Alice was waiting in the office, a sure indication that something terrible was wrong, as she never came to school for
anything
. Her hair was wild. She was wrapped in a stained trenchcoat Harriet had never seen before; she couldn't imagine where it had come from. Alice thrust her car keys at Harriet, who had just gotten her learner's permit the week before. “You drive,” she said, “and step on it.” Then she started crying.
They did not go home.
Instead they drove the snowy road straight to Richmond, where Dabney Carr lay hooked up to tubes and monitors in a private hospital in the Fan District. Swept along by Alice's firm grip on her elbow, Harriet did not even get a good look at the distraught family and friends gathered in the waiting room, nor at the nurses in their official station, though they leapt up as Harriet and Alice raced by. “Just a minute there!” one of them called. But Harriet and Alice did not pause before pushing through the large steel double doors marked
INTENSIVE CARE, NO ADMITTANCE
and then into Room 2 where he lay perfectly flat on a high white bed under a bright white light. Blips and lines flashed across the screen. Little pale oxygen tubes ran out of his nostrils. A bag of fluid hung at the side of the bed, its tubes looping down, then taped to his arm. Another tube was taped into his other arm. His eyes were closed, his cheeks sunken in a
way that Harriet had never seen. She realized that they must have taken his dentures out, though she hadn't actually known that Mr. Carr had dentures, and she didn't know how she knew this. But Mr. Carr's mouth was wide open in the most undignified way; his breath rattled in and out of his chest. Harriet knew instantly that he was dying.
“Oh, honey,” Alice said almost to herself, letting go of Harriet's arm finally to cross to the bed and kiss his parchment cheek. His eyelids fluttered, he made a sound. “I'm here, baby,” Alice said. “I'm here now.” She kissed him again and sank down in the chair by the bed with her arm thrown across his neck, her curly hair covering half his face. The door flew open. Alarms went off. Two nurses and a doctor entered, followed by a thin woman in an emerald green wool pantsuit who pointed at Alice and said, “Don't you think you can come in here like this, you whore! We know who you are.” The bigger nurse took the woman's arm, as if to restrain her. The doctor came forward and tapped Alice on the shoulder. “Ma'am?” he said politely. “Ma'am?” until she raised her streaming face.
But Mr. Carr opened his deepset dark eyes. He struggled to sit up though the other nurse tried to hold him down. “Please, sir!” she said. Mr. Carr's breath came and went in awful gasps. “Letâherâstay,” he said. Then his head rolled back on the pillow. His chest seemed to collapse. The moving blips on the screen changed, and the doctor pushed Alice aside as he leaned forward to listen to Mr. Carr's chest.
The woman in the green pantsuit threw up her hands. “All right! I give up!” she shrieked. “I just give up!” She pushed past Harriet as though she were invisible, leaving the room.
The nurse smiled at Harriet. “You okay?” she asked, and Harriet nodded, her lips dry.
“Suction!” The doctor snapped his fingers.
“You need to go now,” the nurse told Harriet.
“Mama, I'll be right outside in case you want me,” Harriet said clearly over the hubbub even though Alice did not appear to hear her.
“You sweet thing,” Alice said into Mr. Carr's ear.
Though Harriet had dreaded going into the waiting room, she had to; it was the only place to sit, and she couldn't desert her mother. But luckily she was still invisible, in the way her mother had always been invisible until that very day. All afternoon Harriet sat in the corner of the waiting room drinking Tabs and doing her homeworkâthank God she'd brought her books alongâalso
Tess of the d'Urbervilles,
which she was reading for AP English. She did her algebra, then her French (the pluperfect), then read the assigned chapter on Andrew Jackson in the American history book and answered all the stupid questions at the end.
Weeping and talking and smoking cigarettes, the family came and went. “It's hopeless,” the thin woman in the pantsuit hissed at them all. In her mind, Harriet had nicknamed her the Ice Princess, but in reality, she turned out to be Mr. Carr's oldest daughter, Marianne; the other daughter was thin, too, but nicer, crying silently into a wad of Kleenex and tapping her slender foot. Her worried young husband sat beside her, stroking her hair. Cousins and servants came and went. Jefferson Carr did not come, as he was far away, at the boarding school up north. A plump young Episcopal minister who looked like something out of
The Canterbury Tales
appeared with his tight collar, his bulging cheeks. They admitted him immediately; he came out shaking his head. Harriet ate a bag of Fritos and read
Tess
. Several nice men in suits showed up. They spoke reassuringly to the family, nodded to Harriet as if they knew her, then arranged themselves in chairs by the bay window, which gave out onto a wintry little park.
