Chapter Thirty
Twin Key Chains
Mikage gave Victoria an account of what happened to Tom in her brisk, businesslike way: “Tom broke his hip the day after you left town...then he broke his other hip, became bedridden, developed pneumonia, and died yesterday. The nursing home called me, because you placed my number in your contact file...it’s so sad...I know you and he were close. The memorial service is scheduled at the nursing home a week from today...oh, and a lawyer from Grand Rapids called me, and said you should try to find a Dr. Rozeta Zahra at the regional hospital, and bring her with you to the service...she’s a heart surgeon.”
“Thanks for getting hold of me. I’ll be there...strange...I know Dr. Zahra. Would you attend the service in Zeeland with me, Mikage?”
“Yes, of course...I miss you terribly, Victoria. You can both stay at my place. By the way, you need to buy a cell phone...then we could talk once in a while. Don’t be so cheap!”
“Maybe I will when I can afford one. I miss you, too.”
Victoria rejoined the others where the cars were parked. She pulled Zizi aside, and told her about the death of Tom, and the unusual request from the lawyer in Grand Rapids. Zizi had no idea what this was about, but she could see Victoria was upset. She also had no idea how anyone could know her to ask about her. She quietly placed her arm in Victoria’s, and said, “I will go with you. I’m not on call next weekend.”
“Zizi, I didn’t know your first name was ‘Rozeta.’”
“Do you like ‘Zizi’?...I chose it to be my American name...it’s what my little brother used to call me?”
“Yes, I like ‘Zizi,’ although ‘Rozeta’ sounds pretty, like a flower.” As everyone left the cemetery, an eagle circled the sky rounding out the day.
The next Friday, Zizi and Victoria loaded the Honda for the weekend, and headed south on Route 131. Victoria explained to Zizi how she had worked at the nursing home part time, and how attached she had become to the patients there, especially Cal and Tom. As Victoria talked, Zizi looked over towards her and something glittery caught her eye on the steering column. She had to catch her breath. In the ignition, a silver and turquoise eagle key chain dangled, catching the sunlight. She leaned over to examine it more closely. The face of an eagle with a turquoise eye and gold beak was etched in the round silver piece attached to the clasp. Victoria’s key change was identical in every way to the one her benefactor had given her in Cairo during his visit to the rug factory when she was a child.
“Where did you get that key chain?”
“Tom, my patient at the nursing home, gave me the chain years ago...we’re going to his memorial service tomorrow.”
“Could you please find a place to stop?” Zizi said.
The women remained silent until Victoria exited the highway, and pulled the car to a stop in a rest area. After taking deep breaths, Zizi reached into her purse, and with her hands shaking, she pulled out her benefactor’s key chain. The two women placed them side by side, and examined the twin key chains.
“My benefactor gave this to me when I was a little girl. For years, I didn’t even know it was a key chain. I treasured and guarded it as my only possession.”
“What is the name of your benefactor?”
“I never knew his name, but his monthly checks came from a law office in Grand Rapids.”
The two young women sat there together in the car amazed, starring out through the windshield at the highway overpass, then starring back down at their radiant objects. Neither one of them had lived with an ounce of mystery in their lives. Each woman was a hard-core realist, prepared to have their hopes and dreams run down by circumstances. This coincidence arrived with seeds of hope and change. Victoria returned the key chain to the ignition and drove back to the highway. For the rest of the trip, Zizi asked Victoria to tell her as much as she knew about Tom Albers. Her benefactor now had a name.
Victoria and Zizi met Mikage at the nursing home in Zeeland right before the service. Tom had lost his wife the year before, and lost his two daughters years earlier in a car accident. In the front row reserved for family, a single well-dressed woman in a gray suit sat erect, looking forward as a men’s chorus gathered to sing. Patients and the nursing home staff filled the dining room, a large open space that would serve as a chapel. Even though natural beauty surrounded the home beyond the chain linked fence, the ivory pallor of the patients’ faces showed no signs of contact with the out-of-doors, trees, grass, and earth.
The janitors arranged folding chairs around a makeshift folding table altar covered with a food-stained white table cloth. Candles stood crooked in tarnished candlesticks. On another table, they placed a podium with a Rotary emblem on the front, and rolled in an upright piano. Flowers received at the reception desk, but not yet delivered to a room, were borrowed for the service. The janitors looked like scene changers for a drama production, dragging pieces from a warehouse, and standing by to return them when they were no longer needed.
The nursing home administrators selected a local preacher to perform the service. He knew nothing of Tom’s life history. A tall, rough-looking man in his late fifties, he wore a black ill-fitted suit with a black vest and a black tie. His stiff limbs stuck out from the sleeves and pants like dead branches from a hollow tree trunk. A large pendant holding a silver cross hung over his vest. Briskly entering, the room was full of people he didn’t know. He shook everyone’s hands like they were members of his flock, although he never mentioned anyone by name, and no one called him by name. He sat down hard on a folding chair with a pained face, as if he was used to sitting on cushions.
Aides brought in extra chairs, and helped arrange people attending in wheel chairs. Tom had been a patient for nearly eight years, and he was well-liked. There were over fifty people from the nursing home, both patients and staff, a few retirees from Tom’s company, and stone-lipped Cal, Tom’s best friend. The residents wore pale, bleached out clothes, so the gathering looked like a faded photograph. The three women sat down beside Cal, and Victoria held his weak hand. Even though Victoria had left only two weeks earlier, Cal looked more vacant and frail, his eyes less focused. The preacher’s young assistant passed out hymnals without a word. He looked like he didn’t want to be there, but rather seemed like an indifferent guide in a museum, waiting for the quitting time. After doing his duties, he sat down not even watching, reading his Bible.
