The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (38 page)

She looked nervously around her, as if for an ally or a witness. “We have to go back.”

“You mean, you have to go back.”

“That’s right,” she said.

He slipped the oars into the oarlocks and started rowing, turning the boat and shoving it quickly away from the island. Facing the trailerpark, he rowed along the side of the island, then around behind it, out of sight of the trailerpark and the people who lived there, emerging again in a few moments on the far side of the island, rowing steadily, smoothly, powerfully. Now his back was to the trailerpark, and the girl was facing it, looking grimly past the man toward the shore.

He rowed, and they said nothing more. In a while they had returned to shore and life among the people who lived there. A few of them were in the water and on the beach when the dark green rowboat touched land and the black man stepped out and drew the boat onto the sand. The old man in the white bathing cap was standing in waist-deep water, and the woman who was the manager of the trailerpark stood near the edge of the water, cooling her feet and ankles. The old man with the cob pipe was still chipping at the bottom of his rowboat, and next to him, watching and idly chatting, stood the kid with the long blond hair. They all watched silently as the black man turned away from the dark green rowboat and carried his fishing rod and tackle box away, and then they watched the girl, carrying her yellow towel, magazine, and bottle of tanning lotion, step carefully out of the boat and walk to where she lived with her mother.

Xmas

He was a popular teacher of political science at the state university, was a man entering middle age in flight from the wreckage of two failed marriages. He refused to call them that, however—“failed,” as if marriage were an experiment, a test of some giddy hypothesis he’d cooked up in his youth. Gregory was sensitive to value-laden language. Besides, in each case, his commitment to the marriage had been total, absolute, without hedges, without a control. Gregory had loved both women.

He preferred to think of his marriages as “ended”; to him they were distinct blocks in time that may as easily have been the best of times as the worst. Or why not simply the time of his life? For they had been that, too. Gregory Dodd was one of those men who in their mid-forties enjoy casting their past in a slightly elegiac light.

The important thing was that both marriages were ended now, that’s all—the brief marriage of his adolescence and the fifteen-year marriage of his young manhood: over and done with, and sufficiently behind him that he was able to begin anew, as it were, and he had done that, he believed, with Susan. The elegiac view, even if somewhat premature, makes renewal possible. So that, by falling in love with Susan, Gregory felt that he had moved into a new block of time, one that was as endless-seeming as each of the others had been in the beginning, and he was thrilled again. And now, once more, it was Christmas Eve, and even though Gregory’s own three nearly grown children were in the home of their mother, his second ex-wife, he was nonetheless playing Santa Claus again, loading his car with presents for Susan and her three children, much younger than his, driving down on a snowy night from his house in New Hampshire to Susan’s shabby flat just beyond Boston in Jamaica Plain, Handel’s
Messiah
roaring from the radio and, at the chorus, full-throated Santa at the wheel singing gladly along:
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hal-la-loo-loo-yah!

In New Hampshire, the snow had been dry and blew at the car from the darkness ahead in long white strings, and driving on the Interstate was easy. He kept the Audi at seventy all the way into Charlestown. But here in the city, as he crossed the Fens from Kenmore Square to Huntington, taking the quicker back way across Boston’s South End to Jamaica Plain, the snow was wet and fell in fat flakes that slickened and made driving difficult. It was the night before Christmas, and traffic was light; the nearly empty city streets and darkened brick buildings were beautiful to Gregory: they exuded a stoical melancholy that reminded him of an Edward Hopper painting, although he couldn’t remember which one.

He had overspent, he knew, as usual, but what the hell, it would be worth it to see Susan’s grateful delight when he brought into her living room and heaped under the tinsel-covered tree the dozens of carefully wrapped gifts he’d carted all the way down from New Hampshire for her children. And for her, too—a lovely, dark green, velour robe, Braudel’s
Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century
, all three volumes, an espresso machine he’d ordered in October from the Williams-Sonoma catalog, and an antique cameo pin he had found in a boutique in Portsmouth. He would have to march up and down those narrow, sour-smelling stairs from the car three times to unload it all.

Susan was ten years younger than Gregory, a photographer whose harshly documentary style was out of favor, especially in Boston, and who lived close to the same line of poverty that most of her subjects, blacks and Hispanics in the projects and the worst sections of Roxbury, lived below. She viewed her poverty as the direct consequence and expression of her art; Gregory regarded it as a permanent form of bohemianism and a plight, which he tried to ameliorate with his bourgeois common sense and generosity. He balanced Susan’s checkbook for her and for her birthday had bought her a dishwasher.

