Angels Unaware

by Lisa Deangelis

  I fell asleep soon afterward, too tired to be self-conscious that he was still awake and watching me. It was good to fall asleep first, in the warmth of his gaze. When I woke up, his arm was around me, one leg thrust over mine. I loved him very much that morning because he slept so sweetly, and I felt hopeful and full of the certainty that good things were on the way, because surely nothing could come between us as long as we could sleep wound around each other every night.

  It had taken me twenty-three years to get into bed with a man, but I took to it with a shameful lack of shame, mostly because for all my immodesty, I always held something back, something of myself, in case one day I should need it. Luca said that I was brutal, but he meant it as a compliment. So I never took offense. Early on, I stopped wearing a nightgown to bed which disturbed Luca’s sense of propriety, and he clung to his pajama bottoms stubbornly, until the day I took a scissor to the only pair he owned. Thereafter, he slept naked too and I could touch him all night as much as I liked and feel his warmth against me.

  I especially liked to trace the scar that ran from above his thigh to just below his hip. His scar was like a secret we shared, and like all secrets, it somehow bound us together. He had fallen through a window when he was just a boy and had almost bled to death, and it scared me to think that he could have bled to death in Italy and I’d never have known him. Sometimes, I’d trace his scar too lightly, and he’d slap my hand and say, “Stop it, Darcy. You’re tickling me.” Then I’d trace it harder, and he always knew what that meant. We never had to say much to each other to know when it was time to be together. We were silent then, except for the words Luca would whisper against my throat just before he finished. Foreign words that had no meaning for me, and he would not tell me what they meant. He said if I was going to learn to speak Italian, it just wasn’t right to learn those kinds of words first. But I didn’t want to learn. It would have made me strange to myself to speak Italian.

  In the morning, I liked to watch him shave, and it got to be a ritual. I would sit on the commode tank with my feet on the seat, and he would go through the elaborate procedure of soaping his face with a brush and sharpening his razor with a strap and then making narrow strips from his cheeks to under his chin. My eyes followed every stroke. I don’t know why I got so much pleasure out of watching him shave, except that it was probably the same reason that made him like to watch me brush my hair.

  We fought a lot, about all sorts of things, and for some reason, at the very point when we were most frenzied and ready to spit on each other, I would begin to want him. And that was how all our fights ended, sweetly and without the need for words. It helped too that Luca had never really lost his accent, so that even when we fought and he wanted to be mean, everything came out sounding like endearments.

  Sometimes at night, lying in our bedwhen sleep wouldn’t come quickly, we would talk. With my head on his shoulder, I’d watch the glow of his cigarette in the dark and tell him things that I had never told another living soul. Luca somehow, in his patient, unhurried way, made me remember things I hadn’t thought of in years. He liked to talk about Italy. He had grown up an urchin on the streets of Naples, his mother having died when he was a baby and his father preoccupied with keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table. He hadn’t felt particularly motherless because in Naples all the grown-ups raised all the children. But when he had turned sixteen, his father wanted a better life for his son and to see him educated. So with the money they had accumulated, they traveled to America. But even more than talking about his life, Luca liked to draw me out about my own experiences growing up in Galen.

  “You don’t seem to fit in with the rest of the people here,” he said to me.

  “I never wanted to,” I told him.

  “You sound like it’s a matter of honor not to be like the others.”

  “It is…to me. But the funny thing is that you fit in here just fine.”

  “Oh, I can fit in anywhere,” he said wistfully. “My father raised me to fit in.”

  “How’s that?”

  He sighed. “As a young man, he’d had to leave Naples to find work in Switzerland. That’s how the poor people do it in Italy. The men go off for months to wherever there is work. So children grow up without fathers. Speaking only Italian, he was marked as a foreigner. He met a German girl there. He told me about her once. It was long before he met my mother. He wanted to marry the girl, but her father wouldn’t allow it. I think my father thought of that girl till the day he died.” Luca’s voice was filled with regret. “I think he loved that girl more than he ever did my mother. That’s why we are so lucky, my Darcy. We got to marry the one we loved. Hardly anybody gets to do that for one reason or another.” He kissed me.

  “What does the German girl have to do with you fitting in?”

  “Well, it was very bitter to my father that he’d been rejected, and he never stopped believing that if he’d spoken German, he would have been able to make a place for himself in Switzerland, and everything would have turned out differently. When I was born, he was determined that I would learn to speak as many languages as my brain would hold. He was willing to go without food to pay for tutors.”

  I laughed. “The other boys must have made fun of you.”

  “Yes. They called me professore. I told my father how I was suffering but he wasn’t sympathetic. He said, ‘Your friends are morons and I’m not going to raise you to be a moron just so a bunch of morons will accept you.’ He felt that if I knew languages and cultures, I could live anywhere and never be shut out as he was in Switzerland.”

  “I guess he was right,” I offered.

  “Right? Maybe. But it was him who loved the German, not me. Why must we always restore to our fathers whatever they missed in life? Why must we undo their mistakes when their mistakes have nothing to do with our mistakes?”

