A Dangerous Age

by Ellen Gilchrist

Genres: War & Military; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

The winner of the National Book Award returns with a moving story of a family of women drawn together by the trials of the times.

The women in the Hand family are no strangers to either controversy or sadness. Those traits seem, in fact, to be a part of their family’s heritage, one that stretches back through several generations and many wars. A Dangerous Age is a celebration of the strength of these women and of the bonds of blood and shared loss that hold them together. Louise, Winifred, and Olivia are reconnecting the pieces of their lives and rediscovering love, but each is unwittingly on a collision course with a seemingly distant war that is really never more than a breath away. By turns humorous and heartbreaking, this finely honed novel about the centuries-old struggle for women who are left to carry on with life when their men go off to war is by a writer the Washington Post says “should be declared a national cultural treasure.”

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 272

Sample

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.

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 percent 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 fucking 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 bri. . .