cried: ‘Quits for the morning! Let’s go out and watch the herons.’ Placing her near her wheelchair, he held it steady with his arms and feet and said: ‘Imagine there’s a fire. You’ve got to get out. You’re alone, but the chair is locked in the park position. Can you possibly work your way into it? Use any tricks you can think of, but get into this damned chair.’ And he watched her struggle, her upturned face looking right into his, until he detected the moment when she realized that all her strength, all her willpower was not going to get her into that chair. Saying nothing, giving her the merest bit of help possible with his right hand, he enabled her to swing her left hip into the chair. When she was settled, he said: ‘I want you to feel the exact amount of force I used to ease you over the last hump,’ and he exerted against her outstretched hand less than a quarter pound of energy: ‘You were so close, Betsy. You almost had it done.’
‘Put me down again.’
‘You feel strong enough? We’ve had a pretty lively workout, you know.’
‘Just put me down,’ and again she struggled valiantly to work her left hip into position, but failed. He said nothing as he eased her back into the chair, and she said: ‘I could feel the solution that time. Couple of days from now, I bet I’ll climb into this chair.’ Noticing that Dr. Zorn had entered the room and had, presumably, seen her double failure, she continued: ‘You be here, too, and you’ll see me vault into that chair.’ He gravely replied: ‘With your determination it’s possible, I’m sure.’
The two men wheeled her to a veranda from which they had a good view of the pond to which, from time to time, water-birds came that she could not identify. Later, Ms. Oliphant came by and guessed that Betsy was trying to identify the birds: ‘Could you maybe use a bit of help? The little white ones, cattle egrets. You’ll often see them riding on the necks of cattle, picking insects from behind the animal’s ear. The big white ones, we don’t see them too often, the white heron, naturally. We don’t see any right now, but there’s also the big blue heron, a monstrous bird in comparison with the others. The seagulls I’m sure you know, and the big pelicans, wonderful comedians, they never come to the pond. They prefer the open water over there.’
Later that afternoon Yancey introduced her to Dr. Champion, the prosthetist. Yancey laughed: ‘Impossible to pronounce that word. It means the mechanical genius who will make and fit your prosthesis, that’s the technical word for your new legs. I call him our orthopedic mechanic, and he’s one of the best. When he makes your legs, they fit and they work.’ The frail, reticent man, not over thirty-five years old, went immediately about his task, which was to record her body measurements to determine what length and character her two mechanical legs should have. When he inspected her stumps prior to taking plaster casts, he congratulated her: ‘You were well served by whoever handled that part of the a
‘They’ll be properly weighted,’ he promised. ‘Of that I can assure you. And articulated, best in the business.’
‘Are we jumping the gun a bit?’ Betsy asked, and he laughed: ‘Mr. Yancey said he wants to hurry this one along. Says you’re a prime target for a sure, swift rehabilitation.’ He smiled at her as she sat in the sunlight coming in from the pool area and asked: ‘Would you like to feel, right now, early in the game, how the fittings are going to enclose the space below your knees?’
‘Yes, I would, very much,’ and she pulled her shorts above the knees and invited him to apply the fixtures. When tightened, they felt snug, and he pointed out: ‘And these don’t even conform to your plaster casts. Miss Cawthorn, this is going to be a great adventure for you, and I’ll be proud to be a part of it.’
She did not share his enthusiasm, for the curious structure he placed on her right leg bore no relationship to anything human. It consisted of a big plastic cup into which her stump found a secure haven, but below it stretched what she could only think of as part of a metal skeleton, the bones of a leg without any kind of covering to make it look like a leg. The whole ended in a normal shoe, but bigger than any she had ever worn: ‘That’s to give stability.’ the prosthetist explained. The session ended with her thinking: I’ll never adjust to anything as ugly as that. It will never be a part of me.
But the technician was a clever man, and as she left him he handed her a big glossy magazine, Amputee Sportsmen. When she went to bed she started to leaf through it casually, but soon she was riveted by the photographs. Here was a handsome young man with one skeleton leg like the one she’d seen, and he was driving a golf ball off the tee and twisting his metal leg as easily as if it had been real. On the next page was a girl with her right leg missing above the knee playing basketball and delivering a sharp pass to a teammate. Amputees were hunting, driving fast cars, casting for fish and working trained field dogs. It seemed there was nothing they had to give up except perhaps swimming. She noticed that half had flesh-colored coverings over their steel structures, half did not, and also that half had lost a leg above the knee, the other half below. Upon closer checking of the magazine she made a sad discovery: there was no photograph of a sportsman with both legs gone, and her euphoria evaporated.
That night she turned to her immediate problems, and she lay awake a long time pondering the test she had failed that morning when she could not edge her left hip into the chair, and the more she thought of the problem, and analyzed the specific twists of her body she had failed to make, the more she was overtaken by a strange sensation: as she began to visualize every move she would have to make to climb into that chair, and which signals she would have to send to muscles, bones and ligaments, she could feel herself rising in the air and finding the seat she sought. And then, as she remembered the feel of the mechanical devices that would be attached to her leg stumps, she could almost will them to return to her stumps, and remain there with her new legs attached. She could feel what motions would be necessary for her to climb out of bed and walk across the floor to the bathroom, and she felt herself doing this without crutches or a four-footed walker or cane. Her rehabilitation started in those midnight moments as she visualized her cure and made it a part of her psyche to be applied later in governing her new legs and the newly strengthened muscles and ligaments that would operate them. Having enlisted her entire body and brain in this exercise, she convinced herself that it could be achieved, and she slept well.
