Men and Angels (18 page)

It was Saturday evening. The children were in bed and the adults sat around the fire with their books. Anne had bought, on one of her shopping trips with the children, a bottle of Courvoisier for Jane. She and Jane and Ben took slow sips from their snifters, putting them down in the light they read by, watching, occasionally, the light in the amber liquid. The three of them became conscious of a chill in the air; they would have to rise, get a sweater or go to bed. There was a moment of indecision and then, as if a clock had been struck, they knew the evening had ended.

“I must tell you about Sundays,” Jane said. “I go to church. Depending upon the hour of your departure, I could go early or late. Will you tell me what you wish? Unless, of course, any of you wants to accompany me.”

Anne felt thrown off balance. She thought she had some understanding of Jane. But she couldn’t comprehend that within that complicated, finely rendered consciousness, there lodged the image of a prayable being. Was it the same person Laura thought of as she stared over the top of her Bible? Once more, Anne felt at the frontier of an alien land, and one she had no inclination to explore. She looked at Laura, then at Jane. So the two of them had something in common. Perhaps it would make Laura less lonely to go to church with someone.

“Would you like to go, Laura?” she asked the girl, who sat away from them, on a straight chair, leaning her Bible on the corner of the library table.

“No, thanks,” said Laura, smiling.

“Are you religious, dear?” Jane asked, as if she were asking her if she could read.

“I have a religious life, but I don’t go to church.”

“I see. What is the nature of your religious life, then?”

Anne was appalled. How could Jane ask such a question; it was like asking Laura what the nature of her sexual life was. But Laura didn’t seem afraid.

“It’s very different than what you do.”

Anne could feel her heart beat deeper in her empty chest. Now it would happen. Jane would say something demolishing, and Laura would be defenseless. And she couldn’t protect Laura without crossing Jane; she knew, therefore, that she would leave the girl exposed.

Jane stood up and poked the fire. “Well, Anne, it’s up to you. Do you want to make an early start of it, then? It might be better in terms of traffic.”

“Yes, that would be best,” said Anne.

She could have wept. Jane wanted them to leave. And it was Laura’s fault. She had spoiled the weekend; she had poisoned the well.

Anne heard a knock at her bedroom door. She wondered if it was one of the children, knocking through an impulse to politeness or angling to spend the night in her bed. She hated having to make that kind of decision: did one go along with the request, innocent in its own right, or refuse it, fearing to set a bad precedent? “Come in,” she said, uncertain of the welcome she would give. She was glad to imagine one of the children in the room with her; the sharpness of Jane’s dismissal had unbalanced her, and when she felt off balance, the weight of the children could make her feel set to rights. Yet she thought it was a cheat, to use her children for comfort. It was their dependence that soothed her, and their trust; it was their weakness, after all, that gave her strength.

“May I come in,” said Jane, sticking her head around the door.

Anne sat up in bed and covered her chest with the sheet. Her surprise at discovering Jane and not her children at the door made her feel naked.

“I brought the brandy up. I hoped we could talk before you left.”

“Of course,” said Anne, starting to get out of bed.

“No, don’t leave the covers. I’ll sit here on the bed, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all. I was expecting one of the children. What a pleasure to find you instead.”

“I’m afraid I’ve been rather snappish from time to time this weekend. I didn’t want to send you off on that note.”

“You’ve been wonderful.”

“Not consistently. I’m not by nature a patient person. It would be nice if I could say I used to be, but in fact I’m far better than I was when I was young. I’m not good at being nice to people I don’t want around. Particularly in my own house. I find it lacerating—as if I were wearing some itchy material. Or carrying a cross.”

Anne laughed. “You don’t like Laura.”

“She’s a bad piece of work.”

Anne felt emboldened by the situation’s informality, an informality that Jane had chosen. “Oh, Jane, you simply can’t say that. The children adore her.”

“The children
adore
Ben; they get along all right with Laura, that’s all. She has a dreadful arrogance, that girl.”

“She seems to me terribly insecure; she doesn’t know what to say next or where to put one foot in front of the other. She’s homeless, Jane; she has nowhere to go, and she doesn’t know where to begin to look.”

“Yes, and she’s quite arrogant about it. Have you asked her ever? And think of that vacant smile. Absolutely chilling.”

Anne sat straighter in the bed. “Jane, I agree she’s not ideal. But the ideal hasn’t presented itself, and she’s far from the worst. She’s very responsible with the children, and I can’t do my work without live-in help.”

