The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (27 page)

The only surgeon in the area capable of removing the clot from her brain was driving over from Plattsburgh. They hoped to have the operating room cleaned up and ready for him by early evening. With her heart condition, however, and the trauma inflicted on her by the interrupted surgery this morning, and the likelihood of still more embolisms, the anticoagulants, and now the stroke, “I’m sorry, but it truly does not look good,” Dr. Rabideau told Frances.

She did not know where to turn for consolation or advice. She was the only one left in the world who loved her mother, and her mother was the only one left who loved her. Frances’s father, Irene’s long-gone first husband, had his new life, a new wife and new kids out in California. Irene’s second husband, Vann, had his new life, too, Frances supposed. He and Frances had never liked each other much, anyhow.

A little after lunch, the supervisor of maintenance in the hospital found Vann on the second floor of the new wing, still tracing the overhead ducts with Tommy Farr. The supervisor, Fred Noelle, was a man in his mid-sixties who had worked for the hospital since high school. He knew every inch of the old building, every valve, switch, pump, and fitting, and had been an especially useful consultant when they were designing the addition. Cautiously, Fred asked Vann if earlier this morning he might have done something in the way of connecting the heat and ventilation ducts of the new wing to the ducts of the old. Tied them together, say, and then opened them up, maybe. Fred knew there were lawsuits coming. A lot of finger-pointing and denials.

“No,” Vann said. “Why? You got problems over there?”

“Have we got problems? Yes, we’ve got problems. We’ll be cleaning the place up for the rest of the year.” He was a balding, heavyset man with a face like a bull terrier, and he looked very worried.

“What the hell happened?” Vann asked him.

Fred told him. “They got crap on patients, in the labs, all over. Even in the operating rooms.”

Vann was silent. Then he spoke slowly and clearly, directing his words to the kid but speaking mainly for Fred Noelle’s benefit. “It couldn’t have been us. There are baffles between the two systems, blocks, and they don’t come out till after we get everything installed and blown out and balanced and the whole wing is nice and clean and ready for use. Then we open it to the old system. And that won’t be till next summer,” he said, his voice rising. He knew he was telling the truth. He also knew that he was dead wrong.

Somewhere, somehow, one of the baffles between the two networks had not been installed by his men, or else had been left off the drawing by the mechanical engineer who had designed the system for the architect. Either way, Vann knew the fault was his. This morning, before cranking up the compressor, on the off chance that one of his sheet-metal guys had screwed up, he should have checked the baffles, every damned one of them. No one ever did that, but he should’ve.

He placed the drawing on the floor and got down on his hands and knees to examine it. “See,” he said to Fred. “Take a look right here. Baffle. And here. Baffle. And here,” he said, pointing to each of the places where the ducts crossed through the thick wall between the two wings of the hospital.

But then he saw it. No baffle. The mechanical engineer had made a terrible mistake, and Vann, back when they’d installed the ducts, hadn’t caught it.

Fred got down beside him, and he saw it, too. “Uh-oh,” he said, and he placed his fingertip where a barrier should have been indicated and where, instead, the drawing showed a main duct flowing through the old exterior wall and connecting directly to the heat and ventilation system of the hospital. A straight shot.

Tommy squatted down on the other side of Vann and furrowed his brow and studied the drawing. “Bad, huh, Vann?”

Vann followed Fred Noelle out of the structure and across the parking lot and through the main entrance of the hospital. They went straight to the large carpeted office of Dr. Christian Snyder, the hospital director. Fred made the introductions, and Dr. Snyder got up and shook Vann’s hand firmly.

“We think we got this thing figured out,” Fred said. Dr. Snyder was a crisply efficient fellow in his early forties with blond, blow-dried hair. He wore a dark, pin-striped suit and to Vann looked more like a down-state lawyer than a physician. Fred unrolled the drawing on Dr. Snyder’s large mahogany desk, and the three men stood side by side and examined the plan together, while Fred described Vann’s test and how it was supposed to work and how it had failed.

“You’re the subcontractor for the sheet-metal work?” Dr. Snyder said to Vann.