A black woman named Viola appeared with a big silver tray of fried chicken, deviled eggs, and roast beef sandwiches. Until then, Harriet had not realized she was starving. She ate and ate. “This is the best chicken I've ever had,” she said, taking another drumstick. Viola
beamed, squeezing Harriet's hand. Jeff loved her, Harriet remembered. He was always talking about Viola.
A general flurry ensued as the outer door opened again and a heavyset woman came in pushing a wheelchair and calling out, “Here she is!” It was Mrs. Herring, Mr. Carr's secretary. Harriet recognized the deep Southern drawl she'd heard so often on the phone. And the woman in the wheelchair must be Mrs. Carr, who didn't look crazy at all, only frail and sick. Someone had given her a hairdo that very instant, it looked like, spraying her thin blond hair into a transparent halo around her head through which the scary outline of her skull was visible. Her bright red lipstick made a garish gash across her face. “Mama!” her daughters cried. Cousins crowded around. The men in the suits stood up at their chairs.
“Oh, Viola,” Mrs. Carr said, ignoring them all, “there's a bat in the Florida room, you'll have to get it out immediately, I won't go back in there until you do.”
“Yasm,” Viola said.
“How many times do I have to tell you to close that flue?
Always close the flue,
” Mrs. Carr went on. But she seemed to have thought of something else by then, mumbling, looking down to pick at the sleeve of her gray wool suit.
“Doesn't she look pretty?” Mrs. Herring said to them all.
“Doesn't she know about Daddy?” the younger sister asked.
“Well, I've
told
her,” Mrs. Herring said. A little silence fell. Violet arc lights came on among the dark branches of the trees outside the window. Mrs. Carr picked at her sleeve. “Mary Tate, Mary Tate,” Mrs. Herring said. “Look here, Mary Tate, your whole family is here, isn't that nice?”
Mrs. Carr held her head up then and looked around, balancing her luminous hairdo carefully. “Well, they're all going to hell!” she snapped.
But Mrs. Herring was wheeling the chair forward. “I suppose this
is as good a time as any for her to pay her last respects to Mr. Carr,” she said to the assembled crowd, clearly relishing her role.
“Dabney is going to hell, too,” Mrs. Carr announced cheerfully over her shoulder. “Dabney will burn, burn, burn.”
“Code blue, Room 2, code blue, Room 2,” the intercom crackled.
“Oh!” the younger sister began to wail.
“My God, it is too late.” Mrs. Herring pressed her hand to her heart.
Viola grabbed the wheelchair. “Less us just go on home now, Miss Mary Tate,” she said. “You come along with Viola. I bet you haven't had no decent supper yet neither.”
“They don't know how to cook a thing up on that hill,” Mrs. Carr said. “They make a pancake as hard as a rock.”
Everybody in the waiting room was crying now. Harriet put all her books in her book bag, then stood up and put on her coat. One of the men in suits came over and thrust something into her coat pocket just as the steel doors opened; later, she'd see it was a hundred-dollar bill. “Mama!” Harriet rushed forward to her but the other two men were already there somehow, escorting Alice out, dragging her really, Mama's blond curls wild and her cheeks fiery red like the circles of rouge on a kewpie doll. She sobbed uncontrollably. A magic path opened before Mama and the men, like the Red Sea, Harriet thought, grabbing two more pieces of chicken and some sandwiches from Viola's abandoned tray and stuffing them into her bookbag as she followed.
They did not go back to Richmond for the funeral.
Mile 597.4
Montgomery Point
Sunday 5/9/99
1600 hours
C
OURTNEY PAUSES AT THE
door before heading out onto the deck where they're all to meet before the Captain's Champagne Reception. The warm breeze stirs her hair and she can feel it curling, well,
frizzing
around her face, it's something about the humidity out here on the water. Thank God for curling ironsâCourtney uses the large two-inch diameter kind, which actually straightens her hair out. Suddenly she remembers the day Gene burned his hand on it; she'd plugged it in in his bathroom while she showered.
