Men and Angels (2 page)

“You must be a wonderful friend to have so many friends,” said Laura, knowing that was what Hélène wanted. Pride and loneliness. They ate the woman up. It would be easy to make her think that she was helping Laura; it would be easy, she could see it now; this was the person who would help her next. Not that she needed help. Not really. Only in the things that perished, that the moths ate, that rusted, that ended in the drain. If only she had no need of clothes and food and shelter. As it was, she needed very little. But she did need that. So she would smile at the woman and listen to the stories of her friends, listen with half her mind while with the other she remembered who she was. The chosen of the Lord.

She told the woman that although she had faith the Lord would provide, she was worried for her immediate future. “I have nowhere to go,” she said. She told her about the Chamberlains. But did not tell her they had made her leave. I have nowhere to go, she said, hoping the woman would remember she had said both her parents were dead.

“I have it,” said Hélène. “Why don’t you live in my house in Selby? The college has got it for me. It’s a nice town, a lot of young people. Two hours from New York and two from Boston. You’d like it, you could probably find a job. Unfortunately, my darling friend will not be there. But probably I could find some names of people who need help caring for their children. In America the women do not want to take care of their children. They say they want to find themselves. I did not know that they were lost.”

She laughed, and Laura laughed, pretending that she understood. She thanked Hélène. She said the Lord had sent her. Why should we be afraid, she said, when we are in the hands of the Lord?

“How beautiful it is, your faith,” Hélène said. “That is why, of course, I trust you, although I do not know you. What is our faith for if we suspect the stranger, if we close the open hand out of fear?”

She listened to Hélène tell about her dear friend Michael. What a tragedy that he would not be in Selby for Laura to meet. A great man. A kind man, and so intelligent and handsome. His wife, Anne, was sweet, but nothing up to him. Pretty and sweet, but essentially rather empty. A person of no ideas. Her looks have served her badly, they have hindered her development. She has that kind of prettiness that people like. So she has never had to stretch herself, or grow. It is a pity. She will never understand her husband. She can never be a true companion to him.

Laura saw that Hélène loved the husband, hated the pretty wife. And that the man would never love her. And the wife would have the husband and the children and the house, and Hélène’s bitter heart would say the woman was a fool. But Hélène would never have what she wanted. So she would always be talking to people on planes. She would always be giving the keys of her house to strangers.

Laura kissed her. Took the keys. Said she would see the house was spotless when Hélène arrived in a week. “I’m good at that. I like that sort of thing,” she said.

“Thank God. I am quite hopeless. I’m afraid my mother spoiled me in this way.”

Laura said good-bye to Hélène, taking her keys, the numbers of her friends in Georgia. In Detroit. In Illinois. In California. I will see you in a week, she said, leaving her at the gate of her next flight.

She had only ten dollars. She would eat bread and margarine and jelly as she had in London for these months. She would go to Selby, Massachusetts. To the house she had the key to. She would find work taking care of children. Then she would teach them. She would teach them the word of the Lord. That the love they longed for was as nothing. That the way of the Lord was light. And that she was the favored one, the chosen of the Lord. And they would see it. But at first she would not speak of these things. Until she saw they loved her. She would be wise as serpents. Wise as serpents and innocent as doves.

A
NNE HAD ALWAYS WORRIED
that so many people thought her good. That morning as she stood by the window waiting for Hélène and the girl she had met on the plane, she wondered once again if it could be her looks that so took people in. She reminded people, she’d often feared, of their dream of the perfect first-grade teacher: it was her white skin and blue eyes that did it, her light, straight reddish hair, her figure—a small bosom and no waist—her comical size-eleven feet. Once a perfect stranger at a party, very drunk, had said to her, “You’ve no idea what a comfort a forehead like yours is to a certain kind of person.” She hadn’t known exactly what he’d meant, but the implications hadn’t pleased her.