“No. No, I’m just the field super for him. Sam Guy, he’s the sub-contractor.”

“I see. But you’re responsible for the installation.”

“Well, yes. But I just follow the drawings, the blueprints.”

“Right. And this morning you were testing the new ductwork, blowing compressed air through it, right?”

“Yes, but I didn’t realize…”

Dr. Snyder cut him off. “I understand.” He went around his desk, sat down heavily and picked up a pencil and tapped his teeth with it. “Fred, will you be able to attend a meeting here this evening? Seven-thirty, say?”

Fred said sure, and Dr. Snyder reached for his phone. Vann picked up the drawing and started to roll it up. “Please, leave that here,” Dr. Snyder said, and then he was speaking to his secretary, “Celia, for that meeting with Baumbach, Beech, and Warren? Fred Noelle, who’s in charge of maintenance, he’ll be joining us.”

He glanced up at Vann as if surprised to see him still standing there. “You can go, if you want. Thanks for your help. We’ll be in touch,” he said to Vann, and went back to his telephone.

Outside in the lobby, alone, Vann pulled out a cigarette and stuck it between his lips.

“Sir! No smoking!” the receptionist barked at him, and he shoved the cigarette back into the pack and made for the door.

On the steps he stopped and lit up and looked across the road at Lake Colby and the pine trees and hills beyond. There was a stiff, cold breeze off the lake, and it was starting to get dark. Vann checked his watch. Three thirty-five. Off to his left he saw a woman with her back to him, also smoking and regarding the scenery. Vann couldn’t remember when he had done anything this bad. Not at work, anyhow. In life, sure—he’d messed up his life, messed it up lots of ways, most people do. But, Jesus, never at work.

The woman tossed her cigarette onto the parking lot below and turned to go back inside, and Vann recognized her—Frances, his exwife’s daughter. He realized that he was glad to see her and blurted, “Hey, Frances! What’re you doing here?” Startled, she looked up at him, and he saw that she was crying. “Wow, what’s the matter, kid? What’s happened?” he said, and took a step toward her. She was taller than he remembered, a few inches taller than he, and heavier. Her face was swollen and red and wet with tears. “Is it your mom?”

She nodded yes, like a child, and he reached out to her. She kept her arms tight to her sides but let him hold her close. He was all she had; he would have to be enough.

“Come on inside and sit down, honey, and tell me what’s happened,” Vann said, and with one arm around her, he walked her back into the lobby, where they sat down on one of the blond sofas by the window. “Jeez,” he said, “I don’t have a handkerchief.”

“That’s okay, I got a tissue.” She pulled a wrinkled tissue from her purse and wiped her cheeks.

“So tell me what happened, Frances. What’s wrong with your mom?”

She hesitated a second. Then she inhaled deeply and said, “I don’t understand it. She’s in a coma. She went in for open-heart surgery this morning, and something happened, something went wrong, and they had to bring her out in the middle of it.”

“Oh,” Vann said. “Oh, Jesus.” He lowered his head. He put his hands over his face and closed his eyes behind them.

“There were complications. She had a stroke. The doctors don’t think she’ll come out of it,” she said, and started to cry again.

Vann took his hands away from his face and sat there staring at the floor. The beige carpet was decorated with the outlines of orange and dark green rectangles. Vann let his gaze follow the interlocking colored lines from his feet out to the middle of the room and then back again. Out and back, out and back. There were six or eight other people seated in the sofas and chairs scattered around the lobby, reading magazines or talking quietly with one another, waiting for news of their mothers and fathers, their husbands and wives and children in the rooms above.

“Do you think maybe could I go and see her?” he said in a low voice.

“I don’t think so. She’s in intensive care, Vann. She won’t even know you’re there. I saw her a little while ago, but she didn’t know it was me in the room.”

Slowly Vann got to his feet and moved away from Frances toward the receptionist by the elevator. He wanted to see Irene. He could say it to himself. It didn’t matter if she knew he was there or not, he had to see her. He needed to fill his mind with her actual, physical presence. No fading memories of her, no tangled feelings of guilt for things done and undone, no dimly remembered hurts and resentments. Too late for all that. He needed to look at her literal existence, see her in the here and now, and take full-faced whatever terrible thoughts and feelings came to him there.

