Angel in the Parlor (16 page)

“Amyas!”

There was a round of applause. Bearded and costumed, Amyas waved. He was a play unto himself; what need have we of players? thought Nicholas. Amyas smiled his kingly smile and shook the hand that reached out to him. A boy in a striped poncho hurried up to Nicholas.

“I'm Homer Sax. Welcome to the city of strangers and dreamers. Mike, bring Amyas his chair.”

As if by magic, an upholstered armchair appeared in the front row. It was the only chair in the room. Amyas sank into it graciously. Nicholas sat on the floor to his left, feeling embarrassed. He looked around for Janet but she was nowhere to be seen.

Suddenly Homer Sax stepped out in front of them and clapped his hands for order. Gradually the voices stopped and everyone fell quiet. Three men and three girls sat down in a line to the right of him. Nicholas was startled to see Janet at the far end.

“This is our workshop of dreams,” said Homer Sax, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. “Anyone from the audience can come up and tell his dream. Afterwards we'll have music and dancing—” he turned toward Amyas—“and wine. Did someone bring the wine?”

A few snickers from the back.

“Yaaas!” shouted a voice.

Everyone laughed. Homer Sax took off his beads and threw them on the ground.

“Well, who wants to go first?”

No one moved. At last a shuffling sound in the back row broke the silence, and a pimply blond boy lumbered up to the front, hopped up on a little wooden box at the back of the stage, and cleared his throat.

“I dreamed I was looking out of the window. Looking down at Prince Street. It was early in the morning.”

A black boy in jeans and a sheepskin vest leaped up from the line of actors, picked up the beads and hung them around his neck, and stared over the heads of the audience, keeping his hands behind his back.

“It was cold. Down in the street people were beating each other up.”

The boy wrapped his arms around himself and shivered. Janet got up and limped out of the line, leaning on her cane. A red-haired boy in black pants and a black sweater seized the cane and pretended to beat her with it. She cowered and sank to the ground. Amyas made a strange noise in his throat. Nicholas looked at him. His enormous hands were gripping the arms of the chair.

“Then I heard the humming of many bees. I looked up the street and saw a procession of animals, all holding each other's paws and dancing the hora down the street.”

The rest of the players scrambled to their feet and began to bow and skip.

“And it stopped being cold. And people stopped beating each other. And I woke up.”

Janet rose and shook hands with her assailant. Leaning on her cane like an old woman, she hobbled across the stage. Janet the old woman, Janet without Amyas, living out her days alone, turning into Norma Mardachek. Nicholas tried to shake her from his mind, but she hung with sharp claws like a fierce bird.

Now everyone was clapping. The dream teller plumped down on the other side of Amyas.

“A splendid dream, sir. A splendid dream.”

Slowly the players returned to their line.

“Amyas,” shouted Homer Sax, coming to the front of the stage. “You tell us a dream. Yours must be extraordinary.”

Amyas glanced at Janet who was sitting on the floor among the players. She was drawing circles on the floor with her cane.

“Nicholas,” he whispered, “help me up.”

Nicholas jumped up and offered his hand.

“Steady the chair,” whispered Amyas.

Nicholas held the back of the chair. Amyas rocked to and fro several times; then giving a great heave, he threw himself on his feet and thudded across the stage. Somewhere behind him empty wine bottles clinked their heads together. He mounted the box and faced the audience like an elephant on a barrel. There was a sharp splintering sound. Nobody laughed. Amyas stepped off without embarrassment. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and began to shout as if he were delivering a sermon into the wind.

“I dreamed I was a shepherd, leading a flock of sheep across the red desert.”

The black boy in the sheepskin vest threw down the beads and walked slowly across the stage, leaning on an imaginary staff. Janet and three other girls crawled on all fours after him.

“Then I saw an old woman and a little boy whom I knew to be very evil.”

A tall, skinny girl led the red-haired boy to a place in front of the shepherd. Crouching on the floor, they grimaced and pointed to him.

“To prevent them from destroying us, I changed my entire flock into stones.”

The sheep curled up into four limp mounds.

“Yes, I even changed myself into a stone, except for my right ear, which I left unchanged so that I could hear if any evil was being plotted against us.”

