Angel in the Parlor (4 page)

“He never goes to funerals any more,” her mother answered.

The car turned onto Washington Avenue and Erica sat up, alert. Her father had always taken this route when he drove Kirsten and her to school, past the Presbyterian church, past the turreted houses on Mansion Street and the gardens gone to ruin around them.

“I don't suppose you saw the write-up about my husband in the paper?” her mother asked the driver. “All the children's names were in it.”

“I missed it,” said the driver tragically.

And then, after a silence, he said, “The corner of Market and State streets, isn't it? I'll let you off at the front entrance.”

The car drew up to the curb and the driver scurried to let them out. They huddled awkwardly in their dark clothes in the middle of the sidewalk while shoppers eddied around them. The doors of the church stood open. Students lounged in the park across the street, and over the drugstore a rock band wailed. It was a bright, sunny day. Erica looked nervously at the children, washed and combed and sweating.

“I guess you kids haven't seen a dead person before, have you?” Kirsten said.

“I have,” said Danny. “On TV.”

“That doesn't count,” said Joan.

“Come on,” Erica urged her mother. “Let's go in.”

As they entered the church even the children grew quiet. From the vestibule Erica could see the coffin, heaped with red roses.

“We're early,” said Kirsten. “Nobody's here.”

Erica took Theo's arm, and they moved in procession down the aisle.

“Why, look—over by the window,” her mother whispered. “There's Frank Pederson.”

They all looked. A slim, gray-haired man was just sitting down.

“Who is it?” asked Minnie.

“Frank Pederson. He's not anybody important, but he always loved Hal. He only took one course with him,” she chattered nervously.

They arrived at the steps of the altar where Erica had knelt, angel-winged, in Christmas pageants. She dropped Theo's arm and looked into the casket, past the white satin pillow with its gilt inscription, “From the Grandchildren,” pinned to the lining of the lid. She looked at her father's face, her face close to his face, both astonished.

“It's Grandpa, all right,” whispered Joan, “but he looks like a dummy.”

“I want to touch him,” said Erica's mother. “I'd never forgive myself if I didn't touch him.”

Her hand caressed his cheek. In the light of the stained glass her silver wedding band winked. An old notebook ring, Erica always called it after the engraved flowers had worn off. Her mother had let her wear it sometimes for a treat.

Erica reached out and touched her father's forehead. The makeup on his skin had rubbed into his hair. Over her shoulder she saw the guests arriving. The music pumped out from an invisible place behind the pulpit, and a large, bald man in black robes stood up at the lectern and snapped on the light.

Her mother motioned toward him. “That's Reverend Hurd,” she said.

“Theo, stay with me,” said Erica, but Mr. Metzger stepped between them.

“Pallbearers on the right, family on the left. The front row.”

Sitting next to her mother, Erica rested her chin on her son's head and fixed her eyes on her father's profile, the sharp nose and the high forehead jutting above the satin lining.

“‘In my father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you,'” the minister intoned.

Erica listened. Yes, there was enough room in her father's house, always enough for whoever wanted to sleep there.

Reverend Hurd closed his Bible.

“Is that all?” whispered Anatole.

“Now he says the Meditation,” Erica whispered back.

In the world of clocks, the carillon was chiming the half hour.

“‘We live with death, and die not in a moment. But the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying. We cannot hope to live so long as our names, as some have done in their persons. Our fathers find their graves in our short memories.'”

The pages sighed, fluttered, and turned. Her mother was staring stonily ahead of her.

“‘The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the Register of God, not in the record of man. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the equinox? There is nothing strictly immortal, but immortality.'”

The voice rose on all sides of her. Erica felt people leaning forward to hear him.

“‘But all this is nothing in the metaphysics of true belief. To live indeed is to be again ourselves, ready to be anything, in the ecstasy of being ever.'”

From the car they observed the mourners leaving the church, walking quickly past them.

“There's Mrs. Bergman,” exclaimed her mother, and waved. “And Mr. Nutt and Mrs. Hanson!”

She waved again. They all waved except Theo.

“Nobody notices us,” Minnie said.

