Recessional: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Each of the four men who had invested substantial money in this project had supposed that Andy would be the manager, and each brought forth serious questions as to the practicality of what he now proposed.

  ‘Can you become fully licensed in Tennessee?’

  Dr. Zembright answered: ‘I served on our licensing board for years. It’s safe to bet Andy’s eligible to be our resident physician.’

  Another asked: ‘What are we going to do about this man Hasslebrook?’ and Andy said with considerable vigor: ‘Mr. Taggart showed me how to handle him. Throw him out of our establishment right now. Deny his application.’

  When two of the businessmen objected to such treatment: ‘He could sue us. We have to consider civil rights and laws ensuring that anyone can live anywhere.’ Andy said: ‘I think the time’s ripe for you to know exactly what this man has been threatening to do,’ and he explained Hasslebrook’s charges against him and his plan to hound Zorn and destroy him. The two men who had objected to throwing the agitator out of Sheltering Hills changed their minds: ‘Any court would agree that it would be suicidal to allow him to live right in the heart of the institution he is determined to ruin. We agree with you, Andy, throw the bum out and dare him to sue.’

  The financiers were not as pleased with Andy’s desire to have Betsy as his general assistant: ‘Sounds as if we’d have another Hillary Clinton on our hands.’

  ‘We both voted for her husband,’ Betsy confessed, and the partners groaned.

  ‘Did you think when you cast your ballot,’ Mr. Gilman, the financier, asked, ‘that you were also voting for Hillary to serve as co-president?’

  ‘Let’s put it this way,’ she said blithely. ‘You might as well accept the conditions Andy has laid down. I’m well aware that my father will probably leave me his shares of the partnership, and voilà, I’m automatically an equal shareholder.’

  Mr. Desmond said: ‘Not if I can buy his shares from him,’ and the group appreciated that the recent exchanges had not been idle banter.

  The corporate jet flew back to Chattanooga, where Betsy bade farewell to her father, thanking him for the gallant moves he had made in gathering this group of financial supporters: ‘They’ll be proud of what Andy and I accomplish. We’ll set new standards for the industry.’ She also bade a warm farewell to Dr. Zembright: ‘Andy taught me to walk again, but your surgery made it possible for me to survive,’ and she kissed the old warrior.

  One night after twelve, as she had promised she would, Helen Quade walked along the silent corridors of Gateways until she came to the apartment of Ambassador St. Près. There she stopped, knelt and slipped under the door a slim parcel containing the typed manuscript of three chapters of her forthcoming book on male-female relationships, Likewise the Mistress, Too. Having done this, she retraced her path, trusting that she would encounter no one at this late hour who might misconstrue her purpose.

  In the morning when St. Près reached down for his paper, he found the package, was more than casually interested in how Reverend Quade might have explained her conclusions about men and women, and ate his breakfast of fruit juice and a tasty mix of orange slices, bananas and raisins. As he did so, he scanned Helen’s essays and saw that the first two covered much of what she had said when they had argued in the tertulia, and he noted the skill and grace with which she wrote. But the third chapter broke new ground, at least for him, and he had barely reached the second page when a diagram captivated him. It showed two extremely elongated triangles parallel to the foot of the page. The base of the top one was two inches wide at the extreme left of the page and withered away to a dot at the extreme right. The bottom one was a mirror image, two inches at the right, a dot at the left. The first was labeled FEMININE TRAITS, the bottom MALE TRAITS, and each showed graduated numbers, 100 at the base, 0 at the apex.

  It was what the minister said to accompany the diagrams that caught St. Près’s attention:

  We can conclude from the accumulation of scientific evidence cited above that most human beings are neither all male nor all female. In fact, I think there is good reason to accept the theory that humans who function with the greatest efficiency in all fields have a proper mix of both male and female characteristics, and that those unfortunates who are one hundred percent either male or female are destined for psychological or social dysfunction.

