A Quiet Belief in Angels

by R.J. Ellory

  “Come inside,” I said. “Come inside and sit down.”

  “My wife . . . my children also . . . ?”

  I frowned. “They are here?”

  Kuharczyk nodded and grinned widely. “Down there,” he said, and pointed to a knot of trees near the side of the road. He raised his hand and waved. A woman appeared, and within a moment a huddle of children were behind her, and for a moment I believed it was Mathilde Kruger, Hans, Walter and Elena. It was in that precise moment that I decided finally to leave. Wladyslaw Kuharczyk and his family would take the position left vacant by the Krugers, and I would do as many had wished I would for several years, and vanish out of Georgia.

  Kuharczyk and I agreed on a price for the house and the land. I later learned that despite the document signed by my mother, the proceeds of the sale would have to be held in trust until she died. I made an arrangement with the bank to issue further funds against the trust, and though it was not a great deal of money, I believed it sufficient to get me to New York, to a place called Brooklyn. I had read of Brooklyn in magazines and books; I understood it was inhabited by authors, poets, artists, and others of a similar leaning and nature. Brooklyn was where I would live and work, where I would write the novel that would encompass all that my life had been, and then herald all that it would become. Brooklyn was to be my spiritual home, perhaps the place Alex would have chosen for me.

  I saw two people before I left: Haynes Dearing and Reilly Hawkins. Dearing was almost monosyllabic, shook my hand, gripped my shoulder so hard it hurt.

  “You ain’t gonna write no letter,” he said. “You’re gonna have better things to do than write letters, and I’m sure as hell gonna be too busy to read ’em. Get outta here. Place like this’ll wind up pulling everything out of you.”

  “Sheriff, I . . .”

  Dearing shook his head. “Hell, Joseph, I really don’t have a mind to hear much of anything you gotta say. You an’ me done all the talkin’ we needed a long time ago, right?” He smiled, reached up and tipped the brim of his hat back on his head. “I got word that someone tugged up thirty or forty yards of fence near Lowell Shaner’s place, I gotta go tend to that now. You go wherever you’re gonna go and make something of a life for yourself, okay?”

  “Okay, Sheriff.”

  Dearing nodded. “Good enough, Joseph, good enough.” He smiled once more, reached out and shook my hand, and then turned and walked away.

  “Sheriff?”

  Dearing paused and turned back.

  “You know I didn’t have anything to do with Gunther Kruger’s death, don’t you?”

  Dearing looked down. He raised his right foot slightly and started to dig a hole in the dirt with the toe of his boot. “Seems to me we got a lot of dirty water gone beneath a few burned bridges. Seems to me it don’t matter how such a thing might have happened, Joseph.” He stopped digging, looked up and smiled. “You remember that ten-dollar word you used, the one about someone getting a kick out of someone else’s misfortunes?”

  “Schadenfreude.”

  “That’s the one. That’s pretty much all I’m feeling regarding Gunther Kruger right now, know what I mean?”

  “I do, Sheriff,” I replied. “Sure do.”

  “Well, okay then, Joseph . . . doesn’t seem to me we got much else to say ’cept good luck and goodbye.”

  I raised my hand and stood silently as Sheriff Dearing turned and walked away. I waited for a little while, and then I made my way over to Reilly’s house.

  TWENTY-ONE

  MY BUS JOURNEY PASSED THROUGH SIX STATES—BOTH CAROLINAS, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey. The Okefenokee Swamp, Altamaha River, Jekyll Island and Dover Bluff: these things behind me. Looking from the window as the wheels fought against rutted tracks and awkward angles, I passed out of Georgia like waking from a dream, and watched as soft edges gave way to intense light and harsh colors. Jostled in a cramped and airless vehicle, I drove out of the past toward the future that was waiting for me.

