Men and Angels Read online

  It was in a garden that the Spirit had first come to her.

  The first coming of the Spirit had been beautiful. She was at her grandmother’s. Her grandmother was good at gardens. Laura was in her grandmother’s garden. Her mother had just been unkind to her. What was it she had said, “Go outside and blow the stink off you”? It was because her sister Deborah had taken the blouse she had wanted to wear that morning. Laura had planned the clothes that she would wear each day on their visit to their grandmother. Debbie had taken her blouse. It was pink with embroidered flowers on it. Laura had embroidered them. She washed the blouse by hand and ironed it. She particularly wanted to show it to her grandmother. Then her sister came down wearing it. Debbie looked just like their mother. She was beautiful, just like their mother. And their mother loved her best, loved her only.

  Her sister Debbie walked into their grandmother’s kitchen wearing Laura’s blouse. Even now, even though she no longer felt anger because the Spirit lived in her, Laura could remember how she felt that day. Behind her eyes were dark things, sea creatures, the roots of trees uprooted, buildings falling on buildings. She ran toward her sister and hit her hard across the back.

  “It’s mine,” she said. “You can’t wear it.”

  Her mother came toward them. She pulled Laura away from Debbie. With the back of her hand she struck Laura. The large ring that their father had bought her for their fifteenth anniversary hit Laura in the eye. Her mother kept on hitting her. Four times she hit her in the face.

  “How dare you touch that child,” their mother said. Debbie was fourteen, three years younger than Laura. She was not a child.

  Laura remembered how her teeth felt on the inside of her lips. She had bitten her lips until they bled. The blood was salt and thick, her teeth were dry against the sore flesh she had bitten. She stood before her mother. She was bigger than her mother. She could feel her eyes were wild.

  “It’s my blouse, and she can’t have it.”

  She was standing above her mother. Then she realized that she could kill her. It was possible; it might be easy. In a minute it could happen, and it would be done. And she knew her mother knew. With small steps, frightened, Laura’s mother moved toward her own mother, Laura’s grandmother.

  “You don’t deserve this family,” her mother said. “I don’t know where you came from. You can’t be my child.”

  “Cecilia,” said the grandmother.

  Her mother was not afraid any longer. She knew that Laura was not going to kill her. The skin around her eyes looked bruised; her dark eyes, swelling with her anger, were a monster’s eyes. They reached out, as if they were hands, as if they could choke her daughter. She walked close to her.

  “You great big ugly clod. You might as well let your sister have all your clothes. You’ll never be anything. You’re not my child, you never were. Get out of here. I can’t stand the sight of you. Get out and blow the stink off you. Don’t come back till you’re fit to be a member of this family.”

  Even now, even now that she no longer felt anger, she remembered. She had run to the end of the garden. Her tears were splitting her body, as if lightning had split her, as if her veins were fire, as if the nerves that spread out from her spine were wires, cutting her hot flesh. She lay down on the grass. She pressed her eyes into the flesh of her arms. She was thinking that she wanted her mother to die. She was thinking that she could have killed her.

  Then it came. It was not anything she saw or heard. She knew only that it was with her. She knew she had been chosen. In her heart she knew the words, “You are the chosen one, the favored of the Lord.”

  She was not frightened, for she knew it was the Spirit of the Lord inside her, coming with power and with love. She walked back into her grandmother’s kitchen. That was the beginning of her power. No one was there but her father.

  “I’m sorry,” said her father. “I guess your mother got a little carried away.”

  She smiled at him with her new smile, the smile that she always had now, the smile that had the wisdom of the Spirit, and the Spirit’s peace. “It doesn’t matter,” she said to her father.

  And it didn’t. Before the Spirit came, she would have been grateful to her father. Angry that he had not spoken sooner, but grateful that he was on her side. But she knew then that she would never need him anymore. Her poor father. She prayed that he, too, would one day find the Spirit. Her mother’s flesh was choking him. But with her mother dead, he would find the Spirit. She prayed for him to find it, but no more than for anyone else. He meant nothing special to her. Once she had needed him to love her. But now she was loved in the Spirit. She was the chosen of the Lord. Now people needed her.

