The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (16 page)

You did not pity it then, you were angry with it, annoyed that it should get caught so helplessly in other people’s designs for themselves. But you pity it now, tonight, as it lies there below you like a great and dignified beast trapped in quicksand, resigned, yet with all its systems functioning efficiently in the darkness, as close to a state of rest as a living organism can come without descending into death. Stasis. You pity it for its very presence in the world, its large and pathetic demands on space, the way it tries and constantly fails to avoid being seen. And the way it has at last given up that attempt, has at last agreed to be seen, to be wholly present. You pity it, and finally you understand it. You understand the body of Jane Hogarth.

From below comes the abrupt noise of your husband returning from the company he keeps, drunkenly bumping furniture and walls as he makes his way in darkness up the narrow stairs. He stops outside your room, where your body lies in its cold juices. He pauses for a second, then moves down the hallway. At the attic stairs he stops again. Slowly he ascends to the attic. His feet scuffle overhead, like rats.

Your body stirs, then rises, and plucks itself gracefully from the sopped and stinking bed. At the sideboard there is a china pitcher of water and a basin. With a wet cloth and soap, your body slowly washes itself. Delicately, lovingly, the hands move over the shoulders, breasts, and belly, across the buttocks and thighs. Even the feet are washed and carefully dried. Then it slips a clean, white, linen gown on, and, relighting the candle left by Ellen on the sideboard, your body takes its leave of the room, as if the body were a queen leaving her private chambers for court. The body turns left at the door and stops at the bottom of the attic stairs, turns left and mounts the stairs to the attic.

There they are, the man atop the girl in her narrow bed in the corner. They are twined together in a tangle of limbs, blotches of hair, bed-clothes in a snarl. You watch as your hands place the candle on a stool by the door and reach across to the man, who, suddenly aware of the presence of your body in the low room, filling it with bulk and swiftness, turns from the girl’s shut face and faces yours, as your huge hands grab his shoulders as if they were chunks of mutton and yank him away from the girl’s clinging legs. The little man is hefted into the air, and the girl screams. He groans helplessly and is pitched across the room against the wall. Your left hand grabs his throat, lifts him to a standing position, and your right hand, balled into a fist, crashes into his face. Your hand releases his throat and lets his body collapse on the floor, a marionette with its strings cut, where he moans and spits in pain and fear. When your gaze turns back to the girl, the man scuttles for the door and clatters down the stairs to the hallway below, and, while the girl pleads for her life, he flees through the darkened house for the street, howling through his broken mouth like a dog kicked by a horse. Your right hand slaps the girl powerfully across the side of her small head, then in one continuous motion sweeps through the air to her wicker satchel next to the bed, draws it up and hurls it at her. Her wardrobe is wrenched open and its contents spilled onto the floor, then thrown at the sobbing girl on the bed.

Calmly, with dignity, your tall, broad, powerful body turns and leaves the room, descends the stairs, and somberly returns to your bedroom. A new candle is lit, and the bedding is removed and swiftly replaced with clean linen. Then the body slides into the cool, broad bed, covers itself against the chill of the late summer night, and soon falls into an even sleep.

The morning will come, and though many things will still be the same, some things will be different. The girl, Ellen, will be gone, on the streets of the city or else returned to her father’s home in the country. Your husband, his mouth tender for weeks, will be silent, but brooding and filled with the resentment that feeds on fear. He will go on behaving just as before, and in time he will forget this night’s fury and your immense power, and his fear will abate, and drunkenly one night he will climb onto your prone body to take his pleasure from it. People will still smile when they see you in the company of your diminutive husband, and it will irritate him, as always, and he will hurriedly walk several paces in front of you. You will remain childless.

But never again, for as long as you live, will you be indisposed. You will live in your body as if it were the perfect mate, the adoring father, the admiring handmaiden, and the devoted child of your devotions. You will live in your body as if it were your own.

