thedrifter
05-13-08, 07:27 AM
Excerpt from 'A Dangerous Age'
By Ellen Gilchrist
1
Onward, or How Nature Took Back
the Reins as Touching the Hand Clan of North Carolina during the Dangerous
Years of 2001 to 2005
Miss Winifred Hand Abadie to marry Charles Christian Kane
on December 21, 2001, in the Chapel of Saint James
Episcopal Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, at seven in the evening, reception to follow at the Duke Inn in Durham.
That was the printed announcement, but it might have gone on to say: Formal dress. The bridesmaids will be wearing red velvet. The thirty-year-old bride will be wearing an off-white satin and lace gown that was worn by her mother and two of her aunts. The maid of honor will be Louise Hand Healy (that's me), the bride's first cousin. The bridesmaids will be Tallulah Hand, Nell Walker Bush, Sarah Hand, and Dr. Susan
Clark, all of Memphis, Tennessee, and Olivia de Havilland Hand of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Oklahoma | Tennessee | Christmas | Memphis | World Trade Center | Durham | Armani | Sally | Winnie | Leave | William Shakespeare | Tempest | New York Fire Department | Touching | Yeats | Kanes | United States Marines
The bridegroom will be attended by his three brothers and his father. Mr. Kane is employed by the Greenlaw Investment Strategy of Raleigh.
Our cousin Olivia figured it out and decided we would be the oldest bunch of bridesmaids ever assembled in an Episcopal church for a formal wedding. The red velvet bridesmaids' costumes were actually good-looking cocktail dresses with jackets we could wear later, and were being custom-made for us by a shop in Durham that specialized in that sort of thing. Winifred had lost ten pounds to fit into the wedding dress, and we had people flying in from all over the world.
Except the wedding never took place because Charles Kane perished on September 11, 2001, along with three thousand other perfectly lovely, helpless human beings.
He had been in the first tower of the World Trade Center, on the fifteenth floor, with two other young brokers, trying to set up a deal to build a new tennis club in Raleigh. The night before he had told Winifred on the phone that he thought they had it licked and he would be home a day early, in time for their mutual birthday, on the thirteenth. "We'll be able to buy a house right away if this goes through," he said. "Start looking for one and make sure it has a yard. I want some children, Winnie. I want a real life."
"We're going to have one," she answered. "Why are we having this damned complicated wedding, Charles? How did we get into all this?"
"We didn't. Our mothers did."
Their mothers had. Winifred's mother, my aunt Helen, and Charles's mother, Sally, had been friends since high school. They had given birth to Winifred and Charles on the same day in the same hospital. They were having a wedding and that was that, and Winifred and Charles were going along with it and all of us were flying in and getting giddy at the thought of red velvet bridesmaids dresses and a Christmas wedding in North Carolina with the stock market at an all-time high and all of us as rich and successful as we could be and the world before us like a land of dreams.
It is extremely hard to have a funeral when you don't have anything to bury. It was four months after the disaster before the Kanes gave up waiting for the New York Fire Department to send them a bone. They just went on and had a memorial service on the tenth of January, and everyone who had been planning on coming to the wedding came to that instead. Winifred wore a dark brown Armani coat and knee-high boots, and I sat on one side of her and one of Charles's brothers sat on the other side, and we read poems out loud and talked about how sad we were, and the next day Charles's identical twin younger cousins joined the United States Marines.
Our cousin Olivia was the last reader. She read a poem by Yeats and a beautiful long passage from The Tempest by William Shakespeare. A few of our cousins thought the Shakespeare was overly melodramatic and depressing, but most of us liked it. Here's what she read:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors
(As I foretold you) were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air,
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.. . .
"You are not a widow," I told Winifred later that night. We were sitting in the library of her mother's house with Olivia asleep on the sofa and an empty bottle of white wine making an indelible stain on Aunt Helen's cherry coffee table.
"Then what am I?" she answered. "We learned I was pregnant last spring, and the baby would have come a week before the wedding. We thought it was hilarious. We were so excited. We didn't tell a soul besides my doctor, who had confirmed the tests. I lost the baby a few weeks later. We were really sad. Charles wanted to be a father so much. We wanted five babies. We wanted as many babies as we could get. So what am I now, Louise? I spent years dating dopey men who either left me or bored me or thought I was fat. And then I turned around and there was Charles, back in town and working for his daddy, and it was like I'd been blind all my life and suddenly could see. Now this. This isn't just some other thing that happened. It's the end of hope for me. I don't know. Maybe I'll go to medical school. I talked to Susan about it. I took the prerequisite courses when I was at Duke. I have to do something for other people now because it's finished for me. It's over." She was sitting on the sofa where Olivia was sleeping. Olivia had been made editor of the newspaper in Tulsa, Oklahoma, shortly after 9/11. She had not been to North Carolina since the attacks and had only been able to get to the memorial service an hour before it began. "The publisher actually suggested I might want to do an editorial about coming to this funeral," she told me earlier that evening. "The effects of terror on the individual, et cetera, as opposed, I asked him, to the effects on what else?"
"You aren't going to write about it, are you?" I asked.
"I hope to God I won't."
Olivia woke up and put her hand on Winifred's head and began to pat her. "It's okay," she said. "It's going to be okay. It isn't the end for you. It's a tragedy but you'll live through it. Our ancestors lost their loved ones all the time and they pulled through. We just have to relearn how to do it." She patted Winifred a few more times, then lay back down on the sofa. "Don't let me miss my plane tomorrow," she said. "I have to be back. Don't let me miss it."
She fell asleep with her hand still on Winifred's arm. It was a strong, wide hand, thick, wide fingers, her Cherokee blood. Winifred and I watched her sleep. She was so much like our aunt Anna we couldn't stop talking to each other about it. Driven, driven, driven, even in her sleep. Not that my mother or our uncles Daniel and Niall were any less driven, but it showed somehow in Olivia more than it did in them. She shone with it. She was our shining, driven cousin.
"Did you apply to medical schools?" I asked Winifred. "Did you take the MCAT? How far did you get with that? I remember Mother telling me about it, but I was gone from home and didn't pay attention to the details."
"It was six years ago. I applied to twelve medical schools and I didn't get into any of them. My MCAT scores were low and my undergraduate grades from Duke weren't all that good. I took the MCAT before I took physics. It was a stupid thing to do. Well, I'll never be a physician. That's a dream. And I am a widow. Don't say I'm not."
"You can try again. Take the Kaplan course. I know people who applied three times before they got into medical school. It's a tough racket to break into."
"How could I do that?" She was sitting up, looking at me.
"Your daddy has plenty of money. He'd support you. Quit your job and start this month. Call the Kaplan people. You have to make a move, Winnie. If you don't, you'll get sick. This sort of thing makes people sick."
Our cousin Tallulah was pretending to sleep in a nearby room. Every twenty or thirty minutes she would get out of bed and wander into the library to join us. "People aren't supposed to die when they're young," she would say. Or "My heart is broken for you." Or "I don't know what we're supposed to do now. Maybe I'll join the air force. I know how to fly. I've been to the Middle East. I went to a tournament in Dubai. I know people over there."
"What do you want?" Tallulah would ask. "Tell me what I can do to help you." Then she would fall back asleep on the floor, with her head propped up on Winifred's knees. After a while she would go back to wherever she had been pretending to sleep.
"She's hyper because she exercises all the time," I told
Winifred. "If she quits playing tennis for three days, her system doesn't know what to do."
"She's a phenomenon," Winifred added. "Did you ever get to see her play in college? She won all these awards for best sportsmanship, plus being All-American three years in a row."
"I saw her once. I was awed, that's for sure, but also because she looks like Grandmother. In the face she looks just like her when she's playing tennis."
"I don't know what I'm going to do," Winifred said. "Not tomorrow or for all the days after that. I can't think of anywhere to begin."
Tallulah was waking up again. "Go to medical school like Louise said to," she put in. "The world needs people to use their skills. I'd go if I could do that sort of science. Louise is right. You have to go to work or you'll die. It's the only thing that will save you." Then she curled back up on the floor. She was still wearing the clothes she had worn to the memorial. She hadn't even taken off her panty hose.
Of course my brilliant cousin Winifred didn't go right out and sign up for the Kaplan course and go back to pursuing her dreams of medical school, because that is not how shock and grief work in the world. The winter of 2002 wore on into spring and summer and the stock market didn't really recover and neither did my cousin. She went to France and stayed awhile, and then she went to Italy and to Spain, and then she came back home and called me a lot in the late afternoons, but she wasn't making much progress in stopping behaving like a widow. Her parents kept giving her money and acting like she was a child, something my aunt Helen is notoriously good at doing. Meanwhile, the rest of us moved on with our lives. Our doctor cousin, Susan, joined a clinic in Memphis and changed her specialty to internal medicine and then to surgery. Olivia ran her newspaper, Tallulah Hand became the tennis coach at Vanderbilt, and my uncertain career in the arts moved on by fits and starts.
My name is Louise Hand Healy, but I work under the name of Louise Hand because my mother's sister was a famous writer and I thought the name might be a leg up in the television business. It turns out, of course, that the only legs that help a woman in television are the ones that are spread for a sixty-year-old producer with a pocket full of Viagra and breath mints.
Well, that's unnecessarily cynical. There are lots of nice men and women in the business, and I know many of them.
I've made a start up the ladder. I made three documentaries for PBS, two of which actually got on the air, one about the grave of a Roman soldier who a professor at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville believes is the biological father of Jesus, and one about a Civil War battleground in Tennessee that had been forgotten. Only twenty men died in the battle, but sixteen of them are buried there. It looks like I'm about to become the thirty-six-year-old woman specialist in graveyards if I don't make a move soon. Maybe I should go back to calling myself Louise Healy and see if I can get a fresh start.
The events of that terrible September day are now nearly three years behind us, and I've been having epiphanies. Or awakenings, or hell, maybe I'm actually growing up at last. I think it started with a trip I made two years ago to Italy, when I was caught in a terrorist attack at Heathrow Airport. Or maybe it was the LASIK surgery I had last year that made me see like an eagle and freed me from my bifocal contact lenses. It might be the tooth-whitening procedure I had last month, or maybe it was dyeing my hair chestnut brown, mostly from despair when my third documentary got dumped on the cutting-room floor at WYBS and I decided my career had begun to tank. I don't get depressed, but that film's failure definitely cut a wedge in my self-esteem. I had to talk to a psychoanalyst to start believing it was the fault of their bad taste and not my bad moviemaking.
