Angel in the Parlor

by Nancy Willard

  “You don’t understand! Once a letter goes into the dead letter office, it disappears like a snowflake in a blizzard. The pile is always shifting, so you can’t count on finding the recent ones. In warm weather they may work their way clear down to the middle of the pile.”

  “Then I guess there’s no hope, is there?” said Nicholas.

  The man shook his head.

  “None.”

  Amyas took the news bravely.

  “She’s testing me,” he repeated over and over. “She’ll come back.”

  But already Nicholas found himself making those subtle adjustments of thought and feeling that people discover to help them accept loss. Already Janet had crystallized into a series of snapshots which his mind brought forth whenever he saw a girl wearing a velvet headband over straight hair, or when he passed the theatrical makeup store, which because of fire was now closed indefinitely. When she finally did return, she seemed to have passed through layers of experience so far beyond his understanding that she was hardly the same person.

  V

  Nothing could have been simpler than her return. It happened on a May evening after a light rain when the smell of clean air blew through the loft from the roof outside, like a friendly guest. Amyas and Nicholas were puttering with the glider when both heard the elevator climbing to their room. It jolted to a stop and somebody fumbled at the lock on the door. Nicholas felt himself go cold. But Amyas, turning as pale as the cast on his leg, wheeled himself to the door just as it sprang open. In walked Janet. When he saw her, he let out a cry.

  “My God, what has happened to you?”

  Only her heavy shoe and her cane told Nicholas here was the old Janet. In every other way she seemed a changed creature. She had cut her hair short and she wore a man’s pinstripe suit, taken in at the shoulders and waist; everywhere else it bagged outrageously. Yet she was not a comic figure but as sly and cautious as a stray cat.

  “Evening,” she said, nodding to Nicholas.

  Then she opened her mouth to say something to Amyas, but no one ever heard what it was, for when he lifted his arms, she rushed to him and buried her face in his beard, and they clung together like wrestlers engaged in some bizarre test of endurance. Then her body relaxed and she raised her face and smiled first at Nicholas, then at Amyas, who stroked her hair.

  “We’ll celebrate,” whispered Amyas. “We’ll go someplace together and celebrate. My little dove,” he exclaimed, “you don’t have to tell me anything. We’ll go to Tony’s. Nicholas, go fetch my mandolin. This evening I’ll initiate my new crutches.”

  In the taxi, Janet perched on Amyas’s good knee and laid her arm around his shoulders. The hair shaved from the cut at the back of his head after the accident had not quite grown back. Janet rubbed her fingers over the stubble, and Nicholas, sitting in front, tried to focus on the meter.

  “Are you glad to see me, Nicholas?” she asked.

  “Very glad,” said Nicholas.

  “We’re here,” exclaimed Amyas. “Nicholas, do you have the fare? I find it difficult to get at my purse just now.”

  When the taxi stopped, Janet leaped to the sidewalk and offered Amyas her arm. He spilled out of the cab, puffing and groaning, and teetered unsteadily on his crutches. Like two maimed derelicts, they entered the restaurant together, leaving Nicholas to search his wallet for something smaller than a twenty-dollar bill. He could hardly hide his impatience as the driver slowly counted out the change.

  “Five, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen dollars. Thank you, mister.”

  Stuffing the bills into his jacket, he hurried inside. How many years had passed since he last walked through this door, in some other life, his life before Amyas? Looking about, he spotted one vacant seat in the back at a table occupied by two young men and a girl in a pinstripe suit who sat opposite the empty place and kept glancing behind her toward the kitchen. A waiter, seeing him, took the mandolin out of his arms and hurried away. There was no sign of Amyas in the kitchen. The cook was standing at a counter chopping vegetables. Nicholas pushed his way down the aisle past the long rows of people eating and sat down opposite Janet.

  Suddenly everyone in the room burst into applause. Out of the kitchen marched Gunther the dwarf lugging his guitar. Amyas the giant limped after him, swinging his elephantine leg as he leaned on his crutches. When Nicholas saw again the black vest embroidered with flowers, he could almost believe that Amyas had never taken it off.

