102: Becoming Adults

Whitney was in transit the first week of October. That meant that she had seven days to get from Fort Leonard Wood to her permanent duty station. Her path led through Bloomington, of course, but only for a few days. Then she would catch a plane in Indianapolis.

“Where are you going?” I asked when she got home.

“Stuttgart, ” she said. She looked into my eyes. It dawned on me what she was saying.

“Stuttgart? As in Germany?” I squeaked. She nodded. “What does permanent duty station mean? Like forever?”

“That will be my base of operations for the foreseeable future, ” she said. “Brian, I’ll miss you all so much. But this is where I’ve been assigned. I’ve been a Marine for sixteen months. I have almost five years to go and two more in reserves or active. I’m a Marine, Brian. I might be a Marine for the full career. Unless deployed, I will be working regular hours at my new duty station. I’ll get time off and even vacation time. I hope ... Will you come to visit me sometimes?”

“So far away. Of course, I’ll come. I’ve never been out of the country. I need to get a passport. We can go to the Federal Building in Indianapolis. How long does it take to get a passport?”

“Brian, you have time, ” she laughed. “You aren’t going with me. Once I get there and know the lay of the land and how things work, we’ll arrange a time in the spring for you to take a vacation from your very successful television career.”

“I speak German! I could be there to help you.”

“I’ve had a crash course in basic German. Ich liebe dich, ” she said.

“Oh, Whitney. It never occurred to me that you’d be so far away. All these last months, I’ve just kept thinking you were only a state or two away and I’d see you in a few weeks. Are you even going to be able to make phone calls?” I asked.

“Yes, of course, ” she said. “Though they’ll be short and costly. We’ll have to write a lot of letters. And I don’t know how it will go when I’m deployed. They say our first deployment will be within three months.”

“Wait. You mean you won’t even be in Germany? Where will you be deployed?”

“Stuttgart is the command center for Europe and Africa. I could be deployed anyplace in that area. Narrow it down? There are three likelihoods for a platoon of MPs. We get deployed to a Marine base anywhere on two continents to provide base security and policing. We get deployed to an embassy someplace to provide security for our diplomatic corps. We get deployed to a combat zone if one heats up, ” she said. “We’ll know soon after we reach our permanent duty station. It’s not up to me.”

“I can understand deployment to a base or an embassy, ” I said. “Why would they ever send you to a combat zone? You aren’t combat troops.”

“Technically we are. And my platoon received training in different types of security. Who do you think is responsible for prisoners of war?”

“Oh, crap!”

The entire casa and most of the clan wanted to spend time with Whitney while she was home, but, of course, there were a few important things we needed to take care of. While we had some common banking accounts for the casa, the business, and the clan, those were managed primarily by Louise and Rose. We each had individual bank accounts and our royalties and wages went to our personal accounts. Louise had account numbers for everyone to auto deposit our pay and deduct specific joint expenses like our share of maintenance for the ranch and the food bill. But none of us really had control over anyone else’s finances. The first thing Whitney did was take me to her bank Monday morning and make me a signer on her checking and savings accounts. She rented a safe deposit box and I was a signer on that, as well. She didn’t have a lot to put in the box. She had a couple stock certificates that she’d been given at graduation, her military awards and certificates, and her will. That brought me up short.

“Brian, you are executor of my will and will have power of attorney over all my personal and financial affairs. It’s a pretty simple will. I don’t have any real property to speak of. But you need to watch my bank accounts and make sure I’m not just putting my money in a checking account that doesn’t earn anything. I’ll have an account on base that I’ll keep my general expenses in so you don’t have to worry about that, but some of this stuff needs to be transferred into stocks or mutual funds. You and Louise can decide what’s best on that, ” she said.

“Crap, Whitney! A will?”

“Anything can happen, Brian. What have you done? You have four kids and thirteen cónyuge. How have you provided for them if something happens to you? Think about it? You’re no safer than I am. You’ve already died once, ” she said.