  She was good with children; she understood them, and they liked her, she was sure they did. Even that time with the Chamberlains, the children had liked her. Only the parents hadn’t understood. They said the things she told the children gave them nightmares. But it wasn’t true. It was the presence of the Spirit that made the parents uneasy. She showed them their uncleanness by her life among them, by the presence of the Spirit. It was the darkness in the parents that gave the children nightmares. Her power was not great enough, the evil in the Chamberlains had beaten her. Now she knew, from Jesus’ words to the apostles, how she must proceed with Anne and with her children. She had not been wise with the Chamberlains, she had spoken the name of the Spirit too early, and the darkness had overcome them. Now she would not speak the name of God, not speak of the Spirit, until the time was right. They would not know the Spirit was among them until the power of the Spirit had subdued their darkness. Then she would conquer. Then they would all be saved.

  The Chamberlains had asked her to leave. But they had said they would recommend her to another family. Their children had learned a great deal, the Chamberlains said, from Laura. She had taught the little girl to cross-stitch, the boy to make flowers, birds and animals from clay. Perhaps another family, the Chamberlains had said, with a more religious background…. As it is, we are not believers.

  Not believers. Of course not, you are choked with wickedness. She had not said this to them. She wanted them to recommend her.

  It would be different with Anne Foster. Now she knew more; now the power of the Spirit was much greater. It would not be difficult to save them all. She would begin with the children.

  As a little child, she had wanted the heat that jetted round her mother’s body. But her mother said, “Don’t hang on me.” Once, when Laura was a child, her mother had pushed her off the arm of the couch and she had cut her lip and bled and bled so that everyone was frightened. “Well, I told her not to hang on me,” her mother said, cleaning Laura’s face with quick, sharp hands that did not linger, did not treasure. “Why can’t you be more like your sister? Do you see her hanging on me all the time?”

  Debbie was quick and dark and like the mother dancing. She sang and snapped her fingers. She told stories with mistakes in them just to make people laugh. She hung upside down from the trapeze on the swing set. The children in the swimming pool were her friends, dove and rose up from the water holding hands with her, played treasure hunt and went for shining pennies with her at the bottom of the pool. Laura wore a bathing cap because she didn’t like to get her thick hair wet, swam by herself in straight rows that she counted up like gold, feared hanging from the trapeze and swung alone in silence, kicking the sand with the toe of her shoe. Then her mother shouted at her for her dirty shoes. “Make friends, be more independent.”

  She had one friend named Warren. He came to the house. He went into the pool with her. But then he had an accident. He moved his bowels in the pool. He spoiled the clearness of the water (so clear you could see pennies on the bottom that her father threw for children to go after). The pool had to be completely emptied, her mother said, screaming at her, hitting her, saying it was just like her to bring filth home with her. Warren was not allowed to come again.

  But she wasn’t filthy. She was careful, she was tidy. Debbie was
the one whose book covers were ripped, whose clothes were on the floor after she tried on outfit after outfit to see which ones would make her girlfriends love her. Debbie never helped. Laura helped her mother in the kitchen. She tried to help her mother keep the house clean, but her mother wasn’t interested and thought Laura cleaned house to make her feel bad. “You love it, don’t you, putting me in a bad light.”

  Debbie taught their mother the new dances. Married at seventeen, a mother six months later (Laura had been conceived in sin), her mother said she had never had the time to be young. She liked to stand next to Debbie at the mirror. She liked to say, “We could be sisters, couldn’t we,” putting her hands around her waist, then around Debbie’s. Laura would hang back, heavy, her braids a weight on her shoulders, pushing her down to the earth while they danced high above it, light, like stars that burnt and dazzled.

  She would teach Anne’s children that the flesh was nothing; a mother and her children, all that famous love, was nothing more than flesh to flesh, would drown them all, would keep them from the Spirit.

