The Angel on the Roof

by Russell Banks

  “Customer,” says Sammy, munching peanuts.

  Rick says the same, “Customer,” and they go on as before.

  “Probably an old girlfriend,” Sammy adds.

  “Ha-ha,” I say back.

  A Celtics-Knicks game on TV has their attention, double overtime. Finally the Knicks win, and it’s time to go home, guys. Snow’s piling up. We pull on our coats, pay the bartender, and, as we leave, the old lady’s party is also getting ready to go, and when I pass their table, she catches my sleeve, says my name. Says it with a question mark. “Warren? Warren Low?”

  I say, “Yeah, hi,” and smile, but still I don’t remember her.

  Then she says, “I’m Gail Fortunata. Warren, I knew you years ago,” she says, and she smiles fondly. And then everything comes back, or almost everything. “Do you remember me?” she asks.

  “Sure, sure I do, of course I do. Gail. How’ve you been? Jeez, it’s sure been a while.”

  She nods, still smiling. “What’s that on your face? Makeup?”

  “Yeah. Been doing a little theater. Didn’t have any cold cream to get it all off,” I say lamely.

  She says, “I’m glad you’re still acting.” And then she introduces me to her family, like that, “This is my family.”

  “Howdy,” I say, and start to introduce my friends Sammy and Rick, but they’re already at the door.

  Sammy says, “S’long, Warren, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” and Rick gives a wave, and they’re out.

  “So, it’s your birthday, Gail. Happy birthday.”

  She says, “Why, thank you.” The others are all standing now, pulling on their coats, except for Gail, who still hasn’t let go of my sleeve, which she tugs and then says to me, “Sit down a minute, Warren. I haven’t seen you in what, thirty years. Imagine.”

  “Ma,” the son says. “It’s late. The snow.”

  I draw up a chair next to Gail, and, letting go of the dumb pretenses, I suddenly find myself struggling to see in her eyes the woman I knew for a few months when I was a kid, barely twenty-one, and she was almost fifty and married and these two fat guys were her skinny teenage sons. But I can’t see through the old lady’s face to the woman she was then. If that woman is gone, then so is the boy, this boy.

  She looks up at one of her sons and says, “Dickie, you go without me. Warren will give me a ride, won’t you, Warren?” she says, turning to me. “I’m staying at Dickie’s house up on the Heights. That’s not out of your way, is it?”

  “Nope. I’m up on the Heights, too. Alton Woods. Just moved into a condo there.”

  Dickie says, “Fine,” a little worried. He looks like he’s used to losing arguments with his mother. They all give her a kiss on the cheek, wish her a happy birthday again, and file out into the snow. A plow scrapes past on the street. Otherwise, no traffic.

  The Greek and his crew start cleaning up, while Gail and I talk a few minutes more. Although her eyes are wet and red-rimmed, she’s not teary, she’s smiling. It’s as if there are translucent shells over her bright blue eyes. Even so, now when I look hard I can glimpse her the way she was, slipping around back there in the shadows. She had heavy, dark red hair, clear white skin smooth as porcelain, broad shoulders, and she was tall for a woman, almost as tall as I was, I remember exactly, from when she and her husband once took me along with them to a VFW party, and she and I danced while he played cards.

  “You have turned into a handsome man, Warren,” she says. Then she gives a little laugh. “Still a handsome man, I mean.”

  “Naw. Gone to seed. You’re only young once, I guess.”

  “When we knew each other, Warren, I was the age you are now.”

  “Yeah. I guess that’s so. Strange to think about, isn’t it?”

  “Are you divorced? You look like it.”

  “Yeah, divorced. Couple of years now. Kids, three girls, all grown up. I’m even a grandpa. It was not one of your happy marriages. Not by a long shot.”

  “I don’t think I want to hear about all that.”

  “Okay. What do you want to hear about?”

  “Let’s have one drink and one short talk. For old times’ sake. Then you may drive me to my son’s home.”