Near the Museum of Fine Arts, Gregory slowed and turned left off Huntington onto a potholed side street, following the taillights of the only other car in sight. The two vehicles moved past dark, high buildings—alternating rows of warehouses and public housing from the fifties and sixties—where here and there a short string of Christmas lights or a solitary electric candle blinked from a window as if with sarcasm. The car ahead had slowed; the driver seemed to be looking for a number on one of the graffiti-splashed doorways. This was not so much a neighborhood as a zone of half-destroyed buildings located between construction sites, a no-man’s-land still being fought over by opposing armies; people lived here, but not by choice, and only temporarily.

In the seventies Susan and her ex-husband, the father of her three daughters, had been active in the Weather Underground. Her radical past and marriage she regarded as a chapter in her life that had ended, although the momentum of that chapter had carried over long enough for her to have been five months pregnant with her third child before finally obtaining a divorce. By then her husband had gone underground altogether, and separating her life from his, she felt, had been like granting him his last wish. It had certainly been the best thing for the children. A year later, with two white women and a black man, he tried to rob a Brink’s truck in Framingham, and a guard had been shot and killed. Susan’s ex-husband and one of the women had been captured the following day in upstate New York, and the rest, as she said, was history.

Gregory had tried to get Susan to tell him more about her life with her ex-husband; he was fascinated by it, slightly aroused in a sexual way that he did not understand, and he wanted either to chase his arousal into desire and satisfy it or else to exorcise it altogether. There were no pictures of the man in her apartment, and the children never spoke of him. It was as if he had died before they were born and their only parent was their mother.

Though the girls were little more than a year apart in age, the way Susan described it, she and their father had never actually cohabited: “Oh, God, it goes back to college, really, to Brandeis. But he was married to the Movement, from the start, like an organizer, sort of. He’d show up for a few days, and then he’d be gone for a month, sometimes longer,” she said in her vague and elliptical way, which frustrated and sometimes annoyed Gregory.

Usually, when they talked about her marriage it was late at night in bed, after making love, over cigarettes and the last glass of wine from the second bottle. He didn’t want to press her on the subject, to insist that she provide details, instances, dates and times and specific circumstances—although he surely did want to know them all—for fear that she would think he was unnaturally fixated on this closed chapter of her life. “It was like, every time we made love, I got pregnant. I couldn’t take the pill, it made me sick and fluttery and all, and nothing worked. We didn’t do it all that much,” she said, and lightly laughed.

“Well, three times at least,” Gregory said.

“At
least
,” she said, and she punched him on the shoulder. “C’mon, Gregory, it’s history.”

“I know, I know. I’m only kidding you.”

The vehicle ahead suddenly stopped, and Gregory hit the brakes, and the Audi slid and came to a stop a few feet behind it. Gregory reached over and turned down the radio, puzzled. The car ahead of him was a battered, ten-year-old Chrysler with a huge, flat trunk; the number plate was wired loosely to the rear bumper, and Gregory imagined fixing it with a pair of twenty-cent stove bolts.

The rear window of the Chrysler was covered with snow, and Gregory couldn’t see inside. He cut left and pulled out to pass by, and as he drew abreast of the other car, it moved out also, as if to make a U-turn in the middle of the street. Gregory jumped on his brakes and spun the wheel. The Chrysler drew quickly in front of him, the Audi swerved, and when its front bumper ticked the rear bumper of the other car, Gregory thought he heard the number plate clang.

Abruptly, the other car stopped, half-turned in the middle of the deserted street, blocking Gregory’s passage. The driver stepped from the Chrysler and walked slowly toward Gregory. He was a black man, tall and wide, in a leather jacket and watch cap, scowling. A second black man got out of the Chrysler and came along behind. They were both middle-aged, his age, and seemed irritated, but not threatening. A mistake, Gregory thought. He must not have known I was so close to him. Gregory pressed the button and lowered his window, to explain and even apologize for nearly colliding with the man’s car and ruining Christmas for all of them.

He said, “I thought you were stopped—” and the larger of the two men simply said, “Yeah,” and slammed his fist through the open window straight into Gregory’s face. Then they turned and walked back to their car and got in. Gregory spat a piece of tooth, touched his lip with fingertips, and came away with blood; he looked at the steering wheel and thought: I must have hit the wheel when I stopped; I must have broken my mouth by accident; something that I don’t know about must be what just happened.

