Bereavements (32 page)

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to help. But there was no way she could. Martin’s shocking, sickening, heart-breaking death was incomprehensible: a freak accident, a coincidence of time, place and one of the city’s raving psychotics (she never once thought of Bruno) madly roaming the streets.

What was the point of risking all the unpleasant publicity a revelation of her friendship with Martin would involve?

None. None at all. No, she would try to put it entirely out of her head.

Besides, it was Christmas Eve and she wanted all her time to belong to Angel.

Seated beside her, directly behind four precise nuns, Angel, scrubbed shiny-nosed and sufficiently well-dressed for the occasion, proved true to Mrs. Evans prediction. Consistent with the first immutable law concerning small boys and midnight mass, he twice fell asleep, his head heavy against her shoulder.

A little later on, during the interminable and (God must have agreed) tedious goings-on at the altar, his behavior—as sure as gravity, as certain as the pull of the moon on the sea—expressed the second immutable law: that is—that any male child under eighteen, regardless of race, if given a coin to hold for the collection, will, at some crucial point in the mass, drop it.

Angel not only proved the rule but was a classic example. The Ben Franklin half-dollar which Mrs. Evans had Rose polish to its brightest and which he insisted on keeping, not safely in a pocket, but constantly either looked-at or squeezed in a sweaty palm, clattered loudly to the floor the moment the sunburst of the Monstrance—in dead, breathless silence—was raised above the bowed heads of the adoring congregation.

When they returned from mass, famished for the small feast that awaited them, and Angel’s first look at the snowdrift of presents under the tree Rose and Cook and Dori had dressed, an event of the most singular nature occurred, an astonishing, momentary optical illusion.

They stepped from the car, and after Dori had driven off to garage it, and they turned to go into the house, they saw that someone had covered the snow-and-ice-cleared stairs with a red carpet.

In the split-second of her surprise, Mrs. Evans had time to speculate concerning which of the servants was responsible. Dori? Cook? Rose? Perhaps all three, thinking, as a joke, to make her welcome back from midnight mass and to the festive house a “royal” one.

But it was not a rug at all.

It was Bruno, of course, who, lying in the deepest shadow under the door, had, more than an hour ago, after watching Angel get into the car with Mrs. Evans, slashed his wrists: two, three, four times each, the criss-cross of wounds erupting, flooding his life down the steps to create, adorn, spread out for the feet of his beloved, the bright, red carpet of his blood.

Book VI

T
WO FANTASTIC
deaths: one a murder, the other a suicide, both so brutal, senseless, bloody and violent, that for hours, sitting numb, motionless at the desk in her bedroom, Mrs. Evans couldn’t, wouldn’t admit the reality of either.

The Christmas Eve she’d planned, the time in the country where, a day late and despite everything she finally did manage to go and take Angel with her, became a true “mare” of night to which she was hopelessly fettered, the monster rearing and plunging through moors of her mind so desolate, they seemed eerie, empty landscapes of the moon.

Martin dead, acquired a meaning and a worth he hadn’t possessed in life, and she was anguished, ashamed to have thought the young man trivial, to have
used
him the way she had, to have been careless, even contemptuous of a friendship that, if partly bought, had only been superficially so.

I have admired you always. 1 have
adored
you in a sense . . .

That
much had been genuine, together with all it implied.

And had money bought the abundance of his grace, his charm, his passion to please her? His sexual ardor, as unwelcome and refused as it was? All were lovely, generous flowers offered in arms too full.

She had been despicable, disdaining every one, even betraying and disowning him in fact as well as in mind as he lay dead in the snow, his beautiful throat grinning with the hideous mouth cut into it by a maniac.

Maniac! It was
she
who had killed him, pulling him closer, pushing him away, then close again, then away, taunting him in her subtlest manner, bruising his pride, his manhood . . . finally sending him off with a goodbye icier than the snow that had swirled between them, hiding him—and it was to be forever— from view.

And sweet, dear, unbearable Bruno, with his horrid, broken branch of a body, stunted wing, gorgeous face, manly cologne, and fake muscles on boney flesh! What of him?

