The Angel on the Roof

by Russell Banks

  “All right, Tommy,” Vann said, and he stood away from the valve and handed the skinny kid the wrench. “You wanna do the honors?” Vann lit a cigarette, clenched it between his lips, and inhaled deeply and stuck his chilled hands into his jacket pockets.

  “Just turn the sucker on?”

  “Let ’er rip. When you hit twenty-five PSI’s on the gate valve gauge, close ’er up.”

  The kid knelt down and with one large hand slowly opened the valve and released a jet of compressed air into the pipeline that led to the threaded gate valve soldered to the side of the sheet-metal duct directly overhead. That duct in turn led from the cold furnace behind them to elaborate crosses and intersections at several places in the basement, which split into smaller ducts that passed through the reinforced concrete ceiling on to the floors above. At each floor the ducts split again and snaked between and above the yet-to-be installed walls and ceilings of the new rooms and corridors. These ducts, carefully blocked and baffled at the openings, turns, T’s, and Y’s, eventually crossed out of the new wing into the old hospital and tied into its system, which carried heated air from the outdated but still adequate furnace in the basement of the main wing of the hospital to the one hundred fifty private and semiprivate rooms and wards, the scrub rooms and surgeons’ dressing rooms, the physical therapy center, the operating rooms, the emergency room, the maternity ward and nursery, and all the large and small, public and private lavatories, the janitors’ closets, kitchens, dining rooms, nurses’ lounges, computer center, labs, billing offices, administrative offices, and the gift shop and florist shop, which was closed this early in the day, and the nearly empty waiting rooms, and even into the large, glass-fronted lobby, where Frances, the daughter of Irene Moore, was at this moment strolling from the hospital, down the steps to the parking lot. Frances was on a run into town for some small present to greet her mom when she woke, something sentimental and silly, like a teddy bear, that her mom would pretend to hate, the way she always did, but Frances knew that her mom would store the gift in a secret drawer so that she could take it out and look at it whenever she wanted to realize anew how much her daughter loved her.

  Something was going wrong. The first sign was a cool puff of air that carried a gray plume of ash—probably cigarette ash—from a wall register into the cafeteria on the first floor of the old wing. A janitor leaned against his mop and with some annoyance watched the gray powder float onto his clean floor.

  In a laboratory on the second floor, bits of dirt fell from the ceiling vent onto the head and shoulders of a puzzled technician, causing her to jump from her seat and stare at the vent for a moment. When no further debris fell, she sat back down and resumed cataloging urine samples.

  Then along one corridor after another and in the maternity ward and in several of the private rooms, on all three floors of the hospital, nurses, doctors, maintenance people, and even some patients began to see tiny scraps of paper, ashes, shreds of pink insulation, metal filings, sawdust, and unidentifiable bits of dirt fly from the registers and ceiling vents, float through the air, and land on sheets and pillows, sterilization cabinets, stainless steel counters, computers, desks, spotless equipment and tools of all kinds, dusting hairdos, nurses’ caps, starched white uniforms, and even falling onto the breakfast trays. Nurses, doctors, administrators, and staff people strode up and down hallways and made phone calls, trying to locate the cause of this invasion of flying debris. Attendants grabbed sheets and blankets and covered the newborn infants in the nursery and patients in the wards, shouting orders and firing angry questions at one another, while patients pressed their buzzers and hollered for help and brushed the floating bits of dirt and trash away from their faces, bandages, casts, and bedding. Those patients who were mobile ran, limped, and rolled in wheelchairs from their rooms and wards to the hallways and nurses’ stations, demanding to know what was happening, had there been an explosion? Was there a fire?

  In the operating room, Dr. Rabideau shouted, Close her up! For Christ’s sake, close her up and get her the hell out of here!

  Down in the cold basement of the new wing, Vann stood in the light of a single bulb and puzzled over the gauge on his compressor. He rubbed his cigarette out on the cement floor.

