The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (20 page)

“Well… I loved her,” I said.

The woman raised one plucked eyebrow in disbelief. She smiled. “Sure, you did, honey,” she said, and she patted me on the arm. “Sure you did.” Then she let the smile drift off her face, turned, and walked away from me.

When someone you have loved dies, you accept the fact of her death, but then the person goes on living in your memory, dreams, and reveries. You have imaginary conversations with her, you see something striking and remind yourself to tell your loved one about it and then get brought up short by the fact of her death, and at night, in your sleep, the dead person visits you. With Sarah, none of that happened. When she was gone from my life, she was gone absolutely, as if she had never existed in the first place. It was only later, when I could think of her as dead and could come out and say it,
My friend, Sarah Cole, is dead,
that I was able to tell this story, for that is when she began to enter my memories, my dreams and reveries. In that way, I learned that I truly did love her. And now I have begun to grieve over her death, to wish her alive again, so that I can say to her the things I could not know or say when she was alive, when I did not know that I loved her.

8

The woman arrives at Ron’s apartment around eight. He hears her car with the broken muffler blat and rumble into the parking lot below, and he crosses quickly from the kitchen and peers out the living-room window and, as if through a telescope, watches her shove herself across the seat to the passenger’s side to get out of the car, then walk slowly in the dusky light toward the apartment building. It’s a warm evening, and she’s wearing her white Bermuda shorts, pink, sleeveless sweater, and shower sandals. Ron hates those clothes. He hates the way the shorts cut into her flesh at the crotch and thigh, hates the large, dark caves below her arms that get exposed by the sweater, hates the sucking noise made by the sandals.

Shortly, there is a soft knock at his door. He opens it, turns away, and crosses to the kitchen, where he turns back, lights a cigarette, and watches her. She closes the door. He offers her a drink, which she declines, and, somewhat formally, he invites her to sit down. She sits carefully on the sofa, in the middle, with her feet close together on the floor, as if being interviewed for a job. He comes around and sits in the easy chair, relaxed, one leg slung over the other at the knee, as if he were interviewing her for the job.

“Well,” he says, “you wanted to talk.”

“Yes. But now you’re mad at me. I can see that. I didn’t do anything, Ron.”

“I’m not mad at you.”

They are silent for a moment. Ron goes on smoking his cigarette.

Finally, she sighs and says, “You don’t want to see me anymore, do you?”

He waits a few seconds and answers, “Yes. That’s right.” Getting up from the chair, he walks to the silver-gray bicycle and stands before it, running a fingertip along the slender crossbar from the saddle to the chrome-plated handlebars.

“You’re a sonofabitch,” she says in a low voice. “You’re worse than my ex-husband.” Then she smiles meanly, almost sneers, and soon he realizes that she is telling him that she won’t leave. He’s stuck with her, she informs him with cold precision. “You think I’m just so much meat, and all you got to do is call up the butcher shop and cancel your order. Well, now you’re going to find out different. You
can’t
cancel your order. I’m not meat, I’m not one of your pretty little girlfriends who come running when you want them and go away when you get tired of them. I’m
different
! I got nothing to lose, Ron. Nothing. So you’re stuck with me, Ron.”

She sits back in the couch and crosses her legs at the ankles. “I think I
will
have that drink you offered.”

“Look, Sarah, it would be better if you go now.”

“No,” she says flatly. “You offered me a drink when I came in. Nothing’s changed since I’ve been here. Not for me and not for you. I’d like that drink you offered,” she says haughtily.

Ron turns away from the bicycle and takes a step toward her. His face has stiffened into a mask. “Enough is enough,” he says through clenched teeth. “I’ve given you enough.”

“Fix me a drink, will you, honey?” she says with a phony smile.

Ron orders her to leave.

She refuses.

He grabs her by the arm and yanks her to her feet.

She starts crying lightly. She stands there and looks up into his face and weeps, but she does not move toward the door, so he pushes her. She regains her balance and goes on weeping.

He stands back and places his fists on his hips and looks at her. “Go on, go on and leave, you ugly bitch,” he says to her, and as he says the words, as one by one they leave his mouth, she becomes the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. He says the words again, almost tenderly. “Leave, you ugly bitch.” Her hair is golden, her brown eyes deep and sad, her mouth full and affectionate, her tears the tears of love and loss, and her pleading, outstretched arms, her entire body, the arms and body of a devoted woman’s cruelly rejected love. A third time he says the words. “Leave me now, you disgusting, ugly bitch.” She is wrapped in an envelope of golden light, a warm, dense haze that she seems to have stepped into, as into a carriage. And then she is gone, and he is alone again.

