A Cry of Angels (3 page)

"Running late this morning, Mr. Whitaker."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Mr. Burroughs?"

"He's on his way."

"Mr. Jurgen?"

I grinned. "Most especially."

"Well, maybe he'll arrive by dinnertime. Don't suck your thumb, you're too big for that." I took my scalded thumb out of my mouth. Having heard the morning report, Miss Esther sniffed with satisfaction. The morning was right, the day on course. She elbowed her pillows into order and prepared to taste her coffee.

It was strange to me even then that a dilapidated house of off-cast old people could be run with such discipline and order. And probably no one could have managed it but Esther Whitaker Cahill.

I had been brought to live with my great-aunt when I was a little over five years old, after my mother and father were killed in a tenant-house fire in North Carolina. There were other relatives scattered nearby, and many of them far better off than Miss Esther, but she was the only one who showed an interest in taking me in.

There was no family tree, as such, among the Whitakers. It was more like a plant bed, with each member springing from common soil, but having little else to do with each other. A disjointed clan of farmers, carpenters, mill hands and preachers, given to wasteful living, bad marriages and early deaths, their one shared family trait was a tendency not to do very well at whatever career they chose.

Esther Whitaker had high hopes of escaping that crowd and starting a new line when she took Wylie Cahill out of Duke University and eloped with him to Morehead City. Wylie was flunking his way out anyway, and she saw no cause to delay the vice-presidency awaiting him in his father's insurance company.

But Wylie never became the insurance tycoon his father and bride envisioned. Wylie was an outdoorsman who preferred hunting partridges to selling policies, and he spent his days rambling the countryside in his roadster, slapping backs at church barbecues and swapping stories over a bottle of shine at country stores, completely forgetting appointments to snatch his shotgun from the boot if he saw a sharecropper in the field with a hunting dog that looked like it knew its business.

Miss Esther would put her hands on her hips, mimicking him:

"'Insurance is a hell of a game to sell folks anyhow,' he would say! 'You got to get a man to bet you the price of the premium that he'll die before the next premium is due. It's hard to get a man to bet you he'll die before the month's out. Then he gets tired of losing month after month and having to pay the premium, and pretty soon chucks it altogether.'"

With that business philosophy and his natural habits, great-uncle Wylie managed to lose every agency his father gave him, each loss causing him to be banished farther south, and when his father finally died and he inherited the company, it was no real challenge to him to lose that too.

By the time they were reduced to the storefront independent agency in Quarrytown, Miss Esther was hardened to the fact that instead of escaping to the Cahills, she had simply naturalized another Whitaker. As their financial condition worsened they began trading houses, living on the profits as they traded down, until they ended up in the two-story house with the shaded yard in the mill village hollow. Then the mill changed hands and the blacks started moving in and they were stuck. There was no profit in a sale after that.

They had one son, Vance, and his mother started in on him early, with piano, special tutoring, careful selection of his friends—but again the Whitaker genes came home to roost. Vance grew fat, took to wearing loud clothes and shied away from the daughters of prominent granite families to hang out at the square dances at Taylorsville. Urged to join social clubs in high school, he became a Future Farmer and talked artificial insemination at the table. In time he traded his piano in on an electric guitar, his years of lessons serving only to make him the only member of the Quarrytown Troubadors who could read music.

When, as a second-string lineman, Vance inadvertently recovered a fumble and scored the touchdown that gave Quarrytown its first Class-A Championship, and his father his fatal heart attack, Miss Esther threw up her hands.

Inconsolably grieved, Vance dramatically announced that he was quitting school to understudy a tobacco auctioneer in North Carolina. Miss Esther packed his bags without a word.

Vance had since married, and now lived with his wife and their twins in Durham. They had only been to visit Miss Esther once in the eight years I had lived with her, but every year Vance did send a Christmas card, sometimes with a five-dollar bill inside, sometimes with a picture of the twins. Sometimes both.

