Death Comes to a Hero

THE WASHINGTON REGIONAL Medical Center for Exercise had become the pickup bar for all the old people of Fayetteville, Arkansas. Every health-conscious fifty-and sixty-year-old citizen in town had started going down there, at noon to hear the old forties and fifties music, with its crescendo of “Begin the Beguine.” Later in the day, to get serious on the StairMaster and treadmill and Exercycles, while radio station ninety-two-point-four poured out Oldies onto the airwaves. By which the twenty-six-year-old disc jockey meant songs from the ‘seventies and ‘eighties, music that reminded Brenda Lacey of the years her sons had been into dope. Still, it was nice to exercise to the Pointer Sisters and the Marvelettes and Diana Ross and the Supremes. Brenda was in great shape for her age. Her legs were long and thin and her skin was tight and she only weighed two pounds more than when she had been Homecoming Queen of Fayetteville High. She had lived a lot of history and none of it had gotten her down. She was living in an age of miracles and proof of it was all around her. An elderly man with one leg was working the ski machine with great dexterity. It always cheered Brenda up to be at the center when he was there. He came in wearing a suit and tie and never took them off the whole time he went from machine to machine with his good leg and his other miraculous man-made leg. Brenda never tired of watching him make his miraculous adjustments. He was plump and had a fine handsome face that was intent on every step of his way. She had seldom seen him smile but he always had a pleasant look on his face.

Another thing that cheered her up was the group of elderly housewives who met each day at noon to do aerobics to the ‘fifties music. They told stories as they danced, of wars their husbands had gone to and what the music meant to them. When “Begin the Beguine” came on, a soft dreamy spirit would fill the room and the women’s faces would become sensual and tender. Brenda was not quite as old as the women who danced at noon. “Begin the Beguine” reminded her of her young aunts and their friends, who would sit around the living room floor on Saturday afternoons, playing phonograph records and rolling up their hair and writing V-mail letters to their sweethearts overseas. When they begin the beguine, it brings back a night of tropical splendor. It brings back the sound of music so tender. It brings back a memory, ever green.

The young men and women who ran the Washington Regional Medical Center for Exercise all belonged to a Christian church. They kept everything immaculately clean. They changed the filters on the air-conditioning units. They were polite and kind to the old people who came there to recuperate from their triple bypass operations and varicose veins and gastrointestinal upsets. The old people were remorseful over their old ways. They were sorry they had eaten too much and drunk too much and been too lazy and waited so long to get on the StairMasters and treadmills and Exercycles and weight machines. They were going to make up for lost time. With the help of the young people they were going to learn how to live forever. How to eat, how to do aerobic exercise, how to be healthy, happy old people, how to be thin and get the heartbreaking fat off their buttocks and hips and waists.

It occurred to Brenda that she had never seen anyplace as hopeful as the Washington Regional Medical Center for Exercise. People came in smiling and left smiling. It was a good idea. An idea whose time had come. Brenda smiled at the obstetrician who had come in the door. He was a local hero. The only doctor in northwest Arkansas who was brave enough to do abortions. Once a year for twenty-six years he had examined Brenda to make sure she wasn’t getting cancer. She had never had cancer and she thought it was the goodwill and kind nature of Doctor Hadley that made those pap smears come back negative. If she had gone to a mean or stupid doctor there was no telling what might have happened. She smiled and waved to let him know how much she cared. “You’ve lost so much weight,” she said. “You better be careful. You’ll be going anorexic on us.”

“Not a chance,” he answered. “Not as long as they make Häagen-Dazs.”

The dean of the Business School at the University of Arkansas came in the door, signed in, and went to work on the free weights. A sportswriter for the Northwest Arkansas Times came in the door and took his stack of newspapers over to the Exercycle that had the plastic holder for papers and climbed aboard and began to pedal. The mistress of the richest man in town came in. She looked great from her hours on the treadmill and her plastic surgery. She wore panty hose and makeup when she exercised. She had her hair done and came right over and messed it up.

Brenda climbed down off her machine and went to the heart-rate monitor and stuck in her index fingers. One-forty, which immediately went down to one-ten. She was going to live forever, that much was clear. “Are you finished?” the obstetrician asked.

“Yes, I have to go pick up a child. I’m in the Big Sister program.”

“That’s nice. That’s lovely of you.”