He looks around the room, searching for her. Sitting down in the easy chair, he places his face in his hands. It’s not as if she has died; it’s as if he has killed her.

Assisted Living

Mother and son entered the restaurant talking, their statements overlapping, “I’m sorry, no, Teddy, it wasn’t like that at all,” she said, and he said, “The only way the two things make sense,
moral
sense, is if they’re cause and effect. The old man used you, Mom, he used you pure and simple.”

Caught at the door by everyone, they stopped talking, smiled, nodded good morning to Della behind the counter and the several customers they recognized. And looked hard into one another’s face.

“That’ll be enough out of you,” Emily said, and smiled. A joke.

Teddy touched his lips with an index finger, bowing to her authority. His joke. He towered over her, bulky as a bear in his camel hair coat and silk scarf.

Emily loved Teddy and was grateful to him but sometimes felt he should just let things go, or let her go. She poked her bladed nose and chin up at him like a fist. The woman was eighty-one, and the events were nearly a half century old—she didn’t even think they were interesting anymore, let alone connected. On her own she never would have connected them. Fine, if he wanted to worry over the distant past as if it explained his and her present, but he shouldn’t make her do it, too.

Teddy was very intelligent, though, and knew a lot more about the world and men—his father included—than she. He was a man himself, after all, and a college-educated professional, a pharmacist who owned his drugstore and the minimall that contained it. Teddy had moved his mother up here to New Hampshire barely a year ago from her house in Somerset, Massachusetts, where, after her divorce from Teddy’s father, Wayne, and after Teddy and his younger brother and sister finished their educations and married and raised children and even after their divorces and remarriages, she’d stayed on alone. She had grown old in that modest, suburban house, the cookie-cutter ranch that she first saw back in the fall of 1953, when it was freshly built, the paint barely dry, and the yard and neighborhood still a raw construction site.

She and Wayne had sat in the green Studebaker he liked so much and stared at the house from the unpaved street. She was behind the wheel, and he was in the passenger’s seat; they were peering out her open window. “It’s too small,” she said. “We’ll never fit.”

He reached over and wrapped her shoulders in his thick arm and smiled at the house as if appraising a villa. “Not to worry, m’dear. The place itself will grow, until we do fit.”

He was mostly right. A more than competent carpenter, Wayne that first year built a large screened porch off the kitchen and the following year added an el with a master bedroom and second bathroom. Emily and the kids planted grass and maple saplings and a boxwood hedge. Before long, the tract house had become a proper American home in the suburbs, the envy of the preceding generation of Americans and the desire of the one that followed. Then came the divorce from Wayne—because of his drinking and womanizing, and she was better off without him anyhow, everyone said so—and the kids left home for college, secretarial school, the military, and Emily’s sixties arrived and went, and she grew ever more alone, and her seventies passed, when most of her friends died. Until she turned eighty, and it became evident to Teddy, and to Emily, too, that, even though she was still relatively healthy and clearheaded, she could no longer manage basic household tasks. She had the early signs of Parkinson’s and what she said was a leaky heart and claimed to have had a stroke, although her own doctor doubted it: she seemed to have suffered no lasting effects from it, except an occasional loss of peripheral vision, and called it
my
stroke, not
a
stroke.

Of her three children, Teddy was the custodial child and the one, at least in his siblings’ eyes, with the money. His brother was still in the Army, a noncommissioned officer ready to retire, and his sister was an administrative assistant for a college dean. With their easy approval and Emily’s reluctant consent, Teddy had moved their mother to this town, his town, the neat, self-contained village in southern New Hampshire where he had settled with his newly begun second marriage a decade ago, and installed her in an efficiency apartment in an assisted-living facility. Teddy paid all her bills and let her use her small social security check for pin money. The facility offered nutritious, balanced meals in a dining hall on the first floor, regularly scheduled entertainment and recreation periods, laundry service, and housecleaning. And, as Teddy often reminded her, a comprehensive “life-care” health plan with a clinic and visiting physician right there on the premises. “If you broke your hip and needed round-the-clock medical care for months, you could stay right here at St. Hubert’s,” he said. “Down there in Somerset, all alone, you’d have to go straight into a nursing home.”

She agreed. Old age was dangerous, and assisted living looked like the best protection available.