A plump woman with bulbous eyes and wild hair shuffled in with a walker in the row in front of Cal and the three women. She smelled like lavender and the nip of Yukon Jack she used to get her medicines down. Her red rouged face looked folded like a rose pressed long ago between pages in a family bible. She wore a bright-colored, flowered sun dress, a contrast to the faded clothing around her. She commented to no one in particular, “When you’re old, you need to wear bright colors.” She stared down at one of the seats. “I’ve heard a lot of good things about this chair,” she said, and sat down. She winked at Cal, but he gave no response. After some gospel hymns and and a call to worship, the preacher rose to speak in a bull voice punctuated with periodic pauses and the repetition of certain words for emphasis:
“We pray to God that our recently departed brother, Tom, Albers was saved...saved by Jeeezus before he died. Firstly, and you all know more than I do about this, being saved by Jeeezus is like cannin’ green beans. Once the jar is sealed, how long are the beans good for? Now I know some of you people have canned before. How long are canned green beans good for? (A man in the third row answers, ‘about a year’). No sir... they are good foreeever if Jeeezus seals them! If you are saved, you are seealed by the Lord! Ameeen! And once you’re saved, when your body dies, you will go to Heaven, and when the Rapture comes...and my brothers and sisters, it will surely come... in 1/165th of a second, you will be taken bodily out of your graves...if you are saved.”
Even demented Cal knew where this was heading, and nodded to his nurse for a bathroom break. The nurse wheeled him out, and he never came back.
The preacher continued with his dramatic pageantry, holding his cross with dirty fingernails:
“Nextly, we need to ask ourselfs, what can we do here in this nursing home where you all don’t do anything. Why, you can pray...not so much for your families, ‘cause everyone prays for families, but you can pray for other people like your pastors, people who do things. So while you’re here takin’ it easy, you need to make intercessory prayers, and you need to pray for our country, because our country is in a whole lot of trouble, and you have to do it with desire, fervent desire. You have to desire what you are prayin’ for---Ameeen! I know that we all have to do this for ourselfs, because my own life is a battle with Satan...but I am convicted that prayer moooves the Hands of God. Let me say it again, prayer moooves the hands of God. Lastly, you have to believe this ‘cause if you’re saved, this life here in this nursing home is the closest to Hell you’re goin’ to git. So pray for people who are doin’ somethin,’ since you all have a lot of time in this nursing home. Jeeezus, Jeeezus, Jeeezus, Ameeen!”
As soon as the preacher said the word, “Satan,” Blackie, a jet black Scottish Terrier therapy dog, playfully called “Satan” by the patients, came running into the cafeteria stage left, and proceeded to nip at the preacher’s pant legs. After some great entertainment, serving the residents as a talk subject for weeks, one of the attendants dragged the dog away stage right to isolated applause and muffled laughter. Everyone was amused except the preacher who smiled while swearing under his breath. During the rest of the sermon, the preacher’s leg twitched as if the dog were still present. One of the men a few rows back from the front, opened up a newspaper and began to read, mouthing the print in a low voice.
After the preacher added some volume to his voice and provided more affirmations of conditional immortality, he stopped talking at last, the men’s chorus sang, the closing hymn ended, and the benediction closed the service. Throughout the service, the preacher avoided the sad eyes of the patients looking for love; instead he looked up at heaven waiting for angels to speak.
Mikage said, “I don’t think he likes people...and he didn’t have much to say about Tom. He also frightens me with his talk about the world coming to an end...it’s depressing to think we may all be blown to pieces in a fraction of a second.”
“Not a lot of love coming out of his mouth...just dusty and dull words,” Victoria said. “The part about the green beans...well, I’ve never put up green beans or anything else... but he seemed kind of silly to me. And then at the end, he dismissed us like poor students, and practically ran out of the building along with his assistant.”
Zizi did not criticize the preacher like the other women. In fact, she astounded them with another example of her unremitting compassion. “I have met kinder preachers,” Zizi said, “but he asked us to pray for him. We cannot regard him in the same way he regards us. We must see him as someone who suffers like us. I will pray for God to unseal his heart. And besides...I could still hear God speaking to me through him, even through his silliness. He said he is battling with Satan...I have the same battle.”
The old woman in the row in front of them wept, looking down at the yellow tennis balls securing the legs of her walker. She kept trying to arrange her skirt with one hand as she watered the linoleum floor with her tears. The three women gathered around her, and comforted her. She said, “Where’s Cal?”
“He needed a bathroom break,” Victoria said.
“That old skunk takes a break when ever he wants to get out of something...does the same thing when we play word games and balloon volleyball,” the woman replied. People began to gather at the back of the cafeteria to snack on dry boxed cookies and lukewarm soda from big plastic bottles.
The woman in the gray suit approached the three of women. “I’m looking for Victoria Randall and Rozeta Zahra,” she said.
“Yes,” Victoria said, answering for both of them, and this is my friend, Mikage Hoshimoto.
“My name is Hannah Zimmerman. Black streaks of mascara showed evidence of tear stains on her face, and she kept daubing her eyes with a small white handkerchief. Could you please come to my law office in downtown Grand Rapids on Monday morning at nine o’clock? The matter has to do with Tom Albers.”
Victoria and Zizi agreed to meet Hannah the next morning, shook hands with her as she departed, and then accepted Mikage’s invitation to spend the night at her apartment.
No comments:
Post a Comment