The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (21 page)

For years, like an archaeologist attempting to reassemble a piece of pottery from a handful of shards, he’d turned the memories over in his mind, trying to construct a coherent narrative, a story with a beginning, middle, and end that would explain the intensity of emotion that he associated with that brief period of his life. He finally gave it up. It was adolescence, that’s all. These emotions, like his brother’s and sister’s overall feelings toward their mother, were displaced from some other, still unexamined part of his life. There was no story here.

Until this morning, when he picked up his mother at St. Hubert’s Assisted Living Facility. The Home, she insisted on calling it. She hitched herself into the passenger seat and with her usual twists and grunts had so much difficulty fastening the seat belt that at last he had to lean over and snap it for her himself. She responded with a sincere, almost blissful smile. Her great pleasure was in being attended to, and it didn’t matter who it came from or whether the attention was large or small: the degree of pleasure it gave was the same. Then she said, “I dreamed about the house in Somerset last night. It was lucky, you know, that Wayne made me put it in my name.”

Teddy said, “He did what?”

In her dream, she rode the bus home from Teddy’s drugstore with a bag of groceries, and after a long walk, when she felt utterly lost in a strange city, she finally found the house, but when she tried to open the door it was locked. Then she noticed a for sale sign on the front lawn, which frightened her. “I said to myself, ‘It’s lucky Wayne made me put the house in my name,’ and then woke up, feeling very relieved that he’d done that. What do you think that means?”she asked. She knew Teddy enjoyed explaining people’s dreams, but she took his interpretations no more seriously than she took her daily horoscope in the newspaper. Still, it flattered Teddy to be asked, and they were
her
dreams, after all, and her horoscope, so the form of the inquiry was familiar and pleasing to them both.

“That you were relieved?”

“I
know
why I was relieved. He put the house in my name is why. No, the other.”

“But that’s the most intriguing detail in the dream.”

“It wasn’t just in the dream, Teddy. It was real.”

“What was?”

“Your father putting the house in my name.”

Teddy looked across at her, puzzled and suddenly troubled. “Why the hell would Dad do that? In reality, I mean. I can understand in a dream why, but not in reality.”

Wayne hadn’t even attended the closing at the bank, she told him. She’d gone alone. He was too busy, had to work that day, something. She couldn’t remember. Anyhow, since it was going to be in her name—the deed, the mortgage, the insurance, everything—there actually was no reason for him to go. The car, too, she said, his Studebaker: he’d transferred title of the car to her a few weeks before they passed papers on the house. That’s why it was so much easier later, she explained, when they got divorced, for her to hold on to the house and car. And probably why he felt he didn’t owe her any alimony, either, and didn’t have the guilt of a normal man who wasn’t making his child support payments on time.

“So, yes, I guess there was a negative side to it, as well as a positive,” she said. “Maybe I wasn’t so lucky after all.”

“There’s only one reason he’d sign everything over to you,” Teddy announced.

“The paperwork,” she said quickly. “Your father always hated paperwork. I was the one who paid the bills and corresponded, you know.”

“He must’ve been on the losing end of a lawsuit.”

“No, no. He was just too busy, and he hated paperwork, that’s all. Do you mind if I have some heat?” she asked. “Would you turn the heater on?”

Teddy ignored her. He was remembering his father’s car accident, realizing for the first time that it had occurred close to the time of their move from New Hampshire south to Somerset, the one event in his childhood that Teddy associated with the beginning of disruption, loss, and fear: he believed that, for him, there began the end of family life. Up to that point, Teddy hadn’t noticed the rapidly widening gap between other people’s family lives and his. But from then on, from the autumn of his thirteenth year, the gap defined him.

Teddy’s memories of his father’s accident were as sketchy and unreliable as his memories of the move to Somerset, and his mother was as reluctant to talk about both events now as she had been back when they occurred. Teddy, however, was not in the slightest reluctant to reconstruct the events of that summer and fall of 1953 and then to substitute for his tattered memory of the original his closely woven reconstruction.

