The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (49 page)

The Friday before Christmas, Earl, George, Louise, and their mother are sitting in the darkened living room, George sprawled on the floor, the others on the sofa, all of them eating popcorn from a bowl held in Louise’s lap and watching
The Jackie Gleason Show,
when the phone rings.

“You get it, George,” Earl says.

Reggie Van Gleason III swirls his cape and cane across the tiny screen in front of them, and the phone goes on ringing. “Get it yourself,” says George. “I always get it, and it’s never for me.”

“Answer the phone, Louise,” their mother says, and she suddenly laughs at one of Gleason’s moves, a characteristic high-pitched peal that cuts off abruptly, half a cackle that causes her sons, as usual, to look at each other and roll their eyes in shared embarrassment. She’s wearing her flannel bathrobe and slippers, smoking a cigarette, and drinking from a glass of beer poured from a quart bottle on the floor beside her.

Crossing in front of them, Louise cuts to the corner table by the window and picks up the phone. Her face, serious most of the time anyhow, suddenly goes dark, then brightens, wide-eyed. Earl watches her, and he knows who she is listening to. She nods, as if the person on the other end can see her, and then she says, “Yes, yes,” but no one, except Earl, pays any attention to her.

After a moment, the child puts the receiver down gently and returns to the sofa. “It’s Daddy,” she announces. “He says he wants to talk to the boys.”

“I don’t want to talk to him,” George blurts, and stares straight ahead at the television.

Their mother blinks her eyes, opens and closes her mouth, looks from George to Louise to Earl and back to Louise again. “It’s Daddy?” she says. “On the telephone?”

“He says he wants to talk to the boys.”

Earl crosses his arms over his chest and shoves his body back into the sofa. Jackie Gleason dances delicately across the stage, a graceful fat man with a grin.

“Earl?” his mother asks, eyebrows raised.

“Nope.”

The woman stands up slowly and walks to the phone. She speaks to their father; all three children watch carefully. She nods, listening, now and then opening her mouth to say something, closing it when she’s interrupted. “Yes, yes,” she says. And, “Yes, they’re both here.” She listens again, then says, “Yes, I know, but I should tell you, Nelson, the children … the boys, they feel funny about talking to you. Maybe … maybe you could write a letter first or something. It’s sort of … hard for them. They feel very upset, you see, especially now, with the holidays and all. We’re all very upset, and worried. And with me losing my job and having to work down at Grover Cronin’s and all…” She nods, listens, her face expressionless. “Well, Lord knows, that would be very nice. It would have been very nice a long time ago, but no matter. We surely need it, Nelson.” She listens again, longer this time, her face gaining energy and focus as she listens. “Well, I’ll see, I’ll ask them again. Wait a minute,” she says, and puts her hand over the receiver and says, “Earl, your father wants to talk to you.” She smiles wanly.

Earl squirms in his seat, crosses and uncrosses his legs, looks away from his mother to the wall opposite. “I got nothin’ to say to him.”

“Yes, but… I think he wants to say some things to you, though. Can’t hurt to let him say them.”

Silently, the boy gets up from the couch and crosses the room to the phone. As she hands him the receiver, his mother smiles with a satisfaction that bewilders and instantly angers him.

“H’lo,” he says.

“H’lo, son. How’re ya doin’, boy?”

“Okay.”

“Attaboy. Been a while, eh?”

“Yeah. A while.”

“Well, I sure am sorry for that. You know, that it’s been such a while and all. But I been going through some hard times myself. Got laid off, didn’t work for most of the summer because of that damned strike. You read about that in the papers?”

“No.”

“How’s the paper route?”

“Okay.”

“Hey, son, look, I know it’s been tough, believe me, I know. It’s been tough for everyone. So I know what you’ve been going through. No kidding. But it’s gonna get better, things’re gonna get better now. And I want to try and make it up to you guys a little, what you had to go through this last six months or so. I want to make it up to you guys a little, you and Georgie and Louise. Your ma, too. If you’ll let me. Whaddaya say?”

“What?”

“Whaddaya say you let me try to make it up a little to you?”

“Sure. Why not? Try.”