  A soldier rode behind me, tattered medal ribbons pinned around the brim of his hat, tunes from a cracked harmonica that he held in his hand, his mind lost somewhere in a dark memory of Europe that would forever haunt him. I believed I too heard their voices. An elderly woman sat across the aisle, her face like parchment washed clean of its message, eyes like holes punched through daylight to find the quiet darkness beyond. Huddled with the other passengers, we spilled from the bus into towns like Goose Creek and Roseboro, Scotland Neck and Tuckahoe and filed sluggishly into austere rooms in cheap motels. Thin sheets and gray walls, blankets too scant to cover both face and feet, shivering awkwardly as I resisted wakefulness. Cramped in knee, elbow, shoulder and heart for hours upon hours and hundreds of miles. A thousand miles, or two, or three or more. I changed buses, and faces: a pretty girl with a tiny baby, a brash college jock with too many teeth, a middle-aged man who cried with his eyes closed and never said a word from Richmond to Arlington. My rite of passage.

  Alex was in my dreams, the child too, and men walking side by side, an arm’s length between them, beating a ragged path through undergrowth and swampland to find children lost and never to return. My mother: aged, infirm, crazy. A dead father, taken out along the High Road. Gunther Kruger swinging blue and swollen from a rafter. All these things; things of moment, of meaning, of dark and indefinable magic amidst the mundane and monotonous. My life. Nothing more nor less than that.

  Road spooled out behind me. Took us days to reach New Jersey. Bus broke down outside of Perth Amboy. Stood at the side of the road, muscular twitch in my left leg.

  “Smoke?” a man asked.

  I turned, smiled, shook my head.

  “Staten Island,” he said, and slanted his eyes northeast. “Is where I come from. It’s where I’m going. You?”

  “Brooklyn,” I replied, and looked at the man’s face suspended beneath a wide brim of a wider hat. Skin sallow and slick, waxy cheeks, pockmarked and ridged. Looked like a man who’d survived a terrible illness.

  “Don’t look like no trolley-dodger to me.”

  “I’m from Georgia,”

  “Georgia, is it? And what are you doing headed this way?”

  “I’m going to be a writer,” I said as we heard the sound of bells from a distant church steeple.

  “A writer, is it? And what’re you going to be writing about in Brooklyn?”

  I shrugged and smiled. “I’ll figure that out when I get there.”

  “Gateway to the Hamptons,” the man said, and drew on his cigarette. “Scott Fitzgerald, eh?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, something like that is gotta be something good enough,” he said, and he drew on his cigarette once more.

  We waited an hour for another bus that came all the way from Linden to fetch us.

  That night brought dark sky, heavy rain, and the sound of liquid thrumming against the roof of the vehicle, ceaseless and interminable. I slept with my knees against my chest, and it took ten or fifteen minutes to recover circulation when I woke.

  And in the morning, Brooklyn came at me like a wild thing. High-rise and hopeful; light smashing between buildings that reached farther than the eye could see, the glass of a million windows, and people, so many people, too many of them to see as individuals, Broadway, Union Avenue, signs for schools and churches, medical centers, advertisements and hoardings resplendent in colors and messages; and more people, more along one sidewalk than passed through Augusta Falls in three seasons.

  We alighted at the bus station on Lafayette Avenue. I carried my bag, which must have weighed all of fifty pounds, and hauled it away into Brooklyn with no clear idea of where I was going. I had just wanted to find somewhere I could lie flat as a board and not wake until I wanted. Three blocks and I could walk no farther. I found a small hotel that seemed clean and took a room for the night. I unpacked some things. I washed my face and shaved. I dressed in a clean shirt, a creased jacket, and ventured out to a world that was
both a stranger and my new home. I wandered for an hour, notebook in hand, felt sure I was lost, and then turned a corner to find myself facing the hotel. I felt foolish. I was a rube, a hick, a country-born farmhand. I was also desperately hungry, and in a narrow-fronted diner on Lewis Avenue I ordered enough food for two. I watched cars fender to fender, lights changing, drivers leaning on horns, a traffic cop with a ruthless eye, stepping out into the rush of engines with no concern for his welfare. The passage of time, of people, of the past through the present into the ever-widening future. I smiled like the fool I was. Here was something worth traveling to; here was New York City, heart of North America, its streets like veins, boulevards like arteries, its avenues like snapping electric synapses, channeling; a million voices, a million more laid over them, everyone close up together like family but seeing nothing but themselves. Here was a place one could be somebody at the junction, and nobody by the time you crossed to the other side. Everything I saw was bright and bold and arrogant. The cut of suits, the scarlet lips of girls, the cars a mile of burnished chrome. Majestic. Imposing. A clenched fist of a city. A thunderhouse of humnity.

