If Angels Fight

by Richard Bowes

  Below them, a party had picnicked next to Mirror Lake a bit earlier. Hikers had passed though. But at the moment, the shore was deserted, the surface undisturbed. The Rex was not in evidence.

  Helen’s eye remained penetrating, her speech clear. “A peaceful death,” she said, “is one of the gifts of the gods.”

  Julia wished she had thought to ask her grandmother more questions about how their lives had been altered by the shrine. She realized that her own introduction to it at so young an age had occurred because Helen could not stand dealing with the man who had murdered the one closest to her.

  The two sat in a long silence. Then the old woman said, “My dearest child, I thought these might be of interest,” and indicated a leather folder on the table.

  Julia opened it and found several photos. She stared, amazed at the tree-lined Cambridge Street and the young couple agape at their first glimpse of each other. She couldn’t take in all the details at once: the deliveryman hopping from his cart, the elderly gent out for a stroll, the boy who walked slightly behind what must have been his parents.

  Small, perhaps foreign in his sandals, he alone saw the tall, dark- haired young man, the tall blond young woman, stare at each other in wonder.

  “You knew before . . .” Julia said looking up. She didn’t dare breathe. Her grandmother still smiled slightly. Her eyes were wide. Beside her stood a figure in a silver mask. Tall and graceful. Not Corporal Smalley. Not at all. He wore only a winged helmet and sandals. Hermes, Lord Mercury, touched Helen with the silver caduceus staff he carried.

  Julia caught her breath. Her grandmother slumped slightly. Helen Stoneham Garde’s eyes were blank. Her life was over. The figure was gone.

  5.

  “First day of Autumn,” Martha Eder said when Julia came down the Old Cottage stairs the morning after her return. A picnic basket had been packed. Julia had not brought cigarettes for Smalley, had reason to think they weren’t necessary.

  The air was crisp but the sun was warm enough that all Julia needed was a light jacket. As she set out, Henry Eder interrupted his repair of a window frame. “I can go with you, see if anything needs doing.” When she declined, he nodded and went back to his work.

  Grief was a private matter to Mainers. Besides, even after three quarters of a century, Julia’s family were still “summer folk,” and thus unfathomable.

  The walk up Mount Airey was magnificent. Julia had rarely seen it this late in the year. Red and gold leaves framed green pine. Activity in the trees and undergrowth was almost frantic. A fox, intent on the hunt, crossed her path.

  After her grandmother’s death, she had returned to the cabin only on the occasions when she brought Tim. In the last few years, she hadn’t been back at all.

  She remembered a day when she and Robert sat in the study of their Georgetown mansion and Timothy knocked on the door. Just shy of twelve, he wore his Saint Anthony’s Priory uniform of blazer and short pants. In 1951, the American upper class kept its boys in shorts for as long as possible. A subtle means of segregating them from the masses.

  Representative Robert Macauley, (D-NY), was maneuvering for a Senate nomination in what promised to be a tough year for Democrats. He looked up from the speech he was reviewing. Julia, busy with a guest list, watched them both.

  Timothy said, “What I would like for my birthday this year is a crewcut. Lots of the kids have them. And I want long pants when I’m not in this stupid monkey suit. And this summer I want to be allowed to go up to the cabin on Mount Airey by myself.”

  Julia caught the amusement and look of calculation in her husband’s eyes. Did his kid in short pants gain him more votes from women who thought it was adorable than he lost from men who thought it was snooty?

  “In matters like this, we defer to the upper chamber,” he said with a quick, lopsided smile and nodded to Julia.

  She felt all the pangs of a mother whose child is growing up. But she negotiated briskly. The first demand was a throwaway as she and her son both knew.

  “No crewcut. None of the boys at your school have them. The brothers don’t approve.” The brothers made her Protestant skin crawl. But they were most useful at times like this.

  “Long pants outside school? Please!” he asked. “Billy Chervot and his brothers all get to wear blue jeans!” Next year would be Timothy’s last with the brothers. Then he’d be at Grafton and out in the world.

  “Perhaps. For informal occasions.”

  “Jeans!”

