A Quiet Belief in Angels

by R.J. Ellory

  He asked me about my father, about living relatives, about friends of the family I could stay with while she was being treated.

  “You’re a bright boy,” he told me, “and so I’ll tell you a few things about what we’re going to do and why. Is that okay?”

  “You’re gonna make her better, right?”

  Gabillard smiled. Smiled with his mouth and not his eyes. “Not necessarily that simple,” he said. “The brain is a complex piece of machinery, and there isn’t a great deal we know about it. Fixing someone’s brain isn’t like fixing a broken arm, Joseph.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with her brain,” I said. “I think it’s her mind that’s been overwhelmed by all the losing she’s suffered.”

  Again Gabillard smiled, and laughed, and reached out and touched my shoulder like he was being patient and understanding with someone who couldn’t possibly have the faintest idea what was going on.

  I got the idea if I disagreed further then I might find myself on the way to Brunswick.

  “Chloral hydrate-induced sedation,” Gabillard said at one point. At other points he mentioned carbon dioxide treatment to limit the supply of oxygen to the brain and thus diminish the life of the mental viruses that afflicted her; he spoke of Librium to help her sleep, Scopolamine to elicit underlying thoughts and feelings that even my mother didn’t know, Veronal to sedate, and to encourage susceptibility to hypnotism; and later he talked about a Hungarian called von Meduna who’d invented Matrazol shock therapy.

  “You see,” he concluded, “there are many things we can try, and all of them, I assure you, are going to contribute to your mother feeling an awful lot better. Now, Joseph . . . I understand there was an insurance policy your father signed for medical purposes?”

  I saw her once before I left. She was lying on a bed in a white room. Through the glass porthole in the locked door all I could see were the soles of her shoes.

  Like Virginia Grace Perlman over the brow of a hill.

  I saw my mother once a week for eleven months. For a while I would drive up there with Reilly Hawkins, but in April of ’43 he said he didn’t want to go anymore.

  “I can’t be doing this every week, Joseph. It’s not that I don’t care a great deal for both you and your mother, but hell, Joseph, I can’t bear to see that place another time. I can’t bear to think what they might be doing to her inside those walls, and I sure as damn don’t wanna go in and see for myself.”

  I understood. I couldn’t bear it myself, but I went anyway. I took a bus most of the way and walked the rest.

  My mother, Mary Elizabeth Vaughan, née Wheland, born December nineteenth, 1904, in Surrency, Appling County, not far from the banks of the Little Satilla River, married Earl Theodore Vaughan after a thirteen-month courtship on her twentieth birthday. She bore his only son October eleventh, 1927, and buried her husband in July of ’39 after just fourteen years of marriage. A widow at thirty-four who would never marry again because she started to lose her mind. It seemed to me that the hospital at Waycross finished the job for her.

  She moved incrementally out of this world into a world of her own. By the summer of ’43 she no longer recognized me. I was a little older, but my looks hadn’t changed so much. Gabillard told me that Haynes Dearing had visited twice, perhaps three times, but Dearing never mentioned it to me. I believed he would have found it too hard to speak of what she’d become.

  The alienists and doctors at Waycross kept telling me there were signs of her recovery.

  “Recovery from what?” I asked, and they would smile and shake their heads, and say, “It’s not quite as simple as that, Joseph.” After a while I stopped asking and they stopped talking. I would go up to the third floor and sit by her bed, hold her hand, wipe her brow, and she would look at me and tell me things that I knew were just imagined.

  I never saw Death. He never sat beside me. He never haunted the room in which she slept waiting for His moment to take her. There were brief times when I wished He would come. Not for me, but for her. I believed I had lost the better part of my mother on the night Elena Kruger died. The night my mother recognized that the life she’d wished for and the life she possessed would never be the same. I believe she saw the world for what it was, and the thought of making it alone was too overwhelming. She found a way to escape, and it was all I could do to go on seeing her for the years before she died.