That really set me back. Tuesday we met with Lamar and he took care of the power of attorney, an easy task since the form of it, as well as the will, had largely been supplied by the Navy JAG law officer she had met with. He corrected Whitney’s will so that I wasn’t the executor of her estate since it turned out that I was pretty much her only heir. Lamar became the executor. It was a wake-up call to all of us and Lamar promised to set up a process for everyone in the clan to have a will since we had such unusual living arrangements and relationships.

Wednesday, I took Whitney with me to Indianapolis and she was my guest on the show. We talked about women in the military and possibilities both as enlisted women and as officer candidates. The young women and several of the men in our audience were moved by the words. We were careful never to mention where she was being based or anything regarding her specific platoon or job responsibilities. We even had the Marine recruiter who signed her up in the first place moderate the discussion so we were sure everything was within regulations. She looked incredibly sharp in her dress uniform. She wasn’t just a Marine; she was my Marine.

We stayed at the Sheraton that night and in the morning—well, just after midnight—she gave me my twenty-fourth birthday present. I gave it back until we were both too exhausted to continue. At ten-thirty Thursday morning, I watched her board her plane for the first leg of her journey to Stuttgart.

As I stood there watching her plane depart, with tears filling my eyes, I realized that this had been the first time Whitney and I had been together since she joined the Marines that we didn’t spar.

Halloween is a lot harder on the kids when it comes on a weeknight. Of course, they were all pretty little. Eleanor was four and Matthew almost four so they didn’t have school the next day. But parents and family still had to work. We put out the word to the community, including those in the southeast corner, that we would celebrate and accept trick-or-treaters on Sunday and held open house at the studio for parents and other adults. It went on for about four hours and we had a very good time. I even got to go to a few of the houses with my children before I had to go entertain the grown-ups.

Céleste and James were just eight weeks old but I couldn’t believe the little costumes their mothers put them in. They both wore beige t-shirts the moms had painted to look like they were tattooed. They both had little black leather vests and Céleste had a black knitted baby cap. Of course her ‘tattoo’ was a black rose. We had our own baby anarchists.

“Auntie Nicolette will teach you all about being a good anarchist, ” Nicki explained to the two babies. “Your mommies and daddies will never know what hit them.”

Nicolette, for her part, reverted to her leathers and a black wig so she could demonstrate proper decorum. She did not wear a t-shirt under her vest and the rose tattoo was on clear display in her cleavage. I examined it carefully later, just to be sure it didn’t need touching up.

It just needed touching. And licking. And sucking...

The next week, I did a week of remote broadcasts from the new Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. They really did a great job with that place and included performance venues of various sizes in the design. They had both radio and television studios that we could broadcast from.

Samantha, Jennifer, and Courtney traveled with me. What a treat! All three were typically tied to their offices. Samantha was doing a great job of locating interesting places for our week on the road each month. In addition to a week broadcasting from Harpo Studios in Chicago, we were scheduled for a week at Caroline’s Comedy Club in New York City in January. We’d be at the Houston Space Center, back in Fort Lauderdale, in the Crystal Court in Minneapolis, and at Boston University. This spring we’d even have a week broadcasting from the Space Needle in Seattle.

But the week in Cleveland with the three girls was almost a vacation for all of us. If we weren’t on set, we were in bed.

Jennifer had transitioned to a role at CEN in which she was coordinating advertising and marketing for all the CEN originated programing instead of just Hearthstone’s. Courtney was teaching two classes at IU this year. She’d sailed through her master’s thesis and was working on her PhD with an emphasis on digital video technology. She was really excited about having a digital storage medium that was like a super-CD. She said DVDs were going to make our lives so much easier in the future. All I could do was nod. I didn’t need any more evidence that she was onto something than the sales of the video editing software she developed. Her little company now had three other programmers working on developing the software.

Most of all, we made love.

Now that we had a regular schedule and a network to keep alive, we didn’t take all week off for Thanksgiving. Rees, Elaine, and I ran our broadcasts through Wednesday with reruns on Thursday and Friday. The Redress crew were producing ahead of schedule and Heaven’s audience was growing on the new network. They were able to take the week off and Heaven consented to be my guest on Thanksgiving Eve. Fashion Week was off this week and we put up a rerun on Sunday night. The show was proving to be surprisingly successful, driven in part by its half-hour timeslot right after Redress. Pam and Nancy had actually received a couple modeling contracts. They were starting too late to ever become supermodels like Heaven, but local modeling work was good and they could work a couple gigs in around their classes and Fashion Week this spring.