It was a warm June weeknight on the south shore of Cape Cod. Wayne Holmes and his lady friend were out for the evening in Wayne’s green Studebaker, heading down Route 28 from a roadhouse in Hyannis to a tavern in Falmouth. As they entered the village proper, Wayne reached to tune the car radio, trying to pick up Vaughn Monroe and his orchestra, broadcast live from the Norumbega Ballroom all that week. He took his eyes off the road for a second, when a child, a boy maybe ten years old or possibly as old as Teddy, stepped between two parked cars, and Wayne’s right front fender caught the boy and tossed him into the air. There were screams, shouts, tires squealing—and then an awful silence, except for Vaughn Monroe’s theme song, “Racing with the Moon.”

The boy was killed instantly. The middle son of a Portuguese fisherman, he was on his way home from the butcher shop where he worked part-time as a delivery boy. Wayne’s lady friend had slammed her head against the dashboard, causing a concussion and possible fracture, and her neck and back had been seriously injured by whiplash, but she would in time recover from her injuries completely. Wayne was drunk. He could walk and talk coherently, but he had consumed half a dozen Manhattans in the Hyannis roadhouse and a bottle of beer on the drive to Falmouth. Arrested at the scene, he was thrown into jail for the night and released the next morning on bail posted by his union shop steward at the New Bedford shipyard.

Teddy didn’t know the name of his father’s lady friend, but he thought it might be Brenda. To the police, to his insurance company’s lawyers, to the lawyer for the parents of the dead boy, and to the judge and jury, Wayne denied that he had been drinking—the police at the scene were wrong, that’s all. There were no breath tests then, no proof, and Brenda, perjuring herself, backed him up. The charge of driving-while-intoxicated was dropped, and because the boy had stepped into moving traffic at midblock, Wayne was found not responsible for his death, which should have ended the case.

Except that Wayne reneged on his promise to divorce Emily and marry Brenda. He didn’t even visit Brenda in the hospital to comfort her or to thank her for testifying falsely on his behalf. The accident had frightened Wayne deep in his bones and made him decide temporarily to give up drinking and womanizing. Besides, he’d lost his driver’s license for a year, an automatic penalty when the driver of a moving vehicle causes a fatality, and his car insurance policy had been canceled, and he was going to need the help of his wife and friends just to get back and forth between work in Massachusetts and home in New Hampshire. It was time to end the affair.

Brenda disagreed. She loved him and had lied for him at considerable risk to herself and did not expect to be repaid with abandonment and indifference. She had spent three weeks in the hospital and now suffered recurrent migraines, serious and continuing back and neck pain, and so on, a long list of complaints and deprivations that he would have to pay for. It was going to cost him tens of thousands of dollars. She promised she’d strip him of everything he owned.

Brenda revealed her intentions to Wayne in New Hampshire one Saturday afternoon in July. He was in the living room half asleep on the sofa, listening to a Red Sox game on the radio, when the phone rang. Emily, passing through the room at that moment, answered it, handed the receiver to him, and said, “It’s a woman for you.” She then went into the kitchen and sat at the window and stared dry-eyed out at her children playing in the yard.

A few moments later, Wayne entered the kitchen and stood behind her. He placed his heavy, wide hands on her shoulders and said, “We’re going to have to sell the house and move. Out of state. And I’ve got to put the car in your name, along with everything else I own or we own jointly. It’s because of the accident, Emily. The parents of the kid, they’re suing me for everything I own.”

Emily nodded, accepting his explanation, but not believing it, either. The truth, whatever it was, would wreck her life and the lives of her children. The truth would have to wait.

“Teddy, please,” Emily said, “may I have the heat turned up? It’s quite cool in here.”

“Sorry,” he said and flicked the heater switch and set the thermostat at seventy-two degrees. The big, gray Lincoln still impressed Teddy, even after owning it for a year, and he took particular pleasure in operating its onboard electronic systems. Emily, too, liked the car and whenever she was a passenger, for the duration of the ride, ran her fingertips lovingly along the seams of the soft leather upholstery. She’d never noticed the habit, but her son had. So far he’d not mentioned it to her, because he knew that if he brought her pleasure to her attention, she would abandon it.

Emily looked out the car window at the large, white houses crowding the broad, tree-lined street. “It wasn’t the way you say, Teddy. The accident and all. That had nothing to do with our decision to move to Somerset. And there was never anyone he promised to marry. Your father didn’t want a divorce from me, not even later. I was the one who wanted it. Well, not really,” she said. “I did it because of you kids.”