“Hey. Listen, Earl, that’s quite an attitude you got there. We got to do something about that, eh? Some kind of attitude, son. I guess things’ve done a little changing around there since the old man left, eh? Eh?”

“What’d you expect? That everything’d stay the same?” Earl hears his voice rising and breaking into a yodel, and his eyes fill with tears.

“No, of course not. I understand, son. I understand. I know I’ve made some big mistakes this year, lately. Especially with you kids, in dealing with you kids. I didn’t do it right, the leaving and all. It’s hard, Earl, to do things like that right. I’ve learned a lot. But, hey, listen, everybody deserves a second chance. Right? Even your old man?”

“I guess so. Yeah.”

“Sure. Damn right,” he says, and then he adds that he’d like to come by tomorrow afternoon and see them, all of them, and leave off some Christmas presents. “You guys got your tree yet?”

Earl can manage only a tiny, cracked voice: “No, not yet.”

“Well, that’s good, real good. ’Cause I already got one in the back of the truck, a eight-footer I cut this afternoon myself. There’s lots of trees out in the woods here in Holderness. Not many people and lots of trees. Anyhow, I got me a eight-footer, Scotch pine. The best. Whaddaya think?”

“Yeah. Sounds good.”

His father rattles on, while Earl feels his chest tighten into a knot and tears spill over his cheeks. The man repeats several times that he’s really sorry about the way he’s handled things these last few months. But it’s been hard for him, too, and it’s hard for him even to say this, he’s never been much of a talker, but he knows he’s not been much of a father lately, either. That’s all over now, though, over and done with, he assures Earl; it’s all a part of the past. He’s going to be a different man now, a new man. He’s turned over a new leaf, he says. And Christmas seems like the perfect time for a new beginning, which is why he called them tonight and why he wants to come by tomorrow afternoon with presents and a tree and help set up and decorate the tree with them, just like in the old days. “Would you go for that? How’d that be, son?”

“Daddy?”

“Yeah, sure, son. What?”

“Daddy, are you gonna try to get back together with Mom?” Earl looks straight at his mother as he says this, and though she pretends to be watching Jackie Gleason, she is listening to his every word. As is George, and probably even Louise.

“Am I gonna try to get back together with your mom, eh?”

“Yeah.”

“Well … that’s a hard one, boy. You asked me a hard one.” He is silent for a few seconds, and Earl can hear him sipping from a glass and then taking a deep draw from his cigarette. “I’ll tell you, boy. The truth is, she doesn’t want me back. You oughta know that by now. I left because
she
wanted me to leave, son. I did some wrong things, sure, lots of ’em, but I did not want to leave you guys. No, right from the beginning, this thing’s been your mom’s show. Not mine.”

“Daddy, that’s a lie.”

“No, son. No. We fought a lot, your mom and me, like married people always do. But I didn’t want to leave her and you kids. She told me to. And now, look at this—
she’s
the one bringing these divorce charges and all, not me. You oughta see the things she’s charging me with.”

“What about … what about her having to protect herself? You know what I mean. I don’t want to go into any details, but you know what I mean. And what about your
girl
friend?” he sneers.

His father is silent for a moment. Then he says, “You sure have got yourself an attitude since I been gone. Listen, kid, there’s lots you don’t know anything about, that nobody knows anything about, and there’s lots more that you
shouldn’t
know anything about. You might not believe this, Earl, but you’re still a kid. You’re a long ways from being a man. So don’t go butting into where you’re not wanted and getting into things between your mom and me that you can’t understand anyhow. Just butt out. You hear me?”

“Yeah, I hear you.”

“Lemme speak to your brother.”

“He doesn’t want to talk to you,” Earl says, and he looks away from George’s face and down at his own feet.

“Put your mother on, Earl.”

“None of us wants to talk to you.”

“Earl!” his mother cries. “Let me have the phone,” she says, and she rises from the couch, her hand reaching toward him.

Earl places the receiver in its cradle. Then he stands there, looking into his mother’s blue eyes, and she looks into his.

She says, “He won’t call back.”

Earl says, “I know.”