  “She’s not holding any pressure at all now. Not a damn bit,” he said to Tommy Farr. “Something’s open that shouldn’t be. Or else we’ve got one hell of a blowout someplace,” he said and reached up and shut off the air to the main duct. He switched off the compressor motor, and the basement was suddenly silent.

  “How we gonna find out what’s open?” Tommy asked.

  “We got to check everything that’s supposed to be closed. One of you guys must’ve left a cap off one of the register openings.”

  “Hey, not me! I ain’t no sheet-metal guy. I was in the trailer counting fittings all day Friday.”

  “I know, I know. I just need somebody to blame,” Vann said smiling. He clapped the kid on the shoulder. “C’mon, let’s get the drawings from the trailer. We’ll go room to room and check every vent until we find the missing cap. Then we’ll cap ’er and try again.”

  Vann had done his job the way he was supposed to, and his men had done theirs. He could not have known what had occurred beyond the thick fire wall that separated the new wing from the old, could not have known that over there, when he finally shut his compressor down, the debris had instantly ceased to fall. And he could not have known that seconds after Doctors Ransome, Rabideau, and Wheel-wright in a panic had closed their incisions and rushed her from the operating room, his ex-wife Irene had gone into cardiac arrest in the recovery room. They had managed to get her heart pumping again and her blood pressure back, but an embolism had formed in her left carotid artery and had started working its way toward her neck. Shortly after noon, a blood vessel between the left temporal and parietal lobes of her brain burst, and Irene Moore suffered a massive stroke and immediately lapsed into a coma.

  The only surgeon in the area capable of removing the clot from her brain was driving over from Plattsburgh. They hoped to have the operating room cleaned up and ready for him by early evening. With her heart condition, however, and the trauma inflicted on her by the interrupted surgery this morning, and the likelihood of still more embolisms, the anticoagulants, and now the stroke, “I’m sorry, but it truly does not look good,” Dr. Rabideau told Frances.

  She did not know where to turn for consolation or advice. She was the only one left in the world who loved her mother, and her mother was the only one left who loved her. Frances’s father, Irene’s long-gone first husband, had his new life, a new wife and new kids out in California. Irene’s second husband, Vann, had his new life, too, Frances supposed. He and Frances had never liked each other much, anyhow.

  A little after lunch, the supervisor of maintenance in the hospital found Vann on the second floor of the new wing, still tracing the overhead ducts with Tommy Farr. The supervisor, Fred Noelle, was a man in his mid-sixties who had worked for the hospital since high school. He knew every inch of the old building, every valve, switch, pump, and fitting, and had been an especially useful consultant when they were designing the addition. Cautiously, Fred asked Vann if earlier this morning he might have done something in the way of connecting the heat and ventilation ducts of the new wing to the ducts of the old. Tied them together, say, and then opened them up, maybe. Fred knew there were lawsuits coming. A lot of finger-pointing and denials.

  “No,” Vann said. “Why? You got problems over there?”

  “Have we got problems? Yes, we’ve got problems. We’ll be cleaning the place up for the rest of the year.” He was a balding, heavyset man with a face like a bull terrier, and he looked very worried.

  “What the hell happened?” Vann asked him.

  Fred told him. “They got crap on patients, in the labs, all over. Even in the operating rooms.”

  Vann was silent. Then he spoke slowly and clearly, directing his words to the kid but speaking mainly for Fr
ed Noelle’s benefit. “It couldn’t have been us. There are baffles between the two systems, blocks, and they don’t come out till after we get everything installed and blown out and balanced and the whole wing is nice and clean and ready for use. Then we open it to the old system. And that won’t be till next summer,” he said, his voice rising. He knew he was telling the truth. He also knew that he was dead wrong.

  Somewhere, somehow, one of the baffles between the two networks had not been installed by his men, or else had been left off the drawing by the mechanical engineer who had designed the system for the architect. Either way, Vann knew the fault was his. This morning, before cranking up the compressor, on the off chance that one of his sheet-metal guys had screwed up, he should have checked the baffles, every damned one of them. No one ever did that, but he should’ve.