  New York took my breath awa. I did not regain it for more than two days.

  Monday, May second, 1949. Stood in the front hallway of the hotel where I was staying; newspaper on the porch caught my eye; a byline beneath the header, story about a man called Arthur Miller, a play-wright, an icon it seemed; awarded a Pulitzer for Death of a Salesman. Concierge breezed past me, flung open the door, snatched the paper from the floor and headed back the way she’d come. I held her up momentarily, inquired after a boarding house, apartments or rooms to let. Middle-aged woman, squinted at me from beneath heavyset brows that bunched in the middle.

  “Throop and Quincy,” she snapped as if throwing small stones. “Place on the corner of Throop and Quincy if more permanent is your requirement. My sister has a house down there. Name’s Aggie Boyle, Miss Aggie Boyle . . . tell her I sent you down.”

  After breakfast I ventured down to Throop and Quincy and found the house with a sign in the window: ROOM TO LET. Aggie Boyle was built with as much substance as her boarding house.

  “Eight dollars a week, buy your own food, share the facilities, hot water between six a.m. and eight-thirty a.m.” Her tone was perfunctory and businesslike, her face like some old Tyrolean maid. Childless, perhaps she had never felt the hand of a man beyond simple courtesy as she climbed steps or alighted a train. Beneath the acres of skirt were acres of flesh and beneath that were sturdy bones, bones hewn from old trees, hammered together for permanence, sufficient perhaps to carry her into the afterlife. Aggie’s hands were crudely fashioned, width of fingers preventing anything but a fan of digits, and when she turned her head it traveled in unison with her shoulders, as an elephant or a rhinoceros. But there was something about her that was likable. Stationed on the earth to serve some purpose, to provide berthing and breakfast for the weary and restless. I imagined there was a past; imagined stories of Aggie and her sister, the years behind them, the things that carried them to Brooklyn.

  “There are four other tenants,” Aggie told me as we climbed the stairs to the attic room. “Two gentlemen, two ladies. Mr. Janacek. He’s from Eastern Europe. Been here a good few months. Minds his own business, prefers it if we all mind ours too. Mr. Franklin. He reads copy for the Brooklyn Courier, makes sure they spell the words right and don’t miss out the commas. Mrs. Brock. She’s been here for more than fifteen years. Elderly lady, helps out at the library Wednesdays and Fridays. Last, there’s Miss Spragg, who’s assistant registrar at St. Joseph’s College, over by De Kalb and Underwood Park, you know?”

  I smiled and nodded though I had no idea where St. Joseph’s College was.

  “If you stay that’s who you’ll have for friends and neighbors, so it’d suit you to be polite and mind your manners ’til you know what they’re about.”

  The room was functional and clean, large enough for a bed, two chairs in the bay, a writing desk against the left-hand wall, a closet with a rail for hanging clothes.

  I walked to the window and looked down into the street.

  “I’ll take it,” I said. I turned and looked at Aggie Boyle.

  “You don’t need to think about it?” she asked, in her voice an element of surprise.

  “What’s there to think about?”

  She smiled, shook her head. “Don’t s’pose much of anything really.”

  “Then we’re done.” I reached into my pocket, took out a fist of dollars. “How much do I pay you?”

  “Two weeks’ money now, and then I collect every Friday.”

  I counted out sixteen dollars and gave them to her. The money disappeared into the pocket of her apron.

  “I’m a writer,” I told Aggie. “I’m going to be working here as well. You think the sound of a typewriter will bother anyone?”

  Aggie smiled again, showed the kind of teeth that had been raised chewing sugar cane right from the ground. “Don’t think you’ll find any complaints. Only one who concerns herself with noise is Mrs. Brock and she’s on the other side of the house.”