  Later, with hindsight and maturity as company, I recognized my own quiet and gradual retreat.

  I stayed in the house, the home where I’d been born and raised. I worked after school, any jobs I could find, and it seemed—through sympathy and compassion—people were willing to let me undertake things they could have done themselves. In the summer months I would work until it was too dark to see. Simple jobs. Fencing, clearing ground for plowing, cutting down trees. And then I would go home and write; I filled the leather-bound book that Reilly Hawkins had given me, and I asked Miss Webber to get me a dozen exercise books. When I’d filled those I asked for more. She wanted to know what I was writing.

  “What I think, sometimes what I feel,” I said, but I never brought them for her to read. Perhaps I believed that if I wrote enough of reality then I would finally empty out, and into the vacuum would appear the fruits of imagination and inspiration. Then I would write like Steinbeck or Fenimore Cooper, fiction as opposed to a work of incident. It was only later that I understood how the two were related: that experience, fashioned by imagination, became fiction; and life, viewed through the tint and hue of imagination, became something one could better tolerate and understand. I colored my memories with sounds and pictures that I knew had not occurred. I thought for a moment that perhaps I was losing my anchor to reason, but I appreciated the fact that there was a conscious choice on my part. Regardless of what I wrote, regardless of how I portrayed something, I knew with certainty what was fact and what was fiction. I read voraciously, borrowing books from Miss Webber, from Reilly Hawkins, from the Augusta Falls Town Library. Regardless of author, location, time, style or subject matter, I read them all.

  Sometimes I thought of the Guardians, but I tried not to. We had been children, nothing more than that, and the world that we faced had always been vast enough to swallow us. I did not see Maurice or Michael, or Ronnie Duggan with his bangs in his eyes; perhaps I did not wish to see them, for they would simply remind me once again of how we had failed to protect the children. To see their faces would have been to see Elena, the way her body was carried to the flatbed the night of the fire. Such things would feed the ghosts, and I wanted to leave those ghosts behind.

  By the time I turned sixteen in October of ’43 I believed that the war in Europe couldn’t continue much longer. Perhaps I also believed that the terrible things that had happened in Augusta Falls were part of some best-forgotten past. The flyers that Sheriff Dearing had pinned to trees and fences had long since dissolved beneath rain and weather. Lives went on regardless, and those that had lost their children somehow survived. People had stopped asking after my mother, and the trips I made to Waycross, trips that took the better part of three hours each way, now occurred no more than once a month, sometimes less. In the coming December she would be thirty-nine years old. To see her at Waycross, laid up in bed, sometimes seated in a wicker chair by the inched-open window, her hair graying, her face drawn and anemic, you’d believe she was fifty. Whatever spirit she might have possessed had been stolen or broken, I couldn’t tell which, but the woman I visited was not my mother. She was a shell, twisted up inside with fear and desperation, her eyes seeing me but translating something else.

  I wished that Haynes Dearing would continue to visit my mother, that it was not just us against the world. I never spoke to him of his visits, and he never mentioned them to me. I think we would both have been too awkward and embarrassed to know quite what to say.

  After my birthday I started to think of leaving, and though my departure would not ultimately come for another few year
s, the seed was planted. Perhaps the things I read, perhaps the realization that there was in fact a world beyond Augusta Falls, a world where small-minded bitterness and past recriminations would not matter, precipitated such a thought. The anonymity one might experience in a city appealed to me, so rich with noise that a single face, a single voice, would barely be noticed. Perhaps this thought was my own means of escape from all that had happened, but I could not leave my mother behind.

  So I stayed. I held my tongue and my temper. I lived alone. I earned sufficient money to hold my mind and body together, to buy pencils and exercise books, to take the bus out to Ware County once a month and see the woman who was once my mother.

  Perhaps, had it not been for Miss Alexandra Webber, I would have slipped into obscurity, but in the summer of ’45, as the world exhaled the tension of a spent war, she came to visit me.

