The Enemies at the Gate

By Washbourne Hall

Is love an art requiring knowledge, or only a pleasant sensation to fall into? Nothing begins as hopefully and fails as regularly, yet hardly anyone believes there's anything to be learnt about love. Is love which profits the soul but is otherwise profitless something we shouldn't spent time learning about?
A millionaire, his friend of limited financial means, a beautiful girl over whom they're rivals, are all young, bright, intelligent, and locked in a desperate relationship. As they commit or protect their hearts they learn the vagaries of love in surprising ways, with results you wouldn't expect.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 7, 2003
• ISBN: 9781465329271

Washbourne Hall

WASHBOURNE HALL’S prior novel, THE ENEMIES AT THE GATE, is a cogent commentary on the life of the young during the awkward years between youth and adulthood. And now in his new novel THE MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE, he has penned a provocative and penetrating novel which probes into the age-old question, Is there a god? And he has done it with humor. If you thought you had this question well and truly settled, be prepared to have the debate come alive all over again. And be prepared to be uproariously entertained. WASHBOURNE HALL is also the author of a book of poems entitled, THE OLD MAN OF THE HILLS, and other poems. He lives with his wife in Florida.

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Copyright © 2002 by Washbourne Hall.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any

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from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author‘s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to

any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

DEDICATED TO MY MOTHER MUM.

WHOSE MEMORY I HOLD

SECURE AND SACRED.

There are enemies at the gate of every marriage waiting to enter to do harm. Until those enemies are discovered and demolished the Romeo and Juliet syndrome will continue to haunt and destroy any number of love relationships. And the enemies at the gate are usually the tangled emotions that accompany love; emotions that may have been instilled in us from the very earliest youth.

Reverend O’Shae

THE ENEMIES AT THE GATE

CHAPTER ONE

Frightened and apprehensive the inhabitants awoke, and without wasting time to pull on anything over satin negligees, silk pajamas and naked skins they bolted to doors and windows. Their hearts pounded mightily. Blood drained from their faces. Their voices cracked and faltered as they asked, ‘What in the name of God is happening?’ The question rang through households and from person to person as though there were some among them who had answers. None however possessed information beyond the explosion they heard, the vibrations they felt, and the fire they observed.

What happened was that at twenty minutes after midnight a mighty explosion occurred, the deafening roar of a blast that shook the earth and thundered across the land.

Mrs. Abbracciamente was sitting in her family room watching the rebroadcast of President Nixon’s resignation speech. Clothed in dishonor, it was his last address to the nation as the Watergate debacle swept him out of office. The headlight of the gold-colored Mercedes of her neighbor Peter Ormsby Pryce, the Second, flashed through the picture window when it veered off the road into his driveway. The sudden flash of light temporarily blinded her, but when she regained her vision she watched as Peter locked up the car and entered the house, and the light in the canopy over the front door that flooded the car went off. Now she could give the President her eyes as well as her ears. She listened until the speech itself ended and political experts and presidential historians began to make learned commentaries concerning the President’s place in history. She leapt from the chair at the sound of the blast and rushed to the picture window.

Oh God! she exclaimed when she saw the house next door enveloped in flames that rolled back the darkness like a black translucent curtain.

Those who viewed the spectacle from afar saw the night sky spangled like a glorious carnival of firecrackers, and mistook its beauty for a planned display of fireworks rather than the uncontrolled inferno that it was.

The Pryces are inside, she shrieked in terror, the sound of desperation in her piercing outcry. They’re going to burn. A devout Roman Catholic she made the sign of the cross. Lord have mercy. I’m going to call his father.

Five fire engines were early on the scene, their sirens blaring, their white and crimson strobe lights rotating and flaring. Television crews, newspapermen and photographers soon arrived and the commotion that occur at such disasters began.

We interrupt this program to bring you this Special Report, the TV announcer said. The national instrument of mass communication was going to spread the news to the country and around the world. An explosion and fire has occurred in the Westchester, New York home of Peter Ormsby Pryce, the Second, and his second wife, Karen, the former Mrs. Harcourt.

Working at a table in the bedroom of his fourth floor walk-up apartment in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Alwyn Harcourt paid no attention to the TV for it was the chatter and the noise that emanated from it, not the content of the program, that kept his company. But the names the announcer mentioned pierced through his concentration. He stopped working and turned to the TV in time to see Peter’s burning home appear on the screen.

