Vann had known from the moment he and Irene first spoke of marriage that if he failed at this, his second shot at romance and domestic bliss, he would have to revise his whole view of life with women. This was going to be his second and probably last chance to get love and marriage right. Vann knew that much. You can’t make a fresh start on anything in life three times. By then, if a man gets divorced and still goes on marrying, he’s chasing something other than romance and domestic life, he’s after something strictly private. Vann had gone on anyhow. And now, in spite of the third divorce, or perhaps because of it, whenever he told himself the story of his life, the significance of his second marriage remained a mystery to him and a persistent irritant. Vann remembered his ten years with Irene the way men remember their war years: the chapter in the story of his life so far that was both luminous and threatening and loomed way too large to ignore.
He picked up his coffee cup and went outside and stood on the rickety, tilted porch of the cottage, where he deliberately studied the smear of pink in the eastern sky and the rippling ribbons of light on the small, manmade lake in front of him. Lake Flower. Weird name for a lake. He decided that it was going to be a fine day. Which pleased him. He’d scheduled the ductwork test for today and did not want to run it in a nasty, bone-chilling, autumn rain. Vann was field superintendent for Sam Guy, the mechanical contractor out of Lake Placid, on the addition to the Saranac Lake General Hospital. Tomorrow, if today’s test went smoothly—he had no reason to think it wouldn’t—he’d have the heat turned on in the new wing. After that they’d be working comfortably inside.
It was still dark—dark, and cold, a few degrees below freezing— when he got into his truck and drove from the Harbor Hill Cottages on Lake Flower out to the hospital, and despite his studied attempts to block her out, here came Irene again. He remembered how they used to sit around the supper table and laugh together. She had a loose, large face and no restrictions on distorting it to imitate fools and stupid people. Her tongue was rough as a wood rasp, and she had a particular dislike of Sam Guy, who, the day after Vann’s business folded, had hired him and sent him back on the road. “That man needs you because without you he can’t pour pee from a boot,” she’d declare, and she’d yank one of her own boots off and hold it over her head and peer up into it quizzically.
Vann had never known a woman that funny. Toward the end, however, she had started turning her humor on him, and from then on there was no more laughing at Irene’s comical faces and surprising words. His only recourse had been to slam the door behind him, while she shouted, “G’wan, go! Good riddance to bad rubbish!”
He switchbacked along tree-lined streets, crossing the ridge west of the narrow lakeside strip of hotels, motels, stores, and restaurants, and entered a neighborhood of small wood-frame houses and duplexes. The pale light from his headlights bounced off frost that clung like a skin to yellowed lawns, glassed-in porches, and steeply pitched rooftops. Gray strands of smoke floated from chimneys, and kitchen lights shone from windows. Jesus, family life. Which, despite all, Vann still thought of as normal life. And a proper breakfast. Vann could almost smell eggs and bacon frying. Moms, dads, and kids cranking up their day together: he could hear their cheerful, sleepy voices.
Vann had lived that sort of morning, but not for nearly fifteen years now; and he missed it. Who wouldn’t? Way back in the beginning, up in Plattsburgh, with his own mom and dad, he’d been one of the kids at the table; then later, for a few years, with his first wife, Evelyn, and the boys, he had been the dad. But family life had slipped from his grasp without his having noticed, as if, closing his eyes to drink from a spring, he’d lost a handful of clear water and was unable afterwards to imagine a way to regain it. The spring must have dried up. A man can’t blame his hands, can he?
Instead, he’d learned to focus his thoughts on how, when he was in his twenties and married to Evelyn and the boys were young, he simply had not appreciated his good luck. That was all. Evelyn had remarried happily and wisely right after the divorce, and the boys, Neil and Charlie, raised more by their stepfather than by Vann, had turned into young men themselves—gone from him forever, or so it seemed. A postcard now and then was all, and the occasional embarrassed holiday phone call. Nothing, of course, from Evelyn—his child bride, as he referred to her—but that, especially as the years passed, was only as it should be.