It was my favorite piece of work and took a year's research. I was paid twenty-five thousand dollars, minus the 10% that went to my agent and the forty thousand it took me to live on and travel while I did the research. I hate to tell you what it was about or you'll join the crowd who think I'm turning into a ghoul. Okay. It was about how the fall trees turn yellow and gold above the Civil War graveyards in six different towns and how the graves look when they are covered with gold and red and purple and brown and black and yellow leaves. It was really a beautiful piece of work, with cinematography by a hot young Asian who used to be the art director at Random House but quit. It had a voice-over written by my cousin Olivia. The voice-over was the names and dates and ages and everything we could find out about the dead soldiers. I'll admit Olivia and I stuck in some things we can't prove, but my God, this is art, for God's sake, not copyediting.
I couldn't believe Olivia agreed to do it for me. I flew to Tulsa on a fall day and she met me at the airport and drove me to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to photograph a cemetery there that is about as beautiful as anything can be, rows of small white markers going out from a central monument, and covered in late October by golden maple leaves. Above the graves the ancient maple trees stand sentinel, still holding some of the gold leaves, and beside an iron fence a local school bus sits and waits for the afternoon. We read the ages of the young men who died on one long morning and afternoon and night, forty miles away in a pasture by a river. Nineteen, seventeen, sixteen, nineteen, twenty-five, fifty-four, nineteen, eighteen, and on and on.
"They were hauled here in wagons after the battle," Olivia said. "There are a few Cherokees. I've been here many times. There are three more Civil War cemeteries in the area, but none as beautiful as this."
"Does nothing ever change?" I asked.
"The human race is just getting started, Louise. The cerebral cortex is only a hundred thousand years old. It's still a baby, sucking teat and eating Cheerios. We might get better, maybe even wise, if we can last another thousand years."
"A thousand? I don't know, Olivia. There's an awful lot of plutonium and uranium two thirty-five around, not to mention plagues and plastique explosives, not to mention global warming. I'm not sure we have a thousand years in us."
"There are bright minds everywhere exploring and thinking and warning," she said, looking out across the rows of golden-covered victims of the past. "Compassion and wisdom are already with us. But we have to spread the word of good things. When I wish on the first star at night, I wish for wise first-grade and kindergarten teachers. I pray for them when I pray."
"Not me. I'm still half reptilian brain, Cousin. I wish to kill dope peddlers. I'm not very advanced. I want to personally catch and kill dope peddlers and child abusers. I swear I do. I think that way, but I know it's because I watch too much television."
"You need to get laid," she answered. "Well, so do I, for what that's worth."
"Have you seen Bobby Tree?"
"Not in a while. I still dream of ****ing him. How's that for a reminder of what's really going on? He's doing well, Louise. He's out of the marines and he has a construction company. But don't talk about him. Keep cataloging the ages of these men. I want to use it in the piece."
Olivia never talks about her men. She's had some great ones, including one of the best football players in the South and a bank president. But the main one has always been the one she married and divorced, a Cherokee with black hair who was her junior high boyfriend before my aunt Anna and uncle Daniel found her and brought her to Charlotte, North Carolina, to try to turn her into a southern debutante. That's a long story and turned out okay in the end.
Bobby Tree is the name of the man she can't forget. He pops in and out of her life, no matter how much distance she puts between herself and those days. He joined the marines the last time she dumped him, and then came back in one piece and covered with medals. I don't believe that's over yet, no matter how much she won't let anyone say his name to her. If it was over, she'd be able to talk about it, or that's my theory. I don't believe you ever stop loving anyone you ever really loved. You have them there like money in the bank just because you loved them and held them in your arms or dreamed you did. You can forget a lot of things in life, but not that honey to end all honeys.
Back to my last failed video project. It lost a lot of money, including some of mine and some of my momma's. I'm sorry about losing Momma's money. That was retrograde. So now I have to find a better idea and a new backer and make a film that will get me some respect, or I have to admit I'm a second-rate journalist who'd better start learning to live in the present. And maybe I'll meditate.
Unless I get married and have babies, an idea that's starting to seem more and more like a really good one. Except who wants to bring a baby into a world that looks like it's exploding, not to mention the stock market tanking. Olivia says you really don't have to watch the news. Just turn on a financial channel and see what the markets are doing.
More about me. My father is a stockbroker. My mother is a journalist who has written three bad novels that at least got published and stayed in print a few years.
Do you remember I told you about Charles Kane's identical twin cousins who joined the marines the day after the tragedy? Well, yesterday afternoon I got a call from Winifred that deepened all that sadness. "Brian Kane just had his chin blown away in Afghanistan," she said. "Carl, his twin, is still stationed in California, but they sent Brian on because he was the star of their basic training. He was a star in telecommunications, and all he was doing was riding in a tank and running the computers to tell them where to look for weapons. That's all I know except the tank ran over a mine and blew up, and what I want to know is why we can't make tanks that can withstand mines if we are going to ride all the good-looking, strong young men around in them. They're flying him to Walter Reed as soon as they get him stabilized. I'm going there to help. So can you help me get a job in Washington? Who do you know there?"
"No," I answered. "Oh, ******* wars to hell. Are they those good-looking blond boys with the huge smiles who were at the funeral?"
"They sent Brian over the day he finished basic training. He was a genius with computers. He was at Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he and Carl joined the marines."
"How old are they?"
"I don't know. So how about the job? Can you get me one?"
"There aren't any jobs for someone like you, Winifred. You're overqualified for anything I can think up for you to do. You'd be in a perfect place in Washington to study for the MCAT. It's nuts to give up on your dreams."
"I might do it," she said. "I might just do that. I could take the Kaplan and pick up a refresher course in organic chemistry at any of the schools near there. I'm going to stay in Washington and help with Brian as long as they need me. It's my memorial to Charles. Their family isn't very large. They don't have a lot of people like we do."
"Get a big apartment and I might come live with you, if you get a comfortable place without any cats and dogs. I'm sick of every childless woman I know having a house full of rotten spoiled pets."
"Will you try to find a place for me? I need you to help me find somewhere to live."
"I live in Baltimore, Winnie. I don't know anything about D.C. except that everything is done by pull. You need to get your daddy to call some senators or representatives or lobbyists. I heard that's how it gets done around there."
"Well, look anyway. I mean, see what you can do."
"I'll try. When will you get here?"
"In a few days. I'll call as soon as I get an airline ticket."
So of course I got no sleep that night for worrying about where Winifred would live and where she should apply to schools and how she could find a part-time job. Finally, about three in the morning, I got out of bed and made a list of contacts; then I found the Sunday papers and put them in a pile to look for apartments. I wanted to move into D.C. myself but I'd been too busy to look for anything. I'd been living for three years in a garage apartment behind the home of the style section editor of the Washington Post. It's comfortable but far away from any work I do. When I can find work, it's in D.C., or I have to talk to people there: small pieces for magazines or papers, or pickup jobs at television stations. Anyway, I wasn't looking forward to spending the rest of the winter driving into D.C. in bad weather and awful traffic.
"Epiphany," I told Cousin Olivia when I got her on the phone the next morning. I always call her first thing in the morning because she goes to the newspaper at dawn, so she's available. Plus, she's maybe the smartest person in the family now that Aunt Anna's dead.
"I'm going to find a place where both of us can live," I went on. "If Winifred needs to be in D.C. while she heals her wounds, I might as well help her. What else do I have to do with my empty heart and empty womb?"
"You don't have an empty womb. You have a busy life. If you want a child, go find some sperm and get to work. A baby is going to slow you down, but who knows, it might spur you on instead."
"I have to get a script ready for Allison Cardy by the tenth of February."
"Then get it done. You procrastinate, Louise. It's your Achilles' heel."
"Not always. I can stop it if I like."
"Then do it. Look, I have to go. Call me tonight, okay?" She hung up and I made a pot of coffee and went into my workroom and finished the script. By two in the afternoon I had it in the FedEx box and was on my way to D.C. to look for an apartment near Walter Reed. It was time for a change. I called Winifred and told her what I was doing and she said go ahead and don't worry about what it cost and just find something and rent it, she'd be there by the end of the week.
That was Wednesday.
"Without change, something sleeps inside us and seldom awakens." That's my mantra, when I remember to use it. I learned it from Dune, a book I will never stop loving. A great newspaperman wrote the Dune books after a lifetime of watching the world and its madness. It's the best metaphor for modern life ever written. It's our Don Quixote although no one ever admits it in literary circles.
I remembered it now as I set out to take Winifred into my heart and help make her well. She will be a great doctor someday, and I'll be able to feel I helped make it happen. What I forgot was that it was my empty nest that was really calling the shots. Not one I emptied, but one I never built or filled.
So within a month, while I was waiting at our empty apartment for Beds Incorporated to deliver the two new beds with mattresses and springs that Uncle Spencer and Aunt Helen were giving us for a housewarming present, who should drive up and park his Jeep and come walking up the front path to our duplex door but Carl Kane, first cousin to the dead bridegroom and brother to Brian Kane, who was being patched up by a team of plastic surgeons at Walter Reed with Winifred standing by while she studied flash cards from the Kaplan course for the MCAT. Of course, every doctor she met was falling in love with her and offering to help her get into medical school. She had never gained back the weight she lost in order to wear the wedding dress, and at fighting weight she is a major contender in the upscale looks department. I mean, she is lovely, the kind of woman a man thinks would make him look good in the world.
Carl stood at the end of the path, and I was standing in the doorway waiting for the delivery truck. I won't forget that moment ever. He had on his marine uniform, but it wasn't in very spiffed-up condition. The jacket was unbuttoned, the tie was sticking out of a pocket, and the khaki shirt was unbuttoned to the chest bone. Fair-haired men don't show much chest hair, but I could imagine it farther down. He'd been sweating, and he looked more like the anti-establishment guitar player he had been than the marine he was now.
"I'm Carl Kane," he said. "They sent me over to see if I could help. Winifred said to see what you needed."
"I could use some coffee," I said. "And a newspaper. I've gotten addicted to news. So how are you all doing? Are they stitching on him today?"
"They stitched yesterday. I think he'll look okay. I've never seen such attention. Rumsfeld visited the hospital yesterday. We met him. It's busy over there."
"And you're on leave?"
"For another month. Then I'm going over. I keep telling myself not to want revenge, but what the hell, you can't help what you feel, can you?"
He stood there looking like someone I wouldn't want mad at me. Red-gold hair about half an inch long. Really nice hands. Six feet tall, intense, smart.
"How old is Brian?" I asked. "And you?"
"Twenty-four; well, we will be twenty-four soon."