The Pryces are inside and are presumed dead, the announcer added. The cause of the explosion and fire are unknown.

Alwyn Harcourt’s throat tightened and dried.

There was a time when he thought that his marriage was conceived at a place where marriages were created to perfect indestructible specifications. So when it exploded like an overblown balloon his emotional life broke with it and work, hard and unending, became the shell with which he preserved his sanity.

He turned back and looked at the wedding picture of himself and his ex-wife at one end of the table, then moved his eyes across the few books he had read on health and the disappointing other few he had read on financial success when he had first thought of going into business, to the urn at the other end containing his mother’s ashes. Before she passed his mother, he called her Mum, gave Karen her gold chain with a heart-shaped locket attached to it. And on the evening Karen left him she removed the chain from around her neck, wound it round the neck of the urn and left the locket hanging. With her two suitcases dangling from her hands like the locket dangling from the chain, she walked out of the apartment and his life.

A light breeze blew through the apartment and clinked the locket against the urn. He imagined it was either Mum’s breath or her invisible hand that moved it, and the barely audible tinkle it made a chime with a message. Time ground to a halt for him not gradually, but with a sudden disconcerting jolt that left him sweating and cold. He telephoned Ursula Bergman. He had to talk with someone lest, like Peter’s house, he explode inside.

Ursula was asleep.

Turn on the TV, he told her when she awoke and answered.

Upon hearing his voice Ursula assumed that all was not lost in their budding relationship. This most independent and stubborn man was not about to walk out of her life with the thoughtless ease with which Karen, when she was Mrs. Harcourt, had walked out of his. She turned on the TV, and Peter’s burning home appeared.

They’re inside, he said. Tears quickened behind his eyes.

Dear god! Ursula moaned, for she remembered.

Earlier in the evening after having failed to persuade Alwyn to spend more time with her at her apartment, she had angrily declared she wished that fool of a woman, meaning Karen, was dead. Apparently that innocent wish had come to pass.

Her faults, God knows we each have an assortment, did not descend that low. Sure she wanted Alwyn Harcourt to be her own. But although his obsessively strong love for his ex-wife was keeping them apart, Karen’s life was far too large a price to ask. It was an innocent outburst that was not meant the way it sounded, and for her it had died and was forgotten the moment her impulsive utterance gave it birth. And yet, following so suddenly and so closely upon her wish she was left with a rebuking conscience.

After the shock passed and she adjusted her mental attitude she said, If you’d like to go there, I’ll come and get you.

Peter’s first wife, Janice, chased upstairs, fast as her pregnancy allowed and banged on her parent’s bedroom door.

What’s so urgent, baby? her mother asked as the girl rushed breathlessly in. You’re white as milk. Talk to me.

Peter’s house is on fire, Janice blurted out.

Her mother laid back and relaxed. That house or a couple of million dollars might have been yours if you hadn’t walked out of that marriage the way you did. Bitter memories of her daughter’s short-lived marriage to Peter Ormsby Pryce, the Second, arose. There’s a rough justice in the world though, and they’re getting their’s. Yet I don’t suppose it’s nothing money can’t replace.

They’re inside it, Janice screamed, offended at her mother’s heartless display.

Then I hope they burn, her mother screamed back.

Janice’s face reddened and her lips moved as if silently saying something so naughty, so disrespectful and vile that she didn’t dare utter it out loud.

I’m going up there, she announced, and dashed out of the bedroom crying, leaving the door open.

You’d abort that kid of his if you had any sense, her mother shouted as the girl scrambled down, and because of the pregnancy paused tired at the foot of the stairs. It’s only a baby, she heard her mother saying, the words escaping through the open door and cascading down the stairs upon her head with surprising heaviness. But God forgive me, I can’t help attaching the sins of the father to the child. Then with intensified hostility she ended, Let them burn in hell.

Janice looked up the stairs with loathing, then moved on.

For Karen’s loyal Republican parents the night was doubly wretched. The rebroadcast of their idol’s final speech to the nation was interrupted to report the possible fiery death of their only child, their daughter Mrs. Karen Pryce, formerly Mrs. Karen Harcourt. Mrs. McCullen fainted where she lay. Mr. McCullen succumbed to a mild shock. They recovered when Alwyn telephoned to say he was coming to get them, along with the Rev. O’Shae.

