Read The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks Online
Authors: Russell Banks
Tags: #Literary, #Short Stories, #Short Stories (Single Author), #Fiction
Nov. 21, 1953
Dear Jack Bailey,
Maybe my first letter to you about why my mother should be queen for a day did not reach you or else I just didn’t write it good enough for you to want her on your show. But I thought I would write again anyhow, if that’s okay, and mention to you a few things that I left out of that first letter and also mention again some of the things in that letter, in case you did not get it at all for some reason (you know the Post Office). I also want to mention a few new developments that have made things even worse for my poor mother than they already were.
First, even though it’s only a few days until Thanksgiving my father who left us last May, as you know, has not contacted us about the holidays or offered to help in any way. This makes us mad though we don’t talk about it much since the little kids tend to cry about it a lot when they think about it, and me and my mother think it’s best not to think about it. We don’t even know how to write a letter to my father, though we know the name of the company that he works for up in Holderness (a town pretty far from here) and his sisters could tell us his address if we asked, but we won’t. A person has to have some pride, as my mother says. Which she has a lot of.
We will get through Thanksgiving all right because of St. Joseph’s Church, which is where we go sometimes and where I was confirmed and my brother George (age 10) took his first communion last year and where my sister Louise (age 6) goes to catechism class. St. Joe’s (as we call it) has turkeys and other kinds of food for people who can’t afford to buy one so we’ll do okay if my mother goes down there and says she can’t afford to buy a turkey for her family on Thanksgiving. This brings me to the new developments.
My mother just got fired from her job as assistant bookkeeper at the tannery. It wasn’t her fault or anything she did. They just fired her because she has these nervous spells sometimes when there’s a lot of pressure on her, which is something that happens a lot these days because of my father and all and us kids and the rest of it. She got two weeks pay but that’s the only money we have until she gets another job. Tomorrow she plans to go downtown to all the stores and try to get a job as a saleslady now that Christmas is coming and the stores hire a lot of extras. But right now we don’t have any money for anything like Thanksgiving turkey or pies, and we can’t go down to Massachusetts to my mother’s family, Aunt Dot’s and Aunt Leona’s and Uncle Jerry’s house, like we used to because (as you know) the bank repossessed the car. And my father’s sisters and all, who used to have Thanksgiving with us, sometimes, have taken our father’s side in this because of his lies about us and now they won’t talk to us anymore.
I know that lots and lots of people are poor as us and many of them are sick too, or crippled from polio and other bad diseases. But I still think that my mother should be Queen for a Day because of other things.
Because even though she’s poor and got fired and has dizzy spells and sometimes blacks out, she’s a proud woman. And even though my father walked off and left all his responsibilities behind, she stayed here with us. And in spite of all her troubles and worries, she really does take good care of his children. One look in her eyes and you know it.
Thank you very much for listening to me and considering my mother for the Queen for a Day television show.
Sincerely,
Earl Painter
The day before Thanksgiving their mother is hired to start work the day after Thanksgiving in gift wrapping at Grover Cronin’s on Moody Street, and consequently she does not feel ashamed for accepting a turkey and a bag of groceries from St. Joe’s. “Since I’m working, I don’t think of it as charity. I think of it as a kind of loan,” she explains to Earl as they walk the four blocks to the church.
It’s dark, though still late afternoon, and cold, almost cold enough to snow, Earl thinks, which makes him think of Christmas, which in turn makes him cringe and tremble inside and turn quickly back to now, to this very moment, to walking with his tiny, brittle-bodied mother down the quiet street, past houses like their own—triple-decker wood-frame tenements, each with a wide front porch like a bosom facing the narrow street below, lights on in kitchens in back, where mothers make boiled supper for kids cross-legged on the living room floor watching
Kukla, Fran & Ollie
, while dads trudge up from the mills by the river or drive in from one of the plants on the Heights or maybe walk home from one of the stores downtown, the A&P, J.C. Penney’s, Sears: the homes of ordinary families, people just like them. But with one crucial difference, for a piece is missing from the Painter family, a keystone, making all other families, in Earl’s eyes, wholly different from his, and for an anxious moment he envies them. He wants to turn up a walkway to a strange house, step up to the door, open it, and walk down the long, dark, sweet-smelling hallway to the kitchen in back, say hi and toss his coat over a chair and sit down for supper, have his father growl at him to hang his coat up and wash his hands first, have his mother ask about school today, how did hockey practice go, have his sister interrupt to show her broken dolly to their father, beg him to fix it, which he does at the table next to his son, waiting for supper to be put on the table, all of them relaxed, happy, relieved that tomorrow is a holiday, a day at home with the family, no work, no school, no hockey practice. Tomorrow, he and his father and brother will go to the high school football game at noon and will be home by two to help set the table.