“
Us
? You’ve got to be kidding, Mom.”

“You know what I mean, Teddy. Please, honey, just leave me alone. This is all water under the dam.” She paused, and they drove on in silence. “We don’t have to rehash everything these many years later, do we?” she asked him.

“I just want to know the truth,” he answered as he pulled the car into the parking lot of the diner.

“The truth about what?”

“The connections. Cause and effect. I need to know if the old man moved us out of our house and home for a reason, no matter how tawdry and selfish. Or was it just on a whim? If it
was
for a reason, if the one thing, his accident and so forth, caused the other, then I guess I can forgive him. But if there wasn’t any reason, well…” He shut off the engine and opened his door. “I think that’s what’s terrified me for years, Mom. Since it happened, actually, I’ve been afraid that he did it on a whim. That he did it, not because he thought he
had
to, but because he
wanted
to! If that turns out the case, I don’t think I’ll spit on his grave, exactly… But you, of all people, should know how I’d feel. I’d sure
want
to spit on his grave!” He saw that his mother was struggling with her seat belt again, and he reached over and released her.

She smiled up at him, as if she hadn’t heard a word he’d said. “They don’t make these things for old people, do they?”

He didn’t answer. They walked side by side to the entrance of the diner, and once again he stated his need to believe that his father had torn the family from their beloved home to protect himself from the wrath of a spurned woman.

Emily said, as they came through the door, “I’m sorry, no, Teddy, it wasn’t like that at all.”

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.”

Now they were leaving. While Teddy paid the check at the cash register, Emily walked alone to the car. The conversation had left her sadder than she could remember feeling in years. Since her divorce, really. And even then she hadn’t felt this sad. She hadn’t had the time back then to take the measure of her sadness, not with so much happening, so many crises large and small. Her heart in her chest felt changed by the sadness from flesh to stone, fossilized.

Why, she asked herself, was Teddy so obsessed and troubled by the move away from New Hampshire those many long years ago? He had settled in a town very like the town they’d been forced to leave and had made himself a full new life here, almost as if he’d resided and worked here since childhood. He had even taken to calling it his hometown. And he’d bought a house that was in many ways a replica of the Victorian house they’d had to sell for the tacky little ranch in Somerset. Teddy had repaired the breach in
his
life.

Emily, though, had nothing that was as beautiful and strong and in its proper place as Teddy’s hometown and house. And she never would. She had nothing that could repair or replace the life that her husband had stolen from her that long-ago summer when he decided her life and their children’s were actually his. The children, in time, had taken their lives back, all three of them, especially Teddy. But she had gone on without hers for so long that she had nearly forgotten it ever existed at all—until this morning, when Teddy started questioning her. Now she saw that all she had for a life was the Home, St. Hubert’s Assisted Living Facility. And she knew that the Home wasn’t really hers, either. It was Teddy’s, not hers. He was doing to her what his father had done to him, only softly and slowly, and the person he was lying to was himself.

Teddy came up behind her and opened the car door for her. When she spoke, she turned away, so he wouldn’t see her tears. “You’re right, Teddy. About your father. And that woman, Brenda something. It was like you said, your father didn’t do it on a whim, Teddy. He didn’t. He had his reasons.”

He looked at her now and saw that she was crying. “Oh, Mom, I’m sorry,” he said, but he knew instantly that it was too late. He had done a thing that could not be undone.

She patted his hand. “You’re a good boy, Teddy,” she said. “A good boy.”

The Neighbor

The idea was to watch his gaunt wife, seated on the sulky, drive the chocolate-colored mare down the dirt road to the general store, to make a small purchase there, and return. He was a black man in his fifties, she a white woman the same age, his children (from a previous marriage) were black, her children (also from a previous marriage) were white. Everyone else in town was white, also. Many of them had never seen a black man before this one. That’s probably why he had this idea about the sulky and his wife and the store.

