Strong Medicine Read Online Free Page B

I can help with that, just let me-"
    "Andrew! Please be serious."
    "Can't. I'm too happy."
    "Then I'll be serious for both of us."
    "How many children?" he asked. "And when?"
    "I've thought about it," Celia said, "and I believe we should have two-the
    first child as soon as possible, the second two years later. That way, I'll
    have childbearing done before I'm thirty."
    "That's nice," he said. "Tidy, too. As a matter of interest, do you have
    any plans for your old age-after thirty, I mean?"
    "I'm going to have a career. Didn't I ever mention that?"
    "Not that I remember. But if you'll recall, my love, the way we leaped into
    this marriage caper didn't allow much time for discussion or philosophy."
    "Well," Celia said, "I did mention my plan about children to Sam Hawthorne.
    He thought it would work out fine."
    "Bully for Sam!-whoever he is." Andrew wrinkled his brow. "Wait. Wasn't he
    the one at our wedding, from Felding-Roth?"
    "That's right. Sam Hawthorne's my boss, the regional sales manager. He was
    with his wife, Lilian."
    "Got it. Everything's coming back."
    Andrew remembered Sam Hawthome now-a tall, friendly fellow, perhaps in his
    mid-thirties but prematurely balding, and with craggy, strong features that
    reminded Andrew of the carved faces on Mount Rushmore. Hawthorne's wife,
    Lilian, was a striking brunette.
    Reliving, mentally, the events of three days earlier, Andrew said, "You'll
    have to make allowance for my having been a little dazed at the time."
    One reason, he remembered, was the vision of Celia as she had appeared, in
    white, with a short veil, in the reception room of a local hotel where they
    had elected to be married. The ceremony was to be performed by a friendly
    judge who was also a member of
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St. Bede's Hospital board. Dr. Townsend had escorted Celia in on his arm.
    Noah Townsend was fully up to the occasion, the epitome of a seasoned
    family physician. Dignified and graying, he looked a lot like the British
    prime minister, Harold Macmillan, who was so often in the news these days
    smoothing U.S.-British relations after the preceding year's discords over
    the Suez Canal.
    Celia's mother, a small, self-effacing widow who lived in Philadelphia,
    was at the wedding. Celia's father had died in World War 11; hence
    Townsend's role.
    Under the Bahamas sun, Andrew closed his eyes, partly as relief against
    the brightness, but mostly to re-create that moment when Townsend brought
    Celia in . . .
    In the month since Celia, on that memorable morning in the hospital
    cafeteria, had announced her intention to marry him, Andrew had fallen
    increasingly under what he thought of as no less than her magic spell.
    He supposed love was the word, yet it seemed more and difFerent-the
    abandonment of a singleness which Andrew had always pursued, and the
    total intertwining of two lives and personalities in ways that at once
    bewildered and delighted him. There was no one quite like Celia. No
    moment with her was ever dull. She remained full of surprises, knowledge,
    intellect, ideas, plans, all bubbling from that wellspring of her
    forceful, colorful, independent nature. Almost from the beginning he had
    a sense of extreme good fortune as if he, through some machinery of
    chance, had won a jackpot, a prize coveted by others. And he sensed that
    others coveted Celia as he introduced her to his colleagues.
    Andrew had had other women in his life, but none for any length of time,
    and there had been no one he seriously considered marrying. Which made
    it all the more rcmarkable that from the moment when Celia-to put it
    conventionally-proposed," he had never had the slightest doubt,
    hesitation, or inclination to turn back.
    And yet . . . it was not until that incredible moment when he saw Celia
    in her white wedding dress-radiant, lovely, young, desirable, all that
    any man could ask of a woman and more, far more -it was not until then
    that, with a flash which seemed an exploding ball of fire within