  But she must be careful. She must not make the mistake she had made with the Chamberlains. She would teach the girl to make clay animals. She would build models with the little boy. She would let them cook with her in the kitchen, make whatever mess they wanted and then clean it up without a word. They would look through field glasses at birds. They would pick wildflowers. They would dip leaves in glycerine and paste them into books. The children would love her. They would have fun. She would not talk to them about the Spirit until she knew that they loved her.

  Four

  “DARLING, IT’S IANTHE,” SAID the voice on the telephone. “You’ve got to come over quick, right now, immediately. I’m dying, I’m in absolutely desperate straits. You’ve no idea.”

  “What is it, Ianthe?” Anne said distantly. Ianthe had interrupted her while she was working, and she’d known her long enough to be wary of her reports of disaster. Ianthe was the woman to whom she’d lost the job of director of the college gallery. Tall, knife-thin, with a shock of Veronica Lake blond hair and lips colored in red and outlined in a darker reddish purple, she had become, improbably, one of Anne’s best friends. For one thing, they worked well together.

  “You can keep track of the fucking old masters in the basement,” Ianthe had said to Anne when they began working together, “and deal with the alums who want to give us their uncles’ watercolors for a tax writeoff. Whereas I can suck off the entire Board of Trustees for a Stella when the time comes. We’ll make a splendid team.”

  And, in fact, they did. Ianthe’s vision of their division of labor was not far off. Anne organized the gallery’s holdings, kept records, varied the displays and wrote exhibit notes that were generally admired. Ianthe expanded the collection so that the gallery was lauded as unusually representative of current trends. Anne knew that she could never have done what Ianthe did. She could never, for example, have accomplished Ianthe’s latest feat, the purchase, for a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, of a painting by an Italian Neo-Expressionist. In tabloid colors, it presented a dog biting the thigh of a child who sprawled among his schoolbooks, screaming.

  “Darling, it’s this brain-damaged child they’ve hired to replace you,” Ianthe was saying. “I don’t know where they found him, the state hospital, no doubt. He’s probably the latest experiment in community care. I know they dope him up and let him out in the morning and send him to me to help me run the gallery.”

  “Jack is really very good, Ianthe. If you’ll calm down and explain things to him, I’m sure he can handle everything.”

  “There’s no use explaining things to him, my love. He doesn’t have a brain. Simply, physiologically, he doesn’t have one. So there’s no use wasting each other’s time. You speak to him; you’re used to your adorable children. Speak to him as you would to Peter. Or to Sarah, perhaps. Draw him pictures.”

  “I’ll speak to him, Ianthe. Only not right now.”

  “He’s right here, darling. At my elbow, as usual; he’s free to talk.”

  “But I’m not. I’m working. I’ll come over in the afternoon.”

  “Oh, excuse me. I forgot that you’d suddenly joined the ranks of the illustrious. Forgive this poor day laborer for daring to interrupt.”

  “I’ll come to the gallery this afternoon. I’ll see you at three.” Ianthe’s insults disturbed Anne not at all. It was part of the texture of their friendship. Ianthe felt free to say perfectly dreadful things to Anne, but, unlike the things that Hélène said to her, they were never really disturbing because either they were so far off the mark as to have no wounding power, or they were clearly true, something she’d known about herself forever. And with Ianthe, she had access to a life that had nothing to do with Selby. Ianthe left town on the first bus she could on Thursday afternoons to spend the weekends in New York, where she had an apartment. She was the only person in the town, Anne reckoned, not to own a down coat; in the winter she pushed through the snow in her mink, ruining pair after pair of Charles Jourdan shoes while the rest of the community made its wholesome unbeautiful way, every inch puffed out, protected and concealed. And in Selby, where everyone behaved well, where even homosexuals kept up a premise of solid and undangerous monogamy, Ianthe had flamboyant, public love affairs. Each of her affairs was like a brilliant, terrible child she brooded over—now Medea, now the Angel of the house. It was one of the things Anne admired her for; it took real courage, she felt, at forty-eight to give oneself over so wholeheartedly—the quick rush of initial faith, the brief luxe of the heyday of a love affair, the bitter unraveling, and with Ianthe, the long period of diamond vengeance. Her vengeances were splendid. She ended her affair with Adrian Rosen—who was, of all the people in Selby, Anne’s closest friend—by throwing all his clothes into the wood stove and falling asleep in his bed while they burned.

