The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (47 page)

“Jeez,” George says. “How can she stand that Les Paul and Mary Ford stuff? Even Louise goes to bed when it comes on, and it’s only what, six-thirty?”

“Shut up.”

“Up yours.”

Earl leans down and scoops up the fallen dictionary, pens, airplanes, and lamps and places them back on the worktable. The black binder he opens squarely in front of him, and he says to his brother, “You want to see what I was writing? Go ahead and read it. I don’t care.”

“I don’t care, either. Unless it’s a
love
letter.”

“No, it’s not a
love
letter.”

“What is it, then?”

“Nothing,” Earl says, closing the notebook. “Homework.”

“Oh,” George says, and he marches his feet up the wall and back again.

Several weeks slide by, November gets cold and gray, and a New Hampshire winter starts to feel inevitable again, and Earl does not receive the letter he expects. He has told no one, especially his mother, that he has written to Jack Bailey, the smiling, mustachioed host of the
Queen for a Day
television show, which Earl happened to see that time he was home for several days with the flu, bored and watching television all afternoon. Afterwards, delivering papers in the predawn gloom, in school all day, at the hockey rink, doing homework at night, he could not forget the television show, the sad stories told by the contestants about their illness, poverty, neglect, victimization, and, always, their bad luck, luck so bad that you felt it was somehow deserved. The studio audience seemed genuinely saddened, moved to tears, even, by Jack Bailey’s recitation of these narratives, and then elated afterwards, when the winning victims, all of them middle-aged women, were rewarded with refrigerators, living room suites, vacation trips, washing machines, china, fur coats, and, if they needed them, wheelchairs, prosthetic limbs, twenty-four-hour nursing care. As these women wept for joy, the audience applauded, and Earl almost applauded, too, alone there in the dim living room of the small, cold, and threadbare apartment in a mill town in central New Hampshire.

Earl knows that those women’s lives surely aren’t much different than his mother’s life, and in fact, if he has told it right, if somehow he has got into the letter what he has intuited is basically wrong with his mother’s life, it will be obvious to everyone in the audience that his mother’s life is actually much worse than those of many or perhaps even most of the women who win the prizes. Earl knows that, although his mother enjoys good health (except for “spells”) and holds down a job and is able to feed, house, and clothe her children, there is still a deep, essential sadness in her life that, in his eyes, none of the contestants on
Queen for a Day
has. He believes that if he can just get his description of her life right, other people—Jack Bailey, the studio audience, millions of people all over America watching it on television—
everyone
will share in her sadness, so that when she is rewarded with appliances, furniture, and clothing, maybe even a trip to Las Vegas, then everyone will share in her elation, too. Even he will share in it.

Earl knows that it is not easy to become a contestant on
Queen for a Day
. Somehow, your letter describing the candidate has first to move Jack Bailey, and then your candidate has to be able to communicate her sufferings over television in a clear and dramatic way. Earl noticed that some of the contestants, to their own apparent disadvantage, downplayed the effect on them of certain tragedies—a child with a birth defect, say, or an embarrassing kind of operation or a humiliating dismissal by an employer—while playing up other, seemingly less disastrous events, such as being cheated out of a small inheritance by a phony siding contractor or having to drop out of hairdressing school because of a parent’s illness, and when the studio audience was asked to show the extent and depth of its compassion by having its applause measured on a meter, it was always the woman who managed to present the most convincing mixture of courage and complaint who won.

Earl supposes that Jack Bailey telephones the writer of the letter nominating a particular woman for
Queen for a Day
and offers him and his nominee the opportunity to come to New York City’s Radio City Music Hall to tell her story in person, and then, based on how she does in the audition, Jack Bailey chooses her and two other nominees for a particular show, maybe next week, when they all come back to New York City to tell their stories live on television. Thus, daily, when Earl arrives home, he asks Louise and George, who normally get home from school an hour or so earlier than he, if there’s been any calls for him. You’re sure? No mail, either, no letters?

“Who’re you expectin’ to hear from, lover boy, your
girl
friend?” George grins, teeth spotted with peanut butter and gobs of white bread.

“Up yours,” Earl says, and heads into his bedroom, where he dumps his coat, books, hockey gear. It’s becoming clear to him that, if there’s such a thing as a success, he’s evidently a failure. If there’s such a thing as a winner, he’s a loser. I oughta go on that goddamned show myself, he thinks. Flopping onto his bed face-first, he wishes he could keep on falling, as if down a bottomless well or mine shaft, into darkness and warmth, lost, and finally blameless, gone, gone, gone. And soon he is asleep, dreaming of a hockey game, and he’s carrying the puck, dragging it all the way up along the right, digging in close to the boards, skate blades flashing as he cuts around behind the net, ice chips spraying in white fantails, and when he comes out on the other side, he looks down in front of him and can’t find the puck, it’s gone, dropped off behind him, lost in his sweeping turn, the spray, the slash of the skates, and the long sweeping arc of the stick in front of him. He brakes, turns, and heads back, searching for the small black disc.