The Child Screams and Looks Back at You

When your child shows the first signs of illness—fever, lassitude, aching joints and muscles—you fear that he is dying. You may not admit it to anyone, but the sight of your child lying flushed and feverish in bed becomes for an instant the sight of your child in his coffin. The nature of reality shifts, and it’s suddenly not clear to you whether you are beginning to dream or are waking from a dream, for you watch the child’s breath stutter and stop, you cry out and then struggle to blow life back into the tiny, inert body lying below you. Or you see the child heave himself into convulsions, thrash wildly in the bed and utter hoarse, incoherent noises, as if he were possessed by a demon, and horrified, helpless, you back to the door, hands to mouth, crying, “Stop, stop, please, oh, God, please stop!” Or, suddenly, the bed is sopped with blood pouring from the child’s body, blood seeping into the mattress, over the sheets through the child’s tangled pajamas, and the child whitens, stares up pitifully and without understanding, for there is no wound to blame, there is only this blood emptying out of his body, and you cannot stanch its flow, but must stand there and watch your child’s miraculous, mysterious life disappear before you. For that is the key that unlocks these awful visions—your child’s being simply alive is both miracle and mystery, and therefore it seems both natural and understandable that he should be dead.

Marcelle called her boys from the kitchen to hurry and get dressed for school. One of these mornings she was not going to keep after them like this, and they would all be late for school, and she would not write a note to the teacher to explain anything, she didn’t give a damn if the teacher kept them after school, because it would teach them a lesson once and for all, and that lesson was when she woke them in the morning they had to hurry and get dressed and make their beds and get the hell out to the kitchen and eat their breakfasts and brush their teeth and get the hell out the door to school so she could get dressed and eat her breakfast and go to work. There were four of them, the four sons of Marcelle and Richard Chagnon. Joel was the oldest at twelve, and after him, separated by little more than nine months, came Raymond, Maurice, and Charles. The father had moved out, had been thrown out of the apartment by Marcelle’s younger brother, Steve, and one of Steve’s friends nearly nine years ago, when the youngest, Charles, was still an infant, and though for several years Richard tried to convince Marcelle that she should let him move back in with them and let him be her husband and the father of his four sons again, she had never allowed it, for his way of being a husband and father was to get drunk and beat her and the older boys and then to wake ashamed and beg their forgiveness. For years she had forgiven him, because to her when you forgive someone you make it possible for that person to change, and the boys also forgave him—they were, after all, her sons, too, and she had taught them, in their dealings with each other, to forgive. If you don’t forgive someone who has hurt you, he can’t change into a new person, she told them. He is stuck in his life with you at the point where he hurt you. But her husband and their father, Richard, after five years of it, had come to seem incapable of using their forgiveness in any way that allowed him to stop hurting them, so finally one night she sent her oldest boy, Joel, down the dark stairs to the street, down the street to the tenements where her brother, Steve, lived with his girlfriend, and Joel found Steve sitting at the kitchen table drinking beer with a friend and said to him, “Come and keep my daddy from hitting my mommy!” That night marked the end of Marcelle’s period of forgiveness, for she had permitted outsiders, her brother and his friend, to see how badly her husband, Richard, behaved. By that act she had ceased to protect her husband, and you cannot forgive someone you will not protect. Richard never perceived and understood that shift. If you don’t know what you’ve got when you’ve got it, you won’t know what you’ve lost when you’ve lost it. Marcelle was Catholic, and even though she was not a diligent Catholic, she was a loyal one, and she never remarried, which is not to say that over the years she did not now and again fall in love, once even with a married man, only briefly, however, until she became strong enough to reveal her affair to Father Brautigan, after which she broke off with the man, to the relief of her sons, for they had not liked the way he came sneaking around at odd hours to see their mother and talked with her in hushed tones in the kitchen until very late, when the lights went off, and an hour or two later he left. When in the morning the children got up and came out to the kitchen for breakfast, they talked in low voices, as if the married man were still in the apartment and asleep in their mother’s bed, and she had deep circles under her eyes and stirred her coffee slowly and looked out the window and now and then quietly reminded them to hurry or they’d be late for school. They were more comfortable when she was hollering at them, standing at the door to their bedroom, her hands on her hips, her dressing gown flapping open as she whirled and stomped back to the kitchen, embarrassing her slightly, for beneath her dressing gown she wore men’s long underwear, so that, by the time they got out to the kitchen themselves, her dressing gown had been pulled back tightly around her and tied at the waist, and all they could see of the long underwear beneath it was the top button at her throat, which she tried to cover casually with one hand while she set their breakfasts before them with the other. On this morning, however, only three of her sons appeared at the table, dressed for school, slumping grumpily into their chairs, for it was a gray, wintry day in early December, barely light outside. The oldest, Joel, had not come out with them, and she lost her temper, slammed three plates of scrambled eggs and toast down in front of the others, and fairly jogged back to the bedroom, stalked to the narrow bed by the wall where the boy slept, and yanked the covers away, to expose the boy, curled up on his side, eyes wide open, his face flushed and sweating, his hands clasped together as if in prayer. Horrified, she looked down at the gangly boy, and she saw him dead and quickly lay the covers back over him, gently straightening the blanket and top sheet. Then, slowly, she sat down on the edge of the bed and stroked his hot forehead, brushing his blond hair back, feeling beneath his jawbone as if for a pulse, touching his cheeks with the smooth backside of her cool hand. “Tell me how you feel, honey,” she said to the boy. He didn’t answer her. His tongue came out and touched his dry lips and went quickly back inside his mouth. “Don’t worry, honey,” she said, and she got up from the bed. “It’s probably the flu, that’s all. I’ll take your temperature and maybe call Doctor Wickshaw, and he’ll tell me what to do. If you’re too sick, I’ll stay home from the tannery today. All right?” she asked and took a tentative step away from the bed. “Okay,” the boy said weakly. The room was dark and cluttered with clothing and toys, model airplanes and boats, weapons, costumes, tools, hockey equipment, portable radios, photographs of athletes and singers, like the prop room of a small theater group. As she left the room, Marcelle stopped in the doorway and looked back. Huddled in his bed, the boy looked like one of the props, a ventriloquist’s dummy or a heap of clothes that, in this shadowy half-light, only resembled a human child for a second or two; then, looked at from a second angle, came clearly to be no more than an impatiently discarded costume.

