The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (30 page)

Success Story

After high school, I attended an Ivy League college for less than one term. A year later, I was married and living in central Florida. This was 1958 and ’59. General Dwight Eisenhower was our President, and Dr. Fidel Castro, hunkered down in the mountain passes southeast of Havana, was getting praised for his integrity and good looks by
Time
magazine and
Reader’s Digest.

I’d been a whiz kid in high school, rewarded for it with an academic scholarship. In this Ivy League school, however, among the elegant, brutal sons of the captains of industry, I was only that year’s token poor kid, imported from a small New Hampshire mill town like an exotic herb, a dash of mace for the vichyssoise. It was a status that perplexed and intimidated and finally defeated me, so that, after nine weeks of it, I fled in the night.

Literally. On a snowy December night, alone in my dormitory room (they had not thought it appropriate for me to have a roommate, or no one’s profile matched mine), I packed my clothes and few books into a canvas duffle, waited until nearly all the lights on campus were out, and sneaked down the hallway, passed through the service entrance, and walked straight down the hill from the eighteenth-century cut-stone dormitories and classroom buildings to the wide boulevard below, where huge, neoclassical fraternity houses lounged beneath high, ancient elms. At the foot of the hill, I turned south and jogged through unplowed snow, shifting my heavy duffle from one shoulder to the other every twenty or thirty yards, until I passed out of the valley town into darkness and found myself walking through a heavy snowstorm on a winding, narrow road.

A month later—with the holidays over and my distraught mother and bewildered younger brother and sister, aunts, uncles, and cousins, all my friends and neighbors and high school teachers, as well as the dean and director of admissions at the Ivy League college, convinced that I not only had ruined my life but may have done something terrible to theirs, too—I turned up in St. Petersburg, Florida, with seven dollars in my pocket, my duffle on my shoulder, and my resolve to join Castro in the Sierra Maestra seriously weakening.

I’d spent Christmas and New Year’s at home, working days and nights as a salesman in a local men’s clothing store, trying hard to behave as if nothing had happened. My mother seemed always to be red-eyed from weeping, and my friends from high school treated me coolly, distantly, as if I had dropped out of college because of a social disease. In some ways, my family was a civic reclamation project—the bright and pretty children and pathetic wife of a brute who, nearly a decade ago, had disappeared into the northern woods with a woman from the post office, never to be heard from again. As the oldest male victim of this abandonment, I was expected by everyone who knew the story to avenge the crime, mainly by making myself visibly successful, by rising above my station, and in that paradoxical way show the criminal how meaningless his crime had been. For reasons I was only dimly aware of, my story was important to everyone.

Leaving them behind, then, abandoning my fatherless family in a tenement and my old friends and the town I had been raised in, was an exquisite pleasure, like falling into bed and deep sleep after having been pushed beyond exhaustion. Now, I thought the morning I left—stepping onto the ramp to Route 93 in Catamount, showing my thumb to the cars headed south—
now
I can start to dream my own dreams, not everyone else’s.

The particular dream of joining Castro died easily. It started dying the moment I got out of the big, blue Buick sedan with Maryland plates that had carted me straight through all the way from Norfolk, Virginia, to Coquina Key in St. Petersburg, where the elderly man who drove the car had a “fiancée,” he told me, with a suite in the Coquina Key Hotel.

“You, you’re a smart kid,” he said to me, as I slid from the car and hauled out my duffle from the back. “You’ll do all right here. You’ll catch on.” He was a ruddy, white-haired man with a brush cut that he liked to touch with the flat of his hand, as if patting a strange dog. “Forget Cuba, though. No sense getting yourself killed for somebody else’s country.” He was a retired U.S. Army captain, named Knox, “like the fort,” he’d said, and he gave advice as if he expected it to be taken. “Kid like you,” he said, peering across at me from the driver’s seat, “smart, good-looking, good personality, you can make a million bucks here. This place,” he said, looking warmly around him at the marina, the palm trees, the acres of lawn, the flashy bougainvillea blossoms, the large new cars with out-of-state plates, the tall, pink Coquina Key Hotel with the dark red canopy leading from the street to the front entrance, “this place is
made
for a kid like you!”

