Acts of God (11 page)

The concourse was quiet except for some piped-in music, which no one had remembered to turn off. Johann Sebastian Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor was playing. I looked back at Robert and pointed into the air and he smiled and held out his hand as though to play the bass clef on a keyboard.

“What?” Cynthia demanded. “What are you doing?”

“The sound of Western civilization,” I answered, loving her very much for being herself and no one else. “It's a piece I love by Bach. In my failed novel I had Elise play it for herself before she walked out the door to go drive her automobile into the frozen lake, when I was trying to make sense of Aunt Anna's suicide. The book was a complete failure but I learned a lot from writing it.”

“What did you learn?” Rivers asked.

“That I am not a fiction writer, certainly not a novelist, and, more important, that suicide really is a mistake and not fair to the ones who are left behind.”

“I disagree,” Mary Jane said. “If you are in great pain or about to be, you get to end your life. I sure haven't been in charge of myself all these years to leave my death in the hands of fate.”

“Me either,” James Monroe put in. “Well put.”

The Toccata and Fugue in D Minor was interrupted by an announcement. “There has been an explosion in a petrol supply truck. There are no casualties. This was not, we repeat, not caused by a bomb but by human error. There is no cause for alarm. Stay calm. We expect to have the airport running again by evening. If you need help there are stations in every concourse.”

“I say.” James Monroe had taken Robert's arm. “I wonder if they could supply me with portable oxygen. Heart problem, probably not life-threatening. I'm a director of Lloyd's. We insure these airplanes, actually.” He had begun to breathe with difficulty and both Mary Jane and Robert began moving with him to the front of the line. The line didn't seem to be accomplishing much except giving everyone a place to be, but when I got to the head of it they checked my airline ticket, offered help if needed, and when I told them I worked for PBS and BBC and showed them my press credentials, they opened up and gave me all the information they had. It wasn't much. There had been bombings in downtown London and threats to Heathrow, but the explosion had indeed—“indeed,” they kept repeating—been caused by carelessness and had nothing, repeat nothing, to do with terrorism.

“As if I'm going to believe that any more than I believe all those wildfires in southern California are caused by campfires,” Cynthia said to me in a quiet voice. Once again I loved her so much for being herself that I could barely stand it.

“How have we lost each other all these years,” I said. “Your ‘little voice,' you used to use that when we'd whisper in class. Remember in Mrs. Jarvis's room at Southern Seminary and you'd tell me all the gossip when she was writing on the blackboard?”

“She liked to write on the blackboard more than anyone I have ever known in my life,” Cynthia answered. “She would write down whole poems with all the punctuation, then read them to us, then make us read them.”

“Or make us copy them and she was supposed to be teaching history.”

“She was a doll. Let's write her a postcard and tell her where we are. How could we find out her address?”

“We'll send it to the school, to the History Department. Surely by now she has a medal of honor or a portrait in Hancock Hall. I saw something about her in an alumni newsletter not long ago. I bet she's still alive.”

“Let's buy postcards and write to everyone we can think of.”

“Great idea.” I turned around and told Cynthia's idea to Rivers and she wanted in, so as soon as we finished in the line we found a shop that was miraculously still open and began to pick out cards.

The second explosion shook the building's floor and foundation. Things in the shop fell from their shelves and we huddled together in the middle of the magazine section. Rivers grabbed me by the sleeve and began to pull me out of the shop. “Get to clear ground,” she said. “I know earthquakes. I'm telling you, get out of here.” She yelled at the shop girl to follow us and we moved out into the area where the lines had formed to show tickets. We each had a handful of postcards. When we settled down on the floor in a cleared place, Rivers handed the shop girl a twenty-dollar bill but the girl wouldn't take it. She was crying and I began to try to calm her.

“Human error, we repeat, human error,” Cynthia said. “You bet it's human error. Error to leave home during a worldwide crisis. Error to think we can run free and democratic societies with this madness all around us. Oh, God, I have to talk to my children. What are we doing here? Call someone, Louise. Get us out of here.”