We had a comparatively sedate Thanksgiving, not to say that it was small. We served dinner in the studio, which had much more room now that we’d taken out the audience seating and just had the Young Cooking and Fashion Week sets. We set up a huge buffet and people from all over the village stopped in to eat. I noticed that even a couple from the Southeast corner had joined us for a while. In spite of how many of us there were, we did nothing formal and it was all very low key with a lot of visits back to individual houses.

I took some time at noon to call Whitney. She was six hours ahead of us, so I caught her just before she headed to dinner. Even though she was in Germany, the officers’ mess offered a full Thanksgiving dinner all day and several private groups were holding their own celebrations. Since Whitney had no ties in Germany, she lived in on-base officer housing.

“Can I come and visit you for Christmas?” I asked. The topic of when I would visit Germany had arisen in every one of our conversations since she left. Whitney sighed.

“I’m afraid not, love. I’m being deployed. As of Monday we are in lockdown and my platoon ships out on or about the tenth. With luck, I’ll get two weeks leave in time for fireworks, ” she said. “I’m putting in for it.”

“Where are you headed?” I asked. Worry tinged my words and I could feel my heart accelerating.

“If the orders hold, my platoon is being sent to take over embassy security in Pretoria.”

“Pretoria? That’s like ... Where is that?”

“South Africa. The current platoon rode out all the political turmoil around the first elections last year. Our deployment should be pretty routine, ” she said.

“I love you, Whitney.”

“Just keep saying that, Brian. Every once in a while, I think I hear you.”

Part of being an adult, I guess, is having the talk. Whitney and I had the talk. She told me exactly what her wishes were if she should die in service. She wrote them down and gave a copy to her mother as well. Cremated and her ashes spread in the River of Life. We’d all talked about that, but none of us actually wanted to think about it.

What’s harder, though, is to have the talk with your parents.

“Mom and Dad, what do you want us to do if we need to prepare a funeral for one of you?” I asked.

“Mom, that goes for you, too, ” Jennifer said to Anna. The five of us were sitting at the table. I had papers spread out in front of me. I’d been trying to list my assets and what should be done with them.

“We’re not planning to die soon, son, ” Dad said.

“Nobody plans to, Dad. Sending Whitney off to Germany and finding out she’s heading for South Africa just reminded me that I haven’t made my will. I have four children by three different mothers. Not having my shit together is pretty irresponsible. It just got me thinking that I should be talking to you, as well, ” I said.

“Not many twenty-four-year-olds have thought about that, ” Anna said.

“We’re not typical, ” Jennifer said. “We all have an interest in an entertainment company that has an interest in a media company. In addition to the interest in the companies, we have an interest in the property of both the clan and the casa. Brian has residuals that should continue to come in for twenty years or more. I don’t even know who owns the horses out back or how much of a share of this house I own.”

“I’m glad you are all working on this, ” Mom said. “I take it everyone is?” I nodded. “Then it’s only right that you should know our plans, too.” She sighed. “We really want to move down here. There are just problems with it.”

“Your grandad is in a home now, ” Dad said. “His house is unoccupied because he wouldn’t sign an agreement for us to manage his estate. We can’t legally go into the house and pack it up. I found out that even inheriting the property was made contingent in his will on us living on the property. If we sell our place and move down here, your grandad’s property is to be sold and the proceeds donated to charity. No one in the family gets anything.”

“Can’t you do anything?”

“Oh, we can get management rights now. His Alzheimer’s is getting worse and he can’t make day-to-day decisions. But he was of sound mind when he wrote his will and the only reason we could sell the place would be if he became destitute and we needed the money to care for him. Otherwise, we are stuck where we are until he passes on, ” Dad said. “For my part, your mom and I have created a partnership with Anna and the three of us own the place in Mishawaka together. If something happened to me, the property passes to the two of them with your mom getting my share. However, all my other assets are split between Nona and Anna unless Nona and I own them jointly.”