The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (25 page)

“You will too,” I said.

“Right.”

We shook hands, and I left.

Plains of Abraham

Had he known everything then that he’d know later, Vann still would have called it a coincidence, nothing more. His was a compact, layered mind with only a few compartments connected. He had been married three times and was unmarried now, and this morning he couldn’t shake Irene, his second wife, from his mind. He shaved and dressed for work, tightened the covers, and slid the bed back under the sofa, all the while swatting at thoughts of Irene, the force of his swipes banging doors and walls, making him feel clumsy and off-balance.
Thinking about problems only aggravates problems,
but the way these random scraps of memory, emotion, and reflection flew at him—even now, four years after the divorce from Irene, with the lump of a whole third marriage and divorce in between—was strange. Vann and Irene had not seen or spoken to each other in person once in those years.

It was a coincidence, that’s all, and would have been one even if Vann
had
known that on this particular morning, a Wednesday in November, Irene, who was forty-eight years old and close to a hundred pounds overweight and suffering from severe coronary disease, who normally would herself be getting ready for work, was instead being prepared at Saranac Lake General Hospital for open-heart surgery. The procedure, to be performed by the highly regarded vascular surgeon, Dr. Carl Ransome, was to be a multiple bypass. It was a dangerous, although not an uncommon operation, even up here in the north-country, and had Irene not collapsed in pain two days earlier while grocery-shopping at the Grand Union in Lake Placid with her daughter Frances, the procedure would have been put off until she had lost a considerable part of her excess weight. Too late for that now.

“Jesus,” Dr. Ransome had said to the night nurse, after visiting Irene in her room for the first time, “this’ll be like flaying a goddamned whale.” The nurse winced and looked away, and the young surgeon strode whistling down the corridor.

Vann stirred a cup of instant coffee and wondered if he ever crowded Irene’s mornings the way she did his. Probably not. Irene was tougher than he, a big-bellied joker who had seemed nothing but relieved when he left her, although he himself had been almost surprised by his departure, as if she had tricked him into it.

“Good riddance,” she liked saying to Frances, her daughter. “Never marry a construction man, doll baby. They’re hound dogs with hardhats,” she said.

Vann wasn’t quite that bad. He was one of those men who protect themselves by dividing themselves. He regarded love and work as opposites—he loved to work but had to work at love. Yet, with Irene, what Vann thought of as love had come easy, at least at first. When they married, Irene and Vann had been in their mid-thirties, lonely, and still shaky from the aftershocks of belligerent first divorces, and for a few years they had managed to meet each other’s needs almost without trying. Vann was a small man, wiry, with muscles like doorknobs, and back then he had liked Irene’s size, her soft amplitude. He had regarded her as a large woman, not fat. And she had liked and admired his crisp, intense precision, his pale crew-cut hair, his tight smile.

To please her, and to suit himself, too, he had come in off the road and for a while kept his tools in the trunk of his car and worked locally. He started his own one-man plumbing and heating business, limited mostly to small repairs and renovations, operating out of an office and shop that he built into the basement of Irene’s house in Lake Placid. Frances, who was barely a teenager then, had resented Vann’s sudden, large, hard presence in her mother’s life and home and stayed away at boarding school, except for holidays, which was fine by Vann, especially since Irene’s first husband was paying the tuition.

Irene quit her job at the real estate office and kept Vann’s books. But after four barely break-even and two losing years in a row, his credit at the bank ran out, and the business collapsed, and Vann went on the road again. Soon he saw his needs differently. He guessed Irene saw her needs differently then, too. He knew he had disappointed her. He allowed himself a couple of short-term dalliances, and she found out about one. He told her about one other. He drank a lot, maybe too much, and there were some dalliances he barely remembered. Those he kept to himself. A year later, they were divorced.

Vann had known from the moment he and Irene first spoke of marriage that if he failed at this, his second shot at romance and domestic bliss, he would have to revise his whole view of life with women. This was going to be his second and probably last chance to get love and marriage right. Vann knew that much. You can’t make a fresh start on anything in life three times. By then, if a man gets divorced and still goes on marrying, he’s chasing something other than romance and domestic life, he’s after something strictly private. Vann had gone on anyhow. And now, in spite of the third divorce, or perhaps because of it, whenever he told himself the story of his life, the significance of his second marriage remained a mystery to him and a persistent irritant. Vann remembered his ten years with Irene the way men remember their war years: the chapter in the story of his life so far that was both luminous and threatening and loomed way too large to ignore.