To Wilbert Trout comforting words did not come easy.

His outrage at Peter for seducing his wife, for almost ruining his marriage and causing him to contemplate and then to attempt suicide, had not fully subsided. Nevertheless, Peter’s tragedy opened no space in Wilbert’s heart for joy. He was genuinely shocked at the news, and said he’d meet Alwyn in Westchester.

The lives of Mr. and Mrs. Peter Ormsby Pryce, the Second, had significantly crossed those and other lives, and the newscast brought them chasing to the scene. They gathered and grieved at what they thought was an unfortunate accident that may have ended two young lives when their life together had practically just began. And they grieved as well for the death of a love that had struggled mightily for years and surmounted severe and numerous obstacles to unite them.

Newspaper headlines were hurriedly recast to give prominence to the near tragedy of the young socialites in words and pictures. And as the world is in endlessly fascination with the eccentricities of lovers, the sentimental stories that accompanied the pictures tugged at the hearts and stirred the emotions of readers in every place.

The first rays of sunlight pierced the early morning fog and fell upon the remains of what had been one of the finest homes in Westchester County, New York. Crowds watched the firemen as they moved through the building searching for the cause of the explosion and the fire, as well as for the bodies.

Peter’s gold-colored Mercedes, burnt and covered with gray ashes sat under the ragged canopy over the front door where Peter had parked it the night before. His father, Peter Ormsby Pryce, the First, removed a stack of papers from the rear seat through a broken window, the papers charred and damp around the edges, and read the document on top of the stack.

The New York City Council by unanimous vote hereby decrees that the name of that section of roadway in the Borough of Manhattan fronting the structure known as ABM House be and is hereby changed to Peter Ormsby Pryce Plaza.

First Mr. Pryce and afterwards his son Peter had moved bureaucratic mountains to have that block of the avenue renamed, a milestone event in Mr. Pryce’s scenario for his burgeoning business empire. But joy, like sadness, can be evanescent. The near tragedy eclipsed the satisfaction he was supposed to feel.

The firemen found the couple in the master suite upstairs on the twisted remains of their antique brass bed. Severely burnt but still alive, they were wrapped in each other’s arms as if asleep. Karen’s head rested so lightly upon her husband’s chest, and Peter’s arms enfolded his wife so tenderly that the grey-haired Fire Captain left the comfort of his car to inform the press at a briefing: Something is seriously wrong here. Never have I seen fire victims as relaxed as these, as if they never felt the heat of the fire. An investigation is indicated.

The stories the public read in the morning papers and cried over even as the firemen searched were all that would be known for a while.

The investigation completed, news that the explosion and fire were deliberately planned by Karen with her suicide and her husband’s murder as the motives spread quickly. The question asked by the incurably curious public whenever their discussions turned to love, happiness and the lifestyle of the rich, the famous and powerful people of the world was that which no investigation could conclusively answer: Why did the former Mrs. Karen Harcourt, the second Mrs. Peter Ormsby Pryce, the Second, want to take her life and the life of her husband?

They had everything going for them. They were young, both only in their twenties. There was wealth. Peter was heir to a fortune estimated at millions. There was beauty. She was exceptionally beautiful and he extremely handsome. There was love. An uncommon bond had struggled enormously to unite them. Their place in society was secure. Their friends among the rich, the famous, the powerful people of the world. Their future was whatsoever they chose to make it. All of the ingredients for happiness and success were in their hands. All of the needed factors were at their command.

Were love, youth, beauty and wealth insufficient? And if they were, what are the ingredients that were missing? And if the missing factors were placed on one side of the scale, were they sufficient to counterbalance the factors that remained? Why?

CHAPTER TWO

It was dusk. The gray haze of evening descending. Tenants living in the rent-controlled apartments behind the crumbling doorways of Manhattan’s Lower East Side subsisted with dozens of bars, late-night lounges, brothels and other odious businesses whose patrons began to arrive for their after-hour entertainment.

