A Quiet Belief in Angels (40 page)

I remembered the line, the very first line, a line I had memorized following my conversation with Paul. I smiled; I cleared my throat; I spoke.

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem—”

The girl frowned, looked embarrassed.

“—a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”

She shook her head. “Excuse me?”

“The first line,” I said, somewhat proudly, though I felt like a fool. “The first line of
Cannery Row,
the book you have there.”

The girl raised her eyebrows, peered down at the slim volume in her hand. “Is that so?” she asked. “I wouldn’t know, I haven’t read it.”

“I have.”

“So it would seem.” She lowered her hand to hide the thing, and then she moved as if to get past me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I took a step back in an effort to be less intimidating; I tried to smile, something heartfelt and warm, but my muscles tensed. I imagined she thought me quite crazy. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you,” I went on. “It’s just that when you see someone with a book you love, you think there might be some—” My throat tightened. I did-n’t know what I’d planned to say.

“Some what?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied. My self-consciousness rapidly increased to near emotional distress. “Really, I’m sorry. I wanted to speak to you last time you were here. I’ll go now. I’m just making a fool of myself.”

The girl smiled. “Okay,” she said gently. Once again she stepped to the left as if to pass by.

I knew that if I let her go then I would more than likely never see her again. Such were the Fates.

“I come here quite often,” I said. “I’ve only just moved here, and I don’t really know anyone. I wondered . . .”

She looked at me askance.

I raised my hands and backed up. “This is not going the way I wanted,” I said.

“And what did you want?” she asked.

“I don’t know, miss . . . I just wanted to introduce myself. I wanted to say hello. I wanted to find a reason to speak to you, that was all.”

“And what did you want to speak to me about?”

I shrugged. “Anything really. Books. Who you are. Where you come from. Whether or not we could . . . I don’t know . . . whether or not we could get to know one another. I thought we might have something in common . . . literature, you know? We might discover that we have something in common, and then you could be the only person I know in Brooklyn.”

She smiled. “What’s your name?”

“Vaughan,” I said. “Joseph Vaughan.”

“Well, Joseph Vaughan, it was very nice to meet you but I really am in a hurry. I have to get back home now, so if you don’t mind?” Once again she took a step to the left to come by me.

“Could I see you again perhaps?” I asked. I had reached a point of no return. I had nothing to lose. My dignity, my self-respect, everything had gone by the boards.

“You could,” she said. “But then I could see you again. Wouldn’t necessarily mean that I wanted to see you again. Like today, the fact that both of us happen to be in the same library at the same time means nothing more than we both come here to borrow books. Coincidence, yes?”

I did not mention that I had come every day in the hope that she would be there.

“I’m not a great believer in coincidence,” I said.

“Are you not?” she replied, a rhetorical question. “Seems also that you are not a great believer in recognizing when someone doesn’t have time to stand and talk to strangers.”

That was it. She had managed to crush me completely.

“I apologize,” I said sheepishly. “I really am very sorry to have disturbed you. I didn’t mean to come across as—”

“You came across just fine, Joseph Vaughan, and I’m sure it was very nice to meet you, but I really have to go now. I have things I need to do.”

This time she stepped toward me with greater determination, almost authority, and I stepped aside.

“See you again some time then,” I said.

“Perhaps,” she replied, and then she turned the corner at the end of the row and disappeared.

I stood there for a few moments, my heart thudding, my nerves like taut whipcord, and I willed myself to do something. Anything.

I put the books I had selected on the edge of the nearest shelf and then hurried out of the library and down the steps to the street. A half block down I found a flower seller, threw a dollar at him and grabbed the nearest bouquet. He hollered after me for change, but I was already at a run, back toward the library.

I was there as she came out of the door and started down the steps.

I stood my ground, breathless, red-faced, the bunch of flowers like a shield against her possible rejection.

She saw me, and for a moment she looked surprised, taken aback, and then she smiled, smiled wider, started laughing.

