John Barth - The Development

"Jesus," Tim wondered. "Can we even consider it?"

They could, his wife (the family investment manager) assured him. But what about the fact that Bayview, no less than the other places they'd checked out, got it's share of bad reviews as well as good? On the one hand were those happy Golden Agers in the brochure photos, duly apportioned by gender and ethnicity and handsomely decked out in "country club casual" attire while bird-watching or flower-arranging, painting and quilting and pottery-making, or smiling at one another across bridge and dining tables. On the other, such Internet chatroom grumbles both from some residents and from their relatives as The food sucks, actually, if you've been used to eating real food, and Be warned: It's college dorm life all over again — at age eighty! and Frankly, it's the effing pits. The best Margie and Tim could guess was that temperamentally upbeat, outgoing, people-enjoying types were likely to find their continuing-care situation at least as much to their liking as what had immediately preceded it in their curriculum vitae, while the more easily dissatisfied were, well, dissatisfied. They themselves, they supposed, fell somewhere between those poles.

"May we not fall on our geriatric asses between them," they more or less prayed; then gave each other a determinedly cheerful high-five over white wine and champignon cheese at Happy Hour on their screened porch overlooking Oyster Cove, and took the plunge: what they'd come to call the Old Farts' B.M. Move. Given the ever-rising value of Heron Bay real estate, Margie figured they could list for $400K the free-and-clear villa for which they'd paid slightly more than half that amount fifteen years ago, take out a $300K mortgage on it to finance either a midrange Bayview cottage or one of those high-end apartments, pay of the mortgage shortly thereafter when good old 1010 Oyster Cove Court sells for, say, $375K, and shift across the river with most of their present furnishings at a tidy profit — the more since ex-realtor Margie would be handling the sale and saving them the seven percent agent's commission.

Thus the plan, and thus it came to pass — even a bit better than their projection, but at their age a wrench and hassle all the same. In a mere five months, the villa found a buyer for $380K, and between it's sale and closing dates a high-end Bayview apartment became available, it's widowed and emphysemic tenant obliged to move into the Manor's Medical Center. While they'd thought that "transitioning" to one of the cottages might be less of a jolt, they took the apartment, reminding themselves that they had, after all, rather enjoyed that interim condominium over near Annapolis, and that as they grew older and less able than presently, the apartment would be more convenient — to that same Medical Center, among other things. So okay, they would miss gardening, outdoor barbecuing, and the relative privacy of a house. But what the hell, they had adjusted readily enough back in the '80s from detached house to duplex living; they could hack it in a comfortable apartment.

So hack it they did: quite admirably all in all, given Margie's physical limitations. As their nation enmired itself in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Mannings bade goodbye to their Oyster Cove neighbors and other Heron Bay friends (who were, after all, a mere thirty-minute drive from Bayview), scaled down from two cars in a garage to just Old Faithful in a designated parking-lot space, and packed and unpacked their stuff for what must surely be the last time. Over the next year-and-a-bit — from late summer 2003 to mid-autumn '04—they repositioned their furniture and knickknacks, rehung their wall art, reshelved as many of their books as they had room for, donated the rest to the Avon County Library, and gamely set about making new acquaintances, sampling the Manor's sundry activities, and accustoming themselves to their start-out meal plan: breakfasts and lunches together in the apartment, dinners in the dining hall except now and then in a Stratford restaurant. Pretty lucky they were, T.M. supposes in retrospect, to have made their "B.M. Move" when they did, before the nationwide housing-market slump just a few years later, not to mention before the recent, all-but-total destruction of Heron Bay Estates by that spinoff tornado from Tropical Storm Giorgio in an otherwise eventless hurricane season. And most certainly not to mention… the Unmentionable, which however is this His-Story's defining event and therefore must be mentioned, to say the least, not far hence.

And a pretty good job they did, all in all (he believes he was saying), of making the best of their new life. Okay, so they shook their heads occasionally at the relentless professional cheeriness of some of the Bayview staff; and they had no taste for the bridge tournaments, square-dance and bingo nights, and some other items on the Activities menu; and the dining hall fare, while it had it's fans, was in their opinion mostly blah. But on the plus side were some of the Manor's sightseeing excursions to places like the du Pont estate's Winterthur Garden, up near Wilmington, and the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum down in St. Michaels (the Mannings had got out of the habit of such touring), the Happy Hour and dinnertime socializing in the Blue Heron Lounge and dining hall, which one could do as much or little of as one chose (sipping from one's personal wine supply at the bar), and the comforting-indeed knowledge that, if needed, assistance was as near at hand as the Help Alarm button conveniently located in every residence unit. They were doing all right, they assured their children and their Heron Bay Estates friends; they were doing all right…

Until, on a certain chill-but-sunny midmorning in November 2004, as suddenly and without warning as that above-mentioned fluke tornado two years later, out of nowhere came the End of Everything. After a late breakfast of orange juice, English muffins, and coffee (they'd been up past their usual bedtime the night be fore, watching with unsurprised dismay the presidential election returns on TV), Tim had withdrawn to his computer desk in the apartment's guest-bedroom/study to exchange disappointed e-mails with Son and Daughter, who shared their parents' stockliberal persuasion. Margie, still in her nightclothes, lingered at table over a second coffee to read the Baltimore Sun 's painful details of John Kerry's unsuccessful bid to thwart George W. Bush's reelection — a disaster for the nation, in the Mannings' opinion — after which she meant to move as usual to her computer in their little den/office/library to do likewise and attend to some family business before lunch and whatever. But he had no sooner sat down and booted up than he heard a crash out there and, bolting kitchenward, found his without-whom-nothing life partner, his bride of half a century minus one month, his Margie!Margie!Margie! face-down and motionless on the breakfast-nook floor tiles, coffee from the shattered porcelain mug staining her nightgown and the crumpled pages of the Sun. With a half-strangled cry he ran to his fallen mate, her eyes open but not moving, her face frozen with alarm. Some years previously, the Mannings had signed up at the Heron Bay Estates Community Activities Center for a half-day course in Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and Warning Signs of Stroke and Cardiac Arrest, and had vowed to review the various drills together at least annually thereafter — but never got around to doing so. Now he desperately felt for a pulse, put his face near hers to check for respiration, and detected neither; dashed to locate and press that Help button (on the wall beside the main-bath toilet); dashed back to try whether he could recollect anything whatever of the CPR routine; pressed his mouth to Margie's in what was meant to be some sort of forced inhalation but dissolved into a groaning kiss and then collapsed into a sobbing, helpless last embrace.