Twenty-four from thirty-six is twelve. I must not think this way, I was thinking. Do not think that way, I thought.
The van arrived with the beds, and Carl went inside with me. We watched as they assembled the contemporary iron bedsteads and then unwrapped the mattresses and springs and placed them on the stands. After they left I got out the vacuum and Carl helped me vacuum the floors of the two bedrooms, and then I opened a box and took out mattress covers and new pale blue sheets and we made up the beds and found the pillows in a closet and put pillowcases on them, and then we sat on one of the beds and didn't talk much. I hate myself at times like this. Men think they get led around by their desires. Try a biological clock.
"Let's go find me some coffee," I said. "And some eggs and toast if it's not too late, or else some lunch." I stood up.
He moved near to me and took my arm. "I'm all yours," he said. "They sent me to you."
Like who sent him? The clan, the family, the Fates?
Who decided I needed a boyfriend more than I needed a job? Who remembered we hadn't had a single baby in ten years in the whole Hand clan? And it wasn't because we weren't cut out to be fruitful.
Had I taken a birth control pill in the past five days? Who knew? I'd been so busy saving Winifred, happy to be of use and not to have to think about myself morning, night, and noon. I hadn't even flossed my teeth since we made the down payment on the duplex and started ordering furniture and letting our parents pay for it, much less remembered to swallow a birth control pill when there certainly didn't seem to be much reason to swallow one.
"Is it true identical twins feel each other's pain?" I asked Carl when we were settled in a booth in a neighborhood restaurant I'd found a few days before.
"I feel this pain," Carl said. "It kills me to see the mess it made. The surgeons have been photographing me; that's weird enough. We're mirror images of each other, it turns out. Something like that. They may take some skin off my butt if they need it. He's knocked out most of the time. They aren't letting him be in pain. They've got the best doctors in the world at Walter Reed."
"They should have. I'm glad they do."
"So you make movies? Winifred said you'd made some films."
"I've made a few documentaries. I'd like to go to Afghanistan and film some of what's going on there. I don't know what it takes to get to do that. I'm small potatoes in the film world, Carl. I'm just scrabbling for a living. It's crazy. No one makes a living doing this. I don't know why I think I can."
"I bet you will. I bet you're good."
"I might be. It takes so much to prove yourself. You have to get people to put their faith in you and give you money."
"You aren't going to eat those biscuits?" He had finished his eggs and toast and bacon and was eyeing what was left of my eggs and biscuits.
"I am not. They are all yours." He took a biscuit and filled it with butter and added jelly and began to eat it. I had not taken my eyes off his shoulders and hands since we sat down and I just went on looking at them. The sexual stuff between us was so thick you could almost see it.
"What are you going to do now?" he asked.
"Wait for the movers to bring the rest of the furniture this afternoon. Stuff from my place in Baltimore. Did Winifred say when she'd be back?"
"She said to tell you she wouldn't be home until late tonight or maybe tomorrow. She might spend the night in the hospital so Aunt Sally can get some rest and our mother can leave."
"Okay."
We drove back to the duplex and went into the kitchen, where he helped me unpack some boxes. Then he touched my arm, and we had a real conversation.
"Would you go have dinner with me some night?" he asked. "I mean a date, like on a date."
"You're too young for me."
"No, I am not."
"Then maybe I'll go. I'm thirty-six years old, Carl."
"So what. I'm a man, Louise. Don't play games with me."
So I didn't play any. I put my arms around him and sighed a long, deep sigh and took the man to bed and kept him there until a delivery man started beating on the door a few hours later.
Before he left to go back to the hospital, he made plans to take me to dinner the following night. "Don't act like nothing's happened," he said. "Promise you won't start all that."
"Who are you?" I asked. "I don't know who you are."
"Yes, you do. You know plenty. I'm a musician, Louise, and I'm the dominant twin. Brian is my child and my brother. He's me and now I'm going back up there and spending the night beside his bed. And then I'm going over there where they did this to him and count coup. Can you deal with all of that?"
"Twenty-four?" I said. "I don't believe you're twenty-four. I think you are a hundred."
When I was seventeen years old and having my first bad crush on a boy, my mother told me something she probably should not have told me, but all the women in our family tell things they shouldn't tell. "You don't know how easy it is to become pregnant," she said. "You cannot imagine. I got pregnant with you the day your father and I were moving into our first apartment. The bed had just been delivered and we were making it up, but we didn't even finish making it up. We made you instead. Louise, you must not have intercourse with anyone. If you think you cannot stop from doing it, you must come to me and we'll get you some birth control pills first. You get pregnant in one second, one second. I know you don't believe that. No one does."
I loved her telling me that. She had been drinking wine and she looked like a heroine in a movie, bending near me, her eyes big and wild and her hair curling all over the place like it does when she hasn't combed it. Plus, I liked the guilt she felt for months afterward for having told me, and her fear that I would tell my father that she had told me. He would not have thought it was funny. He's a serious man and so different from her it's a wonder they're still married. I guess they just like to do it.
And then it was true. I was knocked up. And I wasn't sorry and neither was Carl. Brian was jealous and Winifred was embarrassed, and we took to standing around the hospital bed, the four of us, trying to decide when to tell the older people in the family. We decided to have the marriage ceremony first and then tell them about the baby.
"We'll have the wedding here, in the hospital room," Carl said. "So Brian can be best man. We'll get a marine chaplain to do the service. There's a nice man in the chapel downstairs. I talked to him right after Brian got here. I know he'd do it. Come on, Louise, let's go talk to him."
Get this. I'm knocked up by a twenty-four-year-old marine on his way to Afghanistan for God knows how long. I'm going to get married without telling my parents. A baby is growing inside me. And while we are in the chapel waiting for the marine chaplain to talk to us, my cellphone goes off and Rafael Donald from PBS calls to say there's some interest in my doing a piece about the national cemeteries in the D.C. area.
I walked outside the chapel to take the call. "No," I said. "No more cemeteries. Absolutely not. Ask them if they want to do a piece about babies born while their fathers are away at war. I'm pregnant, Rafael. How's that for a turn of fate? He's a twenty-four-year-old marine. I'm marrying him this week. Then he's going to Afghanistan."
"What?" he said. "Louise, have you gone crazy?"
"Probably," I answered. "But I'm out of the funeral and cemetery business. I really won't do that anymore. Who wants to back it?"
"The station in Boston. WGBH. They're rolling in dough, Louise. It won't be about the cemetery. It will be about its history. Well, it's your idea. Your proposal."
"My priorities have altered recently."
"I guess they have." Rafael is married to an actress. She plays a doctor on Days of Our Lives. He worships her and talks about her all the time, even quotes her opinions on films. He's a terrible romantic and wonderful to work with.
"How about I send a crew to film the shotgun wedding? You're photogenic as hell, Louise. Is this marine good looking also?"
"What do you think? He's twenty-four. He helped me move the beds into my new apartment. His twin brother's in Walter Reed having his face put back together after a bomb blew up his vehicle in Afghanistan. Our new metaphors and stories, all sprung from our deepest fears. I'm ecstatically happy, Rafael. I've never felt this way. I'm giddy."
"Where will the wedding be?"
"In the hospital, by his brother's bed, with the widow of a nine-eleven victim for the maid of honor."
"I want to film it. Just one camera? Will you do it?"
"Sure. But I won't say for sure I'll let you use it."
"That's fair. I'll send Carter Wilson. He's so good, when you see the pictures you'll want us to use it."
"Ten four." I hung up and went back into the chapel and sat down by Carl and thought about getting to know him, but then I decided just to hold his hand until the chaplain came.
"We'll be able to give our parents copies of the video," I told him later that night when I was broaching the idea of making our wedding into a career move. "And Brian doesn't have to be filmed at all if he doesn't want it. Winifred said it's all right with her. Do you think it's tacky? It is tacky. I'll admit that. But our parents might appreciate it."
"Mother knows something's going on. She keeps giving me looks."
"Mine's calling every day. Your mother's talking to Aunt Helen and she's calling my mother and they're buzzing with it. Maybe we should go on and tell them and let them come."
"Whatever you want to do." Carl was watching a basketball game while we were having this conversation. I am marrying a man who watches thirty hours of sports a week and I do not care. My intellectual life is in the can for the time being and I think it's funny. Right now I think everything is funny. I'm happy. I'm the Mad Hatter of happiness. I'm even starting to like Carl's music, since it's clear he isn't ever going to want to listen to mine.
"I want to get married this coming Saturday if the cinematographer can come then."
"The chaplain said he'd do it whenever we want to."
"Call and ask him if Saturday morning is good. And I'll call Rafael."
"Look at this replay, Louise. Look at that foul. My God, they should kick that guy out of the game. He almost broke the other guy's nose."
"Would you call him now?"
"It's almost the half. Can I wait until then?"
We got things set up for Saturday morning at eleven. Thursday Brian took a turn for the worse and had to be put on an antibiotic drip, but he kept saying he still wanted us to have the wedding, so we pressed on. He could talk and he could swallow, and his chin was starting to look like a chin again, even if half of it was titanium, with some plastic pieces, soon to be covered with skin from his own derriere.
I was getting the beginnings of morning sickness, which had allayed my giddiness to some extent, but not the euphoria. The euphoria was intact.
Winifred's mother, Helen Hand Abadie, had a telephone in each hand. With her right hand she was trying to reach Winifred's cellphone with her cellphone. Her left hand held the receiver to the land phone, on which she was talking to her sister, Louise. If Winifred answered, she could put Louise on hold.
"I don't know what Little Louise is doing," Louise began. "She hasn't asked her daddy for money in months. I know she doesn't have a job. So are you and Spencer paying for all this, this duplex and everything? I don't want you supporting our child, Helen, even if you can afford it. I want her to get a job with a salary if she's never getting married. She can't just live from hand to mouth forever."
"A lot of them are doing that now," Helen answered. "I think what you should be worried about is her dating that young boy. Winifred just barely admits it, but I know that's what is going on."
"You told me that last week. I don't care about that. She couldn't take that seriously. She only dates men in the film business. I think she's pretty calculating about it, Helen. That's the worry I have. That she only goes out with men to help her career. I don't know how we came to this. Not one of the girls is married. None of them have children. We had a chance and then Winifred's fiancé died and now I guess they all think falling in love is bad luck."
"Many times it is bad luck."
"Oh, my. Well, at least none of ours have tattoos yet."
"That we know of. Listen, Louise, someone's calling on the other phone. It might be Winnie. I'll call you back."
Helen dropped the land phone into its base and pushed a button on the cellphone.
"Hi, Mother, it's me, Winnie. I only have a minute. What do you need?"
