The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (14 page)

Here she comes now, a beautiful young woman in jeans and mint green sleeveless T-shirt, wearing sunglasses, and smiling broadly at the sight of her father. He stands on the clinic steps with arms folded, still a hundred yards away from her, and she lifts her right hand high in the air and waves.

He waves back, smiles, and feels his chest tighten and buckle with emotion. He has never felt as proud of Rose as he does at this moment. It’s the simplicity of her beauty and her sincerity, he decides. That’s what makes him proud of her. They are qualities of body and character, qualities of
self
, that for unknown reasons have been invisible to him until this moment. He doesn’t ask why he never saw them before. Instead, he wonders why they should have suddenly become visible.

Because she is at hand, yet still far away, is his answer. But coming nearer by the second, and nearer, when suddenly, to avoid hitting something on the road that he can’t see, a piece of broken glass, perhaps, she swerves the bike out into the middle of the street and puts herself between an oncoming UPS truck and a Volvo station wagon bearing down behind her. Kent reaches toward her with both arms, his mouth wide open as if to shout, but he can’t break his silence, he can’t even say her name, and she swerves a second time, this time cutting in front of the UPS truck and off Main Street onto a narrow lane on the opposite side, where she disappears.

The UPS truck passes Kent nonchalantly, as if the driver has noticed nothing out of the way, as if he’s not seen anyone in danger for a very long time, and the Volvo station wagon passes in the other direction as normally as cars have passed all day, the woman driver chatting with the passenger, her husband, perhaps, or a client to whom she’s about to show a house. Then, on his right and across the street, Rose emerges from behind a high hedge on the corner of Main, pedaling her blue Raleigh with ease and obvious pleasure. She’s still smiling and is close enough now to call to him and be heard. “Hey, Dad! What a day, huh?”

Kent rushes across the street and grabs her bicycle by the handlebars and stops it dead. Rose’s face drops and tightens. Her father is panting, red-faced, sweating.

“Jesus, Dad, what’s the matter?” she asks, her voice rising in fear. “Are you okay?”

“
Why?
Why do you do this to me? To
yourself
! Why do you do it to yourself?”

Rose lets go of the handlebars. She reaches forward and places her hands on her father’s shoulders, as if she is the parent and he the reckless child. “Dad,” she says. “Stop.”

“Why?”

Then, calmly, patiently, with a detachment that’s incomprehensible to him, she explains. “I do it because what you do is violent, and it makes me violent, too. That’s why.” The two of them stand there with the blue bicycle between them, traffic whizzing by in the background.

“What? It’s
my
fault?”

She sighs, and then she tells her father what he needs most to know, but has always seemed incapable of knowing: that his kindness and intimacy draw her close to him, but only for him to reject her—because of her sloppiness, her carelessness, her disorder. She reminds him of last night’s confrontation over the spilled birdseed. She tells him that he should have let it go till morning. “I’m twenty-nine, Dad. Leave me a note. I’d have cleaned it up this morning.” He spoiled their earlier moment in the kitchen, she says, which, if he had left her alone, would have helped her deal with her little failure later in a useful way. “In a way that wouldn’t have scared you. You don’t know, but it’s what I’ve been doing for years,” she says.

“What have you been doing for years?”

“Things that would scare you, Dad. Only this time you saw it.”

Side by side, they walk along the sidewalk, uphill away from the office. Rose keeps one hand on the handlebars, steering the bike, and the other on her father’s slumped shoulder. “I’m not angry at you,” she says, sounding distant and almost scientific. “Not anymore.” She understands his needs. Her needs, however, are different, and it’s her mother, she says, who’s shaped her needs. Not him.

“Your mother?”

“Dad, Mom is like my hollow double,” she says. “My absent self. Not you. You’re my father.” All these years he’s treated her as if she were like him, she explains, instead of like her mother. And consequently he’s dealt with her as if she had his needs instead of her mother’s. Rose smiles at him, but from a great height.

