The Third Angel

by Alice Hoffman

  “Not you,” Vi said when she saw him.

  The doctor laughed. “You know I'm the best doctor in town. Even if you hate me, admit it.”

  “Fine,” Frieda's mum said. “Still wearing two watches, I see.”

  “Wouldn't want to be late for you,” the doctor said. He turned to Frieda. “Can you get a glass of water and two aspirin tablets?”

  It wasn't until Frieda was halfway down the stairs that she realized that was what her father did whenever he wanted to get rid of a patient's family member; whenever he thought a diagnosis might be bad.

  In a panic, she went into the kitchen and ran the water. She thought she saw someone in a black coat standing outside the window. Her heart flew up, thinking it might be Jamie and then she knew all at once it wasn't Jamie at all. Jamie would never be here in Reading. He would have never come after her. It was the angel who'd sat in the back of the car; the one who waited outside the window until the time was right to come inside and take whatever he wanted. It was the one you didn't want to see at your door.

  Frieda's dad called an ambulance and he and Frieda followed along in his car. It was twilight and all the birds were singing. The ambulance didn't have its siren on. Frieda knew that was a bad sign. She'd told her mother everything would be all right when the medics came to get her, but her mother's eyes were closed and she didn't answer. Frieda and her father were silent as they drove. Frieda had begun to cry. She'd thought it might be a stroke, and that her mother would recover, but the doctor told her it had probably been an aneurysm.

  “Oh, Frieda,” he said. “I wish I could make it turn out differently. I wish I had the power.”

  Then she knew for certain. It was the tone he always had when there wasn't any hope, when the angel in the black coat had already come and gone and the other two angels were nowhere to be found.

  The funeral was small, her mother's closest friends, a few people from the environmental group, Bill and his family, and Frieda's father. The service was held at the graveside because Frieda's mother never had liked anyone making a fuss over her. It was a warm day and Frieda stood in the shade. Her stomach felt huge and her feet were swelling and she thought she might faint. She could not believe that her mother would never know her grandchild. She could not believe this was the way her mother's life had turned out.

  After the service, Bill's mother made a luncheon at Lilac House, cold meats and cheese and crusty yellow bread that the bakery down the road was known for.

  “You all right?” Frieda's father said. He had come out to the porch to where Frieda was sitting. She could not stand the pleasant chatting going on inside. She couldn't bear to be polite.

  “Not really.”

  “No. Of course not. I don't know if this makes it better or worse, but when I sent you in the kitchen that day she said the best thing that ever happened to her was you.”

  Frieda's throat hurt and her eyes burned but she didn't cry again. The more she didn't cry the worse she felt. The more she cried the worse she felt. There was no difference, so she might as well not feel anything. That afternoon, when everyone had left, she asked Bill for the keys to the car. She wanted to run some errands to take her mind off things. She drove to the music store in Reading. She wandered around until she found the new releases. There it was. Lion Park. Frieda stood there with her head bent. She couldn't stop herself from crying then. It just poured out. A clerk came up to her, a young woman with straight blond hair, wearing jeans and a flowing Indian floral blouse. She probably wasn't more than a few years younger than Frieda was, but she seemed a mere girl. Maybe Frieda had seemed that way when she first went up to London. Like the world was open to her. Like she deserved something more.

  “You all right?”

  Frieda nodded. She held up the album. “I know him,” she said of Jamie.

  “Cool,” the girl said. “I love that record.”

  Frieda went and paid for it. He'd taken credit for her two songs, but then she'd always thought he would. The album was dedicated to the nurses who had helped him survive as a child and to his wife, the angel of his life, Stella. Frieda drove home. She kept the record in the china cabinet, and only took it out when no one was home. She sat by the window and looked at the leaves moving in the hedges and the sparrows nesting there and she listened to Jamie's voice. She still felt the same as she had the first time she'd heard him, and she felt ridiculous for feeling that way. She started taking walks with her father on Saturdays, as she once had with her mother. It was a way to mourn her mother, but after a while she simply enjoyed the doctor's company. They were a good deal alike, after all.