“I like to have children around. They cheer me up.” She smiled and threw back her head. It was true. Her children were grown and gone and her husband had run off to the Virgin Islands when he had his midlife crisis. All she had was one part-time boyfriend who was out of town half the time selling prefabricated buildings and she sure wasn’t going to marry him and nurse him into the sunset. She had all the old men she wanted right down here at the Washington Regional Medical Center for Exercise.

She walked over closer to the obstetrician. She spoke loudly enough for the one-legged man to hear. “I have a cherry tree in my backyard that is full of cherries. I’m going to invite the neighborhood children over to pick the cherries. Who knows, I may make a pie, if I can remember how.” The obstetrician beamed. The one-legged man lifted his head and smiled. Brenda took their approval and wrapped it around her like a cloak. She heaved a deep happy sigh and turned and walked out into the summer sunlight. It was true about the cherry tree and now that she had thought of it she would invite all the children over to pick the cherries. They would fall from the children’s hands into bowls and pans and saucers. She would stop by the store and buy piecrusts and cream. They would have a party, here on the planet earth, in the summertime, in the only world there is.

II

The one-legged man was a retired professor of English at the University of Arkansas and his specialty was Joyce and Eliot and Pound. He was spending his retirement explicating the Cantos, work which he thought would last him the rest of his life.

Brenda found this out one rainy Sunday afternoon when she was at the center and he was the only other person there. The center was only open from two to five on Sunday afternoons so the young people who ran it wouldn’t have to miss any Christian church events.

“I hate the way they only stay open three hours on Sunday,” Brenda began. The one-legged man was on the biceps press. She was on the inner thigh machine. “It’s so inconvenient.” He didn’t answer. She giggled and tried again. “Still, it’s an imperfect world. And we’re lucky to have this place. All the other health clubs I ever went to were so dirty. I thought I was catching things all the time. Well, I won’t even come here during flu season.”

“Ariadne’s dancing floor,” he said. “The way the machines all spread out from the middle.”

“A dancing floor. That’s right. I always try to get in here at noon to watch the old ladies do aerobics. Listen, they’re really getting in good shape. I was watching them the other day, they’re really getting limber. When I used to first watch them I was laughing at them. Now they’re getting good. It makes me ashamed of myself. I’m starting to love them.”

“You could follow one of them through a day and know the history of our culture. May I introduce myself. I’m Morais Wheeler. I’ve been watching you. You work very hard, don’t you?”

“I’ve done this all my life. I can’t sit still. I have a lot of energy. My name is Brenda, a boring name.” She got up and went to the other side of him and got on the StairMaster. “Morais, that’s a pretty name. Yeah, that’s nice.”

“It’s French. My mother was French. I keep thinking I’ve seen you somewhere. Do you work in town?”

“I used to. I was in the courthouse for a while, in the driver’s license bureau. But I don’t remember you. I would have noticed you.”

“Is that where you are now?”

“No, I work for the Organ Recovery Team. I’m the secretary. It’s real good hours.”

“Joyce would love it.”

“Your wife is Joyce?”

“No. Joyce is a writer I admire. I haven’t ever had a wife.”

“How’d you lose your leg?”

“A long time ago, in another country.”

“In a war?”

“You might call it that.” He smiled a deep wide beautiful smile that lit up his face and her face and all the space around them. It was a smile full of mystery and excitement. As old as he was, his smile seemed to promise things.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry. I guess you don’t want to talk about it.”

“I don’t actually. Not really.” He smiled at her again. He wrapped a smile around her embarrassment and then he got down off the machine and went over to the ski machine and began to make the delicate adjustments that put him in balance so he could exercise his good leg. His tie moved up and down on his white shirt. His coat was unbuttoned.

Brenda moved her legs and feet up and down on the StairMaster. It was divine, amazing. He was someone special. She had known that all along. He had probably been in some secret service in the army. In some code business or some secret thing behind the lines. He couldn’t talk about it, of course. Real heroes never wanted to talk about their deeds. Yes, this was just what Brenda wanted. To get to know some people who did something besides watch basketball games. Brenda’s boyfriend watched basketball games all the time. Every time he came over it was just to sit in her den and watch basketball games. “Why don’t you go play basketball?” she had told him finally. “Why do you just sit around and watch it all the time?”

She climbed down off the StairMaster and went over and stood beside the ski machine and started doing stretches. “Do you mind if I talk to you while you do that?” she asked. “Tell me if you can’t talk while you do it. I’ve been watching you for so many weeks I feel like I know you.”

