Bereavements (33 page)

He turned from the tree, the skiis, the sled, his face alive with pleasure, but Mrs. Evans wasn’t there. When she came in, hours later, and with Dori and Delia standing idly by, watching, she knelt, smiling.

“Come here, Angel,” pulling him gently to her, palms cupping elbows, eyes searching his so strangely, he felt a moment’s stinged panic, quite as if it was his father who called him.

“Enjoy them.” The sled, the skiis, of course. Then: “You feel warm,” the back of her fingers touching his temple; “don’t tell me you’re getting a fever? Darling, not again! You musn’t be sick for the holidays.”

Her lips touched his cheek; then she moved her head under his so that they brushed his mouth, too.

And there it was again—the perfume or cologne she put on to make her smell nice, only to Angel it hadn’t the niceness of flowers. It was much sweeter than that, with an acrid echo, a faraway sting of acid that hurt the nerves inside his head, making him slightly dizzy and for the moment blurring his vision.

Now her hand moved to steady his chin which was beginning to jerk.

“Do you forgive me?”—almost a whisper, though her eyes rose for a quick look at the servants standing by, as if to see if they’d heard, though it didn’t matter in the least if they had.

Forgive her for what? He didn’t put the puzzling question into words, but it was so stark on his face he didn’t have to.

“For . . . everything;” lowering her head, then raising it tearfully. “For all. . . this embarrassing opulence”—with a weary gesture about. “How dreadful . . . how truly awful. But I did tell you that Mr. Harrison-Smith was a theatrical man.”

Slightly bewildered, Angel took a small step back. She reached for his shoulders, then didn’t touch him—as if she wasn’t allowed or didn’t dare. So strange! Because she had just now kissed him.

“If only I had laurel for your head,” she next said, whispering again, “and a robe sewn with pearls, trailing yards behind you, like a prince . . . and rings by the dozens to cover your fingers . . .”

Dori cleared his throat uncomfortably, shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Angel glanced up at him quickly, virtually asking for help, not knowing what to do or say.

“Rings,” Mrs. Evans repeated, reaching for his left hand, stroking it.

And in the next moment she had fallen from her kneeling position, full-length on the floor where she breathed with effort and kept tossing her head.

All three servants came forward instantly, Delia with a cry, but it was Dori who lifted her and carried her up the arc of one of the winding stairs to her bedroom.

He paused midway, to look back at Angel, who hadn’t moved, who seemed petrified with guilt and concern.

“It’s all right. It’s no one’s fault. It’s just . . .” He didn’t finish.

There was no need to. Angel hadn’t heard Dori speak at all. The moment Mrs. Evans stroked his hand, fixed him with her loving eyes, dizzied him with her strange sweetness, he had, as he later vaguely remembered “blacked out,” sustained a sufficient distortion of sense and self to lose his surroundings—at least give them such a warped and fluid queerness that he and the world seemed to drop a league beneath the sea.

The next thing he saw was Mrs. Evans in Dori’s arms at the top of the stairs.

“She fainted,” Delia said, and not without a peculiar censorial expression, adding, “again.” She loved her employer dearly, but had long ago lost patience with what she considered never-ending and self-indulgent theatrics.

“But—why?” Angel asked.

The woman looked at the boy severely, quite as if she were scolding.

“There’s only one answer to that. It’s
him!
Out there!”—with an angry, jerking gesture to the south windows and outdoors, “—always
him!”

Him. Forever Jamie, Angel thought. She was ill because she was near him once more, probably having even already visited his tomb. Mourning him again, dressed in her misty black silk or lace, whatever it was floating behind her like a drift of clouds.

Maybe too, what happened in New York after midnight mass, was part of it—though he hadn’t quite understood all of that, nor had anyone explained: the frozen blood on the sidewalk, and that dead dwarf, like he’d come from some freakshow or circus, having killed himself there, on the steps, the razor still in his hand. Angel remembered the razor clearly because he had leaned close to see, and it had been so painful to look at—the blade end gripped in a fist closed so tight it had cut, bone and all, through two fingers.

And Mrs. evans sobbing, calling those strange words, over and over:
“My Little Crocodile . . . My Little Crocodile . . .”