Sometimes, however, the place seemed little more than an oversized boardinghouse filled with nearly mindless, disabled old people, a trio of cold-eyed nurses, and a cadre of bored, cigarette-smoking attendants who’d rather be working in a prison. It seemed those times a strange way to live, with nothing natural about it. Whenever Emily wondered what she was doing in such a place and how had she come to choose it, she recited back to herself the sequence of small, sharply determined steps that had brought her here, starting with her report to Teddy on the phone eighteen months ago that she could no longer lug home her week’s groceries and lived too far from a store that delivered and thus had begun to ride the bus downtown and back daily for her food.

She missed her ranch house in Somerset and her longtime independence and possibly her solitude and wanted them back. Or if not that, then at least to be free to complain about their absence. But she couldn’t even complain. “Consider the alternatives, Mom,” Teddy kept reminding her. “This is not just what’s best for you, it’s your only option. You really can’t live alone anymore.”

True enough, she supposed, and also true that in some ways it was a relief to let Teddy take control of her life and a luxury not to have to worry ever again about anything.

Except, unexpectedly, this—this what? This
mystery
, which had been nothing at all, a nonexistence in her life. Until this morning, until Teddy, driving her to the diner in his new Lincoln Towncar, created it. In all these years, Emily had not thought to put the two together—her husband Wayne’s car accident down in New Bedford and his sudden decision a few weeks later to sell the partially renovated Victorian house in New Hampshire and buy the barely finished ranch house down in Somerset, Massachusetts. In a matter of days, Wayne had uprooted Emily and their children and replanted them in a fly-by-night housing development a hundred miles to the south. At the time, the accident, which she knew only from Wayne’s account, seemed to have happened to someone other than her husband, to a total stranger, and not to her and her three kids. The move from New Hampshire to Somerset, however, seemed to have happened only to her and the kids, and not to Wayne.

“Look, the connections, Mom, are obvious,” Teddy said. With one hand he stirred nonfat creamer into his coffee and with the other set the empty plastic thimble neatly into the tray of unopened creamers. It was the occasion of their weekly breakfast at the Cascades Diner; a ritual marked and silently honored by the waitresses and the regulars. Teddy Holmes was a good son. A man nearly sixty years old, a local businessman with plenty of responsibilities and a second wife and grown family of his own, yet he still managed to find time once a week to take his elderly mother out for breakfast.

“Not obvious to me,” Emily said. “Not then, and not now, either.”

Della, their waitress, bellied up to the booth, pen poised and order pad out, and asked if they knew what they wanted.

“Yes!” Emily exclaimed and with helpful precision listed small grapefruit juice, two poached eggs medium-soft, toasted English muffin. “With
ba-con,
” she growled, expressing anticipated pleasure, and added, “Extra crispy, please,” and fluttered her eyelashes.

Della gave her a promissory wink and turned to her son, who ordered his usual scrambled eggs, bacon, and hash browns. Slowly he stirred his coffee. As if to reassure him, Emily rested her hand on his, and he ceased stirring, lifted his cup with his free hand, and took a sip.

“Sometimes I neglect how hard it was for you kids,” she said. “Before my divorce, even.”

Teddy’s father—her late ex-husband, as Emily referred to him—had been a willful man and charming, and in moving them he’d gone against everyone, especially the children, who, after months of anxious resistance, had finally settled into their third school and home in the seven years since Teddy started school. She remembered that Teddy more than the others had hated the move. And though she herself had truly resented living apart from her husband and raising their kids practically on her own, Emily hadn’t wanted to move, either. She loved that small New Hampshire town, the broad, tree-lined streets and large white homes, the grassy commons downtown, and the easy availability of roles that she could fill—church bake-sale chairperson, PTA vice president, Boy Scout mother, Girl Scout mother, member of the women’s auxiliary to the fire department, to the VFW, the Elks. Emily liked small-town organizations and associations—she was the type of woman who is happiest when presented with a clear-cut role in life, when
chosen
. And she liked the house they’d bought there, a long-neglected, four-bedroom Victorian. After stripping half its walls and woodwork of generations of wallpaper and paint, she had begun to glimpse unexpected possibilities of gentility.

But down in Massachusetts, Wayne told her, they’d finally be living close to where his work was located, and he could sleep in his own bed on weeknights for a change. It wasn’t his fault that he resided with his wife and kids only on weekends. He hated it as much as they did. He particularly hated the long drives home on Friday night and back on Sunday. Wayne was a shipyard welder, and he’d followed the construction of the first generation of nuclear submarines south along the New England coast from Portland, Maine, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he’d worked on the
Thresher
, which so famously sank. From there he’d transferred to Charlestown, Massachusetts, and, after six months, signed on in New Bedford. Which was where the accident happened.