At the sound of the front door closing, a quiet click, as if someone is deliberately trying to enter the apartment silently, Earl wakes from his dream, and he hears voices from the kitchen, George and Louise and his mother:

“Hi, Mom. We’re just makin’ a snack, peanut butter sandwiches.”

“Mommy, George won’t give me—”

“Don’t eat it directly off the knife like that!”

“Sorry, I was jus’—”

“You heard me, mister, don’t answer back!”

“Jeez, I was jus’—”

“I don’t
care
what you were doing!” Her voice is trembling and quickly rising in pitch and timbre, and Earl moves off his bed and comes into the kitchen, smiling, drawing everyone’s attention to him, the largest person in the room, the only one with a smile on his face, a relaxed, easy, sociable face and manner, normalcy itself, as he gives his brother’s shoulder a fraternal squeeze, tousles his sister’s brown hair, nods hello to his mother, and says, “Hey, you’re home early, Ma. What happened, they give you guys the rest of the day off?”

Then he sees her face, white, tight, drawn back in a cadaverous grimace, her pale blue eyes wild, unfocused, rolling back, and he says, “Jeez, Ma, what’s the matter, you okay?”

Her face breaks into pieces, goes from dry to wet, white to red, and she is weeping loudly, blubbering, wringing her hands in front of her like a maddened knitter. “Aw-w-w-w!” she wails, and Louise and George, too, start to cry. They run to her and wrap her in their arms, crying and begging her not to cry, as Earl, aghast, sits back in his chair and watches the three of them wind around each other like snakes moving in and out of one another’s coils.

“Stop!” he screams at last. “Stop it! All of you!” He pounds his fist on the table. “Stop crying, all of you!”

They obey him. George first, then their mother, then Louise, who goes on staring into her mother’s face. George looks at his feet, ashamed, and their mother looks pleadingly into Earl’s face, expectant, hopeful, knowing that he will organize everything.

In a calm voice, Earl says, “Ma, tell me what happened. Just say it slowly, and it’ll come out okay, and then we can all talk about it, okay?”

She nods, and George unravels his arms from around her neck and steps away from her, moving to the far wall of the room, where he stands and looks out the window and down to the bare yard below. Louise snuggles her face in close to her mother and sniffles.

“I… I lost my job. I got fired today,” their mother says. “And it wasn’t my fault.” She starts to weep again, and Louise joins her, bawling now, and George at the window starts to sob, his small shoulders heaving.

Earl shouts, “Wait! Wait a minute, Ma, just
tell
me about it. Don’t cry!” he commands her, and she shudders, draws herself together again, and continues.

“I… I had some problems this morning, a bunch of files I was supposed to put away last week got lost. And everybody was running around like crazy looking for them, because they had all these figures from last year’s sales in them or something, I don’t know. Anyhow, they were important, and I was the one who was accused of losing them. Which I didn’t. But no one could find them, until finally they turned up on Robbie’s desk, down in shipping, which I couldn’t’ve done, since I never
go
to shipping anyhow. But Rose blamed me, because she’s the head bookkeeper, and she was the last person to use the files, and she was getting it because they needed them upstairs, and … well, you know, I was just getting yelled at and yelled at, and it went on after lunch … and, I don’t know, I just started feeling dizzy and all, like I was going to black out again. And I guess I got scared and started talking real fast, so Rose took me down to the nurse, and I did black out then. Only for a few seconds, though, and when I felt a little better, Rose said maybe I should go home for the rest of the day, which is what I wanted to do, anyhow. But when I went back upstairs to get my pocketbook and coat and my lunch, because I hadn’t been able to eat my sandwich, I was so nervous and all, and then Mr. Shandy called me into his office…” She makes a twisted, little smile, helpless and confused, and quickly continues. “Mr. Shandy said I should maybe take a lot of time off. Two weeks sick leave with pay, he said, even though I was only working there six months. He said that would give me time to look for another job, one that wouldn’t cause me so much worry, he said. So I asked him, ‘Are you firing me?’ and he said, ‘Yes, I am,’ just like that. ‘But it would be better for you all around,’ he said, ‘if you left for medical reasons or something.’”

Earl slowly exhales. He’s been holding his breath throughout, though from her very first sentence he has known what the outcome would be. Reaching forward, he takes his mother’s hands in his, stroking them as if they were an injured bird. He doesn’t know what will happen now, but he is not afraid. Not really. Yet he knows that he should be terrified, and when he says this to himself,
I should be terrified,
he answers by observing simply that this is not the worst thing. The worst thing that can happen to them is that one or all of them will die. And because he is still a child, or at least enough of a child not to believe in death, he knows that no one in his family is going to die. He cannot share this secret comfort with anyone in the family, however. His brother and sister, children completely, cannot yet know that death is the worst thing that can happen to them; they think this is, that their mother has been fired from her job, which is why they are crying. And his mother, no longer a child at all, cannot believe with Earl that the worst thing will
not
happen, for this is too much like death and may somehow lead directly to it, which is why she is crying. Only Earl can refuse to cry. Which he does.

Later, in the room she shares with her daughter, their mother lies fully clothed on the double bed and sleeps, and it grows dark, and while George and Louise watch television in the gloom of the living room, Earl writes: