The Side of the Angels

by Christina Bartolomeo

  “I wish to hell this was all over, or doesn’t happen. The strike, that is. It would give Eileen a coronary if I crossed a picket line, and of course I’d never do that. But if we somehow reach a contract, then I could be in the hospital, I could make sure she’s getting what she needs when she needs it.”

  I wondered what I’d do if Louise were in some hospital somewhere and I couldn’t go see her.

  “Let’s change the subject,” said Kate. “Will you feel strange, working with Tony?”

  “We’re both old pros.”

  “If you’re both such old pros, then how come he was so self-conscious when he came to Clare and me and said, and I quote, that ‘this old flame’ of his was going to be coming in to work this campaign?”

  “Sometimes he’s straight out of Lawrence Welk, the expressions he uses. The expressions he used, that is. I don’t know a lot about what he’s like these days.”

  “I don’t think guys like Tony change that much over the years. I don’t mean that Tony’s boring, I mean that he was well on the way to being who he was when you met him. My husband, Mike, and I, we got married so young that I felt as if he was turning into a different person right in front of my eyes at some points. Especially when he went through medical school. He’s probably felt that about me, too.”

  “But here you are, still together.”

  “He makes me laugh. Consistently, which from what I can tell is pretty rare. The other stuff goes up and down, but that hasn’t changed.”

  Kate slurped up the last of her watered-down sangria through her straw, and said, “How does anyone do it? What no one tells you when you’re young is how virtually impossible it is for any two adults to live together without wanting to kill each other once in a while.”

  “You couldn’t really call it living together with me and Tony. He wasn’t home enough. Though I often wanted to kill him just the same.”

  “I bet. His job is his heart and soul, which is not healthy. Not healthy at all.”

  “He’s a throwback to the old days when the union boys risked their lives to organize. Got shot by Pinkerton men and all that.”

  In the town where Tony grew up, the union meant the difference between making it into the middle class or staying poor. The union was what saved you from being fired a week before you qualified for a full pension, or from being tumbled into poverty by illness. Because the union took care of you, you could send your kids to college. You could get them out of a world where you punched the clock.

  Kate said, “Not easy to live with, those true believers.”

  “No.”

  “Tony would be kind of hard to get over, I’d think.”

  “Yes.”

  I shook myself.

  “But I had someone new. Well, I guess I still have him. If I want him. No one could say I’m pining away, since Tony.”

  “You’re fine with all this? Being around him, working with him?”

  “Hey, we’re all hardwired to forget.”

  “If you say so.”

  But you can’t forget someone who’s going to be right in front of you fourteen hours a day, scowling and muttering and second-guessing you at every turn. I knew so much about Tony. I knew that he couldn’t eat Italian without falling asleep right afterward, that two of his back molars were capped because the fillings had cracked, and that he spent the first half of the night on his right side and the second half on his left side. I knew that he’d never pay more than a dollar fifty for a greeting card on principle, no matter how sentimental the occasion, and that there wasn’t a movie in the world he’d wait in an hour-long line for.

  Unlike the background material in Weingould’s files, I couldn’t see how any of this knowledge was going to do me any good in the coming weeks. I wished I had the sort of memory eraser that aliens use when they’re returning abducted humans in science fiction films. But that’s life, I guess. There’s never an alien handy when you need one.

  “Get some sleep,” Kate said when we parted. “You look dead on your feet. I’m going to go home and say hello to my poor husband. He’ll probably look at me and say, ‘Your face is familiar. Where do I know you from?’ My kids, on the other hand. This is soccer season. They barely notice I’m gone.”

  She took me back to the strike office parking lot, told me the fastest way to my bed-and-breakfast, and waited for me to drive off in my own car.

  “Your lights aren’t on,” she yelled, before I even had the chance to find the right gadget on the unfamiliar dashboard of the rental car. “Your lights!”

  It gave me the oddest sense of being watched over.