“I need to see my wife,” he said to the receptionist. “She’s in intensive care.”

The woman peered at him over her horn-rimmed glasses. “Who’s your wife?”

“Irene. Irene Moore.”

He signed the book that the woman pushed at him and stepped quickly toward the elevator. “Third floor,” she said. He got into the elevator, turned, and saw Frances seated across the lobby looking mournfully at him. Then the door slid closed.

At the nurses’ station outside the intensive care unit an elderly nurse pointed him down a hallway to a closed door. “Second bed on the right. You can’t miss her, she’s the only one there.”

The room was dark, windowless, lit only by the wall lamp above the bedstead. Irene’s body was very large; it filled the bed. Vann didn’t remember her as that big. She made him feel suddenly small, shrunken, fragile. There were IV stands and oxygen tanks and tubes that snaked in and out of her body and several thick black wires attached to cabinet-sized machines that blinked and whirred, monitoring her blood pressure, heart, and breathing.

For a long time he stood at the foot of the bed peering through the network of tubes and wires at his ex-wife’s wide, round body. She was covered to her neck by a sheet. Her thick arms lay limp and white outside the sheet. A tube dripped clear liquid into a vein at one wrist. On the other wrist she wore a plastic identification band.

No wedding ring, he noticed. He looked down at his own left hand. No wedding ring there, either.
Irene, you’re the one I loved.
He said the words silently to himself, straight out.
And I’m only loving you now. And, Jesus, look at what I’ve done to you, before I could love you.

What’s that love worth now, I wonder. To you or me or anybody?

He felt a strong wind blow over him, and he had to grab hold of the metal bedframe to keep from staggering backwards. The wind was warm, like a huge breath, an exhalation, and though it pummeled him, he wasn’t afraid of it. He turned sideways and made his way along the bed. The wind abated, and he found himself looking down at Irene’s face. There was a tube in her slightly open mouth and another in one of her nostrils. Her eyes were closed. Somewhere behind her face, Irene was curled in on herself like a child, naked, huddled in the darkness, alone, waiting.

Vann slipped his hands into his jacket pockets and stood with his feet apart and looked down on the woman he had been able to love for only a moment. He stood there for a long time, long after he had ceased to love her and had only the memory of it left. Then he turned away from her.

When he emerged from the elevator to the lobby, he quickly looked around for Frances and found her seated in a far corner of the room, slumped in a chair with her head on one arm and her eyes closed as if asleep. He sat down next to her, and her eyes fluttered open.

“Did you see her?” Frances asked.

“Yeah. I did. I saw her.”

“She didn’t know you were there, did she?”

“No. No, she didn’t,” he said. “But that didn’t matter.”

“Where’re you going now, Vann? From here.”

“Well, I don’t know. I thought maybe I’d wait here, Frances. Keep you company. If you don’t mind, I mean.”

The girl didn’t answer him. They both knew that Irene was going to die, probably before morning. Like a father, Vann would wait here with her and help the girl endure her mother’s death. He thought of the big framed picture that Irene had sent him and that he had carted around with him these last few years from one job to the next, wondering what to do with the thing.
Plains of Abraham. What kind of name was that, anyhow? The picture was of a mountain.
Maybe he would give it to Frances. He’d just give it to her and say that her mother had bought it for him years ago because she knew he loved it, and he hoped that Frances liked it enough to hang it where she could see it every day, and he could see it sometimes, too, if she’d let him.

People coming into the lobby were brushing snow off their shoulders and hats. Vann looked out the window at the parking lot and the lake. It had been snowing for a while, and the cars in the lot were covered with powdery white sheets. Sam Guy would fire him, no doubt about it, and both Vann and Sam would be lucky if no one sued them. Vann would go back to working locally out of his car, like he’d done when he first married Irene. He was coming in off the road, too late, maybe, to make anyone happy, but here he was anyhow, trying.