Earl’s mother says, “That job down at Grover Cronin’s? It’s only … it’s a temporary job, you know.” She says it as if uttering a slightly shameful secret. “After Christmas I get let go.”
Earl jams his hands deeper into his jacket pockets and draws his chin down inside his collar. “Yeah, I figured.”
“And the money, well, the money’s not much. It’s almost nothing. I added it up, for a week and for a month, and it comes out to quite a lot less than what you and me figured out in that budget, for the rent and food and all. What we need. It’s less than what we need. Never mind Christmas, even. Just regular.”
Earl and his mother stop a second at a curb, wait for a car to pass, then cross the street and turn right. Elm trees loom in black columns overhead; leafless branches spread in high arcs and cast intricate shadows on the sidewalk below. Earl can hear footsteps click against the pavement, his own off-beat, long stride and her short, quick one combining in a stuttered rhythm. He says, “You gotta take the job, though, don’t you? I mean, there isn’t anything else, is there? Not now, anyhow. Maybe soon, though, Ma, in a few days, maybe, if something at the store opens up in one of the other departments, dresses or something. Bookkeeping, maybe. You never know, Ma.”
“No, you’re right. Things surprise you. Still…” She sighs, pushing a cloud of breath out in front of her. “But I am glad for the turkey and the groceries. We’ll have a nice Thanksgiving, anyhow,” she chirps.
“Yeah.”
They are silent for a few seconds, still walking, and then she says, “I’ve been talking to Father LaCoy, Earl. You know, about … about our problems. I’ve been asking his advice. He’s a nice man, not just a priest, you know, but a kind man, too. He knows your father, he knew him years and years ago, when they were in high school together. He said he was a terrible drinker even then. And he said … other things. He said some other things the other morning, that I’ve been thinking about since.”
“What morning?”
“Day before yesterday. Early. When you were delivering your papers. I felt I just had to talk to someone, I was all nervous and worried, and I needed to talk to someone here at St. Joe’s anyhow, because I wanted to know about how to get the turkey and all, so I came over, and he was saying the early mass, so I stayed and talked with him awhile afterwards. He’s a nice priest, I like him. I always liked Father LaCoy.”
“Yeah. What’d he say?” Earl knows already what the priest said, and he pulls himself further down inside his jacket, where his insides have hardened like an ingot, cold and dense, at the exact center of his body.
Up ahead, at the end of the block, is St. Joseph’s, a large, squat parish church with a short, broad steeple, built late in the last century of pale yellow stone cut from a quarry up on the Heights and hauled across the river in winter on sledges. “Father LaCoy says that your father and me, we should try to get back together. That we should start over, so to speak.”
“And you think he’s right,” Earl adds.
“Well, not exactly. Not just like that. I mean, he knows what happened. He knows all about your father and all, I told him, but he knew anyhow. I told him how it was, but he told me that it’s not right for us to be going on like this, without a father and all. So he said, he told me, he’d like to arrange to have a meeting in his office at the church, a meeting between me and your father, so we could maybe talk some of our problems out. And make some compromises, he said.”
Earl is nearly a full head taller than his mother, but suddenly, for the first time since before his father left, he feels small, a child again, helpless, dependent, pulled this way or that by the obscure needs and desires of adults. “Yeah, but how come … how come Father LaCoy thinks Daddy’ll even listen? He doesn’t
want
us!”
“I know, I know,” his mother murmurs. “But what can I do? What else can I do?”
Earl has stopped walking, and he shouts at his mother, like a dog barking at the end of a leash: “He can’t even get in touch with Daddy! He doesn’t even know where Daddy is!”
She stops and speaks in a steady voice. “Yes, he can find him all right. I told him where Daddy was working and gave him the name of McGrath and Company, and also Aunt Ellie’s number. So he can get in touch with him, if he wants to. He’s a priest.”
“A priest can get in touch with him, but his own wife and kids can’t?”
His mother has pulled up now, and she looks at her son with a hardness in her face that he can’t remember having seen before. She tells him, “You don’t understand. I know how tough it’s been for you, Earl, all this year, from way back, even, with all the fighting, and then when your father went away. But you have got to understand a little bit how it’s been for me, too. I can’t … do this all alone like this.”