It was impossible not to smile—even through tears and the hurt of sobs convulsing her body when she recalled the dwarf’s absurd, impossible passion, the monstrous histrionics of his fantastic:
“Alas! Thou knowest not what misery is! It is to love a woman—to love with all the energies of your soul. . .”

What difference did it make that she hadn’t slashed his wrists herself? She had killed him just the same. Pathetic little boy, coming into the world with a burden so vast it was impossible to carry. Next to his suffering, Christ with his cross was bathetic. No wonder, though born to it, she wasn’t a Christian. The pain of Jesus, the much-publicized agony on the cross—what was it compared to what Bruno had suffered all his life?

And what of her own, her very own Jamie?—more than three weeks in his dying, the pain so inexplicable, nowhere and everywhere simultaneously, that his muffled brave cries in that flower-choked room were simply not to be endured.

If she had had a choice, how happy, happy she would have been to see him crucified. Yes! Hang him on nails for an easy three hours!

That being impossible, she desired to pick up a pillow and quickly smother him to death—and should have.

Instead, she stuffed handfuls of money into the pockets of slyeyed nurses and orderlies to sneak in extra syringes of morphine, yes, and street-bought pellets of LSD.

She’d had to buy everything all her life, why should things be different now? Dreams and lies were for sale, too . . . a few hours of peace purchased; sweat dried on the anguished brow, the white knuckled hands that clung through their leather handcuffs to the iron bars of the bed, loosening their frightful, constantly-kneeding grip.

In the end, like Bruno with his incredible “Alas!” she had dissembled belief, groveling on her knees, crying
“Mercy! Mercy!”
to Whomever or Whatever might exist that was said to traffic in such things.

True to her nature, Mrs. Evans almost fainted at the sight of Bruno dead on the stairs. But her loss of consciousness wasn’t total: little more than a staggered, reeling seizure of the bewildered Angel, who had no idea what was happening, together with a strange, prolonged, deep, airy cry—more flute than human voice.

Intuitive Rose had already opened the door and was prodding the tiny puzzling corpse with a toe before screaming, not understanding the red of the steps which she thought painted by a mischievious child, one of the numerous underground graffiti artists of the day.

Below, she saw Mrs. Evans in Angel’s arms, all three for moments transfixed until Dori stopped the car and came back.

It was impossible to walk up the steps: the blood was either still wet or half frozen, so Dori opened the iron gate and helped Mrs. Evans into the house through the service entrance.

The police were soon there and countless questions asked and answered truthfully, if just a few with understandable circumspection, and because the tiny dead boy on the doorstep had no relatives—at least any that could be found—he was destined to disappear into the city morgue for a few days where an autopsy was obligatory. After that . . .

Perhaps she’d be back from the country in time, if she could bear to face a funeral. If not (and she wasn’t) she left a large sum of money with Cook and Rose who were to make sure that Bruno had not only a decent burial but an expensive one.

Later . . . later . . . (she thought vaguely) she would purchase a tombstone: something simple and suitable. And in her dazed, shocked grief, she smiled a little, wondering if any tombstone, even the smallest she could buy, wouldn’t be much taller than the Little Crocodile himself.

There was another tree in the Long Island house, a nine-foot giant just as you entered—there!—in the great round hall, centered between the twin, mirror-image staircases that rose majestically to the high second floor on either side.

Angel guessed that this one had been dressed with “ten trillion” of the tiniest lights he had ever seen, each a pinpoint of a distant star. But unlike the city tree “in town” (as Mrs. Evans called New York) with its multicolored ornaments and waterfall of tinsel, this one was covered with small, patiently home-made angels—all of puff-ball cotton, cut-out gold paper and twisted furry pipe-stem cleaners, “in honor,” Mrs. Evans smiled, half-sadly, again wearing her diaphanous mourning, “of the one
real
angel I know.”

There had been so many presents in New York: clothes and books, games and toys, that Angel hardly expected anything more. But here under the tree he found a pair of boy-size skiis and a bright yellow sled with Snow Flyer painted on it in curled fancy script, and under that, his name,
his
name printed: Angel Rivera.