  I nodded, smiled back.

  “Bathroom’s down to the right at the end of the hall. Faces Miss Spragg’s room so don’t be coming out of there as nature intended, okay?”

  “Okay, Miss Boyle.”

  “Aggie,” she replied. “Everyone calls me Aggie.”

  “Okay, Aggie.”

  “Well, I’ll let you settle in . . . you’ll need to be collecting your things and bringing them back. When you’re ready to leave come and fetch your key.”

  “Thank you.”

  She stepped forward and looked at me with her penetrating eyes and frowned. “You carry a lot of weight for someone so young,” she said. “That your writer’s curse or you had a difficult time back wherever you came from?”

  I laughed, taken aback. “Writer’s curse?”

  “Hell, they all got a curse. I seen them come and go. Actors are the same. Carrying a hundred people around in their heads. Something to do with being creative and all that.”

  “I don’t know about any curse,” I said.

  “Then you’ve had a difficult time of things.”

  “Difficult enough.”

  Aggie nodded. “I could see that about you. Seems to me Brooklyn is the best place for you then.”

  “How so?”

  “Place is so busy you never have time to look anywhere but somewhere else, know what I mean?”

  I thought of the people on the sidewalk, the smell of the place, the crowded diners, the thunder of humanity. “I think so,” I said. “I think I know what you mean.”

  “Well, if you don’t you’ll soon find out,” Aggie replied, and with that she turned and disappeared into the hallway.

  I stayed for a few minutes, my mind hollow, my thoughts contained. I breathed in the smell of new paint, of emptiness, of a room waiting to be filled by someone. I had arrived. Arrived somewhere from out of someplace else. A fresh start, a new beginning, a rebirth.

  The ghosts were there, some of them—perhaps all—but for now they were quiet. I closed my eyes and tried to see my mother’s face, but I could not. My father was an indistinct blur of monochrome, like the memory of a faded photograph. And the little girls—all of them, side by side somewhere, waiting for their wings perhaps: waiting to be angels.

  It took everything I possessed to remember a little of Georgia, and in some way I felt that was good.

  I was first seduced by Miss Joyce Spragg, assistant registrar of St. Joseph’s College, on the evening of Sunday, June twelfth.

  Miss Spragg was forty-one, twenty years my senior.

  “Come and share a bottle of Burgundy with me, Joseph,” she said. I was seated at my desk, perhaps daydreaming, a half-hearted attempt to work, and I had left my door ajar.

  I rose from my chair and crossed the room. As I reached the door she pushed it open with her foot. She stood there in a cotton print dress, in one ha
nd the bottle of wine, in the other two glasses. Her hair, dark and luxuriant, was swept back from her face. She was a fine-looking woman, her lips glossed in crimson, her eyes a haze of smoky blue.

  “A drink,” she repeated. “Unless, of course, I am interrupting your work.”

  I shook my head and smiled. “I’m not really working.”

  “Then that’s settled,” she said. “We’ll share this bottle of wine and talk of inconsequential things for the evening.”

  I followed her across the hall to her room. Compared to my sparse habitat it was richly furnished with brocade throws and patterned silk cushions. Standing away from the wall was an ornate wooden screen, a gown draped over it, and to its right a deep, high-backed leather armchair. Miss Spragg and I had spoken many times, a cordial greeting as we passed in the hallway or encountered one another in the downstairs kitchen, but it had never been more than that.

  “You are a writer,” she stated. “Aggie told me you’ve come to Brooklyn to write a book.”

  I nodded and smiled. “Yes,” I said.

  “Please . . . sit down,” she said, pointing the bottle toward a chaise lounge at the foot of her unmade bed. She then uncorked the bottle with a degree of deftness that I could only assume came from familiarity, and filled both glasses.

  “To a tremendous novel, and its great success,” she toasted.

  I raised my glass and thanked her for the sentiment.

  “So, you are Joseph Vaughan from Georgia,” she said as she walked to the bed and sat down on the edge of the mattress. “I understand that you have suffered some trials and tribulations?”