Tears Are for Angels

by Paul Connolly

  "But there was something about her, something the other painted little rabbits didn't have. Maybe it was the way she talked, not harsh and full of Bronx. Maybe the way she smiled all over her face, sort of eager to please, like a puppy clog.

  "Anyway, I liked her. I was working in a show then- that was just a line I was giving you about writing-and I was doing O.K. and I always managed a bigger tip than usual for her. I could figure she needed it, working in a place like that.

  "So one day I went in at the regular time and the kid wasn't there. I keep calling her a kid. I guess actually she wasn't but maybe a year or two younger than I was." Jean's face grew suddenly harsh. "But I was a lot older than she was in other ways. Even then.

  "I didn't think much about it, but when for three days I didn't see her, I went to the manager and asked him what happened to the little blonde, the one they called Lucy."

  "He looked at me sort of sour. 'I had to give her the boot.' he said. 'She got herself in trouble.' "

  I didn't say anything. I just sat and listened to her. Each one of the words was a blow from a hammer, each one hit me separately, but I kept on pulling in my belly and sucking at the air. I didn't say anything or even move. She was still leaning against the doorjamb, her hands behind her, when she began to speak again.

  "I don't know. It happens to thousands of decent kids every year. It wasn't anything to blow my stack over. But I don't know. It got to me somehow, thinking about that eager, what-comes-next little face. Anyway, he gave me her name and address and I went around to the dump where she lived.

  "It was a furnished room on about the fourth or fifth floor of an old house in a slum neighborhood. Like the one I grew up in. I felt right at home going up all those stairs. I think I could have gone up them blindfolded.

  "I found the right door and knocked on it, but there wasn't any answer. I stood there, all decked out in a new outfit I was wearing for the first time, clean and smart and pretty, and looked around me at that dark hall and smelled the fried meat and the old dust and the unwashed people, and I thought, This is what you got away from, sister. This is what you worked and lied and cheated and sweated to get away from. You better clear out of here now before you get the smell of it all over you again and never get it off.

  "But I knocked again. There wasn't any answer this time, either. So I opened the door and walked in. She hadn't even locked it.

  "She was crouched in the window, with her back to me. I don't think she even heard the knocking or the door opening or me coming in. She just crouched there on the sill, like a bag of old clothes stuffed into the window to keep the rain out.

  "Something told me not to scream or speak or do anything to frighten her. I stepped out of my shoes and tiptoed across the room. I noticed that the bed was made up and everything was very neat. It was funny, almost, the room so neat and clean and her there in the window like that.

  "I was right up behind her then and I reached out and put both my arms around her waist and I sort of whispered, Don't be afraid. Just come in here and tell me about it, now.

  "I thought she'd try to jump then, when I got my arms around her, and I was all braced to hang on and stop her if she put up a battle. But there wasn't any battle. There wasn't anything. She didn't even move. She just kept on crouching there as stiff as a statue. Well, I started pulling at her and still she didn't fight or anything, and pretty soon I got her out of the window and over on the bed.

  "She was in some kind of shock, I guess. She just lay there, hardly even breathing. There was a glass of water by the bed. I wet my handkerchief and kept bathing her face, talking easy and gentle to her. Pretty soon she began to come around.

  "Her eyes got real scared, her face screwed all up. and then she began to cry. I've seen the time I needed to cry myself, so I just sat there and let her get it all out of her. It was pretty terrible.

  "I sat there and pretty soon the crying started to the down. Then it stopped and she turned her head and looked at me. Her eyes were wide and scared and sort of unbelieving.

  " 'The fence,' she whispered. 'The fence.'

  "I didn't get it at first. But she kept whispering it, over and over, like it was something she had to make me understand. And finally I understood. I got up and went to the window and leaned out and there it was. The fence, four stories below. It was one of those old fences with iron palings, sharp and pointed, and it was right under her window.

  "There was a piece of paper fluttering on top of it but not blowing away. Right through the middle of it was one of those palings, sharp and black and waiting, and all the rest of the fence there too, waiting, like a row of teeth sharpened with a file.

  "I heard her whisper behind me, 'I was going to jump. And then the fence was there looking at me. I couldn't move all of a sudden. I couldn't even think. I could just see those spikes, waiting for me. And I couldn't move.'

  " 'Don't talk about it,' I said. 'It's all right now.'

  "Well, that was a long time ago, and she's dead now. But maybe you understand why, that day in Belleview, when I read about her committing suicide in the papers, I knew it wasn't so. Why, if there was a bullet hole in her head, I knew somebody else had put it there.

  "Because bullets are spikes, too. Aren't they, Harry?"

  She still had not moved away from the door. I felt my fingernails biting into my palms.

  "Yes," I said. "Bullets are spikes, too."

  "You're beginning to see, aren't you? Beginning to see how much there was about her you never even dreamed of."

  "Go on," I said. "I want to hear it all."

  "There's not much more. I took her in with me and took care of her. Her folks were dead and she'd come to New York to get on the stage. They all come to get on the stage."

  "Like you?"

