Recessional: A Novel (17 page)

They were such an unlikely pair that Andy started asking questions about how they had managed to get together and remain happily so if reports of their earlier years in the Palms could be believed. When Krenek was interrogated, he said: “I was bewildered when they came in eleven years ago as two of our first residents, for she was all classic beauty and he was a rough-and-tumble Bronx brawler. I put it down as a dreadful mismatch, but it quickly became evident that these two really loved each other, were happy together, and had worked out an arrangement that allowed him to continue to drink beer and her, champagne. Their secret? I never discovered what it was, but it ought to be patented and sold in a bottle. A lot of couples, including some here at the Palms, could use the elixir.”

When asked about them, the headwaiter said: “Muley set a high standard for the other men in that he was so courteous toward her. Always holding her chair, always standing up when she returned to
the table, always deferring to her in a conversation with others, and always jutting out his lower jaw as if he would tear anyone apart who bothered her in any way.”

“What happened when she had to be moved to Assisted Living?” Zorn asked, and the waiter explained: “Each afternoon at five he takes the elevator up to Assisted, helps dress his wife in a formal gown, places her in her wheelchair and proudly brings her down to the dining room and sits her at that table, where he usually invites someone to join them for dinner, but I’ve seen that people refuse the invitation, if they can.”

“That seems cruel.”

“Not if you’ve sat with them once or twice.”

“Is it that bad?”

“Worse.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s so terrible—the way she behaves. Almost every meal she’ll suddenly stop in the middle, look at him as if he was a stranger, and snarl at him. She doesn’t know who he is, but she’s convinced he’s done her wrong in some way.”

“What does he do?”

“Sits there and takes it till she calms down. Then he resumes feeding her. She can’t do it by herself, you know.”

“Then what?”

“Well, she loves yogurt, but as you know, most nights the machine’s broken, and she ends the meal abusing him for having broken it.”

“Do you wait on them often?”

“I enjoy it. He’s a sharp guy on sports, and I study her to see if there’s any pattern in her strange behavior.”

“And your conclusion?”

“Random. Except that she despises him for something bad she imagines he did to her.”

“Any clues as to what?”

“It changes. Sometimes it’s money, sometimes the conviction that he mistreated a daughter she fantasizes she had. Could be—”

“Do they have a daughter?”

“No. I checked. They married late, you know. No children.”

The mystery of Muley Duggan grew darker and more complex as Andy accumulated bits of evidence about his past life, but one thing was clear: his vulgarity was unquestionable, as the doctor observed
when he was invited by the Mallorys to accompany them on a visit to Muley’s apartment for afternoon cocktails. Pasted onto the wall beside the wet bar that Muley had installed at his own expense was a poster:

I’m not a fast bartender

And I’m not a slow bartender

You could call me

A half-fast bartender

On the bar itself lay stacked copies of
Sports Illustrated
,
Time
and
National Geographic
, with four ingeniously devised puzzles that were difficult to do when sober, impossible after a few drinks. It was the apartment of a bachelor with a robust appetite for games, beer and cartoons that verged on the unacceptably offensive. Several male residents had complained to Zorn on behalf of their wives who had objected to a joke Muley delivered at the Mallorys’ celebration of their return to the Palms.

It had been a gala affair, with the Mallorys in good spirits, dancing a waltz. Muley took the microphone and said: “Last week our dear friends Chris and Esther made a sentimental journey. They flew back to Niagara Falls, found the same hotel they’d stayed at on their wedding night, got the same room with the same four-poster bed and did everything they’d done sixty years before.”

A stooge who had been coached by Muley asked in an awed voice: “You do mean everything?” and Muley said: “Only one difference. On the wedding night after they went to bed, she got up, went into the bathroom and cried. This time
he
went in and cried.”