The Chrysler pulled back onto the street and moved slowly away, its taillights shrinking in the snowy distance, and Gregory began to tremble. Rage washed over him like a cold wave, and when he was covered, his entire body turned suddenly hot. He touched his lips again and found that they had swollen to nearly twice their normal size. His shirt was spattered with his blood, and when he groped through his mouth with his tongue, he realized that a tooth had been broken and several others loosened by the blow.

The Chrysler was gone now, and Gregory was alone on the street, sitting in his car with all his presents for Susan and her children. What was he to do now? Where could he go, his face all bloody and swollen, his chest heaving, his hands clenched to the steering wheel as if he were being yanked violently from the car? He was utterly ridiculous to himself. He was a fool, a man whose life was unknown to him and out of control, a man whose past was lost to him, and whose future was a deliberate, willed fantasy. He felt like an unattached speck of matter afloat in space, and all he wanted was to be in his own home with his own children and their mother, in his proper place, his life intact, all the parts connected and sequential.

He put the car into gear and drove slowly away, toward Susan’s home, where she lived with her children. He knew that she would be alarmed when she saw him and then would comfort and take care of him. But they would not be the same together as they had been before and as he had planned, so that while he drove he had to fight against the new and terrible longing to turn back.

The Guinea Pig Lady

The story of Flora Pease, how she got to be the way she is now, isn’t all that uncommon a story, except maybe in the particulars. You often hear in these small towns of a woman no one will deal with anymore, except to sell her something she wants or needs—food, clothing, or shelter. In other words, you don’t have a social relationship with a woman like Flora, you have an economic one, and that’s it. But that’s important, because it’s what keeps women like Flora alive, and, after all, no matter what you might think of her, you don’t want to let her die, because, if you’re not related to her somehow, you’re likely to have a friend who is, or your friend will have a friend who is, which is almost the same thing in a small town. And not only in a small town, either—these things are true for any group of people that knows its limits and plans to keep them.

When Flora Pease first came to the trailerpark and rented number 11, which is the second trailer on your left as you come in from Old Road, no one in the park thought much about her one way or the other. She was about forty or forty-five, kind of flat-faced and plain, a red-colored person, with short red hair and a reddish tint to her skin. Even her eyes, which happened to be pale blue, looked red, as if she smoked too much and slept too little, which, as it later turned out, happened to be true. Her body was a little strange, however, and people remarked on that. It was blocky and square-shaped, not exactly feminine and not exactly masculine, so that while she could almost pass for either man or woman, she was generally regarded as neither. She wore mostly men’s work shirts and ankle-high work boots, which, except for the overcoat, was not all that unusual among certain women who work outside a lot and don’t do much socializing. But with Flora, because of the shape of her body, or rather, its shapelessness, her clothing only contributed to the vagueness of her sexual identity. Privately, there was probably no vagueness at all, but publicly there was. People elbowed one another and winked and made not quite kindly remarks about her when she passed by them on the streets of Catamount or when she passed along the trailerpark road on her way to or from town. The story, which came from Marcelle Chagnon, who rented her the trailer, was that Flora was retired military and lived off a small pension, and that made sense in one way, given people’s prejudices about women in the military, and in another way, too, because at that time Captain Dewey Knox (U.S. Army, ret.) was already living at number 6, and people at the park had got used to the idea of someone living off a military pension instead of working for a living.

What didn’t make sense was how someone who seemed slightly cracked, as Flora came quickly to seem, could have stayed in the military long enough to end up collecting a pension for it. Here’s how she first came to seem cracked. She sang out loud, in public. She supposedly was raised here in Catamount, and though she had moved away when she was a girl, she still knew a lot of the old-timers in town, and she would walk into town every day or two for groceries and beer, singing in a loud voice all the way, as if she were the only person who could hear her. But by the time she had got out to Old Road, she naturally would have passed someone in the park who knew her, so she had to be aware that she wasn’t the only person who could hear her. Regardless, she’d just go right on singing in a huge voice, singing songs from old Broadway musicals, mostly. She knew all the songs from
Oklahoma
and
West Side Story
and a few others as well, and she sang them, one after the other, all the way into town, then up and down the streets of town, as she stopped off at the A & P, Brown’s Drug Store, maybe Hayward’s Hardware, finally ending up at the Hawthorne House for a beer, before she headed back to the trailerpark. Everywhere she went, she sang those songs in a loud voice that was puffed up with feeling, if it was a happy song, or thick with melancholy, if it was sad. You don’t mind a person whistling or humming or maybe even singing to herself under her breath while she does something else, sort of singing absentmindedly. But you do have to wonder about someone who forces you to listen to her the way Flora Pease forced everyone within hearing range to listen to her Broadway songs. Her voice wasn’t half-bad, actually, and if she had been singing for the annual talent show at the high school, say, and you were sitting in the audience, you might have been pleased to listen, but at midday in June on Main Street, when you’re coming out of the bank and about to step into your car, it can be a slightly jarring experience to see and hear a person who looks like Flora Pease come striding down the sidewalk singing in full voice about how the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye.

