Acts of God (10 page)

“I'm on my way to join my family in Turkey. They're on holiday. If I'd had my radio on in the automobile I might have known not to go into the airport. This started in London several hours ago. They've closed the banks.”

“So here we are,” Rivers said. “Well, I'm going to try to call my family. God knows what they're hearing on television.” Everyone pulled out cellular phones and began trying to make calls. Except me. I wasn't thinking about making a cellular telephone call in the presence of a man as handsome as Robert McArthurs, even if he is happily married to a beautiful American journalist who nursed him back to health after a stroke he suffered in his thirties and about which he wrote a wonderful, lyrical, long article in
The New Yorker
that later became a book.

“I read your book about the stroke,” I said. “I had already read the one you wrote about the English language. I have Anna's autographed copy.”

“Tell me about your family,” he said, settling into a seat beside me on the sofa and putting his elbows on his long legs and leaning toward me. “I stayed with your grandparents when I came to Charlotte, and then spent several days at your Uncle Daniel's house. Tell me where everyone is. Start with your grandparents.”

“The family,” I said, giggling. “ ‘These are the patterns that enthrall a genetic line. Power from the preceding generations hobbles the new generation.' I was thinking about that earlier today. I can't remember why.”

“ ‘Are we doomed to repeat the patterns,' ” he quoted. “She wrote that to me in a letter before she used it in the book. Where is the quotation from?”

“I don't know. About my family. Grandmother is still alive but very weak and bedridden. She is ninety-nine. Granddaddy died four years ago. All the Hands and Mannings live a long time. I guess I should have some long-term-care insurance but I don't. Anyway, the most interesting people are my cousin, Tallulah, who plays tennis, and my cousin, Scarlett, and my cousin, Daniel Davis, and who else, my sister, Laura, who is in medical school, and I guess you know about Uncle Daniel's daughter, Olivia. She's a writer. She wrote a history of the Cherokee Indian chief, Sequoyah, and now she's the editor of the Tulsa, Oklahoma, newspaper. She's the first woman editor. She keeps in touch with me. She wants to be a novelist but she can never get the novels published. She sends them to me to read. You'd like her if you met her. Everyone says she looks like Anna.”

“Anna was so lovely. She shone with life. It is impossible that she died. And stupid. She could have been saved.”

“We don't think so. No one in the family has ever been angry with her for doing it. She was a comet. She had to go that way. She couldn't be an invalid or a sick person. Everyone thinks that except for Grandmother. Grandmother thinks it was unholy and set a bad example.”

“We're a strange generation, the one Anna and I belonged to. Your mother is the youngest, isn't she?”

“Louise, ‘the most selfish girl on the planet,' as Anna described her in fiction without even changing her name. Momma thinks it's funny. She is selfish. She's had two facelifts and she spends four weeks a year at a spa in Dallas. She looks younger than I do.”

“What are you talking about?” Cynthia and Rivers and Mary Jane had finished their telephone conversations and were turned to us now.

“About my family,” I said. “Robert came to my aunt's funeral in Charlotte and he came back later to look at manuscripts Aunt Helen found in Anna's papers. He knows everyone in the family. I was catching him up.”

“They're exciting people,” Mary Jane said. “Powerful and beautiful, all of them.”

“Tell me about Daniel,” Robert asked.

“He quit drinking. Uncle James, who is the oldest, got prostate cancer but has never treated it. He's had it for ten years and it hasn't gotten any worse. Then he got hunchbacked because he only has one lung from having polio when he was young so that scared Uncle Daniel and he quit drinking. He still acts just like he did though. He gardens and he's gone crazy for growing roses. And he takes care of Grandmother. He goes to see her every afternoon and they talk about all of us. I write her letters and he reads them to her.”

“What is going on out there?” Cynthia said. She stood up. “Look out the window.” We all got up and looked. The plane that was supposed to have been taking us to Italy was being backed away from the terminal. It was turning and taxiing toward a runway.