The shepherd hunched himself up like a beetle but laid his hand against the side of his head.

“Then I heard one of my sheep escaping.” Amyas's voice trembled a little. “Yes, indeed, I heard one of my sheep escaping. And I thought, have I not changed them all into stones?”

No one moved on stage. Amyas's eyes glittered and seemed to bulge from his head. Not a sound could be heard but Amyas's heavy breathing and the
clump clump
of Janet's shoes, like an animal dragging a trap. When Amyas spoke his words hissed out like steam.

“Then I said to myself, though I am stone, yet I will fly!”

He let out a yell and lunged toward the door. Nicholas flew after him, sprang on his back, and hung on. They tumbled through the doorway together in time to see Janet running down the stairs. Amyas heaved himself this way and that but Nicholas locked his arm around the other man's neck and pinned him against the railing.

“Janet, run!” he shouted.

A terrible cracking followed. The railing snapped and split and Amyas dropped to the stairs below, with Nicholas riding him like a boy on a dolphin. It felt stranger than any dream, this sudden loss of weight and support, this falling through space, this turning into a pair of struggling swimmers who suddenly hit rock at the bottom of the air. Then Nicholas saw only Amyas's eyes staring past him and a gush of blood from his head spreading over the floor.

Far away he heard cries.

“Call an ambulance!”

“Don't move him! For God's sake, don't move him!”

Hands lifted Nicholas to his feet. He ached in a hundred places but he knew he was not hurt. Amyas had cushioned the fall, and now he lay with bloody head and twisted limbs like a drowned man, bloated and washed up on a strange shore. Janet was wailing like a child. Homer Sax's voice rose over them all.

“Give him air. Clear out, all of you!”

Nicholas staggered upstairs. The tall, skinny girl took him by the arm and tried to wipe away a thin trickle of blood that flowed from a cut over his left eye. Something unpleasant was thumping inside his skull. He sat on the floor where the players had been but a moment before, and obstinately refused to move. But a little while later when Homer Sax came to help him back up to the sixth floor loft, he took his arm meekly enough. The stairway was littered with broken pickets like toy swords. Amyas and Janet had disappeared.

III

Nicholas woke up suddenly. Someone was pounding on the door.

“Coming!” he shouted. As he eased himself painfully out of bed, he heard a discreet cough. By the elevator door stood a small, dark-haired man with large teeth. He was leaning on a rack of trench coats, slacks, and jackets.

“Excuse me. Your door was open. I assumed that Mr. Axel left it open so that I could deliver the suits.”

“What suits?” said Nicholas. The man was staring at his sweat shirt and chinos, torn from the struggle on the stairs and wrinkled from last night's fitful sleep.

“You're supposed to pick out whatever you like. I got some nice Harris tweeds here and some good slacks if you don't like anything so fancy as a suit.”

“Not now,” said Nicholas. “Come back tomorrow.”

“Oh, I can't do that,” cried the man nervously. “I have no idea what we'll come across tomorrow. These may be gone. And we might not get any more tweed in for a week. You don't find so many in the spring.”

“Please go,” said Nicholas.

“Listen,” persisted the man. “I can't go unless you pick one. Mr. Axel has paid for two suits, and he wanted them brought up right away. He's very fussy about his orders. Do you mind if I pick some things for you?”

The man pulled a corduroy jacket and a pair of slacks off the rack and hung them on the open doors of Janet's bed. Then he pushed the rack into the elevator, closed the door, and disappeared as mysteriously as he had arrived.

There was no point in going back to bed. Nicholas put on the jacket and noticed a cigarette hole in the left sleeve. He felt he should return it at once, but to whom? Furthermore, the loft had grown chilly without Amyas. Nicholas opened the door to the roof and heard the chimes from the church on Sullivan Street, like the twelve clocks of God that his wife once told him would ring the elect into paradise. A man at Bellevue heard it three times a day: the passing of time depends, he said, on the three golden bells that turn slowly inside. Nicholas started to open the first cage, then decided it was too risky. He went back inside and scooped a bowlful of cracked corn from one of the bags under the sink. He was on his way out to feed the doves when he heard voices ascending the elevator.