An ambulance moved along East Houston, skirting round the heels of fleeing pedestrians and aggressive yellow taxicabs and paused in compliance with the law before turning on Orchard Street. And yet, from the siren’s strident blasts you got the impression it was chewing up the roads. Pulsating shrills pierced the air. Feint echoes answered. Other vehicles gave the screaming monster pass as it bathed the scene in flares of white and amber.

An arthritic Jewish old gentleman wearing a Yankee baseball cap instead of a yarmulke, whom age shrunk several sizes, stepped from the curb and flagged the ambulance.

Up there, he said when the ambulance stopped, and pointed to a fourth floor window through which a faded curtain showed. The old man waited for action. For godsakes hurry!

In desperation he slapped the ambulance, frail arm battling cold steel. But the unfeeling monster sat there, unmoved.

Two paramedics broke from the back of the ambulance and raced upstairs, one with a black box the size of a small suitcase, the other with a canvas stretcher rolled up on its carrying shafts. An oxygen mask pulled from the black box was put over the woman’s nose. They strapped her to the stretcher and carried her down.

Anybody going with her? the ambulance driver enquired.

You should go, Pa, said an old woman in a light fall overcoat, her grey hair flailing in the wind.

Pa thought it over. Guess I ought to, Ma. Showing a bit of care and concern for Mum is the least we can do.

His mother wasn’t up there when Alwyn Harcourt got home.

Mum had a seizure, Ma said, entering the apartment behind him. Her grey hair was combed, and having removed the light fall overcoat she revealed that age had expanded her too generously. They took her to Bellevue Hospital. Pa went along.

Mum nursed a heart condition complicated with hypertension and obesity. And she stuck to the rigid dietary regimen, Not for myself, she had always insisted, for my son.

On the way to the hospital Alwyn thought there ought to be family members upon whom he could call in a crisis, but there were never any letters from, nor photographs of, nor mention about any family member. It seemed that his lineage began and ended with his mother. There wasn’t even a girl in his life.

Forget girls, Mum insisted when she saw that he began to show an interest in them. When girls come into the picture boys become like wild animals, sacrificing everything for the painted faces. Beauty may make a woman, but education makes a man. She wagged a warning finger at his face. Forget girls. Get your education.

How do you know that? Alwyn had asked with a grin.

I saw it happen to your father, Mum replied, toying with the heart-shaped locket on the gold chain around her neck.

Her young man, David Harcourt, pumped gas at a Manhattan Esso Service Station. At nights, at her insistence, they mingled with the crowds on Fifth Avenue where she’d gaze at the fabulous dresses on the mannequins in the store windows.

They window-shopped along Diamond Row, that strip of jewelry outlets on Forty-Seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, managed by ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews that wore black suits and long black overcoats even in the hottest summer, with flowing beards and sidelocks that curled and hung from under their black hats. Dressed in black from head to foot they looked wildly different, but she admired the wildly attractive jewelry they displayed and marveled at the prohibitively expensive prices.

Gonna get you something like that one day, David said one night after she had admired a gold chain on display with a heart-shaped locket attached to it.

Did you see the outrageous prices? she had asked him.

She was delighted that he thought her worthy of such a beautiful and expensive gift, but how could he afford it? It was a generous thought, and she soon forgot it. Each week thereafter he’d secretly put aside a small sum from his paycheck for a purpose he revealed the night he presented her with the chain and locket she had admired. The presentation left her breathless.

Some nights they’d walk up Broadway to the plaza at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts to gaze at gentlemen in dark suits escorting gowned ladies into the complex of marble buildings to attend operas at the Metropolitan Opera House, or stage plays at New York Theater, or ballet at Avery Fisher Hall. She’d imagine herself among them dressed in the fashionable dresses she had gawked at on Fifth Avenue, accessorized with the jewelry she admired on Diamond Row, with David as her escort in a dark suit.

World War ll was in progress. The Nazi hordes were tramping across Europe with their thick boots, unfamiliar goosestep and splendid military hardware, a swaggering giant conquering nation after nation. A month after David’s presentation the US Military made him a presentation every young man who received one wished he could refuse. He was drafted into the army to be sent overseas to fight the Japanese in the Pacific theater.

Let’s get married before you leave, she suggested.

Young Harcourt shook his head. I may not return alive.

She had thought of that possibility and pushed it out of her brain. His response brought it whizzing back. She began to cry.