The way he viewed it, Vann’s main sin in life had been not to have appreciated his good luck back when he had it. If he had, he probably would have behaved differently. His was a sin of omission, then. To reason that way seemed more practical to him and more dignified than to wallow in regret. It helped him look forward to the future. It had helped him marry Irene. And it had eased his divorce from Inger, his third wife. The Norwegian, was how he thought of her now.
At the variety store where Broadway turned onto Route 86, he picked up a Daily Enterprise and coffee to go and a fresh pack of Marlboros. He was driving one of Sam Guy’s company pickups, a spruce green three-quarter-ton Jimmy, brand-new. It had been assigned to him directly from the dealer, and though he liked to pretend, at least to himself, that the vehicle belonged to him and not his boss, Vann would not have said aloud that it was his. That wasn’t his style. He was forty-nine, too old to say he owned what he didn’t. And too honest.
Besides, he didn’t need to lie: he was making payments to the Buick dealer in Plattsburgh on a low-mileage, two-year-old, black Riviera that he’d bought last spring to celebrate his divorce from the Norwegian. She’d gotten sole ownership of the house he’d built for them in Keene Valley, but she was also stuck with the mortgage, which gave him some satisfaction. His monthly payments for the car had worked out to six dollars less than his monthly alimony checks, a coincidence Vann found oddly satisfying and slightly humorous, although, when he told people about it, no one else thought it funny or even interesting, which puzzled him.
The Norwegian had gotten his previous car, a rusted-out AMC Eagle, but she was welcome to that, too. The Riviera was loaded. A prestige car. It cheered Vann to be seen driving it, and he hoped that over the summer the Norwegian, who was a legal aide for the Adirondack Park Agency in Ray Brook, had accidentally spotted him in the Riviera once or twice. He didn’t particularly want to see her, but he sure hoped that she had seen him and had noted that Vann Moore, yes indeedy, was doing just fine, thanks.
Out on Route 86 a few miles west of town, he turned right at Lake Colby and pulled into the hospital parking lot, drove to the rear of the three-story brick building, and passed along the edge of the rutted field to the company trailer, where he parked next to a stack of steel pipe. From the outside, the new wing, a large cube designed to merge discreetly with the existing hospital building, appeared finished—walls, roof, and windows cemented solidly into place. Despite appearances, however, the structure was little more than a shell. The masons hadn’t started the interior walls yet, the plumbers hadn’t set any of the fixtures or run the aboveground water, vacuum, and air lines, and the electricians were still hanging overhead conduit. The painters hadn’t even hauled their trailer to the site.
The ductwork for the air-conditioning and heat was finished, though. Three days ahead of schedule. Vann was a good super. He’d risen in the ranks from journeyman pipe fitter to foreman to super. He’d run his own business and could read drawings and engineering specs, could do estimates for new work in Sam Guy’s office in Lake Placid when the weather turned bad and everyone else got laid off. And he was a good boss, respected and liked by his men. Sam Guy regarded Vann as his right hand and had no compunctions about saying so, and he paid him appropriately. To people who wondered about Vann’s way of life, and there were a few, Sam said that if Vann hadn’t been tagged over the years with alimony payments and hadn’t lost three houses, one to each wife, he’d be living well on what he earned as a super. He wouldn’t be renting furnished rooms and shabby, unused vacation cottages, following the work from town to town across the northcountry. To V
ann, however, the opposite was true: if he hadn’t followed the work, he’d not have been divorced three times.
Inside the hospital, in the physicians’ scrub room, Dr. Ransome and his assistant this morning, Dr. Clark Rabideau, the resident cardiologist who was Irene’s regular physician, and Dr. Alan Wheelwright, the anesthesiologist, were discussing the incoming governor’s environmental policies while they slowly, methodically washed their hands and arms.
Their patient, Irene Moore, dozy with sedatives, her torso shaved from chin to crotch, was being wheeled on a gurney down the long, windowless, second-floor hallway from her room to the main operating room at the end. Her twenty-year-old daughter Frances sat alone by the window in Irene’s room, flipping through a copy of Cosmopolitan. Frances was a tall, big-hipped girl, a second-year student at Saint Lawrence University, planning to major in psychology. Her straight, slate-colored hair fell limply to her shoulders, and her square face was tight with anxiety.