“You are a fool,” she said, echoing my own thoughts. “What are you doing now?”

“I brought you some flowers,” I said, stating the idiotic obvious.

“What on earth for?”

“To apologize for upsetting you.”

“You didn’t upset me.” She reached the bottom of the risers and stood on the sidewalk.

“Look,” I said, feeling something close to irritation overcoming my self-consciousness. “I really don’t know what it is about me that repels you. I’m sorry for looking the way I do. I’m sorry for stopping you when you obviously have better things to do, but my way of thinking tells me that if you don’t talk to people, if you don’t somehow start a conversation with someone, then you’ll spend the rest of your life alone and regretful. I saw you once before. You looked like someone who would be good to speak to. I came here every day since then in the hope that I might see you again—”

“You did what?”

I realized I had taken my foot out of my mouth only to place it firmly back inside. “I came here yesterday, the day before, the day before that. I came here until I saw you again, and then I couldn’t let myself not say something. The fact that I’ve said entirely the wrong thing is beside the point now. The truth is, whatever might happen now, at least I won’t kick myself for not saying something.”

“And what do you think should happen now?” Her expression was feisty and petulant.

“I . . . well, I figured we might go and have a soda or a cup of coffee or something. I figured you might tell me your name, at least.”

She smiled. She seemed to relax a little, let down her defenses. “My name? Sure I can tell you my name.”

I paused, waiting.

“Bridget,” she said. “My name is Bridget McCormack.”

“Pleased to meet you, Bridget McCormack.”

She nodded. “Reciprocated, Joseph Vaughan.”

“So would you like to go have a soda—”

“Or a cup of coffee?”

“Right, yes . . . a cup of coffee.”

“For annoying me, you got no points at all. For apologizing, you get five out of ten. For the flowers?” She shook her head. “The flowers weren’t necessary.”

I put the flowers behind my back.

“But I’ll take them anyway, just so you don’t feel you’ve wasted your money.”

I withdrew the flowers and handed them to her.

“For persistence you get ten out of ten, and yes, I will go for a cup of coffee with you . . . but not today. Today I am actually on my way somewhere, and as a result of this little detour I am already considerably late, so if you don’t mind?”

“So when?” I asked.

“When what?”

“When can I take you for a cup of coffee?”

“Monday,” Bridget McCormack said definitively. “You can meet me here at noon on Monday and take me for a cup of coffee, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, and smiled wide.

“Though this does not necessarily mean that we’ll have anything in common, or even like each other for that matter.”

I nodded. “Understood, but at least we can give it a try.”

“That we can,” she said. “That we can.”

“All right, Monday it is. I’ll see you then, Miss McCormack.”

She laughed and walked past me. “You really are a foolish man, Joseph Vaughan.”

My heart soared. I said nothing. I stood there on the sidewalk and watched her walk down the street and disappear around the corner. She did not look back, and for this I was grateful; standing there with my hands in my pockets, a smile on my face as wide as the Mississippi was long.

Bridget McCormack was not Alexandra Webber. Bridget was similarly intelligent and well-read, but there was something unique about her that made it easy not to be reminded. She did not look like Alex. Her voice was different, and when she laughed she seemed to possess such self-assurance. No one could ever have replaced Alex, no one could ever take her place in my heart, but Bridget somehow managed to make me feel good about being alive. I experienced emotions that had been absent for years, and as I experienced them I realized how much I had missed them. Bridget was twenty-one years old, born of Irish-American parents, a lapsed Catholic, a student of the Humanities at Brooklyn College, and she intended to write poetry and essays, to write letters and articles for eclectic magazines, to study art, to live life, to be herself.

We met that following Monday. We walked three blocks and stopped at a deli. There we sat for the better part of two hours, and she let me speak of myself, of why I was in Brooklyn, of my work in progress.

“So tell me about this book,” she said, and I did, pouring out something of myself that would have seemed strange considering it was our first meeting.

“You are passionate about this, aren’t you?” she said when I was finished.