  8

  THE WHITE HART had started its life as a coaching inn during the Revolutionary War, but inside, the year was 1888 or so, the height of Victorian excess. Except for the plaster-and-beam ceilings, the entire place had been draped and ornamented within an inch of its life. The windows were invisible behind swags of brocade weighted with bobbled fringe. The plank floors were hidden by layer upon layer of faded rugs, and the couches well swathed in paisley throws. The walls were crowded with gilt-framed cardboard prints from the most sentimental of nineteenth-century British domestic artists. They depicted little girls in ringlets and pantaloons giving kittens a bath, or simpering lovers leaning against a churchyard wall, or mothers sewing tiny garments by lamplight.

  My hostess, Mrs. Crawley, dressed with a blithe disregard for the fashion ideals shown in Town & Country. She wore a cheap silk blouse, obviously an inexpert Pucci knockoff. The blouse was anchored down with cascading gold chains, and her pearl button earrings were so large and sturdy they could have served on a winter coat. Her lipstick was fuschia, her eye shadow mauve, her rouge an unhealthy shade of lilac. The coal-black of her hair had obviously been dumped out of a bottle. I liked her on sight.

  “Come up,” she said. “You look beat.”

  Why was everyone saying this? How bad did I look?

  My room resembled a New Orleans brothel midway through the Gay Nineties. It had a dressing table with a ruffled skirt and a three-way hinged mirror. The bed was huge and decadent, with curlicued brass knobs one imagined clinging to in order to achieve certain sexual positions. It was just my luck to be alone whenever I encountered beds like this. There was even a low armless sofa referred to as a fainting couch, shoved into a corner as if any three square feet empty of furniture created an unbearable horror of the void.

  Mrs. Crawley handed me a key, informed me of her breakfast hours, and prepared to leave. Contentment stole over me as I put the inn key on my own ring.

  “Your assistant called,” Mrs. Crawley said. “She asked me to have you call her back at home.”

  The phone was a squat old black model with a rotary dial, concealed by the ruffled net skirts of a plastic shepherdess with the face of Ava Gardner and a broken crook barely holding a tiny gold note pencil.

  “I tried you at the strike office,” Wendy said, perky as ever at 10 P.M. “You weren’t there, but I remembered where you were staying.”

  As Ron had arranged, Wendy was stepping in for me on the Christmas fund-raiser for Campsters U.S.A., and she was raring to go. Advocacy’s main role on this one was to dogsbody for the fund-raiser committee chairwoman, Janet Stratton-Smith. Or Jantsy, as she liked to be called, for reasons I didn’t understand. Did the prep school nickname bring back the happy days of her youth, or was it just that the Buffy-and-Muffy types looked and thus felt the same all their lives? The same pleated skirts and girlish-elderly hairdos and stingily applied makeup. Certainly Jantsy’s style hadn’t changed since she was fifteen. In fact, I think she still had a riding jacket from her teenage years that she wore sometimes, out of what passed for sentiment.

  Jantsy had married at twenty to a corporate attorney who’d done very, very well for himself, thanks to her enthusiastic prodding. After raising three blond children, she’d cast about for something else to do. Blessed with the energy and political skills of Lyndon B. Johnson, she threw herself into charity work.
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  Jantsy’s events were spectacularly well attended in a city where there is fierce competition for important guests, but she had an outrageously high standard of perfection. Her pet project was “A Campsters Christmas,” a yearly gala to raise money so that city children who had never seen a cow could spend the summer in the Berkshires. She herself loved the great outdoors, which she knew in the form of golf courses, motorboats, and two weeks in Maine in August. I felt that the great outdoors was what my family had left the Old Country to escape, and found the Campsters event, and Jantsy, a worse trial with every holiday season that passed.

  Wendy said, “I have a progress report for you.” She thought this phrase sounded professional.

  Wendy was horribly efficient, horribly cheerful, and horribly dedicated. Her office was filled with business-gal geegaws, from the bronze nameplate she’d had made for her door (Wendy Williams, Public Relations Coordinator) to her matching desk set and bulletin board. She even had a gold-rimmed porcelain tray for her business cards. Over her desk was a poster of the Alps at sunrise and the words, “You can reach great heights if you start at the bottom and work up.”

