When the courtship intensified and the day came when a wedding could be announced the Palms swung into maximum activity. The older women, especially the widows, greeted the news with delight; many remembered their wedding day fifty or sixty years ago as the most meaningful day in their lives. 'So much depended on it,' one widow said. 'It was the beginning of my real life, and a day as sacred as that ought to be celebrated with pomp and joy.'

Felicita Jimenez, who had happy memories of the gala weddings in Colombia, took charge, with the approval of the other women, of how the marriage should be honored: 'It's got to be held here in our recreation room. After all, it's a Palms affair, they met here and courted under our very noses. That's decided.' And she allowed neither the prospective bride nor the groom even to suggest an alternative: 'We'll give them a wedding they'll cherish the rest of their lives.'

She appointed a flower committee, a music committee and a refreshments team. She wheedled eighty dollars from Miss Foxworth and appointed a committee of three, headed by Senator Raborn's wife, to organize showers for the bride. Sentiment in favor of the marriage was so unanimous that gifts of considerable value were contributed.

And then came the problem of who would perform the actual ceremony. Felicita assumed it would be Reverend Quade, who was not only willing but eager to do so, for early on she had identified Lurline White as a superior girl: 'I would feel privileged to help launch her into her new and exciting life. I see rocky times ahead in even a perfect white-black wedding, so let's all give it our most heartfelt sanction.' Felicita was relieved that Mrs. Quade felt that way.

But Luther upset everything: 'I'd like to have Judge Noble in the ceremony. He's an honored gentleman and it would be proper.' As soon as this preference became known, hidden animosities surfaced: 'You'd think he'd be proud to have a distinguished minister like Helen Quade perform the ceremony. Anyway, is Judge Noble qualified to do it?'

Felicita Jimenez was both vocal and loud: 'Isn't it the woman's right to select the priest for her wedding? Comes once in a lifetime. It's the girl's prerogative, and I think it's disgraceful that a man should try to give orders even before the wedding starts. It's a bad omen, believe me.'

When Reverend Quade heard of the fracas, she did what her friends would have expected: 'I understand Luther is a fine young man, a proud one, and if he feels that it would be proper for a fellow black to officiate, it's no problem with me. I get far too many weddings and burials as it is.'

But when Luther heard that Reverend Quade was withdrawing he was aghast: 'Hey! I didn't mean Noble should perform it alone. I meant he should be in on the deal. I saw on television where a rabbi and a Catholic priest married a young couple. Side by side. Why couldn't we do the same?'

When this suggestion was circulated, even the most skeptical applauded: 'Just the way it should be. We don't have two better residents than Helen Quade and Lincoln Noble, or two nicer young people than Lurline and Luther.' Judge Noble, when approached by friends, said publicly he would be honored to stand beside Reverend Quade on such a joyous occasion.

A few newspapers along the west coast reported on the forthcoming wedding, playing up the oddity of a black Mr. Black marrying a white Miss White, and television crews sought permission to attend the ceremonies. One male columnist at the Tampa paper submitted an essay for the Op-Ed page: I've lived to see the whole circle. When I was a student in Haverford College in suburban Philadelphia a beautiful young woman named Foot married a young man named Hand, and the papers reported: 'They were bound. Hand and Foot.' Tomorrow our column might read: 'God intended them to be joined, Black and White.'

In this swell of amity, the wedding was solemnized in the recreation room with fellow cooks, white and black, attending Luther, and fellow waitresses, also of mixed color, coming down the improvised aisle as bridesmaids. Before the far wall the two officials waited, Helen Quade as tall and dignified as ever, Judge Noble stately and solemn. They had agreed upon an eclectic ceremony with passages from the lovely Episcopalian ritual, others from the legal rites performed by justices of the peace, and a reading from Kahlil Gibran. A choir of nurses from Health sang Negro spirituals, and those couples from Gateways who were fortunate enough to have survived together into their seventies or even eighties held hands and fought back the tears.

Dr. Zorn, who had insisted upon serving as Luther's best man, chanced to look across the crowd to where Betsy was dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief and he thought: I want to be sitting with her, and his own eyes misted over.

