Recessional by James A. Michener
The managers of the affair had arranged a small dinner in Bixby’s honor on the evening before the opening, and at it he was at his best. He had acquired through the years a taste for dark German beer, although a Guinness stout would do as well, but with the self-discipline that had kept him active in the big leagues for so long, he restricted himself to one bottle a night. He did not want it served in a glass, for then the portion was apt to be smaller, and he nursed along his bottle, never gulping it down but savoring each carefully apportioned mouthful. He was, Andy thought as that first evening progressed with Bixby relating old adventures in the various ball-parks of the 1920s and ’30s, as fine an example of a celebrated old-time professional athlete as one could have hoped for. Zorn realized that he now prized this old man far more than he had when he first heard him reciting his famous account of that historic game in Philadelphia.
Andy had to admit, however, that it was a strain on the three following days to sit and listen to Buzz give his speech twice a day, afternoon and evening. There would be a roll of drums and Buzz, seated in a comfortable chair with a glass of water at his side, would deliver the familiar opening sentence in a warm, husky voice: ‘Some who are entitled to have an opinion believe it was the greatest game in the history of baseball, but I’ve seen better on television. Bobby Thomson’s one-out homer against Ralph Branca.…’
Andy thought that each of the six times Buzz gave his oration it got better, but that was improbable because the words and the delivery were always identical. These sessions were the biggest events of Buzz’s life, and he savored them. But what surprised Andy was that when his talks ended, Bixby had the energy to circulate among the dealers, signing almost anything they placed before him: ‘Buzz Bixby, 12 October 1929.’
Bixby, with his enormous popularity as the oldest World Series player ever to appear at such a function—‘ninety years and still able to hit a curve,’ the announcer said when introducing Bixby’s speeches—had long lines waiting whenever he took his scheduled place at a dealer’s table, and at seven bucks a throw for his autograph and the exchange of a few words he would make far more during this visit than he had in the entire year when he starred in the Series.
Andy was astounded at how much money was involved, and one of the Long Island men informed him: ‘These grand old players earn much more money each year from us than they ever did playing the game, when salaries were so modest.’
‘Does something like this take place elsewhere in the country?’
‘All the time. Everywhere they can draw a crowd. Most affairs feature an old-timers’ game. You see the men in action again, but they play it canny. No one wants to pull a hamstring from running too hard, and those who have to wear glasses play it very cautious at the plate.’
It was a phenomenon unmatched in any other sport. One of the managers explained, ‘No football player can be idolized by the fans the way a baseball player is. He plays one hundred fifty-four games a year, old style, one hundred sixty-three new style. And he stays at it year after year. And most important of all, he usually does it for the same team, ten, twenty years at a time. The hometown fans grow to love him. But you take football. The players have so much gear on them that the fans never really see them. There’s little identification and not much love, they move around so much, one town after another, loyalty doesn’t have a chance to develop.’
‘What’s going on over there?’ Andy asked, pointing to where a mob surrounded a player.
‘That’s the real phenomenon. Pete Rose. Very stormy career, banned from baseball for betting on the game, but a great hero. The fans love him, and Pete comes here with two truckloads of stuff. He sells everything. The shirt he wore when he broke Ty Cobb’s record, the bat that got the base hit. He sells them everywhere. Or anything else you might be interested in. He earns a fortune at these affairs.’
Later, Andy was amazed when Buzz, his speech finished and his signings done, wanted most of all to visit with Pete Rose. When the two stood together for the photographers, Buzz acted out one of the memorable scenes of World Series play, instructing the cameraman as he went: ‘Game six of the World Series, Tuesday, October twenty-first, 1971, Kansas City at bat in the ninth, bases full. Critical moment. Frank White batting for K.C. pops a high easy foul ball, which Phillies catcher Boone ought to catch with no trouble, but the ball pops out of his mitt, giving White another chance to win the game.