“Is that Frank Pernell? Let's call to him,” said Kirsten.

Ahead of them, a policeman gunned his motorcycle and the hearse slowly pulled out into traffic.

“Time to go,” Theo said.

The family passed the park. Students on the curb waiting to cross glanced at them with mild interest. An old man in a slouch hat grimaced impatiently.

“In the old days,” said Minnie, “men would have taken off their hats when they saw a hearse.”

Like actors in a theater of silence, the family glided through the busy streets, past the farmers' market and the trading-stamp redemption center, past the railroad station, past the cement works, past the broken houses and dirt yards of the poor. A black man leaning on a shovel gazed at them.

This was the edge of town; now they drove high into the green hills. The dogwood flared like white fires built all through the woods, their trunks so thin they seemed a shower of petals caught in the act of falling. Forsythia and honeysuckle burst forth on both sides of the road, and far off the black willows were marching across the field, marking the path of the river.

“When I die,” said Theo, “throw my ashes in a mountain stream.”

“I'd like an angel on my grave,” said Erica. “I don't care what happens to me, but I want to be all in one place.”

Suddenly Danny began to sob. Kirsten folded his head against her shoulder.

“Don't cry,” she whispered. “Grandpa lived a good life. A good life. And he's gone to heaven. I know he has.”

As the black car drove out of sight her mother gave a little gasp.

“I forgot to buy anything to drink! People will be stopping by.” She mashed five dollars into Erica's palm. “Theo, run out and get a bottle of something fancy.”

“You can take my Volkswagen,” Minnie said.

“Erica,” her mother whispered, “go with him and make sure he doesn't speed.”

“We'll get the best,” said Theo. “You can count on me.”

They drove down the quiet street into the green cathedral of the elms, turned onto Washington Avenue, and passed the drugstore and the bookshop.

“Let's try Paccino's,” said Theo. “It's the closest.”

Though she did not drink, Erica loved to study the bottles: the golden fish on the bottles of Moselle, and the blue nuns, the red barons, the kings bearing grapes and wands on the bottles of Liebfraumilch. The mysterious city, yellow as an old map, on the squat green flasks of Mateus rosé.

“Where's your best sherry?” asked Theo.

The man eyed him up and down.

“The imported sherries are on your left. A fifth of Harvey's Bristol Cream sells for about eleven dollars. It's the best in the world.”

“We'll take a gallon,” said Theo.

“Did you say a gallon?” the man said.

“A gallon,” repeated Theo. “Didn't you say it's the best in the world?”

As Erica laid her mother's five on the counter, she saw that Theo was emptying his wallet. The senselessness of it filled her with sudden anger.

“Theo,” she exclaimed, “that money is all we brought with us. How will we get home?”

But the salesman was already wrapping the sherry, medallioned with gold lions, elegant as a reliquary.

2

Animals Running on a Windy Crown

I

At morning prayer on Whitsunday, Father Martin is taken ill. See how his hands shake and his old legs buckle under him. Peter Beasley, the deacon, has to help him out of the sanctuary. For six weeks his name is read at intercessions, and prayers are murmured for his speedy recovery. But there comes a day when the congregation hears the visiting priest intone Father Martin's name among the names of the departed; may God's light shine upon them forever. Dozens of hands make the sign of the cross. Outside, the forsythia bushes are dropping their yellow bells on the wet sidewalk, and the bare elms stand misted with the promise of leaves.

Two months later, the vestry submits a list of suitable candidates for the new rector of St. Joseph's to the bishop, who rejects them all and after a long delay sends a young man from a parish in Syracuse. He has wheat-colored hair, a red beard, and remarkably small hands. When he blesses the elements, his hands seem wax, his fingers tapers. He is unmarried, which many consider regrettable. Father Martin had a jolly wife and three daughters who took turns minding the nursery during the services.

The new rector, Father Hayden, is installed with great pomp, but not until All Souls' Day is he persuaded to move from the boardinghouse, where he has rented two furnished rooms, into the rectory, where he has the care of twenty. Mrs. Stout, who cleaned for Father Martin and Father Legg before him, complains she can find nothing to do. Father Hayden's furniture fills half the living room and one bedroom—he has chosen for himself the cook's room off the kitchen—and he shows no inclination to buy any more. Nor does he order curtains for the windows. He pulls the shades in the evening and he raises them in the morning.