Like most young girls, she hadn’t liked her looks, but she’d come to understand, at thirty-eight, that she was lucky in them because they didn’t excite envy or threat. Threat. People were using that word so much now. But what sort of person
threatened
people? Homicidal teenagers, loan sharks, blackmailers? Yet people used the word now for law-abiding citizens. Was it because people felt in danger now? It was a dangerous world, and they were right to feel it. Only, they didn’t feel it about her. And so, she suspected, looking at her face, taking in her quietness, her slight stoop, and frequent failure at quick comment, they had no other category in their imaginations into which they could fit her but the good. She knew, though, that that was wrong; she knew that goodness shouldn’t be confused with safety.

No one would imagine her good, she thought, if they knew what she was feeling at that moment about Hélène. Hélène was one of the people in the world she most disliked, and she could only feel mean-hearted in disliking her. She was one of Anne’s husband’s best friends. She’d done extraordinary things to help him with his work, allowed him access to areas of French academic life most Americans would be barred from. She was generous to everyone; she had money of her own and traveled frequently, and she was always smuggling in things that her friends in other countries couldn’t live without. She was full of stories about having concealed English sausages in her bra, French cigarettes in the tops of her stockings, packets of seeds in her sanitary napkins—always for her friends. It was said that after her sabbatical in Tubingen, she had so many people to say good-bye to that she had to rent a beer hall for her farewell party.

But even knowing all this, Anne couldn’t like her, for Hélène’s presence in her life hardened her own position and made it false. In Hélène’s presence she became a figure in a drama of Hélène’s invention. She had to become Michael Foster’s pretty wife, imaginatively raising Darling Peter, Darling Sarah. She had to give up her intellectual and conversational place beside her husband. Hélène pushed her off, past the horizon, a rowboat nosed away by a tanker. In willfully inventing her awry—but only just—Hélène cut off her life. For it was a struggle for a woman in Selby to feel she had a genuine existence. Maleness shaped the town; it had for two hundred years. Since the eighteenth century, young men had come to Selby to be educated into their fathers. Women had only recently been admitted into the college; there were, as yet, the president kept saying with uneasiness, no female full professors. And if the college didn’t quite know what to do with women students and faculty, it knew even less what to do with faculty wives. They were like the people who worked in the dark basement offices handling money or records behind doors marked
COMPTROLLER
or
PERSONNEL
—words that had nothing to do with the rest of college life. Their function was acknowledged to be necessary, but it was much better if they lived unseen.

Anne knew she had been luckier than most. Four years after they’d arrived at Selby, she’d been made assistant director of the college gallery, a job her Harvard Ph.D. had shamed the college into giving her. But it was the director’s job she’d applied for, and that was given to a stranger, someone whom no one in the administration would ever have to imagine making the bed for one of the male faculty, washing his underwear, wiping the noses of his children, mopping the floor he walked upon on his way out
her
door to
their
real life. When the president told her she hadn’t got the director’s job she’d applied for, and offered her the assistant’s job, he said he knew she’d be happy that they’d offered the job to a woman, as if he believed she were applying for the job only as a gesture, as a member of a class, interchangeable with any other member, and so it didn’t matter that she didn’t get the job herself, since it existed for her only symbolically.

If Hélène had done merely what so many others in Selby had done, if Anne could simply say that Hélène needed, for her own self-love, to make Anne insignificant and dull, the inferior wife of a superior husband, she would have been able to pass it off. But Hélène did more than that. She upset Anne’s moral balance. To dislike someone so publicly acknowledged as embodying everyone’s ideal of goodness made her doubt herself. For when she wasn’t around Hélène, she could think that goodness was of great importance to her; and she could believe in its force. But with Hélène before her she had to acknowledge the limits of goodness, and its weakness, to recognize that in itself it could do nothing to win love. Without the grease of accident—looks, wit, a deft hand or a quick eye—the machinery of affection never started. You could try to like someone you merely admired for his goodness—she had tried with Hélène—but you rarely succeeded. Whatever examples of changed lives and fortunes resulting from Hélène’s acts she’d brought to her mind, she hadn’t been able to stop herself from flinching when Hélène had embraced her once and said, “I think you do the most important work in the world. Making a man and children happy. This I could never do. I am too greedy, too impatient. You are so good.”