“Yeah. Well, I got plenty of time for that.” I took a step away from the car, and Knox leaned farther across the front seat. I said to him, “I don’t need to make a pile of money just yet.”

“No? How much you got?”

“Not much. Enough.” I lifted my duffle to my shoulder and gave the man a wave.

“If you don’t need money, kid, what
do
you need, then?”

“Experience, I guess.” I tried to smile knowingly.

“Listen. I’ve been coming down here every goddamned winter for eight years now, ever since I retired. I’ve
got
experience, and lemme tell you, this place is gonna be a boom town. It already is. All these old people from the North, and there’s gonna be more of ’em, son, not less, and all of ’em got money to spend, and here you are on the ground floor. I’d give all my experience for your youth. Son, forget Cuba. Stay in St. Pete, you’ll be a millionaire before you’re twenty-five.”

I was sorry now that I’d told Knox the truth back in Virginia, when he’d asked me where I was going. I’d said Cuba, and he’d laughed and asked why, and I had tried to tell him, but all I could say was that I wanted to help the Cuban people liberate themselves from a cruel and corrupt dictator. We both knew how that sounded, and neither of us had spoken of Cuba again, until now.

I stepped away from the car to the curb. “Well, thanks. Thanks for the advice. And the ride. Good meeting you,” I said.

He called me by my name. I hadn’t thought he’d caught it. “Look, if you need some help, just give me a call,” he said and stuck a small white card out the window on the passenger’s side.

I took the card and read his first name, Dewey, his address back in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and a post office box here in St. Petersburg. “Thanks,” I said.

“I stay at the hotel,” Knox said, nodding toward the high, pink, stuccoed building. “With my fiancée. Her name’s Sturgis, Bea Sturgis. Bea’s here all the time, year round. Nice woman. Give a call anytime.”

“I’m okay,” I said. “Really. I know what I’m doing.”

He smiled. “No,” he said. “You don’t.” Then he waved good-bye, dropped the Buick into gear, and moved off slowly toward the hotel garage.

It was not quite nine in the morning, and it was already hot. I peeled off my jacket, tied it to the duffle, and strolled across the street to the park by the marina and sat down on a bench facing the street. Behind me, charter fishing boats and yachts rocked tenderly against the narrow dock, where pelicans perched somberly on the bollards. Across the street, men and women in short-sleeved, pastel-colored blouses and shirts and plaid Bermuda shorts drifted in and out of the hotel. New cars and taxis and limousines drove people by and let people off and picked people up. A light breeze riffled quietly through the royal palm trees that lined the street. Everyone and everything belonged exactly where it was.

I was suddenly hungry and realized that I hadn’t eaten since the night before at a Stuckeys in North Carolina. A few minutes passed, and then I saw Knox emerge from the parking garage at the left of the hotel and walk briskly along the sidewalk toward the hotel, his gaze straight ahead of him, businesslike. He reached the canopy, turned under it, and entered the building, nodding agreeably to the doorman as he passed through the glass doors to the dark, cool interior.

I stood up slowly, grabbed my duffle, crossed the street, and followed him.

I never saw Knox again. I called him from the house phone in the lobby, and he laughed and called the manager, who met me at the front desk and gave me a note to take to the concierge, who put me to work that very day as a furniture mover.

I was the youngest and the healthiest of a gang of seven or eight men who set up tables and chairs for meeting rooms and convention halls, decorated ballrooms for wedding receptions, moved pianos from one dining room to another, dragged king-sized mattresses from suite to suite, unloaded supplies from trucks, delivered carts of dirty linen to the basement laundry, lugged sofas, lamps, cribs, and carpets from one end of the hotel to the other. Paid less than thirty dollars a week for six ten-hour days a week, we worked staggered shifts and were on call seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. We were given room and board and ate in a bare room off the hotel kitchen with the dishwashers and slept two to a tiny, cell-like room in a cinder-block dormitory behind the hotel.

Most of the kitchen help was black and went home, or somewhere, at night. We furniture movers were to a man white and, except for me, over forty, terminally alcoholic, physically fragile, and itinerant. It took me a few days to realize that we were all a type of migrant worker, vagrants, wanderers down from the cold cities and railroad yards of the North, and that the day after payday most of this week’s crew would be gone, replaced the next day by a new group of men, who, a week later, would leave, too, for Miami, New Orleans, or Los Angeles. No one else wanted our jobs, and we couldn’t get any other. We were underpaid, overworked, and looked down upon by chambermaids, elevator operators, and doormen. Like certain plumbing tools, we were not thought to exist until we were needed.

