Men and Angels (15 page)

Then he began to invite her into his room, to pray alone with him. “You are so beautiful,” he would say when they had prayed. White skin and shining hair, he would say, touching her so that something stirred in her. He knew how to touch her to make these things happen. He said the Lord wanted them to be joined flesh to flesh and not just in the spirit. He took her, he took her innocence, and she gave it, believing she was doing the work of the Lord. But then she saw. Saw that he was full of lies and was a thief. She saw, in his room at night, that he kept some of the money people brought in for himself. She let him know she saw.

“No one will believe you,” he said, turning away from her. “I’ll tell them you’re insane, that you have visions. You’ve talked to the others about your visions, it’s me they’ll believe. I’ll call the police and tell them you’ve stolen money from me. They’ll lock you up and throw away the key. I’ll get the others to testify against you.”

She had not been wise. Had had too much faith in the friendship of others.

“Tell them, the Spirit will determine which is the greater spirit. They will discover yours is the Spirit of Lies, of Thieving, of the Flesh that steals the flesh of others.”

In a family meeting, he denounced her. And the others stood behind him, circled around her like wolves. She was a dove in the midst of wolves. “Leave us,” they chanted. “Leave, Spirit of Darkness. Leave us,” they kept shouting, all of them together, again, and then again. Who had said they were her brothers and her sisters. Who had said they knew she was the chosen of the Lord.

She ran out of the house, leaving her bag behind. She walked through the dark streets, past the bars where college students laughed and danced and shouted from their cars. The car lights hurt her eyes, the sounds of the loud music hurt her skin, as she ran, ran past them, past their laughter and their shouted messages, ran past the government project, past the bars where men sat silent, solitary, ran across the highway, letting cars swerve to miss her. She ran till she got to the bus station, where she sat all night. She sat erect and terrified, afraid to sleep, afraid to see the eyes of Fletcher Voss that had grown into hands to choke her. Then she reached into her pocketbook and found her Bible. She prayed for comfort and for succor. The Spirit of Darkness had almost overcome her. She needed the shelter of the Lord.

Then she remembered Matthew 10. She had written it out in her notebook: “If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. And if any one will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly, I say to you, it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town.”

She felt the smile rising within her. The smile of triumph. Her enemies had vanquished her now, but they would be repaid in kind a hundredfold. Her fear vanished. She knew she would be cared for. For it said, in the same chapter of Matthew: “So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.”

And she knew that she was of great value. For that reason she had been persecuted. Beware of men, Jesus had said, for they will deliver you up to councils, and flog you in their synagogues, and you will be dragged before governors and kings.

This had almost happened to her. He said if he told people about what the Spirit had told her, she would be locked up. He said he would get the people in the house to testify against her. Yet she would triumph, and her enemies go down to ruin. She imagined the house of the Children of Light in flames. But she would not be able to help them, for the flames would be the judgment of the Lord.

She slept sitting up in the bus station. In the morning she went back to Mrs. Rosa’s store. She knew she would not stay there long. If they will not receive you, Jesus said, or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave the house or town. When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next.

She knew she would be going somewhere soon, so she didn’t want to get a room. She slept in the bus station and got to Nettie’s early in the morning, where she washed her body and her clothes, hiding them in the basement of the store to dry.

In less than a week the Spirit had shown her what to do.

She was working at Nettie’s Needles patiently explaining how to work a simple pattern to Mrs. Chamberlain, explaining the same thing for the fiftieth time. She wanted to tell Joan Chamberlain that she had no talent for needlework; her fingers were slow and thick, she had no concentration, she would never finish the pillow cover for her little girl, the one with the squirrel and the nuts, in time for her birthday. But she knew she couldn’t say that, and Joan Chamberlain had been nice to her, asked her about her family, praised Laura’s skill, her clear teaching. So, after ripping out the red threads that were supposed to be green, green of course for the leaves of the tree in the background, and knowing that something was being arranged for her by her Father, who cared for her more than for many sparrows, she was not surprised to hear Joan Chamberlain say, “You wouldn’t be interested in going to London for six months, would you? In January as a mother’s helper for my family. Of course, you’d be one of the family yourself. But paid, of course. We could talk about that later. That is, if you’d like to. But you’re probably happy here, and I wouldn’t want to take you away from Nettie.”

That was the way Joan Chamberlain was. She was a small, light woman with colorless eyelashes; she never finished anything. She twitched; she twittered; she was a nervous little rodent in a cage, first sipping water, then pushing a wheel, then scattering its food, then running from one corner to another, appearing to look for something it could never actually possess.

Shake off the dust from your feet. She knew she was meant to leave the city. London. She didn’t care that it was London; it could have been Buffalo, Detroit. A place had been found for her; her Father had provided.

She told Joan that the lease had just run out on her apartment, and asked if she could move into their house early. Joan said terrific, terrific, she would have to ask her husband first, but he would probably be ecstatic, because maybe she could help out with the housework, only if she wanted to, but that would be terrific because she, Joan, was such a slob.

She said she’d be glad to, that she liked housework, that she found it soothing. Joan said that was just incredible, and just terrific. Laura told Joan to call her at Nettie’s Needles. She did not want the woman she was working for to know that she was sleeping in the bus station.

Laura didn’t like Jack Chamberlain. He was a tall, lean, fair-haired man, joking with his children, exasperated with his wife. Laura never understood how he could have married Joan. Perhaps she had once been pretty. Laura did not understand marriage; the idea of it disgusted her: choosing a partner for the urges of the flesh, in filth creating children to be hurt and caused to suffer.

Certainly the Chamberlains were unhappy. Jack raged; Joan cried; the children were disobedient and worried. She knew that she was good for the children. She taught them many things. It wasn’t her fault they weren’t happy.