If it is Saturday morning, you can look into the rectory kitchen and see him baking bread, which he will distribute tomorrow at the ten o'clock service. If it is afternoon, you will find him at his desk in the parish house, answering letters and drinking great quantities of tea, a special blend of hyssop, skullcap, lemon grass, and the flower that is called life everlasting. All day long he keeps a pot of water boiling on the stove of the parish house kitchen, as one might maintain an eternal flame on the grave of a hero. During his first two weeks in residence, he has already burned the bottoms out of two teakettles and quietly replaced them.

At any time of the day you can hear him singing. Even the choir mistress says his singing could charm the devil and convert a dog. Hear him this morning, the first Sunday in Advent, standing behind the holy table, hands lifted like white birds:

The Lord be with you.

And the people answer him:

And also with you.

A small, dark-haired man wearing a windbreaker and a fur cap and carrying a duffel bag steps into the vestibule of the church. He removes his cap, stands swaying from side to side, and glances about him as if uncertain how he arrived here. He allows the usher to show him to the back pew, but he lets the mimeographed service sheet slide to the floor, and he sits, open-mouthed, kneading his cap, and watches row after row of men and women move forward and kneel at the communion rail.

When the last woman has returned to her seat and the deacon is wiping out the chalice, the little man walks carefully down the center aisle as if he were stepping around an arrangement of traps that he alone can see. Now he stands at the rail and he waits.

Father Hayden glances up from the prayer book, which lies open to the postcommunion blessing. Their eyes meet. The little man whispers without ceasing.

“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

The deacon nods at the head usher, who takes the stranger gently by the arm and draws him into Father Hayden's office.

And after the service, it is there Father Hayden finds him, warming himself by the empty fireplace, still kneading the cap in his hand. Catching sight of the rector in the doorway, Peter Beasley, still vested, springs forward.

“I offered him the bread and wine you had reserved for the sick—it was all we had left—but he didn't want any.”

The man nods and crooks his thumb and index finger to shape a wafer. Seen at close range, everything about him seems exaggerated, his pointed chin, the comic black tufts of his eyebrows, his sharp nose, and the size of the duffel bag which rises over his shoulder as he gestures toward the pictures of Jesus on the Christmas cards ranged along the bookshelf behind the rector's desk.

“Jesus, Jesus,” he repeats tonelessly.

Father Hayden reaches for the nearest card and hands it to him, but the man shakes his head no, and motions to show that he wants a smaller picture.

“Some people don't know when they're well off,” snorts the deacon.

“Perhaps he's Roman Catholic,” muses Father Hayden. “All that business about not wanting the bread and the wine. If I could find him one of those little prayer cards—you know, the kind they give to the children at Saint Mary's—” And seeing how easy it is to make this man happy, Father Hayden takes his arm. “Is it a prayer card you want? Come back later. I'll try to find you one.”

Now see him that evening, when a full moon silvers the cloister that joins the back of the rectory to the parish house and the church. Frost sparkles on the ground, and the grass around the broken sundial lies long and sparse like an old woman's hair. He goes into his bedroom and has just started to remove his collar when he hears a knock at the front door. Assuming it's the sexton stopping to remind him of the vestry meeting—though later it strikes him that the sexton, coming from the church, would have knocked at the back door—he shouts.

“I'm coming!”

He pauses in the kitchen to snap on the vestibule light. Though he feels sure he locked all the doors a few minutes earlier, he enters the hall and sees standing before him the small dark-haired man, wearing the collar of his wind-breaker straight up under his chin, like a priest's. The filigree shade on the overhead lamp spatters him with a shining skin of light as he closes the door behind him. He is about to speak when he drops the duffel bag, and a dozen miniature boxes of breakfast cereal tumble out. Involuntarily Father Hayden kneels down to gather them up but recoils from the little man's hands, snatching this way and that as if they were picking pockets.