Theory of Flight

Her first day at Kitty Hawk, she stayed at the cottage with her mother and father and explained to them why she was leaving Roger. As if speaking into a tape recorder, the three adults stared straight ahead and talked to one another. They sat on the beach in canvas and aluminum chairs and watched the children play with shovels and buckets at the edge of the water. The sun was white, unencumbered, untouched, in a cloudless sky, burning at the center of the dark blue, circular plane.

Bored with buckets and shovels, the two little girls—daughters and granddaughters—put the toys down and moved closer to the water to dodge the waves, tempting them, dodging again. At first laughing gaily, then, whenever a wave shoved their ankles and knees or as it receded caught them from behind, their laughter suddenly, momentarily, turned manic, and their small, brown faces shifted to gray, mouths gaping, eyes searching the beach for Mamma.

“Jesus,” Janet said. “It’s like Greece, this sky and that sun!”

“All week,” her father said. “It’s been like this all week. Can you believe it?” With his leathery, tanned skin, bony face, and round, wrinkle-rimmed eyes, he looked like a giant sea turtle thrown into a canvas beach chair. He lay there, rather than sat, staring at his granddaughters, fingertips nervously drumming knobby knees, toes digging into the hot white sand. “Maybe you can give it one last chance,” he said. “You’ve got the children to think about, you know.”

“All I’ve
done
, for God’s sake, is think about the children! I mean, please, figure it out for yourself, Daddy. Are they better off with one parent who’s reasonably sane and more or less happy than with two parents, both of whom are crazy and miserable and blaming their craziness and misery on each other? Which would
you
have preferred? For that matter, which do you think
I
would have preferred?” Chewing her upper lip, she still did not look at him. She wondered about herself, her thirties: Would she become idly cruel?

Her father started to stammer, then inhaled deeply, a reversed sigh, and talked rapidly about his own mother and father, reminding himself, his wife, and his daughter that at least once in this life there had been a perfect marriage. In the middle of his eulogy, his wife got up from her chair, wiped clinging grains of sand from her calves and hands, and walked back to the cottage.

“Do you want a drink, Janet?” she called over her shoulder. The turquoise straps of her bathing suit were cutting into reddened loaves of flesh.

“God, no, Mother! It’s only three o’clock!”

“What about you, Charles?”

“Gin and tonic. You know.”

The mother turned and waded through the deep sand, over the low ridge to the cottage. The daughter and the father continued to sit in the low-slung chairs, side by side, watching the girls play. For several minutes, the old man and the young woman said nothing.

Then the man sighed loudly and said, as if to a friendly bartender, “Jesus, what a goddamn shame.”

She turned slowly and looked at him. “A shame that it took me eight years. That’s all
I’m
ashamed of!” she snapped. She got up from her chair and jogged down to the water, pounding through the surf until she was waist-deep, and dove into a breaking wave, disappearing and after several seconds popping up beyond the wave in smooth, dark green, deep water.

She poked one hand up in the air and waved to her father. He lifted a skinny brown arm and slowly waved back.

Stalking past the bunch of teenage boys and men in T-shirts with sleeves rolled up to show off biceps and tattoos, Janet hurried to a place about halfway down the Fish Pier. Out at the end of the pier, the serious fishermen had gathered, fifteen or twenty of them, red-faced white men in duck-bill caps, short-sleeve shirts, and Bermuda shorts, all of them leaning like question marks over the waist-high wood railing, peering out and down at their lines, silently attentive.

Janet was what they used to call a looker—neat, trim, sexy if tanned and wearing carefully selected clothes, a fashionably casual haircut, and minimal makeup (but not without makeup altogether), the kind of woman whose attractiveness to men depended greatly on the degree to which she could reveal that men were attractive to her. If, when it turned out that for whatever reason or length of time she was not interested in a particular man, her boyish, physical intensity was capable of frightening him, and on such occasions she was sometimes thought to be a lesbian, which, on these occasions, pleased her. It’d serve the bastards right, she thought.

