Bereavements (37 page)

He had only to think of his father, recreate, re-feel with his body, not his mind, that intolerable mixture of love and revulsion, comfort and panic, safety and danger, bliss and the most deadly of spiritual threats—the loss of selfhood, of soul—to have a rush of blood pulse around his eyes, stain and burn in his cheeks, literally an instant fever that might last minutes at a time, or go on for hours.

It wasn’t his sin that his father had taken his body in a corruption of love; it was that Angel had given it, just as in another strange way, he had totally given to Mrs. Evans a heart he could in no way take back.

Without body, without heart. Soon without mind, because he was giving that away, too, slowly losing it, letting it go, in fevers and dreams, in nightmares and visions.

The peculiar sweetness he smelled so often and which he thought emanated from Mrs. Evans, he decided was his very own. It was the sweetness of death, the foretaste, the physical manifestation of the kind of sleep he was beginning to long for.

And the boy in the mirror who had dropped Angel in a faint to the floor, wouldn’t have done so a second time—if he ever saw him again. Because the image was as unreal as the sweetness.

He’d seen Jamie’s picture—gazed at it trembling, knowing that that’s what he wished for, that’s what he wanted to be. And in his illness, he became that—created, manifested, projected the-thing-that-is-loved behind a golden sheen in the glass—stripping the boy of his clothes the way his father so often had his—“just to see”—before the man’s aching arms seized him: eyes-fevered, eyes-hungered, eyes-feasting, filled to overflowing with a ripened love.

So the vile connection took shape. In this fantastic circuitous route of mind, heart, body, the extrapolation was this: to be loved is to die. To be loved one must be dead.

Dori carried Angel down from Jamie’s room to the kitchen, the boy laughing because he really could walk,-he wasn’t that weak, though he did feel peculiar and feverish in the head.

One look at his flushed face, the queer, far-away look in his eyes, a touch of fingers to his cheek and Delia was sure he had a fever.

Deciding to keep an eye on him, she bundled him in a robe and sat him before the fire in her sewing room which annexed the kitchen. She watched him gulp down a large cup of warm sassafras tea, his eyelids fluttering closed as he drank the last sip.

When he’d dozed off, or so she thought, though he hadn’t, remaining pleasantly drowsy, listening to every word that was said, she returned to the others.

“He’s a puzzle!”—looking at Dori, almost angrily, as if the man possessed a solution he wouldn’t reveal. “One minute a fever, sky-high I’d swear, and the next none at all! And so moody, so often depressed. Dori, when you get back to New York . . .” She stopped, reminded that the future was so very uncertain, Angel’s most of all. “Poor child,” she concluded, “what’s to become of him? He does have a family—a father at least, didn’t you say?”

“Yes. But he’ll not go back to him; that much I know. There was—trouble of some sort. She’s already taken care of it, legally. You know how she is, what she can
do
if she wants to! Sometimes I think she could move Los Angeles to New York by picking up the phone.”

He paused, looking at Delia whose expression retained its worried concern. “She’ll take care of him—one way or another.”

“Mostly the one way,” Delia replied, her voice slightly hard; “not at all the other. Do you know what she gave us,Jodi and me, for Christmas? One
thousand
dollars, in hundred dollar bills, all crisp and new—without any card, no signature. I wouldn’t have known who sent it—unless I knew. That’s what was in that nice white legal-size envelope you handed me.”

Dori shrugged, pretending indifference, though he knew exactly what she was feeling. “So? I got the same. What is it? You suddenly hate money?”

“No.” The woman turned away, sighing. “I’d never hate money. I was too rotten poor as a child. But . . .” She turned back. “I needn’t explain; you and I, we know each other too well. And her even better. We love her too much and forgive her too often.” She looked toward the room where Angel was “sleeping.” “But he!—he doesn’t want
money!
”

“Why not, if it buys the things he does want?”

“Oh Dori! What nonsense! How can it buy what he wants?”

“What does he want?”

Delia laughed. “You’re putting me on. You know all this better than I. He wants what she promised. He wants her to love him.”

Dori agreed with one soft word. “Yes.”

And Delia—“But how can you give, how can you get what’s already owned?” Adding bitterly—“The dead own the living. If he wants that kind of love, he’d better die.”

It snowed again, the fine powdery kind: so much at the caprice of the wind, it fogged across the windows in thick gusty clouds.