  The man who is 100 percent masculine, with no ameliorating grace of a few feminine traits, is doomed to be what Edgar Spencer characterized as ‘a complete macho and a total bore,’ while the poor female who is 100 percent female with no stiffening attributes of the male is apt to become a nymphomaniac, unable to control her sexual urges. People of judgment find either of the two extremes distasteful.

  On the other hand, the unfortunate person who stands at the midpoint, the 50 percent marker, of both the male and the female measure is almost doomed to a life of confusion and even tragedy. The optimum mix would seem to be 80 percent of the dominant characteristic, 20 percent of the opposite. In women this proportion can produce a creature of great beauty but also of strong will, and in the male it seems to produce men of powerful character able to make decisions but softened by a love of the arts, an appreciation of beauty and a concern for social justice.

  Any educational system geared to produce 100 percent females or 100 percent males is not serving its nation well, and either men or women who drive themselves to function at or excel at the 100 percent level of their sex cheat themselves and do a disservice to society.

  He was so taken by this reasoning and so impressed by the diagram that made her argument visible—she had the 100 percent area in each pyramid a heavy black, with a progressively lighter screen, until the area approaching the pointed apex showed an almost clear white.

  ‘Damned effective, that visual,’ he said as he galloped through the remainder of the chapter, discovering at each point some insight that pleased him. When he reached the last page he telephoned the Reverend: ‘Helen? Richard here. Would you be free to take a short stroll with me? I’ve finished your Chapter Three and find a wealth of points I’d like to discuss. Rough gear if you will. We might be heading into the savanna.’

  It was about ten when they left Gateways, each with a stout walking stick and she with a pair of binoculars. He remembered to bring scraps for the birds, and when the screaming gulls had broadcast the news that here came food, they walked past Judge Noble’s old spot with egrets and herons and pelicans in attendance, but soon they were in rougher parts of the savanna.

  When they reached the Emerald Pool, St. Près suggested that they rest on a hummock overlooking the green water and from this vantage point, which gave them a view of the savanna south and east, the channel to the west and the towers of the Palms to the north, he opened the subject that he wished to discuss: ‘Your diagram of the range of characteristics that a woman can have, and the same for a man, hit me very hard because I discovered that truth, for myself, when I was eighteen or nineteen. My parents could afford to have me attend an expensive private school that had a superjock as coach, Bully Sykes, a lineman when Fordham had their famous Blocks of Granite. Boy, was he tough!’

  ‘And he gave you a bad time?’

  ‘Not at all. I was about as tall as I am now, slimmer, but good at playing end and receiving passes. I was—you might call it—Bull’s pet. The way he treated me proved he could also handle the straight-A student. He didn’t like me, I wasn’t his type, but he accepted me, especially since I won several games for him with my diving catches. I could really stretch out.’

  ‘So what happened?’ she asked as she kicked pebbles with her hiking boot into a rather large hole in the bank by the pool. ‘You have a big bust-up with him?’

  ‘Oh no! But when he gave his totally asinine pep talks I used to think: This is pretty stupid, and a couple of times he caught me looking at the ceiling when he came to his bit about the glory of the school and the forthcoming test of our manhood. I was thinking: There’s also the approach of Mr.
Strang. He doesn’t have to employ such nonsense. Strang taught English.

  ‘I remember thinking in the middle of the Lawrenceville game, our win-all-lose-all battle, that I did not want to be like Coach Sykes or Master Strang, the first was too masculine, the second wasn’t masculine enough. And I do believe that in the middle of that crucial game I realized that I was no more than eighty percent of what Coach Sykes advocated. And what was the other twenty percent? I was not able then to define that other component of myself, but I knew it had something to do with Thomas Hardy, Wordsworth and that marvelous befuddled Russian clerk in Gogol’s The Greatcoat. Now I can see that it was the aesthetic element, and in later years that strain developed rather strongly.’

  He looked at her handsome face marked with a few wrinkles. ‘Was your experience somewhat similar? How old were you when you deduced what you wrote in the chapter?’