For some weeks in the late summer, Dr. Zorn had noticed that Nurse Varney appeared listless in the late afternoons as if overcome with fatigue. Since he knew from close observation that she was not performing any more tasks at the Palms than before, he had to conclude that she must be moonlighting at a second job. He could not believe that she was doing this only to augment her salary, for she was being paid top dollar for her important contribution, but he did not dare ask lest she take offense. He was all too aware that she was, as Ken Krenek had once stated, the most valuable person in their operation.

So although Zorn was reluctant to query his nurse about a possible second job, he felt he should know what was happening because it could impair her work at the Palms. One morning, with trepidation, he asked in a carefully casual tone: 'Are you getting enough sleep, Nora? I'm worried about you,' and she knew he had spotted the change in her appearance. At first she denied there were any problems, but when on the second day he said: 'I want Dr. Farquhar to take a look at you,' she could no longer keep her secret.

'I have obligations.'

'Your major obligation is here. You must report here fully rested, it's only fair to us.'

Firmly but not contentiously she said: 'Maybe my obligations there are as important as those here,' but when she saw him stiffen at this rebuff, she regretted her curt response and said tentatively: 'I think maybe you'll understand. I think you have heart as well as brains.'

'Understand what?'

'Could you spare half an hour? Right now?'

'For you, yes. Of course.'

Taking her car they left the Palms, drove east along 117th Street, turned left on Superhighway 78, crossed the bridge, drove through the cypress swamp and into the southern reaches of Tampa. Dodging down side streets, she took him into a jumble of broken-down warehouses intermixed with mean culs-de-sac lined with obviously empty three-story houses whose windows had been broken and front doors ripped off for firewood.

'What is this?' Zorn asked, and Nora replied: 'End of the world, gateway to hell.' And as she pulled up to a curb she offered a solemn confession: 'This is where I've been spending my nights.' Knocking on a half-broken door, she said: 'The other side of medical practice.'

The door opened and a surly woman dressed in a heavy man's sweater led them up rickety stairs with frayed carpeting. She took them to a tiny room on the third floor, and from the moment she kicked open the door without knocking, Zorn saw all he needed to know about that room: from the facing wall two large areas of plaster had worked loose from the laths and fallen to the floor, making the wretched room look even more desolate and forbidding.

On a cheap metal bed in the far corner of the room, jammed in beside the lone window, lay a very tall, emaciated young black man who once must have been handsome, for he had a face with strong chiseled features and deep-set glowing dark eyes. Even in his present condition he looked as if he could have been an athlete.

Against his better judgment, Andy Zorn again became a doctor, for automatically he leaned down to take the stricken man's pulse: 'Is it what I think it is?'

'Yes, AIDS,' the young man whispered. At this terrible word Zorn drew back because, coming from those withered lips, it sounded doubly horrible. Nora explained: 'Jaqmeel is my nephew, my brother's boy. Basketball scholarship to the university at Gainesville. And this happens.' She elbowed Zorn aside and took the young man's hand.

Zorn asked: 'Are you pretty good at the game? I should think you might be, with your height and all.' He used the present tense purposely, as if there were a chance that Jaqmeel might one day miraculously recover and play again.

'Fair.'

His aunt could not accept this depreciation of his ability. Taking from her purse a carefully folded clipping from a sports page, she showed Zorn a full-length photograph of a six-foot-four university basketball player in a uniform that displayed his two hundred and twenty pounds of aggressive muscle: 'He was the star. What they call the point guard, rather big for that job, but very quick in his movements.'

Zorn had the grace not to gasp at the horrendous difference between the photo and the figure huddled on the bed. The first was a giant oak tree, the second a shriveled reed. Nora, eager to have Dr. Zorn understand how extraordinary her nephew was, used basketball jargon she had picked up from him: 'With him so tall and strong in those days, he made himself a master of the in-your-face slam dunk,' and this made Jaqmeel smile wanly. Then he said: 'I'm nothing now,' with such grim finality that the doctor shivered. In an awkward effort to maintain a conversational tone Zorn asked: 'How far did you get toward your degree?'

'It was mostly basketball.'

Again his aunt would not allow such an evaluation to stand: 'Two years of excellent work, mostly A's and B's. His professor told me Jaqmeel could go on for a master's.'

'In what?'