  “We shall see.” He would be wearing them, she knew, obviously beloved, worn ones. On a drizzly morning in Maine. His hair would be short. He’d have spent that summer in a crewcut.

  Julia had studied every detail of a certain photo. She estimated Tim’s age at around fifteen. The shot showed him as he approached Stoneham Cabin. He wore his father’s old naval flight jacket, still too big for him, though he had already gotten tall.

  “Mount Airey?” the eleven-year-old Tim had asked.

  She heard herself saying, “Yes. That should be fine. Check in with Mrs. Eder when you’re going. And tell her when you come back. Be sure to let me know if anything up there needs to be done.”

  Her son left the room smiling. “What’s the big deal about that damned cabin?” her husband asked.

  Julia shrugged. “The Wasps of the Eastern United States,” she said and they both laughed. The title of her grandfather’s tome was a joke between them. It referred to things no outsider could ever understand or would want to.

  Julia returned to her list. She had memorized every detail of the photo of their son. He had tears in his eyes. The sight made her afraid for them all.

  Her husband held out a page of notes. “Take a look. I’m extending an olive branch to Mrs. Roosevelt. Her husband and my dad disagreed.” He grinned. Franklin Roosevelt, patrician reformer and Timothy Macauley, machine politician, had famously loathed each other.

  Julia stared at her husband’s handwriting. Whatever the words said would work. The third photo in the leather folder her grandmother had given her showed FDR’s widow on a platform with Robert. Julia recognized a victory night.

  She could trace a kind of tale with the photos. She met her husband. He triumphed. Their son went for comfort to the Rex. A story was told. Or, as in The Iliad, part of one.

  That day in the study in Georgetown, she looked at Robert Macauley, in the reading glasses he never wore publicly, and felt overwhelming tenderness. Julia could call up every detail of the photo of their meeting.

  Only the boy in the background looked directly at the couple who stared into each other’s eyes. He smiled. His hand was raised. Something gold caught the sun. A ring? A tiny bow? Had Robert and she been hit with Eros’ arrow? All she knew was that the love she felt was very real.

  How clever they were, the gods, to give mortals just enough of a glimpse of their workings to fascinate. But never to let them know everything.

  That summer, her son went up Mount Airey alone. It bothered Julia as one more sign he was passing out of her control. “The gods won’t want to loose this one m’ lady,” Smalley had told her.

  Over the next few years, Timothy entered puberty, went away to school, had secrets. His distance increased. When the family spent time at Joyous Garde, Tim would go to the Cabin often and report to her in privacy. Mundane matters like “Smalley says the back eaves need to be reshingled.” Or vast, disturbing ones like, “That jungle portal is impassable now. Smalley says soon ours will be the only one left.”

  Then came a lovely day in late August 1954. Sun streamed through the windows of Joyous Garde, sailboats bounced on the water. In the ballroom, staff moved furniture. A distant phone rang. A reception was to be held that evening. Senator Macauley would be flying in from Buffalo that afternoon.

  Julia’s secretary, her face frozen and wide-eyed, held out a telephone and couldn’t speak. Against all advice, trusting in the good fortune that had carried him so far, her husband had taken off in the face of a sudden Great
Lakes storm. Thunder, lightning and hail had swept the region. Radio contact with Robert Macauley’s one-engine plane had been lost.

  The crash site wasn’t found until late that night. The death wasn’t confirmed until the next morning. When Julia looked for him, Timothy was gone. The day was cloudy with a chill drizzle. She stood on the porch of Old Cottage a bit later when he returned. His eyes red. Dressed as he was in the photo.

  As they fell into each others’ arms, Julia caught a glimpse that was gone in an instant. Her son, as in the photo she had studied so often, approached Stoneham Cabin. This time, she saw his grief turn to surprise and a look of stunned betrayal. Timothy didn’t notice.

  The two hugged and sobbed in private sorrow before they turned toward Joyous Garde and the round of public mourning. As they did, he said, “You go up there from now on. I never want to go back.”