  "No. I grew up there. But I guess I wanted the stage as bad as she did. As they all do."

  "I thought she was born there, too."

  "I know. We gave her a new background. We gave her a second start-not just another effort, but a whole new life. We planned it together during those months we waited for the baby. I figured it was too late for me-I'd seen too much, done too much to start over. But with her -well, the trouble she was in was just one of those things. She got caught the first time. With some zoot-suit Broadway cowboy. Because he told her he could get her a spot in a night club. She never even saw him again to tell him he was a papa. And it was the first time for her."

  "All right," I said. "Goddamnit, all right!"

  "It makes you squirm, doesn't it? A lot of things are falling into place, aren't they?"

  "Go on," I said. "You can't say anything I'm not saying to myself."

  "I taught her how to wear clothes, how to walk and make herself up and wear her hair. When the baby came, I arranged to have it taken to the adoption home, the best one in the city. Well, after the baby, you wouldn't have known her. It's like that for some women. She had been skinny, but now she filled out and her skin got that peaches-and-cream look a girl would give her soul for. I had saved up some money and we spent it all outfitting her. And then I got her a job in a department store, mod-

  cling, after I talked her out of trying the stage again."

  "Why? Why did you do all that for her?"

  "Then I got a chance to do a tour with a USO show and I took it. While I was gone I got a letter from her saying she was married to you. When I got back to New York, you were overseas. I could see she was in seventh heaven, and I guess maybe right then I was as happy as I'm ever going to be in this world."

  "Why?" I said again. "Why all this for her?"

  She closed her eyes. She hadn't moved from the door-jamb since she started her story.

  "It was almost as if she were my younger sister, the way we came to feel about each other. She was a clean kid, with a nice clean uncluttered mind. She was kind and she liked to laugh, and she went to church every Sunday. She was the sort of person I'd never known before.

  "And she loved that baby. It took me mo
nths to convince her it was best to place the child with the adoption people. Even then it was only because she realized what life would have been for little Jean-she named her for me-that she decided to do it. She didn't care for herself. It nearly broke her heart when she finally made up her mind to do it."

  I noticed how quiet the night had suddenly grown. Her voice was the only sound you could hear. Even the crickets, I thought, even the crickets are listening to her.

  "And then after she was married-well, I guess it proved something," she said. Her voice cracked as if her throat had gone dry with the long recital.

  "It proved girls like Lucy and me had a chance after all. It showed you could find what you wanted without stealing and cheating and sleeping with people who could help you, getting old before your time and even then not finding it. Maybe because I felt like I had done all those things already and couldn't go back. But I had kept her out of it. I had proved something, to myself, through her. I guess that was it."

  I didn't say anything. I had never known such shame as I did then, at the remembrance of the cowardice and the weakness and the self-pity in which I had wallowed for two years. If I could wipe it all out, I thought, if I could make it like it had never been…

  "Because, you see, I wasn't any Ethel Merman. I was just another cutie in the line, maybe a solo dance every now and then, but never anything big. And it didn't look as if there ever would be anything big.

  "But right then, while I was back in New York, I got a chance to go to South America with a show, one of the leads. It looked like my big break. I should have known better, I should have known there weren't any big breaks for little Jean. But I went.

  "The show folded in San Paulo and I was Hat broke. I didn't even get my last week's pay. So I took a job in a little joint there, dancing, and that's where I was when the letters stopped coming from Lucy.

  "I had written her that I had a swell job, because I didn't want to spoil anything for her. The two of you were out on the Coast when I first landed there, and then you were back on your farm and then the letters stopped coming.

  "At first, I was saving every penny to get home. After she quit writing, I figured she had just sort of forgotten about me and I felt pretty bad about it. I just stayed on down there. But finally I got sick of it and I had enough money and I took a plane. I landed in New York three weeks ago.

  "Well, I put in a call to Lucy, for old times' sake. That was when I found out she was dead, and that you couldn't be readied by phone."

  There was no more emotion in it than in the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, but I listened to each dull syllable of it. I wanted to run out into the night, to lose myself in darkness, but I forced myself to stay there on the bunk, stay there and listen.

  "I bought that old car and drove to Belleview, the nearest town of any size to St. John's I could find on the map, and went to the library and looked it up in the papers. That was when I knew it wasn't suicide and that somebody had killed her.

  "I got a hotel room. I didn't leave it for two days, trying to figure it out. And I remember three things. I remembered she told me in New York about your wedding night. How when you-found something missing, you flew into a rage and she had to lie about having had an accident when she was a little girl to keep you from walking out."

  "But I believed her," I said. "I believed everything she told me!"

  "Sure. You believed her finally. And after I remembered that, I remembered what she had said in one of her letters. That she sometimes thought if you ever found out about the baby you'd kill her. For deceiving you."

  "I was always so sure," I said. "There was right and there was wrong. I didn't know anything about anything."

  "No," she said, "you didn't. And then there was the last thing. If that home had ever placed the baby somewhere, they'd have notified Lucy. Not where, or to whom, but just that it had been adopted and was well and happy. So suppose they had notified her. Only suppose you opened the letter first and found out about it all."