The emaciated young man, not eager to relive his days of glory, mumbled: 'He thought I could go into college teaching. Black history.'

Admiringly his aunt said: 'Jaqmeel could do it. He speaks well, none of that "all peoples gots" that you teased me for,' and Zorn could see from the way she looked at the young man that she loved him and had marked him as the member of the family who would really make it in the white man's world. To her, his loss would be tragic.

Dismissing somber thoughts, he again became a doctor, 'First thing we must do,' he said brightly, 'is get you out of this dump.' Turning to Nora, he asked: 'Where can we take him? Don't worry about the money. Something can be arranged.'

'No one will take him,' Nora said. 'Even if you have the money.'

Zorn could not accept this: 'There must be something available. This is the United States. We don't throw people into the streets-or into places like this.' He took it upon himself to call downstairs: 'Ma'am, can you give me some help?' and when the frowsy woman climbed protestingly to the third floor, he asked: 'Could you tell me if there's a place with medical care that we can take this young man?'

'There ain't any.'

'There must be, in a civilized place like Tampa.'

The woman looked at Nora, then shrugged her shoulders: 'There is one place, but it costs money.'

'Money we have,' Zorn snapped, and the women started whispering.

'Why the whispering?' the body on the bed cried weakly. 'Whatever it is, I can take it.'

'It's a hospice,' the woman said harshly. 'Where they take people to die.'

'I'm ready to go,' the wasted young man said with no touch of bravado. He was nearing the end and knew it. 'Let's get on with it.'

When Nora nodded, Zorn lifted the man in his arms, and the woman running the place grabbed the bedsheets, which she was obviously afraid Nora might steal. Zorn's labor down the stairs was too easy: This man weighs practically nothing! How could he have been a rough-house basketball player of well over two hundred pounds? Studying the young athlete's face he clearly saw a look of unimpaired exceptional intelligence, and from that moment he accepted responsibility for Jaqmeel's existence as long as the frail body could stay alive.

As they loaded him into Nora's car, Zorn noticed that a curious-looking couple-a dumpy woman about five feet tall, and a scarecrow of a man a foot taller-stood across the dirt-filled road photographing everything happening at the hovel. Returning to the landlady, he asked: 'Who are they?' and she said with obvious bitterness: 'The morals police. They photograph everyone who enters or leaves my house.'

'Why?'

'They want to be sure that anyone inside dies in the proper way. None of that Kevorkian stuff like out in Michigan. Helping deadenders to commit suicide.' Placing her right thumb to her nose, she threw them an indecent gesture before slamming the door.

The hospice to which they drove, Angel of Mercy, occupied a respectable three-story house in a reasonably decent part of Tampa, and its manager was no frowsy beldame in a man's sweater. Mrs. Angelotti was a middle-aged Italian woman who with her husband, Tommaso, operated one of the few havens for people with AIDS in this city, where the disease was not yet rampant. They all stood on the porch while Nora explained that they were rescuing her nephew from a situation so abominable that no stricken man should end his days there, and they were sympathetic when Nora said: 'I didn't want him to come to you, where he's supposed to die. It doesn't seem right.'

'It isn't right!' Mrs. Angelotti said. 'But this is how it is.'

'Can you direct us to any other place where he'd have a chance of getting round-the-clock care?' Dr. Zorn asked.

'We have no such places. Be glad you found us. I give these men loving care. In their dying breath they thank us, all of them, rich or poor, because we seem to be the only ones who give a damn.'

'Can he get a doctor's care with you?'

'Most doctors don't like to come here. What's the profit to them? And I don't mean money. Some of them are generous about that. But if they come here they run the risk of contracting AIDS, and besides, they have no real chance of curing the young men anyway. So it's a no-win proposition. It's the goodness of my husband that makes this place possible. One day a couple of years ago, he got real mad and said: "We can't let them die like dogs." You should see some of the places these men have to go for their last days.'

'We saw one of them.' Zorn said. 'That's why we're here.' He had not yet entered the hospice, but now, forced to accept the fact that there was no alternative, he wanted to satisfy himself that the Angel of Mercy was a proper refuge: 'Could we please see your place? Then we can decide.' Mrs. Angelotti looked at him and shook her head as if she could not believe his innocence: 'Doctor, not many couples are brave enough to run a hospice, so it's leave him here or lug him back to some foul hole in the wall. You haven't a lot of options, you know.'