“I’m sorry,” I replied. “Once I get going it kind of takes me over.”

She reached out and touched my hand. “Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Sorry is for the things you’ve done that you shouldn’t have, not for the things you believe in. Next time, bring some of it, would you? I’d like to read what you’ve written.”

I said I would. Anything to gain a second rendezvous. Thoughts of her pulled at me like gravity.

The subsequent months we met two, three times a week. We went to the movie theater, we ate in a restaurant on the edge of Bedford-Stuyvesant, we walked in Tompkins Park until our hands froze and our noses were blue. We learned something new about one another each time, and she encouraged me to work at The Homecoming the same way Alex would have done.

As Christmas approached we recognized that time together was so much better than time apart, and it was Christmas Eve of that year, a week or so after I had typed the last lines of my novel, that Bridget McCormack came to the boarding house on Throop and Quincy and consumed my heart.

Love, I would later conclude, was all things to all people. Love was the breaking and healing of hearts. Love was misunderstood, love was faith, love was the promise of now that became hope for the future. Love was a rhythm, a resonance, a reverberation. Love was awkward and foolish, it was aggressive and simple and possessed of so many indefinable qualities that it could never be conveyed in language. Love
was
being.

I loved Bridget McCormack, and that night—Monday, December twenty-fourth, 1951—she loved me in return.

For a while it seemed that the ghost of Alexandra Webber was there between us, and then I felt her leave. Her passing was quiet, and with her she took the memory of the child that never was. But the past was like an eye, opening, closing, and opening once more.

TWENTY-FIVE

B
ROOKLYN WAS MY NEW WORLD. SUCH THINGS AS I REMEMBERED from the moment I arrived: The high-rise and hopeful, the light smashing down, the multitude of people, the cars fender to fender, drivers leaning on horns, the passage of time, of people, of the past through the present into the ever-widening future. Here—as I’d imagined—was a place where I could be someone. In this clenched fist of a city I had finally, irrevocably, become the man I had longed to be.

And Bridget McCormack believed in me, and I believed back.

It was then that I believed I had finally buried the ghost of Georgia. Despite my memory and my conscience, despite the memory of my mother and all that had happened in Augusta Falls, I believed I was finally free. I felt it was not so much an escape as a pardon. My sentence had been served; justice had been seen to be done; I was reprieved.

It seemed fitting. It seemed right. It seemed just.

I met Bridget’s parents. Her father was a staunch Irish Catholic, his face like a boiled egg dropped from a generous height, maintaining some semblance of shape despite the jigsaw of cracks and fissures. Nails bitten to the quick, his fingers looked raw and sore and useless for gathering up anything smaller than shoes. And when he spoke, his thoughts came out as rough chunks of sound; had an ear for ten-dollar words: disposition, pivotal, exigent. Each phrase considered carefully, weighed and valued, like a bluff or call for a thousand-dollar pot. Her mother slight and insubstantial, haunting the edges of the conversation, snippets of words as if cut from a magazine. We lied to them, told them I was as Catholic as they came. We laughed in private. We wore our faces for the world, and the world took to accepting us without condition or reserve.

For the first time since Alex I was truly happy. Hennessy stood quietly on the sidelines, ever encouraging, ever patient. He neither questioned nor envied what I had and showed his colors as a true and loyal friend.

Early in 1952, when I believed things could get no better, Bridget came to see me at the boarding house.

“You will be sore at me,” she said as I opened the door and let her in.

“Sore at you? Why would I be sore at you?”

She stood in the hallway, her head down, “I did something, Joseph, without telling you. I did something and I think you might be mad at me, and I’ve been holding off coming over all day . . .”

“What?” I said. “What’s happened?”

She shook her head and looked down again like a furtive thing. She shifted from one foot to the other.

“For God’s sake, Bridget, what?”

“Promise first,” she said. A scolded child.

“Promise what?”

“That you won’t get mad.”

I huffed impatiently. I opened my arms, hands wide.