Recessional: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘I’ve heard it whispered here at the Palms. Many people have been accused of things they haven’t done. What matters is, they blustered about impeaching you but they didn’t do it. You’re home free. You kept your seat on the court, didn’t you?’

  This was true, though it was something of a hollow victory. But at that moment he was driven to concentrate on the real crime he had committed, the deep kind that can scar a man’s soul: ‘In Kennedy High, when I was fifteen years old I fell deeply, passionately in love with Edith Baxter, and I think she liked me, too, but pressure from everyone scared me away. We had a few secret dates, saw each other as much as possible, and I learned that she had even vaster dreams than me. She wanted to be free of rural Mississippi and change the world. If I now have a broader vision than most, it’s because I knew Edith in those days and nights of long thoughts.’

  Hesitating about continuing such revelations, he rocked back and forth for some moments, then braved it: ‘I think you’ll understand, Mrs. Varney.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. You backed away from the one fine young woman in your life.’

  ‘Coward, I played the coward. With her I could have gone to the stars and, damn it all, I knew it all the time. Jesus, what an ass I was. In college I thought: I’ve left her behind. She’ll never catch up. If I’m to find a place in one of the big law firms I’ll need a wife with a college education. I got such a wife, and she put me in touch with her good friend Windy Wilson.’

  ‘What happened to Edith?’

  ‘Graduated from high school with honors, couldn’t go to college, girls from backwoods Mississippi didn’t go much in those days. So she went into social work, became a force to reckon with in the South and wound up as one of the United States representatives at the United Nations.’

  ‘You mean that Edith Baxter Jackson?’

  ‘The same. The little high school girl who wouldn’t fit in as my wife at a prestigious law firm.’

  Nora laughed, not at Judge Noble but at herself: ‘I sometimes look back on the young men I might have married and ask myself: Of that wonderful lot why did I pick the world-class loser? None of us is vaccinated against that malady.’

  The two friends laughed at the disasters that so often overtook worthy members of their race, and although Nora could see that Noble wanted to remain and talk further, she had to excuse herself: ‘Judge, I have to check on Assisted Living and Extended Care. That’s what they pay me for,’ and she left him sitting in her office.

  After about ten minutes of mournful reflection, he rose, placed his chair in its proper position and wandered into the kitchen to collect whatever scraps the cooks had saved for his birds. With a bagful of bounty he strolled down to the channel where two noisy gulls aloft signaled to their colleagues: ‘Here he comes again, loaded!’ and almost instantly a swarm of gulls appeared to pester him for food. Next came the three graceful herons; they looked exactly like the three judges who used to enter the Louisiana courtroom together in their black robes. He liked those birds.

  Then from the south came half a dozen snowy egrets, those poets of the marshland, and they had become so accustomed to the judge and so assured that he would have something for them, no matter how small or scarce the fragments from the Palms, that they clustered about him as if they were his children coming close to feed from his outstretched hand. They were his family, each with its distinct merits. None flew faster or with more grace than the gulls, those white bombardiers of the sky; none were more beautiful than the big snowy egrets or more delightful than the small cattle egrets. But, as from the first days with the birds, he reserved his chief approbation for the dark, stately blue herons, with whom he identified in an almost nonpersonal way: They’re noble birds. Would that I could be like them.

  Then, as his supply of food dwindled, he noticed with regret that the bird he loved the most was missing. Rowdy, the tame pelican, was nowhere to be seen, not in the sky lumbering along in his heavy, slow pace, nor in the water swimming awkwardly toward the shore. ‘Rowdy!’ the judge shouted, ‘where are you?’ When there was no reply, he left a few scraps in the bottom of his bag and muttered: ‘Dinner’s here whenever you’re ready.’