She had overheard them talking to their mother. “She’s no fun,” they said. “She’s boring.”

“Listen, you,” said Joan, “thank your lucky stars we’ve got her. She’s got the patience of a saint. You could have a real monster. And when we get to London, you’ll have so much to do you won’t even notice her.”

She felt, always, the Chamberlains congratulating themselves for including her in their wonderful lives. She felt them doing it with each museum they took her to, each historic building they pointed out to her, each meal in each restaurant they offered. Food did not interest her; she despised the Chamberlains for their sense that each new food they found was a treasure. They smacked their lips like animals over the desserts at an Indian restaurant. They could talk for a week about English cream. They did not think, they never understood, that the things that entered their mouths ended up in the drain. “I believe that food is so much more than something to fill the belly,” said Jack Chamberlain, congratulating himself on educating Laura. “It’s an art in itself, not only in its preparation but in its consumption.”

And ends up in the drain, Laura wanted to tell him, but did not. Instead she smiled, appeared to take an interest. She wished that she didn’t want to eat, but in fact she was often hungry. She would have preferred to eat the same foods every day. In food she savored what was sweet, white, soft, familiar. She kept in her room in the London flat a loaf of white bread, a tub of soft margarine, a jar of strawberry jam.

When Joan found these things, she tried to make a joke of them. “You don’t need to eat
this
stuff. Just help yourself to anything in the refrigerator. Anytime, for heaven’s sakes. Margarine, ugh. Laura, you poor darling.”

She could not say to Joan that she preferred her margarine to Danish butter, her soft white sliced bread to the hard brown loaf they kept, her strawberry jam to their plum preserves. That she liked eating in her room, in her bed in silence, preferred it to the Chamberlain family table, where the children were forbidden to fight and where it was demanded that the conversation be intelligent.

She knew she was not pleasing to the Chamberlains. The children were not interested in the things she thought of for them to do. She was nearly silent on the excursions the Chamberlains planned for her and the children: the Tower of London, Madame Tussaud’s. These were the wrong things to be teaching the children. She began reading to them from the Bible. Jessica, the oldest child, said, “Our family doesn’t believe in religion. Our father says it’s superstition.”

Then she knew for certain that the Devil was in the house, had taken root, been fed and nourished, welcomed and revered. So it was no surprise to her when Jack Chamberlain told her they would not be needing her, no surprise that things worked out as they had with Hélène. She knew that Hélène hated Anne. Because Anne was beautiful, and Hélène was not. Because Anne had only to walk into a room to make people love her. Things came easily to her; people wanted to be near Anne for the things she did that were not difficult for her. She did not have to do favors, write letters, have people to live in her house.

Hélène hated Anne because she did not understand that the things that drew people to Anne, that gave her her house, her husband and her children were of no importance. Hélène was angry, as Laura had once been angry. Now she knew she needed no one; so she need never be angry. People needed her. Anne Foster needed her particularly. She would teach Anne that the things that made up her life were of no importance. And she would teach the children.

A
NNE WANTED TO GET
an early start to beat, as far as possible, the rush of the Thanksgiving weekend, so she picked the children up at school and drove from there to Jane’s house on Long Island. Driving in the light that at three-thirty was already beginning to fade, she watched Laura pouring drinks for the children, giving them cookies. I would be doing that, she thought, and Michael would be driving. She began to feel teary at the thought of a holiday without him, her first in sixteen years.

Michael. Her husband. All the days together, nights. Food cooked and eaten, children waited for and born, held, nursed in sickness. “I’ll go…. No, you sleep, I will this time.” All the hours shared in sleep, the folded dreams. The sex, two bodies, knowing, known. The arguments, estrangements, lonelinesses: “The person I most love knows not a thing about me, is a stranger, wants to do me harm.” Afterwards, the coming together, exciting, tender after the hard butts of willed misunderstanding, innocent uncomprehending tiredness, resentment, fear. She missed her husband terribly. There were things she wanted to tell him, ask him, every day, that she could say to no one else. And his body, yes, she had the dull ache of desire, constant now. It made her feel ashamed. No one had made love to her in ten weeks. If she weren’t married, that would be the ordinary thing. Single people, widows, divorcees: that was their life. She was a coward. She could only just get by without her husband.

That was the sort of thing she was afraid Jane would find out about her, and despise her for. Marriage, that little dovecote for weak hearts, fearful spirits. The great did not need marriage, entered into it for some convenience: money, sex, domestic comforts, the need for some general fealty formally contracted and arranged. But all the meals at home, the small conversations, the pleasure in familiar furniture, the late-night reading, all those dreams so badly realized in most houses were not the dreams of the great. Caroline had recoiled from those dreams as if they were dangerous. Yet her work was all about them. Was it dishonest of her? Feeling as she did, ought she to have painted flowers like Georgia O’Keeffe, forbidding rocks that would push the children from the room, skyscrapers jutting into skies of industry or carnival but not of birds? When Caroline’s work was dismissed as irrelevant, it was on the ground of excessive domesticity. But she was estranged from her family, kept her child from her, lived in hotels until she was sixty.

Anne wondered what Jane’s house would be like. Women who lived alone revealed themselves in their houses in some clear way that men who lived alone could not. A man who lived alone comfortably was an invention of the will; a woman who lived without comfort, without order, was defying some curse of domestic servitude. It was hard to predict how Jane would live. She had worked hard, yet she had been a beauty; she had lived alone most of her life, yet she had been beloved. Anne hoped the children would be all right in her house. Perhaps she should not have brought them on her first visit, before she knew what the house was like, before she knew Jane better. It was good that Ben would be there. The children adored him, and he was wonderful at taking them off the scene for small trips they considered fabulous.