  Anne would always be grateful to Ianthe for returning to her her faith in her own abilities. After she’d lost her job at the Gardner Museum in Boston, she’d been convinced she had no talents and no right to the world of work.

  It was 1974 when she’d lost the job. The Arabs had raised the price of oil. Of course people would take their money from museums. Nothing to do with you, they reassured her, those silvery administrators telling her that they must let her go. Your work is excellent. It’s just our funding’s been cut way back. And we have to get rid of a few of the younger people.

  But how could it not reflect on her, that great exposing beam they cast upon her? Nine other people had been let go, people she respected, whose work she knew had been praised. But three had been kept on, and she hadn’t been one of them. For months, she’d reviewed her performance and her work: what had she failed to do or done too much of? In the end, she felt she simply lacked distinction, that she was the sort of person no one would be afraid to let go: there would be no need to feel uncomfortable, to feel afraid.

  She had felt shame then, as she had never in her life felt it before. Always, she had been the one who got the prizes, was accepted into the right schools, earned the high honors. For the first time then, she understood the pain of all the children sent down after missing a word in the spelling bee while she had stood on the stage, triumphant; she understood the desire to hide that friends of hers who hadn’t been let into the right schools had felt. She knew, for the first time then, that failure made you feel like a criminal; that it became a part of your physical life, like the convict’s shaved head. For years she’d felt marked by it, and only Ianthe had allowed her to enter the world again, almost naturally. In praising her—particularly since she praised so rarely—it was as though Ianthe had bought her new clothes and allowed her to leave behind her convict’s suit; it was as if she’d built her a house in which she could grow her hair so that she could, once more, walk out into the street unmarked and common.

  Besides all that, Ianthe made her laugh, and she loved to laugh; that was the common thread among her three best friends in tow
n, Ianthe, Adrian and Barbara Greenspan. They made her laugh. She had always known herself to be the perfect straight man; she was like her father in that. It was fine; she enjoyed her friends enormously. And now she could endure Ianthe’s insult, for, after all, she had got her way. She would not go to the gallery until afternoon. She could go back to work.

  She’d taken over Michael’s study. For days she’d hesitated. The room was his; it was the one room in the house set apart, exclusively owned. Even the air seemed of a different quality: cooler, lighter, as if the children’s flesh, the smells of cooking, the fog of argument, the quick dense breath of sex had not come near it. The books were Michael’s, and the furniture; he had chosen the color of the walls—Williamsburg blue—and the Turkish carpet, light blue and red, the best in the house. On the walls were his pictures, the photograph of Colette, a page from an eighteenth-century edition of Candide, the Daumier print she had saved for six months to buy him. She fingered the raised letters on the spine of the bound copy of his dissertation: The Image of the City in Balzac, Zola, and Proust.

  She had been working at the dining room table. That was all right as long as the children were in school or asleep in the evenings. But Laura was around now, and she didn’t feel it was right to limit her free access through the dining room. With Laura around she never felt that she was unobserved.

  Yet she had to admire the job Laura was doing; she was wonderful with the children, marvelous around the house. On one of Anne’s days in the city, the refrigerator stopped running. Laura took care of the melting ice cream, running to the floor like a sticky cartoon rainbow; she saved the stews and casseroles and vegetables Anne had spent days cooking and freezing. She scrubbed the floors and moved the refrigerator, stowed the perishables next door at the Greenspans’, kept the milk safe for the children by filling the sink with bags of ice. When Anne got home, there was only the report of a crisis averted, not the desperate physical evidence. Laura had even called the electrician Barbara had recommended, for she saw that the lights were dimming and there had to be a problem with the wiring. The electrician had come and had concurred; he could fix the problem temporarily, but the house would need complete rewiring. Laura had made an appointment with him for Saturday, when Anne would be around to talk to him at length.