With her mother unconscious, or nearly so, Frances felt suddenly, helplessly alone. I’m over my head in this, she said to herself, way over, and quickly turned the pages, one after the other. What the hell am I supposed to be thinking about? What?
It was nearly daylight. In the northeast, the flattened sky over Whiteface Mountain was pale gray. In the southeast, over Mounts Marcy and Algonquin, a bank of clouds tinted pink was breaking apart, promising a clear day. The other workers were rumbling onto the job site, electricians, masons, plumbers, steamfitters, driving their own cars and pickups, while the foremen and supers arrived in company vehicles. It was light enough for Vann, smoking in his truck, sipping his coffee, to read the front page of the paper and check the NFL scores. It got his mind finally off Irene.
He folded his paper and left the warm truck, but as he crossed to the trailer, key in hand, he glanced out across Lake Colby at the pink morning sky and the dark line of pines below, and the scenery sent him drifting again. He remembered an afternoon four years ago, shortly after the divorce. He was running the public high school job over in Elizabethtown and living in the Arsenal Motel on Route 9N at the edge of town, and one Friday when he drove in from work, a large flat package was waiting for him at the front desk.
Vann knew at once that it was from Irene—he recognized her handwriting and the return address, their old Lake Placid address. He lugged the crate back to his room and lay it flat on the bed and studied it for a while. What the hell kind of joke was she playing on him this time?
Finally, he pried open the crate and removed several layers of brown paper and plastic bubble wrap from the object inside. It was a large, framed picture. He recognized it instantly, and felt a rush of fear that made his heart pound, as if he had unwrapped a bomb. It was a signed color photograph by a well-known local photographer of Adirondack scenery. Very expensive, he knew. A few years back, when they were still happily married, he and Irene had strolled into a Lake Placid crafts shop, and Vann had glanced up at a picture on the wall and had felt himself leap straight up and into it, as if into someone’s dream. It was called Plains of Abraham and the scene was of a late summer day, looking across a field of tall grasses and wildflowers toward Mount Algonquin. The golden field, wide and flat, lay in sunshine in the foreground at eye level. A dark, jagged line of trees cut across the middle, and the craggy, plum-colored mountain towered in the distance, a pure and endless blue sky behind and above it.
This was the first and the only picture that Vann had ever wanted to own. He asked the saleswoman how much, figuring he could maybe spring for a hundred bucks.
“Twenty-two hundred dollars,” she said.
He felt his ears and face flush. “Pretty pricey,” he said and moved quickly on to the maple cutting boards and ceramic bowls.
For months afterwards, Irene had teased him about it, imitating his high, thin voice and pursed lips. “Pretty-pricey,” she chirped, checking out a restaurant menu. Or speculating about local real estate: “Pretty-pricey.” But she had seen the strange, distant, pained look on her husband’s face as he gazed at the picture on the wall of the crafts shop. And now here it was before him, as if staring at him from his bed, while he stood over it, confused, frightened, stubbornly resisting awe. He no more wanted to live with that picture than he wanted to live with the woman who had sent it to him. It made him feel invaded, trapped, guilty. Just as she did. If he kept it, what was he supposed to do, write her a thank-you note? What he should do, he thought, is return the picture to the crafts shop and pocket the money himself. Serve Irene right.
He took down the large print of an antlered deer that hung above his bed in the motel room and replaced it with Plains of Abraham and stepped back to examine it. It was like a window that opened onto a world larger and more inviting than any he had ever seen. No, the picture was too personal between him and Irene and too mysterious to return for cash, he decided. He would wrap it up and recrate the thing and mail it back to her tomorrow. She’s so damned smart, let her figure out why she sent it to him.
He washed and changed out of his work clothes and went for supper and a few drinks at the Ausable Inn in Keene Valley, where he’d arranged to meet Inger, the Norwegian, whom at that time he’d not quite decided to marry, although he was sleeping with her three and four nights a week. He didn’t return to the motel until halfway through the next day, Saturday, and by then, hungover, fuddled with sex and sleeplessness, he had all but forgotten the picture. But when he entered the small room and saw the photograph hanging above his bed, he remembered everything. He sat down on the chair facing it, and his eyes filled with tears. He could not believe that he was actually crying. Crying over what? An overpriced picture of some scenery? A damned divorce? An ex-wife?