  I say fine and ask the Greek, who’s at the register tapping out, if it’s too late for a nightcap. He shrugs why not, and Gail asks for a sherry and I order the usual, vodka and tonic. The Greek scoots back to the bar, pours the drinks himself because the bartender is wiping down the cooler, and returns and sets them down before us. “On the house,” he says, and goes back to counting the night’s take.

  “It’s odd, isn’t it, that we never ran into each other before this,” she says. “All these years. You came up here to Concord, and I stayed there in Portsmouth, even after the boys left. Frank’s job was there.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess fifty miles is a long ways sometimes. How is Frank?” I ask, realizing as soon as I say it that he was at least ten years older than she.

  “He died. Frank died in nineteen eighty-two.”

  “Oh, jeez. I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I want to ask you something, Warren. I hope you won’t mind if I speak personally with you.”

  “No. Shoot.” I take a belt from my drink.

  “I never dared to ask you then. It would have embarrassed you then, I thought, because you were so scared of what we were doing together, so unsure of yourself.”

  “Yeah, no kidding. I was what, twenty-one? And you were, well, not scary, but let’s say impressive. Married with kids, a sophisticated woman of the world, you seemed to me. And I was this apprentice plumber working on my first job away from home, a kid.”

  “You were more than that, Warren. That’s why I took to you so easily. You were very sensitive. I thought someday you’d become a famous actor. I wanted to encourage you.”

  “You did.” I laugh nervously because I don’t know where this conversation is going and take another pull from my drink and say, “I’ve done lots of acting over the years, you know, all local stuff, some of it pretty serious. No big deal. But I kept it up. I don’t do much nowadays, of course. But you did encourage me, Gail, you did, and I’m truly grateful for that.”

  She sips her sherry with pursed lips, like a bird. “Good,” she says. “Warren, were you a virgin then, when you met me?”

  “Oh, jeez. Well, that’s quite a question, isn’t it?” I laugh. “Is that what you’ve been wondering all these years? Were you the first woman I ever made love with? Wow. That’s… Hey, Gail, I don’t think anybody’s ever asked me that before. And here we are, thirty years later.” I’m smiling at her, but the air is rushing out of me.

  “I just want to know, dear. You never said it one way or the other. We shared a big secret, but we never really talked about our own secrets. We talked about the theater, and we had our little love affair, and then you went on, and I stayed with Frank and grew old. Older.”

  “You weren’t old.”

  “As old as you are now, Warren.”

  “Yes. But I’m not old.”

  “Well, were you?”

  “What? A virgin?”

  “You don’t have to answer, if it embarrasses you.”

  I hold off a few seconds. The waitress and the new kid and the bartender have all left, and only the Greek is here, perched on a stool in the bar watching Nightline. I could tell her the truth, or I could lie, or I could beg off the question altogether. It’s hard to know what’s right. Finally, I say, “Yes, I was. I was a virgin when I met you. It was the first time for me,” I tell her, and she sits back in her chair and looks me full in the face and smiles as if I’ve just given her the perfect birthday gift, the one no one else thought she wanted, the gift she never dared to ask for. It’s a beautiful smile, grateful and proud and seems to go all the way back to the day we first met.

  She reaches over and places her small, crackled hand on mine. She says, “I never knew for sure. But whenever I think back on those days and remember how we use
d to meet in your room, I always pretend that for you it was the first time. I even pretended it back then, when it was happening. It meant something to me.”

  For a few moments neither of us speaks. Then I break the spell. “What do you say we shove off? They need to close this place up, and the snow’s coming down hard.” She agrees, and I help her slide into her coat. My car is parked only halfway down the block, but it’s a slow walk to it, because the sidewalk is a little slippery and she’s very careful.

  When we’re in the car and moving north on Main Street, we remain silent for a while, and finally I say to her, “You know, Gail, there’s something I’ve wondered all these years myself.”

  “Is there?”

  “Yeah. But you don’t have to tell me, if it embarrasses you.”

  “Warren, dear, you reach a certain age, nothing embarrasses you.”

  “Yeah, well. I guess that’s true.”

  “What is it?”

  “Okay, I wondered if, except for me, you stayed faithful to Frank. And before me.”

  No hesitation. She says, “Yes. I was faithful to Frank, before you and after. Except for my husband, you were the only man I loved.”

