Cathleen Schine - The Three Weissmanns of Westport

In the Museum of Natural History, beneath the dinosaur, where she and Crystal had taken refuge from the rain, Amber held her cell phone in one hand. With the other she pinched her sister's arm as punctuation to every other word. "It's all her fault, Frederick. Everything was going so well," she said into the phone, administering three pinches.

"Ow… It just slipped out, Amber… Ow…"

The day before the rainstorm, Betty had gone to the doctor with a bad cough. She hadn't wanted to, but when Annie got home from work and heard her, she had called the doctor and made the appointment without even asking Betty, treating her like a child, and Betty did not have the energy to argue.

"I don't like the way you sound," the doctor had said.

I don't like the way you sound, thought Betty. He was a young man and condescending. But at least he didn't call her dear and talk very slowly and loudly the way some of them did.

"But she just has a cold," Miranda said when the doctor insisted on putting Betty back in the hospital. No need to make a big deal out of it. And everyone knew that people got sicker in hospitals. Especially older people.

"Don't get sundowner's syndrome," she said that night when she and Annie left Betty to the ministrations of the harried nursing staff. "Wash your hands a lot."

"I already have a staph infection, darling."

"See?"

Betty had sent them off with a thrown kiss, a coughing fit, and a wave.

"American Idol," she'd gasped urgently, pointing at the TV.

They looked back at her when they reached the door. She was small and pale and wracked with coughs. Tubes ran into and out of her. She fished her wallet out of the bedside drawer. She dialed the phone, glancing up at the 800 number flashing on the television screen to get it right.

"Oh God, not again," Annie said.

A young man on the TV commercial mopped up a puddle of cola with a miraculously absorbent cloth. "Wowsham!" he said.

The next day, the day of the rainstorm, Betty was still in the hospital. Miranda had spent most of the day there, then taken a break to pull up weeds and breathe the uncontaminated air blowing off the Sound.

Now, as Roberts and Leanne enacted their unhappy pantomime behind the window, Miranda picked Annie up at the station and drove straight to the hospital. She said nothing about what she had seen in the rain. They spoke only of Betty.

"She was fine this morning," Miranda said. She heard how lame this sounded. "She ate some toast and applesauce."

When they arrived in Betty's hospital room, they hung up their wet coats, and their mother waved them closer, one on each side of the bed. "Sit here, and you here," she said. Then she held them close.

"I love you," she said softly, tears welling up. "I love you both so much."

Annie and Miranda caught each other's eye across their mother's back.

"We love you, too," they both murmured. But, what the hell is going on? said their tone.

"It's over," Betty said at last, after a considerable embrace and hushed sniffling. "It's over."

"What?" Annie asked, standing suddenly. "What's wrong? What did the doctor say?"

"The divorce. The divorce is over," Betty reassured her.

"You're not getting divorced?" Miranda asked, a stupid smile spreading across her face.

"Oh, darling, of course we're getting divorced. That's the point. Josie has to give me a divorce now. The forensic accountant figured everything out."

"What forensic accountant?" Annie asked. "What are you talking about?"

"His name is Mr. Mole. Isn't that perfect? I knew he'd help the minute Roberts told me his name."

"Roberts?"

"Roberts and Mr. Mole arranged everything. Josie has to give me our apartment. He has to give me some of our assets, he has to behave like a mensch. It's all settled. I knew he was a mensch. He always said so, after all. "

Annie sank back onto the bed. "Jesus," she said, letting out a sigh of relief. Then: "Some mensch. What Yiddish dictionary do you use?"

"We won!" Miranda said. "Finally. We really won?"

"I'm supposed to go into town tomorrow to sign the papers. But…"

"They'll let you come home tonight, and we can drive you in," Annie said.

Betty laughed. "You practically pronounced me dead, and now you want me to hop out of bed and go to meetings? Anyway, they will not let me out tonight…"

"But…"

Betty coughed, then pointed to her chest. "… Pneumonia or some such thing…"

Annie rushed out of the room in search of the doctor, who was nowhere to be found, of course. Pneumonia or some such thing? She had saved that minor piece of information for a parenthesis? Her mother was infuriating. Annie wanted to shake her and her pneumonia. She wanted to shake someone, anyway. The doctor would do. She listened to the page: Dr. Franken, Dr. Franken, please call in… Dr. Franken, Dr. Franken… " Her mother called him Dr. Frankenstein. He was not much older than Annie's son Charlie. Dr. Franken, Dr. Franken. Hospital pages always sounded so ominous. The blood was pounding in Annie's ears.

"You have power of attorney," her mother was saying when she went back into the room to wait for the doctor. "I want both of you to go in and sign the papers for me."

"Oh, Mom, that can wait. Let's worry about your health now…"

"You can worry about two things at once, Annie," Betty said, smiling. "I've seen it firsthand. I want you to go in." She paused. She reached out and held Annie's hand in her own left hand, Miranda's in her right. "I want you to go," she said.

Dr. Franken, Dr. Franken, said the page.

"I want that rotten, selfish, dirty bastard to face you," Betty said. Her eyes were fierce. " Both of you."

Miranda and Annie stared at their mother.

"He owes you that," Betty said. "Rest his soul," she added gently.

The doctor appeared eventually, a youngster in a white coat. Betty's staph infection had gotten worse, he said. Pneumonia… intravenous antibiotics… couldn't possibly go home… at her age… lucky to have survived the meningitis… at her age… at her age… at her age…

Annie had mechanically taken notes. When she tried to decipher them when she got home, she said, "Just words. A bunch of meaningless words. All I really heard was at her age. She's not even that old. That little punk doctor."

She lay down on Betty's chaise.

"Don't worry, Annie," Miranda said in a worried voice. "She'll be okay."

It was the first time Annie could remember Miranda comforting her. It terrified her. Things must be very bad indeed.

Miranda called Leanne, who promised to call the hospital and see, doctor to doctor, what was really going on.

"She'll go in and see her in the afternoon, too, when Henry's napping. Hilda can keep an eye on him."

Miranda seemed so proud, Annie thought, as if Leanne's generous behavior reflected on her somehow. "That's great," she said, and Miranda beamed.

Then Annie called Cousin Lou's house to see if Rosalyn could go to the hospital in the morning.

"Oh, she can't possibly, she'll drive your poor mother crazy. No, God, no. I'll go, though. I'm more soothing, aren't I? I cheer people up. I'll go. Rosalyn is much too nervous right now. This business has been a terrible strain on her."

"What business? Mom in the hospital?" Leave it to Rosalyn to turn this into her own malady.

"No, no. Those two girls from Palm Springs. It's gotten all topsy-turvy."

Annie almost moaned. She did not care about Amber and her antics right now. She did not even care about Frederick. What was done was done. She cared only about her mother.

"One of them seems to have run off with that Barrow fellow," Cousin Lou was saying. "Gweneth is mad as a wet hen…"

Where did her cousin ever come up with that colloquial American expression? Annie wondered irrelevantly.