“I can talk. Of course. I’d like to talk to you. Where shall we begin?” The smile again. That great big space-filling smile.

“What did you say just then? About someone’s dancing floor? What was that about?”

“Ariadne. The labyrinth. A maze emanating from a center.”

“You’re a teacher, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am. Retired these last few years, although they still run me in when they’re shorthanded.”

“I’m going back to college. I want to study French, then I’ll go to Paris and parlez-vous. God, it’s really coming down out there. I love a summer rain. Well, I’d better go get on the treadmill. We’ve only got half an hour before they close.” She waited. He gave her half a smile. He was getting tired. It was amazing that he could hold himself up on that machine as long as he did. Oh, God, she thought. I tired him out. I’m so inconsiderate. I ought to be ashamed of myself.

She went over to the treadmill and set the speed on thirty-eight to punish herself for being insensitive. Behind her Professor Wheeler bent to his task. He had promised his cardiologist that he would exercise an hour a day and he always kept his promises. Molly, he was thinking. Artless, timeless, the scene is the bed; the organ is flesh; the symbol, the earth; the female monologue. You are Molly. I am Leopold. A marriage bed rooted to the bole of an olive tree. The rain falls on our empty pastures.

I’ll make a pie for dinner, Brenda was thinking. If he tries to eat it in front of the television set I won’t let him. I’ll say, Sit here at this table and talk to me. If you take that cherry pie into that room with that television set, it’s over. I’ll go out tonight and get another boyfriend or I’ll do without. Sit here at this table, David. Sit down and talk to me.

We are all wanderers, Professor Wheeler was thinking, as he got off the machine and straightened up his spine. Everyman is a Jew. But not Molly. Molly is warm from making love. Bloom would create order from chaos. Would create order from Molly, who knows no order.

I am not watching television tonight, Brenda decided. She turned the treadmill up to forty, then forty-one. I want to go for a walk on the mountain and see the vistas. I want to walk until the sun goes down. It stays up so long in summer. We might have to walk for hours. We might just walk along and talk about how beautiful the world is in summer. How long the days, how fine and clear the nights. The stars, how they shine down upon us. Professor Wheeler’s right. It is a dancing floor. The best thing to do is dance.

The young Christian boy who tended the machines was standing by the door looking at his watch. Brenda looked in his direction and smiled at him. She felt guilty for keeping him so long. He probably had better things to do than watch old people exercise. He probably had a date.

Think of the courage in all of it, Professor Wheeler was thinking, as he straightened up his tie. What a wrenching it will be to leave this world.

 

On her way out to the car Brenda found a blue and black Monarch butterfly flattened out against a window. She moved in close and studied it. Later, there was a daddy longlegs on the screen door. The next morning she took a piece of coffee cake out onto her patio and a bumble bee came and sat upon it and began to take the honey on the icing. “I feel like I’m getting messages from somewhere,” she told Professor Wheeler that Monday when she met him at the center. “It’s like everywhere I look something’s going on to make me remember nature.”

“It hasn’t rained in weeks. The creatures are looking for moisture anywhere they can.”

“Why do they flatten themselves on windows? The butterflies, I mean?”

“There’s a small amount of condensation there. Half a cup of water is a treasure in the desert.”

“What did you teach when you were a teacher?” She speeded up the Exercycle to make up for asking him such a personal question.

He stopped his machine and thought a moment. “Poetry mostly. Literature. From all over the world at one time or the other. I know quite a large number of languages. Did you think further about calling my friend, Dan Levine, about your French classes?”

“No. I’ve been too busy. I’m breaking up with my boyfriend but he doesn’t know it yet. I’m giving him tests. He’s flunking them.” She considered telling Professor Wheeler about the eating-pie-in-front-of-the-television test, then decided against it. It was too crude to talk about to him. “He keeps wearing his baseball cap in the house. I can’t put up with that.” She speeded up even more. “To tell the truth I won’t sleep with a man who wears a hat in the house. My grandmother was a charter member of Chi O. It was founded here, did you know that? Well, that was all a long time ago. My family hasn’t done too good since then.”

“Families rise and fall, like tides. Only the genes remain. You can breed out a lot of genius in a generation. So, that is why”—he took his towel and wrapped it around the neck of his coat and shirt and tie—“I chose literature. I cast my lot with the muses. Erato, Clio, Calliope, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polymnia. Of course, I have been lucky. I have had an endless supply of students for children.”