The second thing that made Flora seem cracked early on was the way she never greeted you the same way twice, or at least twice in a row, so you could never work out exactly how to act toward her. You’d see her stepping out of her trailer early on a summer day—it was summer when she first moved into the park, so everyone’s remembered first impressions naturally put her into summertime scenes—and you’d give a friendly nod, the kind of nod you offer people you live among but aren’t exactly friends with, just a quick, downward tip of the face, followed by a long, upsweeping lift of the whole head, with the eyes closed for a second as the head reaches its farthest point back. Afterwards, resuming your earlier expression and posture, you’d continue walking, wholly under the impression that, when your eyes were closed and your head tilted back, Flora had given you the appropriate answering nod. But no, or apparently no, because she’d call out, as you walked off, “Good
morn
-ing!” and she’d wave her hands at you as if brushing cobwebs away. “
Wonderful
morning for a walk!” she’d bellow (her voice was a loud one), and caught off guard like that, you’d agree and hurry away. The next time you saw her, however, the next morning, for instance, when once again you walked out to the row of mailboxes for your mail and passed her as, mail in hand, she headed back in from Old Road, you’d recall her greeting of the day before and how it had caught you off guard, and you’d say, “Morning,” to her and maybe smile a bit and give her a friendly and more or less direct gaze. But what you’d get back would be a glare, a harsh, silent stare, as if you’d just made an improper advance on her. So you’d naturally say to yourself, “The hell with it,” and that would be fine until the following morning, when you’d try to ignore her, and she wouldn’t let you. She’d holler the second she saw you, “Hey! A scorcher! Right? Goin’ to be a scorcher today, eh?” It was the sort of thing you had to answer, even if only with a word, “Yup,” which you did, wondering as you said it what the hell was going on with that woman.

Everyone in the park that summer was scratching his or her head and asking what the hell was going on with the woman in number 11. Doreen Tiede, who lived with her five-year-old daughter, Maureen, in number 4, which was diagonally across the park road from Flora Pease’s trailer, put Marcelle on the spot, so to speak, something Doreen could get away with more easily than most of the other residents of the park. Marcelle Chagnon intimidated most people. She was a large, hawk-faced woman, and that helped, and she was French Canadian, which also helped, because it meant that she could talk fast and loud without seeming to think about it first, and most people who were not French Canadians could not, so most people tended to remain silent and let Marcelle have her way. In a sense Marcelle was a little like Flora Pease—she was sudden and unpredictable and said what she wanted to, or so it seemed, regardless of what you might have said first. She didn’t exactly ignore you, but she made it clear that it didn’t matter to her what you thought of her or anything else. She always had business to take care of. She was the resident manager of the Granite State Trailerpark, which was owned by the Granite State Realty Development Corporation down in Nashua, and she had certain responsibilities toward the park and the people who lived there that no one else had. Beyond collecting everyone’s monthly rent on time, she had to be sure no one in the park caused any trouble that would hurt the reputation of the park; she had to keep people from infringing on other people’s rights, which wasn’t all that simple, since in a trailerpark people live within ten or fifteen feet of each other and yet still feel they have their own private dwelling place and thus have control over their own destiny; and she also had to assert the rights of the people in the park whenever those rights got stepped on by outsiders, by Catamount police without a warrant, say, or by strangers who wanted to put their boats into the lake from the trailerpark dock, or by ex-husbands who might want to hassle ex-wives and make their kids cry. These things happened, and Marcelle was always able to handle them efficiently, with force and intelligence, and with no sentimentality, which, in the end, is probably the real reason she intimidated most people. She seemed to be without sentimentality.

