Of Love and Evil (2 page)

“Look, the way my father feels about you,” she’d said, “it’s easier for me to fly to the West Coast. And of course I’ll bring your son to see you. Don’t you think he wants to know who his father is?”

She was still living with her father, apparently, old Dr. Carpenter, as I had called him back then, and it didn’t surprise me that I had earned his contempt and scorn. I’d crept off with his daughter into the family guesthouse, and never dreamed all these years that she’d had a child as the result.

The point is: they were coming.

Malchiah went down with me to the front walk. It was perfectly plain to me that other people could see him, but he looked entirely normal, as he always did, a man of my height, and dressed in a three-piece suit pretty much like my own. Only his was gray silk. Mine was khaki. His shirt had a sheen to it, and mine was a workingman’s blue shirt, starched, pressed and finished off with a dark blue tie.

He looked to me rather like a perfect human being, his wondering eyes drifting over the flowers and the high palms against the sky as if he was savoring everything. He even seemed to feel the breeze and to glory a little in it.

“You’re an hour early,” he said.

“I know. I can’t sit still. I feel better if I just wait here.”

He nodded as though that was perfectly reasonable when in fact it was ridiculous.

“She’s going to ask what I’ve been doing all this time,” I said. “What do I say to her?”

“You’ll say only what’s good for her and for your son,” he answered. “You know that.”

“Yes, I do,” I conceded.

“Upstairs, on your computer,” he said, “there’s a long document you wrote called ‘Angel Time.’ ”

“Yes, well, I wrote that when I was waiting for you to come
to me again. I wrote down everything that happened on my first assignment.”

“That was good,” he said, “a form of meditation and it worked well. But, Toby, no one must read that document, not now, and maybe not ever.”

I should have known this. I felt a little crestfallen but I understood. With embarrassment I thought of how proud I’d been to recount my first mission for the angels. I’d even boasted to The Right Man, my old boss, that I had changed my life, that I was writing about it, that maybe someday he’d find my real name in the bookstores. As if he cared, the man who’d sent me as Lucky the Fox to kill over and over again. Ah, such pride, but then, in all my adult life, I’d never done anything before to be proud of. And The Right Man was the only person in this world with whom I had regular conversations. That is, until I had met Malchiah.

“Children of the Angels come and go as we do,” Malchiah said, “only seen by a few, unseen and unheeded by others.”

I nodded.

“Is that what I am now, a Child of the Angels?”

“Yes,” he said, smiling. “That’s what you are. Remember it.”

With that he was gone.

And I was left realizing I had some fifty minutes to wait for Liona.

Maybe I’d take a little walk, have a soda in the bar, I didn’t know. I only knew suddenly I was happy, and I was.

As I thought about this, I turned around, and looked towards the doors of the lobby, but for no particular reason. I saw a figure there, to one side of the doors, a figure of a young man, who stood with arms folded, leaning against the wall, staring at me. He was as vivid as anything around him, a tall man like Malchiah, only with reddish blond hair, and larger
blue eyes, and he wore a khaki suit identical to my own. I turned my back on him to avoid his fixed stare, and then I realized how unlikely it was that the guy should be wearing a suit exactly like mine, and staring at me like that, with an expression that was just short of anger. No, it hadn’t been anger.

I turned back. He was still staring. It was concern, not anger.

You’re my guardian angel!

He gave me a near-imperceptible nod.

A remarkable sense of well-being came over me. My anxiety melted away.
I’ve heard your voice! I’ve heard you with the other angels.
I was fascinated and oddly comforted, and all of this in a split second.

A little crowd of guests came out of the lobby doors, passing in front of this figure, and obscuring him, and as they turned left to go along another path, I realized he had disappeared.

My heart was skipping. Had I seen all this correctly? Had he really been staring at me, and had he nodded to me?

My mental picture of this was fading rapidly. Someone had been standing there, yes, of course, but there was no way now to check what had happened, to submit it to any kind of analysis.