“My children live so far away. One’s in Seattle and the other one’s in Alaska. It’s like they’re gone forever. So I was thinking I could take up where I left off and go back to school. I was thinking about learning massage therapy maybe. Think of the good you could do.”

“I’ll bring you some forms for the French class when I come back in. Will you be in tomorrow, do you think?” He straightened his tie. Moved his hand from the StairMaster, waited.

“Sure I will. I’ll be in at noon for sure. Our office is just down the street so it’s easy for me to come in at lunchtime.”

“I’ll see you then, if I may.”

When he left the center, Professor Wheeler drove over to the university administration building and collected all the admission forms and put them in an envelope for Brenda. He smiled at himself for doing it. It was almost time for a semester to start. Time to believe you could fill one mind with treasure and the world would somehow profit. He left the administration building and walked with his crutch down to the student center and sat at a table eating a piece of devil’s food cake and watching the young people going in and out of the bookstore. He had already wandered around the bookstore glancing at the texts of the various disciplines. They were mostly so poorly written and devoid of opinion it was impossible for him to imagine anyone reading them without falling asleep. The language police had triumphed. Every opinion was hedged. Dialogue banished. Argument eschewed. Cant had displaced thought on American campuses. If I had time I could educate Brenda, he decided, and somehow that thought made his cake taste better.

The next day he did not feel well but he managed to get himself up and dressed and to the center by noon. He delivered the forms to Brenda and even exercised for half an hour and then went home and stayed in bed reading and writing letters.

At nine that night she called. “Professor Wheeler, listen, it’s Brenda Lacey. I hope you weren’t asleep. Listen, I just filled them out and I’m turning them in tomorrow. I just thought you might want to know.”

“That’s wonderful. I’m awfully glad. Remember to request Doctor Levine, if you can get him.”

“I will. Well, how are you? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I was just tired from the heat, I think.”

“You looked pale. Does your leg hurt? The one you lost, I mean?” She would never have asked that in person. Over the phone, in her excitement over the forms, it seemed okay somehow.

“No. I just get tired. You couldn’t use this old heart at your donor center, I’m afraid. It wouldn’t keep a lazy cat alive. Will I see you tomorrow then? I’m planning on going in at eleven.”

“Maybe you need a transplant. We can put you on the list. You have to—”

“Oh, no. I’m much too fastidious for that. I’ll see you tomorrow then, will I?”

“Sure. I’ll be there. As close to noon as I can make it.”

He hung up the phone and stood with his hand on the receiver thinking of how pleased he was, as pleased as a child. He closed his eyes and felt his heart straining to let in so much happiness. Then he walked outside in his pajamas and seersucker robe and sat on the porch for a long time looking at the stars. There was a new moon high in the sky and not a cloud or a streetlight to mar his view. Down in the Tin Cup project, a block below the cemetery, jazz was coming from a radio. How high the moon, he hummed along. A tenor saxophone, a trumpet, a piano. German instruments found their way into the hands of Africans in New Orleans and voila, jazz. I do not want to leave this, he decided. I should go back to New Orleans for a week before I die and listen to that music. If Pound heard it, oh, liquid poetry, he might have seen it as a river, a small clear mountain river like the Wind River in Wyoming. But that was another trip, in another place, another time.

It was very late when he went back inside and went to sleep.

That was a Tuesday night. On Thursday afternoon, when they happened to finish exercising at the same time, Professor Wheeler invited Brenda to his house to see his flowers. “I could make you a sandwich if you’re hungry,” he added. “I’ve been cooking things this morning. I can smell fall in the air, can’t you?”

“What flowers?” She was so pleased with the invitation she was blushing.

“The hostas are blooming. And there’re still some zinnias. I will cut some for you to take home for your table.”

They went to his house and he set the table and fed her soup and a tuna fish sandwich and a glass of iced tea. They looked at the flowers and then sat on the porch and he told her about the young men who were buried in the Confederate Cemetery across the street. He told her what states they were from and what they thought they were fighting for. “They were fighting for Missouri,” he said. “To save it for the Confederacy.”

“I was born in Missouri,” she said. “Why didn’t they teach us that in school?”

“Did you turn in the forms for your French class?”