  I don’t believe her, but I know why she has lied to me. This time it’s my turn to smile and reach over and place my hand on hers.

  The rest of the way we don’t talk, except for her giving me directions to her son’s house, which is a plain brick ranch on a curving side street up by the old armory. The porch light is on, but the rest of the house is dark. “It’s late,” I say to her.

  “So it is.”

  I get out and come around and help her from the car and then walk her up the path to the door. She gets her key from her purse and unlocks the door and turns around and looks up at me. She’s not as tall as she used to be.

  “I’m very happy that we saw each other tonight,” she says. “We probably won’t see each other again.”

  “Well, we can. If you want to.”

  “You’re still a very sweet man, Warren. I’m glad of that. I wasn’t wrong about you.”

  I don’t know what to say. I want to kiss her, though, and I do, I lean down and put my arms around her and kiss her on the lips, very gently, then a little more, and she kisses me back, with just enough pressure against me to let me know that she is remembering everything, too. We hold each other like that for a long time.

  Then I step away, and she turns, opens the door, and takes one last look back at me. She smiles. “You’ve still got makeup on,” she says. “What’s the play? I forgot to ask.”

  “Oh,” I say, thinking fast, because I’m remembering that she’s Catholic and probably doesn’t think much of the Masons. “Othello,” I say.

  “That’s nice, and you’re the Moor?”

  “Yes.”

  Still smiling, she gives me a slow pushing wave with her hand, as if dismissing me, and goes inside. When the door has closed behind her, I want to stand there alone on the steps all night with the snow falling around my head in clouds and watch it fill our tracks on the path. But it actually is late, and I have to work tomorrow, so I leave.

  Driving home, it’s all I can do to keep from crying. Time’s come, time’s gone, time’s never returning, I say to myself. What’s here in front of me is all I’ve got, I decide, and as I drive my car through the blowing snow it doesn’t seem like much, except for the kindness that I’ve just exchanged with an old lady, so I concentrate on that.

  Searching for Survivors

  Poor Henry Hudson, I miss him. It’s almost as if I had been aboard the leaking Discovery myself, a cabin boy or maybe an ordinary seaman, and had been forced to decide, Which will it be, slip into line behind the callow mutineers and get the hell out of this closing, ice-booming bay and home again to dear, wet England? Or say nay and climb over the side behind the good Commodore, the gentle, overthrown master of the Discovery, settling down next to him in the open shallop, the slate gray, ice-flecked water lurking barely six inches below the gunwales of the overloaded rowboat, as the ship puts on sail, catches a safe slice of wind rising out of the Arctic, and drives for open seas, east and south.

  I would’ve had no choice—assuming I was given one. I would have stuck with the bigger boat and would have watched the smaller one, Hudson standing darkly iron-willed in the low bow, as it gradually became a black speck on the gray, white-rimmed sheet behind us, and then disappeared altogether.

  It’s so easy to forget him, to let my memory of him gradually disappear, the way his image, for one who stood at the stern of the Discovery, disappeared: 1611, after all, is a long ways back. Which is why I’m truly grateful whenever I happen to be reminded of him and his loss, and mine—when driving over the Hudson River, say, the fiery red sun setting behind feculent New Jersey marshes, or when driving the curly length of the Henry Hudson Parkway north of Manhattan.

  Oddly, reminded of Hudson, I’m always reminded in turn of other things. Mainly automobiles. The automobiles of my adolescence, for some reason. There must be deep associations. When I end a dark day by suddenly, accidentally, conjuring bright images of Henry Hudson lost in the encroaching white silence of his bay, I usually remember the first car I ever owned. It was the unadorned frame of a 1929 Model A Ford. I was fifteen, not old enough to take a car out on the road legally, but that was all right because I intended to spend the next two years building the frame of a thirty-year-old car into a hot rod. Hot rods were very important to almost everyone, one way or another, in the late fifties. My closest friend, Daryl, who was sixteen, was building his hot rod out of a 1940 Ford coupe up on cinder blocks behind his father’s garage. He already had an engine for it, a ’53 Chrysler overhead valve V-8, which lay on the floor of the garage in front of his father’s parked car. That car was an impeccable 1949 Hudson Hornet, which Daryl, whenever his father felt reckless enough to grant it, was old enough to drive and did. This happened rarely, however, because the Hudson was Daryl’s father’s obsession. I remember him as a tense, thin man, short and drawn in on himself like a hair-triggered crossbow, always rubbing gently the sleek skin of that car with a clean, soft cloth in the speckled orange, autumn sunlight of a Saturday afternoon, the slow circles of the cloth seeming to tranquilize the grim man as he worked.