It’s only a flash of awareness, as if a darkened room were lit for a second and then dropped into darkness again, but Kent sees how vain and cruel he’s been. He sees that he’s been a man completely opposed to the man he thought he was. And as surely as he lost her mother fifteen years earlier, he has lost Rose now, and for the same reason. He knows nothing of his daughter’s needs, because he knew nothing of her mother’s.

He says to Rose, as they turn off Main Street onto Ash, “Was I wrong, to divorce your mother? To leave you?”

“No,” she says. “You weren’t. But you shouldn’t have tried to keep her through me. And me through her,” she says. “Now you’ve lost us both.”

“You’ll never come to visit me again, will you?”

She shakes her head no. “I’m sorry. I think this has been the end of everything between us. But we’ll see.” She tells him to go on back to his office. She’ll leave the bicycle in the garage and call a cab to take her to the Trailways station.

He stops, and she continues on.

The Lie

A ten-year-old boy—maybe eleven, maybe nine, but no older and certainly no younger—kills his buddy, one Alfred Coburn, while the two are enemy espionage agents engaged in a life-or-death struggle in the middle of the wide, perfectly flat, tarred roof of an American-owned hotel in Hong Kong. The young killer, whose name is Nicholas Lebrun, stabs his good buddy in the chest just below the left nipple, slicing deftly between two ribs, thence through the taut pericardium, plunging unimpeded into the left ventricle of the heart—stabs his friend with an inexpensive penknife manufactured by the Barlow Cutlery Corp., of Springfield, Massachusetts. This knife has a plastic, simulated-wood grip and a two-and-a-half-inch steel blade. Also a one-and-a-half-inch smaller, narrower blade.

Alfred, poor wide-eyed Alfred, squeaks in surprise and falls; Nicholas understands what has happened and runs home.

A distance of approximately one city block separates the Transilex parking lot that has been serving as the roof of an American-owned hotel in Hong Kong and the asbestos-shingled, wood-framed, mid-Victorian house that has been serving as the Lebrun home and hearth for over forty years—ever since Nicholas’s paternal grandfather was a young, newly wedded, still childless man. Nicholas’s grandfather was named Ernest, but he was called Red because of the color of his thick, short-cropped hair and mustache. A clockmaker and a good one, too, Ernest learned his trade (he would have said craft) in his hometown of Hartford, Connecticut. Later, when the time industry shifted to Waltham, Massachusetts, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, he followed it and went to work for the Waltham Watch Company. A French Protestant and native New Englander, Ernest Lebrun: thrifty, prudent, implacably stable, high-minded and honorable, incorruptible, intelligent, organized, good-humored—all resulting in his having become well-liked and financially secure well before he was forty years old. He died in a dreamless sleep shortly after World War II had finally ground to a halt and sometime during the year that commenced with his grandson Nicholas’s birth and winked out with the child’s first birthday, a fact surely of considerable moment for Ernest (Red): hanging on to shreds of life until after the birth of his first male grandchild, the son of an only son, assured finally and at the very end of the continuation of the name, et cetera.

It is because of the distance between the Transilex parking lot and home and because he ran all the way home that Nicholas is out of breath, panting, and red-faced when he turns into the scrubby yard and arrives safely at what appears to be and what later turns out to be heaven.

Robert Lebrun, the boy’s middle-aging, auburn-haired father, a paid-in-full member of the United Association of Plumbers and Pipe-fitters (AFL-CIO), Local 143, is comfortably swinging on the porch glider, smoking an after-supper cigar in the orange evening light and from time to time reading from the tabloid newspaper spread on his lap.

Abruptly, Nicholas parks himself next to his father, upsetting with his momentum the glider’s gentle vacillation, and the father asks the son, his only child, heir to his ancient name and lands, Why is he running? The lad tells his father why he is running. Not, of course, without considerable encouragement from the father—whose cigar goes slowly out during the telling.