  He placed the drawing on the floor and got down on his hands and knees to examine it. “See,” he said to Fred. “Take a look right here. Baffle. And here. Baffle. And here,” he said, pointing to each of the places where the ducts crossed through the thick wall between the two wings of the hospital.

  But then he saw it. No baffle. The mechanical engineer had made a terrible mistake, and Vann, back when they’d installed the ducts, hadn’t caught it.

  Fred got down beside him, and he saw it, too. “Uh-oh,” he said, and he placed his fingertip where a barrier should have been indicated and where, instead, the drawing showed a main duct flowing through the old exterior wall and connecting directly to the heat and ventilation system of the hospital. A straight shot.

  Tommy squatted down on the other side of Vann and furrowed his brow and studied the drawing. “Bad, huh, Vann?”

  Vann followed Fred Noelle out of the structure and across the parking lot and through the main entrance of the hospital. They went straight to the large carpeted office of Dr. Christian Snyder, the hospital director. Fred made the introductions, and Dr. Snyder got up and shook Vann’s hand firmly.

  “We think we got this thing figured out,” Fred said. Dr. Snyder was a crisply efficient fellow in his early forties with blond, blow-dried hair. He wore a dark, pin-striped suit and to Vann looked more like a down-state lawyer than a physician. Fred unrolled the drawing on Dr. Snyder’s large mahogany desk, and the three men stood side by side and examined the plan together, while Fred described Vann’s test and how it was supposed to work and how it had failed.

  “You’re the subcontractor for the sheet-metal work?” Dr. Snyder said to Vann.

  “No. No, I’m just the field super for him. Sam Guy, he’s the sub-contractor.”

  “I see. But you’re responsible for the installation.”

  “Well, yes. But I just follow the drawings, the blueprints.”

  “Right. And this morning you were testing the new ductwork, blowing compressed air through it, right?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t realize…”

  Dr. Snyder cut him off. “I understand.” He went around his desk, sat down heavily and picked up a pencil and tapped his teeth with it. “Fred, will you be able to attend a meeting here this evening? Seven-thirty, say?”

  Fred said sure, and Dr. Snyder reached for his phone. Vann picked up the drawing and started to roll it up. “Please, leave that here,” Dr. Snyder said, and then he was speaking to his secretary, “Celia, for that meeting with Baumbach, Beech, and Warren? Fred Noelle, who’s in charge of maintenance, he’ll be joining us.”

  He glanced up at Vann as if surprised to see him still standing there. “You can go, if you want. Thanks for your help. We’ll be in touch,” he said to Vann, and went back to his telephone.

  Outside in the lobby, alone, Vann pulled out a cigarette and stuck it between his lips.

  “Sir! No smoking!” the receptionist barked at him, and he shoved the cigarette back into the pack and made for the door.

  On the steps he stopped and lit up and looked across the road at Lake Colby and the pine trees and hills beyond. There was a stiff, cold breeze off the lake, and it was starting to get dark. Vann checked his watch. Three thirty-five. Off to his left he saw a woman with her back to him, also smoking and regarding the scenery. Vann couldn’t remember when he had done anything this bad. Not at work, anyhow. In life, sure—he’d messed up his life, messed it up lots of ways, most people do. But, Jesus, never at work.

  The woman tossed her cigarette onto the parking lot below and turned to go back inside, and Vann recognized her—Frances, his exwife’s daughter. He realized that he was glad to see her and blurted, “Hey, Frances! What’re you doing here?” Startled, she looked up at him, and he saw that she was crying. “Wow, what’s the matter, kid? What’s happened?” he said, and took a step toward her. She was taller than he remembered, a few inches taller than he, and heavier. Her face was swollen and red and wet with tears. “Is it your mom?”

  She nodded yes, like a child, and he reached out to her. She kept her arms tight to her sides but let him hold her close. He was all she had; he would have to be enough.

  “Come on inside and sit down, honey, and tell me what’s happened,” Vann said, and with one arm around her, he walked her back into the lobby, where they sat down on one of the blond sofas by the window. “Jeez,” he said, “I don’t have a handkerchief.”