“Surely there’s someone else.”

“Not in Selby in the middle of the year.”

“What about those agencies who send au pairs from abroad?”

“What guarantee do I have that anyone else would be better? I could spend my time comforting a Swiss manic-depressive or a Norwegian alcoholic whom I’d have to hide the liquor from. I’d rather stay with the devil I know.”

Jane looked up sharply. “I hope you’re right. It’s the opposite of what I want, to bring up anything to interfere with your work on Caroline. The children are wonderful, and one would like somebody wonderful to care for them.”

“The children
are
wonderful, and I’m not worried about them. Besides, if they learn a little patience and kindness from this experience, it’s all to the good.”

“Listen, dearest Anne, forgive me for talking like this. I see you almost as a member of my family. The vanity, you know, of a childless woman.”

Anne put her arms around Jane and embraced her. How pleasant it was to feel Jane’s large bones, her firm flesh. She had always been afraid to embrace her mother too robustly. Her mother was so much smaller than she; her bones were light and delicate. Anne felt for years that she had loomed above her mother, that she could hurt her with her sheer physical size. Jane smoothed Anne’s hair and kissed her on the forehead.

“Shall I turn off the light?” she said.

“That would be lovely.”

“You’ll sleep well now?”

“Yes.”

She would sleep well; she was very happy. Jane had taken her in.

“Mother, we need to speak to you alone,” said Peter, the minute they had got home and had hung up their coats.

Peter’s urgent bulletins were undependable. His alarm might be entirely unwarranted or the only true sighting in a world of careless navigators. One could never tell if he was being, on any occasion, the boy who cried wolf or the boy with his finger in the dike.

“Tomorrow’s Laura’s birthday,” he said, short of breath, closing the door to Anne’s bedroom, “and we really have to make it good.” So Jane was wrong, Anne thought, they
were
fond of her.

“Laura’s an orphan,” Sarah said seriously. “She’s never had a birthday party.”

“How do you know that?” asked Anne with concern.

“Well, we asked her if it was sad not to have your parents with you on your birthday. And she said she didn’t have any parents,” Peter said.

“So that means she’s an orphan,” Sarah said, looking dreamy.

“That means she must have been brought up in an orphanage,” Peter said.

“There aren’t very many orphanages anymore,” Anne said.

“Well, what happens to you if you have no parents?” Sarah asked.

“You go and live with other people who are like your parents. They’re called foster parents.”

“I don’t think that happened to Laura. I think she lived in an orphanage.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Well, if she had those foster parents, she’d write to them, or call them. She never calls anyone; she never gets any letters.”

“Do you like being with Laura?” Anne asked, daringly, not knowing what she would do if they said they didn’t. So much of life with children, she thought, was throwing balls ahead of you and then hoping you could run fast enough to catch them.

“She does a lot of things with us,” said Sarah. “She never yells at us.”

“Who yells at you?” asked Anne.

“You do,” said both the children.

“I don’t yell at you.”

“You raise your voice,” said Peter.

Anne felt jealousy ripple over her. She wanted to say to the children, Don’t you miss me? Don’t you hate my not being around?

“They don’t let you raise your voice in orphanages,” Peter said. “They make you talk in a whisper. They shave your head and don’t let you eat anything but oatmeal.”

Sarah was looking at her brother with rapt fascination. One could never tell what the springs of romance would be for children. To them Laura was mysterious and exciting. The scent of deprivation that hung on her they picked up. Only, in their nostrils it was an exotic perfume: the stuff of their nightmares made to breathe plain air.

“You’re going to make her that daisy cake, right?” said Peter.

“Yes, and I’ll invite Hélène, and in the afternoon Laura and I will go to lunch.”

“Invite Adrian,” Sarah said. “Laura likes Adrian.”

“Adrian’s very busy,” Anne said quickly. “I don’t think he’ll be able to come.”

“Anyway, you can ask him, Mommy,” Sarah said.

She felt her children steer her into a corner, as if she were a cow being pushed into a stall. She didn’t want Adrian near Laura. The combination seemed to her grotesque. But she knew she had no right to that judgment. If it would please Laura to have Adrian, Anne ought to invite him. It was supposed to be her day.

“And buy her a present from you,” Sarah said.

Anne hadn’t thought of that. What did you buy a girl like Laura?

“I’m giving her the model I just made. Of a yacht. It was very complicated. She’ll like that,” said Peter.