Most people, when they call in a physician, deal with him as they would a priest. They say that what they want is a medical opinion, a professional medical man’s professional opinion, when what they really want is his blessing. Information is useful only insofar as it provides peace of mind, release from the horrifying visions of dead children, an end to this dream. Most physicians, like most priests, recognize the need and attempt to satisfy it. This story takes place in the early 1960s, in a small mill town in central New Hampshire, and it was especially true then and there that the physician responded before all other needs to the patient’s need for peace of mind, and only when that need had been met would he respond to the patient’s need for bodily health. In addition, because he usually knew all the members of the family and frequently treated them for injuries and diseases, he tended to regard an injured or ill person as part of an injured or ill family. Thus it gradually became the physician’s practice to minimize the danger or seriousness of a particular injury or illness, so that a broken bone was often called a probable sprain, until X rays proved otherwise, and a concussion was called, with a laugh, a bump on the head, until the symptoms—dizziness, nausea, sleepiness—persisted, and the bump on the head became a possible mild concussion, which eventually may have to be upgraded all the way to fractured skull. It was the same with diseases. A virus, the flu that’s going around, a low-grade intestinal infection, and so on, often came to be identified a week or two later as strep throat, bronchial pneumonia, dysentery, without necessarily stopping there. There was an obvious, if limited, use for this practice, because it soothed and calmed both the patient and the family members, which made it easier for the physician to make an accurate diagnosis and to secure the aid of the family members in providing treatment. It was worse than useless, however, when an over-optimistic diagnosis of a disease or injury led to the patient’s sudden, crazed descent into sickness, pain, paralysis, and death.