He picked up his coffee cup and went outside and stood on the rickety, tilted porch of the cottage, where he deliberately studied the smear of pink in the eastern sky and the rippling ribbons of light on the small, manmade lake in front of him.
Lake Flower. Weird name for a lake.
He decided that it was going to be a fine day. Which pleased him. He’d scheduled the ductwork test for today and did not want to run it in a nasty, bone-chilling, autumn rain. Vann was field superintendent for Sam Guy, the mechanical contractor out of Lake Placid, on the addition to the Saranac Lake General Hospital. Tomorrow, if today’s test went smoothly—he had no reason to think it wouldn’t—he’d have the heat turned on in the new wing. After that they’d be working comfortably inside.

It was still dark—dark, and cold, a few degrees below freezing— when he got into his truck and drove from the Harbor Hill Cottages on Lake Flower out to the hospital, and despite his studied attempts to block her out, here came Irene again. He remembered how they used to sit around the supper table and laugh together. She had a loose, large face and no restrictions on distorting it to imitate fools and stupid people. Her tongue was rough as a wood rasp, and she had a particular dislike of Sam Guy, who, the day after Vann’s business folded, had hired him and sent him back on the road. “That man needs you because without you he can’t pour pee from a boot,” she’d declare, and she’d yank one of her own boots off and hold it over her head and peer up into it quizzically.

Vann had never known a woman that funny. Toward the end, however, she had started turning her humor on him, and from then on there was no more laughing at Irene’s comical faces and surprising words. His only recourse had been to slam the door behind him, while she shouted, “G’wan, go! Good riddance to bad rubbish!”

He switchbacked along tree-lined streets, crossing the ridge west of the narrow lakeside strip of hotels, motels, stores, and restaurants, and entered a neighborhood of small wood-frame houses and duplexes. The pale light from his headlights bounced off frost that clung like a skin to yellowed lawns, glassed-in porches, and steeply pitched rooftops. Gray strands of smoke floated from chimneys, and kitchen lights shone from windows.
Jesus, family life.
Which, despite all, Vann still thought of as normal life.
And a proper breakfast.
Vann could almost smell eggs and bacon frying. Moms, dads, and kids cranking up their day together: he could hear their cheerful, sleepy voices.

Vann had lived that sort of morning, but not for nearly fifteen years now; and he missed it. Who wouldn’t? Way back in the beginning, up in Plattsburgh, with his own mom and dad, he’d been one of the kids at the table; then later, for a few years, with his first wife, Evelyn, and the boys, he had been the dad. But family life had slipped from his grasp without his having noticed, as if, closing his eyes to drink from a spring, he’d lost a handful of clear water and was unable afterwards to imagine a way to regain it. The spring must have dried up. A man can’t blame his hands, can he?

Instead, he’d learned to focus his thoughts on how, when he was in his twenties and married to Evelyn and the boys were young, he simply had not appreciated his good luck. That was all. Evelyn had remarried happily and wisely right after the divorce, and the boys, Neil and Charlie, raised more by their stepfather than by Vann, had turned into young men themselves—gone from him forever, or so it seemed. A postcard now and then was all, and the occasional embarrassed holiday phone call. Nothing, of course, from Evelyn—his child bride, as he referred to her—but that, especially as the years passed, was only as it should be.

The way he viewed it, Vann’s main sin in life had been not to have appreciated his good luck back when he had it. If he had, he probably would have behaved differently. His was a sin of omission, then. To reason that way seemed more practical to him and more dignified than to wallow in regret. It helped him look forward to the future. It had helped him marry Irene. And it had eased his divorce from Inger, his third wife.
The Norwegian
, was how he thought of her now.

At the variety store where Broadway turned onto Route 86, he picked up a
Daily Enterprise
and coffee to go and a fresh pack of Marlboros. He was driving one of Sam Guy’s company pickups, a spruce green three-quarter-ton Jimmy, brand-new. It had been assigned to him directly from the dealer, and though he liked to pretend, at least to himself, that the vehicle belonged to him and not his boss, Vann would not have said aloud that it was his. That wasn’t his style. He was forty-nine, too old to say he owned what he didn’t. And too honest.

