He rose when she entered, not out of courtesy or good breeding, but only in surprise, in no way expecting what he first heard, and then saw: the rustle of her dress, the jangle of jewelry, a quick young step across a glass-bright floor, and then the woman herself!
Old? Yes; if what the chauffeur had said was true. “Forty or so”—ancient to a child Angel’s age, but not at all looking it, hiding it in some beautiful way; slender, with a dress made of gold! and hair that almost matched, smoothed tight against her head like hammered metal. And rings, all shiny green; bracelets—ten or twelve—bright and tinkly as tamborines.
She stood very still staring at him, and while he grinned, chipped tooth and all, feeling as if the corners of his mouth were touching the lobe of each ear, she took a very long time to smile. He thought she never would, but then, there it was: as shiny and warm as the gold of her dress, broadly, deeply generous, like sometimes his father’s, the eyes crinkling so much they almost disappeared.
“Angel,” she said. And that was all. Then his small sweaty hand was clasped in hers, and a cool, smooth cheek, smelling faintly like the altar lilies at Easter mass, gently touched his own.
A vision of a reeking black skeleton in bed, a bony hand waving him away, as it had all his life, almost felled him. He staggered, half-fainting while simultaneously he relived the memory of an orgasm, the frantic, arched spasm of his hips, the wild, jerking cough of his coming against the bold questioning touch of his father’s hand.
Mrs. Evans caught him, steadied him, if not understanding, at least accepting—as she would the sudden dizzying flush of an attack of malaria—this curious, inexplicable moment of passion and trauma.
Concerned but smiling, she pushed him into a cushioned chair as if he were foolishly, disarmingly drunk on too much beer, or had merely stumbled, having caught his foot under the edge of a throw rug.
So, of course, Angel’s surrender to Mrs. Evans was over in one blinding, fractured second: he had given her his heart. It was broken, old before its youth, worthless perhaps, but hers.
Instantly. Without pause. Without hesitation. Without doubt. Eternally. Forever.
Before Angel’s arrival, Mrs. Evans had questioned Rose about the garden. Would it be too cool to sit outdoors? Had it been swept and hosed down—cleared of the first light fall of autumn leaves? Had anyone dusted the furniture (which was white wrought iron) to make sure it wasn’t coated with its usual daily share of the city’s abominable grime?
Nothing had been done to the garden; no one had been out there for days. And with time so short, Mrs. Evans decided not only not to express any anger, but not even feel it.
“Well, look at the morning room,” she instructed Rose, with only a slight edge of sharpness in her tone. “If the sun is too bright”—the room, with its wall of floor-to-ceiling windows faced south-west—“draw the blinds halfway; make sure the light is pleasant and” (yes) “flattering. Also, make space, clear the coffee table. I’ll tell Cook we’ll have tea and something . . . hm, sweet . . . suitable for a boy, whatever his age.”
Consequently, as the girl went to the morning room to do as she was told, she was extremely puzzled. The visitor—and this was the first she had heard of him—must be a relative she knew nothing about, and of considerable importance, boy or no. For she had caught a glimpse of her employer as she walked quickly by, rushed words thrown over her shoulder. Mrs. Evans was no longer in black!—shock and puzzle enough—but wore jewelry and make-up and a dress Rose had seen only once, two years ago, at a Christmas party in Palm Beach: an exquisite, long-sleeved, full-skirted fantasy of threaded black and green against a flood of muted gold.
There were preliminaries to eliminate: his age, his last name (“Rivera”), where he lived (“well—‘uptown’ ”) shying away from a specific street address; a bit about his father (“Aurelio”)—handsome, apparently, worshipped but also very much feared—she could see that (and also, remembering her conversation with the man on the phone, rude and uncouth).
Next: Angel’s siblings (he knew the word!), but no, there were none. His grade in school?—well, he was one behind, not because he was dumb; why sh—God! he could get all A’s when it pleased him, but he didn’t go very often—to school, that is (clearly a dedicated truant).
Was his ear actually pierced, or was that bit of shiny silver pasted on? Such a silly question! but designedly so—to make them both laugh.