"Just to know that you're all right. Are you all right? What's going on?"
"Nothing. We're just standing by while they do the surgeries. It's slow. Nerve and skin grow slowly, it turns out."
"Are you studying?"
"Of course I am."
"Well, your father and I are coming there this weekend. We have reservations at the Four Seasons for Friday and Saturday nights, so we'll take all of you out to dinner."
"Oh, God, that's not good. Not this weekend. Too much is going on."
"You said nothing was going on."
"I mean, Louise is busy and you can't come to the hospital on Saturday because they have to work on Brian all day."
"We don't have to come to his room."
"It's a bad time, Mother."
"Well, we're coming anyway. Your father has to see some people so I hope you'll find time to be with us. I don't want to bother you."
"All right. Call when you get here Friday. Call my cellphone."
"We might bring Louise. She's worried about Little Louise."
"Oh, God. All right. Whatever. I have to go."
Winifred hung up and immediately started trying to reach Louise or Carl, but they weren't answering their telephones.
She gave up and went over to Brian's bed and sat beside it, watching him sleep. After a while he opened his eyes and she took his hand and leaned near. "Plot thickens," she said. "My parents and Louise's mother are on their way. They've sniffed it out. It makes me believe in mind reading, the way that bunch of women can get on the scent. Once when I was in fourth grade I started doing some heavy petting with a boy who lived down the street, and my mother knew about it within hours. I think she smelled it on my hands. So how are you?"
"It's uncomfortable. I feel like I have a piece of metal in my chin. Why don't they go on and tell everyone what they're doing?"
"Because a cinematographer from WGBH is coming. I guess they think there wouldn't be room for the family."
"You want to marry me while the preacher's here?"
"Not until I see how you're going to look."
"What time are we going to have the ceremony Saturday?"
"At eleven in the morning, last I heard."
"You think I ought to let them take pictures of me like this?"
"Sure. If you don't like it, they can edit it out."
"How do I look?"
"You look nice, for someone who's been blown up. Brian, may I ask you something?"
"Sure. Shoot."
"Do you want Carl to go over there and revenge your injury? If he could stay here, would you want him to stay?"
"I want him to go over there and kill as many of them as he can find. I want to go back myself as soon as I can."
"I hate men. You know that, Brian. All of you are as dumb as posts. But I like the way you look. I think the camera ought to concentrate on your arms and shoulders. Your shoulders really look good in your pajamas."
"Sure we can't get married?"
"I don't think so." Winifred looked into his eyes and giggled like a girl. It was the first minute of real honest-to-goodness fun she had had in months. She didn't even start feeling guilty about being happy until late that night.
By Thursday night, Louise's father had decided to come along with the others to Washington, D.C.
"Secret wedding's not going to work," Carl said to his brother. The four conspirators were back in session around the hospital bed. "I vote we go on and tell them."
"Second that," Brian said. "I'm not strong enough right now to bull**** Momma. She's driving me crazy, calling me every minute. It's affecting my recovery. No kidding. I don't lie to her. It's not worth the aftermath."
"All right, then we tell," Louise agreed.
"Thank goodness," Winifred added. "I'm the one who will be blamed if we don't. I'll have both families mad at me."
At nine o'clock on Friday night, Louise and Carl went to the Four Seasons Hotel and sat down with Louise and Jim Healy and Helen and Spencer Abadie and invited them to the wedding. They had told Carl's family the night before.
"But you have to stay out in the hall while the chaplain's doing the service," Louise said, "because it's going to be filmed for PBS."
"No," Big Louise said. "You didn't do this to me. I can't believe you'd turn your own wedding into a movie for the masses."
"PBS viewers are not the masses, Mother. They are uptight matrons like yourself. No masses will see this unless I really get lucky, and besides, we haven't made plans to air it. We are filming it in case we need it for something."
"That's supposed to make me feel better?" Big Louise was weeping now. Hanging on to her husband and weeping.
"There's the baby," Helen Abadie comforted her sister. "Think about the baby, Louise. Think about that."
On Saturday morning there was fog so thick it was unsafe to drive, but by nine o'clock it began to lift and by ten the sun had broken through and was lighting up Washington, D.C., and the hearts of its inhabitants.
At Walter Reed Army Medical Center the press corps had gotten wind of the wedding, and the hall leading to Brian Kane's room was packed with people and cameras. By 10:50 the administration of the hospital had persuaded the bride and groom to move the wedding to twelve o'clock in the chapel, and the hall was cleared and ten nurses and nurses' aides were moving Brian's bed toward the elevator. "I would have done something with my hair if I'd known this," Louise kept muttering to anyone who wanted to listen.
The parents of the bride and groom were escorted from the hall to the chapel, passes were given to three networks, the PBS cinematographer had sent for help and extra cameras, and the United States of America was on its way to yet another media event and Oprah moment. Louise couldn't help wondering if the attention might not get her lost PBS special back onto a viewing schedule.
"I, Louise Hand Healy, take thee, Carl Mallory Kane, to be my lawful wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, in sickness and in health, until death do us part."
Louise began to cry as she finished the speech. She was still crying small, soft tears while Carl repeated the words to her, and then Brian teared up while he pulled the ring out of his hospital robe and handed it to his brother, and only Winifred, who had the most reason to cry, kept her cool and took the bride's flowers and stepped back and counted the house, listening while the chaplain pronounced her cousin and her dead fiancé's cousin man and wife.
One door closes, another door opens, she was thinking. It was the first cynical thought she had entertained since the morning of September 11, and it came like sunlight through fog, and without guilt or remorse.
"I won't let Carl go over there," Carl's mother whispered to her husband. "One son is enough."
"Not now," her husband whispered back. "We'll talk about it later."
THE BABY WAS A BOY, too small and undeveloped to have access to the long line of memory that becomes the human brain, but made already of flesh and blood and subject to floods and tides and hormonal beaches, and he was having an especially creative day, having stretched out his fingers and toes a millimeter and pushed up what would become the cerebral cortex. Nature was singing, good, with what some humans have taken to calling strings, but are really parts so infinitesimal they are completely unimaginable to the human brain. Good going! That's right, keep going, they were singing, having become tired of allowing the Hand-Manning genetic pool to make its own so-called decisions for ten years now, and its gene bearers sink into cynicism and despair despite the pool's inherent gift for fecundity and joy.
"I won't marry you," Winifred told Brian much later, after he had been taken back to his room and the doctors had run off everyone except Winifred and his parents. His father had taken his mother somewhere to try to reason with her about calling the president of the United States or one of their senators about not allowing Carl to go to a war zone.
"But when you get out of here I might **** you," Winifred continued. "Just to be mean and just because I haven't been laid in four years. This wedding made me horny. Making myself come is okay and I'm good at it because I went to a girls' boarding school. I'm an expert; I can get it done in two minutes and get back to work. It's not that. I want to cuddle up to you. That is, if you have a face when this is over and don't look too bad."
"You won't care how I look when I start in on you." Brian was drifting off into a morphine moment. The doctors had not been using much pain medication because he had told them not to, but today they'd decided they wanted him calmed down for the night.
"What if I pretend you're Charles? Just kidding."
"Pretend I'm the Cookie Monster if it makes you good, happy?—?sorry, sleep. Sleep." He was drifting off, and Winifred watched him until he was deep asleep and then moved to a chair by the window and called Tulsa, Oklahoma, to talk to her cousin Olivia.
"You won't believe what's going on up here," she began when Olivia answered the phone at her office at the Tulsa World.
"Will I not? I've been watching it on television all afternoon. Why didn't Louise do something with her hair? She looks like a waif out of David Copperfield."
"There was fog this morning. It ruined our hair. Besides, we didn't know there would be reporters. We thought it was going to be one cinematographer from PBS station in Boston. So, how did I look?"
"Very nice. You looked good. So did Louise, except for the hair. Did she even comb it?"
"The problem is it's too long. I can't believe she won't cut it. It's so curly you can't get a comb through it. I'm going to try to get her to cut it. She's pregnant. Did you know that?"
"It's on every television news program every hour. You haven't seen the news?"
"Aunt Louise will love that. Just when she was about to get Charlotte society to forgive her for the books she wrote about them. Now they'll get their revenge."
"I wish I could have been there. Where are you? What are you doing?"
"I'm staying with Brian at the hospital. There wasn't a reception. We're going to have it later, when Brian is out of here."
"Do I detect a maternal note?"
"Not to this man. He doesn't want a mother."
"Tell me more."
"Nothing to tell."
"You need to talk to a shrink, Winifred. You don't know what you're doing. You need to get some therapy for at least six months before you go down some paths that you don't need to tread."
"You always want people to go to shrinks. I'll just talk to you instead, if you don't mind."
"I mind right now. I have to get a paper out tomorrow and we're having floods on some of the rivers that feed into the Arkansas, and besides that, the fight over pollution from Arkansas farms is red hot. Anyway, congratulations and all that to the bride and groom."
"I told Brian about you the other day. I showed him the picture of you on the cover of Tulsa magazine. He said you were hot."
"Where did you get hold of that?"
"Jessie sent it to me. She writes every other Sunday. She's been writing to me ever since Charles died. Real letters. I didn't tell you that."
"My sister is an angel. I should see her more, but I don't have time to travel for fun."
"You could invite her to come see you."
"Does she want me to? Did she say she wants me to?"
"She wants you to know the children."
"Oh, God, you're getting just like your mother, Winifred. Did you know that? You can lay a guilt trip on someone so fast it's scary. So tell me about Brian. He said I was hot? I don't think that photograph looks hot. I think it looks professional."
"When he can travel, maybe I'll bring him up there to see you. He was fascinated by the idea of Tahlequah."
"He should be. It's sui generis, that's for sure. Look here, Winifred. I really have to go. I have to get to work. Give Louise my love. Give them all my love. Ten four."
Olivia hung up the phone and shook her head. Her family in North Carolina was like some traveling circus that was always showing up in town, full of magic tricks and cotton candy and games that were hard to win. One of their ancestors had crossed the Delaware with George Washington. Another had painted portraits that were hanging in the White House. There had been several generals and a governor. When she talked to them, she always had a memory of the day she found the photographs of her father and sat down to write the first letter to her aunt Anna. She had been thirteen, not even tall yet, and she had set out with a notebook and pencil to find out who she was, besides a Cherokee Indian in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
I found out, she thought now.
Olivia went back to work on an editorial about pollution and public health.
Winifred went back to Brian's bed and looked down at the brave man and decided to call his mother and see how she and his father were doing. And what am I doing? she asked herself. Well, you don't always have to know, you know.