“Not yet. I’m going to do it this afternoon. They never are open when I can get away. Not that we’re very busy. We mostly just sit around. Or take false alarms. We never know when there’ll be someone to harvest.”

“Harvest?”

“That’s what we call it. Didn’t you know that? They’ve tightened up about what they’ll take. And there aren’t as many car wrecks as there were last year. Last year we got four hearts. Well…” She was afraid she had offended him in some way.

He was laughing. “Actually I have a donor card in my wallet. Not that anything of mine could be of much use, except my liver. I haven’t given it much to do for many years.” He laughed again.

“When I went to work for them I thought they were going to send me to school to learn how to be on the harvest team but they never did. I’m still the secretary. Mostly I answer the phone.”

“You have a nice voice. That’s important for work like that.”

“Finding people fast is the main thing. You have to break into calls.”

“Think of the harvest you could have made out there.” He pointed toward the cemetery, where seven hundred and twenty young men lay underneath the maple trees, spread out like a star from a central monument, the dead of Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

“Why do you live way back here?”

“Because it’s quiet. Except for the project in Tin Cup. Sometimes I can hear the children getting on the school buses. That’s always nice. Would you like more tea?”

“No, I think I’ll go on. I want to make sure I got all the lines filled out on the forms. I’ll turn them in tomorrow. They don’t care if I leave as long as I take the mobile phone.” She stood up, collected the flowers he had picked for her and put into a Mason jar. He walked her to her car and watched as she backed and turned by the cemetery gates and drove off down the road. The graces all attend her, he decided. Strange how they choose the ones they do.

He walked back into the house and lay down upon his bed to listen to his heart grind and beat. He should have let them implant the pacemaker but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Perhaps he would relent. Who could bear to die as summer dies, with glorious fall only weeks away. He closed his eyes and began to remember a dance at V.M.I. in nineteen thirty-nine. A girl in a Black Watch plaid taffeta formal, her breasts swelling up out of the bodice, her cheeks aflame, her strong arms and laughing face.

Brenda had forgotten her purse. She was almost to the courthouse when she remembered it was hanging on a rocking chair on Professor Wheeler’s porch. It had fifty dollars in the billfold. Money she had taken out of the money machine at the McElroy Bank that morning on her way to work. He’ll think I’m so stupid, she decided. And just when I finally got a friend who reads books.

She turned the car around in the courthouse parking lot and started back up toward Tin Cup. There was a construction project going on on Spring Street. A water main had broken and the city was fixing it. She had to wait five minutes while a teenager in an orange vest let the traffic through from the other direction. Then he motioned her on and she picked her way around the machines and up the hill.

Professor Wheeler got up from the bed and sat in his reading chair and opened the day-old New York Times that had been in the mail. He opened the paper to the editorial page and began to read Russell Baker, who was in one of his silly moods over American foreign policy. His heart tightened as something made him laugh. He took a cigarette out of a package and struck a match and lit it. He inhaled deeply. His heart contracted. It pulled his chest into a knot for what seemed an eternity. It pulled and pulled and pulled. Then it stopped.

Brenda drove slowly up the gravel road in third gear. She had a recurring nightmare that she was driving her old Toyota up a hill and it wouldn’t go. It was her punishment for buying a car with a standard transmission. She had always liked the idea of shifting gears for herself. Now she had to pay for it with this stupid dream. The dream took many forms. In its most terrible form she was trying to get to a seven o’clock movie at Fiesta Square and the car wouldn’t go up Township Road. She would be trying to get to the last showing of something she really wanted to see.

She pulled into the parking space before Professor Wheeler’s house and saw the chair with her purse hanging on it. She got out of the car and walked up onto the porch and retrieved her purse and put the strap over her shoulder. The door was open. She looked through the screen and saw him lying there. The cigarette was still smoking. It was a few inches away from the day-old New York Times and it was smoking.

The sounds of the earth were deafening. A billion cicadas seemed to be singing a dirge. From the maple trees across the road and the gardens and the grasses the small creatures of the earth were singing and calling, mourning a man who had believed in dharma, in dialogue and metaphor, in justice and peace. A man who had outgrown evil. Who had never stopped to have an unkind thought.

Brenda knelt beside her friend and searched for a pulse but the pulse was gone. She ran around the house and found the phone on a shelf in the kitchen. The pulse of the earth kept on beating until it was joined by the sound of sirens.