  “Gunther! Amyas!”

  “Amyas!”

  Gunther waved to the girl who had called out his name. But Amyas smiled only at Janet. Behind them, the waiter carried the mandolin and a chair, which he set directly opposite Janet’s table. The dwarf tuned his guitar, holding it high against his cheek. Amyas leaned his crutches against the wall, seated himself, and laid his fingers on the fretboard of the mandolin. Looking at each other, they thumped out a few measures. Then the dwarf opened his mouth and shouted the refrain, which Amyas punctuated with cries of joy:

  You and I and Amyas,

  Amyas and you and I

  To the greenwood must we go, alas!

  You and I, my life and Amyas.

  The two young men stopped eating to listen. Janet rested her chin in her hands and Nicholas felt her eyes upon him. He gave her a quick smile. She did not smile back, nor did she take her eyes from him. Now the dwarf was bobbing up and down as he cantered toward the last verse.

  Who’s gonna shoe your pretty little foot

  with boots of Spanish leather?

  I’ll go no more to her bedside,

  so let the devil take her.

  Let the devil take her! roared the audience, stamping its feet.

  The dwarf lifted his hands from the strings, and everyone applauded. Nicholas rose automatically as the waiter slid an extra chair between Janet and himself. When Amyas sat down, a feast appeared as if by silent command. Where there was nothing, now there was bread, wine, soup, half a sheep’s head, and a plate of spaghetti. Amyas’s eyes followed the waiter’s hands with pleasure, till the last dish appeared on the table.

  “Meine Kinder,” he said. He looked from Janet to Nicholas, reached across the table, and took their hands. “My little doves.”

  Then he gave himself over to his dinner. Janet twirled the spaghetti around her fork and when Amyas lifted a tidbit for her to take from his fingers, she shook her head. But neither Nicholas’s silence nor Janet’s reticence could dim the luster of his joy. As Nicholas drank, he felt some part of himself drift away in sleep while another part of him entered an elaborate and familiar dream. Of Amyas reaching for Janet’s cane. Of Janet draping Amyas’s coat around his shoulders. Of himself following them outside, into the taxi, into the elevator. Cautiously he stepped into the spacious room and entered his own life as a stranger.

  In the darkness he heard Janet tossing and singing to herself behind the closed doors of her bed. Under the embroidered skins of one thousand dragons lay Amyas, his immense belly shaken with snores. Nicholas closed his eyes and drifted back to sleep. All at once someone touched his cheek.

  “Be quiet,” whispered Janet. “It’s just me.”

  She was sitting on the floor beside him, wrapped in Amyas’s peacock blue nightshirt, barely visible in the weak light from the street.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the matter. I want to talk to someone.”

  “Oh.” Nicholas relaxed a little. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “Don’t, Nicholas. I couldn’t fall asleep.”

  The silence between them rippled with Amyas’s snorts and sighs.

  “Nicholas, do you ever miss your wife?”

  “No,” said Nicholas.

  “You don’t? I just don’t see how you could love her and go away and not think of her afterward.”

  Nicholas considered this carefully.

  “You did love her, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t think so. I was lonely and she came along at the right time.�
��

  “I wish you’d met me then.”

  “Then I would have married you.”

  Suddenly she put her lips close to his ear and whispered, “Nicholas, I’ve got us a place to live. Will you come with me?”

  “What did you say?” cried Nicholas.

  “Not so loud! I’ve got us a place to live.”

  Nicholas stared at her in astonishment.

  “Do you want me to marry you?”

  Her shoulders shrugged under the peacock folds.

  “I want to go away for good. I feel like I’m rotting here. Don’t you feel like that? Day after day, always the same thing, the same room. Except to do the shopping. Amyas never wants me to go outside at all.”

  “Why did you come back?”

  “I don’t want to live alone.”

  “I thought,” said Nicholas very slowly, “that you were in love with Amyas. And I don’t think you’re in love with me.”

  Janet twisted a corner of the nightshirt.

