A Quiet Belief in Angels (39 page)

“Jesus, what the hell happened?”

Reilly Hawkins standing over me, his hand outstretched, helping me up until I sat with my back against the bed.

I opened my eyes and looked down at my hands. They were shaking. “A dream—”

“Nightmare more like,” he said, and then his hands were beneath my arms and he was lifting me until I sat on the edge of the mattress.

“You want a drink of water?”

I nodded.

Reilly hurried from the room and went downstairs. I held my hands out in front of me. It was impossible to keep them still.

I pressed them against my chest, felt like some great winged animal was fighting to break free of my rib cage. I closed my eyes and leaned back.

And saw my mother’s face . . .

Had to rout him out with a cleansing fire, Joseph . . . had to . . .

“No!” I shouted, an involuntary sound.

Reilly appeared in the doorway, a glass of water in one hand, the bottle of mash in the other.

He set them down on the floor and then helped me to my feet and down the corridor. He sat me on the edge of his bed, pulled a blanket up around my shoulders, and then returned for the glasses.

“Just the water,” I said, and took the glass from him.

He smiled awkwardly. “Whiskey is for me,” he whispered. “You scared the living Jesus outta me, Joseph.”

He uncorked the bottle and took a swig.

“I’m s-s-sorry,” I stuttered.

“Don’t be,” he replied. “You have a right to be out at sea for a while.”

I nodded, tried to breathe deeply.

“Lie down,” Reilly said. “Try to go back to sleep. I’ll stay with you, okay?”

I said nothing. I handed him the glass and lay down slowly. I felt sleep tugging me back, and I was scared to go.

But I did go, eventually, and it seemed that whatever darkness was inside me had dissipated.

Homecoming
, I thought, and drifted away silently.

Late the following morning, four days after my twenty-third birthday, my mother faded silently as well.

She was two months and four days shy of forty-six.

I was not present when she died, and felt grateful, as if some small mercy had been bestowed on both of us. She had found her escape.

It was early evening when I learned of her death, seated there in Reilly Hawkins’s kitchen, a meal before me untouched, my mind insufficiently strong to focus on anything, the day having stretched out behind me absent of all definition and clarity. Reilly had stayed with me but we had spoken little. He had not asked me about my departure, my intended return to Brooklyn, and had he asked I would not have been able to answer.

Dr. Piper drove down to Hawkins’s place because he figured that’s where I would be.

When he came I knew what he would say, but he told me well, and it seemed that such a thing was in the warp of his being.

“Gone,” he said quietly. “With peace, with a smile, Joseph, but she is gone.”

He did not know of her crime, and I would not be the one to tell him. I would tell no one. The secret she had shared with me would stay in my heart for as long as I could bear to hold it.

Perhaps there are scars—in the mind, in the heart—that never heal. Perhaps there are words that can never be spoken or whispered, words to write on paper that fold into a boat that sails out on a stream to be swallowed by the tide. Perhaps there are shadows that forever haunt you, that close up against you in those moments of private darkness, and only you can recognize the faces they wear, for they are your shadows, the shadows of your sins, and no earthly exorcism can ever expel them. Perhaps we are not so strong after all. Perhaps we lie for the world, and in lying for the world we lie for ourselves.

Later, when Dr. Piper’s words were nothing more than a memory, I cried for my mother.

I cried for Elena Kruger: the one I’d promised to protect.

Early morning. Sky like hammered copper. Heart like a blunted fist. Rain fine as dust.

Buried my mother. Same plain deal coffin as my father. This time there was no Southern wake. I did not tie her clothes to a branch of sassafras and burn them. Gunther Kruger did not carry her body down the country blacktop on a flatbed truck. Afterward, there was no gathering in the kitchen of my childhood to tell tall tales of the life she had led.

This time there was nothing.

I did not cry for the woman who’d died; I cried for the woman I remembered. I stood over the grave and said some kind of prayer, a few words built on a thin hope with my eyes closed tight, screwed up in wrinkles like twists of paper. The rest of the world was elsewhere, seven leagues before me and still ahead of the wind.