  “To see what you’ve been writing all these years,” she said, and she smiled with such warmth, her features clear and certain and beautiful. “I came to hear you read, Joseph Vaughan,” and she sat across from me at the kitchen table, and I remembered the cool rush of longing that would fill me as a child.

  I had thought of Alexandra Webber, and the thoughts were as defined as shapes cut through paper. My head, my hands, my heart, my hopes; prayers like wishes, made and then forgotten.

  Loneliness is a drug, a narcotic; it grows through veins, through nerves and muscles; it assumes some right of possession over your body and mind; it feeds itself, and creates its own requirement. Loneliness and solitude are walls.

  Alexandra Webber came to see what I had written on those walls, and though I believed there was no doorway she somehow found one.

  I chose to step back quietly and let her through.

  I shift again as numbness turns my legs to stone. I look over the man’s shoulder, out through the window toward the lights of New York. I see cars passing in the streets below, beyond them the myriad lights of a million windows, and behind each one the life that is played out, each oblivious to the next, each bound up tightly, in its own im portances and singular moments.

  My voice sounds like someone else, as if my body stands before the window but I am somewhere removed.

  “I never asked you why,” I say. “I never asked you how these things happened, did I?” I look at the body seated in the chair in front of me with its head lolled back. I know there will be no answer, but for some reason the silence unsettles me.

  “Did you even understand what you were doing? Did you ever think about what you’d done? Did you never feel guilty? Suffer remorse?” I clench my fists. “How could you do such things? How could any human being do such things to a child?”

  I close my eyes. I try to remember faces. Any of them. Alice Ruth Van Horne. Virginia Grace Perlman. I try to remember Alexandra, how she looked when she arrived that day, the day she invaded my solitude and made me believe that I could live again.

  I try to picture my mother, how she looked when I visited her at Waycross.

  But there is almost nothing. The shapes and features are vague and indistinct.

  “Did you ever think about what happened to their parents, their brothers and sisters? Did you?”

  I shake my head. Look down at the floor. I feel as if I am floating near the ceiling and there beneath me is my body, small and inconsequential. My voice is like a whisper in a storm. Nothing. Less than nothing.

  I consider what I have done.

  I wonder—just for a heartbeat—if I am little more than the worst type of hypocrite.

  An eye for an eye?

  Could such a thing ever be right?

  But now it’s too late. This thing is done.

  I sit quietly.

  I wonder how long it will be before they come.

  In these final hours all I can do is try to remember all that happened, and even as I do I believe I can feel the past coming up to meet me.

  ELEVEN

  CLEAN AIR, A BREEZE FROM THE COAST, CARRIED WITH IT THE SMELL of sour gum, juniper and sassafras. I stood at the window of the house, looked over the empty Kruger lot, and but for reminiscence and memory would never have known a house had stood there. Smell of fresh-cut wood stacked in back of the shed, the pine sap leaking into the earth, catching thrips and blackflies, preserving them in grain and grit until their time to burn.

  It was from the same window that I saw her coming.

  I can hear her downstairs making food. She said she could make the best eggs this side of the Altamaha River.

  In my dreams she was younger, with hair cascading down one side of her face and across her shoulder. Her skin was unblemished, innocent, as clean and clear as her eyes, and smelling of soap, of the thin film of sweat that would break across her forehead when she leaned over me in a one-room summer schoolhouse and made me recite something.

  Footsteps across the ceramic tiles below. Flat Syracuse soles, schoolteacher shoes—predictable, pragmatic. The sound of a fork as she whipped the eggs into a frenzy.

  The sound of my heart as blood rushed through me; the sound of sweat escaping the pores of my skin; the sound of waiting.

  She came early when the fractured, awkward light of dawn still filled the gap between night and day.

  I watched her as she approached the house, and was there to open the door when she reached it.

  “Joseph Calvin Vaughan,” she said, as if my name was something I didn’t know.