  They went on long rambles, through fields, in and out of gates, to villages they'd only passed by in the car. They'd driven to see the doctor's patients in most of these towns, but they'd usually been in a hurry. Everything was so different close-up. They saw bluebells, tricklets of streams, little frogs, pollen floating in the air; occasionally they'd spy a family of foxes, a male, along with the vixen and their kits. The sight of them made Frieda feel like crying all over again, they were so joyous running through a field, but she kept herself in check. She was only twenty, too young to think about crying all the time.

  By the end of the spring, Frieda was slowing down. She had gained too much weight and she felt like an ox. All the same, she was starving nearly all the time. They'd begun to take a rucksack of picnic food along on the Saturday walks because Frieda was so often famished. She'd never been so hungry in her life. They sat in meadows and ate cheese sandwiches and pickles and didn't talk much. When they did, they discussed her father's most interesting and puzzling cases. The woman who was poisoning her own daughters with little balls of mercury taken from a thermometer and calling in to the doctor's office every day. The man who ate nails and suffered from traces of metal in his blood. The baby who couldn't feel pain and kept banging his head on the bars of his crib.

  “Medicine is solving mysteries,” the doctor said.

  “Isn't all of life?”

  They agreed that it was. Frieda had brought along a thermos of tea and she now poured two cups. The air smelled sweet, like grass.

  “I feel the same way as your mother, you know,” the doctor said. “I know all lives are supposed to be equal, but nothing has mattered to me the way you do.”

  “That's a mistake. I'm quite nasty,” Frieda joked. “I've been having cravings for mayonnaise and egg sandwiches and I belch a lot. I'm revolting actually.”

  “No one but you,” the doctor told her.

  By then, Frieda had learned to be sociable to the doctor's new wife, who was a pleasant enough woman. Frieda not only remembered the night when Jenny was crying, after her husband had died; she now remembered driving over to that house with her father several times afterward, and having him tell her to stay in the car, where she read until the light disappeared. She saw through the window once. They were having tea. He sang on the way home, and Frieda had wanted to believe everything was the same, but it hadn't been.

  The baby came at the start of summer, a little boy they named Paul who'd taken three days of horrible labor before he arrived. At the end of those three days, Frieda thought she might die and she didn't much care if she did. She hated her own baby and herself and the whole world, and then all at once he was born and everything changed. She wondered why no one spoke the truth about birth; it was so close to dying you could see the angel before you, right there, standing on the linoleum floor. Actually there were two angels, the Angel of Life and the Angel of Death, both beside the window, waiting. One was in shadow, one was in light; it was difficult to determine which was the one you wanted to watch over you. And then there was the Third Angel, the one her father had spoken of, the one right in the middle that could fall either way, the one you have to try to rescue, if you can, and that was when the baby was born.

  The moment she saw her child, Frieda became another person.

  “Can you believe we made this little man?” Bill said. “He's perfect.
All fingers and toes.” It was the first time Frieda had ever seen her husband cry.

  She fell madly in love in that instant. She wasn't even listening to Bill. The baby seemed to be staring at her with his clear gray-blue eyes. He was looking right inside to the deepest part of her. Love of my life, Frieda thought. Angel of angels. She sobbed as though her heart was breaking and everyone thought it made sense that she needed a sedative after the labor she'd been through. She deserved a rest, after all; she was entitled to spend the rest of the summer enjoying the baby.

  She didn't go back to nursing classes in autumn; she'd wait a year before she returned. She wanted the autumn to last forever. The green turned to that golden color she'd always loved, of ash trees and oak. She and her father took the baby on their walks now, bundled into a backpack the doctor had fashioned into a papooselike creation.

  “You should patent it,” Frieda said. “Women all over would want to carry their babies this way.”