“The ventilation systems are unharmed.” A voice came through the speakers. “We have the airport under control.
The airport is under control.
Stay calm, stay where you are. Do not panic.” The voice repeated that message several times, then added, “The initial explosion was caused by human error near a petrol truck. The second explosion was indeed an explosive device, but we have found the others and all will be well. There will not be further explosions. Stay where you are. Remain calm. Do not panic or attempt to leave your area.” This second message was repeated several times, then the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor came back on and I sat back, patting the shop girl's arm and listening to the music and I began to think I really was, after all, helpless. After all the bravado of my thirty-five years, after all the opinions and education and help from people like Mrs. Harriet Jarvis and all the travel and work and friends and books and paintings and beautiful clothes and hotels and automobiles I was just as helpless as the smallest insect crawling across my white tile bathroom floor that I stepped on with my house slipper, always being remorseful when I killed it and always remembering Salinger and Seymour Glass teaching me Zen Buddhism, which I may or may not have understood or learned.

The heavenly music written by the genius Johann Sebastian Bach kept on playing and I kept on patting the arm of the sweet, brown-haired shop girl and Rivers and Cynthia sat beside me doing breathing exercises, as the concourse filled with soldiers.

After what seemed a short while but was probably almost an hour we all started to feel better about things and the shop girl went back to the shop and picked up some bags of chips and a few health snack bars and brought them to us and we found folding chairs and sat on them and began to write postcards. We alternated between writing postcards and trying to make cellular telephone calls to people who were worried about us. Robert McArthurs and Charles Halliday returned to our group but James Monroe, who had turned out to be the chairman of the world-famous insurance company that insures the queen's jewels and the airplanes of British Airways, had been whisked off to receive further medical treatment.

“So does all this change anyone's mind about whether it's a good idea to have children in 2004?” Rivers asked. “I'd like to go back to that if no one minds?”

“What would be the alternative?” Robert asked. “Just let the human race die out? Except only Western civilization would die out, our upper-middle-class part of it, since Africa and India have proven that people will continue to reproduce under the worst imaginable circumstances, not to mention the circumstances in which the first twenty-five million years of human evolution proceeded.”

“But the question is,” Mary Jane said, “whether educated people knowing what we know would go on having children.”

“They might not until the birth control pills ran out,” Cynthia said. “Then they'd go back to having babies the way we used to have them all those twenty-five million years, which is girls having them the first year they ovulate and the babies are probably stronger and the grandmothers take care of them and life would insist on itself. It wouldn't die out. It wouldn't let itself die out. I'm going home, everyone. As soon as this calms down I'm going back to my house and my children.”

“Don't do that,” I said. “Give us a few days with you in the villa your husband paid for. Don't throw away his gift to you.”

“I'll come by and see you,” Robert said. “I have an author in Florence I need to visit. Perhaps I can wangle an airline ticket out of the paper and come have an evening while we're all on holiday.”

WESTERN CIVILIZATION WON
its battles on this nineteenth day of April, 2004. By six that afternoon Heathrow Airport was secured by British forces. By seven that evening airplanes were taking off for their destinations. Fifteen people had been arrested in London and every inch of Heathrow had been searched. Two more explosive devices had been found and defused but the authorities still insisted the first explosion had been caused by human error. Rumor had it that it had been a cigarette thrown on the ground by a tired dog handler and that he had confessed and asked to be forgiven.

AT ELEVEN THAT
night Mary Jane, Cynthia, Rivers, and I boarded a British Airways jet bound for Pisa, Italy. We had convinced Rivers to come with us to the villa to decompress before she pressed on to Florence. “We have cars with drivers at the villa,” Cynthia told her. “You shouldn't go to a major city until all this calms down. We'll want to go into Florence in a few days so we'll take you.”