  FINALE

  Julia approached the grove and cabin on that first morning of fall. She was aware that it lay within her power to destroy this place. Julia had left a sealed letter to be shown to Timothy if she failed to return. Though she knew that was most unlikely to happen.

  A young woman, casual in slacks and a blouse, stood on the porch. In one hand she held the silver mask. “I’m Linda Martin,” she said. “Here by the will of the gods.”

  Julia recognized Linda as contemporary and smart. “An escaped slave?” she asked.

  “In a modern sense, perhaps.” The other woman shrugged and smiled. “A slave of circumstances.”

  “I’ve had what seem to be visions,” Julia said as she stepped onto the porch. “About my son and about this property.”

  “Those are my daughter’s doing, I’m afraid. Sally is nine.” Linda was apologetic yet proud. “I’ve asked her not to. They aren’t prophecy. More like possibility.”

  “They felt like a promise. And a threat.”

  “Please forgive her. She has a major crush on your son. Knows everything he has done. Or might ever do. He was very disappointed last month when he was in pain and wanted to talk to the corporal. And found us.”

  “Please forgive Tim. One’s first Rex makes a lasting impression.” Julia was surprised at how much she sounded like her grandmother.

  The living room of Stoneham Cabin still smelled of pine. The scent reminded Julia of Alcier and her first visit. As before, a door opened where no door had been. She and Linda passed through an invisible veil and the light from the twelve portals mingled and blended in the Still Room.

  “Sally, this is Julia Garde Macauley. Timothy’s mother.”

  The child who sat beyond the flame was beautiful. She wore a blue tunic adorned with a silver boy riding a dolphin. She bowed slightly. “Hello, Mrs. Macauley. Please explain to Timothy that the Corporal knew what happened was Fate and not me.”

  Julia remembered Smalley saying, “It’s a child will be my undoing.” She smiled and nodded.

  Linda held out the mask, which found its way to Sally’s face.

  “This is something I dreamed about your son.”

  What Julia saw was outdoors and in winter. It was men mostly. White mostly. Solemn. Formally dressed. A funeral? No. A man in judicial robes held a book. He was older, but Julia recognized an ally of her husband’s, a young congressman from Oregon. This was the future.

  “A future,” said the voice from behind the mask. Julia froze. The child was uncanny.

  Another man, seen from behind, had his hand raised as he took the oath of office. An inauguration. Even with his back turned, she knew her son.

  “And I’ve seen this. Like a nightmare.” Flames rose. The cabin and the grove burned.

  “I don’t want that. This is our home.” She was a child and afraid.

  Later, Linda and Julia sat across a table on the rear porch and sipped wine. The foliage below made Mirror Lake appear to be ringed with fire.

  “It seems that the gods stood aside and let my husband die. Now they want Tim.”

  “Even the gods can’t escape Destiny,” Linda said. “They struggle to change it by degrees.”

  She looked deep into her glass. “I have Sally half the year. At the cusps of the four seasons. The rest of the time she is with the Great Mother. Once her abilities were understood, that was as good an arrangement as I could manage. Each time she’s changed a little more.”

  Another mother who must share her child, Julia thought. We have much to talk about. How well the Immortals know how to bind us to their plans. She would always resent that. But she was too deeply involved not to comply. Foreknowledge was an addiction.

  A voice sang, clear as mountain air. At first Julia thought the words were in English and that the song came from indoors. Then she realized the language was ancient Greek and that she heard it inside her head.

  The song was about Persephone, carried off to the Underworld, about Ganymede abducted by Zeus. The voice had an impossible purity. Hypnotic, heartbreaking, it sang about Time flowing like a stream and children taken by the gods.

  From the time “Files of the Time Rangers” was published, got some nice reviews, was on SFWA’s Nebula Awards short list for Best Novel. After this I went on to write stories about a speculative fiction author living in Greenwich Village, stories about gay Fairies, post-apocalyptic tales involving telepathy. I stopped thinking and writing about Time and the gods and thought it might be for good.

  Though I was born there, I haven’t lived in Boston since I was eighteen. That was in 1962, over fifty years ago as I write this. But looking for material, I go back to the city and to those years I spent there. For me Boston in the mid-20th century feels like a legend, one only I remember and have to tell before it gets forgotten.