  “Miss Webber,” I replied.

  “You’re a young man now, Joseph, no longer a child. I haven’t taught you for the better part of two years. You can call me Alexandra.”

  “Alexandra,” I said.

  “That’s my name,” she said, and she smiled.

  There was silence between us for a dozen or more heartbeats.

  “You’re going to invite me in,” she said, more a statement than a question.

  I tilted my head to one side. “I am?”

  She nodded. “You are,” she whispered, and she stepped beside me and squeezed past into the narrow hallway.

  I had on jeans, a shirt buttoned twice. My feet were bare. I had washed but was not yet fully dressed for the day. There was a quarter-mile of fencing to raise along the narrow side of the clear-cuts. Frank Turow was paying half, Leonard Stowell’s brother-in-law the other. It was good money, and I didn’t want it gone to some other itinerant jour neyman with a hammer and a bag of nails.

  But then Alexandra Webber came to my house to make eggs, to make small talk, to make believe.

  Later, when she called from the bottom of the stairwell, I almost slipped from my skin. I had put on my shoes but they seemed to gain no purchase on the floor beneath me; I went carefully, tentatively, like a new foal, my knees too flexible to easily bear my weight.

  “You have taken care of the house,” she said. She stepped into the kitchen, looked around, nodded at the table. “May I sit down?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said. I remembered that this was my house, if not mine then my mother’s, and I did not need to feel like an uninvited guest.

  “How are you, Joseph?”

  I stepped away from the door and to the right. I kept my eyes on Alexandra Webber. I moved sideways until I felt the edge of the rough wooden counter against the small of my back. I put my hands behind me and gripped the edge with my fingers. It felt like I needed to hold onto something. Something I knew, something familiar.

  “You know how it is, right?” I said.

  She shook her head slowly. She reached up and fingertipped a stray lock of hair away from her cheek and over her ear.

  Things happened in parts of my body that I had not experienced before. There was an ache in the base of my groin, a sensation like something pulling from within. My mouth was dry, a taste like copper and dirt.

  “How it is?” she asked. “No, I’m not sure that I do know how it is, Joseph, tell me.”

  I smiled, shrugged my shoulders. “The last couple of years have been tough, Miss Webber—”

/>   “Alexan—”

  “Alexandra,” I interjected. “I’m sorry, I can’t help but think of you as my schoolma’am.”

  Alexandra laughed. “I was your schoolma’am,” she said. “But I was your friend as well, wasn’t I?” She hesitated for a moment, her eyes questioning.

  “You were,” I said.

  “You used to come and speak to me about all manner of troubles, and then, when this thing happened with your mother . . .” She looked away toward the window. “I imagined you might come and speak to me again, and ask for my help with her . . . but you didn’t. I wondered whether I’d done something to upset you.”

  I laughed, suddenly, abruptly, more nerves than humor. It was a reaction, nothing more than that. “Upset me?” I shook my head. “Even if you tried you couldn’t upset me.”

  She’d brought a Writer’s Digest. There were details of a short-story competition inside. I laughed, remembering “Monkeyshines” and the letter from Atlanta.

  “You still have it?”

  I nodded. “Upstairs.”

  “You wanna go fetch it?”

  “You want me to?”

  “Sure, go get the letter, I can’t remember what it said. I’ll make us something to eat.” She tilted her head to one side. “You okay with eggs? I make the best eggs this side of the Altamaha River.”

  I rose from my chair. I took a step toward the doorway. “Yes,” I said, almost as an afterthought. “Eggs are fine.”

  I went upstairs, closed my eyes and imagined everything I had ever wanted to imagine about Alexandra Webber.

  She read the letter. She smiled, laughed, and asked me questions I later forgot, preoccupied with watching her.

  We ate the eggs, Uneeda crackers and watermelon pickles. I didn’t know if it was better than anything else this side of the Altamaha, but it was good enough for me.