The Visit

In late April of a recent year, I drove from my home in New York City across New Jersey to deliver a lecture at East Stroudsburg University, which is located in Pennsylvania at the southern end of the Pocono Mountains, not far from the Delaware Water Gap. I arrived a few hours earlier than my hosts expected me, so that, once there, I was free to drive twenty miles farther north to the small town of Tobyhanna, where my mother and father lived with me and my brother and sister for a single year, 1952, when I was twelve, my brother ten, my sister six.

For the five of us, the year we lived in Tobyhanna was the most crucial year of our shared life. It defined us: we were that family; we have remained that family. The following summer, my mother and father got divorced, and from then on, although we were the same, everything else was different. Not better, just different.

Looking back, I see that both my parents were careening out of control with rage, frustration, and fear. For years, my father had been plotting ways to leave my mother, whose dependency and hysteria had imprisoned him then, as later they would me. For her part, my mother had been just as busy trying to keep him from leaving, which only made him feel more trapped today than yesterday. He was thirty-eight; his life was skidding past. And he thought that he was somehow better than she, a more important person in the overall scheme of things than she, and he acted accordingly. This made my mother wild.

My father was a plumber, and he had been hired by a New England contractor as superintendent of all the plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning installation in an enormous Army shipping and storage depot being built in Tobyhanna. It was one of the first big postwar military bases commissioned by the Eisenhower administration. My father was the company’s man sent down from Hartford to run its largest out-of-state job, an extraordinary position for a young journeyman pipe fitter with no more than a high school education, a man whose biggest job up to then had been adding a wing to the Veterans’ Hospital in Manchester, New Hampshire. But he was bright, and he worked hard, and he was very good-looking, and lucky. People liked him, especially men, and women flirted with him.

He was a heavy drinker, though, starting at it earlier every day. And with each additional long night’s stay at the bar in Tobyhanna, he turned increasingly nasty and sometimes violent. The job he held was, in fact, way over his head, and he was terrified—not of being fired, but of being found out, and not so much by other people, as by himself.

I drove my car into Tobyhanna, a poor, bedraggled batch of houses and garages and trailers strung along a winding two-lane road abandoned long ago for the Stroudsburg-Scranton highway, and saw at once the bar where my father used to spend his evenings after work and as much of his weekends as he could steal from the house in the woods where he had established his nervous wife and three children. It was a small, depressing, impoverished town, despite the presence of the Army depot—or perhaps because of it.

I drew my car up to the bar on the main street, shut off the motor, and went inside. It was dark, dirty, and damp, smelled of old beer, sweat, and pickled, hard-boiled eggs, with a jukebox in the back, a U-shaped linoleum-covered bar that ran the length of the room, and several dim, flickering neon beer signs in the window.

I ordered a beer from the middle-aged woman behind the bar, whose exact, round, dun-colored double—her twin, I thought, or surely her sister—sat on a stool on the other side of the bar. She sat next to a man with a tracheotomy who was talking to her in a harsh, electronic moan.

A second man was perched on a stool a ways down from me—a scrawny fellow in his mid-fifties whose arms were covered with badly drawn tattoos. His head was wobbling on his neck above a bottle of beer, and he seemed not to notice when I sat down.

The place had not changed a bit in the thirty-four years since I last entered it. The doubling image of the round woman behind the bar and the woman sitting by the man with the hole in his throat acted like a drug or a mathematical formula or a vision, instantly doubling the place itself with my memory of it, matching my arrival in Tobyhanna today with my memory of a Saturday in winter, when my father drove me and my younger brother into town with him—ostensibly to pick up a few groceries or some such errand. It’s no longer clear to me why we three males left the house and hearth for town that day, just as it was not clear to me why I decided to drive north from Stroudsburg, when I more easily and pleasantly could have strolled around the college campus for a few hours, killing time. There was a powerful need to go there, but no remembered reason.

I remember my father bringing my brother and me straight into the bar with him, and I remember his cronies—soldiers and construction workers—buying my brother and me Cokes and potato chips. They teased us, because we were miniaturized imitations of men, and praised us for our manliness, because they were men, while down along the bar my father leaned over a friend’s shoulder and talked intently into his ear, then smiled at a fat woman (or so she looked to me) with bright red lipstick who sat next to him and patted her forearm affectionately, and soon he switched his attention completely over to her, leaving his male friend to drink alone for a while. I watched this take place.