  ‘I think I knew from childhood. With a boy you don’t get the macho indoctrination till you encounter someone like Bully Sykes in your late teens. With us girls, our hundred percent femininity is drilled into us from birth. “Pink is for girls. It’s important that girls take care of their hair. Girls should never sit with the knees far apart.” I was hammered at, but one elderly woman in China gave me a good tip: “When the camera looks at you, never stand with your feet side by side. Always place one foot well ahead of the other and close in.” So when I see the photographs from the missions, there I am looking like a million dollars, and the other poor girls, my classmates, with feet planted together looking like country clods just off the farm.’

  St. Près, not reluctant to let Helen know how much he admired her for her sharp wit, asked: ‘How did you learn so much. Helen?’ and she replied: ‘Constant reading—and picking the brains of brilliant men like you.’

  ‘In college, too?’

  ‘When you’re the child of an American missionary family your daily life is a university education. People are constantly amazed at how accomplished the children of missionaries are. Henry Luce, Pearl Buck, John Hersey, a half dozen college presidents. A major part of the explanation is that the missionary father has a wife who is also a missionary, just as well educated as he is. The children cannot escape being intelligent, and because the family is so poor, the children have to be clever about money. What a combination, guaranteed to produce greatness.’

  ‘Your diagram representing the life experience of human beings and their mix of gender characteristics—that was brilliant. It put me right on the nose—eighty—twenty and content to be that way. How do you place yourself on the scale?’

  She enjoyed discussions like this, so although she realized he had asked a somewhat improper question, she responded: ‘I’m closer to seventy-five—twenty-five. I have a very strong masculine-type underpinning. I think it was the only thing that allowed me to stick it out in the battles I had to fight.’

  ‘But the public sees you as so feminine—so exactly right.’

  When she heard this praise, delivered for no logical reason that she could discern, she suddenly thought: Good heavens! I wonder if he’s mustering his courage to propose, and she became as fluttery as she had been in the early days at the China mission station when she’d done everything within the bounds of decency to win the love of that young man new to China. For most of this year she had placed herself where the ambassador could see her, had praised his views when they participated in discussions, and had made much of his brilliance when she was invited to the tertulia. Jiménez is a polished gentleman, she had told herself. Senator Raborn has a mastery of political and social knowledge, and President Armitage is a world-class brain. But Richard is all those things. And now she surmised he was preparing to ask her to marry him, he seventy-nine, she seventy-five.

  During the long pauses that followed, with him praising her attributes, she was able to think clearly: Yes, if we lived in some small town, I in my little cottage and he in the big house near the golf links. And I was retired from the church on a meager pension. And I lacked companionship. Yes, it would make sense. But here in the Palms, where I have nearly two hundred friends, and good conversation, and a secure life, and a job as de facto chaplain to the place, and access to so many exciting adventures, I don’t need a husband. And she realized, at the conclusion of her silent monologue, that the Palms provided a life so acceptable and of such a superior quality that it made it reasonable for her to think of herself as already married to the ambassador.

  She knew that in decency she ought to intercept his proposal before it was made, to protect his ego if for no other reason, but as a woman who had had to fight men in her battle to obtain recognition in her Church, and for understandable considerations of personal vanity despite her age, she did want to hear his words. So, while doing nothing to encourage his declaration of affection, she also did nothing to halt it.

  ‘Helen, I’ve been so touched by your humanity, your genuine acceptance of people of all types—I’ve been proud to think of you as my newfound friend.’

  ‘Those are words of high praise, Richard.’

  ‘And your performance as the unofficial chaplain of the Palms, it’s been exceptional. You’re a spiritual consolation to all of us, an invaluable asset.’

  ‘I’m a New Testament Christian. It’s as simple as that.’

  ‘But you do it so wonderfully—you’re an exemplar.’ A long pause: ‘And I’ve been wondering if perhaps … since we work together so well in the tertulia discussions … I wonder if there’s a possibility that we could work together in a more settled structure.’ Longer pause. ‘Could we find increased happiness … and stability … if you would consent to marry me?’