The minutes she waited for Hélène loomed and thickened, a small corridor of solitude she could inhabit but could not enjoy or use. She was a mother, and she had a job; time was a precious object: it had mass, extension, force that formed themselves in relation to her work and to her children’s lives. Always she’d treasured solitude, and now, in its rarity, her time alone in her house shimmered with instinct value. Alone, she could collect herself; she could smooth herself until she felt her spirit gather and fall in, till she could feel herself once more entire, sheathed. She could watch her life, see how it lapped like a wave against a lakeshore, slow and noiseless, coming from a place that couldn’t be determined, not even landing, finally, but starting out again, back to its source. But this morning, her time alone did not shimmer; it was broken up and muddied by the image of Hélène.

And every minute that she waited was filled with anxiety: each might be her last alone. At any moment her hoard of silence would be broken into; all she had gathered in would be spilled out; she would be with someone she disliked. And then it happened: she could see Hélène and the girl walking up the sidewalk. Something closed down with a sharp, excluding sound. It was over; they were at the door.

The sight of them made Anne suddenly feel the weather. It was September, but it was still summer. A moist and downcast heat hung close above the ground. It was a heat that no one could take joy in; summer had gone on too long, and limbs grew heavy yearning for a hint of cold. Yet Hélène wore wool, and Anne felt she did it to make some sort of point. And the girl who was with her—Hélène introduced her as Laura Post—was dressed too warmly as well, in brown corduroy pants and a green pullover sweater that had been carefully, expertly darned. The sweater marked her instantly as not a Selby student; no Selby students mended their clothes. They wore them with holes, or they threw them away. And her sandals weren’t the kind that students had; they looked as if they might belong to a Presbyterian missionary or an English nurse on holiday in the tropics. But Laura Post had not crossed that mysterious bridge into the world of finally assumed adulthood. She was young, and wanted to be seen so: tentative, experimental, ready to take on whatever might come up. That, though, was why she was there: to see about working for Anne as a live-in baby-sitter. If her life were fully settled, she wouldn’t be free to do, at a moment’s notice, the kind of work Anne needed done. Thinking of her in this way, Anne tried to study her face. She had the light blue watery eyes of many redheads, which her thick glasses clouded and enlarged. There was something opulent about her skin: it was white, translucent, like an Ingres nude’s. But as if she’d guessed that, and wanted to offset those implications, she’d clipped her thick red hair to the back of her head in a way that unnecessarily, puritanically, revealed her large, protruding ears.

Anne felt herself move away from Laura Post because she found it difficult to place her. But that was the problem with living in Selby, she thought; everyone was so easy to place. She’d often felt that it was like living in a mill town or a sanitarium. Everyone was recognizable, by caste or type. Everyone took an identity from his relation to the college: childish, resentful, rebellious, cringing, proud, servile, workmanlike, enraged. It affected even their postures and the set of their mouths.

Laura and Hélène sat on the couch. Hélène took out of her bag the presents she had brought the children: Swiss chocolates beautifully wrapped in colored foil, an Elizabeth I cutout book for Sarah, and for Peter a model of Nelson’s ship.

“How are you surviving Selby?” Anne asked Hélène.

“Oh, if there were only twelve more hours in the day!” Hélène said, fluttering her hands. “So many students wanting to talk, so hungry for conversation. Always in my office! Always I am there in the office till seven o’clock in the evening, hearing about their so terrible lives. I make them speak to me in French; I tell them it is educational.”

Immediately, Anne felt for every member of the faculty who left his office before dark, the blow of unspoken reproach.

“And how do
you
like Selby?” she asked Laura.

“I’m very happy,” said the girl.

“The children are not here,” Hélène said. “But they are in school, of course. How silly of me. And you, you were doing your lovely work with them out of the house.”