The bartender waddled over to me, picked up my nearly empty bottle, and studied it and set it back down. “Want another?”

I shook my head no.

She lit a cigarette, inhaled furiously, a large, red-faced woman smoking like a steamship, and she studied my face the way she had examined my beer bottle. “You’re not from around here,” she stated.

“Last time I was in here was thirty-four years ago,” I said.

She laughed, once, more a bark than a laugh. “It hasn’t changed.”

“Nope,” I said. “It’s the same.”

The man next to me at the bar, his head wobbling like a heavy flower on a stem, was alert, more or less, and watching me now. “You ain’t old enough to’ve been in here thirty-four years ago,” he growled.

“I was only a kid then. With my father. My father brought me in here.”

The man sat up straight and swept his arms around and pointed at each of the four corners of the dingy room. “This place, it hasn’t changed,” he said. “Where you from?”

“New York City.”

“Hah!” he laughed. “This,” he said, waving his arms again, indicating the three other people in the bar as if they were a place, “this is the way to live! You never lock your doors here. It’s safe,” he proclaimed. “Not like, not like your goddamned New York City.”

I nodded in agreement, got off my stool, and made for the door.

He called after me, “Hey, buddy! You’re welcome!” He grinned through loose red lips and broken teeth and started to cackle at his joke on me and then cough and finally wheeze and whoop with joy, while I hurried out the front door to my car.

On our way home from the bar, me in front in the passenger’s seat, my brother in back, my father said, “Listen, boys, let’s just say we spent the time at the depot. In the office. I should’ve gone over some drawings there, anyhow, so we might’s well say that’s what we did, right?” He looked over at me intently. “Right?”

“Sure,” I said. “I don’t care.”

I peered out the window at the pale curtains of snow falling, the houses that occasionally flashed past, the dark shadows of trees, and of the Poconos closing off the sky. I didn’t care.

My brother didn’t say anything, but my father never asked him to. I was the one he worried about; I was the one my mother would interrogate.

The house itself had not changed. Except for a coat of blue-gray paint, it was still the same two-story farmhouse with the long shed attached at the rear and the weather-beaten, unpainted barn across the circular drive. The two stone chimneys at the ends of the house were matched by the pair of huge maple trees next to the road. Hanging from one of the trees was a small wooden sign.
RETTSTADT’S RESTAURANT
, it said.
SERVING DINNERS FRI.TO SAT. 5 P.M. TO 9 P.M
. I could not imagine who would drive all the way out from Tobyhanna—five miles through the woods on a narrow, winding, hilly road, passing barely a dozen other houses on the way, broken-down and half-finished bungalows and trailers set on cinder blocks among car chassis and old refrigerators and tires—for dinner at Rettstadt’s.

I looked at my watch, 4:45, and drew my car off the road, pulled into the driveway, and parked by the back porch, facing the door that, when we lived there, opened into the kitchen. By now, my limbs felt weak and awash with blood, and my heart was pounding furiously, as if I were at the entrance to a cave.

By the time my father and brother and I arrived home, the snow was coming down heavily, and my father told my mother that the snow had slowed him up, he had got stuck twice, and, besides, he had to spend quite a while at the office at the depot working on some drawings for Monday. That was why we were so late getting home from town.

My mother looked at him wearily. It was the same old story, the same old challenge tossed down, the dare for her to take him on one more time: either believe the liar or enrage him by forcing him to tell the truth.

I know from photographs that my mother was a pretty woman— small, blond, precisely featured, with lively hazel eyes and a sensitive mouth. “Petite,” she liked to say of herself. People said she looked like beautiful women—Claudette Colbert, Ann Blyth, Bette Davis—and she did. Not like any one of them, but she belonged to that particular caste of beauty. I remember her that afternoon standing before the stove, a ladle in hand, a steaming pot before her—but that, too, is a generic image, like her beauty. It was a Saturday afternoon; it was snowing.

