A Dangerous Age (4 page)

“Would you call him now?”

“It’s almost the half. Can I wait until then?”

W
E 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.

W
INIFRED’S MOTHER
, Helen Hand Abadie, had a telephone in each hand. With her right hand she was trying to reach Winifred’s cell phone with her cell phone. 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 cell phone.

“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 cell phone.”

“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.

B
Y
T
HURSDAY 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 bullshit 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.”

A
T 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.”

O
N
S
ATURDAY 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.”

T
HE 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 fuck 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.”