Acknowledging his navete, Andy smiled: 'OK. But please let us look around anyway.' They entered one of the institutions that had grown up in response to the AIDS crisis. It was clean. It had a communal dining room with flowers. It had a reading area, with a corner for card games, and other indications of responsible management, but the young men they saw there were so cadaverous that any visitor did not have to be told that the place was a refuge for those who had been rejected by society, their friends and their families and were waiting to die.

While still on the ground floor, they met Mr. Angelotti in the kitchen preparing lunch, and as they approached he explained: 'I was a cook in the navy. It comes natural; my father was a top-flight short-order cook at an all-night restaurant on the bay.' He told them that he conceived the idea of turning his house into a hospice when he read that young men with AIDS were being turned away from hospitals and rooming houses, so, after consulting with a Dr. Leitonen, for whom he seemed to have great regard-'a doctor with a heart'-he and his wife satisfied themselves that they would not contract the dread disease solely by touch, and he quietly let it be known through Dr. Leitonen that he and his wife would accept AIDS patients in their final stages of decline.

'We've cared for more than forty,' he said, 'and only one has gone away alive. When his parents wouldn't have nothing to do with him he came here to die, but an uncle heard about it and came here to take him into his home-the uncle's, I mean. He died there.'

'All your patients died?' Zorn asked, and Mr. Angelotti said: 'That's what it is. The disease where you always die. Everyone you'll see here is on his way to death, fast express. Sometimes Rosa cries all night, when two or three she's come to love die all at once.'

'Who pays for this?' Zorn asked.

'What they call a consortium of churches, Catholic, Jewish, Baptist, you name it, they give us funds for food, water and electricity.' So the old woman at the hellhole had misinformed Zorn. But he could understand why she had assumed that a place like this would be expensive.

Mr. Angelotti continued: 'The house we give. But they also pay for two part-time nurses who help us.'

'You get no salary?'

'No. We have savings. Rosa never wasted money.'

'If we decide to leave our young man with you, we'd pay.'

'Some relatives do, when they find out where their boy is. And we're grateful.'

When they went upstairs they forgot the almost cheerful atmosphere of the reception area below, for now they saw how once-big rooms had been partitioned to make two or even three very small cubicles, each with its metal cot with wire springs, a thin mattress, one wafer-thin blanket and a beat-up pillow that invariably looked as if the occupant of the cot had wrestled with it in his sleeplessness. And on the cots in some of these cubicles, in various stages of exhaustion, men so withered and enfeebled that they seemed already dead. Certainly they did not react to Zorn's presence, for they knew that death was near and that conversation or other participation in social intercourse was meaningless.

In two of the cubicles the dying men were attended by professional nurses; they were massaging atrophied muscles or bathing hideous bedsores. But even those men who received what little assistance was available in their final days seemed not to be aware that they were being helped. This was a place where death waited outside every door, and little that was done on the frail cots delayed his entrance.

The sight of the cramped cubicles with their doomed occupants affected Zorn so profoundly that he cried: 'Is this the best you can do for men who are dying?' Mrs. Angelotti said quietly: 'It's so much better than what we found when we started,' and Zorn apologized: 'I'm sorry I said that. Mrs. Angelotti, you really are an angel of mercy. But if we bring Jaqmeel here, could he have a bigger room? We'd pay double.'

'It could probably be arranged. But you understand, while he's still able to move about he'd spend most of his time with the others downstairs. And when that is no longer possible, one of the cubicles would be big enough.' She touched his arm: 'You see, Doctor, men like this never have visitors. No need for extra chairs.'

'We'll go down and fetch him,' Zorn said, and with the help of Mr. Angelotti they carried Jaqmeel up to the second floor, where the two nurses took over. After examining him they assured Zorn and Nora quietly: 'He's not in his last stages. Some good food, exercise, meeting with the others will help. And when it's time he can die with dignity.' As Nora and Zorn departed, Jaqmeel said in a very weak voice: 'I know where I am, and I'm glad to be here. It doesn't smell.'

