A Quiet Belief in Angels
Read A Quiet Belief in Angels Online
Authors: R. J. Ellory
Table of Contents
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
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Copyright © 2009 by R. J. Ellory Publications Ltd
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Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress
eISBN : 978-1-101-15595-0
Dedicated to Truman Capote
(1924-1984)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
P
erhaps, somewhere, there are creative endeavors accomplished alone.
This was not one of them.
As always, my endless thanks to Jon, to Genevieve, Juliet, Euan and Robyn.
To Paul Blezard, Ali Karim and Steve Warne for their constant support.
To Guy.
To Victoria and Ryan.
What we remember from childhood we remember forever—permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.
—CYNTHIA OZICK
PROLOGUE
T
HE SOUND OF GUNSHOTS, LIKE BONES SNAPPING.
New York: its relentless clamor, harsh metallic rhythms and hammering footsteps; its subways and shoeshines, gridlocked junctions and yellow cabs; its lovers’ quarrels; its history and passion and promise and prayers.
The city swallows gunshots effortlessly, as if they were no more significant than the beats of a lonely heart.
No one heard it amidst such a quantity of life.
Perhaps because of all these other sounds.
Perhaps because no one was listening.
Even the dust, caught in a shaft of moonlight through the third-floor hotel window, moved suddenly by the retort of the shots, resumed its errant but progressive path.
Nothing happened, for this was New York, and such lonely and undiscovered fatalities were legion, almost indigenous, briefly remembered, effortlessly forgotten.
The city went on about its business. A new day would soon begin, and no death possessed the power to delay it.
I am an exile.
I look back across the span of my life, and I try to see it for what it was. Amidst the madness that I encountered, amidst the rush and smash and brutality of the collisions of humanity I have witnessed, there have been moments. Love. Passion. Promise. The hope of something better. All these things. But I am faced with a vision, and now I see it wherever I turn. I was Salinger’s “Catcher,”standing there on the edge of a shoulder-high field of rye, aware of the sound of unseen children playing among the waves and sways of color, hearing their catch-as-catch-can laughter, their games—their childhood if you will—and watching intently for when they might come too close to the edge of the field. For the field floated free and untethered, as if in space, and were they to reach the edge there wouldn’t be time to stop them before they fell. So I watched and waited and listened and tried so hard to be there before they went tumbling away off the precipice beyond. For once they fell there would be no recovering them. They were gone. Gone, but not forgotten.
This has been my life.
A life spooled out like thread, strength uncertain, length unknown; whether it will cease abruptly or run out endlessly, binding more lives together as it goes; in one instance no more than cotton, barely sufficient to gather a shirt together at its seams, in another a rope—triple-woven, turk’s-head closures, each strand and fiber tarred and twisted to repel water, or blood; a rope to raise a barn, to fashion Portuguese bowlines and deliver a near-drowned child from a flooded runoff, to hold a roan mare and break her will, to bind a man to a tree and beat him for his crimes, to hoist a sail, to hang a sinner.
A life to hold, or to slip through uncaring and inattentive hands, but always a life.
And given one, we wish for two, or three, or more, so easily forgetting the first gift unwisely spent.
Time travels straight as a hopeful fishing line, weeks gathering to months gathering to years; yet, with all this time, a heartbeat of doubt and the prize is gone.
Special moments—sporadic, like knots tied, irregularly spaced as if crows on a telegraph wire—these we remember, and dare not forget, for often they are all that is left to show.
I remember all of them, and more besides, and sometimes wonder if imagination hasn’t played a part in designing my life.
For that’s what it was, and always will be: a life.
Now that it has reached its closing chapter I feel it is time to tell of all that has happened. For that’s who I was, who I will always be . . . nothing more than the storyteller, the teller of tales, and if judgment is to be made on who I am or what I have done, then so be it.
This, though, will stand as truth—a testament if you will, even a confession.
I sit quietly. I feel the warmth of my own blood on my hands, and I wonder how long I will continue to breathe. I look at the body of a dead man before me, and I feel that in some small way justice has been served.
We go back now, to the beginning. Walk with me, if you will, for this is all I can ask, and though I have committed so many wrongs, I believe that I have done enough right to warrant this much time.
Take a breath. Hold it. Release it. Everything must be silent, for when they come, when they finally come for me, we must be quiet enough to hear them.
ONE
R
UMOR, HEARSAY, FOLKLORE. WHICHEVER WAY IT LAID DOWN TO rest or came up for air, rumor had it that a white feather indicated the visitation of an angel.
On the morning of Wednesday, July twelfth, 1939, I saw one, long and slender and unlike any kind of feather I’d seen before. It skirted the edge of the door as I opened it, almost as if it had waited patiently to enter, and the draft from the hallway carried it into my room. I picked it up, held it carefully, and then showed it to my mother. She said it was from a pillow. I thought about that for quite some time. Made sense that pillows were stuffed with angels’ feathers. That’s where dreams came from—the memories of angels seeping into your head while you slept. Got me to thinking about such things. Things like God. Things like Jesus dying on the cross for our sins that she told me about so often. I never took to the idea, never was a religious-minded boy. Only later, with years behind me, would I understand hypocrisy. It seemed that my childhood was littered with folks that said one thing and did another. Even our minister, the circuit rider, Reverend Benedict Rousseau, was a hypocrite, a charlatan, a fraud—one hand indicating the Way of the Scripture, the other lost amidst the boundless pleats of his sister’s skirt. As a child, I never really saw such things. Children, perceptive as they may be, are nevertheless selectively blind. They see everything, no question about it, but they choose to interpret what they see in a manner that suits their sensibilities. And so it was with the feather, nothing much of anything at all, but in some small way an omen, a portent. My angel had come to visit. I believed it, believed it with all my heart, and so the events of that day seemed all the more disparate and incongruous. For this was a day when everything changed.
Death came that day. Workmanlike, methodical, indifferent to fashion and favor, disrespectful of Passover, Christmas, all observance or tradition, Death came to collect the tax, the due paid for breathing. And when Death came I was standing in the yard amidst the scrubbed earth and dry topsoil, surrounded by carpetweed and chickweed phlox and wintergreen. He came along the High Road I think, came all the way along the border between my father’s land and that of the Krugers’. I believe He walked, because later, when I looked, there were no horse tracks, nor those of a bicycle, and unless Death could move without touching the ground I assumed He came on foot.
Death came to take my father.
My father’s name was Earl Theodore Vaughan. Born September twenty-seventh, 1901, in Augusta Falls, Georgia, when Roosevelt was president, hence his middle name. He did the same for me, gave me Coolidge’s name in 1927, and there I was—Joseph Calvin Vaughan, son of my father—standing amidst the carpetweed when Death came to visit in the summer of ’39. Later, after the tears, after the funeral and the Southern wake, we tied his cotton shirt to a branch of sassafras and set it afire. We watched it burn down to nothing, the smoke representing his soul passing from this mortal earth to a higher, fairer, more equitable plane. Then my mother took me aside, and through her shadowed and swollen eyes she told me that my father had died of a rheumatic heart.