“I’m giving her the turkey we made out of pine cones at school for Thanksgiving. I saved it,” Sarah said.

“They don’t give you presents in the orphanage,” said Peter. “Mother, if you and Daddy died, where would we go?”

“You’d go with Aunt Beth and Uncle Richard.”

“We wouldn’t get to pick?”

“Who would you pick?”

They looked at each other. It had obviously been a topic between them.

“Ben,” said Peter.

Anne was surprised. “Why Ben?”

“Because then we could live with him in England. You know, in England they have the queen.”

The queen. Anne remembered that when she was Peter’s age she had kept a scrapbook about the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. Her sister had colored all the pictures with crayon one day, and she had been furious. But their mother wouldn’t say anything to Beth; she said Beth hadn’t meant it, that Beth had thought she was making the book nicer. Anne had known, still knew, that wasn’t true; Beth was trying to ruin something, and she did. Thirty years later the incident could still rankle. Anne looked at her children, wondering what impress would set on the soft wax of their memories to come out years later, a perfect medal struck in brass, treasured, as any old injustice is, simply for enduring.

“Daddy and I aren’t going to die,” she said and instantly regretted it. She shouldn’t say that to them. She should promise to keep them only as safe as she could.

“When is your job going to be over?” Sarah asked.

“June,” said Anne.

“Then Daddy will be home and Laura won’t be here and everything will be like it was before,” Sarah said.

Just like it was before. She saw her past life as a small warm lake in which she had swum contentedly with slow, plain strokes. But now she felt the bottom had always been muddy; leaves and twigs, weeds, gray-green and shapeless, rose to the surface. She watched her daughter counting on her fingers. “Seven more months,” Sarah said, with satisfaction.

Anne phoned Hélène and Adrian in the morning. Adrian sounded as if he was not alone; grumpily he agreed to come. Hélène’s voice, on the other hand, indicated she had been awake for hours. Anne felt its timbre was calculated for reproach. She realized she had forgotten entirely about Hélène, and she hated that about life, that people could be blotted out, sliced off, as if by a blade falling, that life could fill itself up like a television screen or a pointillist’s canvas with small hectic dots, creating some images, pushing others out. With people she loved, this anguished her; whenever she encountered it, she was distressed. She didn’t like Hélène—she was relieved that she didn’t have to see much of her; it was one of the benefits of Michael’s absence. Nevertheless, it shocked her that Hélène’s life had ceased to exist for her so entirely. How are we rooted in the world, she wondered, when for others we can so easily fail to be?

“I have not seen you or the children or Laura for weeks and weeks,” Hélène said.

“I’m sorry, Hélène. I’ve been so caught up…”

“I hope Laura at least has some free time for pleasure.”

Guiltily, Anne realized that Laura hardly ever left the house without her or the children. But she couldn’t imagine anything Laura would want to do. She worried that she had taken advantage of the girl’s unhappy nature.

“She’s terribly conscientious,” said Anne.

“Ah, yes, I know, it is why I was recommending her. But she is young. She must enjoy her life.”

Once more, Anne was struck by how much she disliked Hélène. She was tired of not liking people whom she had no justification for disliking. If she disliked Adrian, Barbara, or Ianthe, she would be able to come up with reasons: Adrian was lustful and self-absorbed, Barbara had an acid tongue and a controlling nature, Ianthe was simply impossible—yet she loved them; she liked to be with them. Hélène and Laura presented to her nothing she could turn away from without a sense of failure.

She was determined to make Laura’s birthday successful, memorable even. She was pleased with the gift she had bought Laura, a dress she had seen in the window of Lorilard’s, a store that had always puzzled her. She imagined that originally it had catered to the tastes of better-heeled, middle-aged faculty wives whose ideal in casual dress derived from a misunderstanding of the English. The items that made up the bulk of the store’s inventory still served this clientele, but as the possibilities for faculty-wife dress broadened, the store had tried to comprehend the revolution. It had failed, and the failure had been one of understanding. As an institution, it had depended on a standard that had no quick variations; when it had to cope with rapid changes of style, its timing was embarrassingly off—a season or perhaps two behind, but that small lag was death. Nevertheless, like a patient, attentive husband who has lost his wife to a new lover, the store had its small victories. Occasionally, you found, passing by the window—for no one anyone knew went in there regularly—something one might think of buying. And if you bought, you always felt good about the purchase, as if it were a charitable act.