But her dead Little Crocodile had been far from his once Divine Lady’s thoughts. Of course she had behaved as she had, falling to the floor in a near faint, because again, as in the car, the hand she was stroking wasn’t Angel’s.

That
she could have borne, as she had the first time, with sophisticated ease, with all the eclat one can possibly bring to an event so extraordinary. Even with as much, perhaps, as the ridiculous Mrs. Luz, whose business card had printed on it in italic under the psychic’s name:
Direct Voice Medium — In Daily Communication With The Dead.

No. The ring, which was there, the cool hardness of it, the warm aliveness of Jamie’s fingers curling over hers with their message of trust and patience and love—all this was no shock at all.

What had dropped her breathless, voiceless, almost senseless to the floor, was Angel’s face; or rather,
not
his face. Pentimento—or those accidents of the camera that create double images, merging one face into another, in this case Jamie’s over Angel’s, Jamie’s
through
Angel’s: emergent, unmistakably living, alive, smiling and clear. Dawn after night, dark eyes turned blue, black tight-spun hair the color of the silk of corn, only the faintest distortion shimmering over all of this: the tremble of the gold coin one sees at the bottom of a fountain.

Was the dead haunting the living, or the living the dead? Was Jamie resurrected, resurrecting, or had her raving, starstruck, resolute passion corrupted the order of things, changing
I see it because it’s real
into
It’s real because I see it?

Was Angel becoming Jamie? Would he, because she could
make
it happen, or had she finally become the quintessential Jamie of her thoughts and memories, sick and wild with a madness that sought to objectify itself in another being, transpose, transplant, as one does a heart, casting away, like refuse, the old, the used, the weak, the dead . . .

Either way, Angel was dying before her eyes, losing the boundaries of self, and she was doing it . . .

I’ll find a way!

Had she? Could she now cleanse the lepers, wither the fig tree, still the tempest? Could she pour water from a vessel and turn it into wine?

Would she call Lazarus from his grave?

“Lord, he stinketh.” One sister had been doubtful, sly, her dark, lazy eyes teasingly cynical . . .

The first time he tried them, the skiis that is, Mrs. Evans went with him. There were hills to be pointed out, some good, some bad, the object being to find those gently sloping, best for beginners.

She helped him stand, balancing him when he would fall, like a first-time-boy on a bicycle, pushing him, pulling him a little, this way, that, but through it all, to Angel’s heart-sunk dismay, she was joyless, not noticing at all when, her back turned, he dared try a hill that was much too steep. He wound up at its bottom in an explosion of snow, boy and flying skiis.

Breathless, pleased that he had made it at all, he looked up, expecting, hoping for a wagging, scolding finger, even angry words or gestures because he had risked breaking a bone; or laughter—good-natured ridicule to celebrate his having made such a fool of himself.

None of these. Up there, framed against the grey of a sunless sky, was a tall motionless silhouette, the face invisible, dark with wind-whipped veils.

A sudden gust whirled from behind her, dusting him with powdery snow, and with it came her achingly-sweet, now utterly familiar scent: an odor of fevered dreams, night-mare journeys, transitions; sensations in which he floated, smothered, drowned.

Who was she? Not the adored Mrs. Evans he knew; and why did she always change so? First one mask, now the other? Panic welled up so strongly within him he almost wished he was back, agonized, in the naked crush of his father’s arms.

What did she want?—this second, this “other” Mrs. Evans?

He felt like an animal shot; and she—afire with the black smoke of her undulant veils—was the hunter, standing there, merciless, rifle in hand, watching him die.

He didn’t see her for three days.

Dori was there, so she hadn’t left, gone back to New York, or anywhere else that he knew of, because the car had remained idle in the garage.

Recovered from his fright, idle, wandering, lonely, longing to see her, he asked Jodi, who shrugged and went on reading his newspaper, and Delia, who paused, thoughful and perplexed, to dry her hands on her apron, then didn’t really answer at all, except to say that all the trays she’d left “outside Madam’s bedroom” had barely been touched; “—but she’s ‘that way’ sometimes; I don’t even know if she’s there. There are 42 room in this house, you know. I can’t be expected to go knocking on every door.”