Slipping in between two small groups of black people, men and women, she found a spot at the rail and broke out her fishing gear. She stuffed a cold, slumbering bloodworm onto a hook, leaned over the rail, and flipped the tip of the rod, casting underhanded, sending the weighted hook and worm forty or fifty feet out and twenty feet down into the dark water. Slowly, she reeled the line back in, watching the people around her as she worked.

“How you doin’ today?” a man with an enormous head asked her. He flashed a mouthful of gold-trimmed teeth.

“Can’t tell yet. I just got here,” she said. She heard the words clicking in a hard, flat, Boston accent. She never heard her own accent, except when speaking with black people, regardless of where they were from. Southern whites, strangely, only made her conscious of
their
accent, not her own. The same was true for Hispanics. The man was with two women, both of whom seemed to be older than he, and two men, also older than he. None of the others was fishing. Instead, they drank beer and ate fried chicken legs and chattered with each other and with the various people passing by and standing around them. The man fishing was, by comparison, a solitary. He carefully ignored the others. His very large head was almost startling to look at, all the more, for a white person, because of his shining blackness. Janet didn’t realize she was staring at him, at his head, the considerable force of it, until, smiling easily at her, he said, “You know me, Miss?”

“No. No, I guess not. I just thought, I … you do look familiar to me, that’s all.”

“You prob’ly seen me around,” he said, almost bragging.

“Yes.” She noticed that whenever he spoke to her the others immediately lapsed into silence—but only for as long as he was speaking. When she answered him, they went back to their own conversations, not hearing her. It was as if she had said nothing, as if she were a creature of his imagination. It made her nervous.

Nevertheless, the two continued talking idly to one another while they fished, with long periods of thoughtful silence between exchanges, and soon she no longer noticed that the others watched her in attentive silence when he spoke, then switched off and ignored her altogether when she responded. Suddenly, they both finally started catching fish—spots, small, silvery white fish with a thumbnail-sized black dot over each gill. “The tide comin’ in,” he explained. “We gonna get us a mess of fish now, you wait,” he said, and as he spoke, she felt the deliberate tug of a fish on her line. She yanked with her left hand and reeled with her right, swiftly pulling in a small fish that glistened in the sun as she drew it up to the pier and over the rail. The fish she caught, one after another, were only a bit larger than her hand, but the man declared that they’d be the best fish she’d ever caught. “You fry up a mess of them little spots in the mornin’ an’ that’ll be your best breakfast!” he promised and grinned at her and reeled in another for himself, slipped it off the hook, and shoved it into the burlap sack at his feet.

She let her own caught fish accumulate inside the tin tackle box she had brought, her father’s. She could hear them rattling around inside, scattering the hooks, sinkers, and lures in the darkness. Her heart was pounding, from the work as much as from the excitement. She pictured the large, gray blossoms of sweat that she knew had spread across her back and under her arms. Her arms and legs were feathery and full of light, as she felt the shudder and the familiar, hard tug of one fish after another hitting the bait, felt it pull against the steady draw of the reel, then fly through the air, up and over the rail onto the pier. She wanted to laugh out loud and yell to the man next to her,
Hey!
I got
another
one! and
another
one!

But she said nothing. They both worked steadily in silence, grabbing the flopping, hooked fish off their lines, jamming fresh worms onto the hooks, reaching over the rail and casting the lines underhanded in long arcs back down into the water, feeling the weighted hooks hit the water and sink a foot or two into it, feeling them get hit again, and then reeling the fish back toward the pier, lifting them free of the water into the air and drawing them up to the pier and the rail again, and again, until, sweat rolling across her face, her arms began to ache, the muscles of her right hand between thumb and forefinger to cramp, and still the fish kept on hitting the lines. There was a grim, methodical rhythm to their movements, and they were working together, it seemed, the young white woman in blouse and shorts and blue tennis shoes and the middle-aged black man in T-shirt and stained khaki trousers and bare feet.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. Her line drifted slowly to the bottom and lay there, inert, as if tied to a rock. His line, five feet away from hers, did the same. The two of them leaned further out and watched, waiting. But nothing happened. The fish were gone. The tide had moved them closer to the beach, where the school had swirled and dispersed in silvery clouds, swimming with the current along the beach, away from the pier and parallel to the breaking waves. She watched surf casters scattered up the beach one by one begin to catch fish, their long poles going up like tollgates as the schools moved rapidly along.