I put it out of my mind. If he was my guardian, what was he doing but guarding me? And if he wasn’t, if he’d been someone else, well, what was that to me? My memory of this continued to fade. And of course, I’d settle the whole matter with Malchiah later. Malchiah would know who he was. Malchiah was with me.
Oh, we are creatures of such little faith.

An extraordinary contentment filled me suddenly. You are a Child of the Angels, I thought, and the angels are bringing Liona and her son, your son, to you.

I took a long walk around the Mission Inn, thinking what a
perfect cool California day it was, passing all my favorite fountains and chapel doorways and patios and curios and other such things, and it was just time then for her to have come.

I returned to the far end of the walkway, near the doors to the lobby, and I waited for two likely people to start up the path and then pause under the low arched campanario with its many bells.

I couldn’t have been there for longer than five minutes, pacing, looking around, checking my watch, moving in and out of the lobby now and then, when suddenly I realized that amid the steady flow of foot traffic along the path, there were two people standing right beneath the bells as I had asked those two people to do.

For a moment I thought my heart would stop.

I’d expected her to be pretty because she’d been pretty when she was a girl, but that had been the bud to this, the radiant flower, and I didn’t want to do anything except stare at her, to drink in the woman she’d become.

She was only twenty-seven. Even I at twenty-eight knew that’s not very old, but she had a womanly manner about her, and she was dressed in the most becoming and most finished way.

She wore a red suit, fitted at the waist and flaring over her narrow hips, with a short flared skirt that just covered her knees. Her pink blouse was open at her throat and there she wore a simple string of pearls. There was a tiny bit of pink handkerchief in her breast pocket, and her purse was patent leather pink, and so were her graceful high-heeled shoes.

What a picture she was in those clothes.

Her long full black hair was loose over her shoulders, with only some of it drawn back from her clear forehead and fixed perhaps with a barrette, the way she’d done it when she was a girl.

A sense came over me that I would remember her this way forever. It didn’t matter what would happen next or hereafter. I would simply never forget the way she looked now, so gorgeous in red, with her full and girlish black hair.

In fact a passage came to me from a film, and it’s one that many people love. It’s from the film
Citizen Kane
, and an old man named Bernstein speaks the passage as he reflects on memory and how things can strike us that we see for no more than a few seconds. In his case, he’s describing a young woman he once glimpsed on a passing ferryboat. “A white dress she had on,” he says, “and she was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second and she didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month has not gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”

Well, I knew that I would always remember Liona in that very way as to how she looked now. She was looking around, and she had about her the self-confidence and self-possession I remembered, and yet the pure uncomplicated courage that I had always associated with her simplest gestures or words.

I couldn’t believe how lovely she was. I couldn’t believe how simply, inevitably lovely she’d become.

But right beside her was the ten-year-old boy who was my son, and when I saw him, I saw my brother Jacob who’d died at that age, and I felt my throat tighten and the tears stand in my eyes.
This is my son.

Well, I’m not going to meet them weeping, I thought, but just as I pulled out my handkerchief, she saw me and she smiled at me, and taking the little boy by the hand she brought him right up the path towards me, and she said in the most sprightly and confident voice,

“Toby, I would have known you anywhere. You look exactly the same.”

Her smile was so vibrant and so generous that I couldn’t
answer her. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t tell her what it meant to me to see her, and when I looked down at the little boy looking up at me, this dark-haired, dark-eyed image of my long-dead brother Jacob, this perfect straight-shouldered and regal little boy, this confident and clever-looking little boy that any man would want for a son, this fine and splendid little boy, well, I did start to cry.

“You’re going to make me cry if you don’t stop,” she said. She put her hand out and clasped my arm.

There was nothing hesitant or reticent about her, and when I thought back on it, I realized there never had been at all. She was forceful and confident and she had a deep, soft voice that underscored her generous character.

Generous, that was the word that came to me as I looked into her eyes, as she smiled up at me. She was generous. She was generous and loving and she’d come all the way here because I asked her to do it, and I found myself saying it out loud.