  ‘Richard! What a gallant suggestion! It’s quite overwhelming—at our ages. It’s the loveliest idea ever, and I’m profoundly honored.’

  ‘There need be no changes in our patterns of life, no radical alterations in our financial arrangements. It could be said to be a marriage of two like minds, clean and mutually productive.’

  Reverend Quade was taken aback. This had developed far more quickly than she had anticipated. His reasoning was far more advanced than she could have expected, and she was not sure how she could reject such a sensible proposal, but since she had firmly decided not to marry before the conversation veered in that direction, she now knew that she must make her position clear. To do otherwise would be unfair.

  ‘Richard, we haven’t many years, you and I. We’ve organized our lives in rewarding patterns and I don’t think we should disrupt them by an action which might have been eminently sensible sixty—even twenty—years ago but which would lack any real justification now. Mentally, in our attitudes toward society, in our behavior toward our associates, we’re already married. I think we should let it go at that.’

  ‘But you sidestep the fact that I’ve grown to love you, that I need your companionship. The fact that I’m nearly eighty makes my desire to get my life properly organized even more pressing. I would dearly love to spend with you what years remain.’

  ‘And so you shall. Right here where we are. We can dine together any evening you wish. We can take walks like this any day. We can pass into our eighties as dear, close friends. I see no pressing need for change.’

  Not trying to hide his dejection, he asked almost pleadingly: ‘Are you saying No?’ and she clasped his hands, smiled warmly and said: ‘I am, and I know I’ll regret it many times. But no. I think that for us to marry would be wrong and unnecessary.’

  He sighed, rose, moved away from the Emerald Pool and said: ‘You’d have been the ideal wife for an ambassador in a beleaguered African nation. So much to do, so many lives to shape.’

  ‘I’m still striving to achieve those same worthy ends, and so are you, but in these autumnal days we spend our efforts with those who are leaving life, not entering it,’ and she caught his hand, used it to pull herself to her feet, and embraced him.

  On their slow walk back to Gateways St. Près said: ‘There are times when it’s not entirely
advantageous to stand eighty–twenty in your diagram. If I were ninety-five-five I’d not have talked so much. I’d have stated my position, knocked you on the head with my club, and dragged you back to my cave.’

  When she laughed at this alternative he said seriously: ‘And if you’d been ninety–ten, you’d have accepted me on the sensible grounds that every woman should have a husband—as proof of her ability to capture one.’

  She reflected on this, then said: ‘You may be right, Richard. I was certainly so motivated when I chased my young missionary, and landed him. But today …’ She was going to say she had grown more mature, but instead she said: ‘No matter how old we get, we never quite understand the basic drives that help determine our behavior.’

  When he delivered her to her quarters and saw everything not only in place but conveniently located, he said ruefully: ‘No need for you to change, Helen. Modern society has rendered the husband superfluous,’ and as she ushered him to the door she said: ‘But not the fellowship of a man I adore.’

  ‘The standard escape clause: “Let’s be friends.” The threnody of modern courtship,’ he said, and she kissed him good-bye.

  Three days after Christmas, as had been planned in April, the Raúl Jiménez tertulia, lacking its leader, laid their hands on the polished plane and pushed it into position for takeoff, with almost the entire population of Gateways standing by with their cameras while two television crews waited with theirs. As he had done on his earlier midnight flight, pilot St. Près carried out the traditional check of his craft and baffled some observers by dropping to his knees and opening the petcock to test the gasoline. A minute amount of condensation had occurred; he let it drain, smelled his fingers to be sure the remainder was gasoline, and all was ready. President Armitage and Senator Raborn helped him into the pilot’s seat, Max Lewandowski made a final check of the propeller, and then everyone stepped back. The starter soon had the engine coughing, then catching and finally almost roaring in the ears of those close at hand.