Young Nicholas does not forget to mention the fact that just as he steps off the flat, square expanse of tar that has been serving as the Transilex parking lot—now almost innocent of parked automobiles—and onto the narrow sidewalk of Brown Steet, he happens to glance back at his little friend’s fallen body, that small heap of summer clothing and inert flesh already used up and thrown out, dropped in the middle of the great black square. A crumpled pile of stuff lying next to the front tire of a bottle green British Ford sedan. And in that fraction of a second, Nicholas realizes that the owner of the bottle green sedan—a man who lives in the neighborhood and who unfortunately is notoriously effeminate, a practicing pederast, in fact, mocked to his face by all the neighborhood kids and behind his back by the parents—is strolling blithely across the lot, is approaching his car from the side opposite Nicholas and the car’s right front tire.

It’s possible that the man, whose name is Toni Scott, catches a glimpse of Nicholas in flight, but that possibility shall have to remain equivocal. The facts which follow shall demonstrate why this is so.

Toni, who has worked as a waiter in an attractively decorated Boston cocktail lounge of socially ambiguous, though not inconsiderable fame for several years now, has been saving at least five dollars a month by parking his car illegally in the Transilex parking lot, always taking care to remove his car well before the 9:00
P.M
. departure of the Transilex cafeteria second shift and—because of his nighttime working hours—usually managing to slip the innocuous little sedan back into the lot sometime between the 4:00
A.M
. unlocking and 5:00
A.M
. arrival of the cafeteria first shift. However, this particular summer evening ritual removal of his car from its stolen space definitely, even though only partially and from afar, is observed over young Nicholas Lebrun’s fleeing shoulder (fateful, damning, backward glance!) just before the rigorously bathed, meticulously groomed, idly smiling Toni Scott, filled to the eyes with sweet memories and still sweeter anticipation, discovers Alfred Coburn’s hard, sun-haired body by accidentally smashing its rib cage, sternum, and spine with the right front tire of his bottle green car.

He cuts the wheel hard to the left, revs up the tiny four-cylinder motor, and spins the car backwards, swinging the front of the car around in an arc to the right—so that he can make his exit from the lot by the very gate Nicholas has used just seconds earlier.

It is at this point in the boy’s narrative that Robert Lebrun interrupts his son and compels him to insist that no one saw him stab his playmate. He makes the boy reassure him that he (Nicholas) did not extract the penknife from Alfred’s chest—an unnecessary reassurance, for Toni’s right front tire has already torn the knife from its nest of flesh, bone, and blood, has ground it against pavement, paint, white pebbles in the tar, has smashed the plastic simulated-wood grip and removed all fingerprints. Then Lebrun makes Nicholas repeat several times the part of his narrative that has to do with Toni Scott’s arrival on the scene, and finally, after telling his son in clear, exact, and step-by-step terms just what he intends to do, Lebrun stomps into the house and, yelling
Emergency, Police!
to the telephone operator, he calls the cops.

Speaking rapidly, he whispers practically that he is Robert Lebrun of number forty-eight Brown Street and his son and another neighborhood kid have just been sexually molested by the neighborhood fag and his son broke away from the guy but the other kid is still with the sonofabitch in his car, which is parked in the Transilex parking lot, the one that used to be the old Waltham Watch factory lot, and he (Lebrun) is leaving right now to kill that filthy sonofabitch with his bare hands so if they want Toni Scott alive they have about three minutes to get to him. He makes one other call—to Alfred Coburn, Senior, over on Ash Street, some three blocks farther from the parking lot than is the Lebrun house—and using that same rapid, whispery voice, he tells Alfred Coburn, Senior, what he has just related to the cops.

Then Lebrun lunges for the parking lot, while Toni Scott, who dials the police department from the public phone booth that stands luminous in a dark corner of the lot, hears through the glass walls the rising shrieks of approaching sirens before he has even completed dialing the number.

In this story everyone who lies and knows that he lies does so effectively. That is, he is believed. Furthermore, everyone who lies and yet knows not that he lies—meaning, for example, Evelyn Lebrun (Nicholas’s adoring mother) and poor Alfred Coburn, Senior, and the two or three neighborhood ladies who claim they saw Toni Scott talking to the boys from inside his green foreign car, heard the awful thing call the tykes from their play, saw him smilingly offer them candy if they would get into his car—these people also manage to lie effectively: they are believed by the police, the rest of the people in the neighborhood, the newspapers, the district attorney, the psychiatrists testifying for the prosecution, the psychiatrists testifying for the defense, the defense attorney himself (although he pretends not to believe), the judge, the jury, and the U.S. Court of Appeals.