“There goes our chance of making it to the villa this weekend,” Mary Jane said. “I don't suppose Cynthia's husband can get any of his money back, of course not.”

“I'm going to the desk and see what's going on,” I said.

“No, don't do that,” Mary Jane said. “That won't do any good. It's our own fault. We should have known better than to leave home with everything that's going on in the world. So here we are.”

“Bridge, anyone?” Robert suggested. “I can procure a deck of cards.”

“Sure,” Cynthia said, “I'll play. I used to play duplicate. I'm good.”

“I will,” Mary Jane said. “Who's a fourth?”

James Monroe, the man in tweeds, stood up and stretched his arms over his head. “I'll play,” he said. “I'll take one of the ladies and you take the other one,” he suggested to Robert. “That way if they overpower us at least they won't be a team.”

“Robert McArthurs,” Robert said and put out his hand.

“James Monroe,” the man said and extended his own.

The British Airways agent came back to our table and told us they hoped to have flights out by four or five that afternoon. “We don't foresee you having to spend a night here,” he added. “So please try to be patient. We're doing everything we can to end this crisis.”

“The plane with our luggage just left the port,” Cynthia said. “Tell me they are going to bring the luggage back.”

“Where are they taking it?” Rivers began, but the agent had moved on to another group of stranded first-class passengers.

“His can't be a happy job,” Robert offered.

“Flak catchers,” Rivers said. “Having to deal with people like us who are accustomed to bossing people around. I get the feeling lately,” she continued, “that most of my conversations are with people who work for me in one way or the other. I have two houses, and a lodge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I spend half my time talking to housekeepers, plumbers, roofers, painters, drapery hangers, window-blind installers, lawyers, or certified public accountants. I like them. I like people who work better than I like people like myself, which is why I do volunteer work. It's better than not working at all, which is the most boring thing in the world and why old people become morose. Still, I long for conversation with people who don't want anything from me. Like this. I feel fortunate to have run into all of you, even if it took a bomb scare to set it up.”

“Then let's converse,” Robert said. “I don't think anyone really wants to play bridge. Am I right?” The cards had been dealt but he was right, no one was really interested in playing cards.

“Let's choose a subject and expound on it,” Rivers said. “Like the old Greeks used to do. There's plenty to talk about. Terrorism, religion, marriage, divorce, why young people are hard to control, if we should try to control them, if we should, for God's sake, have them.”

“I'm in for that,” I said. “I'm thirty-five years old and I haven't had a child and I'm worried that I haven't. I don't want to use old eggs. I want to have a child now but how can I? I don't live in a community. I leave on the spur of the moment to go anywhere. I don't love anyone enough to quit work and be a wife. And I sure don't want to be a single mother. That's so sad somehow. Nature tells me one thing. Watching my friends with their children tells me another, and besides, I have a mother that really isn't all that good at mothering me. She mostly concentrates on how I look. She thinks all will be well if you're beautiful or at least extremely well-groomed.”

“She may be right,” Rivers said. “Children are a mixed blessing, especially if you get some who don't like you, as I did. Besides my large-size daughter I have a son named Carl who blames everything on me. I'm his scapegoat. When I get a message from him on the message machine I heave sighs before I can stand to call him back. He married an Italian woman he met somewhere. She's mean to him and he blames me for that. I told him not to marry her but he wouldn't stop. Now it's been six years of hell for everyone. I have herpes simplex I picked up at church camp when I was a teenager. Nothing bad, just occasional fever blisters if I get upset. I hadn't had an outbreak in years until Carl married Maria. Every time I stay at their house I break out with fever blisters. Every time I visit them or they visit me. It's so indicative, I mean, evidence of things unseen. All that bad energy swarming around my child and grandchild, all that anger and Italian wine drinking and yelling. So am I glad I had Carl? I had him after three girls, and being the only boy in a houseful of sisters set him up to be bossed and yelled at. What else have my children done to pay me back for having them? The fat one, then the second one married a born-again Christian and goes to some dreadful, stupid church, and the third one lives at home and doesn't work.”

“You have an eventful life,” Robert said.