  Not only was her office more professional than mine, her clothes were too. I never wear suits, but Wendy had at least fifteen, obviously picked from the “Career Dressing” section of better department stores. Clearly this girl had been devouring Working Woman for hints when I was still discovering the joys of Cosmopolitan sex quizzes. Once I heard her talking about me on the phone to one of her friends. “Nicky doesn’t even have a day planner,” she was exclaiming sorrowfully. “Her address book is full of little slips of paper that are always falling out. I don’t know how she manages.”

  The rest of us sometimes referred to Wendy as “P.R. Barbie,” but Ron relied on her when I was gone. She was Advocacy, Inc.’s most tireless worker and its self-appointed morale officer. When we landed the Helpers in Homebuilding account, she baked cookies in the shape of little saws and hammers. On staff birthdays, she was always the one who ordered the cake and found the “From Us to You” birthday card. Every Holy Week she ran an office Easter egg hunt complete with clues on pastel index cards that read something like, “Your face will sure be wreathed in smiles / When you find jelly beans in a drawer full of files.”

  Everyone participated, of course. There was no harm in Wendy, no spite. She just didn’t realize that for other humans, life was not the rah-rah, go-team affair it was for her. While Wendy waved her pompons, most of us couldn’t figure out where the game was being played, let alone which side to root for.

  “So how are the Campsters doing?” I asked.

  “Jantsy’s a little upset about the centerpieces. She thinks they aren’t rustic enough.”

  Janet’s idea was to do the whole ballroom in a homespun, country theme. She wanted the walls draped in spruce branches, which was no problem given the time of year. But she also specified huge bouquets of black-eyed Susans on each table, a feat no florist could perform in the middle of December.

  “I told her twelve times, they won’t be in season, Wendy. And black-eyed Susans are the Maryland state flower, so how would that relate to the Berkshires? We shouldn’t be doing this shit anyway. We aren’t party planners.”

  I could hear Wendy’s little sniff on the other end of the phone. She felt cussing was even more unprofessional than not giving your full name and title when you answered your office line.

  “Didn’t she like the idea of big silver bowls filled with red apples? It’s easy to do, and it works well with the spruce. Very Christmasy.”

  “Jantsy’s afraid people will steal the bowls.”

  Janet had a point. Rich benefactors might be able to buy the earth, but they would still swipe the centerpieces if they could.

  “Oh God,” I said. “Remember last year when she decided on those awful—what were they?—tiger lilies the day before the event?”

  “It was asters,” said Wendy.

  “Whatever. Can you talk to Davida at Parties Plus and see what else she can come up with?”

  “Actually,” said Wendy, “I had a suggestion. I thought we could set up a country scene on each table, with little toy cows and horses and trees, and mountains out of peat moss, and lakes made of blue and green cellophane.”

  “Like model railroad scenery except with wildlife? Hey, that’s cute. That’s really cute. Did she go for it?”

  “I don’t like to brag but she loved it. We’re having lunch with Davida tomorrow.”

  “You’re terrific. You saved the day,” I said, trying to sound like the maternal, capable boss Wendy dreamed of.

  “I just want to keep my end up while you’re gone,” said Wendy.

  When she’d said a chipper good night I wondered why, when it took so little to keep Wendy happy, I was usually so surly with her. She got under my skin like chiggers, but that was no excuse for my frequent curtness. I resolved to do better, just as I frequently resolved to be more patient with my mother, more collegial with Ron, and more open-minded about Louise’s latest trip into the realms of the weird on her continuing search for a religion half as crazy as the one she’d left behind.

  Bent on putting my good intentions into practice, I phoned my cousin. She answered on the second ring, breathless.

  “I just got in,” she said. “Hub was in town, passing through on his way to Philadelphia.”

  Hub, the rich-boy would-be Arlo Guthrie. Louise’s current lost cause. With all the men Louise met, you’d think she could find someone who wasn’t a fanatic or a loony, but her tender blue eyes and tolerant sweetness drew the nut jobs like a magnet.