“Oh my God!” he screeched. “What is this instrument of torture? My darling? Is this yours? What ghastly thing are you planning to do with it? Should I flee while there's still time?”
Courtney stepped out of the shower to grab Gene's hand and run cold water over it at the sink. “I'm so sorry,” she said. “Here, this'll help.”
“Butter,” Gene said. “What about butter? That's what my beloved sainted mother always used to put on a burn, bless her heart.”
Courtney laughed. “Oh, nobody believes in that anymore,” she told him. “That's old hat. It's all cold nowâcold water, ice.”
Gene slipped his free hand around her wet waist. “Very impressive. How do you know all that?”
“Easy,” Courtney told him. “I'm a mom.”
“
Such
a mom,” Gene said into the wet hair at the back of her neck.
“Geneâ” One of the unwritten rules for their Wednesdays together was that they never mention her kids.
“Listen”âhe had both arms around her now, while the water ran on in the sinkâ“I think you're a great mom. I really do. I wish you were my mom.”
Courtney had to laugh. “Oh, stop it,” she said.
“But then I couldn't do this, could I?” Gene had asked. “Or thisâ” Courtney stands dead still on the deck as the memory of what Gene Minor did next sweeps over her like the hot breezy Arkansas air. She was watching him in the mirror the whole time. Later Gene refused to let her use her diabolical curling iron, so her hair sprang up in loopy curls all over her head while they sat out in his garden for it to dry. (She had smoothed them out, of course, the minute she got back home, not that Hawk would have even noticed, but still . . .) “I am enchanted!” Gene had announced, standing behind her, running his fingers through the curls, holding her head like a ball in both big hands. “You little pre-Raphaelite mom, you!” He massaged her head, the most wonderful sensation. Nobody had ever done that to her before. Courtney leaned back in the old Adirondack chair. “Did I mention that I'm a licensed phrenologist?” Gene asked.
“Why, no,” she said dreamily.
“An oversight, then. But let me just tell you, you have some very promising bumps on this head, Mrs. Ralston, bumps that augur extremely well for your future happiness. This one right here, for instance” (he rubbed it) “would be your lump of Venus. I find it to be extremely well situated and highly developedâ”
But now Anna and Harriet are waving to her, all dressed up for the reception. They must wonder why she's standing here like an idiot
staring into the sun when the truth is, she just has to talk to him right now, no matter what.
“I have to make a call.” She waves back to them. “I almost forgot. I'll be back in a little while. I'll be back for dinner if not before.”
They nod and smile, uncomprehending. Courtney waves again, then dashes back to her stateroom where she unlocks the door and dials. She has to look up the number of the flower shop in her little leather book.
“Gene?” she asks.
“Baby?”
“It's me,” she says. Then she can't talk anymore.
“Hey, baby, hang on, I'm just going back here for a little privacy, these dizzy broads I've got in here, they're hanging on every word.” Courtney can hear the high-pitched voices of Miss Violet Perdue and Eugenia Reap; in spite of herself, she smiles. “I'm almost there, just a minute now.” Suddenly his voice is clearer, closer.
“Exactly where are you?” she asks.
Gene chuckles. “In the cooler. Along with three thousand dollars worth of roses, lilies, and baby's breath, all white. We're doing the Pennypacker girl's wedding and reception. Her daddy's name is Worth Pennypacker. It really is. Ain't that a trip?
So Dickens.
Okay, baby, what's on your mind? Aside from the fact that you miss me horribly and life isn't worth living without me and you realize this completely now.”
“Oh God,” Courtney says. “It's true.”
“And you're going to tell old what's-his-name to kiss your ass the minute you set foot on dry land againâ”
“Gene, be serious.”
“I am serious, baby. I am serious as a heart attack, as my beloved sainted mother used to say.”
“Gene, you know I can't do that. We've already had this conversation.”
“But
why
can't you do it, babycakes, light of my life, joy of my heart, my sweet babushka, my popsie, my little cabbage rose?”
“Gene! Gene, stop it, listenâ”