“My little bird, you mustn't worry so much. If he's not there, we'll wait till he comes back.”

Then the door opened and Janet, looking very pale, walked in pushing a wheelchair. Amyas overflowed it on all sides. Seeing Nicholas he gave a yelp of joy.

“See, Janet, didn't I tell you he'd still be here?”

It was the same voice, the same fat belly, the same forked beard. But his face was badly swollen and his thick hair had been cut shorter and the back of his head was heavily bandaged. His right leg ballooned out in a heavy cast, like a piece of artillery.

“They wanted me to stay, but I told them I had important matters at home. A family to look after. I see you've been feeding my doves.”

Then he noticed the new jacket.

“Richie came, did he?”

“My God, Amyas, I'm so glad to see you,” cried Nicholas. He wanted to embrace him but instead shook both his hands.

“Are you glad, Nicholas? Are you glad? Wasn't it silly of me to think you would go away?”

“Where should I go?”

It startled Nicholas as he said it, because for the first time he realized it was true. This knowledge made it easy for him to settle into the slow timelessness of Amyas's recuperation. From that hour on, the past did not exist. None of them mentioned the accident except as a way of marking the end of one life and the beginning of another: the day Amyas broke his leg. In Nicholas's mind the mornings that followed blurred into one continuous morning without end. Even after Amyas got his crutches, Janet would wheel him out to feed his birds—for he hated to leave his chair—and let them out to circle around the roof.

“I've never lost one, Janet. Not one!”

As morning slid imperceptibly into afternoon, Amyas puttered with his glider, Janet went down to rehearse with her players, and Nicholas, following Amyas's wishes, took a job in the Akton darkroom on the second floor. He arrived knowing nothing at all and wondering if perhaps Amyas hadn't bribed Mr. March, the manager, to take him on. The first morning he watched half a dozen men and women wash the shining rolls of film in huge tanks while others ran off masses of prints under the red glow of the safelights. The second morning he cleaned trays, numbered film envelopes, and sorted prints. The third morning he was given his own rolls to wash and another set to print.

It wasn't a bad place to work, he told himself. But when he walked out of the darkroom, the sight of ten old women sitting at a long table and stapling envelopes of photographs depressed him. The packaging room was unimaginably drab, like an airplane hangar. The darkroom, on the other hand, seemed always about to explode. The soft red light which infused all their work whetted and roused strange passions. The women were large and buxom, the men small and hairless, and they worked side by side in a room so tiny that they couldn't help rubbing against each other. The men sidled up behind the women and pinched them, and the women brushed the men with their enormous breasts, and the air grew hot with sweat and promises. The smallest and most brazen among them all, a retired jockey named Jon Spalding, would sometimes whisper in Nicholas's ear, “You'll never have a better chance.”

Nicholas felt at ease only with the two women who worked on either side of him, Charlene Schwartz, a divorcée who had two children and lived in the Bronx, and Barbara Wiggins, a plump girl who had recently quit her job as a waitress and was constantly regretting it. A week after he arrived she began to wear such strong perfume that one of the other women threatened to complain to Mr. March.

“She's sweet on you, she is,” grinned Jon Spalding, nudging Nicholas significantly as they passed one another in the red light.

But Nicholas had lost his taste for large buxom women. Skinny women, with some defect, these were the kind he loved now. No such women surrounded him here, and not wishing to have his taste challenged, he tried to lose himself in his work. He told himself that nothing pleased him more than seeing the images find themselves in the developing fluid. Slowly filling the blank paper, they would arrive, lined up in their Easter clothes on hundreds of doorsteps all over New York. Children blowing out candles, families crowded and smiling on low sofas. And occasionally an attempt at something serious—a landscape, badly out of focus, from a kid's cheap camera.

He arrived at one and left at four, well pleased. He knew that if he quit tomorrow the loss of his small income would hardly ripple their lives. Amyas took care of them but knew the value of keeping up certain illusions about independence, and Nicholas was happy to let Amyas think he accepted the illusions as truth. The truth was, Nicholas enjoyed being comfortable.