And then I walked away, Reilly Hawkins on one side, Dr. Thomas Piper on the other.

It was Wednesday, October eighteenth, 1950.

“Maybe there’s a better place,” Reilly said.

“Maybe there isn’t,” I replied.

“Seems to me it’ll be a good while before either of us finds out, eh?”

I nodded but did not speak.

Two days later, on Friday afternoon, Reilly Hawkins drove me to the bus station in Augusta Falls.

I began the long journey back to Brooklyn.

I promised myself I would never return to Georgia.

TWENTY-FOUR

B
Y THE SUMMER OF 1951 I HAD RETURNED TO MY WRITING. The money from the sale of the house had been released, and I had received more than three thousand dollars. I stayed on at Aggie Boyle’s, but many things had changed. I had watched as my heart slowly healed, and of my mother’s confession I said nothing. My relationship with Joyce Spragg, however meaningful it might have been, died a slow but painless death. I continued my allegiance to the Writers’ Forum, and Paul Hennessy had become my closest friend. It was he who encouraged me to continue The Homecoming.

“You just need a first line,” he said. “Every great book begins with a great first line, you know?”

“Such as?”

He laughed. “Hell, Joseph, you’re the writer. I’m just a lowly reader. I know a great first line when I read one, but when it comes to writing I have a hard enough time filling out a job application.”

“I have a first line.”

“Which is?”

We were in my room. I was at my desk and Paul was in an armchair in the bay. Against the mid-afternoon sunshine he appeared as little more than a silhouette.

I reached for the sheaf of papers upon which I had scrawled the beginnings of my novel so long before, and I thumbed through them.

“Here,” I said. “You ready?”

“Hit me with it, Jackson.”

I smiled. “There was never a time when I believed that life would be anything other than beautiful—”

He was shaking his head. “No, no, no,” he said. “It’s clumsy. No poetry. It sounds trite as well.”

“Anything else wrong with it?”

Paul rose from his chair and walked to the bookcase. “Let’s see what we have here,” he said. He reached for a volume. “
Cannery Row.
John Steinbeck.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Shut up and listen.” Hennessy cleared his throat. “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.” He snapped the book shut and smiled. “See? Poetry. A little magic. It conjures a whole atmosphere in one sentence.” He reached for another. “William Faulkner.
The Wild Palms
.”

“Nobel Prize for Literature last year,” I said. “You’re setting me up against some stiff competition.”

“Which is probably exactly what you need. Here we go. ‘The knocking sounded again, at once discreet and peremptory, while the doctor was descending the stairs, the flashlight’s beam lancing on before him down the brown-stained stairwell and into the brown-stained tongue-and-groove box of the lower hall.’ How’s that for a little mystery, eh? Who’s the doctor! Is he in his own house? What’s the knocking sound? Someone at the door? Who would come knocking at his door at night? Is someone sick? Has someone died?”

“Enough already. I get your point.”

“So write me a great first line.”

“Now?”

“Sure now, why the hell not? What’re you waiting for? You know what they say . . . ten percent inspiration—”

“Ninety percent perspiration, I know.”

“So I’ll go sit over by the window and mind my own business until you’re done.”

I leaned over the desk, pen in hand, and I closed my eyes. I thought of the opening scene. The arrival of friends at a house. Friends long since forgotten. Friends passing through a town who decide to call on the central character. He is surprised, taken aback, but their enthusiasm and charm seem to captivate him. He feels as though there is something here he has lost. He yearns for the past, a time when friends such as these were all that was important, and he decides that the life he has chosen has been a waste. He begins a journey back to his roots. He travels on foot, by train, on buses and wagons, and hitches rides. He crosses from the east to the west of America and lives life as it was meant to be lived. He never does reach the town of his birth, but he does find his home. An allegory, a fable, a myth.

I put pen to paper.

“I hear no scratching of nib on parchment,” Hennessy said from his bay window.

“Shhh,” I hissed. “Can’t you see I’m working?”

A few minutes later I looked up, leaned back, turned in my chair with the paper in my hand and smiled. “I have it,” I said proudly.