My brother dodged around her and disappeared like a mouse through the living room toward the stairs and the unused bedroom on the second floor, a kind of attic in the back where we had set up our electric trains. My sister—I have no idea where she was, possibly in the kitchen, possibly with a friend for the afternoon: country children often visited each other on weekends; it made the driving back and forth easier for the parents. I hung around by the kitchen door, as if waiting for orders from one or the other of my parents. They were looking angrily at one another, however, and did not seem to know that I existed.

My mother said, “I know where you’ve been. I can smell it on you. I can smell her, too.”

My father’s face reddened, and he glowered down at her from his full height, which, because my mother was small and I was only twelve years old, seemed a considerable height, though he was never any taller than six feet, which turned out to be my height as well. He began to shout at her. It was at first a welling-up and then an over-flow of anger, wordless—or no words that I can recall—a kind of sustained roar, which she answered by letting loose with shrieks, cries, calls, wails—again, with no words that I can recall now and surely could not hear then, for the tone was all one needed in order to understand the sad rage this man and woman felt toward one another, like a pair of beasts caught side by side, each with a limb in the jaws of the same cruel trap, and then they begin to gnaw on the flesh and bone of their own trapped limbs.

What in 1952 had been the kitchen was now a restaurant dining room, the floor covered with bright green, indoor-outdoor carpeting, the walls paneled over in imitation pine with five-and-dime framed pictures of a trout stream with a deer bending its head to drink, a barn and silo and amber waves of grain, a covered bridge with throngs of fall foliage behind it. I smelled food cooking and walked through the door that had once led to the woodshed behind the kitchen and discovered that it led now to a large, open room filled with stainless steel counters, dishwashers, sinks, and stoves. I saw in the far corner of the room a small man in white pants and T-shirt scrubbing utensils in a sink. He saw me and waved, as if he’d been expecting me. He was in his late fifties, I guessed, square-faced, short, thick-bodied.

I said, “I’m not here to eat, don’t worry.”

He smiled and nodded. “We’re not set up yet, anyhow. Too early, friend.”

“Yes, well, I’m not here to eat,” I repeated. “I used to live here.”

He squinted across the room at me. Then he pursed his lips and pronounced my last name. My very name!

“Yes!” I said, astonished. “That’s right!” I did not know this man, I had never seen him before. I felt my father loom up beside me, huge and red and full of heat, and I looked automatically to my left, where I felt his presence most, and leaned away from him, then recovered, and stood straight and regarded the small man in white before me.

He put down the spoon he’d been scrubbing and took a step closer. He said my father’s first name and his last. “The plumber. Right? The plumbing guy?”

“Well, yes. My father. I’m not him, though. I’m his son.”

He examined my face for a few seconds, as if he did not believe me. He was looking at a gray-haired man in his late forties, a man nearly a decade older than my father had been in 1952. I was, however, more likely my father than my father’s son.

I told him that my father had died over five years ago.

He was sad to hear that and asked what he died of.

I said, “He pretty much drank himself to death.”

He nodded. “Yeah, well, those construction guys. They all hit the booze pretty hard. I ran the food concession for that job your dad was on, down there at the depot,” he said. “I was a kid then, just out of the service. I knew your dad. What a guy he was! Memorable. He had what you call real personality, your dad.” He wiped his hands with a towel and stuck one out to shake. “George Rettstadt,” he said. “I bought this place a few years after your dad lived here. He rented it, right? Brought your mom and the kids out from someplace in New England for a while, right? C’mon and look around, if you want. I’ve made loads of changes, as you can see,” he said, waving his arms at the four corners of the room, like the drunk at the bar.

I agreed. There had been a lot of changes. But even so, it was the same house, and it smelled the same to me, the light fell at familiar angles through the maple trees and tall, narrow windows, rooms opened into rooms where they always had. Rettstadt had turned woodshed into kitchen and kitchen into dining room, he had covered walls and floors, and he had lowered ceilings, hung brass lamps and tacky pictures. He had altered the whole function of the house—though he still lived in it, he assured me, upstairs. The living room was now a large second dining room that was for private parties, which he said was most of his business. “You know, Lions Club, Boy Scouts, stuff like that. Reunions, weddings, like that.”