  “That’s okay, I got a tissue.” She pulled a wrinkled tissue from her purse and wiped her cheeks.

  “So tell me what happened, Frances. What’s wrong with your mom?”

  She hesitated a second. Then she inhaled deeply and said, “I don’t understand it. She’s in a coma. She went in for open-heart surgery this morning, and something happened, something went wrong, and they had to bring her out in the middle of it.”

  “Oh,” Vann said. “Oh, Jesus.” He lowered his head. He put his hands over his face and closed his eyes behind them.

  “There were complications. She had a stroke. The doctors don’t think she’ll come out of it,” she said, and started to cry again.

  Vann took his hands away from his face and sat there staring at the floor. The beige carpet was decorated with the outlines of orange and dark green rectangles. Vann let his gaze follow the interlocking colored lines from his feet out to the middle of the room and then back again. Out and back, out and back. There were six or eight other people seated in the sofas and chairs scattered around the lobby, reading magazines or talking quietly with one another, waiting for news of their mothers and fathers, their husbands and wives and children in the rooms above.

  “Do you think maybe could I go and see her?” he said in a low voice.

  “I don’t think so. She’s in intensive care, Vann. She won’t even know you’re there. I saw her a little while ago, but she didn’t know it was me in the room.”

  Slowly Vann got to his feet and moved away from Frances toward the receptionist by the elevator. He wanted to see Irene. He could say it to himself. It didn’t matter if she knew he was there or not, he had to see her. He needed to fill his mind with her actual, physical presence. No fading memories of her, no tangled feelings of guilt for things done and undone, no dimly remembered hurts and resentments. Too late for all that. He needed to look at her literal existence, see her in the here and now, and take full-faced whatever terrible thoughts and feelings came to him there.

  “I need to see my wife,” he said to the receptionist. “She’s in intensive care.”

  The woman peered at him over her horn-rimmed glasses. “Who’s your wife?”

  “Irene. Irene Moore.”

  He signed the book that the woman pushed at him and stepped quickly toward the elevator. “Third floor,” she said. He got into the elevator, turned, and saw Frances seated across the lobby looking mournfully at him. Then the door slid closed.

  At the nurses’ station outside the intensive care unit an elderly nurse pointed him down a hallway to a closed door. “Second bed on the right. You can’t miss her, she’s the only one there.”

  The room was dark, windowless, lit only by the wall lamp above the bedstead. Irene’s
body was very large; it filled the bed. Vann didn’t remember her as that big. She made him feel suddenly small, shrunken, fragile. There were IV stands and oxygen tanks and tubes that snaked in and out of her body and several thick black wires attached to cabinet-sized machines that blinked and whirred, monitoring her blood pressure, heart, and breathing.

  For a long time he stood at the foot of the bed peering through the network of tubes and wires at his ex-wife’s wide, round body. She was covered to her neck by a sheet. Her thick arms lay limp and white outside the sheet. A tube dripped clear liquid into a vein at one wrist. On the other wrist she wore a plastic identification band.

  No wedding ring, he noticed. He looked down at his own left hand. No wedding ring there, either. Irene, you’re the one I loved. He said the words silently to himself, straight out. And I’m only loving you now. And, Jesus, look at what I’ve done to you, before I could love you.

  What’s that love worth now, I wonder. To you or me or anybody?

  He felt a strong wind blow over him, and he had to grab hold of the metal bedframe to keep from staggering backwards. The wind was warm, like a huge breath, an exhalation, and though it pummeled him, he wasn’t afraid of it. He turned sideways and made his way along the bed. The wind abated, and he found himself looking down at Irene’s face. There was a tube in her slightly open mouth and another in one of her nostrils. Her eyes were closed. Somewhere behind her face, Irene was curled in on herself like a child, naked, huddled in the darkness, alone, waiting.

  Vann slipped his hands into his jacket pockets and stood with his feet apart and looked down on the woman he had been able to love for only a moment. He stood there for a long time, long after he had ceased to love her and had only the memory of it left. Then he turned away from her.