On Wylie's death Miss Esther found herself in the classic widow's bind: too old to remarry, too young for a pension, too inexperienced to work, and too proud for welfare. All she had was the peeling two-story house in the growing Negro section and a good name in the community. It was one of her friends at a missionary-circle meeting who first asked Miss Esther if it wasn't lonely for her in that big house, and whether it wouldn't be a comfort to her to have the woman's aging mother occupy one of the empty bedrooms. She would be compensated, of course. Miss Esther did indeed find that a comfort, and Mrs. Deedee Cline moved in.

That let down the gate. It seemed half the church had an aging relative crowding them out of bedroom space, and the siege on Miss Esther's was mounted. Before long it was an informal nursing home, though Miss Esther preferred to call it boardinghouse, and Farette was hired to do the cooking and cleaning.

All her life a battler, and surrounded by nothing but weaklings, Miss Esther now found charges worthy of her energies. Old people. People forgotten by those who run the world, people with nothing going for them but their wills. This kind of battle Miss Esther understood, and she threw herself into it, with fire.

At Miss Esther's there was stroke and hum to a day, clash and conflict, a baiting of personality to keep its anger, its vanity, its pride alive. It was never allowed to become one of those places where old people sit and listen to the ticking away of their lives. At Miss Esther's there was humor, there was individuality, there was respect, all radiating from her own bullfiddle personality. "Don't you lay down on me!" was her threatening bedside manner, and she got them up, time and again.

Into this atmosphere she accepted me as she accepted the death of one of her boarders, a fact to be dealt with, to be fitted into the total thrust of order. But I was young, and needed little attention, so she tucked me away in the household and left me to grow, so long as I caused no trouble.

I did cause trouble at first, and a good deal of it. For a while Miss Esther thought she was going to have to ask the state to take me off her hands, and she couldn't be blamed for that; even Dr. Breisner thought I was going to need treatment.

But, of course, that was all in the first dark, turbulent winter—before that magical time when the giant Indian loomed in the doorway—with his fierce, scowling eyes, skin the color of old china, and dried rat's blood on the soles of his boots.

"Well," Miss Esther was saying, "did you meet the new schoolteacher?"

"Did I? She's the reason I'm late." I raised the shades.

She blew on her coffee, watching me closely. "What'd you think of her?"

"I'd say she's made to order for Jayell Crooms. She couldn't even make up her mind on what she wanted for breakfast!"

Miss Esther chuckled. "Yep, Jayell marries that one, he's in for a lively time."

"What'd Jayell want her to stay down here for? I'd think somebody like that would be a lot happier in an apartment uptown."

"Well, of course she would!
I'd
be a lot happier uptown! Anybody would but Jayell. He said he knew she wouldn't, so he's looking for a lot over in Marble Park, but since he's goin' to keep his shop down here and keep on buildin' houses for these blacks and country folks, he says it won't hurt her to get to know the kind of people he's goin' to be dealin' with. And too, I think he's testing her a little."

"Testing her?"

"Rubbing her nose in the kind of life she's going to have if she marries him. Jayell comes from a mighty poor family, and it's poor people he's wantin' to help. She might have just a little too much gloss to suit him."

"
Hnh
! I'd say he's goin' to have a time rubbing any of it off."

Miss Esther smiled. "Could be you're right, Mr. Whitaker. Could be you're right."

"It's sure hard to figure, a girl like that falling for Jayell Crooms."

"Well, I hear he caused quite a stir up at that college, had 'em all flocking around him. The head of the school made a big to-do over the building he drew up for him, had other architects over to look at it, trumped him up for some kind of genius, had him speak to the art classes, that kind of thing. And you know Jayell, the way he talks, the way he looks, I expect he was quite a change from all those professors with the button-down collars, especially at a girls' college where there ain't a whole lot of competition. It ain't too hard to figure them little small-town gals goin' crazy over him. At that age they'll fall in love with anything strange."

"I wonder what it's like, being in love."

"I wouldn't know. All I ever had was Wylie, and that was more like owning a dog. Who sugared this coffee?"

"I did . . . one spoonful . . ."

"Well, get Farette to show you the difference between a teaspoon and a tablespoon." She shivered and set the cup on the bedside table. She looked up sharply. "The others haven't met her yet, have they?"

"Not this morning. Didn't they see her when she got in last night?"

