A Quiet Belief in Angels (35 page)

New York took my breath awa. I did not regain it for more than two days.

Monday, May second, 1949. Stood in the front hallway of the hotel where I was staying; newspaper on the porch caught my eye; a byline beneath the header, story about a man called Arthur Miller, a play-wright, an icon it seemed; awarded a Pulitzer for
Death of a Salesman.
Concierge breezed past me, flung open the door, snatched the paper from the floor and headed back the way she’d come. I held her up momentarily, inquired after a boarding house, apartments or rooms to let. Middle-aged woman, squinted at me from beneath heavyset brows that bunched in the middle.

“Throop and Quincy,” she snapped as if throwing small stones. “Place on the corner of Throop and Quincy if more permanent is your requirement. My sister has a house down there. Name’s Aggie Boyle, Miss Aggie Boyle . . . tell her I sent you down.”

After breakfast I ventured down to Throop and Quincy and found the house with a sign in the window: ROOM TO LET. Aggie Boyle was built with as much substance as her boarding house.

“Eight dollars a week, buy your own food, share the facilities, hot water between six a.m. and eight-thirty a.m.” Her tone was perfunctory and businesslike, her face like some old Tyrolean maid. Childless, perhaps she had never felt the hand of a man beyond simple courtesy as she climbed steps or alighted a train. Beneath the acres of skirt were acres of flesh and beneath that were sturdy bones, bones hewn from old trees, hammered together for permanence, sufficient perhaps to carry her into the afterlife. Aggie’s hands were crudely fashioned, width of fingers preventing anything but a fan of digits, and when she turned her head it traveled in unison with her shoulders, as an elephant or a rhinoceros. But there was something about her that was likable. Stationed on the earth to serve some purpose, to provide berthing and breakfast for the weary and restless. I imagined there was a past; imagined stories of Aggie and her sister, the years behind them, the things that carried them to Brooklyn.

“There are four other tenants,” Aggie told me as we climbed the stairs to the attic room. “Two gentlemen, two ladies. Mr. Janacek. He’s from Eastern Europe. Been here a good few months. Minds his own business, prefers it if we all mind ours too. Mr. Franklin. He reads copy for the
Brooklyn Courier
, makes sure they spell the words right and don’t miss out the commas. Mrs. Brock. She’s been here for more than fifteen years. Elderly lady, helps out at the library Wednesdays and Fridays. Last, there’s Miss Spragg, who’s assistant registrar at St. Joseph’s College, over by De Kalb and Underwood Park, you know?”

I smiled and nodded though I had no idea where St. Joseph’s College was.

“If you stay that’s who you’ll have for friends and neighbors, so it’d suit you to be polite and mind your manners ’til you know what they’re about.”

The room was functional and clean, large enough for a bed, two chairs in the bay, a writing desk against the left-hand wall, a closet with a rail for hanging clothes.

I walked to the window and looked down into the street.

“I’ll take it,” I said. I turned and looked at Aggie Boyle.

“You don’t need to think about it?” she asked, in her voice an element of surprise.

“What’s there to think about?”

She smiled, shook her head. “Don’t s’pose much of anything really.”

“Then we’re done.” I reached into my pocket, took out a fist of dollars. “How much do I pay you?”

“Two weeks’ money now, and then I collect every Friday.”

I counted out sixteen dollars and gave them to her. The money disappeared into the pocket of her apron.

“I’m a writer,” I told Aggie. “I’m going to be working here as well. You think the sound of a typewriter will bother anyone?”

Aggie smiled again, showed the kind of teeth that had been raised chewing sugar cane right from the ground. “Don’t think you’ll find any complaints. Only one who concerns herself with noise is Mrs. Brock and she’s on the other side of the house.”

I nodded, smiled back.

“Bathroom’s down to the right at the end of the hall. Faces Miss Spragg’s room so don’t be coming out of there as nature intended, okay?”

“Okay, Miss Boyle.”

“Aggie,” she replied. “Everyone calls me Aggie.”

“Okay, Aggie.”

“Well, I’ll let you settle in . . . you’ll need to be collecting your things and bringing them back. When you’re ready to leave come and fetch your key.”

“Thank you.”