Even so, less than two weeks into this line of work, I decided to succeed at it. Which was like deciding to succeed at being a prisoner of war, deciding to become a
good
prisoner of war. I believed that I could become so good at moving furniture that I’d be irreplaceable and shortly thereafter would be made boss of the furniture movers, and then my talent for organization, my affection for the hotel, and the warmth of my personality would be recognized by the concierge, who would promote me, would make me his assistant, and from there I’d go on to concierge itself, then assistant manager, until, before long, why not
manager
? In the distant future, I saw a chain of hotels linking every major city on the Gulf of Mexico (a body of water I had not actually seen yet) that I would control from a bank of telephones here on my desk in St. Petersburg at the Coquina Key, which, since it was where I got my start, would become the central jewel in my necklace of hotels and resorts, my diadem, a modest man’s point of understandable pride. I would entertain world leaders here—Dr. Fidel Castro, President Dwight Eisenhower, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. People would congratulate me for having dropped out of an Ivy League college after less than one term, and my mother and brother and sister would now realize the wisdom of my decision, and friends from high school would call me up, begging for jobs in one of my many hotels. Late at night, lying in my narrow bunk, my temporary roommate snoring in the bunk below, I imagined testimonial dinners at which I would single out my old friend Dewey Knox from Chevy Chase. He’d be seated alongside his lady, Bea Sturgis, at the head table, just beyond the mayor of St. Petersburg and the governor of Florida. “It all started with Knox,” I’d say. “He told me this place was made for a guy like me, and he was right!”

Furniture movers came and went, but I stayed. The fourth person in five weeks with whom I shared my grim cell was named Bob O’Neil, from Chicago, and when he found out that I’d been a furniture mover at the Coquina Key for longer than a month, he told me I was crazy. I’d come back from setting up a VFW luncheon in the Oleander Room, hoping to sneak a few hours’ sleep, as I’d been up most of the night before, taking down the tables and chairs and cleaning up the hall after an all-state sports award banquet. My previous roommate, Fred from Columbus, a fat, morosely silent man whose hands trembled while he read religious tracts, which he wordlessly passed on to me, had got his first week’s pay two days before and had taken off for Phoenix, he said, where his sister lived.

My new roommate, when I arrived, had already claimed the bottom bunk and removed my magazines and was now lying stretched out on it. I closed the door, and he sat up, stuck out his hand, and introduced himself. “Hi,” he said, “I’m Bob, and I’m an alcoholic.” He was in his early or late forties; it was hard to tell which. His face was broad and blotched, with broken veins crisscrossing his cheeks and large red nose. He was bright-eyed and had a cheerful, loose mouth and a wash of thin, sandy-gray hair.

I removed his open, nearly empty, cardboard suitcase from the only chair in the room and sat down. I said, “How come you tell people you’re an alcoholic, Bob?” and he explained that he was required to by Alcoholics Anonymous, which he said he had joined just yesterday, after years of considering it.

“That’s what you
got
to say,” he said. “You got to admit to the world that you’re an alcoholic. Put it right out there. First step to recovery, kid.”

“How long before you’re cured?” I asked. “And don’t have to go around introducing yourself like that?”

“Never,” he said. “Never. It’s like … a condition. Like diabetes or your height. I’m allergic to booze, to alcohol. Simple as that.”

“So you can’t touch the stuff?”

“Right. Not unless I want to die.” He swung his feet around to the floor and lit a cigarette. “Smoke?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “The bottom bunk’s mine.”

“You’re kidding me,” he said, smiling broadly. “Look at you—what’re you, eighteen? Twenty?”

“Eighteen. Almost nineteen.”

“Eighteen. Right. And here I am, an old, sick man, an alcoholic, and you can jump up there like a pole vaulter. And you’re saying that bottom bunk’s yours.” He sighed, coughed, lay back down, and closed his eyes. “You’re right. It’s yours.”