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Show 14-7 I looked at the other men. Many of them were wearing uniforms or parts of them. Some of them had medals pinned to their jackets or to their bathrobes. But many of them did not. "Andrew, why didn't you wear your medal? The one with the heart?" "I don't have it any more. Wouldn't wear it anyway." "Why not?" "My business, Annie. Anyway, I sent it home. To my parents." He stood up and looked out over the rows of men. "Looks like everyone is here. No one would miss. None of us have real full dance cards any day of the week." "Mother is nervous, I think. I hope everything goes all right." I glanced over to her where she stood, one hand rubbing the lid of the piano. Andrew ground out his cigarette, then took my arm. "Don't worry, she'll do swell. They guys are excited, just to see a pretty lady. She could bang around the way I do on the piano and they'd still love it." They did love it, although they didn't clap the way audiences did in the concert hall. They sat and listened, not moving or speaking. Even the coughs sounded like distant echoes of the music. Mother played all the pieces she loved, Chopin, Mozart, Brahams, Schumann. She played one or two popular songs at the end. The sounds from the piano moved out through the trees, reaching down to the men on the stretchers, wrapping around the nuns standing behind the wheelchairs, disappearing into the darkness behind us. I sat with Andrew and thought about what he had said about my mother being a pretty woman for the men to look at. I knew my father thought Mother was beautiful because he told her that often. I thought she was and wanted very much to be like her when I was grown. But I had never thought of other people, especially these men who seemed so childlike in their helplessness, looking at my mother in |