  Then, as his birds slowly drifted away, the egrets first, then the herons, and finally the swiftly darting gulls, he was left alone with the heavy thoughts that had assailed him in Nurse Varney’s office: ‘I did everything wrong. I wasted the grandest opportunity a black man of my day could have had placed before him. In my first days on the bench I should have written those legal essays I had so clearly in mind. Four or five of the points I could have made then, they’d have positioned me at the head of my generation. Why didn’t I do it? The issues I could have helped to clarify are the ones that perplex us so much today. I saw the light but turned down the wick.’

  The metaphor pleased him, reminding him of how in college he had caught the attention of the professors because of the originality of his expression when arguing a legal point, but his gratification was brief, for his own words ‘turned down the wick,’ summoned visions of the moral darkness into which he had stumbled.

  ‘Why did I allow myself to get mixed up with Windy Wilson? His nickname should have sounded danger signals and it did, but I wasn’t listening.’ Lowering his head until his chin rested in his cupped hands, he forgot the birds and the beauty of the channel and saw only Windy Wilson, that fast-talking black man who had a score of ways to earn a quick illegal dollar here and there. Normally he would have remained miles away from such a trap, even if he had not been a judge, but Windy had been a friend of his wife’s, had even dated her briefly before her marriage, and when Ellen had insisted on inviting the fellow to dinner, or had taken the judge to affairs at which Windy was present, Noble had complied, even though his better judgment advised against it. Several times, when invitations were either issued or received, he remembered the warning of a respected judge on New York’s superior bench: ‘Always bear in mind that if your butcher gets a bloodstain on his trousers, it’s an excusable consequence of his perfectly honorable profession, but if you, as a judge, get a stain on your gown, it’s a major offense which all the world can see and which will, if the stain cannot be erased, destroy your reputation and your career.’ He had elaborated: ‘You do not even have to be responsible for getting the stain on your robe. Mud may have been accidentally spattered on you, but the stain is there. You shouldn’t have been where mud was being thrown around.’

  When the FBI obtained a court order allowing them to wire-tap Windy Wilson’s very busy phone, they taped two separate discussions of two court cases in which cohorts were involved. Windy had boasted that the men had nothing to fear ‘because I have Judge Noble in my pocket.’ This charge was so egregious that it had to be investigated, and even a cursory round of discreet questioning revealed that Windy Wilson and Judge Lincoln Noble were frequently seen together. The FBI men did not have to resort to hidden cameras. Numerous photographs had appeared in the national press.

  It was never determined who leaked the news of the judge’s pending indictment, but the hideous boast ‘I have Lincoln Noble in my pocket’ swept the country, and several senators who had never approved of promoting black lawyers to the federal bench saw Noble’s case as their chance to halt or at least slow down the process of appointing black judges to the federal courts.

  Impeachment proceedings were proposed, and although they never occurred, for further investigation proved that Windy Wilson was nothing but a loudmouthed petty hood, the damage was done. Judge Noble was allowed to remain on the bench, for there was no reason to depose him, but any promotion was now out of the question. He did compile an honorable record and recovered some of his reputation for honesty, but he knew the opportunity for any advancement in his career was over, and without making any protracted effort at self-defense, he retired, his pension enabling him and his wife to live at the Palms. Ellen’s death shortly thereafter had reinforced his propensity for solitude.
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br />   Now, as he sat alone in the autumn sunlight that had so often graced the next step in his orderly progress up the ladder, he had the deepest regrets, regrets he could not disclose to anyone: If I’d written those essays and built a growing reputation and stayed clear of Windy Wilson, I’d have been a leading candidate to follow in the footsteps of Thurgood Marshall. To keep the black dream alive. To lend a voice of reason to the Supreme Court. I could have done it, I know it.

  Then came the grinding, soul-searing truth: I might have been the one to be moved forward instead of Clarence Thomas. How preposterous it was for George Bush to claim that in selecting Thomas he was choosing the best-qualified judge in America. How utterly ridiculous. I can name half a dozen other black judges infinitely better qualified, Leon Higginbotham up in Philadelphia, to name one.