Ellie
By Ellen Gilchrist
1
Onward, or How Nature Took Back
the Reins as Touching the Hand Clan of North Carolina during the Dangerous
Years of 2001 to 2005
Miss Winifred Hand Abadie to marry Charles Christian Kane
on December 21, 2001, in the Chapel of Saint James
Episcopal Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, at seven in the evening, reception to follow at the Duke Inn in Durham.
That was the printed announcement, but it might have gone on to say: Formal dress. The bridesmaids will be wearing red velvet. The thirty-year-old bride will be wearing an off-white satin and lace gown that was worn by her mother and two of her aunts. The maid of honor will be Louise Hand Healy (that's me), the bride's first cousin. The bridesmaids will be Tallulah Hand, Nell Walker Bush, Sarah Hand, and Dr. Susan
Clark, all of Memphis, Tennessee, and Olivia de Havilland Hand of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Oklahoma | Tennessee | Christmas | Memphis | World Trade Center | Durham | Armani | Sally | Winnie | Leave | William Shakespeare | Tempest | New York Fire Department | Touching | Yeats | Kanes | United States Marines
The bridegroom will be attended by his three brothers and his father. Mr. Kane is employed by the Greenlaw Investment Strategy of Raleigh.
Our cousin Olivia figured it out and decided we would be the oldest bunch of bridesmaids ever assembled in an Episcopal church for a formal wedding. The red velvet bridesmaids' costumes were actually good-looking cocktail dresses with jackets we could wear later, and were being custom-made for us by a shop in Durham that specialized in that sort of thing. Winifred had lost ten pounds to fit into the wedding dress, and we had people flying in from all over the world.
Except the wedding never took place because Charles Kane perished on September 11, 2001, along with three thousand other perfectly lovely, helpless human beings.
He had been in the first tower of the World Trade Center, on the fifteenth floor, with two other young brokers, trying to set up a deal to build a new tennis club in Raleigh. The night before he had told Winifred on the phone that he thought they had it licked and he would be home a day early, in time for their mutual birthday, on the thirteenth. "We'll be able to buy a house right away if this goes through," he said. "Start looking for one and make sure it has a yard. I want some children, Winnie. I want a real life."
"We're going to have one," she answered. "Why are we having this damned complicated wedding, Charles? How did we get into all this?"
"We didn't. Our mothers did."
Their mothers had. Winifred's mother, my aunt Helen, and Charles's mother, Sally, had been friends since high school. They had given birth to Winifred and Charles on the same day in the same hospital. They were having a wedding and that was that, and Winifred and Charles were going along with it and all of us were flying in and getting giddy at the thought of red velvet bridesmaids dresses and a Christmas wedding in North Carolina with the stock market at an all-time high and all of us as rich and successful as we could be and the world before us like a land of dreams.
It is extremely hard to have a funeral when you don't have anything to bury. It was four months after the disaster before the Kanes gave up waiting for the New York Fire Department to send them a bone. They just went on and had a memorial service on the tenth of January, and everyone who had been planning on coming to the wedding came to that instead. Winifred wore a dark brown Armani coat and knee-high boots, and I sat on one side of her and one of Charles's brothers sat on the other side, and we read poems out loud and talked about how sad we were, and the next day Charles's identical twin younger cousins joined the United States Marines.
Our cousin Olivia was the last reader. She read a poem by Yeats and a beautiful long passage from The Tempest by William Shakespeare. A few of our cousins thought the Shakespeare was overly melodramatic and depressing, but most of us liked it. Here's what she read:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors
(As I foretold you) were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air,
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.. . .
"You are not a widow," I told Winifred later that night. We were sitting in the library of her mother's house with Olivia asleep on the sofa and an empty bottle of white wine making an indelible stain on Aunt Helen's cherry coffee table.
"Then what am I?" she answered. "We learned I was pregnant last spring, and the baby would have come a week before the wedding. We thought it was hilarious. We were so excited. We didn't tell a soul besides my doctor, who had confirmed the tests. I lost the baby a few weeks later. We were really sad. Charles wanted to be a father so much. We wanted five babies. We wanted as many babies as we could get. So what am I now, Louise? I spent years dating dopey men who either left me or bored me or thought I was fat. And then I turned around and there was Charles, back in town and working for his daddy, and it was like I'd been blind all my life and suddenly could see. Now this. This isn't just some other thing that happened. It's the end of hope for me. I don't know. Maybe I'll go to medical school. I talked to Susan about it. I took the prerequisite courses when I was at Duke. I have to do something for other people now because it's finished for me. It's over." She was sitting on the sofa where Olivia was sleeping. Olivia had been made editor of the newspaper in Tulsa, Oklahoma, shortly after 9/11. She had not been to North Carolina since the attacks and had only been able to get to the memorial service an hour before it began. "The publisher actually suggested I might want to do an editorial about coming to this funeral," she told me earlier that evening. "The effects of terror on the individual, et cetera, as opposed, I asked him, to the effects on what else?"
"You aren't going to write about it, are you?" I asked.
"I hope to God I won't."
Olivia woke up and put her hand on Winifred's head and began to pat her. "It's okay," she said. "It's going to be okay. It isn't the end for you. It's a tragedy but you'll live through it. Our ancestors lost their loved ones all the time and they pulled through. We just have to relearn how to do it." She patted Winifred a few more times, then lay back down on the sofa. "Don't let me miss my plane tomorrow," she said. "I have to be back. Don't let me miss it."
She fell asleep with her hand still on Winifred's arm. It was a strong, wide hand, thick, wide fingers, her Cherokee blood. Winifred and I watched her sleep. She was so much like our aunt Anna we couldn't stop talking to each other about it. Driven, driven, driven, even in her sleep. Not that my mother or our uncles Daniel and Niall were any less driven, but it showed somehow in Olivia more than it did in them. She shone with it. She was our shining, driven cousin.
"Did you apply to medical schools?" I asked Winifred. "Did you take the MCAT? How far did you get with that? I remember Mother telling me about it, but I was gone from home and didn't pay attention to the details."
"It was six years ago. I applied to twelve medical schools and I didn't get into any of them. My MCAT scores were low and my undergraduate grades from Duke weren't all that good. I took the MCAT before I took physics. It was a stupid thing to do. Well, I'll never be a physician. That's a dream. And I am a widow. Don't say I'm not."
"You can try again. Take the Kaplan course. I know people who applied three times before they got into medical school. It's a tough racket to break into."
"How could I do that?" She was sitting up, looking at me.
"Your daddy has plenty of money. He'd support you. Quit your job and start this month. Call the Kaplan people. You have to make a move, Winnie. If you don't, you'll get sick. This sort of thing makes people sick."
Our cousin Tallulah was pretending to sleep in a nearby room. Every twenty or thirty minutes she would get out of bed and wander into the library to join us. "People aren't supposed to die when they're young," she would say. Or "My heart is broken for you." Or "I don't know what we're supposed to do now. Maybe I'll join the air force. I know how to fly. I've been to the Middle East. I went to a tournament in Dubai. I know people over there."
"What do you want?" Tallulah would ask. "Tell me what I can do to help you." Then she would fall back asleep on the floor, with her head propped up on Winifred's knees. After a while she would go back to wherever she had been pretending to sleep.
"She's hyper because she exercises all the time," I told
Winifred. "If she quits playing tennis for three days, her system doesn't know what to do."
"She's a phenomenon," Winifred added. "Did you ever get to see her play in college? She won all these awards for best sportsmanship, plus being All-American three years in a row."
"I saw her once. I was awed, that's for sure, but also because she looks like Grandmother. In the face she looks just like her when she's playing tennis."
"I don't know what I'm going to do," Winifred said. "Not tomorrow or for all the days after that. I can't think of anywhere to begin."
Tallulah was waking up again. "Go to medical school like Louise said to," she put in. "The world needs people to use their skills. I'd go if I could do that sort of science. Louise is right. You have to go to work or you'll die. It's the only thing that will save you." Then she curled back up on the floor. She was still wearing the clothes she had worn to the memorial. She hadn't even taken off her panty hose.
Of course my brilliant cousin Winifred didn't go right out and sign up for the Kaplan course and go back to pursuing her dreams of medical school, because that is not how shock and grief work in the world. The winter of 2002 wore on into spring and summer and the stock market didn't really recover and neither did my cousin. She went to France and stayed awhile, and then she went to Italy and to Spain, and then she came back home and called me a lot in the late afternoons, but she wasn't making much progress in stopping behaving like a widow. Her parents kept giving her money and acting like she was a child, something my aunt Helen is notoriously good at doing. Meanwhile, the rest of us moved on with our lives. Our doctor cousin, Susan, joined a clinic in Memphis and changed her specialty to internal medicine and then to surgery. Olivia ran her newspaper, Tallulah Hand became the tennis coach at Vanderbilt, and my uncertain career in the arts moved on by fits and starts.
My name is Louise Hand Healy, but I work under the name of Louise Hand because my mother's sister was a famous writer and I thought the name might be a leg up in the television business. It turns out, of course, that the only legs that help a woman in television are the ones that are spread for a sixty-year-old producer with a pocket full of Viagra and breath mints.
Well, that's unnecessarily cynical. There are lots of nice men and women in the business, and I know many of them.
I've made a start up the ladder. I made three documentaries for PBS, two of which actually got on the air, one about the grave of a Roman soldier who a professor at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville believes is the biological father of Jesus, and one about a Civil War battleground in Tennessee that had been forgotten. Only twenty men died in the battle, but sixteen of them are buried there. It looks like I'm about to become the thirty-six-year-old woman specialist in graveyards if I don't make a move soon. Maybe I should go back to calling myself Louise Healy and see if I can get a fresh start.
The events of that terrible September day are now nearly three years behind us, and I've been having epiphanies. Or awakenings, or hell, maybe I'm actually growing up at last. I think it started with a trip I made two years ago to Italy, when I was caught in a terrorist attack at Heathrow Airport. Or maybe it was the LASIK surgery I had last year that made me see like an eagle and freed me from my bifocal contact lenses. It might be the tooth-whitening procedure I had last month, or maybe it was dyeing my hair chestnut brown, mostly from despair when my third documentary got dumped on the cutting-room floor at WYBS and I decided my career had begun to tank. I don't get depressed, but that film's failure definitely cut a wedge in my self-esteem. I had to talk to a psychoanalyst to start believing it was the fault of their bad taste and not my bad moviemaking.