How could he paste it on! Well—why not?—the way women did sequins: with spirit gum perhaps, or even—even with airplane glue! She remembered—and told Angel—how she had peeled difficult, almost impossible patches of it from her fingers during Jamie’s—her son’s—long preoccupation with model plane building, when she sometimes helped, and the oozing tubes of clear, quick-drying “plastic” were so strong and euphoric to smell that both mother and son had been in danger of becoming happy, deliciously-addicted glue-sniffers!
Sensing an ally, or at least an empathetic bird-of-a-feather, Angel confessed, clearing boasting: “I used to sniff glue a lot. Best way—is in a bag;you know: like a brown paper bag. Y’hold it over your mouth and nose, tight, and breathe deep.”
Mrs. Evans was grateful for the advice should she want ever again to sniff glue, but somehow (she said) she had the feeling that her-glue-sniffing days were over. One—you know, loses interest in something if one has done it often enough.
Pause. Silence. What else?—quickly now!
“What a handsome ring!” (the “ruby”).
Oh—! It was nothin’; not really. But it could cut glass; that’s what it was for; he could scratch his name, clear as anything; if she had some glass aroun’ he’d scratch it for her.
Well. . .She looked doubtfully around the room, careful not to see the entire wall of windows they were facing. Not at the moment; but the next time he came, she’d have Dori bring in some glass and he could scratch her name.
And gradually, particularly with anything that made him laugh, Angel lost some of his tightness. The small clenched fists began to loosen, and the unconscious sporadic outward jerk of his chin, probably tic douloureux, became much less frequent and finally disappeared.
His eyes didn’t lose their awe, however, for the walk through the house, and a smooth ride up two floors in a tiny ornate elevator only big enough for two to the “Morning Room” (he wondered if there might be a “Night Room” and an “Afternoon Room”) had exposed him to a display of wealth previously seen only in movies and museums.
Also, his eyes never met hers, evasive always, moving restlessly, roving about the room, concentrating on objects, sometimes himself: a nail chewed, an itch scratched. The healed wound on his head from which a bit of hair was missing and starting to grow in, seemed to bother him, and his hand reached for it frequently, conscious or not, fanning nearby hair over the small open space to hide it.
There was one embarrassing (to him) yet funny (to her) moment when, aching for something to say, to contribute during their first long pause, for it was she, up to now, who had kept the conversation “going,” he turned up a sudden soiled sneaker for a glance at the stained sole, blurting an unthinking. “F’a minute it looked like I stepped in some dog sh—.” Had it been anyone in the world except Mrs. Evans facing him, he probably would have gotten the word out.
As it was, he concluded faintly, “but I guess I didn’t,” the word unfinished: dead, hanged, a corpse swinging in the air between them.
Was it time?
They had been talking twenty, perhaps thirty minutes; tea was on its way, and everything had gone, all in all, well enough. He was bright, he was quick; she suspected he had a very high IQ despite his loathing for school, his constant truancy—which accounted in part, though probably his parents were mostly to blame—for his bad grammar, his atrocious spelling.
Ready or not, she thought, here I come. What about his mother; when had she died?
Well . . .
His face, after a quick chin-jerk, was fairly composed. Better, it w
as blinking and blank. Several doubtful fingers came up to rake the air; did she count two, three, four? And what were they: weeks, months, years? He didn’t say. Only: “I try to put it out of my mind. I like to forget.”
Mrs. Evans could well understand that, and didn’t press for specifics, though she was aware of what seemed a needless and rather peculiar vagueness. But there were other things she desired strongly to know, and soon she was speaking about them—more to adult than to boy—but he proved equal to it.
“There is a thing,” she found herself saying, “called ‘pregnancy psychosis.’ You know what psychosis means.”
He nodded his head vigorously: “Sort of—crazy.”