“Times like this,” Teddy said, “I wish the old man was still around. So I could ask him.”

“Ask him what?”

“About the accident. The move. All of it.”

“It wouldn’t matter,” she said. “Your father lied about everything when he was alive, and he’d lie about it dead, too. Lie, lie, lie. The worst thing, Teddy, is he lied to me knowing all the while it would only make me lie unintentionally to you kids.” She gave him a soulful, hurt look.

Teddy feigned sympathy and inwardly smiled. Recently, to his mild surprise, he’d found his mother’s turns of phrase amusing, and sometimes on the phone with his brother or sister he had tried to share his pleasure by repeating some typically disjointed exchange with her. They, however, were not amused. Since high school they had deliberately lived as far from New England and their shared past as possible; both claimed that their mother’s characteristic turns of phrase were merely flags for her self-absorption, her shallow, craven need for attention, and her self-serving ignorance. Teddy’s siblings, when younger and between marriages, had described their childhoods at length and in detail to psychotherapists and had separately concluded that their mother was a fully flowered narcissist. To them, therefore, whatever she unintentionally revealed of herself solely concerned her present, not their past. They weren’t interested.

Teddy, however, was. His mother was his very close neighbor now, and he’d seen much more of her in the last year alone than any of them had in the previous forty, and he was freshly revising many of his earlier assumptions about her character. Leading him to revise certain assumptions about his childhood and youth, and to rethink his memories of his father.

“It wouldn’t matter what he told you, dead or alive, he’d still be lying,” she repeated. “No matter what he described, the point would be to keep me from finding out about some woman he was seeing at the time. There would be one woman for the car accident in New Bedford, and another for the move to Somerset. In those days, women and me not finding out about them are what connected everything in that man’s life.”

Teddy shook his head no, and waited for Della to set their breakfast platters in front of them. Emily stared eagerly at her food, checked out his plate as if comparing portions, and commenced eating. There was more to it than that, he was certain. For one thing, it was the same woman, not two different women, who lurked behind the accident and who was also somehow the direct cause of their having to leave New Hampshire. He was sure of it.

He hadn’t reflected on these memories in decades. All through his adolescence and even after college, Teddy remembered that long-ago summer and fall only in shifting pieces shaded and half-hidden behind a gauze curtain. He had a specific memory of running from the kitchen of their house in New Hampshire to the woods. Of hiding in the woods until after dark, while the family and even some of their neighbors hollered his name and searched for him. Of the peepers shrieking in the dark; of the smell of damp earth and leaves rotting underfoot. He had no memory of being found or of returning to the house or of the actual move to Somerset. There was no sequence to his memories, no clear chronology, no
sense
to them. His father came home to New Hampshire from New Bedford late one Friday night as usual, and that Sunday morning, whistling and full of good cheer, griddled pancakes for the three children, and when their mother arrived at the table, still in her nightdress and bathrobe, her eyes red and puffy from crying, he announced to the three that they were moving to a new house, a terrific, brand-new house down in Massachusetts, and he would be coming home from work every night, like other daddies did. Teddy remembered his father saying that he hated lawyers, every damned one of them, even his own lawyer. His mother wept; Teddy heard her from his bedroom in the new house, the room that he shared now with both his brother and sister, who were asleep, he was sure, and couldn’t hear their mother crying first in the living room, then in the kitchen, then outside on the back steps, calling,
Wayne, Wayne, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean what I said!
as his father strode angrily into the suburban night. He wanted to wake his brother and sister, but decided not to. He remembered when he walked into his parents’ bedroom on a snowy Sunday morning and said to them,
Who’s Brenda? What’re you guys talking about?
his father had looked at him crossly and said,
Teddy, for Christ’s sake, get lost!
His father couldn’t drive them in his car anywhere anymore. The men that he worked with picked him up on Sunday nights and drove him to New Bedford two hours away and brought him home again on Friday nights late. The family had moved to Massachusetts, but his father still came home only on weekends. He came home drunk. He told them that one of these days he’d be working in the Charlestown Navy Yard again, which was close to Somerset, and then he’d come home every night in time for supper.
Won’t that be great, kids?
His mother, who was driving the Studebaker in the middle of the week one afternoon, said,
Daddy was in an accident and has lost his driver’s license for a year. It upsets him to talk about, so don’t notice it in front of him, okay?