I promise we’ll marry if . . . he added with a pause and kisses that dried her tears. I kept my secret promise with the chain and the locket. God willing, I’ll keep this promise too.

On Easter Sunday, 1945, invasion of the Japanese stronghold at Okinawa began. In three months of fighting thousands of American fighting men lost their lives and thousands more were wounded. David Harcourt’s company suffered casualties of over half its strength. But the marines prevailed, and Admiral Nimitz could announce to the world that the Battle of Okinawa had been won. The injured were shipped home, David Harcourt among them, and he remained in Manhattan Veteran’s Hospital for weeks, afraid to show his love his broken body. One day he found the courage.

Why didn’t you contact me? she scolded when he limped into the restaurant.

The injury is severe, he said. The limp is permanent.

She laughed. You’ll keep your promise. We’ll be married.

She decided they’d pick up the pieces of their lives, complete their high school education which Hitler’s war had interrupted and wider opportunities would present themselves.

She never forgot the cumulative effect of small sacrifices.

Expensive though they were, the chain and locket were acquired by the regular setting aside of small sums. No ambition was too large to be achieved in small increments, and though her ambition was large she was prepared to achieve it in tiny steps. Working at Antonio’s Italian Restaurant was but a stop along the way in her quest for a better life, not a terminus where she’d be stuck.

She wasn’t so ambitious that she believed she was born to play a leading role in any area of the world’s stage, but neither did she believe she was destined to be a waitress all her life. Convinced that hard work was the key, she was prepared to work toward the goals she dreamt of, with David working as hard beside her. But his ambition was not as aggressive as her own for the war had broken his spirit as well as his bones.

The pressure she applied infuriated him. In his estimation she became a nag. And having fought and was injured in a war on a faraway battlefield, he wasn’t prepared to become engaged in a constant battle at home. Concluding there was a less aggravating alternative to life with her, he limped off one morning to find it wherever it was. Alwyn was only months old at the time, and his father was never seen again. He left her to plod through the minefields of life with their baby boy as he had plodded through the battlefields of Japan, not caring whether they’d survive, or become wounded casualties as he had.

Her ambition fizzled. Gradually she lost her beauty. No longer did she sparkle, she became like a bottle of soda gone flat. All that she had was the son whose life, she decided, would be as rich as her’s was poor. Unlike his father whose character was shaped and hardened by the time they met, her son was young and could be molded. And having accepted the guilt of ruining the life of the husband she loved, she was determined not to ruin the life of the son she loved even more. She would cushion the blows and absorb the punishment, shield him, direct him, and clear the way for him. Without recognizing it she had dedicated herself to fulfilling her dreams through him, and to achieving the frustrated ambitions of her life in his. Convinced that her life was over, she held fast to her dreams by planning her son’s.

Those things paraded through Mum’s mind in a flash when she said, I saw it happen to your father.

Obedient to the mother who had sacrificed so much for him, Alwyn relegated girls to a less significant compartment of his life and formed no close attachment with any girl. Faced with this crisis he conceded that in the absence of relatives a girl standing beside him, not to help, but just to be there, would be immeasurably comforting.

Alwyn Harcourt arrived at the hospital in a mental fog, seeing and hearing only enough to find his way. It was as though an artist had painted over the route from the apartment to Mum’s bedside in pale watercolors, and a technician had turned down the sounds of the city to near inaudibility.

He found Mum hooked up to a cardiac machine that beeped, a greenish finger of light tracing a squiggly line across the face of a dark screen. Only Mum’s face stood out bright and clear from the pale shades, and the unvarying beep of the cardiac machine the only distinct sound.

Mum! Alwyn whispered and touched a cheek. She felt cold.

She can’t hear you, a girl’s voice said.

Because he wasn’t hearing clearly her voice sounded like a breeze whispering through the leaves of a distant tree. He turned around, and because he also wasn’t seeing clearly he picked up, indistinctly as in a haze, the oval of her beautifully made up face, like a pink rose above a pink and white candy stripe body topped by a stiffly starched white cap.

The machine speaks for her, the girl added, a twinkle in her emerald eyes. It says she’s alive and there’s hope.

Though he strove to hold back the tears her face disappeared in a fluid blur. She pulled up a chair for him to sit on, then she padded off as noiselessly as she had approached.