  “You start depending on a person to tell you what to do, and pretty soon you can’t leave.”

  Nicholas was silent. He tried to imagine himself not feeding Amyas’s birds, cooking his meals, or working on his glider, and in turn not eating at his table, and sleeping under his roof, and not wearing the clothes that Amyas bought for him. The four walls of the loft seemed to cave in around him, and the winds of freedom blew fear into his heart.

  “When are you planning to leave?”

  “I want to leave right now.”

  “You can’t leave in the middle of the night.”

  “Don’t be silly, Nicholas. It’s almost morning. Get up and pack.”

  “I can’t pack in the dark.”

  “Why not? All you have is your knapsack. It’s under the sofa. Everything else belongs to Amyas.”

  She reached down and pulled it out for him.

  “There’s no need to sneak off like this,” protested Nicholas. “It’s stupid and ungrateful. I really don’t see why we can’t tell him tomorrow morning that we want to leave and walk out the door.”

  “You know he won’t let us go,” said Janet softly. “You know if we ask him and he says yes, we’ll have to come back sometime. Ten years later maybe, but we’ll still have to come back.”

  Far away, the huge figure on the bed by the window sighed deeply. Amyas lay with his arm thrown over his face. When they left, he looked like a drowned man saying goodbye.

  There was almost nobody on Prince Street. Somewhere out of sight the sun rose. A heavy fog bandaged all the buildings and a warm rain began to fall.

  “Smell,” said Janet, drawing in her breath. “It smells like summer.”

  That afternoon they moved into a small, shabbily furnished apartment on Ninth Street. It belonged to Homer Sax’s brother, Paul, who had left a month earlier to study painting in southern France. Every wall in the living room was painted a different shade of red; the kitchen and bedroom were Prussian blue. Paul Sax left them all his furniture, some of his books, and a box of Graham crackers on the kitchen counter. That evening Janet bought a book on cockroaches, explaining to Nicholas that you had to know your enemy in order to fight it. She put their names on the mailbox as Janet and Nicholas Mardachek, and after a week Nicholas felt as if he’d been married forever. The six months he’d spent with his wife seemed but a trial to be passed through before he could enter the life he had always imagined. The two months with Amyas were an intermittent season, a time of healing.

  It was a spring day and he was much younger.

  He did not return to the darkroom. All those days at his father’s filling station in Akron and then the days after that when his wife nagged him to find a job, he had dreamed of someone to wait on him. Of someone with money who wouldn’t make him work. He would buy a movie projector and set it up in the bedroom and they would watch old westerns all night long. Janet was delighted. She did not want to be alone and she was eager to please. They rose at noon and spent the rest of the day browsing in the camera shops around Harold Square.

  At Olden’s, the clerk offered them a secondhand projector for seventy-five dollars. Janet took Nicholas aside.

  “How much does a new one cost?”

  “A couple hundred.”

  “Well, we can afford that.”

  “We can?”

  He was amazed. He knew she had some money, as she never asked him for any, but not so much that she could afford to spend it freely.

  “How much have you got saved?”

  “Enough,” said Janet.

  “You didn’t earn very much with the Apple Town Players.”

  “No,” she agreed. “I took money from Amyas.”

  Nicholas looked so shocked that Janet tried to make light of it.

  “But, Nicholas, he’s very rich. You mustn’t feel bad. He has all sorts of connections and more money than he knows what to do with. Why, Nicholas, he’d want me to have it. He always bought me whatever I asked for. He kept all his money in an envelope under his cookbooks. I’d tell him, ‘Why don’t you get yourself a bigger place?’ But he has this notion of discipline. Even when you’ve got money, you don’t spend it.”

  The clerk was smiling at them.

  “Will you take this one, or would you rather wait for a new one?”

  “I’ll wait, thanks,” said Nicholas. Janet took his arm. They rode the subway home in silence.