  Feeling I had missed the point, I didn’t even try to answer. After a while, he whispered, “Darcy, are you asleep?”

  “No. It’s too hot to sleep. Shall we change position? Has your arm fallen asleep under me?”

  “No. Let’s stay like this.”

  “All right.”

  “In fact, let’s not sleep at all,” he suggested. “I don’t like to sleep. How can I know I’ll ever wake again?”

  “I wouldn’t worry. Most people aren’t lucky enough to die in their sleep. Most die at length and in agony…like Jewel.” I felt his arm tighten around me.

  “You miss her very much, don’t you?”

  “Yes. But I’m angry too.”

  “Why?”

  “That she lived and died, and it didn’t mean a damn thing.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t either. It just seems not right that she should have been so nice to everybody all her life and then die like that. It came to nothing in the end, and so her life didn’t count for anything.”

  He patted my bare shoulder. “If you look at it like that, then no life counts for anything. We all come to nothing in the end.”

  “I guess. I’m tired now.”

  “Don’t fall asleep yet. Let me have one more cigarette.”

  It was one of Luca’s unjustifiable peculiarities that he wanted for us to fall asleep and wake up exactly at the same moment. Together. Needless to say, this rarely, if ever happened and I know it disappointed him.

  “Someday you’re liable to set the house on fire. Every bit of it’s wood. It’d go up easy enough.”

  “I’ll not set it on fire,” he assured me. “Tell me what it was like for you growing up. I can’t imagine you as a child. I think of you as springing from your mother all grown up.”

  “I don’t really remember being one,” I told him honestly.

  “Nothing at all?”

  “A bit here, a piece there.”

  “What do you remember?” He was interested now.
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  “Being afraid.”

  “What of? The things that children fear? Ghosts? Monsters?”

  “I never feared the dead. I can tell you that,” I answered, thinking back to the night I had dragged Jesse’s body and buried it. No nightmare of him rising from his shallow grave had ever tormented me.

  “Then what?” Luca persisted.

  “The living. I fear the living.”

  “But who exactly? Tell me.”

  “Oh, go to sleep. You ask too many questions.”

  “I ask because you’d never tell otherwise. Tell me the first time you can remember ever being afraid,” he said, trying a different tack.

  “That’s not so hard,” I said. “There was only the one time really, and I never forgot it. There was this man once, who wore a uniform. I think he was a soldier, but I can’t be sure.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “I don’t remember. I only know he was big. Or else I must have been very small then, because in my memory, the man is very big, like a giant. It was night. Like this night. Hot. So hot that the sheets stuck to me. Just like now. I was sweating.”

  “Go on,” he encouraged me. “It was night and you were just a little girl. Then what happened?”

  “Sounds. Like crying coming from my mother’s room. I got up and went to the door and listened. She was crying and so I went in and there was this man. They didn’t notice me right away but when they did, the man stood up real quick and put on his uniform. My mother stayed on the bed huddled against the headboard. Her face was turned away from me. The man came toward me. He looked mad. I wanted to run back to my room, but I didn’t want to leave my mother. I wanted us both to get to my room and lock ourselves in. I knew about locks. I couldn’t quite reach the one on my bedroom door, but I knew how it worked. You slid the bolt across. The man was standing over me. I ran past him to the bed. Only when I got into bed with the woman and she turned around, it wasn’t Jewel at all. It was this horrible creature with paint all over her face. Her hair was like Jewel’s a little but that was all. Everything else about her was different. She had a mouth like a fish, and it was rouged red. She started to laugh, and I ran and ran until I was back in my room. The man was coming after me. I could hear him. I tried to reach the bolt, but I wasn’t tall enough. So I dragged over a chair, all the while hearing him coming closer and closer. Just as I got it across, he rattled the knob, and I heard the woman with the horrible face laughing again. ‘Leave her alone,’ she said to him. ‘Her mother says she’s afraid of strangers.’”

  Luca put his hand on my forehead. “You’re so warm,” he said. “Are you feverish?”

  “No. It’s just the heat.”

  “Did you ever find out who those people were?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ask Jewel?”

  “No.”

  “They must have been guests at the inn,” he reasoned. “And Jewel must have let them have her room for the night. But they don’t sound like the kind of people anyone would want staying in their home.”

  “This was never a home to Jewel,” I said, unable to keep a certain note of bitterness out of my voice. “It was a place where all wayfarers were welcomed, and we were just here to clean and cook for those wayfarers, no questions asked. I guess that’s why I always slept with one eye open.”

  I felt Luca’s hand brush my cheek. “You don’t feel that way now, do you?” he said.

  “No,” I lied.

  “Because I never want you to be frightened of anything again. Whatever happens I will always protect you.”

