Recessional by James A. Michener
‘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
‘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.
It had been a dull visit, so Zorn would have been surprised if, when he left the table, someone had predicted: ‘Harry Ingram is about to catapult the Palms into national and even international notoriety, and in doing so, will account for a dramatic end-of-year rise in rentals, converting your center into one of the top moneymakers in the Taggart chain.’
These unlikely events started one hot June day at four in the morning with a telephone call from London, where it was already nine o’clock: ‘Hello! Am I speaking to the Palms? Have you a tenant named Harry Ingram? Could you put me through to him?’
The night operator who had answered the phone pointed out: ‘Sir! It’s four o’clock in the morning here. We don’t like to call the guests at this hour. They become irritated.’
‘I assure you, Mr. Ingram will want to bear the burden of my interruption. Please ring him.’ And when a sleepy, not well-focused Harry came to the phone, the man from London gave him startling news: ‘Are you Harry Peter Denham Robert Ingram? Good. I have surprising news for you. The eleventh Igraham baronet of Illsworth died yesterday, as his younger brother did two weeks ago. Since neither brother left any heirs, the title passes to the collateral branch of the great Chisholm family, and the heir of that line is you. As of this moment you are now Sir Harry Ingram, Baronet.’ Pausing for some moments to allow this astonishing information to register, the London man explained: ‘In our system there are many, many men entitled to be called Sir Thomas This or That, and when they die their title dies with them. But anyone with the title Sir Thomas Jones, Baronet, not only has the title, but his heirs also inherit the title. It’s rather nice, really, to be a baronet. Am I correct in my records? You have no heirs, male or female?’
‘Never been married,’ the bewildered baronet replied, at which his informant said: ‘As I thought. This means that when you die, barring the birth of a child before then, which I suppose is unlikely … you are seventy-two? Correct. So at your death the title will pass to another cadet line, the one in Australia. Do you by chance happen to know them? Name of Stanhope? No. Well, that’s how the matter stands, and may I be the first to congratulate you, Sir Harry?’ and he hung up.
At the same time that the official was informing Harry, his staff was informing the London press corps that one of England’s titles had now passed into the safekeeping of an elderly resident in a Florida retirement home, and news of this amazing development had been sent from the London bureaus of the American news agencies to their offices in the United States, where it was instantly circulated to newspapers and radio and television stations. Since the London release had identified the nursing home as the Palms in Tampa, Florida, the telephones in that establishment started ringing, and two television stations soon dispatched camera crews to the scene.
By the time dawn broke, Nurse Varney was already commanding the telephone system while Andy and Ken Krenek were directing traffic. Ambassador St. Près had been alerted as someone who might understand the niceties of the situation, and he was in Harry Ingram’s little room handling the phone there. It was a tumultuous morning at the Palms as word flashed through the halls that our Harry Ingram has inherited a title in England.’ It was generally supposed that he was to be at least an earl, more likely a duke.
As the morning progressed Ambassador St. Près explained again and again: ‘In the British hierarchy it’s the next-to-lowest title that can be given. Below it is the simple honorific Sir Harry Ingram. Next above that is what he has, Sir Harry Ingram, Baronet. Above that are the viscounts and earls, and above those come the marquis and so on up to the grandest of all, the dukes, Harry Ingram, duke of Sussex, or whatever other majestic title his family might be entitled to.’ And that launched the epoch known at the Palms as ‘the hunt for British nobility.’ Any book that gave the histories of the great families of English history was grabbed at, as were back copies of magazines that had portraits of the various British leaders, biographies of Princess Di and Wallis Warfield Simpson, or anything else that even remotely pertained to the elevation of ordinary Harry Ingram into the aristocracy of Great Britain. Ambassador St. Près struggled so constantly to correct misperceptions that in frustration he suggested that some night after dinner he would be glad to explain what their respected friend Harry Ingram was getting into.
To his surprise, practically the entire population of Gateways, all hundred and ninety-four, appeared, with latecomers having to bring their own chairs. His talk was a masterpiece of elucidation, delivered in proper ambassadorial style.
‘The word nobility, in Great Britain at least, refers only to men and women holding the top five ranks of honors in this descending order: duke, marquis, earl, viscount and baron. They are known as the peerage. Now you must understand that in the British Isles, the honorific Sir is very widely used to bestow a knighthood on any citizen who performs exceptionally well in public life. A leading jockey can become a Sir. A leading actor. Famous cricket players. Queen Elizabeth has awarded the title in honorary form to Reagan and Bush. And it’s customary, if a British foreign officer such as an ambassador has served well, to award him the title in recognition.’
‘Would you be a Sir in England?’ a woman asked, and he said truthfully: ‘I suppose my services in Africa might have warranted it. But more important, I would think, is the fact that if the Palms were in some British village, one or two of our residents might well be Sir this or Sir that, and I’ll leave it to you to speculate on whom I have in mind.’
This caused
‘What does that mean?’ a man asked, and he said: ‘A subsidiary branch of the family, inherited through some younger brother or close relative. I believe Sir Harry has already been informed that at his death his title passes to the cadet line in Australia. Unless he has a son in the meantime.’ This brought laughter, after which the ambassador said in summation: ‘I do think it extraordinary that in a nation like ours, which fought a war of independence to break away from the despotic rule of King George III, we should now be royalty-crazy. People magazine would fade away if they couldn’t write about Princess Di and Fergie, and those tabloids at the supermarket checkouts would vanish.’ He became confidential: ‘I was vacationing in that fine Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, out in the Colorado Rockies, years ago, when H. G. Wells and others in Great Britain were agitating for the abolition of the British royal family. Some English guests were distraught by the effrontery of such a suggestion, but one clever Scot among them said: “Not to worry, my friends. The King and Queen will never be dethroned. The people of Iowa would not allow it.” And he was correct. We have the best of both possible worlds. The British royal family belongs to us, too, but we leave all their expenses to the Brits.’