"It was past their bedtime. Besides, it's more proper they meet at breakfast"—she threw her feet over the side of the bed and felt for her scuffs—"which, by the way, we don't want to miss."

"Miss Esther, you think it was a good idea letting her come here? I don't know how the boarders are going to take her."

Her eyes narrowed mischievously. "Like a dose of medicine, is my guess. From what Jayell told me about her, and what I saw last night, I'd say she's just what this crowd needs right now. Wake 'em up a little, get their minds off themselves. There's been entirely too much achin' and complainin' around here lately. And havin' a teacher around awhile might do you some good too, from what I saw of your grades last year. Let's get to breakfast."

"Ah—I'm not too hungry this morning. I think I'll run out to the Fundeburk place and let Jayell know she's here."

"He knows. He'll come when he's ready."

"He might have forgot—you know how he is when he's workin' . . ."

"There's a place waiting at table, mister!"

"Yes, ma'am."

I stopped at the door. "Oh, I got Em Jojohn home all right. He's sleeping it off now."

Miss Esther shook her head. "Just try and keep him away from the house a few days. That girl's got enough to get used to."

"Yes, ma'am."

I took a deep breath and headed for the dining room.

Places at the table were claimed by the boarders on arrival at Miss Esther's, and held for life. With the exception, of course, of the transient Mrs. Porter. No place suited her, and no sooner was she seated than she was prevailing on someone to swap. The sun was in her eyes. Her chair had a bit of a "rick." Or, couldn't she sit near the hall, as she was expecting a telephone call.

My place, when I was forced to take it, was between Mrs. Bell and Mr. Rampey. Mr. Rampey was a good soul, but a spot finder. On his plate, his glass, the silverware, somewhere at every meal he found a little speck of something and summoned Farette in a rage. She gave up inspecting his dinnerware beforehand because that left the offending speck no place to hide but in the food—and that upset the others.

Still, I was in a more enviable place than the teacher, because she was next to Mrs. Cline. Once Mr. Rampey found his particle he was satisfied, but Mrs. Cline's taste reports went right on through the meal. "Now, I can't taste the beans at all today," she would say, or, across the table to Mrs. Bell, "Can you taste this creamed corn, Lucia? Well, I can't. It just has no taste to me whatever." Sadly, "It's so awful not to be able to taste anything." Brightening then, reassuring us all, "Now I can taste the beets, they're good." Mrs. Cline, our oldest boarder, lived in a room stripped bare except for a bed and a marble-topped night table on which a photograph of her husband in his casket stood surrounded by stalky African violets. She was near ninety now, and fragile-looking as a glass cobweb. She seemed always at death's door, tugging, and just too weak to get it open. At least, that's what we thought, until Em Jojohn, of whom she was terrified, delivered something one day and looked in her room without knocking; she hoisted a heavy potted plant, dirt and all, and splintered the doorjamb above his head.

I saw Gwen about to pass the sausage to Mrs. Metcalf, and tried to warn her, but couldn't get her eye quick enough.

"Oh! My goodness, no." Mrs. Metcalf recoiled in laughing horror. "None of that for me. I'm allergic, you know."

"Oh, really?"

"Why, my, yes, if I took so much as one little bite of pork I'd be flat on my back in the hospital. I can't eat acid fruit, green vegetables, milk or any kind of dairy, and if I so much as touch a piece of beef my ankles swell out to here."

"I'm sorry."

"Listen, last Thanksgiving I tried a boiled onion—you remember, Nadine—well, I couldn't get my breath! Mr. Rampey had to help me to my room! And for days after, I had this peculiar swimmy feeling, and saw these spots. Awfulest thing I've ever been through! I thought it would be all right, boiled, don't you know. But, oh, let me tell you didn't I suffer—ha-ha—from, oh, that boiled onion!"

Gwen looked at the woman's empty plate, empty cup, undisturbed dinnerware. "Well, what can you eat?" she asked.

Mrs. Metcalf folded her hands in her lap and shrugged. "Nothing," she said.

The teacher looked around the table, but nobody else wanted to get into it.

"Awww-riiight!" Miss Esther, announcing her arrival. She nodded good morning to everyone and took her place at the head of the table. "I hope the introductions have been taken care of," she said to Gwen.