In the morning she ate a light breakfast, telling her nurse: ‘Big job today. Don’t want to be waterlogged.’ At the training area she told Yancey: ‘Help me get down on the floor and hold that chair, please.’ Lying huddled on the floor, theoretically unable to do much about anything, she looked up at Yancey, and he saw that with all her energies under control, she was certain to work her way into the chair. But he told her: ‘Wait just a moment. There’s someone else who ought to see your first triumph,’ and he called for Dr. Zorn, who was eager to join the watchers.
Pleased by his presence, she called: ‘Dr. Zorn, you hold the chair rigid.’ When he and Yancey had the wheelchair immobile, she crawled along the floor, directed her entire body to behave as she had visualized the night before and, almost as if lifted by some arcane power, she rose in the air. With no strain she edged her left hip a good two inches higher than required for it to clear the arm, and with a grand relaxation of her whole body she slipped easily into the chair.
‘Bravo!’ Andy cried. ‘Magnificent!’ and she said with some truth: ‘Your being here gave me that extra strength.’
Two successive rainy days in midsummer, a rarity, left the Palms in a somber mood, so that when the tertulia assembled there was little inclination to discuss anything of significance. Raúl Jiménez, reminded of a day like this at a resort in the Colombian mountains, said: ‘I was fifteen, just awakening to the world outside Medellín, when the Spanish ambassador to Colombia came to the resort. He was such an imperious but impressive man, slim, erect, wearing an expensive uniform laden with medals, that I saw in him the grandeur of his homeland.’
‘What effect did this have on your thinking?’ Ambassador St. Près asked.
‘It made me realize for the first time that I was an heir to all the greatness of Spain. I was not only a loyal colombiano but also a Spaniard whose roots went far back in the history of Iberia. I was a Spaniard, something to be proud of, and the discovery changed my life—certainly my attitude toward life.’
‘Did you speak to the ambassador?’ St. Près asked, and Jiménez gasped: ‘At fifteen? Me go up and speak to an official like him? Never! I admired him from afar and made believe that someone like him had been my great-great-grandfather back in Spain. For me it was a noble day, one when I suddenly saw everything in a different light. I’d like to live it over again, that intensity of feeling. As we grow older we lose the capacity for such emotion, and it’s a shame.’
Senator Raborn, who had listened intently to Raúl’s story, said: ‘I had a day like that, and it too was in the mountains. When I was a young officer I was stationed in Peshawar, now in Pakistan, at the gateway to the Khyber Pass. I was bitterly disappointed at not being able to see the Khyber, even more famous then than now, but I was never sent on the scouting expeditions that went into it because I was detailed to a joint British-American exploring team that was visiting three former provinces of the British Empire: Swat, Dir and Chitral. What a fantastic adventure that was! We traveled in little airplanes, rickety helicopters and Land-Rovers that broke down on the ancient mountain roads. And the natives! Their standard of living was like that of people even before the time of Christ. But what a glorious experience it was to be there among the high mountains of the Hindu Kush and the turbulent valley streams.
‘We were in Chitral, talking to old-timers who had fought against the British in the siege of 1895, and one of them told me: “We’d have defeated the Englishmen if the Russians had given us the help they promised,” and in that moment I caught the full meaning of the struggle that had been under way in these mountainous passes for the last two thousand years. It had been constant warfare.’
‘And especially during what came to be called the Great Game in the 1740s,’ St. Près said, ‘when England held back repeated attempts by Russia to burst through the mountains and capture India—’
‘Exactly!’ Raborn said. ‘I suddenly saw it all, and that insight has determined my attitudes on foreign policy ever since.’ He smiled at Jiménez and concluded: ‘I’d like to have a moment of insight l
In the lull that followed, the men looked first at St. Près and then at President Armitage, but it was the ambassador who accepted the challenge: ‘My story is nothing world-shaking but it’s about an emotional time for a seventeen-year-old at a summer resort on Long Island. There was going to be an end-of-season gala dance, and I was hoping that a girl of heavenly beauty—her name was Rosamund—would agree to be my date. What dreams of glory I had! But everybody else wanted to invite her, too, so my chances were not good. Then we heard that she had accepted an invitation from a smoothie from Yale, twenty-two years old with his own car, and we were heartbroken, me especially.
‘But then what seemed a miracle happened. She actually came over to me—my heart was thumping, let me tell you—and said: “Richard, you’re one of my best friends. I wonder if you’d do me a favor about the dance on Saturday.” I thought she was going to ask me to take her, and I must have turned purple, but she placed her hand on my arm and said: “A cousin of mine is coming to town, and I wondered if you’d be real sweet and take her to the dance?”
‘I mumbled, “Yes,” and the cousin turned out to be drab and homely and while I was pushing her around the floor I could see Rosamund dancing with the Yalie. I was in agony.’ He shook his head and said: ‘I’d like to have another summer like that, when everything was lived at such an intense level. Incidentally, years later I saw Rosamund and her cousin at the same summer resort, and Rosamund had gained weight and looked dumpy, but the cousin had matured into a lovely woman.’ He banged on the table with his fist and repeated: ‘The intensity! The years pass and we lose the intensity! It’s the same in politics. I’m ashamed to say that in the last election I didn’t really care who won, Bush or Clinton.’