In the room downstairs that served as a kind of office, Zorn gave the Angelottis a hundred and fifty dollars for Jaqmeel's first week and embraced each of them in turn: 'You are truly Good Samaritans,' then he cleared his throat and said: 'Now, where can I find a doctor who will care for him?'

'Most doctors won't come near this place,' Mrs. Angelotti said, 'but there is the one we mentioned to you, a living saint, who does come here and performs wonders for our men.'

'Where can I find this doctor you mentioned?' Zorn asked, and she wrote out an address: 'Not far from here.' When Zorn telephoned the doctor's office, he found he was not in, but would be later that afternoon. He asked for an appointment, and in this roundabout way Andy Zorn was projected into the heart of the AIDS crisis.

The euphoria that had marked the tertulia's aviation project vanished when a truck delivered a large package to the Palms addressed to Ral Jimenez, who had assumed responsibility for ordering the engine for their airplane. It had been sent down from the Lycoming people in Pennsylvania and was professionally packed with sachets of a silica gel to absorb moisture that would rust the delicate parts of the engine. When the package was solemnly opened in the presence of the five who were building the plane and the engine reflected sunlight from its polished surfaces, the men did not, as one might have expected, react joyfully and revel in their new acquisition.

Instead they looked at it soberly, for they realized that its arrival had altered everything. They were no longer playing at little boys' games. Now, in the real world and within a measurable time, they would be forced to bolt that engine into their homemade contraption, rev it over, apply the gas and fly the bundle into the air, with the channel to the west and the Gulf of Mexico beyond.

'Ideal engine for a small plane like ours,' President Armitage said professionally. 'Amazing how light they can make it and still turn out the power.'

Lewandowski was satisfied with the specifications provided in the handbook: 'It can produce twice the power we'll ever need,' and he visually checked the various components, giving it as his practiced opinion that it was a superior engine.

Senator Raborn said it was durable: 'That little monster can take a lot of punishment. Gives you a feeling of confidence. Worth the money, too.'

That night, when the tertulia assembled in their corner, the conversation did not focus on some arcane topic. Ambassador St. Pres cut right to the subject that was on all their minds, approaching it in his customary urbane way: 'I've been wondering if any of us have been having second thoughts about our grand adventure.'

'Heavens, no!' Armitage said quickly, but the more cautious Jimenez asked: 'What did you mean, Richard-lack of nerve?'

'No, no! Just that we represent, whether we like it or not, the entire establishment of the Palms, and a failure on our part, a disaster if you will, might have regrettable consequences. I was simply wondering if we were prepared to take that risk, not to ourselves but to our larger community.'

Raborn said bluntly: 'Richard, if you're hesitant about taking the first flight, you should know that I had my license reactivated two weeks ago. Just in case something like this came up. The doctor said I had the heart functions of a man of fifty and the reaction times of a thirty-year-old-and that was without wearing my glasses. So I'm the backup pilot and I say we go.'

So did the others, but without the bravado they had shown at the beginning when actual flight was still far in the future. When Lewandowski came over to join the table he brought with him a touch of even more reality. As a cautious scientist he said: 'We should test-run the engine right away. Bolt it down to heavy boards, pile it up, fill her partway with gas, and check how she performs.'

'We won't be fitting it in the plane for weeks,' Armitage pointed out, but the old research expert said: 'More's the reason to check it now. We can send back for another if things should go wrong.' He made plans with Raborn to run the tests in the morning. The others agreed that it was a prudent move.

As they were finishing the meal the ambassador said, slowly and gravely: 'Gentlemen ...' He had never used that opening before with his tertulia. 'On the eve of any major battle action-and our airplane project is just such a major undertaking-sensible soldiers and sailors have somber thoughts. I remember in World War Two on the eve of one of the great naval battles in Leyte Gulf, I was serving as junior officer of the bridge with Admiral Olendorf and he had cleverly deduced where a major part of the Japanese fleet was at midnight and where they would be at dawn, and he believed he had a chance to execute one of the supreme maneuvers of naval strategy, to Cross the Enemy's T.'

'What does that mean?' Jimenez asked.