“Yes. Some women who are about to have babies . . . some mothers, go insane, truly insane . . . for just a little while.” She paused. “What I’m suggesting is an analogy of sorts. I propose,” and for the second time since they’d met she touched him, the lightest of pats on the hand, “that something similar to that can happen—does happen often—when a child dies, though I’m not sure it has a name. I suppose one could call it a loss—or death—psychosis. But what it means, really, is simply ‘expressions’ of extravagant bereavement . . .”
She paused, then repeated heself: “Bereavement. Do you know what that word means: truly, exactly? I didn’t. I had to look it up.” She moved a little closer to him, trying to capture his eyes. “Angel . . . ‘bereavement’ means ‘to deprive of—rutblessly—especially hope and joy.’ It also means ‘to make desolate through loss, especially death.’ ”
Now she smiled slightly, continuing: “Under ‘obsolete’—(you know that word also?)” and the boy nodded again—“it said ‘to take away . . . by violence.’ ”
“Angel, all these things happened to me, as I’m sure they must have to you when your mother died. I was ‘deprived of ruthlessly, made desolate through loss.’ Indeed—” and now she was just a bit playful, her eyes crinkling in amusement, “indeed, I’m afraid I qualified under ‘obsolete’ too: because all that I had, all that was dear, in any way meaningful to me was taken away, by violence.”
“Do you m—mean . . . ?”
The boy was stammering, unable to shape adequate words to suit gentle shy inquiry, afraid to make another embarrassing mistake. “Do you mean that yours—son died in an accident, like a car crash? I had a friend got killed on a motorcycle. Wheels hit an oil slick; he got thrown . . .”
“ No; it wasn’t . . . ”
“ . . . twenty feet . . . ”
“ . . . an accident . . . ”
“ . . . an’ crushed his skull . . . ”
“ . . . it was normal . . . ”
“ . . . against a stone wall.”
“ . . . At least the doctors called it that, as if, at fourteen, any death can be normal!”
They had somehow garbled the conversation, but each to the other had been clear.
But now tears gathered and glistened in Mrs. Evans’ eyes; he saw her throat move as she swallowed, each of her hands seizing the other to hold back emotion.
And seeing such visible grief in another, he felt impotent, helpless, alone. If they had met to share grief, in some strange way comfort each other and ease their mutual pain, they were not doing so.
Each was isolated, in a separate cell, without windows or doors: she the beautiful, kind lady in her sumptuous gold dress, he the thin dark boy from the Spanish ghetto with the small silver bead in his ear and the crackerjacks “ruby” on his finger.
The chin-tic returned, pronounced, in a jerking spasm that would not stop. This time he could not help but be shamefully aware of it and put up both hands to still the shudder.
“My father,” he said shyly, “hates me to do that. I don’t mean to.”
She tossed the apology away with a shrug. Shake, shudder, writhe, scream she seemed to say: all of it served no more purpose than her useless tears.
“What I meant,” she said, continuing, quick to fill in the silence, “is that death, no matter how, regardless of the circumstances, is the unutterable violence. Didn’t you find it so with your mother? I mean . . . What did you do; what were your expressions of”—now she laughed just a bit, trying to lighten the word and the moment—“your expressions of extravagant bereavement?”
The boy was silent a long time, his eyes downcast, watching his nervous fingers twist and retwist an extra, single thread loose in the knee-seam of his dunagarees. Then, when the silence became overpowering, too thunderous to bear:
“Well . . .”
The word was explosive, but more silence followed, until he blurted:
“I answered your ad, for one thing.”
Mrs. Evans looked at him, amazed. How knowing, how “deep,” how brilliantly emotional he was! She nodded.
“A brave thing to do. To meet me. To be here. Truly an extravagant expression. But . . .”
The ornate tea service had arrived, virtually a miniature forest of glittering silver, after Rose, three times, had tap-tap-tapped one foot against the door, unable to free a hand from the immense tray.
The girl waited while her employer, with a slight worried frown, glanced over what she had brought.
“How does that look, Angel?” Her eyes raised anxiously to his. “Chocolate chip cookies, sandwiches . . . Do you mind the crusts cut off? I don’t like bulky foods. And what’s this, Rose, that’s bubbling so?”