When several widows complained that this was far too vulgar for the public recreation area, he accepted the rebuke, but continued to tell gentler jokes that illustrated aspects of life among older people in retirement. Two were widely repeated: “This clergyman was invited to the Palms to give an inspirational talk, and he told us: ‘Especially as we grow older we must give thought to the hereafter,’ and at the conclusion of his little sermon this woman from floor four hurried up to him and said: ‘Reverend, I’m so glad you said what you did. I think of the hereafter almost every day of my life,’ and he said: ‘That’s a worthy habit,’ and she said: ‘I find myself entering a room, stopping in the doorway and asking myself: “Now, what did I come hereafter?” ’ ”

But the favorite was one that touched a lot of lives, and he told it
well, week after week as newcomers drifted in: “This woman on floor three, you all know her, told her husband: ‘I am dying for a hot fudge sundae. Will you be a dear and run down to the corner and get me one? But take your pad and write down exactly what I want,’ and he said: ‘I can remember,’ and she said: ‘Please write it down. Vanilla ice cream, hot fudge, nuts and whipped cream. Do you have all of those things written down?’ He said he had, and off he went. He was gone longer than usual, and when he returned he handed her a brown paper bag containing a hot dog in a roll. ‘See!’ she cried. ‘You should’ve written it down. You forgot the mustard!’ ”

During Zorn’s first visit to Muley’s apartment, he was awed by the immense size of the place and the number of rooms standing more or less unused, and during drinks the doctor pressured Duggan: “Every now and then we have a request for an oversize apartment like this. We could provide you with a neat two-bedroom affair in the Peninsula,” but Muley bluntly rejected the suggestion: “No way. This is Marjorie’s apartment, and I keep hoping she’ll be returning here soon. That Alzheimer’s Center at the University of Southern Florida is right at the breakthrough point in finding a cure, and I’d want her to see the rooms as they were when she left.”

Afternoon cocktails at Muley’s ended at five, for then he went regularly to Assisted Living to dress his wife and escort her down to dinner. On this evening he suggested: “Dr. Zorn, you’ve not gotten to know my wife. Join us for dinner in a few minutes,” and in this casual way Andy experienced dinner with the Muley Duggans. He’d often seen Marjorie in Assisted, but each time he was struck by how beautiful she was, how extraordinarily fragile, as if her head were made of some exquisite Chinese ceramic that allowed the veins to peek through. Proudly Muley walked her to their table and placed her in a chair beside the one in which he would be sitting. With this arrangement he would be able to cut her food and feed her a forkful at a time, then watch her as she slowly chewed and then took a sip from the water glass as he lifted it to her pale lips. “She’s doing better tonight,” Muley told the headwaiter whom Zorn had interviewed, but the young man looked at Andy and shrugged his shoulders as if to say: We’ll see. It often starts like this.

When the tediously slow meal was at midpoint, she suddenly drew back, glared at Muley and said in a loud accusatory voice: “You did it again, damn you. You hid the letters my daughter sent. You never let me have them.” And then she began railing about how he
had stolen her money and left her destitute. She would warn her husband about the misdeeds of his faithless friend. Andy found her performance so unpleasant that he wanted to leave the table, and wished that some messenger would come to tell him he was needed in the office, but none came. Then, as he reflected silently on the ungraciousness of his desire to flee one of the great human tragedies of our time, he composed himself and concluded that here was a mystery greater than he could resolve. Muley was a man in love under circumstances so strange that ordinary words could not explain it.

When the meal ended, with Marjorie refusing the dessert, which she suspected of having been poisoned, Zorn asked Muley: “Would it be possible for me to join you when you take her back upstairs?” Muley was so appreciative of his interest that he agreed effusively, and the three went to the elevator, ascended to Assisted and went to her room, where Muley prepared Marjorie for bed. As the men were leaving her room, they looked back at this beautiful woman and Muley said with the greatest confidence: “I live from day to day, following reports from the team at the university, hoping that news of the breakthrough will come.”

“Do they think that a cure might be found that would reverse the disease? That would cure those already afflicted?”

“No,” Muley said with a deep sigh. “But they believe that what they can do is stop other people from contracting it. Women like Marjorie, they’re lost. Their brains have been damaged beyond repair. But even so, we continue to hope—to pray for the miracle that we know will never come.”