“Good. So let’s hear it.”

“There was a time when it seemed each day could burst with passion; a time when life was swollen with magic and desire; a time when I believed the future could be nothing but perfect. There was such a time. And in my wide-eyed innocent youth, I felt that a path had been carved for me that could only lead higher—”

“Whoa, enough,” Hennessy interjected. “That’s more than one line.”

I looked up. “I have more.”

“I didn’t ask for more.”

“So what d’you think?”

“Better,” he said conservatively. “Better than the other one. You get the idea there’s some impending darkness. A disappointment. Something has happened to dampen this fellow’s enthusiasm, right?”

“Yes, there is. Some friends of his—”

Hennessy raised his hand. “Don’t tell it, write it. Write it first, and then you can tell me.”

I smiled. “You intend to be my muse,” I said.

“God no, Vaughan. A muse should be female, a woman of grace. We shall find you a muse, someone intelligent and elegant, but not so pretty that she’s a constant distraction, eh?”

I had spoken of Alex with Paul so many times before. In that moment I could not bear to speak her name again, and so I said nothing.

“You are going to carry on writing?”

“Yes,” I replied. “You have started me off now.”

“Then, Vaughan, my work is done. I shall leave you to the machinations of your own mind. I am going to find a bar and drink until I can’t see very well.”

“Enjoy,” I said.

“I shall, Vaughan, indeed I shall.”

I worked consistently. I found a groove, a rhythm, and somewhere between dawn and dusk I managed to discipline myself sufficiently to hammer out my words. I bought a new Underwood typewriter, set it atop a folded blanket on my desk to minimize the clatter it made, and shunted page after page between roller and platen. I took up smoking, a nauseating affectation which I promptly became addicted to, and oftentimes I would go out in the evening with Hennessy and we would try as many different drinks as we could manage until we were sick as dogs.

The past tried to leave me alone, but I would collide with it every once in a while. I thought of the girls who’d been killed, and their names would come back to me: Alice Ruth Van Horne, Rebecca Leonard, Catherine McRae, Virginia Grace Perlman, others whose faces I had never known, would never know. I thought of the day I’d found Gunther Kruger in my mother’s room, and then I would think of her creeping from the house that late August night to commit arson. I tried to convince myself that she could not have done such a thing, but I knew she had. She had tried to exorcise the demon from Augusta Falls, a demon she had permitted to enter her bed, her life, her heart perhaps. Guilt, anger, pain, her conscience, such things as these had finally overwhelmed her, and she had inflicted her own madness on the world. That madness had grown, had eaten her alive from within, and finally it had killed her. My thoughts of her were not heavy with grief, but a bitter sense of pity. I did think of my father. I often wondered what would have become of us had he lived. I took my emotions and I wrote them into “The Homecoming”, and in some way, it seemed to make things better.

Early September of the same year, with much of the first draft complete, I registered at the nearest library I could find. From here I borrowed
Worlds in Collisio
n by Immanuel Velikovsky, armfuls of the
Writer’s Digest
, works by Ezra Pound, Machiavelli’s
The Prince
, Fenimore Cooper’s
Satanstoe
. And it was here that I saw her for the first time. And though there was no particular line or curve to her features, though her eyes were neither emarald-green nor sapphire-blue, but warm, a color like mahogany, painstakingly sanded until the grain came proud; though her face cafried the familiarity of someone close but long-lost . . . Despite nothing to name or cite as the one thing, it seemed that everythig about her carried with it a sense of magic. Perhaps it was the feeling that here was a woman who needed no one, and that was the quality that made her so unbearably attractive to me.

I saw her in the library, she too bearing up a handful of books, and I believed that some preternatural selection had designated this moment as one of great importance.

My words, ordinarily my strength, failed me. The first day I could say nothing of consequence or meaning. I merely smiled in the hope that she would smile back. She did not. I felt my heart snap like a green-stick twig.

I returned to the library each day for the better part of a week, and on a late Friday afternoon she appeared from behind a shelf with a copy of
Cannery Row
in her hand.