“A glass of coke, Ma’am. Cook thought, when I told her, that the young man might prefer it to tea.”
“Is that so?” Four waiting eyes attending the boy.
“Oh, yes! I like coke.”
The maid left, and a plate piled high with thin white sandwiches was raised toward him, cookie-cutter cut in the shape of diamonds, hearts, curled ribbons and squares. He didn’t know which to choose, then decided on all four: first a heart, which he had the quick sense to realize should be picked up with the silver tongs provided. He placed this (God, correctly) on one of the small empty plates, followed by a ribbon, a diamond and a square.
He waited, watching Mrs. Evans carefully as she reached for two of the diamonds for herself, poured tea by turning a little spigot in the fat-bellied urn, and began, so delicately it seemed, to eat. Then, famished, he quickly munched one of his own sandwiches, the heart, so small it was in his mouth in a single bite.
“What is it?” he asked, incredulous, teeth chomping, tongue sliding against something indescribably strange and wonderful.
“Only Cook and God in Their wisdom know,” Mrs. Evans replied, nibbling a bit more. “I’d guess—a sprig of watercress, slightly bruised, understand, to enhance the flavor, and a paste made of—let me see—” (exploring thoughtfully, eyes up in her head) “—crushed bacon, a touch of sharp cheese, probably cheddar, a few drops of fresh lemon with a crumble of rind, the barest dash of white wine, heavy cream, several spices . . .” She concluded lamely: “I don’t know. The final secrets of cooks when they die go to their graves with them. Believe me, Angel, the proud fathers of the Inquisition would have failed utterly if they’d had Cook on the most exquisitely-devised of their wretched racks.”
“What?!”—brown cheeks bulging. It was the first time all afternoon she had said something he hadn’t quite understood.
“Nevermind.”
Smiling at the boy, she determined that every single sandwich, all the golden, bitter-sweet chocolate-chip, Cook-marvelous, just-baked cookies would ultimately disappear.
The day darkened. The shadows grew long. The room was filled with the beautiful, deepening blue-grey of the late, autumn afternoon.
From somewhere in the house, a clock chimed, faintly, but quick, clear and silvery, and Angel counted every stroke.
His golden lady hadn’t turned on a single lamp, explaining, “This is my favorite time of day. I like it best.”
Then she asked him to do something really freaky—or so at first it seemed.
Could they—not talk?—just for a little while. There was no need for friends, for people who r
eally liked each other, who were en rapport, so to speak (that word eluded him), to find silence painful. Wasn’t it so? On the contrary, silence said more, meant more sometimes than many, many words.
So would it be all right if they just—sat there, and were with each other, and not be nervous, or impatient, or bored, or even happy or sad, not thinking at all; just . . . quiet, peaceful, still, simply sharing each other—each other’s be-ing and presence?
It was difficult at first, and he felt very strange, nerves raw and gnawing inside of him, chin jerking again, fingernails picking at each other or being chewed.
His heart wasn’t beating right either, so it seemed, thudding erratically, so loud he kept stealing glances at Mrs. Evans to see if she heard.
Her face was serene, and in the fading light and soft shadows, appeared much younger: muscles relaxed, lines smoothed out.
She stared at him for the longest while, right into his eyes, almost expressionless, with just the corners of her mouth turned up, though he couldn’t really tell if she was smiling or not.
And being seen, being watched so closely, was such an unbearable intimacy that his body continued to tighten, making him shift this way and that in his chair, aching to move violently, to leap up, to run, to hide.
He did none of these; instead he forced himself to return her steady gaze as best he could, eyes sliding away only briefly now and then.
Then, as he watched, he eventually saw her eyelids blink, flutter, and gently close.
Had she fallen asleep?! His body prepared itself for the sting of outrage, disappointment, of being “cheated”—though of what exactly he had no idea.
But no; she wasn’t asleep. Her fingers were slowly carressing her rings; her lips had parted. If anything, she seemed super-or ultra-awake, as if she were listening to sounds no one else could hear, or seeing things that didn’t require eyes but a sense more refined than vision.
Bereavements Page 7