It was my favorite piece of work and took a year's research. I was paid twenty-five thousand dollars, minus the 10% that went to my agent and the forty thousand it took me to live on and travel while I did the research. I hate to tell you what it was about or you'll join the crowd who think I'm turning into a ghoul. Okay. It was about how the fall trees turn yellow and gold above the Civil War graveyards in six different towns and how the graves look when they are covered with gold and red and purple and brown and black and yellow leaves. It was really a beautiful piece of work, with cinematography by a hot young Asian who used to be the art director at Random House but quit. It had a voice-over written by my cousin Olivia. The voice-over was the names and dates and ages and everything we could find out about the dead soldiers. I'll admit Olivia and I stuck in some things we can't prove, but my God, this is art, for God's sake, not copyediting.
I couldn't believe Olivia agreed to do it for me. I flew to Tulsa on a fall day and she met me at the airport and drove me to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to photograph a cemetery there that is about as beautiful as anything can be, rows of small white markers going out from a central monument, and covered in late October by golden maple leaves. Above the graves the ancient maple trees stand sentinel, still holding some of the gold leaves, and beside an iron fence a local school bus sits and waits for the afternoon. We read the ages of the young men who died on one long morning and afternoon and night, forty miles away in a pasture by a river. Nineteen, seventeen, sixteen, nineteen, twenty-five, fifty-four, nineteen, eighteen, and on and on.
"They were hauled here in wagons after the battle," Olivia said. "There are a few Cherokees. I've been here many times. There are three more Civil War cemeteries in the area, but none as beautiful as this."
"Does nothing ever change?" I asked.
"The human race is just getting started, Louise. The cerebral cortex is only a hundred thousand years old. It's still a baby, sucking teat and eating Cheerios. We might get better, maybe even wise, if we can last another thousand years."
"A thousand? I don't know, Olivia. There's an awful lot of plutonium and uranium two thirty-five around, not to mention plagues and plastique explosives, not to mention global warming. I'm not sure we have a thousand years in us."
"There are bright minds everywhere exploring and thinking and warning," she said, looking out across the rows of golden-covered victims of the past. "Compassion and wisdom are already with us. But we have to spread the word of good things. When I wish on the first star at night, I wish for wise first-grade and kindergarten teachers. I pray for them when I pray."
"Not me. I'm still half reptilian brain, Cousin. I wish to kill dope peddlers. I'm not very advanced. I want to personally catch and kill dope peddlers and child abusers. I swear I do. I think that way, but I know it's because I watch too much television."
"You need to get laid," she answered. "Well, so do I, for what that's worth."
"Have you seen Bobby Tree?"
"Not in a while. I still dream of ****ing him. How's that for a reminder of what's really going on? He's doing well, Louise. He's out of the marines and he has a construction company. But don't talk about him. Keep cataloging the ages of these men. I want to use it in the piece."
Olivia never talks about her men. She's had some great ones, including one of the best football players in the South and a bank president. But the main one has always been the one she married and divorced, a Cherokee with black hair who was her junior high boyfriend before my aunt Anna and uncle Daniel found her and brought her to Charlotte, North Carolina, to try to turn her into a southern debutante. That's a long story and turned out okay in the end.
Bobby Tree is the name of the man she can't forget. He pops in and out of her life, no matter how much distance she puts between herself and those days. He joined the marines the last time she dumped him, and then came back in one piece and covered with medals. I don't believe that's over yet, no matter how much she won't let anyone say his name to her. If it was over, she'd be able to talk about it, or that's my theory. I don't believe you ever stop loving anyone you ever really loved. You have them there like money in the bank just because you loved them and held them in your arms or dreamed you did. You can forget a lot of things in life, but not that honey to end all honeys.
Back to my last failed video project. It lost a lot of money, including some of mine and some of my momma's. I'm sorry about losing Momma's money. That was retrograde. So now I have to find a better idea and a new backer and make a film that will get me some respect, or I have to admit I'm a second-rate journalist who'd better start learning to live in the present. And maybe I'll meditate.
Unless I get married and have babies, an idea that's starting to seem more and more like a really good one. Except who wants to bring a baby into a world that looks like it's exploding, not to mention the stock market tanking. Olivia says you really don't have to watch the news. Just turn on a financial channel and see what the markets are doing.
More about me. My father is a stockbroker. My mother is a journalist who has written three bad novels that at least got published and stayed in print a few years.
Do you remember I told you about Charles Kane's identical twin cousins who joined the marines the day after the tragedy? Well, yesterday afternoon I got a call from Winifred that deepened all that sadness. "Brian Kane just had his chin blown away in Afghanistan," she said. "Carl, his twin, is still stationed in California, but they sent Brian on because he was the star of their basic training. He was a star in telecommunications, and all he was doing was riding in a tank and running the computers to tell them where to look for weapons. That's all I know except the tank ran over a mine and blew up, and what I want to know is why we can't make tanks that can withstand mines if we are going to ride all the good-looking, strong young men around in them. They're flying him to Walter Reed as soon as they get him stabilized. I'm going there to help. So can you help me get a job in Washington? Who do you know there?"
"No," I answered. "Oh, ******* wars to hell. Are they those good-looking blond boys with the huge smiles who were at the funeral?"
"They sent Brian over the day he finished basic training. He was a genius with computers. He was at Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he and Carl joined the marines."
"How old are they?"
"I don't know. So how about the job? Can you get me one?"
"There aren't any jobs for someone like you, Winifred. You're overqualified for anything I can think up for you to do. You'd be in a perfect place in Washington to study for the MCAT. It's nuts to give up on your dreams."
"I might do it," she said. "I might just do that. I could take the Kaplan and pick up a refresher course in organic chemistry at any of the schools near there. I'm going to stay in Washington and help with Brian as long as they need me. It's my memorial to Charles. Their family isn't very large. They don't have a lot of people like we do."
"Get a big apartment and I might come live with you, if you get a comfortable place without any cats and dogs. I'm sick of every childless woman I know having a house full of rotten spoiled pets."
"Will you try to find a place for me? I need you to help me find somewhere to live."
"I live in Baltimore, Winnie. I don't know anything about D.C. except that everything is done by pull. You need to get your daddy to call some senators or representatives or lobbyists. I heard that's how it gets done around there."
"Well, look anyway. I mean, see what you can do."
"I'll try. When will you get here?"
"In a few days. I'll call as soon as I get an airline ticket."
So of course I got no sleep that night for worrying about where Winifred would live and where she should apply to schools and how she could find a part-time job. Finally, about three in the morning, I got out of bed and made a list of contacts; then I found the Sunday papers and put them in a pile to look for apartments. I wanted to move into D.C. myself but I'd been too busy to look for anything. I'd been living for three years in a garage apartment behind the home of the style section editor of the Washington Post. It's comfortable but far away from any work I do. When I can find work, it's in D.C., or I have to talk to people there: small pieces for magazines or papers, or pickup jobs at television stations. Anyway, I wasn't looking forward to spending the rest of the winter driving into D.C. in bad weather and awful traffic.
"Epiphany," I told Cousin Olivia when I got her on the phone the next morning. I always call her first thing in the morning because she goes to the newspaper at dawn, so she's available. Plus, she's maybe the smartest person in the family now that Aunt Anna's dead.
"I'm going to find a place where both of us can live," I went on. "If Winifred needs to be in D.C. while she heals her wounds, I might as well help her. What else do I have to do with my empty heart and empty womb?"
"You don't have an empty womb. You have a busy life. If you want a child, go find some sperm and get to work. A baby is going to slow you down, but who knows, it might spur you on instead."
"I have to get a script ready for Allison Cardy by the tenth of February."
"Then get it done. You procrastinate, Louise. It's your Achilles' heel."
"Not always. I can stop it if I like."
"Then do it. Look, I have to go. Call me tonight, okay?" She hung up and I made a pot of coffee and went into my workroom and finished the script. By two in the afternoon I had it in the FedEx box and was on my way to D.C. to look for an apartment near Walter Reed. It was time for a change. I called Winifred and told her what I was doing and she said go ahead and don't worry about what it cost and just find something and rent it, she'd be there by the end of the week.
That was Wednesday.
"Without change, something sleeps inside us and seldom awakens." That's my mantra, when I remember to use it. I learned it from Dune, a book I will never stop loving. A great newspaperman wrote the Dune books after a lifetime of watching the world and its madness. It's the best metaphor for modern life ever written. It's our Don Quixote although no one ever admits it in literary circles.
I remembered it now as I set out to take Winifred into my heart and help make her well. She will be a great doctor someday, and I'll be able to feel I helped make it happen. What I forgot was that it was my empty nest that was really calling the shots. Not one I emptied, but one I never built or filled.
So within a month, while I was waiting at our empty apartment for Beds Incorporated to deliver the two new beds with mattresses and springs that Uncle Spencer and Aunt Helen were giving us for a housewarming present, who should drive up and park his Jeep and come walking up the front path to our duplex door but Carl Kane, first cousin to the dead bridegroom and brother to Brian Kane, who was being patched up by a team of plastic surgeons at Walter Reed with Winifred standing by while she studied flash cards from the Kaplan course for the MCAT. Of course, every doctor she met was falling in love with her and offering to help her get into medical school. She had never gained back the weight she lost in order to wear the wedding dress, and at fighting weight she is a major contender in the upscale looks department. I mean, she is lovely, the kind of woman a man thinks would make him look good in the world.
Carl stood at the end of the path, and I was standing in the doorway waiting for the delivery truck. I won't forget that moment ever. He had on his marine uniform, but it wasn't in very spiffed-up condition. The jacket was unbuttoned, the tie was sticking out of a pocket, and the khaki shirt was unbuttoned to the chest bone. Fair-haired men don't show much chest hair, but I could imagine it farther down. He'd been sweating, and he looked more like the anti-establishment guitar player he had been than the marine he was now.
"I'm Carl Kane," he said. "They sent me over to see if I could help. Winifred said to see what you needed."
"I could use some coffee," I said. "And a newspaper. I've gotten addicted to news. So how are you all doing? Are they stitching on him today?"
"They stitched yesterday. I think he'll look okay. I've never seen such attention. Rumsfeld visited the hospital yesterday. We met him. It's busy over there."
"And you're on leave?"
"For another month. Then I'm going over. I keep telling myself not to want revenge, but what the hell, you can't help what you feel, can you?"
He stood there looking like someone I wouldn't want mad at me. Red-gold hair about half an inch long. Really nice hands. Six feet tall, intense, smart.
"How old is Brian?" I asked. "And you?"
"Twenty-four; well, we will be twenty-four soon."
Twenty-four from thirty-six is twelve. I must not think this way, I was thinking. Do not think that way, I thought.