  Paul wasn't in the least bit fussy. His eyes had stayed blue and he had great powers of concentration, on this the doctor and Frieda agreed. The baby seemed to be able to tell the difference between the songs of a magpie and a sparrow. He preferred the magpie, oddly enough, and let out a squeal whenever one called out. Paul also had perfect pitch when he cooed his little baby songs, perhaps because Frieda listened to Jamie's album so often when they were alone. She played it while she nursed him in a chair by the window and while they took their rests at midday. Once she swore Paul was humming “The Ghost of Michael Macklin,” the chorus, which was so mournful. The words had been sad enough when she'd written them, but the music took the sorrow to an unspoken level. Frieda felt a chill across her back when she heard the baby humming, and then of course she realized she must have been mistaken. No baby could be that spot-on musical, not even hers.

  Still, she had the feeling there were great things in store for her child, and she was humbled to be the one lucky enough to raise him. She was well aware that most mothers might feel the same way about their children, but that didn't lessen her sense of possibility. She felt as though she had known Paul forever, as though he'd been her destiny all along, what she'd been running to when she hadn't even known she was on the run.

  “You were wrong,” Frieda told her father as they walked back across the meadow to The Hedges at the end of one of their rambles. They were wearing boots and sweaters and they'd wandered especially far that day. The baby was sleeping in his papoose backpack, tied onto the doctor's back. Frieda had never been happier. “Love isn't complicated,” she said.

  SHE HEARD ABOUT Jamie's death one afternoon after she'd gone to buy apples for a fruit crumble. The baby, now three months old, was with Bill, and Frieda had gone to a farm up the road; Frieda bought the apples, then put the sack in the backseat of the car and switched on the radio. Jamie's album had been a big hit and he'd been touring all through the spring and summer. But to her horror, she now heard that he'd been in a car accident in France a month earlier. Frieda had been so busy with the baby, she'd stopped listening to the news. She'd never even heard about it. Jamie Dunn and his wife and her sister and the drummer in his band were gone. He'd been out of the world for more than thirty days while Frieda had been going on with her life, taking care of the baby, going for walks, not knowing. The broadcaster announced there had just been a memorial service at the Chelsea Town Hall where Jamie had given his last concert in London earlier in the year. Mick Jagger was reported to have sung “The Ghost of Michael Macklin.” It was said that a thousand candles had been lit on the sidewalk outside town hall, and that fans were collecting the wax from the sidewalk as a keepsake.

  Frieda sat there in the lot for a while, then she drove out onto the road. Instead of taking the first turn at the roundabout that would lead toward home, she took the second exit and went south, heading toward London. When she stopped to refill the car's tank she phoned The Hedges. She told Bill that an old friend had died and that she was driving to London; she'd be back as soon as she could.

  “Someone from the hotel where you worked?” Bill asked. It was a time they rarely spoke of.

  “Yes,” Frieda told him. “We were friends.”

  “You're all right?” Bill said.

  “I think so,” Frieda said. “I will be.”

  She hated driving in the city, but she made her way. She was afraid she wouldn't find parking, so she left her car on Kensington High Street. She remembered where the park was. It had seemed much larger last time but it was only a pretty neighborhood park ringed with a Victorian iron fence covered with moss. She was not as sure of the house; they were all Edwardian town houses, not identical, but all equally graceful. Then Frieda remembered it had looked like a wedding cake, all white; the one with the arched windows facing the park. She went up the stairs and knocked and a housekeeper answered.

  “I'm sorry,” the housekeeper said. “Mrs. Ridge isn't accepting any visitors.”

  “Of course I am.” Stella's mother was in the hall. She came closer. “Do I know you?” she asked Frieda.

  “Not really,” Frieda said. “We met a while back. I knew your daughters, and Jamie.”

  Daisy Ridge studied Frieda. “The girl with the suitcase,” she said.

  “Right.”

  “Come in.”

  Mrs. Ridge asked the housekeeper to bring them tea. She was wearing a black suit and high heels and Frieda felt dumpy and out of place in jeans and walking shoes and an old Burberry jacket that had belonged to her mother. There were burrs stuck to the fabric, all along the cuffs.

  The Ridges' marriage had ended before the girls died, and now Daisy Ridge was alone in the house. She had lost everyone who had ever mattered to her. In the mornings she couldn't believe she woke up, as she had no reason to do so. She thought maybe her sister had been the lucky one to pass so early, before she'd had time to become too attached to the world, before she had too much to lose.