Everyone who tells the truth—meaning Toni Scott, the thirty-eight-year-old, fatting, balding homosexual—tells the truth stupidly, inconsistently, alternately forgetting and remembering critical details, lying about other unrelated matters, and so on into the night. Toni Scott is not believed, although now and then he is pitied…

*  *  *

Thus the compassionately prompt arrival of the police at the scene of Alfred Coburn’s beastly murder—slain savagely by a scorned and therefore enraged deviate—plucks Toni Scott from the huge pipe fitter’s hands of Robert Lebrun, only to set him down again one year later in Walpole State Prison (life plus ninety-nine years).

It may have been noticed that the original lie originated with Nicholas’s dad. It was not mentioned, however, that once the lie had been designed and manufactured, once it had been released to the interested public, Robert Lebrun began to have certain secret misgivings about the way the lie was being used. The cause of these hesitant, shadowy misgivings was not, as one might suppose, the cruel fate of Toni Scott. Rather, it was the consummate skill, the unquestioning grace of movement from blatant truth to absolute falsehood that consistently, repeatedly, and under the most trying of circumstances was demonstrated by Robert Lebrun’s only begotten son, the young Nicholas Lebrun. It was almost as if for Nicholas there was no difference between what actually happened and what was said to have happened.

“What happened, Nickie?” his father asks. “Why the hell you running in this heat? You never run like that when you’re called, only when you’re being chased.”

“Nobody’s chasing me,” the kid answers. “But something really awful happened.”

“What?”

“I don’t know actually. Me and Al was just playing around, see, and he got cut with a knife, only I didn’t mean it, it was an accident, honest. You gotta believe me, Pa.” The boy uses the same name for his father that Robert Lebrun was taught to use for his.

This is the point at which Lebrun begins shuffling fearfully through his memories and imagination for an alibi. The fear of retribution, which he now believes to be dominating his son’s entire consciousness (even to the boy’s physical perceptions—of the scaly white glider, the splintery porch floor catching against the corrugated bottoms of his U.S. Keds, the cooling air laden with the smell of freshly cut grass, the cold zinc smell of his father’s dead cigar, the sounds of his mother’s sleek hands washing dishes in warm soapy water), this fear is in reality now the father’s very own.

The father attributes to his son the overwhelming quality of fear that he knows would have to be his were he ten or nine or eleven years old and faced with “something really awful,” “an accident,” a wounding that occurs without warning, absolute and in its own terms as well. Right in the middle of a game.

The father’s now: the force behind the knife as it buries a two-and-a-half-inch steel blade in the playmate’s bony chest; then comes the realization that the boy is dead absolutely and forever, no joke, no pretense, no foolish vain imitation of the absence of existence; his now: the flight from the body’s silent accusation, away from this gusty hotel rooftop deserted and stark in the midst of ragged, teeming, Oriental architecture; and his: the image seen through tinted, wraparound glass of the figure of Toni Scott strolling across the lot toward his green sedan.

And thus Robert Lebrun lies, not to save his son, but to save himself. His own father, Ernest (Red) Lebrun, would have found the dynamic reversed from the beginning of the lie to the end, and, no doubt, Robert at some point along the progression was aware of this, knew that his own father, were
he
placed in a similar circumstance, would not have been able to credit
his
son with possessing an overpowering fear of retribution, and thus the child’s experience would have remained intact, still his very own, unmolested by the rush of the father’s consciousness of himself. And, no doubt, this awareness of how Ernest Lebrun would have responded to a similar set of circumstances, circumstances in which he, Robert Lebrun, would have been the lonely, unmolested son, was a critical factor in making it impossible even now for Robert to become anything other than that lonely, unmolested son. The redheaded Ernest gave to his young son an absolute truth and an absolute falsity, and for that reason Robert was forever a child. Robert to his son gave relative truth and relative falsity, and for that reason Nicholas was never a child.

The question of responsibility, then, seems not to have been raised in at least three generations.