  Then, when he was feeling most bitter, he came to the real reason why he despised Thomas: that interview Thomas gave years before his Supreme Court appointment. When he made fun of his sister for being on welfare, and added that her children had grown to expect the welfare check as their due. He denigrated the very sister who had stood by him. To have abused her was an act so shameful that he must regret it late at night, when he can’t sleep. He befouled his race and his family, who had supported him.

  The judge was gentle in the analysis of the Anita Hill affair because he was himself so vulnerable. Could it be that my behavior was worse than his? That last date with Edith Baxter. I’d come home from college with those two law-school scholarship offers. Stars were in my eyes, and with their help I could see years ahead, the honors that might await me. And I said, to my eternal damnation: ‘Edith, I won’t be seeing you anymore. Law school will be demanding, and there’ll be many new responsibilities. There’s no chance we would ever be married, so don’t wait around for me.’ I can hardly believe I said such a thing. In those words. With those implications. Well, I did, and if I were to die tonight I’d go a lesser man than I could have been.

  The remorse was cutting, like an errant winter wind blowing down the channel and ruffling the feathers of the birds and his conscience. Slouched in his chair he passed into a kind of amnesia, lost between a scarred past and an uneventful future. He was jolted from his mournful reverie by a welcome sound. Rowdy was back, belatedly, for his dinner and was making his customary rumpus in the channel. Judge Noble, looking at him beating his big wings in the water, thought: Poor Rowdy, what a clumsy bird he is. But looking more carefully at the pelican, he saw to his horror that Rowdy had got himself tangled in a long piece of the extremely tough nylon filament used by fishermen. The strands were twisted tightly around the bird’s neck and not only were close to choking him to death but also trailed so far behind that they threatened to drag him down until he drowned.

  As soon as the judge detected his friend’s peril and realized that Rowdy had used his last bit of energy to work his way painfully upstream to where he knew the judge would be waiting to help him, he jumped up from his chair and eased himself down into the cold waters of the channel. Calling words of encouragement to Rowdy, he moved out cautiously to release the bird from its filament prison, but he lost his footing and fell into deep water. Twisting himself in the filament that was stronger than steel wire, he dragged both himself and his cherished friend to a watery death.

  The three blue herons, marching like robed judges, returned to the unopened brown bag on the ground by the chair and began pecking at the paper until it split open. Unaware of the double tragedy a few yards from where they stood at the edge of the shore, they feasted.

  On a brilliant moonlit November night, Ambassador St. Près waited till midnight, then walked quietly to the improvised shed at the edge of the narrow landing strip that had been mowed and smoothed. There the plane was tethered. Looking at its sleek contours, the sturdy wings securely attached to the fuselage and the shimmering propeller, he started the procedure he had been taught by air force men when they served at the embassy with him in Africa. He checked the fuel with a measuring stick that showed the gasoline level. Then he crept under the plane to open the petcock at the very bottom of the gas tank; this allowed any water that might be in the tank to drain off, whether it got there by contaminated gasoline from the pump or by condensation within the tank. Smelling the last drops to be certain that they were gas and not water, he closed the petcock, checked the two tires for proper inflation, then tried to revolve the propeller to be sure it wasn’t drifting loose. Walking to the end of each extended wing, he tried to push it up and down to test its stability and finally unleashed the plane and pushed it out to the takeoff line. When it was positioned, he went to the telephone that had been rigged into the shed and called the air controller at Tampa International Airport: ‘I’m Ambassador Richard St. Près of the Palms, south of Tampa. You may have heard about the five of us building our own small plane, everything but the engine. Within a few minutes I would like to take off on a test flight, and remain aloft about half an hour. Have I your permission?’

  ‘Ambassador, I’m honored that you bothered to call, but if you remain under twelve hundred feet you need no clearance from me. If you go higher into our airspace, all hell will break loose.’

  ‘Then I’m free to take her up?’

  ‘Are you cleared for night flying?’

  ‘When I worked in Africa. I keep my papers in order.’