  Hub’s full name, as I’ve said, was Hubbard Everett Gruber III, but he revealed it only reluctantly. His grandfather was the Gruber in Gruber’s Home Central, the big hardware chain, and Hub did not like it to be known.

  “And how’s Hub’s band doing these days?”

  “It’s called Miss Molly’s Stovepipe, as you very well know, Nicky.”

  I thought this was a superlatively silly name for a band. There was no Miss Molly and no stovepipe. Hub had been stoned when he thought up the name.

  “He just finished a new song.”

  Hub wrote with a prolificness that was suspect in my eyes, but I think Louise imagined that his work was the result of long nights of torment, an outpouring of the soul.

  “The title is ‘Seeing Eye Dog.’ It’s about this guy who kicks seeing-eye dogs on the subway because he himself is in so much pain. Hub wrote it after his last girlfriend turned out to be cheating on him with his band manager for the past five years.”

  I sighed to myself. Couldn’t Louise ever date anyone normal?

  “How was it that Hub did not know this?”

  “He was busy.”

  “It was five years, Louise.”

  “Hub is a trusting person. He thinks that if you put your faith in people, it nearly always pays off.”

  “There’s a fine line between faith and stupidity, if you ask me. He didn’t really go around hurting seeing-eye dogs, did he? Because I think you can be arrested for that.”

  “Of course not. It’s a metaphor for how angry he was at his own blindness about Karen. He always says he didn’t let go of the pain about her until the moment he looked up from the accident and saw me.”

  Louise never met any of her nonnormal men in a normal way. She’d first encountered Hub when he got into a car accident late one February night at the intersection near her apartment, which was the corner of Tenth and Pennsylvania. Louise had heard the crash and run out to be of what assistance she could. She fed Hub and the other driver sandwiches and coffee while they waited for the police to come.

  “I still can’t believe you did that, Louise,” I said now. “Don’t you know better than to flit out into the street at nearly midnight, in your neighborhood?”

  “Nicky, I know my neighborhood. You think it’s dangerous just because it’s mostly black people, which is very narrow-minded of you.”

  “No, I
think it’s dangerous because it’s mostly people with prison records. I don’t care about the color of their skin, and neither should you. You should just stay inside and call 911. Remember when they raided that crack house two doors down from you and you stood on the sidewalk offering to feed the dealers’ rottweilers for them until they made bail? I swear, Louise, please don’t make me come down to the morgue and identify you.”

  My brother Joey referred to my cousin’s living situation as “Louise’s single-handed attempt to integrate Southeast.” In her determination to rub shoulders with her fellow man, Louise had been mugged, burglarized, and had her butt grabbed by a fondle-and-run molester on a bicycle. My theory was that Louise had chosen her dicey neighborhood because it was as far from the rest of her family as she could get without decamping to the suburbs. And the rents were low, so that Louise could squirrel away her money in the event that someday the supply of lonely hearts gave out.

  “Hub’s band is playing D.C. and Baltimore all through Christmas and New Year’s. Will you come hear them with me? We can go backstage.”

  “If I’m home I’ll come, sure.”

  “You have to come home. I want you to see him at his best, when he’s performing.”

  It was hard to imagine that Hub could be any worse on stage than when he appeared before me in person trailing an aura of sweat, stale marijuana smoke, and sandalwood. He believed, Louise informed me, that deodorant caused cancer of the lymph nodes.

  I plunged. I knew better, but I did it anyway.

  “Louise, don’t you think that any of this sudden intensity with Hub has even a little to do with Johnny?”

  “Nicky, I wish you’d quit harping on that. No one could be happier for Johnny than I am. Let go of these girlish fantasies. We’re all grown up now.”

  I tried to speak her language.

  “Louise, don’t you think maybe that the Universe wants you to save Johnny from spending his life with someone humorless and unloving?”

  “You don’t know that Betsey is those things.”

  “She doesn’t laugh at his jokes. She’ll make him live in some development in Gaithersburg.”