On the other hand, he may have had it because he and his wife and all their children were incompetent and, in various ways, a little mad. The madness had got them kicked out of the city, but here, after three years in a small farm-community north of the city, it was the incompetence that had angered the people around them. Country people can forgive madness, but a week ago, the family’s one immediate neighbor, a dour young man in his late twenties, walked out his back door and saw for the tenth time one of their chickens scratching in his pathway to the woodpile. He rushed back into his house and, returning with an Army .45 handgun, fired eight bullets into the chicken, making a feathered, bloody mess of it.

That same night, the black man with his two teenage daughters and his two teenage stepsons and his wife drove to the racetrack and bought for one hundred dollars an unclaimed trotter, an eighteen-year-old mare named Jenny Lind. They rented a van and lugged her home and put her in the barn with the goats, sheep, chickens, and the two Jersey heifers. The farm, the huge barn, the animals—except for the mare—were all part of an earlier idea, the idea of living off the land. But the climate had proved harsh, the ground stony and in hills, the neighbors more or less uncooperative—and there was that incompetence.

It was the end of summer, and every morning as the sun rose the black man got up and before his breakfast walked the mare along the side of the dirt road in the low, cold mist. Behind him, in layers, were the brown meadow and the clumpy rows of gold and ruby-colored elm trees and the dark hills and the mist-dimmed orange sun. Every morning he paraded Jenny Lind the length of the route he had planned for his wife and the sulky—his shining arm raised to the bridle, his face proudly looking straight ahead of him as he walked past his neighbor’s house, his mind reeling with delight as he imagined his wife in her frail-wheeled sulky riding to the store, where she would buy him some pipe tobacco and some salt for the table, a small package to be wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, and then, after she returned along the curving dirt road to the house, one of her sons or one of his daughters would run out and hold the reins for her and help her step graciously down. In that way, the horse received its daily exercise—for no one in the family knew how to ride, because, as the father pointed out to them, no one in the family had yet been to a riding academy, and, besides, Jenny Lind was a trotter.

They searched all over the state for a sulky they could afford, but no one would sell it to them. Finally, he phoned the man at the racetrack who had sold them the horse and learned of a good, used sulky for sale in a town in the far southwest corner of the state. That morning, after exercising the mare, he and his wife got into the pickup truck and drove off to see about the used sulky.

All day long, the two teenage sons and the two teenage daughters rode the mare bareback up and down the dirt road, galloping past the neighbor’s house, braking to a theatrical stop at the general store, and galloping back again. A hundred times they rode the old horse full-speed along the half-mile route. Silvery waves of sweat covered her heaving sides and neck, and her large, watery eyes bulged from the exertion, and late in the afternoon, as the sun was drifting down behind the pines in back of the house, the mare suddenly veered off the road and collapsed on the front lawn of the neighbor’s house and died there. The boy who was riding her was able to leap free of the collapsing bulk, and astonished, terrified, he and his brother and stepsisters ran for their own house and hid in a loft over the barn, where, eating sandwiches and listening to a transistor radio, they awaited the return of their parents.

The neighbor stood in his living room and, as darkness came on, stared unbelieving at the dead horse on his lawn. Finally, when it was completely dark and he couldn’t see it anymore, he walked onto his front porch and sat on the glider and waited for the black man and his wife to come home.

Around ten o’clock, he heard their pickup clattering along the road. The truck stopped beside the enormous bulk of the horse. With the pale light from the truck splashed across its dark body, the animal seemed of gigantic proportions, a huge equestrian monument pulled down by vandals. The neighbor left his porch and walked down to where the horse lay. The black man and his white wife had got out of their truck and were sitting on the ground, stroking the mare’s forehead.

The neighbor was a young man, and while a dead animal was nothing new to him, the sight of a grown man weeping and a woman sitting next to him, also weeping, both of them slowly stroking the cold nose of a horse ridden to death—that was something he’d never seen before. He patted the woman and the man on their heads, and in a low voice told them how the horse had died. He was able to tell it without judging the children who had killed the animal.

Then he suggested that they go on to their own house, and he would take a chain and, with his tractor, would drag the carcass across the road from his lawn to their meadow, where tomorrow they could bury it by digging a pit next to it. Close enough, he told them, so that all they had to do was shove the carcass with a tractor or a pickup truck and it would drop in. They quietly thanked him and got up and climbed back into their truck and drove to their own house.