  Turning, I smiled at him, but it wasn’t a real smile. “It’s not always that simple, this protecting people. I learned that living with Jewel. I used to beg her to keep her door locked. She never listened, even went so far as to have the lock taken off completely. I guess that was to prove to the guests how much she trusted them, which was ridiculous since she didn’t really know any of the people who tramped through here. But I thought that maybe one day somebody wasn’t going to live up to her faith in them and maybe they’d take a notion to cut her throat. And there wouldn’t be a damn thing I could do about it. So I started taking Caroline into my room at night and locking the door behind us. I got a little crazy about it, kept checking the lock again and again. But we were safe at least. Then Jolene was born, and there was somebody else to worry about, to take care of, to protect. When Jolene was an infant, Jewel kept her in a cradle beside her bed so that she could feed her during the night. Jewel would let any old vagrant that wandered by play with the baby and kiss her. I didn’t like it. Jolene was her baby, but she was my sister, too, and I had a responsibility to her. But there was so little I could do. Jolene had to be with Jewel so she could feed her. So I started staying awake nights and listening, just in case something should happen, in case somebody might try to hurt the baby or take her away. It was hard to stay always vigilant, always alert, and sometimes I’d nod off… It got to be that I wished Jolene had never been born.”

  “Darcy, you’re shaking,” Luca said, putting an arm around me. “You don’t have to be afraid anymore.” His voice was soothing. “I’m here now. I won’t let anything bad happen, I promise.”

  And I relaxed in the gentle warmth of his folded arm, and I wished he could keep his promise, and at the same time, knew it wasn’t his to keep because no one can promise you safety in a world that by its very nature is dangerous.

  Time passed, and it was beautiful in the passing. In summer, we went up to the quarry to swim. There was never anybody there but us. People in Galen were too superstitious to swim in a place where a child had disappeared, no matter that it had happened years and years ago. They were still afraid of the watery world that was believed to exist in the depths of the black quarry where Jewel had taught us undines, the water spirits lived. Sometimes in the evenings, we would go to where Jewel was buried and put flowers by her headstone. Luca had fenced it in very nicely and we weeded it regularly. Now Jewel’s was the only grave but someday, I thought, Luca and I would be there with her. From my Rubaiyat, that I had memorized by heart long ago, these words came to mind: And we, that now make merry in the room they left, and summer dresses in new bloom, ourselves must we beneath the couch of earth descend ourselves to make a couch—for whom? Then we turned back for home and to cheer myself, I made myself think: Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend, before we too into the dust descend.

  In the fall, we picked apples from the orchard and made cider. We brought in the pumpkins we’d planted too. Neither of us liked squash all that much but pumpkins looked so cheerful both in the field and on the porchethat we couldn’t resist having a pumpkin patch. One day, Luca picked the bittersweet that grew all around the inn and he filled my arms with it. Every day at dusk, we walked down the lanes, kicking up leaves and watching geese form a black arrow against the sky. After harvest, the fields were barren and haunted, like people newly poor, with the memory of plenty lingering still. At the end of the day, we’d sit on our porch piled with pumpkins and bittersweet, in our rocking chairs, and I’d think that I couldn’t wait for us to be old together, old with all the travails of youth behind us. Then, we’d rock and rock and hold hands and fall asleep in our chairs, our hands still joined.

  When winter came, we tried to seal up the cracks in the old windows, but the draft managed to get through and the house was always cold no matter how many fires were going. To keep warm, we’d get under blankets and tell ghost stories. I told him about the undines that lived in the quarry, and he told me about werewolves that prowled the Apennines. Once, we were so successful in spooking each other that when I heard a noise downstairs, I made him go down to see what it was. Probably it had been no more than a family of mice looking for shelter from the cold night. But Luca took it all very seriously and in a grave manner, he went to the closet and came back wearing a saber, tied with a sash around his waist. Walking toward
the bed, it banged awkwardly against his legs. “It belonged to my grandfather,” he told me solemnly, and bravely he went downstairs to confront the intruders.

  But there was nothing there to run through with a sword and he came back up a little disappointed. That was when the sight of him stark-naked, with this relic hanging from his hip sent me into uncontrolled laughter, and I kept laughing in spite of his begging me to stop, until finally he crawled into bed without a word and, covering me with himself, made me stop laughing for the rest of the night.

  In April, I knew for sure I was going to have a baby. Luca acted very silly about the whole thing, kissing and patting me every time I walked by him, even if it was fifty times a day, and smiling at me all the time and looking swelled up with pride, as if he’d done something that every other healthy man in the world couldn’t do, and tweaking my nose and pinching my cheek, and in general, making a terrible nuisance of himself. As for me, I still wasn’t over the shock of being pregnant. Not that I was dumb to the ways of nature. I knew that if you did certain things long enough and with as much enthusiasm as Luca and I did them, that sooner or later, you were bound to have a baby. It was just that I had never thought of myself as anyone’s mother before. Hell, I had only begun thinking of myself as female a scant few years before. But just the same, I loved being pregnant.

  During that time, I was reminded of a dress that Jewel had had when I was just a little girl. It was made of velvet and it was her favorite dress that she wore only on special occasions, usually when the railroad men were visiting. I loved that dress. It stirred my senses so. I loved to look at Jewel in that dress because she looked so beautiful, not like someone’s mother but like a fairy princess. But the thing I loved most about the dress was the feel of it. I would sit beside her by the hour and just glide my hand along her arm to feel that soft, deep velvet, until she would say in exasperation, “Stop it, Darcy. You’re gonna make a bald spot.”