Goaded, pestered, prodded by Delia, who bundled him up and literally pushed him through the door, Angel went out for a little while, with the half-hearted inclination to try skating over the bumpy ice on the frozen pool, an area of which twice now, Dori had cleared in the hope the boy would use it. But it was impossible to see ten feet away. Blinded, Angel stood at the pool’s edge, hat off, tongue stuck out to taste the icy prickles, then came into the house a snowman, stomping into the kitchen for Delia to complain about as she towel-dried his hair.

Later, after cocoa, he mooned (as she called it) all afternoon The snow had stopped and he could go out again, but preferred lying by the fire in her sewing room,staring into ember and flame as if what he saw was as absorbing as a tv melodrama of passion and crime.

Dori was in town (with no clue concerning his errand or when he would return) and Jodi off in his greenhouse. Upstairs, in a suite of rooms as palatial as the Plaza’s, Mrs. Evans, only once calling down for a small bottle of wine, remained incarcerated and incommunicado.

Did the cat have his tongue—hm? (Delia asked.) Evidently not, because it seemed to be working well, having consumed all seven cookies that had gone with the cocoa. “Surely there must be
something
you can do. Jodi has a whole stack of magazines in his room. Or why don’t you go to the library and get yourself a book; Jamie kept dozens on the . . . ” She changed the wording: “there’s lot’s of children’s, I mean boys’ books there. I’ll bet you never even looked. One whole section on the left wall as you go in.”

There was no reply; not even a gesture to indicate he had heard.

So, if not exactly offended, Delia found her patience and inventiveness exhausted and let him be.

Supper without Dori was also a dreary and silent affair, Jodi reading a week-old newspaper, and Delia moody herself, profoundly worried, though she concealed it, and not particularly inclined to fake cheerfulness and coax the boy into life with small talk.

Ultimately there was no need to. The moment she started fixing a tray for Mrs. Evans, his spine straightened in his chair, his heavy eyes brightened and became dancingly alert.

Presently, as she worked, he said: “I could save you the trouble. I could take it up.”

Delia sighed. She needed no crystal ball to read his mind. “Even if you knocked, she wouldn’t answer. If you persisted, she’d angrily tell you to go away. I know how she is. No one’s to bother her. If she wants anything, she rings down, and I’m the only one to answer the phone. Those were her instructions.”

Angel nodded. “I know, but—”

“All I do anyway, is leave the tray on the table in the hall near her door.” She poured hot coffee into a two-cup silver pot, observing: “She won’t drink this, or eat hardly anything, but I go through the motions.” She stopped to look at Angel, so restless in his chair. “What is is?”

“I was wondering . . . Could I—could we—sort of put a flower on the tray, a rose? Jodi brought in some fresh ones for the front parlor.”

Delia was disarmed, and pained. “That’s a very sweet thought, but I don’t think it would mean anything to her, really. I’ve never done it before.” She joked: “I think it’s done only by newly wed husbands who bring their brides breakfast in bed.”

Angel was unconvinced. “Well it might mean something if it came from me.”

“And how would she know that?”

“Well—I could pin on a message—on the rose, I mean. I could say . . . ” (his eyes moving rapidly, his chin beginning its chaotic jerk) “. . . I could say—Happy New Year.”

Delia almost dropped the silver cover she was about to put on the casserole dish.

“Good heavens, I didn’t know; I’d forgot! It’s the 31st. It never once entered my mind.” She kissed Angel, and the top of Jodi’s head. “Happy New Year! Happy New Year!”

“Well it isn’t—yet,” Angel said; “it comes at midnight.”

“You don’t say,” Delia murmured, back at her tray, “when we’re all snug in our beds. What are you waiting for? Quickly now! Where’s your New Year’s rose?”

He was off to get it, bringing it back in a flash, dashing through the door with: “Is it a bird? Is it a plane?” And he laughed, possibly the first moment’s real pleasure Delia had seen on his face in days, paining her heart.

He ripped a page off the grocery list pad on the wall, and scribbled his message with a hand that shook.

Just that!? just that!?—“Happy New Year?”—So ordinary, so cold. If only Delia wasn’t looking . . . ! He wanted to pour out his heart:
I love you, I love you,
ten thousand times over, and then over again.

His signature was so illegible it almost couldn’t be read. Under it, half covering with a hand as he made it, so Delia wouldn’t look, he criss-crossed two ragged lines for a kiss.

Contrary to Delia’s expectation, Mrs. Evans this time took the silver urn of coffee into her rooms, left everything else untouched. The rose was still there, the paper message unfolded, evidently read, but there was no reply, no acknowledgment at all.

“Oh well!” Angel said, his voice a cracked bell, an octave too high—so cheerful God must have covered His ears.