“My children are angels,” Mary Jane said, “But I get tired of taking care of them all day. I feel guilty when I leave them. I'm feeling guilty now. I'll feel guilty the whole time I'm in Italy if we ever get there and when I get home they'll make me feel even guiltier and probably get sick while I'm gone to prove the point. They're six and seven. A boy and then a girl. They like to fight.”

“My oldest child,” Cynthia began, “The one who would eat chocolate pudding all day but I don't let her do it, also loves to watch television. She will do anything to get to watch the cartoon channel. I'm not sure she can read and she's in the second grade. She has no intellectual curiosity. I've always read and tried to think straight, and was a good student, wasn't I, Louise? I was going to nursing school at Vandy but then I met Darren and married him. I was glad to stop because organic chemistry was hard for me and I wasn't sure I was going to be able to continue so I might have married him as an excuse to quit. So I had Jane and she's not very bright. Darren's a lawyer, magna cum laude at Vandy. My father is a physician. There are lots of smart people in my family. Well, my mother is pretty dull but anyway, so I have this child who loves television. I love her but I don't feel guilty if I leave for two weeks. She'll get to watch television all the time while I'm gone and probably con the temporary nanny into letting her stay home from school half the days. She's good at pretending to be sick.”

“I have two boys, ten and fourteen,” Robert put in. “I've had a good time with them but it's becoming difficult. We caught the older boy with drugs last summer. At thirteen, God knows where he got them. We live in London. It's easy for anyone to get marijuana. And small towns aren't much better.”

“People love to get high,” I said. “I don't. I like to work. I'm ambitious. Maybe that's the same thing but I don't think so. We let our children see us drink. Then we let them drink, thinking they will learn how to drink intelligently, but most of them never do. They learn to use drugs and alcohol for props, for courage, for macho, for pain. They use amphetamines for study. In the high-octane lives we prepare them for there may not be a way to withstand the pain except getting high. You can't teach young people to meditate. It's unnatural. So we have this culture and we are killing ourselves and our children with it even when we aren't at war. What should we do about all that?”

“Stop a minute,” James Monroe said. He stood up and spread open his hands. “You are thinking incorrectly. They are alive. If they are alive, your children are your blessings, your excitement, your entry to the future, both biologically and intellectually. I lost a grandson. If you only knew. I don't mean to preach but really, if they bother you, tell them so, and go on loving them. Don't let them make you feel guilty. That's up to you, I think. Anyone will press on someone who has power over them unless you move away. Don't let them press. If I had my grandson back he could weigh three hundred pounds and wear earrings. If I only knew he was still here, could see him, talk to him.”

“Oh, God,” I began. “Of course you're right. . . .”

There was a sudden blast, a sound, a terrible thunder that moved the floor. The window behind us buckled toward the runway and bellowed out. The shatterproof glass was holding for what seemed a long time, then it collapsed. Robert grabbed me and dragged me back into the center of the lounge. Everyone else ran and scrambled back around us as a second window collapsed.

“Where are the police?” Cynthia screamed. “Where are those soldiers? I thought they were all over the place. Was that luggage blowing up out there?”

“We don't know,” I told her. “Sit down. Sit still. Take a breath. Take some deep breaths. We're in trouble here.”

“Please proceed from the first-class lounge area into the concourse area,” a voice over the loudspeaker was saying. “Please line up two abreast and leave the first-class lounge. There are doctors in the concourse if you are injured. Please hurry, but don't crowd one another.”

We moved as a group toward the door. There were forty people in front of us being handed tags as they exited the lounge. “Please take all your belongings with you,” the speaker announced. “Please proceed in a quiet manner toward the concourse. Do not crowd your fellow passengers. Please proceed in an orderly manner into the D concourse.”

Rivers and I were together in line, then Cynthia and Mary Jane, then Robert McArthurs and James Monroe, then the Chinese mother and daughter. We passed through the doors into the concourse and were given a second set of tags to wear around our necks and then herded toward tables where people with notebooks were writing down names.