  “You have a lovely home,” Frieda said. The tea was brought around. There were scones and jam and a pot of green tea that smelled like weeds and honey. When the housekeeper left, Frieda said, “I just wanted to come and say how sorry I was.”

  “For what? Because you didn't take Jamie away from my daughter? I assumed that was why you came that day. I wish you'd been more successful. Maybe they'd all be alive if you had been. He was driving, you know. When a drug addict drives, what can you expect?”

  “In all fairness, he wasn't the only one.”

  Mrs. Ridge stood up and Frieda thought perhaps she was about to be asked to leave; perhaps she'd insulted Stella's memory even though she'd only spoken the truth. But no, there was something more Mrs. Ridge wanted to show her.

  “You never saw the rest of the house. Just Stella's bedroom,” Mrs. Ridge said. “I was rude to you. I made assumptions.”

  “I did come here for him that day,” Frieda admitted. “I wanted him terribly. I was crazed with it. But he didn't love me. I realized that. I wasn't in his world.”

  “Love,” Mrs. Ridge said. “Is that what led to this?”

  “They were right for each other. He'd have to be crazy not to have fallen in love with her.”

  Mrs. Ridge turned her face away. She had been crying for weeks, stopping and starting. She'd suddenly feel a wave of heat across her chest, up along her throat and face, and there she'd be. It happened when she least expected it, when she didn't even think she was feeling anything. She quickly composed herself—she was good at that—then she turned back to the girl who was visiting her. Ordinarily she wouldn't even have spoken to a girl like this—a stranger she had no interest in. Now she couldn't seem to stop herself. She was lonely, she supposed. She didn't see many people who had known her daughters as anything more than two spoiled, selfish girls. Yes, they took drugs, but they were so much more than that.

  “Marianne was supposed to spend the weekend in the country with me. At the last moment she changed her mind. They were inseparable, you know. Best friends, watching out for each
other. Stella phoned her, invited her along on tour. It would be fun to go on a trip with the band, much more fun than being with me. One was bad enough. Two is destruction. I don't know if I can bear two.”

  “They seemed to take care of each other. Even I saw that.”

  Mrs. Ridge looked up. “Yes,” she agreed. “They were always together from the time they were little girls. I couldn't separate them, even for a nap.”

  “I have a little boy,” Frieda said. “His name is Paul. That's why I came here. I didn't come here because of Jamie. I came because of you. Because I'm someone's mother, the same as you. And I'm so sorry.”

  Mrs. Ridge looked at her. Frieda wasn't at all what she expected; she hadn't been back then and she wasn't now. She was smart and she was honest. She looked like an ordinary girl, but she wasn't. Mrs. Ridge saw that now.

  “If there's anything I can ever do to help in any way, I'm here,” Frieda told her. “You can call me, and I'll drive to London.”

  What she didn't say was that she'd also come because she felt lucky, and her luck had filled her with guilt. It wasn't her father who was the one who'd been left bereft. The deepest truth was that she had come because Jamie hadn't loved her, because she hadn't been the one in the car with him, so crowded with people and musical equipment and suitcases heaped with clothes, that the Angel of Death must have had to squeeze in to fit between them. Frieda was here in this house in Kensington because she hadn't been wanted, she'd been the loser at the time and now somehow she had won. She was still here, still the owner of the stolen beige suede boots, the ones she put on whenever she and Bill went out, which wasn't very often these days. They only went out when Bill's mother would stay because Frieda didn't trust a babysitter with her child. Not yet. Maybe not ever. She would probably turn him into a mummy's boy, her darling child, but she didn't care. He'd probably be the sort of man who called home every Sunday and who argued with his wife about always inviting his mum to holiday dinners. He'd be a man with perfect pitch, who liked to walk through the countryside, who knew the difference between the song of a sparrow and the song of a dove. Just thinking about what she would do if she should ever lose Paul made her eyes start to tear.