Except when dealing with Doreen Tiede, that is. Which is why Doreen was able to put Marcelle on the spot and say to her late one afternoon in Marcelle’s trailer at number 1, “What’s with that woman, Flora Pease? Is she a fruitcake, or what? And if she is, how come you let her move in? And if she isn’t a fruitcake, how come she looks the way she does and acts the way she does?” There were in the park, besides Doreen, Marcelle, and Flora, three additional women, but none of them could make Marcelle look at herself and give a straight answer to a direct question. None of them could make her forget her work and stop, even for a second. Only Doreen could get away with embarrassing Marcelle, or at least with demanding a straight answer from her, and getting it, too, probably because both Doreen and Marcelle looked tired in the same way, and each woman understood the nature of the fatigue and respected it in the other. They didn’t feel sorry for it in each other; they respected it. There were twenty or more years between them, and Marcelle’s children had long ago gone off and left her—one was a computer programmer in Billerica, Massachusetts, another was in the Navy and making a career of it, a third was running a McDonald’s in Seattle, Washington, and a fourth had died. Because she had raised them herself, while at the same time fending off the attacks of the man who had fathered them on her, she thought of her life as work and her work as feeding, housing, and clothing her three surviving children and teaching them to be kindly, strong people, despite the fact that their father happened to have been a cruel, weak person. A life like that, or rather, twenty-five years of it, can permanently mark your face and make it instantly recognizable to anyone who happens to be engaged in similar work. Magicians, wise men, and fools are supposed to be able to recognize each other instantly, but so, too, are poor women who raise children alone.

They were sitting in Marcelle’s trailer, having a beer. It was five-thirty, Doreen was on her way home from her job at the tannery, where she was a bookkeeper in the office. Her daughter, Maureen, was with her, having spent the afternoon with a baby-sitter in town next door to the kindergarten she attended in the mornings, and was whining for supper. Doreen had stopped in to pay her June rent, a week late, and Marcelle had accepted her apology for the lateness and had offered her a beer. Because of the lateness of the payment and Marcelle’s graciousness, Doreen felt obliged to accept it, even though she preferred to get home and start supper so Maureen would stop whining.

Flora’s name had come up when Maureen had stopped whining and had suddenly said, “Look, Momma, at the funny lady!” and had pointed out the window at Flora, wearing a heavy, ankle-length coat in the heat, sweeping her yard with a broom. She was working her way across the packed dirt yard toward the road that ran through the center of the park, raising a cloud of dust as she swept, singing in a loud voice something from
Fiddler on the Roof
—“If I were a rich man…”—and the two women and the child watched her, amazed. That’s when Doreen had demanded to know what Marcelle had been thinking when she agreed to rent a trailer to Flora Pease.

Marcelle sighed, sat heavily back down at the kitchen table, and said, “Naw, I knew she was a little crazy. But not like this.” She lit a cigarette and took a quick drag. “I guess I felt sorry for her. And I needed the money. We got two vacancies now out of twelve trailers, and I get paid by how many trailers have tenants, you know. When Flora came by that day, we got three vacancies, and I’m broke and need the money, so I look the other way a little and I say, sure, you can have number eleven, which is always the hardest to rent anyhow, because it’s on the backside away from the lake, and it’s got number twelve and number ten right next to it and the swamp behind. Number five I’ll rent easy, it’s on the lake, and nine should be easy too, soon’s people forget about Tom Smith’s suicide. It’s the end of the row and has a nice yard on one side, plus the toolshed in back. But eleven has always been a bitch to rent. So here’s this lady, if you want to call her that, and she’s got a regular income from the Air Force, and she seems friendly enough, lives alone, she says, has relations around here, she says, so what the hell, even though I can already see she’s a little off. I figure it was because of her being maybe not interested in men, one of those women. And I figure, what the hell, that’s her business, not mine, I don’t give a damn what she does or who she does it with, so long as she keeps to herself. So I say, sure, take number eleven, thinking maybe she won’t. But she did.”

Marcelle sipped at her can of beer, and Doreen went for hers. The radio was tuned quietly in the background to the country-and-western station from Dover. Doreen reached across the counter to the radio and turned up the volume, saying to no one in particular, “I like this song.”

“That’s ’cause you’re not thirty yet, honey. You’ll get to be thirty, and then you’ll like a different kind of song. Wait.”

Doreen smiled from somewhere behind the fatigue that covered her face. It was a veil she had taken several years ago, and she’d probably wear it until she died or lost her memory, whichever came first. She looked at her red-painted fingernails. “What happens when you’re forty, and then fifty? You like a different kind of song then too?”