‘But wait! Pete Rose far away at first base anticipates that his catcher might have trouble with the ball, so what does he do? He gallops full speed to where he guessed the catcher is going to wind up, and sure enough, when the catcher allows the foul ball to bounce out of his glove, there is Pete ready to dive for it like this!’ And to Andy’s amazement the ninety-year-old man leaped forward, fell onto his knees, and with outstretched left hand pretended to catch the errant foul ball, a few inches off the floor of the hall, just as Pete Rose had done nearly a quarter of a century before: ‘I revere Rose for that supreme effort, mark of a true champion.’
Late Sunday night, at the close of the three-day festival, the Long Island card dealers had a small dinner to express their gratitude for Bixby’s participation in their festival. He had one bottle of dark German beer, a small steak rare and a large wedge of pecan pie. In response to the speeches the managers made in his honor, he replied with his own set speech: ‘And so we see that we are the toys of fate. Chance determines so much of our lives, as my case proves. I keep with me photographs of my two hits in the wild inning. They show Hornsby missing my grounder by less than an inch and my pop fly, same margin. An inch and a half in his favor, I’m a bum. An inch and a half my way, I’m in the Hall of Fame. Chance does direct all.’
At midnight, as the taxi drove them back to their motel, Buzz leaned over, patted Dr. Zorn on the hand and said: ‘I’m so glad you allowed me to come. And thanks for seeing me get here safe. I’d never have been able to do it alone.’ He then squeezed the doctor’s hand and said with childish joy: ‘They remembered me. They lined up to get my autograph as if they knew who I was. I earned so much money doing what I enjoy doing.’ And he trundled off to bed happily.
Andy had barely fallen asleep when he heard a knock at his door. It was Buzz, who had found himself with a bad conscience when he reached his own room. At first he had decided he could wait and clear the matter with Dr. Zorn in the morning, but the more he worried about the impression he might have left, the more he knew he ought to explain right now. Hence the knocking on the door.
Andy climbed back into bed, invited Buzz to take the chair nearby and listened as the old ball player unburdened himself: ‘I don’t want you to misunderstand the way I treated Pete Rose, I love that man. He was always my kind of man on the field. Fight all the way. Don’t surrender to nobody.’
‘Why are you saying this? You treated him fine when you saw him.’
‘I’m talking about another time—when the time came for Pete to be voted into the Hall of Fame, they wrote letters to guys like me who were already in. Would it be right for them to elect Pete, him being a lawbreaker?’ He stopped, obviously pained by his remembrance of that difficult decision, and Zorn waited for him to continue: ‘I argued with myself a long time. Finally voted against him. Yes, I voted against the same man you saw me with a few hours back.’
When Andy asked ‘Why?’ Buzz explained: ‘Maybe you don’t understand baseball, Dr. Zorn, but for the manager of a team to bet on games, that’s way wrong.’
‘I thought it was established that Mr. Rose had never bet against his own team. Pittsburgh, wasn’t it?’
‘Cincinnati. You see, a manager can control all angles of the game. Pitching rotation especially. He knows who he’s going to pitch the next day and the day after that and right on down the line. Good pitcher, twenty-game winner, this day. Poor one the next day, against a poor team. He has to let the gamblers know when he’s betting, when he’s not, and word can spread. “Rose is laying off the Friday game,” or “Pete is betting a bun
‘That must have been painful.’
‘Worse. It was confusing. Because Pete Rose is on my personal all-time team. I love that guy, but my team is a personal thing. When I had to think of putting him on baseball’s Hall of Fame team, the one that stands for the game itself, I just couldn’t do it. I can stomach Pete Rose. The game couldn’t.’ And this time he left the room for good.
As Zorn heard him go down the hall, a deeply worried man, he thought: How strange! No one in this life avoids facing up to moral problems. Half the discussions in the tertulia deal with profound questions of right and wrong. Who would have thought that quiet Buzz Bixby, interested only in baseball, could have been wrestling with a problem worthy of Immanuel Kant: ‘Who in this world is the righteous man?’ Reflecting on his own moral dilemmas, he did not fall asleep for some time.