  Though they did not speak of it again, the source of Janet’s money lay between them like ill-feeling. For it seemed to Nicholas that they had escaped nothing; they were living in one of the many annexes of Amyas’s love. At night, the faces of those he had cast away, Norma Mardachek and Amyas Axel, formed themselves over and over in the darkroom of his mind, and though he could not see them so clearly when he was awake, they fettered his joy. Every afternoon he took long walks alone. Janet saw him to the door with a smile.

  “You see?” she said. “I’m not going to keep you locked up like a tame bird.”

  She never asked him where he went and he never told her. Sometimes he would describe what he had seen.

  “I saw a man walking two goats, a black goat and a white one.”

  “Did you? Where?”

  “I don’t remember exactly.”

  He never told her that he had gone to his old place off Hester to see if his wife still lived there. It would be no use explaining that he didn’t really want to see his wife, that in fact he hoped he wouldn’t meet her. He simply wanted to put his past in order. Yet when he approached the house he could hardly breathe for excitement. Cautiously he climbed the front stairs, entered the vestibule, and peered at the names on the mailboxes. A pang of disappointment shot through him. Hers was not there. He had no hope of locating her now. As he walked away, he tried to call up the dreadful scenes they had played out together.

  “I saw a little boy trying to push another little boy into a mailbox.”

  “Did you really? Where?”

  “Downtown.”

  He did not tell her that it was Prince Street and he had gone to see Amyas. No, not Amyas himself, but the residence of Amyas, as one makes a pilgrimage to see Beethoven’s house or Grace Kelly’s swimming pool, comfortably assured of not meeting the real object of one’s worship. That Sunday morning everything felt as still and changeless as a prayer lettered in gold and touched with peace. Doll Manufacturing Company. Bolts and Parts. The make-up shop, its windows boarded over. The vacant handball court. The newspaper store.

  Nicholas went in, brushing past layers of magazines clipped on wires like an elaborate quilt. An old man who was reading and stroking his gray moustache stood up behind the counter.

  “One egg cream,” said Nicholas.

  It was a spring day and he was much younger, loitering around the playground after school.

  “Nice day,” said the old man, smiling as he watched Nicholas drink till the air in the empty straw made a loud noise. Nicholas pushed the paper cup away.

  “I’m trying to find a
fellow named Amyas Axel,” he said. “Do you ever see him much?”

  “The big fat fella? I knew who he was, but I never run into him myself. Did you say you’re trying to find him?”

  “Yes,” said Nicholas.

  “Well, he’s dead.”

  “I—”

  He could not bring out the words; he did not know what the right words were.

  “I didn’t see it happen. Some kids who live in the building told me he tried to fly out the window. He had some kind of flying machine and he stuck a pair of wings on himself and just took off. Jumped clean out the window.”

  Nicholas said nothing but felt himself turning to stone.

  “He didn’t have no family. There wasn’t nobody to tell about it. The police carted him away like a dead horse.”

  The man allowed a few minutes’ respectful silence before he said, “That’ll be fifteen cents for the egg cream.”

  Fumbling in his pocket for the change, Nicholas touched the shape of a coin caught in the lining. A coin? A medal, wishing him a safe journey, a medal from Amyas? Wasn’t the jacket a gift from Amyas, too? He tore the jacket off his back, threw it on the counter, and fled.

  Although he did not speak of Amyas’s death to Janet, the weight of his new knowledge bowed him. During dinner, he could not concentrate on her plans for repainting the living room white and buying a formica table for the kitchen. That night she showed him a new nightgown she had bought, a high-waisted cotton print with full sleeves and a velvet sash, and when she crawled into bed beside him, smelling of perfume and new flannel, he could not restrain himself.

  “Did you buy it for Amyas?”

  Janet shrugged. Then she said, “You went to visit Amyas today, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Nicholas.

  “How is he?”

  “Dead.”

  She gave a sudden jerk.

  “He jumped out the window last week.”

  Silence, broken only with difficulty.

  “Oh, Nicholas, even when he’s dead, he’s still got us in the palm of his hand,” whispered Janet, and started to cry.

  Nicholas couldn’t bear that; he shook her and pulled her face against him.