'The American warships calculate when the Japanese ships will be coming out of the strait. The enemy is the long downward leg of the T, we're the crossbar at the top. Do you see what happens? As each enemy ship comes out of the leg, he faces our entire line of heavy warships cutting across his path. He can fire his big guns at one of our ships, whichever he elects, but we have nine massive ships that can bring their fire on him. And when he sinks, as he must under that bombardment, the next Japanese ship staggers forward, fires its guns at one of our ships, and again, nine of ours blow him out of the water.

'Now, the possibility of accomplishing this was so exciting that those of us with whom it was going to be attempted could not sleep the five hours before the battle. I was worried sick, wondering what would happen if some supersharp Japanese admiral were to cross our T and blow us out of the water, one by one.

'I asked an older officer what that would mean and he said: "It will mean our Old Man guessed wrong." '

'What happened?' Armitage asked, and the ambassador said: 'It's in the history books. We crossed their T just as Olendorf had planned, destroyed that part of the Japanese fleet and allowed our small carriers in another part of the gulf to turn back the main arm of the enemy fleet, while Halsey sent his planes forward to sink their big carriers to the north.' He paused, then said: 'Naval historians believe our battle to the south was the last time in naval history that battleships will ever fire their big guns at enemy ships. Planes will be sent forward to do the killing. And there will never again be a Crossing of the T.'

Ral Jimenez's story had to do with a different kind of war: 'When I used my paper to wage war against the Medelln cartel, which was assassinating any judges who opposed their criminal drug activities, the boss criminals occupied another newspaper and threatened me with the headline EDITOR JIMeNEZ CONDEMNED TO DEATH. I brazened it out; they stormed my newspaper and executed my assistant editor, who looked a lot like me. That's when my wife and I sought refuge in the United States.'

Senator Raborn had been a marine lieutenant in the battle for New Guinea and had led a patrol-in-strength along the trail from Port Moresby over the mountains to capture the port the Japanese held at Lae: 'Before we could think of attacking Lae, we had to subdue enemy strongholds at Aitape and Wau. Very tough battles, so we were exhausted when we finally came down the mountains to face Lae itself. I was given orders to lead the assault from the west, and as we moved into position I thought: What a hell of a note! To fight my way clear across this damned island only to get it in the neck at Lae! So at the big push, when we stormed the Japanese position, I held back, planning to forge ahead like gangbusters in the second wave. A second lieutenant saw what I was doing, threw me a look of scorn and contempt and led the marines in. He got it full in the face and I got a medal for my gallant leadership in the conquest of Lae.' He blew his nose and added what was clearly the truth: 'But at other actions in Okinawa I made amends, and the medals I earned are for real. The one from Lae I never wear.'

President Armitage had been an army second lieutenant at the Anzio landing, becoming a captain by field promotions on the march up the boot of Italy to Rome: 'I was terrified all the way, at every new battle against the Germans, but when we entered Rome and the girls wanted to kiss us as heroes, I moved to the head of the line.'

These men's behavior under fire and their brilliant careers in peacetime had earned them the right to pontificate in their years of retirement as members of Ral's tertulia, and the Colombian, perhaps, deserved the greatest accolades of all, for he had risked his life many times over to protect the honor of his country, and had left his homeland only when it became hopelessly corrupt.

The waiters appeared with the dessert and midnight approached, but still the veterans talked of battles lost and won. St. Pres had the last word: 'Then it's agreed that we finish the plane, install the engine and fly it?' There was no dissent.

In addition to Nurse Nora, there was another woman in Gateways who followed the progress of young Betsy Cawthorn and her romantic attachment to Dr. Zorn with more than casual attention. Reverend Quade had, through her professional career, observed so many love affairs, including three at the Palms that had ended in weddings, that she had almost been able to chart Betsy's growing interest in her doctor. The night after Betsy had revealed her emotions by embracing Zorn in public at the end of her first walk, she had said to herself: Poor child, she's been desperately in love with him since the moment she arrived, and probably before. Thank the Lord he's not married, or this could prove a sorry mess.

Because she wanted to talk with Betsy, she waited till she saw her eating alone one noon when the dining room was nearly empty. The Duchess, of course, was lunching in solitary splendor at table fifteen, and a few couples who did not enjoy preparing noontime meals themselves were at their tables.

'May I join you?' Reverend Quade asked and Betsy said eagerly: 'Oh, I would like that. I've been wanting to get together so we could talk.'