She stepped forward and looked at me with her penetrating eyes and frowned. “You carry a lot of weight for someone so young,” she said. “That your writer’s curse or you had a difficult time back wherever you came from?”

I laughed, taken aback. “Writer’s curse?”

“Hell, they all got a curse. I seen them come and go. Actors are the same. Carrying a hundred people around in their heads. Something to do with being creative and all that.”

“I don’t know about any curse,” I said.

“Then you’ve had a difficult time of things.”

“Difficult enough.”

Aggie nodded. “I could see that about you. Seems to me Brooklyn is the best place for you then.”

“How so?”

“Place is so busy you never have time to look anywhere but somewhere else, know what I mean?”

I thought of the people on the sidewalk, the smell of the place, the crowded diners, the thunder of humanity. “I think so,” I said. “I think I know what you mean.”

“Well, if you don’t you’ll soon find out,” Aggie replied, and with that she turned and disappeared into the hallway.

I stayed for a few minutes, my mind hollow, my thoughts contained. I breathed in the smell of new paint, of emptiness, of a room waiting to be filled by someone. I had arrived. Arrived somewhere from out of someplace else. A fresh start, a new beginning, a rebirth.

The ghosts were there, some of them—perhaps all—but for now they were quiet. I closed my eyes and tried to see my mother’s face, but I could not. My father was an indistinct blur of monochrome, like the memory of a faded photograph. And the little girls—all of them, side by side somewhere, waiting for their wings perhaps: waiting to be angels.

It took everything I possessed to remember a little of Georgia, and in some way I felt that was good.

I was first seduced by Miss Joyce Spragg, assistant registrar of St. Joseph’s College, on the evening of Sunday, June twelfth.

Miss Spragg was forty-one, twenty years my senior.

“Come and share a bottle of Burgundy with me, Joseph,” she said. I was seated at my desk, perhaps daydreaming, a half-hearted attempt to work, and I had left my door ajar.

I rose from my chair and crossed the room. As I reached the door she pushed it open with her foot. She stood there in a cotton print dress, in one hand the bottle of wine, in the other two glasses. Her hair, dark and luxuriant, was swept back from her face. She was a fine-looking woman, her lips glossed in crimson, her eyes a haze of smoky blue.

“A drink,” she repeated. “Unless, of course, I am interrupting your work.”

I shook my head and smiled. “I’m not really working.”

“Then that’s settled,” she said. “We’ll share this bottle of wine and talk of inconsequential things for the evening.”

I followed her across the hall to her room. Compared to my sparse habitat it was richly furnished with brocade throws and patterned silk cushions. Standing away from the wall was an ornate wooden screen, a gown draped over it, and to its right a deep, high-backed leather armchair. Miss Spragg and I had spoken many times, a cordial greeting as we passed in the hallway or encountered one another in the downstairs kitchen, but it had never been more than that.

“You are a writer,” she stated. “Aggie told me you’ve come to Brooklyn to write a book.”

I nodded and smiled. “Yes,” I said.

“Please . . . sit down,” she said, pointing the bottle toward a chaise lounge at the foot of her unmade bed. She then uncorked the bottle with a degree of deftness that I could only assume came from familiarity, and filled both glasses.

“To a tremendous novel, and its great success,” she toasted.

I raised my glass and thanked her for the sentiment.

“So, you are Joseph Vaughan from Georgia,” she said as she walked to the bed and sat down on the edge of the mattress. “I understand that you have suffered some trials and tribulations?”

I shook my head. “I am healthy enough—”

“But in the mind,” she said, “and in the heart, that’s where life invades with its shadows and edges, does it not?” She laughed. She seemed relaxed, self-assured, aware of her attractiveness and unafraid of what might be thought of her. I envied her confidence.

“People are made of steel and whipcord,” I said. “People survive far greater traumas and losses than those I’ve suffered.”

“So tell me,” she said. “Tell me what happened in Georgia.”

“I thought we were going to talk about inconsequential things.”

She smiled. “You’re the one telling me you haven’t suffered greatly.”

I talked for the better part of an hour. Once or twice she interrupted me, to clarify a point, to request a greater depth or detail, but for the entire time she seemed content to listen patiently as I spoke of my father, my mother, of Alex and the baby, of the child killings, of Virginia Perlman, of the death of Gunther Kruger. I told her everything, even the letter from the Atlanta Short Story people, the collection of newspaper clippings I had carried with me, and when I was done she rose from the bed and refilled my glass.