He imagined he sat at Mum’s bedside for an age although it was far less than a hour, facing the first ordeal he was allowed to face without Mum. He had no recollection of ever being without her unless it was at a time when he was too young to remember. Like the sky, she was always there.

Later the girl returned with a taller, sturdier girl beside her. The candy stripe uniforms were replaced by regular clothes, the white caps gone and their coats hung over their arms. From the shape and contours it was the same face his tear-laden eyes had seen, but now without rouge, powders and lipstick. Her peach-colored skin glowed with a dewy freshness, and her silky blonde hair was pulled back from her face. He was in no mood to describe her beauty. In general beauty for him, as for most men, is the aggregate of physical features that give pleasure to the senses. Her unadorned features gave pleasure to all his senses.

I’ll help her as much as I can, she said.

Thanks! He wanted to sound pleasant, but his voice sounded raspy in his ears. By the way, he stood up politely the way Mum taught him, and extended a hand. I’m Alwyn Harcourt.

I’m Karen McCullen, she said, taking the hand. This is my friend, Gwendolyn.

Gwendolyn’s dark complexion contrasted with Karen’s peachy blonde, and her shining black hair perfectly set off the white of her dress. Unlike Karen whose face, it seemed, had been washed clean of every trace of make-up, Gwendolyn’s was ornamented with eye-shadow, mascara, deeply pink rouge, and vermilion lipstick.

I’ll help too, Gwendolyn said, her eyes smiling playfully.

I’ll be grateful. Alwyn replied.

They turned to go and he saw that Karen’s golden hair was bundled into a ponytail that bobbed up and down, from side to side and round and round with every step. Her skirt was modest in length and fitting while Gwendolyn’s was short and tight. They may be friends, but seemed a contrast in many ways.

Although he had only a girl’s word to go by, Alwyn returned home, by foot and subway, with joyous music in his head and a heart filled with hope. ‘It says she’s alive and there’s hope,’ was all he could think of. Mum was going to be all right. She had to. The sky did not fall no matter what.

CHAPTER THREE

The next day Karen discovered when Mum awoke. In keeping with her promise to Alwyn she approached Mum’s bedside. And having learnt from the nurses that a smile work miracles in a world of pain and suffering, she smiled and asked, How are you, Mrs. Harcourt?

Thirsty, Mum answered faintly. I’m parched inside.

Hang in there, Karen said. I’ll get you some juice.

Mum sucked the juice through a straw from a paper cup Karen held under her mouth.

You’re so young to be a nurse, Mum said between sucks.

I’m a volunteer, Karen told her with a giggle, and wiped a trickle of juice from under her chin. See the red and white stripe uniform I’m wearing? They call us candy stripers.

Mum riveted her eyes on the girl. Have you voted already?

Karen laughed. I can’t. I’m only seventeen and a half. But my dad’s a loyal Republican born in the same town, on the same day, in the same year as Mr. Nixon. He feels obligated. It’s like voting for himself, he says, so he votes early, but not often.

They laughed together.

Mum squinted her eyes to concentrate on the girl. "You have such a pleasant personality, why are we talking politics when there are so many pleasant things we can talk about.

Do you date? Karen’s reaction provided the answer, and Mum smiled. You wouldn’t blush so if you did."

I really must go, Karen said. She wiped Mum’s mouth with a paper napkin and began to leave, but Mum held her wrist.

What kind of husband will you choose when the time comes?

The personal nature and directness of the question was unexpected, and coming from a stranger Karen was stunned for a while. And then she said, I’ve never given that a thought.

You should, Mum told her. Attractive devils are out there waiting to deceive unsuspecting girls like you.

Karen felt better. It was advise to a vulnerable young girl from an old woman who thought herself wise because she had lived so long. She began fluffing up Mum’s pillows. How can you tell anything about me. You’ve seen me for only a few minutes.

I’ve been watching you ever since I opened my eyes. How many bites does it take to know if an apple is sweet?

Karen smiled. Be comfortable. I’ll see you later.

With nothing to do but lay in bed and be cared for by nurses and candy stripe volunteers, Mum decided to review her past to see if there was anything she could pass on to her son to help guarantee the life she envisioned for him. Though her body was immobilized, her mind was clear and nimble.

She returned in her thoughts to her childhood Alabama, to a time when every