When the time came on Monday for Dr. Zorn to shepherd the old man back to Florida, he found to his surprise that Buzz was uncharacteristically late. He received no answer to his call to the room, so he supposed that Buzz was on his way, but when he did not appear Andy grew suspicious and asked the motel people to check. Buzz had died peacefully in his sleep, not drunk with German beer but blissfully intoxicated with the affection that had been shown him by the fans on Long Island, not one of whom had ever seen him play.
The next morning on his flight back to the Palms, when Dr. Zorn glanced at his New York Times and came upon the obituary page, he found an answer to the question that had been posed by the men of the tertulia: Of all the people at the Palms, whose obituary would be given the most prominence in the press?
There it was—two full columns on the death at age ninety of Buzz Bixby, the famous baseball player of the 1929 Athletics, who in the World Series of that year drove in four and scored two of the ten runs in that historic seventh inning.
For some weeks after their experience with the death of the basketball star Jaqmeel Reed, Dr. Zorn and Nurse Varney avoided comment on that tragedy or on the continuing plague of AIDS because the topic was too painful for both of them. But there was another deterrent, and perhaps it was the more potent: as medical personnel both the doctor and his nurse realized that they ought somehow to be engaged in combating the rapid spread of the disease and they were ashamed that they were remaining on the sidelines while the enemy was being fought by others like the Angelottis with their hospice and Dr. Leitonen with his personal mission to the doomed.
And then, one day when Nora was giving Dr. Zorn a routine update on Health, she suddenly slumped in her chair, and said in a voice heavy with sorrow: ‘I feel guilty.’
‘About what?’
‘Leaving Jaqmeel to die alone—by himself.’
‘Nora! I was there to comfort him. So was Dr. Leitonen. And Pablo, of course, was there to help.’
The black woman shivered, lowered her head and whispered: ‘That’s what I mean. When you and the other two weren’t around, Jaqmeel told me: “You’ve got to stay with me. I don’t want to die surrounded by white men in rubber gloves.” ’ She paused, then said bitterly: ‘That’s how they all die. With no human touch.’ Struggling to compose herself, she said: ‘We turn our backs on them. Me most of all, because I was needed.’
‘Nora, Dr. Leitonen fled, too. Couldn’t risk being seen in company with Pablo at the end. As a licensed nurse, maybe you did the right thing, too—the prudent thing.’
‘But I was his aunt. I was family.’
Zorn rose from his desk and strode about his office, trying to sort out his thoughts about this plague, which had so overwhelmed and confused the medical profession. Like many other doctors across the nation, he felt totally adrift.
‘We start with one fact, Nora. You’re the ablest health officer in the Palms. Far ahead of the other nurses, and way ahead of me. You’re the comforter, the stable resource, and the strong woman we turn to in time of trouble.’ He stopped by her chair and pressed one arm around her shoulder: ‘That’s how we see you, Nora, so don’t castigate yourself.’
‘Yes, I can comfort everyone except my dying nephew. That was too cruel for me to take. So I abandoned him. White men with rubber gloves, ending his life for him.’ She collapsed into racking sobs, her head still on the desk: ‘He was the hope of our family, that boy, and I deserted him.’
‘So did his parents,’ Zorn said. ‘So did his coaches.’
‘But they didn’t know any better,’ Nora mumbled. ‘I’m a nurse. It’s my job to know.’
Zorn corrected her: ‘But do any of us know? Apart from people like Leitonen and Pablo, how many of us have been willing to deal with this dreadful scourge? I’m as confused as you are, Nora. I’m a medical doctor and this is a medical crisis. I ought to be in the front lines, but I quit my practice because of the despicable things they did to me and now I’m outside the battleground and it gnaws at me.’
She reminded him that he had brought vitality to the Palms and had affected almost every life there for the better: ‘You don’t need to apologize to nobody, Dr. Zorn.’
‘But when you took me to see Jaqmeel that first day, in that hovel, you took me into the heart of the hell that is AIDS, and I’ve been uneasy ever since. I feel as if I had betrayed my chosen profession, lost the ideals I had as a boy.