Besides, he didn’t need to lie: he was making payments to the Buick dealer in Plattsburgh on a low-mileage, two-year-old, black Riviera that he’d bought last spring to celebrate his divorce from the Norwegian. She’d gotten sole ownership of the house he’d built for them in Keene Valley, but she was also stuck with the mortgage, which gave him some satisfaction. His monthly payments for the car had worked out to six dollars less than his monthly alimony checks, a coincidence Vann found oddly satisfying and slightly humorous, although, when he told people about it, no one else thought it funny or even interesting, which puzzled him.

The Norwegian had gotten his previous car, a rusted-out AMC Eagle, but she was welcome to that, too. The Riviera was loaded. A prestige car. It cheered Vann to be seen driving it, and he hoped that over the summer the Norwegian, who was a legal aide for the Adirondack Park Agency in Ray Brook, had accidentally spotted him in the Riviera once or twice. He didn’t particularly want to see her, but he sure hoped that she had seen him and had noted that Vann Moore, yes indeedy, was doing just fine, thanks.

Out on Route 86 a few miles west of town, he turned right at Lake Colby and pulled into the hospital parking lot, drove to the rear of the three-story brick building, and passed along the edge of the rutted field to the company trailer, where he parked next to a stack of steel pipe. From the outside, the new wing, a large cube designed to merge discreetly with the existing hospital building, appeared finished—walls, roof, and windows cemented solidly into place. Despite appearances, however, the structure was little more than a shell. The masons hadn’t started the interior walls yet, the plumbers hadn’t set any of the fixtures or run the aboveground water, vacuum, and air lines, and the electricians were still hanging overhead conduit. The painters hadn’t even hauled their trailer to the site.

The ductwork for the air-conditioning and heat was finished, though. Three days ahead of schedule. Vann was a good super. He’d risen in the ranks from journeyman pipe fitter to foreman to super. He’d run his own business and could read drawings and engineering specs, could do estimates for new work in Sam Guy’s office in Lake Placid when the weather turned bad and everyone else got laid off. And he was a good boss, respected and liked by his men. Sam Guy regarded Vann as his right hand and had no compunctions about saying so, and he paid him appropriately. To people who wondered about Vann’s way of life, and there were a few, Sam said that if Vann hadn’t been tagged over the years with alimony payments and hadn’t lost three houses, one to each wife, he’d be living well on what he earned as a super. He wouldn’t be renting furnished rooms and shabby, unused vacation cottages, following the work from town to town across the northcountry. To Vann, however, the opposite was true: if he hadn’t followed the work, he’d not have been divorced three times.

Inside the hospital, in the physicians’ scrub room, Dr. Ransome and his assistant this morning, Dr. Clark Rabideau, the resident cardiologist who was Irene’s regular physician, and Dr. Alan Wheelwright, the anesthesiologist, were discussing the incoming governor’s environmental policies while they slowly, methodically washed their hands and arms.

Their patient, Irene Moore, dozy with sedatives, her torso shaved from chin to crotch, was being wheeled on a gurney down the long, windowless, second-floor hallway from her room to the main operating room at the end. Her twenty-year-old daughter Frances sat alone by the window in Irene’s room, flipping through a copy of
Cosmopolitan
. Frances was a tall, big-hipped girl, a second-year student at Saint Lawrence University, planning to major in psychology. Her straight, slate-colored hair fell limply to her shoulders, and her square face was tight with anxiety.

With her mother unconscious, or nearly so, Frances felt suddenly, helplessly alone.
I’m over my head in this
, she said to herself,
way over
, and quickly turned the pages, one after the other.
What the hell am I supposed to be thinking about? What?

It was nearly daylight. In the northeast, the flattened sky over Whiteface Mountain was pale gray. In the southeast, over Mounts Marcy and Algonquin, a bank of clouds tinted pink was breaking apart, promising a clear day. The other workers were rumbling onto the job site, electricians, masons, plumbers, steamfitters, driving their own cars and pickups, while the foremen and supers arrived in company vehicles. It was light enough for Vann, smoking in his truck, sipping his coffee, to read the front page of the paper and check the NFL scores. It got his mind finally off Irene.