The van arrived with the beds, and Carl went inside with me. We watched as they assembled the contemporary iron bedsteads and then unwrapped the mattresses and springs and placed them on the stands. After they left I got out the vacuum and Carl helped me vacuum the floors of the two bedrooms, and then I opened a box and took out mattress covers and new pale blue sheets and we made up the beds and found the pillows in a closet and put pillowcases on them, and then we sat on one of the beds and didn't talk much. I hate myself at times like this. Men think they get led around by their desires. Try a biological clock.
"Let's go find me some coffee," I said. "And some eggs and toast if it's not too late, or else some lunch." I stood up.
He moved near to me and took my arm. "I'm all yours," he said. "They sent me to you."
Like who sent him? The clan, the family, the Fates?
Who decided I needed a boyfriend more than I needed a job? Who remembered we hadn't had a single baby in ten years in the whole Hand clan? And it wasn't because we weren't cut out to be fruitful.
Had I taken a birth control pill in the past five days? Who knew? I'd been so busy saving Winifred, happy to be of use and not to have to think about myself morning, night, and noon. I hadn't even flossed my teeth since we made the down payment on the duplex and started ordering furniture and letting our parents pay for it, much less remembered to swallow a birth control pill when there certainly didn't seem to be much reason to swallow one.
"Is it true identical twins feel each other's pain?" I asked Carl when we were settled in a booth in a neighborhood restaurant I'd found a few days before.
"I feel this pain," Carl said. "It kills me to see the mess it made. The surgeons have been photographing me; that's weird enough. We're mirror images of each other, it turns out. Something like that. They may take some skin off my butt if they need it. He's knocked out most of the time. They aren't letting him be in pain. They've got the best doctors in the world at Walter Reed."
"They should have. I'm glad they do."
"So you make movies? Winifred said you'd made some films."
"I've made a few documentaries. I'd like to go to Afghanistan and film some of what's going on there. I don't know what it takes to get to do that. I'm small potatoes in the film world, Carl. I'm just scrabbling for a living. It's crazy. No one makes a living doing this. I don't know why I think I can."
"I bet you will. I bet you're good."
"I might be. It takes so much to prove yourself. You have to get people to put their faith in you and give you money."
"You aren't going to eat those biscuits?" He had finished his eggs and toast and bacon and was eyeing what was left of my eggs and biscuits.
"I am not. They are all yours." He took a biscuit and filled it with butter and added jelly and began to eat it. I had not taken my eyes off his shoulders and hands since we sat down and I just went on looking at them. The sexual stuff between us was so thick you could almost see it.
"What are you going to do now?" he asked.
"Wait for the movers to bring the rest of the furniture this afternoon. Stuff from my place in Baltimore. Did Winifred say when she'd be back?"
"She said to tell you she wouldn't be home until late tonight or maybe tomorrow. She might spend the night in the hospital so Aunt Sally can get some rest and our mother can leave."
"Okay."
We drove back to the duplex and went into the kitchen, where he helped me unpack some boxes. Then he touched my arm, and we had a real conversation.
"Would you go have dinner with me some night?" he asked. "I mean a date, like on a date."
"You're too young for me."
"No, I am not."
"Then maybe I'll go. I'm thirty-six years old, Carl."
"So what. I'm a man, Louise. Don't play games with me."
So I didn't play any. I put my arms around him and sighed a long, deep sigh and took the man to bed and kept him there until a delivery man started beating on the door a few hours later.
Before he left to go back to the hospital, he made plans to take me to dinner the following night. "Don't act like nothing's happened," he said. "Promise you won't start all that."
"Who are you?" I asked. "I don't know who you are."
"Yes, you do. You know plenty. I'm a musician, Louise, and I'm the dominant twin. Brian is my child and my brother. He's me and now I'm going back up there and spending the night beside his bed. And then I'm going over there where they did this to him and count coup. Can you deal with all of that?"
"Twenty-four?" I said. "I don't believe you're twenty-four. I think you are a hundred."
When I was seventeen years old and having my first bad crush on a boy, my mother told me something she probably should not have told me, but all the women in our family tell things they shouldn't tell. "You don't know how easy it is to become pregnant," she said. "You cannot imagine. I got pregnant with you the day your father and I were moving into our first apartment. The bed had just been delivered and we were making it up, but we didn't even finish making it up. We made you instead. Louise, you must not have intercourse with anyone. If you think you cannot stop from doing it, you must come to me and we'll get you some birth control pills first. You get pregnant in one second, one second. I know you don't believe that. No one does."
I loved her telling me that. She had been drinking wine and she looked like a heroine in a movie, bending near me, her eyes big and wild and her hair curling all over the place like it does when she hasn't combed it. Plus, I liked the guilt she felt for months afterward for having told me, and her fear that I would tell my father that she had told me. He would not have thought it was funny. He's a serious man and so different from her it's a wonder they're still married. I guess they just like to do it.
And then it was true. I was knocked up. And I wasn't sorry and neither was Carl. Brian was jealous and Winifred was embarrassed, and we took to standing around the hospital bed, the four of us, trying to decide when to tell the older people in the family. We decided to have the marriage ceremony first and then tell them about the baby.
"We'll have the wedding here, in the hospital room," Carl said. "So Brian can be best man. We'll get a marine chaplain to do the service. There's a nice man in the chapel downstairs. I talked to him right after Brian got here. I know he'd do it. Come on, Louise, let's go talk to him."
Get this. I'm knocked up by a twenty-four-year-old marine on his way to Afghanistan for God knows how long. I'm going to get married without telling my parents. A baby is growing inside me. And while we are in the chapel waiting for the marine chaplain to talk to us, my cellphone goes off and Rafael Donald from PBS calls to say there's some interest in my doing a piece about the national cemeteries in the D.C. area.
I walked outside the chapel to take the call. "No," I said. "No more cemeteries. Absolutely not. Ask them if they want to do a piece about babies born while their fathers are away at war. I'm pregnant, Rafael. How's that for a turn of fate? He's a twenty-four-year-old marine. I'm marrying him this week. Then he's going to Afghanistan."
"What?" he said. "Louise, have you gone crazy?"
"Probably," I answered. "But I'm out of the funeral and cemetery business. I really won't do that anymore. Who wants to back it?"
"The station in Boston. WGBH. They're rolling in dough, Louise. It won't be about the cemetery. It will be about its history. Well, it's your idea. Your proposal."
"My priorities have altered recently."
"I guess they have." Rafael is married to an actress. She plays a doctor on Days of Our Lives. He worships her and talks about her all the time, even quotes her opinions on films. He's a terrible romantic and wonderful to work with.
"How about I send a crew to film the shotgun wedding? You're photogenic as hell, Louise. Is this marine good looking also?"
"What do you think? He's twenty-four. He helped me move the beds into my new apartment. His twin brother's in Walter Reed having his face put back together after a bomb blew up his vehicle in Afghanistan. Our new metaphors and stories, all sprung from our deepest fears. I'm ecstatically happy, Rafael. I've never felt this way. I'm giddy."
"Where will the wedding be?"
"In the hospital, by his brother's bed, with the widow of a nine-eleven victim for the maid of honor."
"I want to film it. Just one camera? Will you do it?"
"Sure. But I won't say for sure I'll let you use it."
"That's fair. I'll send Carter Wilson. He's so good, when you see the pictures you'll want us to use it."
"Ten four." I hung up and went back into the chapel and sat down by Carl and thought about getting to know him, but then I decided just to hold his hand until the chaplain came.
"We'll be able to give our parents copies of the video," I told him later that night when I was broaching the idea of making our wedding into a career move. "And Brian doesn't have to be filmed at all if he doesn't want it. Winifred said it's all right with her. Do you think it's tacky? It is tacky. I'll admit that. But our parents might appreciate it."
"Mother knows something's going on. She keeps giving me looks."
"Mine's calling every day. Your mother's talking to Aunt Helen and she's calling my mother and they're buzzing with it. Maybe we should go on and tell them and let them come."
"Whatever you want to do." Carl was watching a basketball game while we were having this conversation. I am marrying a man who watches thirty hours of sports a week and I do not care. My intellectual life is in the can for the time being and I think it's funny. Right now I think everything is funny. I'm happy. I'm the Mad Hatter of happiness. I'm even starting to like Carl's music, since it's clear he isn't ever going to want to listen to mine.
"I want to get married this coming Saturday if the cinematographer can come then."
"The chaplain said he'd do it whenever we want to."
"Call and ask him if Saturday morning is good. And I'll call Rafael."
"Look at this replay, Louise. Look at that foul. My God, they should kick that guy out of the game. He almost broke the other guy's nose."
"Would you call him now?"
"It's almost the half. Can I wait until then?"
We got things set up for Saturday morning at eleven. Thursday Brian took a turn for the worse and had to be put on an antibiotic drip, but he kept saying he still wanted us to have the wedding, so we pressed on. He could talk and he could swallow, and his chin was starting to look like a chin again, even if half of it was titanium, with some plastic pieces, soon to be covered with skin from his own derriere.
I was getting the beginnings of morning sickness, which had allayed my giddiness to some extent, but not the euphoria. The euphoria was intact.
Winifred's mother, Helen Hand Abadie, had a telephone in each hand. With her right hand she was trying to reach Winifred's cellphone with her cellphone. Her left hand held the receiver to the land phone, on which she was talking to her sister, Louise. If Winifred answered, she could put Louise on hold.
"I don't know what Little Louise is doing," Louise began. "She hasn't asked her daddy for money in months. I know she doesn't have a job. So are you and Spencer paying for all this, this duplex and everything? I don't want you supporting our child, Helen, even if you can afford it. I want her to get a job with a salary if she's never getting married. She can't just live from hand to mouth forever."
"A lot of them are doing that now," Helen answered. "I think what you should be worried about is her dating that young boy. Winifred just barely admits it, but I know that's what is going on."
"You told me that last week. I don't care about that. She couldn't take that seriously. She only dates men in the film business. I think she's pretty calculating about it, Helen. That's the worry I have. That she only goes out with men to help her career. I don't know how we came to this. Not one of the girls is married. None of them have children. We had a chance and then Winifred's fiancé died and now I guess they all think falling in love is bad luck."
"Many times it is bad luck."
"Oh, my. Well, at least none of ours have tattoos yet."
"That we know of. Listen, Louise, someone's calling on the other phone. It might be Winnie. I'll call you back."
Helen dropped the land phone into its base and pushed a button on the cellphone.
"Hi, Mother, it's me, Winnie. I only have a minute. What do you need?"