He took down the photograph and rehung the deer print. Carefully, he wrapped the picture, returned it to its crate, and stuck the crate into his closet, where it remained more or less forgotten for the entire summer. When the school job was finished and Vann moved seventy miles south to Glens Falls, where a shopping mall was going in, he lugged the picture along and stashed it in the back of his motel room closet down there. He still owned the thing, although it remained in its crate, and the crate stayed in his closet, hidden, barely acknowledged by Vann, except when one job was over and he packed to move to the next. He’d pull it out and sit on the bed and study Irene’s original mailing label as if it could somehow tell him why he couldn’t seem to get rid of the damned thing.
To Irene, her mind and body muffled by sedatives, the washed-out blue tile walls of the operating room looked almost soft, as if covered with terry cloth. The operating table, shaped like a cross, was in the middle of the room under a bank of white lights. Irene felt her body being eased off the cart by a female nurse and the two male attendants who had brought her here. They arranged themselves alongside her in a line and slid her smoothly onto the table. Her body felt like cold butter. She could see what was happening, but it seemed to be going on elsewhere, in a room beyond glass, and to someone else. Her arms were extended and strapped down, and a long, dark blue curtain was drawn around her upper and lower parts, leaving only her enormous trunk exposed.
“We’re outa here, Dale,” one of the attendants said, and Irene heard the squeaky wheels of the cart and the swish of the closing door.
Hidden behind her, Alan Wheelwright, the anesthesiologist, in a blue cotton gown and cap and white surgical mask, stood at the head of the table preparing bags of blood for transfusion, while the nurse, her flecked green eyes expressionless above her mask, swabbed Irene’s belly with orange antiseptic, covering her mounded body from hip to throat, back to front, humming as she worked, as if she were home alone painting her toenails. Then, into each of Irene’s thick, chalk white arms, the nurse inserted an intravenous catheter.
Irene saw a man’s face, which she recognized, despite the mask, as Dr. Rabideau’s, and next to him another man, taller, with bushy white eyebrows, whom she did not recognize but felt she should. There were more nurses now, and the room s
uddenly seemed crowded and small. A man laughed, genuinely pleased. Someone sang, I’m forever blowing bubbles.
She wondered where in the room Vann was standing. Maybe he was one of the people in the masks. She looked at the eyes; she knew Vann’s eyes. Her own eyelids seemed to be semitransparent sheets, shutting over and over, in layers. She blinked and left a film; then another. She wondered if her eyes had been shut for a long time already.
What we have here, folks, is hard labor.
Vann’s eyes were sapphire blue and crinkly at the corners, even when he wasn’t smiling, like now.
Break out the retractors, Dale. We have liftoff.
Vann was down in the dim basement of the new wing, a huge, cold, open space cluttered with cinder blocks, unused rolls of pink insulation, and stacks of conduit. It took him several tries, but finally he got the gas-powered Briggs & Stratton compressor chugging smoothly. The pump was tied to the overhead ductwork through a three-quarter-inch gate valve with a pressure gauge, which Vann had installed strictly for the purposes of the test. He had a kid, Tommy Farr, to help him, but Vann made the connections himself, using Tommy to hand him the tools as he needed them—hose clamps, screwdriver, pipe joint compound, stillson wrench. His bare hands were red and stiff from the cold; Vann didn’t like working with gloves.
The rest of his crew was scattered over the first and second floors of the wing, installing plumbing fixtures in the lavatories and running the vacuum and oxygen lines. The sheet-metal guys had been released for a new job, a supermarket in a minimall over in Tupper Lake. He figured if any blowouts or blocks in the ductwork showed up, he and Tommy could locate and fix them themselves. He wasn’t worried. It was a routine test under fairly low pressure, twenty-five pounds per square inch. It wasn’t as if the ducts were going to carry water. Just heated air from the large, dark furnace that sat ready to be fired in a shadowed corner of the basement and cooled air from the crated air-conditioning units that had been lifted to the rooftop by crane a week ago.
The Angel on the Roof Page 24