“I will go with you then,” Rivers said. “I don't feel like traveling alone after all of this.”

Robert McArthurs left on a flight at ten. Charles Halliday left at ten fifteen, after giving us his cards, writing down our addresses, and promising to keep in touch. “Christmas cards and notices,” he promised. “My list is getting short, due to the grim reaper. I need fresh ladies to dream about.”

“We'll answer,” Mary Jane assured him. “I don't think any of us is going to forget this day or the people who were with us.”

By then we had all managed to talk to people at home or at least get messages delivered. “Tell them it was nothing,” Rivers kept saying. “Or they'll come and get us like in
The Ambassadors
by Henry James.”

“Go to Arezzo and see the ‘Legend of the True Cross' by Piero della Francesca,” Robert McArthurs said as he was leaving. He dropped his bags and scribbled a name and number on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “Believe me, Louise, in the name of all that's holy and in memory of your Aunt Anna, don't forget to do this. It isn't far from Vorno and this man will be your guide and see that you get tickets if you can't get them any other way.”

“What is it?” I asked. “Why do you need tickets?”

“It's a very holy sight,” he said. “It is art at its most real and useful and divine. Trust me. Trust your Aunt Anna. You need tickets,” he added, pulling his bag back onto his shoulder, “because it is a very small chapel on a quiet street and they still let people go in and look at the mural, but they only let in about ten at a time and only so many on any day. There's a coffee shop across the street where Anna and I had coffee and croissants when we were there. It was raining and we giggled with delight both before and after we saw the paintings. Remember me. Send me a postcard.”

“Where should I send it?” I called after him.

“To the
London
Telegraph
. You can find the number.” Then he was gone, the legendary Robert McArthurs, who had been so much a part of Anna's life when she first was famous and whose beautiful letters to her I had read when I was a teenager and used to like to go through the boxes of Anna's things Aunt Helen had stored in grandmother's attic. The papers went to universities, some to Duke and some to Chapel Hill. “We should have kept those papers for a while,” I grumbled.

Rivers and Mary Jane came up to me. “Are you all right?” Rivers asked.

“I hate for Robert to leave. I hate for this to end. It's been an adventure, hasn't it?”

“We'll have a better one when we get to the villa,” Cynthia promised, joining us. “Come on, let's stay together. They might call our flight at any time.”

We arrived at the Leonardo da Vinci airport in Pisa with the sky still full of stars and were met by an Englishman named Paul who runs the villa, and by a beautiful, bilingual woman named Claudia who had left a famous Italian tennis player to come back to Vorno and be second in command at the fourteenth-century villa that cost twenty-six thousand dollars a week to rent. “Movie stars usually rent this place,” Cynthia had explained when I went aghast at the cost. “They're glad to have some normal people. Darren got a cut rate, but he always says that whether he actually does or not.”

The villa was outside the small town of Vorno, which is seven miles from the ancient walled city of Lucca. We were driven there in two Mercedes with a van following with the luggage. It was still dark when we drove through Vorno and out to the villa but by the time we arrived daylight was beginning to light up the hills and the roses on the stone walls and the sculpture on the façades and the steeples of the stone chapel. Two maids in black dresses with white lace aprons served us coffee in the front patio and then we wandered inside to choose our rooms. Cynthia had been assigned the master suite with a ten-foot-square hot tub but she kept trying to give it to one of us.

There were eight compartments. Most of us chose ones in the back on the top floor, but Rivers took a smaller bed and bath on the front of the house near the entrance hall. Some of our luggage had not arrived and she said she wanted to be near the door to hear her suitcase come in.

OUR FIRST NIGHT
at the villa we had a meeting with Paul and Claudia before dinner. We met in the beautiful garden behind the house. There was a fountain and a pool and lemon trees all overlooking and sloping down toward a grass tennis court. We had white wine and cheese and Paul asked us where we would like to go on Thursday and Friday, which were the only weekdays left of the week.