"Just to know that you're all right. Are you all right? What's going on?"
"Nothing. We're just standing by while they do the surgeries. It's slow. Nerve and skin grow slowly, it turns out."
"Are you studying?"
"Of course I am."
"Well, your father and I are coming there this weekend. We have reservations at the Four Seasons for Friday and Saturday nights, so we'll take all of you out to dinner."
"Oh, God, that's not good. Not this weekend. Too much is going on."
"You said nothing was going on."
"I mean, Louise is busy and you can't come to the hospital on Saturday because they have to work on Brian all day."
"We don't have to come to his room."
"It's a bad time, Mother."
"Well, we're coming anyway. Your father has to see some people so I hope you'll find time to be with us. I don't want to bother you."
"All right. Call when you get here Friday. Call my cellphone."
"We might bring Louise. She's worried about Little Louise."
"Oh, God. All right. Whatever. I have to go."
Winifred hung up and immediately started trying to reach Louise or Carl, but they weren't answering their telephones.
She gave up and went over to Brian's bed and sat beside it, watching him sleep. After a while he opened his eyes and she took his hand and leaned near. "Plot thickens," she said. "My parents and Louise's mother are on their way. They've sniffed it out. It makes me believe in mind reading, the way that bunch of women can get on the scent. Once when I was in fourth grade I started doing some heavy petting with a boy who lived down the street, and my mother knew about it within hours. I think she smelled it on my hands. So how are you?"
"It's uncomfortable. I feel like I have a piece of metal in my chin. Why don't they go on and tell everyone what they're doing?"
"Because a cinematographer from WGBH is coming. I guess they think there wouldn't be room for the family."
"You want to marry me while the preacher's here?"
"Not until I see how you're going to look."
"What time are we going to have the ceremony Saturday?"
"At eleven in the morning, last I heard."
"You think I ought to let them take pictures of me like this?"
"Sure. If you don't like it, they can edit it out."
"How do I look?"
"You look nice, for someone who's been blown up. Brian, may I ask you something?"
"Sure. Shoot."
"Do you want Carl to go over there and revenge your injury? If he could stay here, would you want him to stay?"
"I want him to go over there and kill as many of them as he can find. I want to go back myself as soon as I can."
"I hate men. You know that, Brian. All of you are as dumb as posts. But I like the way you look. I think the camera ought to concentrate on your arms and shoulders. Your shoulders really look good in your pajamas."
"Sure we can't get married?"
"I don't think so." Winifred looked into his eyes and giggled like a girl. It was the first minute of real honest-to-goodness fun she had had in months. She didn't even start feeling guilty about being happy until late that night.
By Thursday night, Louise's father had decided to come along with the others to Washington, D.C.
"Secret wedding's not going to work," Carl said to his brother. The four conspirators were back in session around the hospital bed. "I vote we go on and tell them."
"Second that," Brian said. "I'm not strong enough right now to bull**** Momma. She's driving me crazy, calling me every minute. It's affecting my recovery. No kidding. I don't lie to her. It's not worth the aftermath."
"All right, then we tell," Louise agreed.
"Thank goodness," Winifred added. "I'm the one who will be blamed if we don't. I'll have both families mad at me."
At nine o'clock on Friday night, Louise and Carl went to the Four Seasons Hotel and sat down with Louise and Jim Healy and Helen and Spencer Abadie and invited them to the wedding. They had told Carl's family the night before.
"But you have to stay out in the hall while the chaplain's doing the service," Louise said, "because it's going to be filmed for PBS."
"No," Big Louise said. "You didn't do this to me. I can't believe you'd turn your own wedding into a movie for the masses."
"PBS viewers are not the masses, Mother. They are uptight matrons like yourself. No masses will see this unless I really get lucky, and besides, we haven't made plans to air it. We are filming it in case we need it for something."
"That's supposed to make me feel better?" Big Louise was weeping now. Hanging on to her husband and weeping.
"There's the baby," Helen Abadie comforted her sister. "Think about the baby, Louise. Think about that."
On Saturday morning there was fog so thick it was unsafe to drive, but by nine o'clock it began to lift and by ten the sun had broken through and was lighting up Washington, D.C., and the hearts of its inhabitants.
At Walter Reed Army Medical Center the press corps had gotten wind of the wedding, and the hall leading to Brian Kane's room was packed with people and cameras. By 10:50 the administration of the hospital had persuaded the bride and groom to move the wedding to twelve o'clock in the chapel, and the hall was cleared and ten nurses and nurses' aides were moving Brian's bed toward the elevator. "I would have done something with my hair if I'd known this," Louise kept muttering to anyone who wanted to listen.
The parents of the bride and groom were escorted from the hall to the chapel, passes were given to three networks, the PBS cinematographer had sent for help and extra cameras, and the United States of America was on its way to yet another media event and Oprah moment. Louise couldn't help wondering if the attention might not get her lost PBS special back onto a viewing schedule.
"I, Louise Hand Healy, take thee, Carl Mallory Kane, to be my lawful wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, in sickness and in health, until death do us part."
Louise began to cry as she finished the speech. She was still crying small, soft tears while Carl repeated the words to her, and then Brian teared up while he pulled the ring out of his hospital robe and handed it to his brother, and only Winifred, who had the most reason to cry, kept her cool and took the bride's flowers and stepped back and counted the house, listening while the chaplain pronounced her cousin and her dead fiancé's cousin man and wife.
One door closes, another door opens, she was thinking. It was the first cynical thought she had entertained since the morning of September 11, and it came like sunlight through fog, and without guilt or remorse.
"I won't let Carl go over there," Carl's mother whispered to her husband. "One son is enough."
"Not now," her husband whispered back. "We'll talk about it later."
THE BABY WAS A BOY, too small and undeveloped to have access to the long line of memory that becomes the human brain, but made already of flesh and blood and subject to floods and tides and hormonal beaches, and he was having an especially creative day, having stretched out his fingers and toes a millimeter and pushed up what would become the cerebral cortex. Nature was singing, good, with what some humans have taken to calling strings, but are really parts so infinitesimal they are completely unimaginable to the human brain. Good going! That's right, keep going, they were singing, having become tired of allowing the Hand-Manning genetic pool to make its own so-called decisions for ten years now, and its gene bearers sink into cynicism and despair despite the pool's inherent gift for fecundity and joy.
"I won't marry you," Winifred told Brian much later, after he had been taken back to his room and the doctors had run off everyone except Winifred and his parents. His father had taken his mother somewhere to try to reason with her about calling the president of the United States or one of their senators about not allowing Carl to go to a war zone.
"But when you get out of here I might **** you," Winifred continued. "Just to be mean and just because I haven't been laid in four years. This wedding made me horny. Making myself come is okay and I'm good at it because I went to a girls' boarding school. I'm an expert; I can get it done in two minutes and get back to work. It's not that. I want to cuddle up to you. That is, if you have a face when this is over and don't look too bad."
"You won't care how I look when I start in on you." Brian was drifting off into a morphine moment. The doctors had not been using much pain medication because he had told them not to, but today they'd decided they wanted him calmed down for the night.
"What if I pretend you're Charles? Just kidding."
"Pretend I'm the Cookie Monster if it makes you good, happy?—?sorry, sleep. Sleep." He was drifting off, and Winifred watched him until he was deep asleep and then moved to a chair by the window and called Tulsa, Oklahoma, to talk to her cousin Olivia.
"You won't believe what's going on up here," she began when Olivia answered the phone at her office at the Tulsa World.
"Will I not? I've been watching it on television all afternoon. Why didn't Louise do something with her hair? She looks like a waif out of David Copperfield."
"There was fog this morning. It ruined our hair. Besides, we didn't know there would be reporters. We thought it was going to be one cinematographer from PBS station in Boston. So, how did I look?"
"Very nice. You looked good. So did Louise, except for the hair. Did she even comb it?"
"The problem is it's too long. I can't believe she won't cut it. It's so curly you can't get a comb through it. I'm going to try to get her to cut it. She's pregnant. Did you know that?"
"It's on every television news program every hour. You haven't seen the news?"
"Aunt Louise will love that. Just when she was about to get Charlotte society to forgive her for the books she wrote about them. Now they'll get their revenge."
"I wish I could have been there. Where are you? What are you doing?"
"I'm staying with Brian at the hospital. There wasn't a reception. We're going to have it later, when Brian is out of here."
"Do I detect a maternal note?"
"Not to this man. He doesn't want a mother."
"Tell me more."
"Nothing to tell."
"You need to talk to a shrink, Winifred. You don't know what you're doing. You need to get some therapy for at least six months before you go down some paths that you don't need to tread."
"You always want people to go to shrinks. I'll just talk to you instead, if you don't mind."
"I mind right now. I have to get a paper out tomorrow and we're having floods on some of the rivers that feed into the Arkansas, and besides that, the fight over pollution from Arkansas farms is red hot. Anyway, congratulations and all that to the bride and groom."
"I told Brian about you the other day. I showed him the picture of you on the cover of Tulsa magazine. He said you were hot."
"Where did you get hold of that?"
"Jessie sent it to me. She writes every other Sunday. She's been writing to me ever since Charles died. Real letters. I didn't tell you that."
"My sister is an angel. I should see her more, but I don't have time to travel for fun."
"You could invite her to come see you."
"Does she want me to? Did she say she wants me to?"
"She wants you to know the children."
"Oh, God, you're getting just like your mother, Winifred. Did you know that? You can lay a guilt trip on someone so fast it's scary. So tell me about Brian. He said I was hot? I don't think that photograph looks hot. I think it looks professional."
"When he can travel, maybe I'll bring him up there to see you. He was fascinated by the idea of Tahlequah."
"He should be. It's sui generis, that's for sure. Look here, Winifred. I really have to go. I have to get to work. Give Louise my love. Give them all my love. Ten four."
Olivia hung up the phone and shook her head. Her family in North Carolina was like some traveling circus that was always showing up in town, full of magic tricks and cotton candy and games that were hard to win. One of their ancestors had crossed the Delaware with George Washington. Another had painted portraits that were hanging in the White House. There had been several generals and a governor. When she talked to them, she always had a memory of the day she found the photographs of her father and sat down to write the first letter to her aunt Anna. She had been thirteen, not even tall yet, and she had set out with a notebook and pencil to find out who she was, besides a Cherokee Indian in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
I found out, she thought now.
Olivia went back to work on an editorial about pollution and public health.
Winifred went back to Brian's bed and looked down at the brave man and decided to call his mother and see how she and his father were doing. And what am I doing? she asked herself. Well, you don't always have to know, you know.
Ellie