  One day I was thinking of ways to tell the story of being a kid in South Boston circa 1950, living with my parents in the D Street Housing Project and going to St. Peter’s School. Suddenly the Fool of God came marching into the tale, bringing with him Heaven, Hell and the Singularity.

  Writing about the Fool was amusing. In so many ways he sounds like me, reminds me of myself—maybe as I would have been if I hadn’t been able to escape the place of my birth and got recruited by one side or the other in the War Between Good and Evil.

  A MEMBER OF THE WEDDING

  OF HEAVEN AND HELL

  The Fool of God, on a mission from Heaven, moved up the Timestream passing through portals from one world to the next. In the second century of the Caliphate of Mercy, a period others call the eighth century AD, he emerged from a portal in Alexandria, smiled the slack off-center smile that looked a bit half-witted, and batted the breeze with the crew as he sailed across the Mediterranean on a fast markab to a portal in Marseille that would carry him hundreds of years further Upstream.

  Closing in on his destination, the Fool taxied across a St. Petersburg ruled by the mad Czarina Anastasia, sat in a sled wrapped in bearskin rugs as a six horse team bore him to a Buddhist monastery whose portal gave him passage to a world where the monastery buildings housed a station of the Great China Railway. He negotiated centuries and continents to reach a backwater of the Timestream and a certain world in which it was June 1960.

  That date was a safe distance Downstream from both the Singularity and the Last Judgment. A wedding was scheduled for 11:30 on a Saturday that its planners had reason to know would be sunny. Late that morning, attendees assembled at the Church of the Holy Redeemer, a well-to-do suburban Roman Catholic parish in the Eastern United States for the marriage of Aiden Brown to Maria Quinn.

  All would seem ordinary unless you were one who could see that the two ushers standing in front of the church in morning coats, starched white shirts, and ties with glittering studs, polished shoes and striped pants were minor demons in human form.

  The demons’ names in this time and place were Bill and Bob. Both were over six feet and brawny but different enough so as not to be identical (which often attracts unnecessary attention). Bob was blond with the beginning of a receding hairline; Bill was darker, with a slightly bent no
se.

  An older couple, nicely dressed, parked a ’60 Pontiac Catalina sedan and approached. The man seemed slightly startled at the sight of the two; the woman just smiled and refused Bob’s offer of a helping hand on the church stairs.

  When the couple was past, Bill murmured, “I’m starting to wonder when the big guns are going to show.”

  A family group: mother, father and four kids ranging in age from a girl maybe six to a boy around twelve piled out of a Chevy Nomad station wagon. The others passed by with scarcely a glance. But the little girl stared at them wide-eyed.

  When the family was up the stairs, Bill said, “They’re from the bride’s side is my guess. A few years up the Stream and that kid’s going to get recruited by the enemy or us. Nothing we do here is undercover. Hell versus Heaven’s a sporting event.”

  Bob said, “One day they pull you forty years Downstream to this world with variations you never saw before and expect you to blend in like piss on a yellow rug.”

  “And we do it and we don’t ask why,” said Bill.

  “It’s the minor tweaks that get you,” Bob said, “the little things—that Denver 2020 where they drove on the left.”

  “We lived to tell about it, which not everyone there got to do,” Bill reminded him.

  A red Jaguar convertible pulled into the parking lot and a large figure with wide shoulders, sunglasses and a tuxedo got out.

  “Oh, my. It’s the Defiler,” Bob muttered.

  “Major reinforcement on the groom’s side,” said Bill.

  The Defiler didn’t so much walk as roll, as if he were on treads to the passenger door. He opened it, bowed slightly, and gave his hand to a lovely dark-haired lady who looked to be in her early thirties. She wore a picture hat, stiletto heels, a little black dress, and a string of pearls.

  “And here’s the Fiend!” said Bob. The two straightened up and stood, each with his hands clasped at the small of his back.

  The couple came towards them with the Defiler on the woman’s left and about three paces behind, his face blank, a fighting machine on medium alert. The Fiend looked right at them.