  Almost a decade old, the Hudson was still in precisely the condition as the day Daryl’s father had purchased it, in 1949, March, at the Hudson assembly plant in Michigan, after having followed it step by step down the entire length of the assembly line, watching it magically becoming itself, until it was emptied out the dark mouth of the factory into the shattering sunlight of the test track. Then, with meticulously organized pleasure, he had driven it all the way home to Wakefield, Massachusetts.

  No other single experience with a machine compared to the exquisitely abstracted, yet purely sensual pleasure provided by riding in Daryl’s father’s Hudson. The car was deep green, the color of oak leaves in July, and the restrained stabs of chrome on the grille and bumpers and around the headlights and taillights merely deepened the sense of well-being that one took from the huge expanses of color. Shaped more or less like an Indian burial mound from the Upper Mississippi Valley, whether stilled or in motion, the vehicle expressed permanence and stability, blocky, arrogant pacts with eternity.

  Later on, when I was nineteen, I was footloose and almost broke, and needing transportation from central Florida out to the West Coast, I bought a breaking-down 1947 Studebaker for fifteen dollars, and it got me as far as Amarillo, Texas, where it wheezingly expired. Then for a long time I didn’t own a car. I hitchhiked or used public transportation or rode around passively in friends’ cars—lost touch completely with the needs of an earlier aesthetic.

  Then, a few years after the Studebaker and Texas, when I was about twenty-three, I happened to be living in Boston, working as a timekeeper on a construction job at the Charlestown Navy Yard, and one silver-frosted morning in February, I walked sleepily out of the MTA station and headed down the brick sidewalk t
oward the dry-docked USS Constitution and the derrick-cluttered Navy Yard beyond and nearly collided with my old friend Daryl. He was dressed in an expensive-looking, charcoal gray, pin-striped suit with a vest and black wool overcoat with a silver fur collar. He wore a derby, a black bowler, perched atop his narrow head, and he was clenching a black, tightly furled umbrella.

  Daryl! I shouted. I hadn’t seen him in five or six years at least. How the hell are you!

  He responded politely, but with painful reserve, obviously eager to get away from me. He was working on State Street, he told me (when I asked), aiming to be a broker, taking night courses in business administration, living in a flat here in Charlestown in the interim. I asked him about his family, of course, as a matter of simple courtesy, but also because I really had liked and respected his father, that grimly organized sensualist. Daryl told me that his father, a foreman at the Wonder bread factory in Somerville, had retired two years ago and then had died six months later of a heart attack. His mother now lived alone in a condominium in Maryland.

  We shook hands and exchanged addresses and promised to get in touch as soon as possible, so we could really sit down and have a talk. Then we rushed off in our opposite directions.

  I strode quickly through the gate to the Yard and jogged past warehouses toward the new steam plant, and for a second I felt lonelier then I’d ever felt before. Nowadays loneliness was probably the last thing old Daryl was troubled by.

  I pictured his small blue eyes darting past my own as they sought a spot in space over my shoulder and about twelve feet behind me, where they could rest easy while Daryl and I talked to each other. No way to deny it: I truly had expected him to become a successful racing driver. Or at least a well-known mechanic.

  I live in the country now, in central New Hampshire, and two months ago I answered an ad in the local newspaper and bought a Norwegian elkhound puppy, a male, a gray puff of fur with a pointed black face and curl of a tail. I named him Hudson, giving him the second name of Frobisher, so I could be sure I was naming him, not for a car, but for the explorers of the Arctic seas—appropriate for a dog of that explicit a breeding.