  ‘It’s OK, then, but I must warn you about one thing. Our Coast Guard planes monitor these shores looking for small planes like yours, pirates sneaking in with cocaine. No fancy maneuvers or they might shoot you down.’

  ‘Can you alert them that I’m in the air?’

  ‘Can do. Will do. It’s a beautiful night for a flight.’

  Satisfied that he had played by the rules, he returned to his car and moved it into position so that its headlights illuminated the first half of the strip. Leaving the car with its lights on, he walked to the plane, climbed in, fitted himself into the solitary seat and muttered a prayer: ‘Safe skies and safer landings.’ Then he turned on the ignition, waited for the engine to turn over, checked the gas and the various instruments and mumbled to himself: ‘Here we go!’

  When he released the brake and jockeyed the plane onto the head of the strip, he experienced a moment of immense excitement, but once the plane started down the runway, his nerves steadied and he was again a pilot taking off over the great African veldt. When the required speed was attained, he eased back on the controls, felt the nose of the plane tilt upward as required, listened for the last bumps from the runway and soared into the air. No plane, no matter how skillfully built by professionals, could have behaved better, and with this assurance and the land below illuminated by the radiant moon, he turned to the right and made a full-throttle run back over the channel, past the string of building lots with the expensive houses and out over the Gulf of Mexico. Only then did he admit to himself the reason for what he was doing at midnight in November, flying solo over the gulf: I talked them into building this plane. Whenever I saw them flagging, I told them: ‘It can be done.’ When my own fears assailed me I bit my tongue. So it was my moral responsibility. I knew it was a sound job, checked every detail and, thanks to Lewandowski, who has that critical eye, we did it right. But if it was going to go up in the air, sputter and then fall to the ground, I could not afford, I simply could not afford’—he gripped the throttle with both hands—‘to have it crash with everyone looking on in horror, and maybe the television cameras recording the disaster. I could not let that happen.’

  Now, safely aloft and with the gulf below him to smother his failure if it did occur, he was satisfied that his friends had done a thoroughly competent job. The engine throbbed, the wings held fast, the compass turned with the nose of the plane, the gas tank was nearly full, and the grandeur that he had sought when he launched this enterprise was at hand, so he headed far out into the gulf where the tips of waves glistened in the moonlight and silence threw a cloak about the soft rhythms of the engine, muffling its sound. H
e was free, aloft in the sky again as he had been decades ago when he flew for his life over the vast areas of Africa. He had been a novice then, brave and determined to aid others, and tonight he was again a beginner, recovering the skills he was afraid he had lost. How magisterial the night sky was, ahead an unbroken sweep to the hills of Mexico, behind the invisible coast of Florida, and he was a free power floating between them.

  Then a careful turn on the dropped tip of the left wing and a heading back to land, with the dark sea behind and slowly the appearance of lights ahead. How deep in the experience of mankind it was to come back at night across the sea, or the desert, or the snowbound tundra and to see light in the distance and the promise of home! ‘How strange,’ he said to himself as he headed toward the airfield and the shed that housed the plane, ‘that I should have come a stranger to the Palms and allowed it so quietly to creep into my heart that now I call it home. I spent so little to acquire so much! And there it is, waiting in the moonlight.’

  In his euphoria he allowed himself a few bars of the gallant song the air force men had taught him in Africa, the part about living in fame or going down in flame, and his spirit soared. Winging in at the proper altitude and adjusting his flaps to serve as a brake, he descended in what seemed like a roar, touched down exactly as planned, turned slowly so as not to place strain on the outer wheel and taxied back to the crude hangar.

  He was met by Senator Raborn, who greeted him with the same kind of reserve that St. Près showed as he climbed out of their plane: ‘I could guess what you were going to do. I had more or less planned to do the same thing next week, if you didn’t. You wouldn’t want a lot of gawkers on a holiday staring at you if the thing went down. That wouldn’t be fair to the Palms.’