  "So you decided I killed her."

  "Yes. And I came over here to see you, what you were like, before I went to the police and tried to get them to believe me. Because I knew how much she loved you. Because if she could love you all that much, how could you have killed her?"

  "That's a laugh," I said. "She loved me a lot, all right. Enough to go to bed with Dick Stewart."

  "She loved you. I don't know why she did that. There was some reason. I know there was. Maybe he found out some way about the baby, threatened her. I don't know how, but maybe that was it. She would have done it to keep you from finding out about the baby."

  "I should have listened to her," I said. "Maybe that was what she was trying to tell me."

  "It must have been. Because I know-I tell you I know-she loved you more than anything." She tossed the letters in my lap. "These will prove it."

  "One other thing," I said. "The trunk. What were you looking for?"

  "The letter from the adoption home. If I could find that, then I'd know. It would prove you knew about the baby. It would be something the police might believe. But there wasn't any letter."

  I nodded absently. Then I opened the letters and began to read them. And I saw that Jean was right. Oh, there was no poetry or undying protestations or romantic nonsense. They were just letters, the kind any girl might write to an older sister. But it was there, between every line, after every period, in every word. Lucy had loved me, had wanted only for me to be happy. When I finished those letters, there wasn't any doubt of that.

  And I had killed her.

  Maybe two or three years before I would have said something or done something. Maybe I would have squared it away inside of me and got it straight and picked up what there was left of it and gone on to somewhere. somehow.

  But not now. Because there was but one thing I had to turn to now, and I reached down under the bed and got out the fruit jar and took a drink.

  "That's got to stop," she said.

  "Go to hell."

  "If I'm going to help you do it, that's got to stop."

  I set the jar down carefully.

  "Come again," I said.

  "If I'm going to help you kill Stewart, you've got to air out the whisky."

  "If you're…" I got up and walked over to her. She didn't move, but her face told it to me again. "How?"

  "Not like you said. Not just walk in and shoot him."

  "You're wrong. There isn't any other way."

  "That's why the whisky has to go."

  "You go on," I said. "You beat it the hell back to where you came from."

  "No. We're going to do it. And we're going to get away with it."

  "But why? Why you?"

  She moved away from me then and stood in the middle of the floor and looked off into far places I had never seen.

  "Because he wrecked it. I don't know how or why, but he tore it all down, the dream house. He wrecked everything I had worked and schemed to get for her. He caused her to die. He ruined everything. And when he did it, he ruined everything for me, too."

  "Yes," I said. "For me, too. He's ruined everything."

  "And now we're going to kill him."

  I picked up the fruit jar and walked over to the door and threw it as far as I could.

  "Maybe there is a way," I said. "Maybe we can find it."

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I stood there in the door and I could feel her get up and come across the floor to me. She was right behind me.

  "I don't want to die," she said.

  "I don't either. Not now."

  "Did you before?"

  "I didn't care."

  "It's got to be right, then. There can't be any mistakes."

  "There won't be."

  "You've got to keep off the whisky. You've got to eat right and sleep right and get to be a man again. You've got to get your nerves back. You were shaking like a leaf yesterday. You've got to be a man again."

  "I will be."

  "How soon?"


  I turned around then and put my hand on her neck.

  "I could start right now."

  Her eyes narrowed.

  "I need you," I said. "I need to know I can be a man with a woman again."

  Her eyes seemed to glaze over.

  "I hate you, Harry. I hate you for being so bullheaded, and so sure you were right, and for not listening to her that night. I hate you for not even trying to know anything about her except that she was yours, your property. I hate you because you didn't even try to find out if maybe what you saw, what she did, wasn't for some reason. You didn't even give her a chance."

  "And you hate me because of the way you saw me yesterday."

  "Yes. That too. And then you ask me what you did."

  "Because I need you. And I'm going to have you."

  "Yes. You need me."

  She moved away, toward the bunk, and then she kicked her loafers off and her hands went toward her side and the skirt fell around her feet. She began to unbutton the blouse and then that, too, was at her feet and the slip was coming over her head.

  She threw that on the chair and then I fumbled at the hook on her brassiere. She stood there and let me take it off. Then she stepped out of her pants and I picked her up and put her down on the bunk.

  Her breasts were hard and almost flat and her legs cold and her stomach unresisting. Her lips were flaccid under mine and she was like a dead woman. But the fire was in me now, two years of loneliness and wanting boiled in me, and I couldn't stop.

  At first she didn't even close her eyes. And then, later, I heard her whisper, "You son of a bitch."

  Her eyes closed then and I felt the movement of her, her hands on my back, feverish, clutching. Finally the hate or fear or revulsion set her free, set all of her free. We were fused, welded together by some inhuman hand, some hand coming from out of the darkness to encircle us. I heard her whispering the same thing over and over in my ear. Then there was not even the whispering any more, just the wanting and the having. Then the one final, unbelievable, immemorial having, and then the night with the crickets heard again, and the air stirring across us, and the lonely rending bay of a hound, somewhere beyond the dunes.