She sat down again, her expression was distant and pensive.

“I have troubled you, Miss Spragg,” I said.

She smiled and shook her head, “Not at all, Joseph, and stop calling me Miss Spragg for Christ’s sake.” She laughed. “You are how old?”

“Twenty-one, twenty-two in October.”

“And you have already lived the kind of life that could carry a book.”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Have some more wine,” she said, and rose to fill my glass.

A quarter of an hour later she refilled my glass for a fourth time. Her dress rose over her knee as she crossed her legs. I glanced down, and when I looked up once more she smiled at me. She knew I had looked, and there was a moment of awkwardness.

“It is not a sin to look,” she said. “Nor can thoughts be sins, Joseph. And more often than not it’s only someone else’s conscience that tells you
doing
is a sin. If one lives life with an open heart and a sense of integrity . . . well, if one really lives life for the moment then there is never sufficient time to regret.” Miss Spragg leaned forward, and as she leaned she angled her chin toward me and closed her eyes for a moment too long.

“Are you ready to live for the moment, Joseph?”

I laughed, a little nervously perhaps. I could smell her perfume and something beneath, and together they translated into promise.

I set my glass down and leaned forward also, our faces parallel. Our cheeks were merely inches apart.

“I am ready to live,” I whispered, and rose from the chaise lounge to embrace her. I remembered the sound of her glass hitting the floor on the other side of the mattress, considered it remarkable that it remained unbroken, and then she was over me, seeming to consume me like a wave.

Later, both dazed from the rush of passion, she lay across me, her head on my chest, and she told me that what had happened was of no great consequence or meaning.

She turned and looked up at me, and for a moment I saw through her veneer of confidence. The light of her eyes seemed dim, her skin tone fatigued as that of an aged courtesan. Each feature was limned by small shadows, the narrow creases that spoke in epidermal tongues: here, a betrayal; there, a disillusionment; and finally, the outward sign of a broken heart. Each aspiration had been anchored by her pessimism, her attempts to advantage opportunity maladroit and clumsy. Here was a human being who believed the world would always owe her, and to her dying breath would stand testament to its failure to pay.

Or so I believed in that moment, believed and did not care. For Miss Joyce Spragg, assistant registrar of St. Joseph’s College on De Kalb, appeared to me as a small wish for perfection in a very imperfect world.

“Consequence and meaning are relative,” I whispered. “Go to sleep.”

Each time I visited with Joyce, she would remind me that our union was of no consequence or deeper meaning. Each time I would smile. Joyce Spragg was a facade, her ambivalence a veil behind which she hid from the world. Perhaps she believed it necessary to be equivocal and ambiguous. Perhaps she considered such qualities attractive. I never loved her, never fooled myself into thinking I did. Our relationship was a convenience, a means of company, though we did become friends. However, for all her acquired manners and quirks, Joyce did introduce me to the narrow clique of literati who frequented the College Writers’ Forum. We met on Saturday evenings; my introduction was in the first week of July 1949, and here I collided at last with the very people I had yearned to meet when I left Georgia.

The College Writers’ Forum was a haven for misfits and mavericks, those who could perhaps find company nowhere else; and though they proved to be some of the most intelligent and perceptive people I had ever met, they also proved to be the strangest. “They will try to explain classic poetry that they don’t understand,” Joyce said, “and then they’ll drink copious amounts of cheap red wine and regale everyone with their own hideous attempts at iambic pentameter and free prose.”

The Forum was held in a meeting hall half a block from the college campus limits. Joyce, as assistant registrar, was permitted to bring as many guests as she wished as long as they were neither dullards, igno ramuses, nor “foreigners.”

“Foreigners?” I asked. “You mean they consider only American literature of worth?”

She laughed. “Foreigners are those who attend the rival colleges. Foreigners are not allowed in the Forum.”

Satisfied that I belonged to none of the excluded groups, we went. We were met by Lance Forrester, second season chairman. The year was divided not into quarters, but “seasons,” and in turn they were “winter’s end,” “aurora,” “equinox” and “solstice.”