She lay flat on her back in the sand, no blanket or towel beneath her, feeling her skin slowly darken, tiny, golden beads of sweat gradually stringing her mouth along her upper lip and over her chin, crossing her forehead just above her eyebrows, puddling in the gullies below her collarbones and rib cage, between her small breasts, and drifting, sliding in a thin, slick sheet of moisture down the smooth insides of her thighs. It was close to noon, and the sun, a flat, white disc, was almost directly overhead, casting practically no shadow.

“Mommy, you’re really getting red,” Laura quietly said. She stood over her mother for a moment, peering down with a serious, almost worried look on her face. She was the older daughter, temperamentally more serious than her sister. They had always called her Laura, had never tried giving her a nickname. The other child, named Eva, was called Bootsie, Bunny, Noosh, and Pickle—depending on the parent’s mood and the expression on the face of the child. Most people found the two girls attractive and likable—as much for the differences in their personalities as for their physical similarities. Four-year-old Eva was in appearance a smaller version of seven-year-old Laura, and both girls looked exactly like their mother.

This morning the three of them wore purple two-piece bathing suits, and while the mother sunbathed, the daughters, with their pails and shovels, played in the hot sand beside her. The grandmother had driven into the village for groceries and mail, and the grandfather was on his regular morning walk, three miles up the beach to the old Coast Guard station and back.

“Look, Mommy,
sharks!
” Laura cried. Janet propped herself up on her elbows and squinted against the hard glare of sand and mirror-like water. Then she saw them. Porpoises. Their gray backs slashed the water like dark knives.

“They’re not sharks, they’re porpoises, Laura.”

“Are they dangerous?”

“No. They’re supposed to be very bright and actually friendly to humans.”

“Oh,” she said, not believing.

Janet lay down on her back again and closed her eyes. She studied the backs of her eyelids, a yellow-ocher sheet with a slight, almost translucent scratch, like a thin scar, in front of the lid, between her eyeball and the lid. Every time she tried to look at the scar—which seemed to ride across the surface, moving slowly, like a twisted reed floating on still water—it jumped and disappeared off the edge of her circle of vision. A tiny scratch on the retina, she decided. The only way she could actually see it was if she tried not to look at it, but looked past it, as if at something else located in the same general region. Even then, however, she found herself eager to see the line (the scar or scratch or whatever it was), and she searched for it, caught a glimpse of it, and, chasing with her gaze, watched it race ahead of her and out of sight.

Janet realized that the girls were no longer close beside her. She sat up and looked around for them. A small flock of gulls loped over the water, dipping, dropping, lifting, going on. The porpoises still sliced the water a few hundred yards from the beach. As far as she could see in both directions, the beach was deserted. She called, “Laura!” Then called again, louder, and stood up, looking back toward the cottage.

“Listen, Mommy, wake up! You’re really getting a terrible sunburn!” Janet opened her eyes and looked into Laura’s worried face. Eva was sitting a few yards away, humming to herself while she buried her feet in a knee-deep hole she had dug in the sand. “Did you fall asleep?” Laura asked.

“No.” She stood up and brushed the sand off the backs of her slender legs, shoulders, and arms. “C’mon, let’s walk up the beach and meet Grandpa,” she said cheerfully. She reached a hand to Laura, leaned down, and helped Eva pull herself free. The three of them started down the beach toward the Coast Guard station. Offshore, the porpoises cruised alongside, headed in the same direction, and, above them, the gulls.

The third night in the cottage, listening to the radio, a top 40 station from Elizabeth City, Janet drank alone until after midnight. She situated herself on the screened porch, gazed out at the ridge of sand that lay between the cottage and the beach, milky white until almost ten o’clock, when it slowly turned gray, then black, against the deep blue, eastern night sky. She drank Scotch and water, and each new drink contained less water and proportionately more Scotch than the previous, until her face felt like a plaster mask slipping forward and about to fall into her lap.