This episode at dinner, and Muley’s reaction to it—his extraordinary patience and his love for her no matter how she behaved—made Zorn even more curious about the mystery of this strange marriage. His queries led nowhere until one day when Nora was in his office checking some filing cabinets, he asked casually: “Nurse, what do you know about the Duggans? They seem a curious pair—fascinating.”

“Know? I know everything.”

“How?”

“I was their family nurse when they first arrived. That was before I got promoted to my present job. In the evenings after dinner they would sit on their veranda overlooking the river and tell me about the old days.”

“How did they meet? Such a bizarrely matched couple?”

“She was a society woman, married to a gentleman, graduate of Harvard, head of four big department stores in New England, I believe, but it could have been upstate New York. Muley was the owner of the trucking company that served the stores. With an exclusive contract, it was like part of the company. They told me that Muley became part of the family, completely trusted, even went on vacation cruises with them. I take it the husband was a kind of fancy-dancy fellow, they had no children and he was never well. Before he died, they told me, he called them together on the ship they were on at that time and told Muley: ‘When I’m gone, Muley, take care of this woman. She’ll have the money, you’ll have the good sense.’ They laughed when they told me that and Muley said: ‘I’ll bet he never thought I’d take him seriously and marry her, but I did,’ and he added: ‘I think she was pleased to be married to a man who’d had to work. You know, Nora, she became an officer in both her stores and my trucking company, and she was smarter than any of us. That’s why I’m so nice to her.’ ”

Zorn, astounded that a couple like the Duggans would have confided such secrets to Nora, asked: “Why would they have told you these things?” and the big woman said: “Why does everyone open up to me? Because I listen, really listen, and I’m not afraid to tell them when they’re talking like damned fools.” Later, Zorn learned from various sources that all Nora had said was accurate.

Now Andy had become a good friend of Muley’s and from his frequent visits to the Duggans’ apartment he learned that Muley had learned to play Marjorie’s collection of operatic disks and had mastered the trick of picking a single aria from the middle of some disk and transferring it to a tape. In fact, he had become so skilled in this rather difficult maneuver—half a dozen different buttons to push and split-second timing in handling each one—that he had succeeded in making several almost flawless sixty-minute tapes of the music his wife had liked most, and from them he had assembled one master tape that played what he called the Marjorie Duggan All-Star Concert. He duplicated this master tape onto three fresh cassettes, and kept one in Marjorie’s old room, one by the stereo machine in her new room, and one in safekeeping, lest the others be damaged.

Zorn, who had attended operas both as a student and as a doctor in Chicago, knew much of the music and asked to hear what Muley had recorded for his wife. Muley started the tape in the apartment
and handed Andy a typewritten copy of the program: “Marjorie is very feminine, as you’ve seen from those pictures I showed you of her with her first husband. Frilly gowns, fancy hairdos. Well, she loved arias in which two women singers, one with a high voice, one low, sang together. She thanked me a dozen times for making her this private concert of her music, of her women singing about their joys and sorrows.”

There in the apartment overlooking the river and the channel, Zorn sat rapt as Muley’s expensive speakers poured out the rich music his wife had loved: “She would sit here and explain what I was hearing, and in time I came to know. This is Madame Butterfly and her maid decorating the house with flowers for the American’s return. He’ll return, all right, but with an American wife. She’ll commit suicide.

“This next one was her favorite, from an opera called
Norma
about Romans and Druids. She loved this so much that I often called her Norma: ‘Hey, Norma! Here she comes again,’ and we’d listen as the two women sang about the Roman soldier that neither of them was supposed to love. Forbidden because they were priestesses. But Norma died and I think the other woman died, too. Listen to those heavenly voices. Marjorie loved this recording.

“This next one is the one I grew to love best. It’s in a place called Ceylon, again a priestess loving somebody she shouldn’t. When I think of Marjorie I think of these voices in the jungle—so simple, so feminine.

“This next one, you’ve always known it, so did I, but I never knew what it was. I don’t know what they call it but it’s two women in a gondola in Venice.”

“Isn’t it the ‘Barcarolle’?”