“Do you love Daddy?” he demands. “
Do you
? After … after everything he’s done? After hitting you like he did those times, and the yelling and all, and the drinking, and then, then the worst, after leaving us like he did! Leaving us and running off with that
girl
friend or whatever of his! And not sending any money! Making you have to go to work, with us kids coming home after school and nobody at home. Ma, he
left
us! Don’t you know that? He
left
us!” Earl is weeping now. His skinny arms wrapped around his own chest, tears streaming over his cheeks, the boy stands straight-legged and stiff on the sidewalk in the golden glow of the streetlight, his wet face crossed with shadows from the elm trees, and he shouts, “I
hate
him! I hate him, and I never want him to come back again! If you let him come back, I swear it, I’m gonna run away! I’ll leave!”
His mother says, “Oh, no, Earl, you don’t mean that,” and she reaches forward to hold him, but he backs fiercely away.
“No! I do mean it! If you let him back into our house, I’m leaving.”
“Earl. Where will you go? You’re just a boy.”
“So help me, Ma, don’t treat me like this. I can go lots of places, don’t worry. I can go to Boston, I can go to Florida, I can go to lots of places. All I got to do is hitchhike. I’m not a little kid anymore,” he says, and he draws himself up and looks down at her.
“You
don’t
hate your father.”
“Yes, Ma. Yes, I do. And you should hate him, too. After all he did to you.”
They are silent for a moment, facing each other, looking into each other’s pale blue eyes. He is her son, his face is her face, not his father’s. Earl and his mother have the same sad, downward-turning eyes, like teardrops, the same full red mouth, the same clear voice, and now, at this moment, they share the same agony, a life-bleeding pain that can be stanched only with a lie, a denial.
She says, “All right, then. I’ll tell Father LaCoy. I’ll tell him that I don’t want to talk to your father, it’s gone too far now. I’ll tell him that I’m going to get a divorce.” She opens her arms, and her son steps into them. Above her head, his eyes jammed shut, he holds on to his tiny mother and sobs, as if he’s learned that his father has died.
His mother says, “I don’t know when I’ll get the divorce, Earl. But I’ll do it. Things’ll work out. They have to. Right?” she asks, as if asking a baby who can’t understand her words.
He nods. “Yeah … things’ll work out,” he says.
They let go of one another and walk slowly on toward the church.
Dec. 12, 1953
Dear Jack Bailey,
Yes, it’s me again and this is my third letter asking you to make my mother Adele Painter into queen for a day. Things are much worse now than last time I wrote to you. I had to quit the hockey team so I could take an extra paper route in the afternoons because my mother’s job at Grover Cronin’s is minimum wage and can’t pay our bills. But that’s okay, it’s only junior high so it doesn’t matter like it would if I was in high school. So I don’t really mind.
My mother hasn’t had any of her spells lately, but she’s still really nervous and cries a lot and yells a lot at the kids over little things because she’s so worried about money and everything. We had to get winter coats and boots this year from the church, St. Joe’s, and my mom cried a lot about that. Now that Christmas is so close everything reminds her of how poor we are now, even her job which is wrapping gifts. She has to stand on her feet six days and three nights a week so her varicose veins are a lot worse than before, so when she comes home she usually has to go right to bed.
My brother George comes home now after school and takes care of Louise until I get through delivering papers and can come home and make supper for us, because my mother’s usually at work then. We don’t feel too sad because we’ve got each other and we all love each other but it is hard to feel happy a lot of the time, especially at Christmas.
My mother paid out over half of one week’s pay as a down payment to get a lawyer to help her get a divorce from my father and get the court to make him pay her some child support, but the lawyer said it might take two months for any money to come and the divorce can’t be done until next June. The lawyer also wrote a letter to my father to try and scare him into paying us some money but so far it hasn’t worked. So it seems like she spent that money on the lawyer for nothing.
Everything just seems to be getting worse. If my father came back the money problems would be over.
Well, I should close now. This being the third time I wrote in to nominate my mother for Queen for a Day and so far not getting any answer, I guess it’s safe to say you don’t think her story is sad enough to let her go on your show. That’s okay because there are hundreds of women in America whose stories are much sadder than my mom’s and they deserve the chance to win some prizes on your show and be named queen for a day. But my mom deserves that chance too, just as much as that lady with the amputated legs I saw and the lady whose daughter had that rare blood disease and her husband died last year. My mom needs recognition just as much as those other ladies need what they need. That’s why I keep writing to you like this. I think this will be my last letter though. I get the picture, as they say.
Sincerely,
Earl Painter