Doctor Wickshaw, a man in his middle forties, portly but in good physical condition, with horn-rimmed glasses and a Vandyke beard, told Marcelle that her son Joel probably had the flu, it was going around, half the school was out with it. “Keep him in bed a few days, and give him lots of liquids,” he instructed her after examining the boy. He made house calls, if the cry for help came during morning hours or if it was truly an emergency. Afternoons he was at his office, and evenings he made rounds at the Concord Hospital, twenty-five miles away. Marcelle asked what she should do about the fever, one hundred four degrees, and he told her to give the boy three aspirins now and two more every three or four hours. She saw the man to the door, and as he passed her in the narrow hallway he placed one hand on her rump, and he said to the tall, broad-shouldered woman, “How are things with you, Marcelle? I saw you walking home from the tannery the other day, and I said to myself, ‘Now that’s a woman who shouldn’t be alone in the world.’ ” He smiled into her bladelike face, the face of a large, powerful bird, and showed her his excellent teeth. His hand was still pressed against her rump, and they stood face-to-face, for she was as tall as he. She was not alone in the world, she reminded him, mentioning her four sons. The doctor’s hand slipped to her thigh. She did not move. “But you get lonely,” he told her. She had gray eyes, and her face was filled with fatigue, tiny lines that crossed her smooth, pale skin like the cracks in a ceramic jar that had broken long ago and had been glued back together again, as good as new, they say, and even stronger than before, but nevertheless fragile-looking now, and brittle, more likely to break a second time, than when it had not been broken at all. “Yes,” she said, “I get lonely,” and with both hands, she reached up to her temples and pushed her hair back, and holding on to the sides of her own head she leaned it forward and kissed the man for several seconds, pushing at him with her mouth, until he pulled away, red-faced, his hand at his side now, and moved self-consciously sideways toward the door. “I’ll come by tomorrow,” he said in a low voice. “To see how Joel’s doing.” She smiled slightly and nodded. “If he’s better,” she said, “I’ll be at work. But the door is always open.” From the doorway, he asked if she came home for lunch. “Yes,” she said, “when one of the boys is home sick, I do. Otherwise, no.” He said that he might be here then, and she said, “Fine,” and reached forward and closed the door on him.

Sometimes you dream that you are walking across a meadow beneath sunshine and a cloudless blue sky, hand in hand with your favorite child, and soon you notice that the meadow is sloping uphill slightly, and walking becomes somewhat more difficult, although it remains a pleasure, for you are with your favorite child, and he is beautiful and happy and confident that you will let nothing terrible happen to him. You cross the crest, a rounded, meandering ridge, and start downhill, walking faster and more easily. The sun is shining, and there are wildflowers all around you, and the grass is golden and drifting in long waves in the breeze. Soon you find that the hill is steeper than before, the slope is falling away beneath your feet, as if the earth were curving in on itself, so you dig in your heels and try to slow your descent. Your child looks up at you, and there is fear in his eyes, as he realizes he is falling away from you. “My hand!” you cry. “Hold tightly to my hand!” And you grasp the hand of the child, who has started to fly away from you, as if over the edge of a crevice, while you dig your heels deeper into the ground and grab with your free hand at the long grasses behind you. The child screams and looks back at you with a pitiful gaze, and suddenly he grows so heavy that his weight is pulling you free of the ground also. You feel your feet leave the ground, and your body falls forward and down, behind your child’s body, even though with one hand you still cling to the grasses. You weep, and you let go of your child’s hand. The child flies away.

That night the boy’s fever went higher. To one hundred five degrees, and Marcelle moved the younger boys into her own room, so that she could sleep in the bed next to the sick boy’s. She bathed him in cool water with washcloths, coaxed him into swallowing aspirin with orange juice, and sat on the edge of the bed next to his and watched him sleep, although she knew that he was not truly sleeping, he was merely lying there on his side, his legs out straight now, and breathing rapidly, like an injured dog, stunned and silently healing itself. But the boy was not healing himself, he was hourly growing worse. She could tell that. She tried to move him so that she could straighten the sheets, but when she touched him, he cried out in pain, as if his spine or neck were broken, and, frightened, she drew back from him. She wanted to call Doctor Wickshaw, and several times she got up and walked out to the kitchen where the telephone hung on the wall like a large black insect, and each time she stood for a few seconds before the instrument, remembered the doctor in the hallway and what she had let him promise her with his eyes, remembered then what he had told her about her son’s illness, and turned and walked back to the boy and tried again to cool him with damp cloths. Her three other sons slept peacefully through the night and knew nothing of what happened until morning came.