‘But I don’t want you to grieve, Nora. Too many people depend on you.’
When Nora was about to leave, she paused at the door, looked back at Dr. Zorn slouched over his desk and said: ‘The comforting things we say to each other, Andy, they don’t erase the fact that I escaped down those dark stairs when Jaqmeel was about to die. The echo of those steps I took won’t ever go away.’
They did not speak again about AIDS until one morning when Andy abruptly said to Nora: ‘I’ve been thinking about that kind woman with the Italian name, the one who runs the hospice,’ and Nora said: ‘Mrs. Angelotti—yes I’ve been thinking of her too, and about the hospice and Dr. Leitonen.’
‘I think we ought to see what’s happening at the Angelottis.’ She agreed and they drove to the house where her nephew had died.
‘What brings you here?’ the Angelottis asked. ‘Don’t say you have another patient for us.’ Nora answered first: ‘I wanted to thank you for the way you eased things for my nephew. You made the passage tolerable.’ Then she looked at Zorn and said: ‘Him? I don’t know why he wanted to come,’ and Andy said with obvious embarrassment as he took an envelope from his pocket and handed it to Mr. Angelotti: ‘I wanted to help you keep this refuge going. It’s really needed.’ Then he said to Mrs. Angelotti: ‘And I wanted to tell you that if you have any young men with ordinary diseases who need medical care, not in the dying stages because I can’t help there, but—’ He was aghast at the terrible distinction he was making and did not know how to make himself understood. In a rush of words he said: ‘You know what I mean. A young man who has, let us say—’ Again he could not finish, so Mrs. Angelotti helped him: ‘Yes, I do know. Those men in the game room, the ones who won’t be dying for some months. They too need help. Block the kidney disease, they have a chance of living six more months.’
‘I suppose you know I’m not certified to practice medicine in Florida—’
‘Who among us is? That’s why Leitonen is such an angel in our eyes. He has certification and he risks it every day.’
‘But I could give you advice,’ Andy said. ‘If you have a question, I could help you work it out.’
‘And how would we get in touch with you?’
He spent some moments considering this crucial question. They must not call the Palms, for that might endanger the retirement area’s licensing. Nora came to his assistance: ‘You could call me, Mrs. Angelotti,’ but Zorn protested: ‘No, they’d know you were at the Palms, and the damage—’<
‘I’m aware of that,’ Nora said. ‘You can call me at home,’ and she gave the Angelottis her number, adding: ‘And if you need special nursing care, call the same number.’
Mrs. Angelotti turned to Dr. Zorn and asked: ‘So if I have young men with associated medical problems, I can telephone you through Nora, and you’ll come and help them.’
Carefully weighing the implications if he agreed to provide that service, he said: ‘Yes, I’ll help,’ and with that decision he was drawn back into the medical profession at one of its most critical crises.
One morning Laura Oliphant on the ground floor had cooked her own breakfast, and while eating her toast she bit down so hard on an edge of rye crust that she loosened a small porcelain facing on a dental bridge. With her next bite the facing fell off into her mouth.
She was irritated, but in no way distressed, because with dentures such accidents were to be expected. A brief trip to a dentist would solve the problem quickly—perhaps fifteen minutes for the epoxy to harden and no harm done.
But her teeth were in such good condition that she had not established contact with any local dentists. So she went to the main office to consult with her trusted friend Nurse Varney, and when the black woman learned what the problem was, she laughed: ‘Not to worry. Any dentists we use will be able to handle this with ease.’
‘Do I have to go all the way to a dentist? Can’t someone—’
‘Miz Oliphant, in Florida we have a law which says that with any tooth problem you have to see a licensed dentist.’
‘Even for gluing back on?’
‘Especially for gluing back on. A young man in my neighborhood, he’s one of the best dental mechanics in Tampa. He could fix your bridge in ten minutes, three dollars.’
‘Will you take me to see him?’
‘No, no! If there’s even one dental piece in that boy’s shop without a proper signed order from a licensed dentist, that young fellow is in trouble.’