“You came. You came all the way. You came. I thought up until the last moment that you wouldn’t come.”

The little boy took something out of his breast pocket and he handed it to me.

I bent down the better to look at him, and I took what he had given me and I saw it was a little picture of me. It had been cut out of my school yearbook and it had been laminated.

“Thank you, Toby,” I said.

“Oh, I always carry it,” he said immediately. “I always tell people, ‘That’s my dad.’ ”

I kissed him on the forehead. And then he surprised me. He put his arm around me, almost as if he was the man and I was the boy. He put his arm around me and he held me. I kissed him again on his soft little cheek. He looked at me with the clearest simplest eyes. “I always knew you’d come,” he said. “I
mean I knew you’d show up someday. I knew you would.” He said all that as simply as he’d said the rest.

I stood up, swallowed, and then I looked at both of them again, and put my arms around them both. I drew them close to me, and held them, and I was conscious of her softness, of her pure sweetness, a feminine sweetness so alien to me and the life I’d lived, and of a lovely floral perfume coming from her silky dark hair.

“Come on, the room’s ready,” I stammered as if these were momentous words. “I checked you in, let me take you up.”

I realized then that the bellhop had been standing there all the while with the cart of luggage, and I gave him a twenty-dollar bill, told him it was the Innkeeper’s Suite and we’d meet him on the top floor.

For a moment I merely looked at her again, and it came back to me what Malchiah had said. What you tell her, you tell her for her sake. Not for your own.

Something else hit me full force as I looked at her, as well, and that was how serious she was, that seriousness was the other side of her self-confidence. Seriousness was why she would pick up and come here without a moment’s hesitation and let her son meet his father. And that seriousness reminded me of someone I’d known and loved on my adventures with Malchiah, and I realized now that when I’d been with that person—a woman in a long-ago age, I’d been reminded then of this beautiful and living and breathing woman who stood with me in my own day and age now.

This is someone to love. This is someone to love with all your heart the way you loved those people then, when you were with the angels, when you were with people you could never bring to your heart. All these ten years you’ve lived at a remove from every living being, but this is someone as real as Malchiah’s people were real, a person that you can truly and totally love. Never mind whether or
not you can get her to love you. You can love her. And this little boy, you can love him.

As we crowded into the little elevator together, Toby showed me other pictures of me from the yearbook. He’d been carrying them around for a long time too.

“So you always knew my name,” I said to him, not knowing what to say really, and so stressing the obvious, and he replied that yes, he told everybody his daddy was Toby O’Dare.

“I’m glad. I’m glad you’ve done that. I can’t tell you how proud I am of you,” I said.

“Why?” he asked. “You don’t even know what I’m really like.” He was just small enough that his voice had a child’s ring to it rather than an older boy’s, and when he said these words they had a crisp clever sound. “I could be a bad student for all you know.”

“Ah, but your mother was a brilliant student,” I said.

“Yes, and she still is. She goes to Loyola to take courses. She’s not happy teaching grammar school. She makes straight A’s.”

“And you do too, don’t you?” I asked.

He nodded. “I’d skip a grade if they’d let me. They think it would be bad for my social development, and my grandfather thinks so too.”

We’d come to the rooftop and I shepherded them around the balconies and then down the long red-tiled veranda. They had the suites in the hotel at the end of the veranda which were close to my own.

Now the Innkeeper’s Suite at the Mission Inn is the only one that is really modern and lavish in the five-star sort of way. It’s only available when the owners of the hotel aren’t in residence, so I’d made certain that I could reserve it for this time.

They were suitably impressed with the three fireplaces, the immense marble bath, the lovely open veranda, and even more
impressed when they discovered I’d engaged the adjacent room for Toby on the grounds that being ten years of age he might well want his own room and bed.

Then I took them into the Amistad Suite, my favorite, to show them the beautiful painted dome, and the tester bed, and the quaint fireplace that didn’t work, and they did note it was very “like New Orleans” but I think they were thrilled with the luxurious digs they had, and so the whole thing went as I’d planned.